by Terri Kraus
Having eaten an early dinner, he felt better, and the queasy blanket that had covered him since the morning was now gone, replaced by an emptier feeling in which sickness played no part.
He walked past the offices of the hometown radio station, a station he never listened to. He wasn’t really sure why, but he thought it had to do with the fact that it featured an on-air swap meet every morning, and Jack couldn’t tolerate that instead of music, or the sort of music that a swap-meet radio station might play.
He stood at the corner of North and Main, waiting for the light to change. The light snapped to green and Jack hesitated. Three blocks to the east was the Knights of Columbus hall. He knew that he should turn, but he hesitated.
He took a deep, deep breath, and instead of crossing the street, turned east, toward the old high school, past the Methodist Church, past a classically designed bank building, no longer a bank but an insurance agency.
Maybe … maybe I should go to that meeting.
The further east he walked, the slower his steps became, fear slowing each forward motion. Fear and embarrassment and anger.
He knew the building before he could see the address. Outside, in a large glass-enclosed structure, stood a statue of the Virgin, glossy with dime-store colors, the sort of statue that felt more at home in the 1950s than today—a female figure, close to life-size, with movie-star curls of plaster hair, and an ethereal heavenward stare.
Jack stared back for a long time, wondering where one would go to purchase a statue like that. Is there a market for those anymore?
He shook his head to clear his thoughts and walked to the front door, slowly, with hesitation and some level of dread.
I should go inside … I guess.
Once at the front door, he could see, on the side of the entryway mounted on the faux rock facade, a silver-framed, black announcement sign, with ridges running horizontally, holding individual white letters pressed into those ridges.
Times of meetings were posted, for the K of C clubs, youth meetings, special events and the like.
At the bottom was a simple listing: AA: Meetings—M, TU, TH, 8 pm.
Jack let out a sigh of relief. Today was Friday.
Well, I guess that’s my answer then.
He turned quickly, as if he’d just remembered something in his car or house that needed urgent attention, and hurried away from the shadow of the entryway and from under the benevolent watch of the old Madonna.
Jack wouldn’t admit to using circumstances as tests, but this afternoon, this attempt had been a test. The schedule had failed. The opportunity had passed. Jack was in the clear now. He had tried. It could no longer be his fault. He would have stepped through those doors; he thought he would have stepped through those doors, at any rate, had they been opened. But they were not. They were locked and Jack had no choice in the matter. He had to move on.
It had often been like this in the past. Jack had tried, but circumstances had prevented good things from happening. He had tried to be a good father. He had tried his best to be a good husband. But it was difficult. His job was difficult. Everyone had demands on his time. There had been stress, lots of stress, every day, on the job and at home. He had to deal with that stress somehow. If his wife had not understood, well, maybe it was that she never had to deal with such stress.
I did. I tried to be good enough for everyone.
So what if he stumbled once in a while?
Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has a bad day now and again.
Familiar arguments brewed in Jack’s thoughts. Familiar defenses, familiar offensives, familiar hurts and wounds were torn open, a little at a time.
As he crossed Main Street, as he waited for the light, a Butler police car slowly cruised past, the driver’s window open, the driver’s arm resting on the window frame. The officer, slow and steady, stared at Jack as he stood at the corner.
Jack’s breath caught in his chest when the policeman stared at him like that, as if Jack had done something wrong or had something in his pocket that would cause trouble, something that if the policeman knew about, would bring about the flashing red lights.
But I didn’t do anything wrong.
The squad car finished the corner, and made its way away from Jack. Even though the light had changed to green, Jack waited. He closed his eyes.
Nothing wrong at all.
He fought back the trembling in his hands. He fought back the anger in his throat.
Down at the end of the block, and just around the corner, right next to the old theater, was a small convenience store.
Jack crossed the street and walked inside. A bell jingled with an angel-like sound as he entered.
He knew what he wanted—and where it was. He picked it up, walked with great purpose to the counter, and laid his purchase and a ten-dollar bill into the metal tray. The clerk slid them both under the bullet-resistant glass, scanned the bottle, tapped at the register, tossed in the change, and pushed the tray back under the glass.
“You need a bag?”
“Nope,” Jack said and slipped the pint bottle of vodka into his front jeans pocket.
He walked out, quickly, as if to distance himself from what he had just done.
Insurance, that’s all. I won’t even touch it. I’ll just have it. In case. Insurance, that’s all. The insurance will help. Steady my nerves. Just having it. Not drinking it. Holding it. That’s all I’ll do.
And he hurried toward his apartment and away from any intrusive eyes of who might be watching.
“Macaroni and cheese?”
Once upon a time, Leslie had enjoyed experimenting with recipes. Cooking and baking had always been so enjoyable. Now she considered dinnertime the most difficult period of her entire day. Deciding what to cook seemed like an insurmountable task at times, so most nights she stuck to a few traditional, tried-and-true favorites.
Ava screwed up her face, tight, like a pickle, or an olive in a jar. “What kind of mac and cheese?”
An unexpected response.
“What do you mean, what kind?”
“The kind in the blue box. I don’t like the kind in the white box.”
“The blue box?”
Ava set her jaw firm. “It’s cheesier.”
Leslie flipped open the pantry cabinet, hoping that there was a blue box in there.
There was.
She switched the burner on, added the water to the pan, and waited for the boiling to begin. This was the old-fashioned sort of mac and cheese, the kind where you actually had to cook the noodles and drain them, adding the butter and milk and cheesy orange powder at the end. The whole meal would only take a few minutes, but it gave Leslie something to do, something to accomplish.
She ladled the entire pot of yellowy noodles onto a plate, then called Ava to the table. Leslie planned on having a cup of coffee for dinner; her recent episodes seemed to strip away whatever appetite she may have had.
Ava sat, folded her hands on the table, and bowed her head.
The two of them seldom, if ever, prayed before meals.
“God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food.”
Leslie looked up, but Ava’s head was still bowed.
“And thanks for listening to me at lunch. Mrs. DiGiulio said You would listen. Amen.”
Leslie added a soft amen of her own, led by her child’s example.
Ava smiled, picked up a fork, and began to eat, bending her face to near plate level so she could easily shovel the noodles in without the possibility of dropping any or of wasting time in the process.
It reminded Leslie of a dog eating, and the practice would usually bring about a reprimand. But not this evening. There was too much on Leslie’s mind to grow impatient over eating styles.
After observing h
alf of the pile of noodles disappear into Ava’s sidelong face, Leslie could hold back no longer.
“Ava, eat like a lady, please, and not a lady dog.”
Ava poked upright, as if fully expecting her mother’s request, almost as if she had been concerned that it had not been forthcoming sooner.
“What else did you ask God about?” Leslie asked, keeping her words just curious, not demanding. She turned her coffee cup, now half full of lukewarm coffee, moving the cup’s handle to be perpendicular with the table’s edge, making sure it was as perfect as it could be without measuring.
Ava chewed, perhaps thoughtfully, then swallowed large, making it appear that she was forcing a baseball-sized lump of yellow noodles down her throat.
“Things,” she finally said.
“What sort of things?” Leslie asked, adjusting her cup again.
“Just things,” Ava repeated, then speared another forkful of noodles.
Leslie, in most situations, would have left the subject lie, knowing her daughter could hold secrets completely. “That’s all? Just things? You won’t tell me?”
Ava looked at her mother’s face, and the young girl’s eyes caught Leslie’s and held them there for a long time. There was a flicker of something—maybe it was hope, maybe it was resignation, maybe it was a sliver of maturity showing on the young child’s face and in her eyes. Leslie wanted to believe that it was a glister of hope. Then Ava began to chew again, and the contact was broken.
And in that long moment, Leslie became, at the same time, both surer and uneasier, knowing that what Ava had prayed for seemed so very, very far away.
Jack unlocked the door of his apartment and hurried inside, almost slamming the door after him, as if someone was pursuing him. He leaned against the closed door, breathing deeply, his eyes shut, feeling the pleasant outline of the bottle tucked into the front pocket of his jeans. The buzzer on the streetlight down at the corner sounded three times before Jack moved. Slowly, carefully, he extracted the small bottle of Russian vodka from his pocket. He made no attempt at opening it. He made no attempt to find a glass and something to mix with it.
Just insurance, that’s all it is.
He placed the unopened bottle on a small shelf built into the wall, an alcove, most likely built to house an old-style rotary phone, as if this were the most natural place to secure such a bottle, not to be used, but simply to have; not to have access to it, just comfort coming from simple accessibility.
I’m not going to drink it.
He sat on the sofa heavily, grabbed the TV remote, hit the power button, then the mute button. The blue light of the screen flickered on. It did not matter what show was running. Jack did not want to watch or listen, yet the fluttering illumination felt right.
He hadn’t yet taken off his jacket. He didn’t think he could move easily, so he waited, eyes closed, arms folded across his chest, until the urges had diminished, became controllable. He waited and took shallow gulps of air, blocking out the images he’d once assumed were under control, or banished, or forgotten.
They weren’t.
I’m not going to drink it.
He shouldn’t have walked through that cemetery today. He should have remembered what headstones and epitaphs would do to him. It had been such a long time since he’d had to deal with all that. He thought of his daughter again and her mother.
I’m not going to drink it.
And then, from nowhere, from the darkness, came the image of the locked door in the back room of the Midlands Building.
Why am I thinking of that?
Jack let that thought take over. It was different than thinking about the closed bottle. But it was no safer. After a while, after the sky outside grew dark, Jack listed over to one side, found the small pillow at the edge of the sofa, placed it under his head, closed his eyes, folded his arms again over his chest, tucked his hands inside his coat, and prayed that sleep might come and free him.
I’m not going to drink it.
Just before sleep came to him, one thought rolled into his awareness: I have made a wasteland of everything I’ve touched.
Ava snuggled under her Pretty Princess blanket and smooshed up the pillows behind her. On her nightstand was an adult’s thickness of books—books from the school library, as well as books Leslie bought at garage sales, at least twenty books in a teetering stack. Leslie watched as Ava removed one from the middle of the stack with great care and gently opened the cover.
The child smiled as she first encountered the first page. “This one looks real good, Mom.”
For those few moments that she watched, Leslie felt at peace, but only for those few moments. That calm feeling, a stranger to her, disappeared as soon as she stepped out of her daughter’s bedroom. It disappeared because … well … everything was tenuous; everything in Leslie’s life precarious. Everything was at risk.
Am I ever going to be free of all this? Am I ever going to be safe?
She paced in the living room, between the kitchen and the french doors, finally sitting on the lawn chair on the balcony, watching the western sky grow gold, then darken. She pulled out the slip of paper in her breast pocket and stared at it. She looked at her watch again. She stood and walked to the phone in the kitchen.
She had found the strength, earlier in the day, to call the church where Tim Blake, the man Mrs. DiGiulio had mentioned, was senior pastor. Actually, he was one of only two pastors on staff. Grace @ Calvary was not an extremely large church, apparently. The tape message went on and on, giving times of services and meetings, a complicated message about the youth group, the times Pastor Blake would be in the office—and his home phone number as well. The tape claimed he’d be in his office Friday evening until 9:00.
She took a breath, then another, then took the phone off the receiver and dialed. The call must have been directed straight to the pastor’s office phone after hours.
“This is Pastor Blake. May I help you?”
In that instant, Leslie froze, unable to make a sound.
“Hello? … Hello?”
Leslie felt a tremor in her hands. It was all she could do to return the phone to its cradle. It was all she could do to slump into a kitchen chair.
In the hall, near the bathroom, in the faint glow of the nightlight, she saw her daughter, standing there, almost in darkness. The young girl was staring intently.
“It was a tape machine, honey. That’s all it was. I’ll call later.”
Ava stared at her mother for a long time, without saying a word, then shrugged and turned away.
Leslie knew what she was thinking.
She has seen this all before.
Amelia Westland, age fifteen years, nine months
Butler, Pennsylvania
April 10, 1878
I have not yet found a chance to seek out Mr. Beck, though I have discovered where the livery is located whilst on a rare afternoon ramble when the Barrys were on a short holiday. It is not a far distance, and my thoughts of him being nearby are constant. We have time to go to services, but it is plain Mr. Beck attends a different church than I. I am not perplexed, since our growing town boasts of six different Sunday meetings, ranging from Episcopalian to Methodist. I wonder, should our paths yet merge, if our faiths will meld without controversy.
I pray that we will see each other soon. God assures my heart that we will. I know God is with me, and I pray day and night that His will be shown to me. I do not wish to grow old alone and barren, like the Misses Burnett and Tollifer.
Perhaps, when it is summer, I might see Julian in the streets. As I grow mature, the doctor indicated that I will be allowed to visit the markets in town on his behalf, seeing as how the Misses Tollifer and Burnett find walking long distances troublesome and painful.
The LORD will command his lovingkindness in
the day time,
and in the night his song shall be with me,
and my prayer unto the God of my life.
—Psalm 42:8
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE ONE TOOL JACK NEVER anticipated buying—or using—was a broom. In all his previous construction jobs, somebody else held the broom. No carpenter swept up. That was for whoever the new guy was.
Now Jack swept up. He had purchased two brooms: one wide brown industrial sort of push broom, and a more standard, residential model, made from artificial straw. And he had bought a large black metal dustpan. He would vacuum later. If you vacuum when there’s too much dust, he’d learned, it spreads it around.
He started in the back rooms, the bedrooms, and worked forward, sweeping the room like a man cutting grass, making sure he was not stepping in debris already collected. He finished each room, deposited everything into a black trash bag, and worked his way up the hall, careful not to nick or bang the new quarter-round he’d installed throughout the apartment. The finishing trim was a small detail, one he hadn’t quoted originally, but it made each room look finished and complete. Leslie had agreed wholeheartedly.
It took him nearly half an hour to sweep out the entire apartment. It looked so clean and renewed and updated, despite the age of the building and the architectural details.
There was only one task left for Jack to perform: installing the new tub. The bathroom was an odd size. A standard, in-stock tub would have fit easily, but there would be a large gap on each side, and Jack thought that a ledge around a tub of that size would invite water problems later on. So the tub that would fit just right was on order, and the order desk at Home Depot promised him it would arrive by the end of the week.