by Drew Perry
“How tall?” Jack asks him.
“Eighty or a hundred feet.”
“Good money on both ends,” Jack says, running rough numbers in his head.
“Yes indeed,” says Canavan.
Jack looks at him. “That’s how you talk now?”
“What’s how I talk now?”
“Indeed?”
“That’s how I always talk,” he says, not quite looking at Jack. Or at anything, really. He seems embarrassed to be talking at all, which Jack appreciates, given the situation. Also he seems healthy, seems fit, which Jack appreciates less. He’s taller than Jack by a couple of inches. Skinnier. He maybe shaves a little more regularly. Canavan walks back through the gate, back to his chainsaw project, and Jack stands in the back yard, looking at the back of Canavan’s house, at his patio, his grill and chairs all set up. His grass is too long, and there are seedlings growing up out of his gutters, but the house is in good shape, is pretty well taken care of for the most part, has fresh paint on some of the window trim. It’s a bungalow, a mill house, little easy projects all over the place. Canavan needs to, say, re-screen his side porch. He might think about digging out one or two dying shrubs here or there. Jack needs for the kitchen place to magically get his tile back in stock so he can run it the rest of the way across the floor. He needs a dishwasher in the hole where the dishwasher is meant to go. He needs a new breakfast nook rising of its own accord from the mudpit that’s left from the water line disaster. And then he needs all of that across the street, too.
He goes and finds Canavan in the carport. He says, “Beth’s inside?”
Canavan says, “Beth is inside.”
“How’s that going?”
“It’s going,” he says.
“You guys making each other happy in there?”
Canavan looks down his driveway at the street, then goes back to whatever he’s doing to the chainsaw. He says, “Listen, Jack, you should know that none of this was really my idea.”
“From here it seems like it was a little bit your idea.”
“You know what I mean.”
“What I’m saying is, you look like a willing participant.”
“Well, maybe I am, then. I don’t know. Jesus.” And Canavan’s phone rings and saves them both and he answers and gets up and walks around the side of the house, saying Yeah, we can do that, we do jobs like that all the time. Now: Let me ask you a couple of questions. Jack looks up and catches Beth in the window of the side door. She’s wearing a white shirt, has a white mug in her hand. Her hair’s down in her face, a mess of curls, the way he’s always liked it best. His wife: He doesn’t think of her that way very often, tends to think of her simply as Beth. But there she is, his wife, right there. She’s waiting, in Canavan’s house, for him to come up and ring the bell and present her with her son.
This was all coming, is the thing. Or maybe not this exactly, but something like it. He knew that much, knew something had been out there on the horizon even before he’d added a second house to his vast real estate portfolio. So: Last week, when Beth started banging around cups and plates and the mail and anything else she could move or slide or pick up and shake at him, he wasn’t wholly surprised. It’d been in the water. Rena, Canavan’s girlfriend, had left him at the beginning of the spring semester. She teaches with Beth at Kinnett, both of them in art history. This is how everybody met, how they ended up at the dinner table together once or twice a month for the last several years, one big happy family. Rena packed up in February, moved downtown, was living for a little while in a condo that belonged to somebody else over at the college, some corporate communications associate dean or associate-associate dean who was on fellowship somewhere for the semester. Canavan played, to the letter, the fucked-up boy. Drunken and spurned. Beth and Jack were there for him. They went over to the house a couple of times, ate pizza out of delivery boxes and drank beers on the frayed screen porch, him telling them how This is just temporary, this is just until we can work a few things out. Beth and Jack got gently drunk with him and agreed as much as possible. She’ll be back, Terry, Beth told him. How could she not? Now Jack wonders when Beth started plotting her own move into Canavan’s house. If, on those nights, she was sizing up where she’d throw her shoes after she came in the door. She had him fooled, though. They’d ride back home down 70, lights on high to watch for deer, and she’d reach across the seat for his hand. They were thankful it wasn’t them. That’s what he thought they were. Thankful.
Canavan. What he’d figured was that she’d probably go downtown and crash with Rena for a few days—three or four, tops. Because he could see that easily enough: The two of them set up in the little swanky downtown revitalization condo together, drinking wine out of souvenir downtown wine tasting festival glasses, sitting around and listening to pirated underground Sri Lankan hip-hop some intentionally edgy student of Rena’s had turned her on to. They’d crank that up on the out-of-town dean’s stereo and grade papers and let their blue collar men hang out in their respective houses and get their heads together. It’d be good for everyone.
Instead, she chose Canavan, which will break everything into pieces, of course, will put a fairly permanent dent in the diplomatic ties between everybody. His friendship with Canavan’s in the shitter, and he can’t see Rena and Beth drinking wine together out of any glasses, souvenir or not, any time soon. Butner sits with him after work, says, This is pretty goddamn fancy, what she’s up to here. I don’t know what the hell she thinks she’s doing over there, but this is something, I’ll tell you what. Jack tells him things were fine before the house. Or more fine. Butner shakes his head, says, I don’t know, man, I don’t know.
It’s not just the house. He knows that. Knows it doesn’t help, didn’t help, but knows it isn’t the house, the money, nothing easy like that. It’s no one thing. They eat well enough together, sleep well enough, talk about school and the mulch yard. I had another one today, she’ll say, walking in the door, hanging her bag over the back of one of the dining room chairs, a paper in her left hand. Listen to this: “Our father, who art in heaven, hollowed by thy name.” Hollowed! Can you believe these kids? Or: He’ll come home late on a Tuesday, pine needles in his boots and sleeves, and they’ll sit on the front porch until dark, watching the hummingbirds come to the feeders. Her hobby. She brews sugar syrup, has all these red plastic flower-shaped feeders strung from the trees. If they can get Hen set up in front of The Weather Channel, they have an hour or two to themselves.
But something underneath all that got wrinkled. The small, stupid fights had been getting a little more frequent, a little higher-pitched, the both of them at each other too often about whose turn it was to run out to the store for dog food, for yogurt for Hendrick. At first he’d pegged that to her tendency to drift away from him at the end of semesters anyway, to shrink back into herself, into her job, papers piling up, the whiny GPA kids wanting to know what they could do for extra credit. He’d had all that, too, knew what November and April could look like. Jack had taught at Kinnett as an adjunct, taught the freshman humanities series all the students have to take. General Humanities—GenHum—I & II. Fall: Mesopotamia to the Renaissance. Spring: DaVinci to Nixon. The real job was hers. They hired her right out of Carolina, tenure-track, and the dean found an adjunct gig for Jack. She negotiated it for him. But he timed out after his four full years—a college rule that got bent for some adjuncts, and not for others—and with no permanent slot in history opening for him, that was it. It was Canavan, actually, one night over enough beers, who suggested something like a landscaping service. It’d be easy, he said. Couple of pickup trucks and an ad in the Yellow Pages. We could work together. Rena was all for it, said it was such a good idea. Try it for a year, they all said. Even Beth. He’d done it in high school and college, but Jack didn’t want to mow lawns again, didn’t want to rake leaves. Then they hit on the mulch yard. Plants for sale out front, like a little nursery. You know, Canavan said, people do want cheap pine
nuggets. There was the vacant lot out on 70 between Burlington and Greensboro. Beth could stop in afternoons on her way home from the college. It all seemed almost romantic. He had to do something. Why not this? He liked the idea of watering pansies and petunias and azalea bushes. Liked the idea of selling people dirt. He got his loans, bought his yellow loaders, bought a sign.
And once he hired Butner, and once Butner was all but running the show, on the slow days he could be home with Hendrick. In a lot of ways it was easier than teaching. When he was at Kinnett, Jack had drawn all the time slots nobody else wanted, eight in the morning and five-thirty in the afternoon. This was better. This was people pulling up in trucks wanting a few dogwoods, wanting four yards of mini-bark. He could do this. In two years he was making what he’d made as an adjunct, and after three, last year, they moved, bought the little house in Greensboro. Good school district for Hendrick, an elementary school with a fully integrated curriculum. Hen in with all the other kids. Jack was for this. Beth wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure he was ready to be with everyone else. But she went along. The water heater failed the first week, flooded the den. They knocked the couple of walls through. He’s got his plans for the attic, for the kitchen. The A/C doesn’t work so well. The house is a plain rectangle. He’s working on that. She wants him to work faster.
What she really wants more than anything, she says, is to have things finished, to have the trim finished and the paint finished and the tile finished. She wants the kitchen cabinets back up on the wall so she can have places to keep everything, so she’ll know where everything is. I need a calmer life, she says. I need places where things belong. Jack keeps telling her to wait until I’ve got it fixed up. Wait until we clear out that back room. Wait until we’ve got the office roughed in upstairs. She shakes her head, doesn’t want to wait. Last week she walked the halls, straightening the pictures, crying. I can’t live like this, she said. Not right now. Not this week. I can’t do this like this any more. He knew she meant the house, but he knew she meant everything else, too. She meant him. She sat at the table, head in her hands. I have to get out of here for a while, she said. I’m sorry. I am. But you’ll be fine with him. I know you will. I need—You’ve got to get this house cleaned up. You’ve got to finish the floors in here. The upstairs. You’ve got to finish all of this. And the wall, Jack, goddamnit, and the house across the street, another whole house—
I’m trying, he said. I’m trying to make it nice for you.
How is this nice?
It will be, he said. It will. But then she was gone, out the door, and she was calling him twice, three times a day, making him lists of things he’d need to do for Hendrick, things to watch out for, things he already knew, things she knew he knew. You’re finding him new books to read? You’re making sure he has snacks in the afternoons? Same old CPR-poster Beth, now from a distance. She’s been coming over once a day, or meeting them out for lunch, or just taking Hen for an hour. She’s left him, and she hasn’t. And Hen’s handling it, is bearing up: He’s his same old self, working through his same old routines. That first call, though, the first night, Saturday night, when the little light-up display showed Canavan’s number, Jack did not handle it so well. Where are you, exactly, Jack wanted to know, already knowing, because there it was, right there. About that, she said. Now, Jack, don’t flip out. He flipped out a little bit. Yelled a little bit. He hasn’t really yelled that much since then. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to be doing about it. Something, though. He’s supposed to do something. He’s sure he is. He just does not know what.
Canavan comes back around the side of the house, waving his phone in the air. He grins. “Rainmaker,” he says, talking to Jack like Beth isn’t and never has been standing in the door. “Lady’s kids want a stand of pines taken out of her front yard. Over by Kinnett. Right almost on campus. Huge trees. I’ve driven by the place. Pretty easy job. But big. Five grand, maybe more. Plus, if we cut it right, if we can get it shredded, there’s got to be fifty or sixty yards in it for you. So another thousand right there.”
“That’s great,” says Jack.
“Yeah,” Canavan says. “It could be.”
“It’s just all coming out perfectly for you, isn’t it?”
“It’s money for both of us,” Canavan says.
“Outstanding,” Jack says. “Really.”
“It’s just business,” says Canavan, putting his phone back in its holster. He has a holster for his phone. He stands there, hand on his belt, king of the castle. “Listen,” he says. “I don’t know, OK?”
“About what?” Jack says.
“About I don’t know. About anything.”
“OK,” Jack says. “Great.”
Canavan points at Hen. “You want to take him inside?” he says.
“I guess,” says Jack. In the truck, Hen’s reciting the progression of oak trees from the catalog—he’s saying Sawtooth Oak, Pin Oak, White Oak, Swamp Oak. Jack knows them, too, knows the list, finds himself mouthing the names along with him. This was a dumbass move, bringing him over here. He sees that now. He can’t do this. He can’t leave him here with Beth at Terry Canavan’s sweet little tumbledown house. He can’t leave him here while Canavan goes off to bid his million-dollar pines and Jack goes into the yard to watch soccer moms paw over the marigolds, watch dads in deck shoes stand there and approve of the way Butner drives the skid loader. What was he thinking? Hendrick stays with him. That’s how it has to be. Hendrick says, Live Oak, Bur Oak, Overcup Oak. He says, Post Oak.
“Something wrong?” Canavan asks.
Jack says, “You know what? I think I’ll probably just take Hen in with me after all.”
“To the yard?”
“Yeah. I thought it would be easier this way, but I changed my mind.”
“Yeah?”
“I think so,” Jack says.
Canavan runs a finger in his ear, checks to see if he got anything. He says, “Are you sure?”
Jack says, “I am, actually. I’m pretty sure.”
Canavan says, “OK.”
“OK,” says Jack. They’re not looking quite at each other. They’re nodding a lot. Everything is very OK. He sees what’s next. “So I’ll go tell Beth?”
“OK,” says Canavan, nodding.
Jack’s known him long enough to guess that Canavan’s going through several loops of what to say. Hen rocks himself back and forth in the truck. He looks at Canavan, then at Jack, and says, “Zero percent for qualified buyers.” He says, “For a limited time only.” He says, “Chinquapin Oak.”
“Willow Oak,” Jack says.
“Water Oak.” Hen pronounces it carefully, exactly, his mouth round as a ball on the O.
A woman walks by in the street trailing a huge red dog. Jack and Canavan wave. She signals back with a stick. “OK, then,” Canavan says, and opens the passenger-side door of the truck, hauls himself up into the cab alongside Hendrick, looks at the catalog with him.
Hendrick flips a few pages. “All oaks are deciduous trees with toothed leaves and heavy, furrowed bark,” he tells Canavan. “The fruit is, of course, the acorn.”
“Of course,” Canavan says. Jack heads for the front door. I changed my mind, he’ll tell her. I’m keeping him with me. This may not go well. She will have already figured out what to do with him during her class, won’t want Jack changing her plans again. She opens the door before he can knock, and she’s tall there in the doorway, somehow, taller than normal. Maybe she’s grown. She looks good. Her eyes look clear, like she’s been getting sleep. She says, “Hello, Jack.”
“Bethany,” he says, which is not her real name. It’s just Beth. Sometimes he calls her Bethany. Can’t help himself.
She says, “Would you like to come in?”
“Not, you know, a whole lot, I have to say.”
“Don’t start in,” she says.
“Start in on you how?”
“For God’s sake,” she says, and moves out of the way. “Don’t be a jerk. I
didn’t even say on me. Come get some coffee. You look like shit.” She squints out at the truck, at Hen and Canavan. “How’s Hendrick?” she says.
“He’s good.”
“You’re keeping him on the yogurt?”
“Yes.”
“And half a granola bar in the afternoons?”
“Jesus. Of course. Yes, OK?”
“Come in, Jackie,” she says. “Just come in.”
And he does go in. Because what else is there? He hasn’t gone to Wal-Mart to buy a rifle. No shooting sprees here, negotiations by bullhorn, Chopper 5 live on the scene. Instead: Coffee. Maybe some toast. Suddenly, he wants toast. He follows her in, but he can’t figure out how or where to stand. He leans awkwardly on a wall, watches her at the coffeemaker, pouring him a cup. “You look like you know where everything is already,” he says.
She smiles at him, a little half-sad smile, brings him the mug. She touches him on the arm.
“Don’t do that,” he says.
“OK,” she says. “You make the rules.”
“I don’t want there to be rules.”
“I don’t want you to be angry,” she says.
“I’m not here to ask you to come back home.”
“I know that.”
He sips his coffee. It’s pretty bad. “I’m taking Hen in with me. I’m not leaving him here.”
“I figured.”
“You’re not pissed off?” He shouldn’t give a damn about that, but there it is.
She sits down on a sofa, a huge blue reclining thing with actual cupholders in the arms. It’s leather, or fake leather. It’s ridiculous. Jack wonders if there’s a cooler in it. It’s new since the last time he was here. Maybe Canavan won it in a sweepstakes. “I’m not pissed off,” she says. “I’m not much of anything, I don’t think.”