The Odds of You and Me

by Cecilia Galante

  I take the key out of the ignition, slide a glance at the clock on the dashboard. It’s well after ten A.M. I’m already later than Ma probably told Mr. Herron I would be, but I still can’t make myself move. My shoulders are hunched up almost to my ears, my toes curled up inside my shoes. I bring my gaze back to the little girl, watch as she gets to the end of the sidewalk and then hops off with two feet. The father grins, holds out his hand for a high five, and then scoops her up. His arms are huge around her, and he holds her close, protecting her from everything harmful in the world.

  I blink a few times as they disappear around the corner and then rub my eyes. What the hell is wrong with me? What am I doing, sitting here like some kind of zombie?

  I have work to do. Money to make. A security deposit to pay. A life to start living.

  I yank open the car door, slam it shut.

  Bite my lip to hold back the tide of tears behind it and head across the street.

  Chapter 8

  Mr. Herron is eighty-one years old. He lives in a two-story, four-bedroom house that looks like it is about three hundred years old. Shingles are falling off the roof, and one of the window shutters is missing. He’s got a rocking chair on the porch, and a rusty horseshoe nailed to the front door. An old welcome mat that used to spell HERRON looks as if a rodent of some kind has chewed through either side of it, so that only the letters ERR are still decipherable. Mr. Herron has lived in this house for over fifty years; it was where he and his wife raised all their children and, he told me once, where he would die and be buried.

  Ma and I used to clean Mr. Herron’s place every two weeks, just like all our other clients, until we got a call from his son Arthur, who lives out in Arizona. Arthur told us that his father’s diabetes was causing him to lose his eyesight—the doctors said it wouldn’t be long before he was completely blind—and that Mr. Herron had refused to be placed in a nursing home. Could we go over once a day to “straighten up, make sure the place wasn’t turning into some kind of den?” He would cover the cost, whatever it was, and mail us a check twice a month from Arizona. He does, too. Arthur’s checks are never late.

  Now, I walk up the rickety front steps, and reach for the doorbell, which sticks half the time because it is so old. “I’m at my job,” I say to myself. “I’m at my job, ready to do my work, so that I can make money for my security deposit, and that’s all there is to it.”

  I ring the doorbell, stand back, and wait. The paint on the outside of Mr. Herron’s house is chipping badly; the flaky curls remind me of the way Angus’s sunburned skin sheds in the summertime. When he lets me peel it off, they make a little pile on the corner of the kitchen table, like insect wings.

  I ring the doorbell twice more, and then try the door. It’s unlocked.

  “Mr. Herron?” I call down the hallway. No answer. A sharp, acrid smell fills my nostrils as I walk through the house. Something’s burning in the kitchen. The lights are off—the lights are always off—but I can make out a dark plume of smoke rising out of a pot on the stove. “You’ve got something burning out here, Mr. Herron!” I turn off the burner under the pot, look inside. Whatever it was, it is indistinguishable now—just a bunch of black lumps at the bottom. I put the pot in the sink, squirt some detergent in, step back as an angry geyser of steam rises.

  “Mr. Herron? Are you here?” A wave of fear washes over me. What if he has collapsed on the toilet? Fallen down the basement stairs? Then I catch sight of the top of his graying head through the kitchen window. He’s outside in the yard again, on his hands and knees, fiddling in the garden. Rain or shine, snow or wind, Mr. Herron is always in the garden.

  “Mr. Herron?” I push open the back door, squint a little against the pale light.

  He straightens up, fastens his gaze in my direction, squints a little. “Bird? Is that you?” He’s dressed in a gray cardigan over an old white T-shirt, dark blue pants, and leather moccasins. The closely cropped hair on his head is almost all white; only a few thin threads of gray peek out along the sideburns.

  “Yeah, it’s me. I’ve been calling for you in there.” I start across the tiny backyard, stepping over pockets of dirty slush. “Did you know you had something burning on the stove?”

  A shadow flits across his face; his bushy eyebrows narrow. “Ah, shit.” He sits back on his heels. “You take it off?”

  “Yeah, I put it in the sink so it could soak. Whatever it was, it’s ruined now. What were you making?”

  He shakes his head. “Just some applesauce. Lucille says I should be eatin’ more fruits and veg’tables.”

  Lucille is one of Mr. Herron’s home nurses. I’ve been here a few times when she comes in to give him his insulin and check his blood pressure. She’s nice enough, although she uses a whiny, high-pitched kind of voice when she talks to him, like he’s about two years old.

  “You didn’t smell it burning?” I ask.

  “No, I didn’t smell it burning,” Mr. Herron says. “I’m out here, checkin’ on the garden! If I smelled it burning, I woulda come back inside and turned the damn thing off!”

  “Okay, okay. No need to get excited. But you know, it’s probably not a good idea to put something on the stove if you’re going to come out here and work.”

  He snorts and turns back around. “Now you sound like Lucille. Always naggin’.”

  “Did my mother call and tell you I was going to be late?”

  Mr. Herron nods his head, turning over the dirt. “Yup. Said she’d asked you to stop in at the church to pick up her sweater? That right?”

  “Yeah.” What would he say if I told him? What if I just blurted it out: I ran into someone I used to know, Mr. Herron, who just this morning was being taken to jail after putting someone in the hospital and then escaped somehow. He’s at the church where my mother left her sweater! The one she asked me to go get! Can you believe it? When I saw him, he pointed a gun at me, and asked me not to tell anyone. He’s still there, hiding in the choir loft, right next to the old organ. I think he’s hurt, but I don’t know for sure. How long do you think it’ll be before they find him? And what will happen to him when they do?

  “Gotta tell Arthur to dock you,” Mr. Herron says, shaking his head.

  “Even though my mother called?” I look at him, trying to hide my annoyance. “Mr. Herron, it’s not even ten o’clock yet.”

  “Job’s a job.” Mr. Herron shrugs. “You come in late, you get docked.”

  You’re a cheapskate, I feel like saying. An old, crotchety pain in the ass. You’re lucky we come at all, with all the complaining you do, all the mistakes you try to point out even though you can’t see half of them.

  “What’re you planting today?” I ask instead, looking over his shoulder at the lightly packed dirt piles around several small plants. Last summer, before his eyesight really started to go, Mr. Herron made me come out every other week to look at something else that was blooming. I didn’t know what the names of anything were, but for months, the small plot of ground was awash in a sea of colors: peach and magenta, dark purples and yellows. Now, there is a multitude of stems, leaves, and tightly closed buds but no color. Not yet.

  “I’m not planting anything.” Mr. Herron feels the ground under a wide plant with silvery buds. His fingertips feel their way up to the stem, inching gently out along the leaves. I swear his fingers have their own set of eyes. “I’ve already done the planting. I’s checking on my dianthus and my tangerine parfaits. They’ll be bloomin’ soon, and I need to make sure they don’t need any extra help sittin’ up straight.”

  “Tangerine parfaits? That sounds like some kind of dessert.”

  “Mmm, they look good enough to eat, too, once they flower.” Mr. Herron smiles with satisfaction. “Deep, deep orange. Like sherbert. Prettiest little things you ever saw.”

  “When will they bloom?” I wonder if he’ll be able to see them at all by the time they bloom this year.

  Mr. Herron reaches out again, feels around until his fingers come in
to contact with a stem and then make their way up to a tight, barely visible bud. He caresses it for a moment, thinking. “I’d say ’nother month is all. They late-spring risers. Like the dianthus. Pretty soon, this whole front section be drippin’ in orange and purple.”

  “That’ll be pretty.” I look back toward the house. “I’m gonna get started inside now, okay? You want me to put some more apples on the stove while I clean?”

  “Nah, forget it,” Mr. Herron says. “Stuff tastes like baby food anyway.”

  “You sure? It’s no trouble. I could slice some up right now, put them in with some cinnamon sugar . . .” I stop talking as Mr. Herron shakes his head vehemently.

  “Didn’t even want the stuff in the first place. I’m tellin’ you. Just Lucille buggin’ me. Forget it.”

  “All right.” I head toward the back door. “I’ll be inside if you need anything, okay?”

  He grunts without turning back around, his fingers still exploring the ground beneath him.

  THE NICE THING is that even though he can’t see more than a foot in front of him anymore, Mr. Herron is still a pretty neat guy. Basically, I just cover the essentials when I come over: dusting, vacuuming, sanitizing the bathroom. (He does miss the toilet seat quite a bit now.) Sometimes he asks me to fold his wash, but not often. And unless he complains about the way I’ve made his bed, or how I forgot to Windex the TV screen, I’m almost never there for more than two hours. It’s pretty easy work for a steady paycheck.

  I put in my headphones as I start on the kitchen, nod my head along with AC/DC’s opening riff of “Back in Black,” and settle into my usual routine: counters first, then the sink, the front and very top of the refrigerator, and inside the microwave. Afterward, I will water his kitchen plants, sweep and mop the floor, and then, while it dries, move on to the downstairs bathroom. Except that despite turning the volume up as high as it will go, and bobbing my head along to “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” which has one of the single best guitar riffs ever written, nothing about me is settling in. My hands shake as I spray the counters, and when I get up on the little stepladder to water the ugly plant Mr. Herron keeps near the window, my legs feel so rubbery that I almost fall off.

  Is James in pain? That foot injury—whatever it is—looked pretty bad. And the cut on his head was bleeding. Not gushing blood or anything, but still. It looked deep. His wrists, too. He probably needs to see a doctor. Go to the hospital. Maybe I should make an anonymous call to the police station, say something like, “Go look in the choir loft at Saint Augustine’s. There’s a man there. He’s hurt.” Except that they can trace things like that, can’t they? I’ve seen it on those cop shows. Which means that then they’d come looking for me. Start asking questions. If I have a record now, God only knows what would happen if I got involved with something like this. One thing’s for sure: I could kiss the apartment at Moon Lake goodbye. And that’s not going to happen. Not now. Not ever.

  With the downstairs bathroom finished, I head upstairs to start on Mr. Herron’s bedroom. The perimeter of his wide mahogany dresser is lined with a collection of Happy Meal toys from McDonald’s: Strawberry Shortcake, Shrek, Hello Kitty, Minnie and Mickey Mouse, Goofy, even a Build-a-Bear one. He keeps them around for when his grandchildren come to visit. In all the time I’ve been working for him, though, they’ve never come to New Haven. Not once. Still, he tells me to keep them clean, to dust them daily. Just in case, I guess.

  I accidentally knock Hello Kitty and Shrek over with the duster as I start moving it. And then, when I bend over to pick them up, I sit down with my knees folded under me, and stay there, tracing the edges of the figurines, as if I will find something that I am not sure I am looking for somewhere in those big plastic eyes.

  “IT SAYS HERE that one out of every eight people in the United States will have been employed at a McDonald’s at some time in their life,” James said one morning. “Don’t you feel kind of gypped that we only made it to the Burger Barn?”

  I’d smiled when he said that, picked up the dead cigarette butt he’d crushed on the cement block next to him, and tossed it at his foot. It was the third morning of the week I’d purposely drawn the prep work slip just to see him. I still didn’t know why I’d done it exactly. I knew I wanted to be near him, but when I was, like just now, a nameless, inexplicable uncertainty still filled me like water.

  He rolled his shoulder back with a fluid movement and then inhaled. “Ah, well. I only got a year left here anyway, and then I’m heading out.”

  “To where?”

  “Somewhere else. Anywhere else.” He looked at me. “You’re not staying, are you? I mean, this isn’t gonna be one of those lifer jobs for you, is it?”

  “God, no.” I looked down, picked at the skin around my fingernails until one of them started bleeding. “I’m saving to go to nursing school.” It was the first time I’d said anything regarding nursing school aloud to anyone, and while I knew it would take months, maybe even years, before it would actually come to fruition, in that moment, my dream became real—almost as real as James, who somehow, in the throes of these peculiar morning meetings, had morphed from a ghost into a real person.

  “Oh, yeah?” James tapped another cigarette out of his pack, held it between two fingers. “That’s great. My mother was a nurse.”

  “She was?”

  He nodded, cupping his hand around the tip of the cigarette as he lit it. “Best woman in the world, my mom. Hell of a nurse, too. When I was real little, she used to take me into the hospital with her during her shift when she couldn’t find anyone to watch me. I’d sit on one of those blue chairs by the nurses’ station, and she’d me give me a Reader’s Digest to look at, but I never did. I watched her instead. She was the head nurse, so all the rest of them on the floor were constantly asking her things or bugging her about some patient or this medicine.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “She never lost her cool, never got upset, never once raised her voice. One time, even though I wasn’t allowed, I stood in the doorway of this old guy’s room and watched her lead a team of them as he coded, right there on the bed. She was amazing. Cool, confident, knew exactly what she was doing. They brought him back, even before the doctor on the floor got there. She brought him back.”

  I thought about telling him about the nurse I’d seen the night my father died, how tender she’d been with the old man across the hall, how gentle her movements, as if he was the most important person in the world. But the thought passed. What would he care? Besides, that was my memory, my night. There was no reason to share it with anyone.

  “Wow,” I said instead. “Does she still work there?”

  “She’s been dead almost ten years now.” James’s voice flattened, and he stared at something in the distance. What, I couldn’t see. But as I pulled my legs up and settled my chin on my knees, I had the distinct feeling that there was someone else in the world who not only lived in the same country that I did, but also knew the language. It stilled me, this knowledge, as if it might leave again if I did not hold it close. And so that morning, I did not say anything else.

  MR. HERRON IS SITTING in his easy chair in the living room, “watching” a John Wayne movie on TV, and eating a plate full of salami and saltine crackers. He’s got a can of Bud Light cracked open, too, with a straw inserted into the top of it. Okay, so maybe Lucille’s on to something about him needing to eat more fruit. For a moment, I’m tempted to ask him to turn the channel—“How about we just check the local news, Mr. Herron? Can we? Just to see if anything’s going on?”—but the urge passes. He’d start asking questions.

  He looks up at me, mouth moving.

  I pull out my earphones. “Sorry, what?”

  “You sick or som’thin’?”

  “No, why?”

  “Usually you rushin’ around this place like you need t’get outta here yesterday. I can hear you up there today, draggin’ your feet like you got stones attached to ’em.” His voice is louder than usual, but then again,
so is the volume on the TV. “You trying to figure out how to make my bed the way I like it?”

  “No, just thinking.” I take my feather duster out of the back of my jeans and start in on the front of the TV. Two cowboys are rushing across the screen, yelling about a ruckus in the saloon. One of them snatches the gun from inside the holster around his waist, holds it in his hand as if ready to shoot. I pause, watching for a moment. How many people have actually had a gun pointed at them? At close range? I have no idea what kind of guns policemen carry these days, but from what I can recall, the one James was holding looked like this one on the TV. Maybe a little smaller. I don’t think the barrel was quite so long either.

  “Whatchou thinkin’ about?” Mr. Herron sounds bemused. “You got a hot date or somethin’ after this?”

  My face flushes, as if Mr. Herron has caught wind of my thoughts. “No, I have another house to clean today. You know that.”

  Mr. Herron grunts, takes out a handkerchief from his back pocket, and blows his nose. It’s a loud, gurgling sound, followed by copious wiping. I look away. “Where else you goin’?” He asks me the same question every time I come over.

  “Same as yesterday. The rich lady with all the kids. Over near the Grand Union.”

  His face eases a little. “The one with all the kids,” he says. “Yeah.”

  I move soundlessly around the room, but his eyes follow me everywhere. It used to freak me out a little, him watching me like that, until I realized he just needed to know where I was. I guess if I was almost blind, I’d want to know where someone in my house was, too. “She just had another one, too, didn’t she?” he asks.

  “Little girl, two months ago.” I move the feather duster along the edge of his bookshelf. Moby Dick. A Hardy Boys set. Sherlock Holmes. His kids’ collections from way back when. I wonder why he still keeps them around. He’s certainly not reading them.

  “Well, she better get someone to tie them knees together,” he says. “Shit.”