by Drew Perry
Tuesday morning. His head’s full of Beth on the porch, and he takes Hen in early, thinking they might have the lot to themselves for an hour or so. It’s good when it’s empty. But Butner’s there already, and so’s Ernesto, and they’ve got the radio tuned in and blaring, coffee going in the little cheap coffeemaker, doughnuts set up on the desk next to the register. It’s a no repeat workday on 94.1 FM, the morning guy says. Your home for the hits of the eighties, nineties, and today. Up next, a Mr. Mister rock block. Butner leans forward on the sofa, mouth full of doughnut, greets them as they come in the door. “It’s the little man and the big man,” he says, stuffing more food in his mouth. “You remember dancing to this shit in middle school? Like at your middle school dance?”
“No,” Jack says.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Butner says. “I was talking to Paco. I danced with Jenny Resnick. She had a terrific ass, even in eighth grade. And a huge rack.” He offers Hendrick a doughnut.
“He can’t,” Jack says, intercepting. “Blood sugar. He’s not supposed to eat them.” He gets a yogurt out of the fridge instead, pops the top off, hands it to Hendrick with one of the spoons he keeps in the register drawer, in the slot reserved for fifties.
“Jenny Resnick,” Butner’s saying. “Eighth grade could be the high point of ass. The assal high point.” He’s making motions in the air, drawing it out for Ernesto. “After eighth grade,” Butner says, “they start eating cheese doodles. Then it’s over.”
“That’s lovely,” Jack says.
“I had this on tape and on vinyl,” says Butner, nodding his head at the radio. “Both.” He starts singing along in a kind of terrible high whine.
Ernesto shakes his head. “I hate this shit,” he says. “American music.” He goes out to water the flowers, mumbling to himself.
“Paco’s in a bad mood today,” Butner says. “Isn’t talking to me much.”
Jack watches Hen playing with his yogurt, stirring the fruit in patterns. “Maybe if you didn’t call him Paco all the time.”
“I think he likes it, actually.”
Jack looks up at the whiteboard. “Any business?”
“Hundred and twenty bales of wheat straw to Greensboro. Guy called this morning.”
“Do we have a hundred and twenty?”
“We do,” he says. “Barely.”
“It’s late to be planting grass,” says Jack.
“Hey, man, do the math. Five hundred bucks free and clear. What do I care what time of year it is?” He takes another doughnut. “That’s my week right there. You paid me in the first fifteen minutes this morning. Plus fifty delivery.”
“Just make it twenty-five for everybody,” Jack tells him. “People talk to each other.”
“Not these people,” says Butner. “But it’s your show, boss man.” He gets up, walks out on the lot. “Hey, Paco,” he yells, heading for one of the loaders. “What’s ‘delivery’? How do you say ‘delivery’?”
Hen looks up from his yogurt, looks at Jack, touches the end of the spoon to his mouth twice, and says, “Entrega.”
Everything gets a little brighter right then. The phone rings and Jack lets it go. His head feels squeezed. This is not something that’s possible. He stares at Hendrick. He says, “Say that again.” Hen says nothing. He eats his yogurt. Jack sits down next to him, takes his arm, says, “Hen, say that again.”
“Entrega,” Hendrick says. Easy, simple, clear, perfect. “Delivery. Entrega.”
Jack goes to the door and yells for Ernesto to come in, but he’s already on his way, jogging, to answer the phone, which is still ringing. “Patriot Mulch & Tree,” he says, in a hurry, so it comes out Patriomulshantree.
“Hang up,” Jack tells him. “Jesus Christ. Hang up.”
Ernesto shakes his head no, gives him the thumbs-up sign. He says, into the phone, “Hardwood is thirty. Pine will be twenty-seven.” Neither of those is the right price. Ernesto says, “There is a forty-two delivery charge.”
“Please,” Jack says. “Hang up.”
“Entrega,” says Hendrick. “What’s ‘delivery’? Entrega.”
Ernesto smiles, nods at Hen, gives him a thumbs-up, too, like nothing of any consequence has occurred. Jack feels like the world might have come to a full stop, might now be spinning around the other way. “Very good,” Ernesto says, “three-thirty will be perfect,” and hangs up. “Ten yards of pine,” he tells Jack. “Delivery.” He shakes the phone at Hendrick. “Hen,” he says, without pronouncing the H. It sounds like Eng. “¿Qué es eso?”
“Es un teléfono,” Hendrick says.
“Sí, bueno.”
Not one doctor has ever told them to look for anything like this. “You taught him to speak Spanish?” Jack asks. “He speaks Spanish?” He cannot process this.
“Sure he does,” Ernesto says. “We’ve been learning. In the truck.”
“You taught him to speak it?”
“Not all of it,” he says. “Solamente un poco.” He holds his hands close together. “A little bit. A few words.”
“Like what words? Which ones?”
“You know, vocabulary. Arboles. Hamburguesas. ¿Y qué es eso?” He holds up a pencil.
Hen looks. “¿Y qué es eso?” he says quietly. And then he says, “Lapiz.”
Jack watches him say lapiz again and again. “Does he—”
Ernesto stands behind the desk. “Does he what?”
He’s got to ask. “Does he talk to you?”
Ernesto smiles, shakes his head. “No, not much. We just do the words. He doesn’t care for much talking. Not to people. You know.”
Butner comes back into the office, takes a Coke out of the mini-fridge. “Paco,” he says, “there’s some dudes out there wanting to talk to you.”
Ernesto gestures at Butner, says, “And I can’t really blame him, you know?”
“Stop calling him Paco,” Jack says, but it’s like somebody else is saying the words. He’s floating above the office now, watching himself watch Hen.
“Sorry, Paco,” says Butner. Ernesto flicks him off, heads out the door.
Hen starts singing the Patio Enclosures song. In English. The switch flipped back the other way. Someone you know knows something great: It’s Patio Enclo-o-sures. Butner looks at him. “We could use one of those in here,” he says. “Little sun porch, some rocking chairs. Do this place up in style.”
He speaks Spanish. He speaks Spanish. Ernesto walks out toward the men, who are standing around a light green pickup. The lettering on the door says TRIAD LAWNSCAPES. The number of landscaping crews they get in here just because they know they’ll see a familiar face: He ought to give Ernesto a cut. “What are they needing?” Jack asks, trying to bring himself back down, trying to hold it together.
“Hell if I know,” Butner says. “A lot of jabbering and pointing. Talking in Spanish.”
“They wanted Ernesto?”
“They did. Stroke of genius hiring a Mexican, there, boss man.”
“Guatemalan.”
“Whatever.”
“Maybe lay off him a little bit?”
“Yeah, yeah, OK.” Hen says Paco, Paco, Paco. He’s opening and closing the fridge. “Little man’s letting all the cold out,” Butner says.
Jack says, “Did you know he could speak Spanish?”
“Sure, jefe. You didn’t? Ernesto’s been teaching him. For like a month now.” Butner starts flipping through a catalog for sprinkler systems—they’ve been talking about setting one up so all the watering would be automated—and Jack stands in the doorway, his bilingual son now knocking his forehead against the refrigerator, and watches Ernesto sell the guys some mulch. How could he have missed this? It’s like he’s learned Hen can do surgery, can play the oboe. Ernesto points at the skid loader, and there’s a flurry of discussion, and finally one of the guys from the landscaping crew gets in it and starts loading hardwood into the back of the pickup. Christ on a stick. If he rolled it and killed himself he’d put Jack out o
f business. Adios. Hell, even if he just ran a tine through the side of the pickup it might put him under. But Jack stands in the door and watches it all go on anyway, his whole life a buzzing wire, Ernesto smiling and leaning against the side of the truck, all of them reaching over into the bed and smoothing out the pile when it starts to get full. What’s delivery? Entrega. Language acquisition comes at different ages, at different times. Mr. and Mrs. Lang, your son may be severely impaired. Pervasive Developmental Delay. They had to teach him to eat, to swallow. They had to teach him, all over again, to fucking sit. He’d fall asleep nursing, and they’d have to wake him back up. And now he speaks Spanish. He is the Boy Wonder. For my next trick. He’ll grow up to be an interpreter, a public defender, a dentist to the immigrant communities of the eastern seaboard. Entrega. Lapiz. Abierto. Cerrado.
They finish loading the pickup and the three guys give Ernesto some money and drive off. He should call Beth right now. That truth he knows to be self-evident. He should call her and he should hold the phone out to Hendrick and he should have Ernesto ask him what things are. What’s this? What’s this? ¿Y qué es eso? But he doesn’t do it. He’s not ready to talk to her today. He doesn’t want to go back through everything from last night. Plus, he realizes, even as he’s sure this is what she’ll hold against him forever once she knows, he’s not sure he wants to share this just yet. Here’s something that’s his—only his—for the time being. And Ernesto’s, and Butner’s. But still. Ernesto comes in, opens the drawer, puts the cash in the register. Hen gets up, wanting to play with it, wanting to punch in the numbers and make the drawer ping open. Ernesto lets him and the machine rings and whirs and the tape spools out, purple numbers that mean nothing other than that the books won’t be right for today—except that Ernesto draws a little red mark on the tape at the place where Hen started messing around, and Jack gets a good hold one more time of how easily all this might go on without him, or in spite of him. A huge tandem dump truck pulls onto the lot, backs up against the pile of topsoil, dumps more out on top. Butner must have scheduled the delivery. Entrega. The driver waves to them, pulls back out on the highway. In and out, not even five minutes. Ernesto holds up the phone book. “Eng,” he says. “¿Qué es eso?”
“Libro,” Hen says.
“¿Qué tipo de libro?”
“Libro de teléfono.”
“Claro, bueno,” Ernesto says. “Ven aquí, mi amigo.” He holds his hand out, and Hen takes it, Hen who hates to be touched, and the two of them head out toward the hoop greenhouse and Ernesto’s plot of peppers. Butner mumbles to himself about timers, about sprinkler heads, starts making notes on a yellow pad. He’s getting it all figured out. At least somebody is. “Claro, bueno,” Hen’s saying as they walk away. “Claro, bueno. Ven aquí.” This is not possible. It just is not. He should call Bethany. He knows that. Hen keeps talking, keeps saying words, and Ernesto, still holding his hand, says, “Sí, sí. Perfecto.”
Jack hates the therapists they’re seeing right now, can’t even begin to imagine what they’d have to say about this little arrangement, about Beth camped out at Canavan’s. Leave aside that Hen suddenly, magically speaks Spanish: Bethany’s banging away at Canavan. Or was until last night, until Jack trenched his lawn. Now she’s either quit that, or redoubled her efforts. That’s the stuff of therapy right there. Now, Jack, does that make you feel frustrated? These ones always want to know what frustrates him. Everything, he wants to say. I am never not frustrated. I don’t really remember not being frustrated. How are you not frustrated? He liked the last woman, the one before. She would set Hendrick up on the floor with an enormous box of toys, all outdated, toys Jack remembered from growing up—the plastic tree house with the hand-crank elevator in the trunk—and then she’d sit there and just talk to them. Like they were people. She’d give plain, practical advice about how to get him to eat lunch. How to get him to make choices. Whatever you need him to do, say that last. Ask him, Do you want to wear the red shirt or the blue shirt? He’ll say “blue shirt.” But Beth switches therapists every six or eight months, always looking for some silver bullet. Hell, Jack thinks, for that, just leave him with Ernesto for a few days. See where that gets us.
Jack’s been calling the new ones the Beanbags, which drives Beth bonkers. Don’t call them that. Why can’t you ever take anything seriously? But: They have huge beanbag chairs all over their office, and Jack feels like they’re going to sessions in some middle-schooler’s basement. Yellow and orange and green Naugahyde beanbag chairs. Dimmed halogen lights on poles in the corners, Japanese paper lanterns hanging out of the ceiling fixtures. Some kind of music always on in the background, some recording of migrating whales playing in the Gulf Stream. They go every two weeks, should have gone yesterday. He doesn’t know if Beth called to cancel or not. She hasn’t said anything about it. Doesn’t matter: Let them sit over there on their beanbags and listen to The Sounds of the Temperate Rain Forest and flip through their day planners. Let them eat their healthy snacks. They keep a big bowl of raisins in the waiting room, for Christ’s sake. Little domino-sized individual boxes of raisins.
PM&T is slow, even for a Tuesday, but what does come in is big orders, so they do alright. Hen rides along with Ernesto on the wheat straw delivery. God knows what words he’ll know now. Wheat straw, for one. While the lot’s quiet, Butner builds in more caging for the tomatoes he’s got in the ground. They’re starting to take off—he’ll have fruit by the Fourth of July. Jack pulls a few plants from the greenhouse, Better Boys and Cherokee Purples and one Butner’s been swearing by, something called Mortgage Lifter, to give to Canavan. To replace what he took out last night. He’s feeling bad about that part of it now. He should have let those be. You shouldn’t go after somebody’s food crop. The shrubs would have been enough.
They get a call for fifteen yards of river rock for next week. A guy in a beat-up Chrysler comes in and buys out the last twenty or so bales of pine straw they’ve got, takes them home in three trips, tied into his trunk and across his backseat. Beth comes by around one, and Hen’s still out with Ernesto. She says that’s OK, says she’ll call later, says maybe she’ll take Hen for an early dinner. They don’t talk about last night. He doesn’t mention anything about the Spanish. He tries to get her to take the tomatoes. I don’t think so, she says. I think maybe you two boys should work this out. He stands there and looks at her. How’s it going over there? he wants to know. Don’t, she says. OK? Just don’t. He thinks about that. OK, he says. As she leaves, he almost reaches out to touch her on the hip. Muscle memory. Reflex. Instead, so he’ll have something to do, he goes to talk to Butner about whether they ought to price down the annuals yet—it’s getting late to put flowers in—and Butner says he thinks they ought to wait a couple more weeks. Ernesto and Hen come back, go out again. At the end of the day Jack flips the sign in the window and Ernesto goes home to his family and Butner walks across the dusty lot to the Shell, comes back with two tall boys. They sit in the back and Hen does his buckets and the light gets long and Jack unties and reties his shoes and he realizes: This is what it will be like if she never comes back.
The birds start coming back in to roost in the hanging baskets they’ve got for sale up under the trellis. Butner’s in charge of the birds, too, knows which ferns and Wandering Jews have nests in them, won’t sell those. He’ll take them down to show anybody who wants to see, always saying Careful, don’t spook the nest, as though the nest itself was what was so fragile. Wrens and sparrows, mostly, and a nest of towhees in a big trailing petunia off to the far side. Ma’am, I can’t sell you that one now, he’ll say. Come back in a couple weeks after they fledge, though, and we’ll give it to you for half off. He’s explaining something about the towhees that Jack’s not really listening to when Canavan pulls into the lot. “Shit and goddamn,” Butner says. “It’s the motherfucking prize patrol. What the hell’s he doing here?”
Jack’s body goes tight. “I trenched his yard last night,” he says.
> “Good for fucking you, man,” says Butner. “How?”
“With the truck. I took out the shrubs up by his house. And his mailbox.”
“No shit?”
“I got pissed,” Jack says. “I got a little pissed.”
“Well,” Butner says, holding his can out, “it’s about fucking time. You grew a pair. Congratulations.”
Jack sits there, congratulated, while Canavan pulls his rig—a fourteen-foot panel truck he bought from U-Haul and cut the back door off of, so it’s an open box with a trailer behind—back past the greenhouse, toward the pile of branches and limbs they chip once a month. Maybe he’s just here to make a point. He’s a free man: He can drive by the lot whenever he likes. The truck and trailer are both loaded with maple. He’s painted the truck dark green, hired a kid from Kinnett to logo the side. AN HONEST TREE, it says, in block letters. SERVICE is outlined, but not painted fully in. There’s a picture of a guy with a chainsaw next to that, and it’s a pretty good likeness. The arms are a little out of proportion, but it looks like Canavan. Canavan’s actual arms may be out of proportion. He says he didn’t mean for it to look like him, acts like it was some big screw-up, but Jack’s pretty sure he secretly likes it. Likes driving a truck around with a life-sized painting of himself on the side. He’s got his other trucks, new pickups and a flatbed, perfect condition—but he drives this thing most of the time. Jack and his bumperless dump truck, Canavan and his cut-up U-Haul. They’re the goddamned same person. Jack chews on which one of them he ought to hate more.
Canavan starts unloading the wood by himself. It looks like he might have as much as two cords, plus the branches. Jack can’t figure out why he wouldn’t have brought somebody with him to help. There’s no way he loaded all that alone. “I’m not going over there,” Butner says.
“Nobody’s asking you to.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
What Jack intends to do is just sit a while longer, get his bearings, and then he can give him a hand. He can apologize for the tomatoes. Tell him he’s got some replacement plants for him. Tell him the maple looks good. But not yet. Let him go for a while. He’s in a good rhythm, anyway, and pretty soon he’s got most of it off the trailer. There’s still more in the truck. He pulls a chainsaw out of the cab and starts in on some of the smaller branches, sizing them down for the chipper. The gas-oil smell of the engine drifts over.