by Drew Perry
“See?”
“When was this?”
“Three years ago.”
“I don’t think I had her,” she says again. “Aren’t they all named Sarah Cody, though?”
“They’re all named Meghan,” says Jack.
“They are all named Meghan,” she says. “Perfect. OK. Follow-up question. Did you fuck her?”
“What? No, I didn’t fuck her.”
“Listen,” she says. “Don’t get all high and mighty with me. I’m not the one who felt up Sarah Doty.”
“Cody.”
“Right. More importantly, how did you achieve this? Tell me everything. Did you take her somewhere for the weekend? Or did you just both get hall passes at the same time and meet in the stairwell?”
“It was in the parking lot at Gubbio’s,” he says.
“Gubbio’s?”
“A pizza place out there. In Burlington. Some kids from a seminar I taught took me there at the end of class, once it was over. Her seminar.”
“What was it?”
“The history of political boundaries, that kind of thing.”
“You kissed a kid you had in a seminar on boundaries?”
“We were a little drunk.”
“That makes it much better,” she says, holding her cup out. “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” he says.
“So what happened? She fell in love with you, and then made some kind of complaint when you didn’t love her back?”
“No,” he says. “It was just bad luck. Her roommate was Alan Sherrill’s advisee.”
“No shit.”
“No shit.”
“That is bad luck.”
“I know.”
“Though, for the record, ladies and gentlemen, and all the ships at sea, he did kiss the boundaries kid in the parking lot of wherever-the-fuck.”
“Gubbio’s,” he says.
“Maybe I have heard of that place. Is there a kids’ slide out front? Or one of those big bins of plastic balls to jump in?”
“Gubbio’s just has TVs and beer. No slides.”
“Video games?” she asks.
“I think so.”
“Like a little piece-of-shit college dive.”
“Sort of,” he says. “Yeah.”
“I love those places,” she says. She leans over, picks up a pinecone. “So what did Beth say about Little Miss Sarah Cody?” By her tone of voice, he knows she already knows what the answer is.
“Nothing,” he says.
She aims the pinecone at him. “Because you didn’t tell her.”
“I didn’t,” he says.
“Yeah. She would have told me.”
“She would have?”
“Of course,” says Rena. “We talk, you know? To each other?”
“Not all the time, apparently.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I suppose not.” She reaches in the cooler, gets more ice. “You want?” she asks.
“Thanks.” He hands her his cup.
She says, “You know what the saddest thing I ever saw was?”
“No.”
“One of my profs in grad school got divorced the first year I was there. Salima Baker. Expert in Coptic Greek. We were close, sort of. There was a group of us who’d have a few glasses of wine from time to time, Salima and another professor whose name I can’t ever remember and a few of the grad students. It was like a little salon. We thought we were hot shit.” A dog starts barking, and Yul Brynner picks his head up to listen. She says, “Anyway, her marriage came apart. Salima’s. She asked a few of us to help her move out, and on the day she moved, we got there, to her house, and she wasn’t even packed. No boxes. We had to pack her stuff for her. Her husband sat on the back deck the whole time drinking coffee. The only thing she’d done was get her books tied up in stacks. With twine. She had all these books stacked up and tied off in sets of ten or twelve. One of the guys, some boy, I don’t know, had a pickup, and we filled it up with the books, and like one wicker sofa and some clothes. And she had a fish. That was it. That was all she moved out with. Into this awful studio apartment she rented over by where we all lived.”
The dog stops barking. Up the street, the hammering’s stopped, too.
Rena says, “So that’s why I moved out on Terry. Why I moved out of the house.”
“What’s why?” He’s lost.
“Because I’m not ending up like that. I don’t want my books in stacks.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m telling you. I don’t want to end up like her. Like that. The whole thing was just so deeply unhappy.”
“But that’s why you moved out?”
“It’s what you and Beth are doing, right? It’s what Beth’s doing, anyway. And it must be what you’re doing over here. It’s an off-season. You’re both taking deep breaths. You’re looking at me like I’m crazy. I’m not crazy.”
“I know,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“I didn’t even know she was moving in with him until she called,” he says. “She just said she needed to get out for a while. Two weeks now.”
“Fuck that,” she says. “Two weeks is nothing. Two weeks is easy. You guys are fine. We’re all fine.”
“How is it you’re so OK with this?” he wants to know. “You didn’t seem OK last night, all full of wine.”
“I’m not OK, you asswipe, and I’m not the only one who got full of wine. What are you, from the forest?” She gets up. “You’re not getting it. Here’s how I see it, OK? This is what’s going on right now. All this, right? We go with it. We live here, all four of us, in this little bit of time. The two of us can live right here in your back yard, if you want. We’ll set up a tent. Jack Lang East, or whatever you decide to call it. And Beth and Terry will do whatever it is they do. Maybe she can move them in across the street. We’ll bake them something, welcome them to the neighborhood. A pie. Toad-in-the-Hole. We’ll all be grown-ups. All of this will be extremely grown-up.”
“There’s no way any of that’s happening.”
“Why not?” she says. “How would that be any worse?”
“I trenched your yard,” Jack says.
She turns around. “That’s about right,” she says. “When?”
“The night before he chainsawed himself.”
“Good,” she says.
“Beth was fairly pissed.”
“That’s good for her. Healthy.”
“I took the tomatoes out. By the mailbox.”
“You’re a cold-blooded killer, Jack Lang.”
He looks at her. “It’s just—”
“Just what?”
“It’s all wrong,” he says. “You know? Everything. It feels like I’m doing everything wrong. I feel like I should feel—I don’t know. What’d you say? He made you sad? I feel like I should feel sadder.”
“And you don’t?”
“I guess not.”
“Well, fuck, Jack, get sad! Be sad. That’s what this is for. Look at you. You’ve moved across the street. This is a step in the right direction. Listen to what I’m telling you: Unhappy is bad news. Unhappy is different. That’s a kind of permanent condition. We don’t want you getting unhappy. But be sad, OK? Take another week or two here and get sad. Bail out on your boys over there at Mulch City. They can run the show without you for a while. How hard can it be? You dump mulch into people’s trucks, right? Let them do that for a while.” She pours her drink out on the dirt, sets her cup on the cooler. “You know what? Track down Sarah Cody, wherever she is. Call her up. Tell her you want to see her. Old times and all that. Meet her at some interstate exit halfway between here and Maryland and buy her dinner in an Outback Steakhouse and fuck her brains out in some Econolodge. Get the room with two king beds and fuck her once or twice on each of them. Alternate between the two. What is she by now, twenty-four? Twenty-five? She’s probably still never been with anybody who doesn’t shoot his wad in ninety seconds. You’ll be a hero.”
&n
bsp; “I’ve never fucked anybody in an Econolodge,” he says.
“See? You’re missing out. This is your big chance.”
Jack gets up, walks to the fence, opens and closes the gate to the side yard. He’s not convinced. Of anything. He says, “Why aren’t you mad at Beth?”
“I’m mad,” she says. “Who says I’m not? I’m plenty mad. Aren’t you mad at Terry?”
“Of course,” he says. “But it’s like I’m not mad enough at either of them, you know?”
“Not really, but maybe we can work on that.”
One of the windowsills on the side of the house looks like it’s rotten. He’ll have to get at that. He lives here now. He says, “How about we order food? You and me. We can rent a movie.” It’s a ridiculous move.
“No way,” she says, smiling. “Not tonight. No movies for me. I’m having one more drink, and then I’m going home. I think I ought to let you gentlemen settle into your new digs.”
“OK,” he says, relieved and disappointed at the same time.
“Don’t take it so hard,” she says. She gets the bottle of gin out of the cooler, waves it at him. “Come here. Sit down with me for the rest of the Dog Death Show. Pour me one last drink. Give me some conversation. Make a half-honest woman out of me. Tell me all about all the other teenagers you’ve gotten to throw themselves at you.”
“She wasn’t a teenager,” he says, sitting back down, handing her his cup. “She was twenty-one.” Rena is a small brushfire somebody’s set in the corner of his head.
“Twenty-one?”
“Yes.”
She pats his knee. “Well, see? That makes all the difference.”
Two days go like this: Jack gets up early, earlier than usual, because Hen’s up early—he’s not used to the way the light works over here, and his dresser is too far away from the wall. Once Jack gets that figured out, though, things go better. They haven’t been back across the street. They’re making a go of it. And overall, it’s been fine, has been better than Jack really could have hoped for: Hen’s found the faucets over here, has eaten the fish sticks Jack’s made him, has been deep into his new phone book. Jack sits up in the evenings, gets used to a whole new set of sounds.
He goes in to the yard both days, makes sure to meet Beth there, lets her take Hen on errands, lets her take him to lunch. He’s not sure that he wants her to know he’s moved out. He’s doesn’t know what he’d say to her about it. She’d have questions. You’ve just got lawn furniture everywhere? Rena shows up at the house unannounced a couple of times, brings a poster for a bike race in Durham, hangs it on the wall in the living room. You need some kind of color in here somewhere , she tells him. Jack brings home catalogs from work, tears out pictures of shrubs, hangs them on Hen’s wall.
PM&T grinds along under its own power. Butner and Ernesto work the vegetable gardens, and when he’s in, Jack drives the loader back and forth, sets rows of boulders along the front of the lot, in between the flags. Butner’s idea. He’s got it in his head that a boulder might be an impulse buy. They get another truckload of roses in, all in bloom, run a special: Three for the price of two. They move pretty well. Butner’s got a second dry-erase board going in the office now, a gridded schedule of incoming and outgoing. Hen likes to touch his thumb to the ink, leaves little thumbprints all through Butner’s tallies of cubic yards of crush rock. They sell out of petunias. A woman wearing an accountant’s visor buys the last few four-packs.
Hendrick finds a closet full of old National Geographics in the back bedroom, and they spend all of Thursday night looking at the rivers of Zaire, dugout canoes in Greenland, humpback whales off the shores of the Aleutian Islands. There are large maps of the Cherokee Nation, of the Sea of Tranquility. Hen loves the maps, folds them and unfolds them, runs his fingers along the thin red topographical lines. Jack hangs a couple up next to the bike race poster.
Friday late afternoon Jack takes Hen outside, gets him set up with November 1989: The Colorado River, the Urals, the Bay of Bengal. Jack’s got a project: He’s replacing the mailbox, finally. He digs it out, resets it in a new hole, pours in a bag of concrete mix and soaks that down with the hose. Frank comes down his driveway to retrieve his trash cans, waves at Jack, face full of questions. Jack waves back, squats down to see if the mailbox looks plumb and level. Frank rolls the bins back up to his house one at a time. Jack pulls a can of marking spray paint out of the truck, starts drawing in big ovaled flowerbeds in his new front yard. He’s trying things out. He’s planning.
Rena arrives that night with another sleeve of crackers. They drink gin and tonic. She wants to know things—wants him to show her what he’s thinking of doing to the house, what colors he’s going to paint everything. She asks him how he was able to buy it in the first place, how he got the cash for the down payment, how much he thinks he might make when he sells it, how soon that might be. She makes him tell her the Sarah Cody story again, asks him more questions. Was she smart? Who kissed who? They have another drink. Before she leaves, she stands in his kitchen, says, “I think I want two things from you, OK?”
“OK,” he says, looking at the pale hair on her arms.
“One: I want us to go to yard sales some day soon. I’ve been feeling like buying some useless shit.”
“I can do that,” he says. “We can go to yard sales.”
“We need lamps with no cords,” she says. “I want a pasta bowl and a Salad Shooter.”
“Good,” Jack says, feeling like he’s fallen off of something. “That sounds good to me.”
“And second,” says Rena, holding up two fingers.
“Second,” Jack says, feeling like, for once, he knows what’s coming.
“Take me on a date, Jackson. It’s time, I think. Isn’t it? I think it is. I want you to take me to Gubbio’s.”
SATURDAY’S ARE KARAOKE NIGHT’S AT GUBBIO’S! is what the sign says outside, big lightbulb arrow running across the top of it. Jack works on apostrophes and possessives while he gets the dump truck wedged backwards into a space next to the Dumpster. Hendrick’s riding between them, tuning the radio in to station after station. He does not get easily babysat, so he’s along for the ride. Rena insisted, anyway. It wouldn’t be right without him. You two are like some kind of package deal. And Hen will eat pizza: Plain cheese, and you have to blot the grease off with a paper towel, but he’ll eat it. Jack’s wearing a pair of jeans he bought this afternoon specifically for the occasion. He’s pretty sure he’s headed for catastrophe. He just doesn’t know precisely what sort.
They sit over on the side, away from the bar. The music’s not going yet, but there’s a folding table with a karaoke machine and a huge white three-ring binder set up in the corner, a couple of microphones and speakers next to that. A banner hanging off the wall says JEFF AND AARON! KARAOKE, and then under that, WEDDINGS-PARTIES-ANYTIME. There’s no sign of Jeff or Aaron. The restaurant is about half full, mostly families and couples. No students, it looks like. There are a couple of tables of kids about the right age, but they look like locals. Jack’s only been back here once or twice. It does not feel like the scene of the crime, does not feel charged with anything like import. There is Carolina Panthers paraphernalia all over the walls, plus NASCAR posters and beer company banners of bikini-wearing volleyball girls. Drink specials. Pitchers are four dollars. Hendrick starts in on lining up the sugar packets in rank and file across the table. A girl at the bar puts down her cigarette, comes to take their order. She’s wearing a black T-shirt that shows off a good stripe of her stomach. She’s thin, fit. “What can I get you?” she asks them.
“What kind of ice do you have?” Jack asks.
“Huh?”
“Is it cubes, or is it the little crunchy kind?”
“Isn’t it the same thing?” The girl’s lipstick has glitter in it.
“Is it big pieces or little pieces?” he asks her.
“Do you mean the turd ice?” she says. “Like at the movies?”
“Yes,” h
e says. “Yes.”
“No. Our kind is square, with, like, little belly buttons in them.”
“Then he’ll have whatever you’ve got that’s diet, no ice,” Jack says, nodding at Hen. “He can be choosy.”
“That is choosy,” she says. Hen looks up at her, blinks. “Diet Coke or Diet Sprite?” she asks.
“Diet Coke or Diet Sprite?” Hen says right back.
She says, “Diet Sprite, if you ask me.”
Hendrick says, “A sprite is a mythical woodland creature.” He says it very seriously, and Rena laughs out loud.
“Cute,” says the girl. “What about for y’all?”
“We’ll take the pitcher special,” Jack says.
“They’re four dollars,” she says. “All of them.”
“Whatever’s coldest,” Jack says.
“They’re all cold.”
“Bud,” says Rena, interrupting. “Jesus. We’ll be here all night if you let him decide. Bud.”
“Pitcher of Bud and a Diet Sprite,” the waitress says. “Y’all want menus?”
Jack says, “Two slices of cheese and a large—” he looks at Rena. “Pepperoni?”
“And sausage,” she says. “Make it pepperoni and sausage.”
“We got good sausage,” the girl says.
“Great,” Rena says. “Perfect.” The girl walks over to the bar, writes up a ticket, hangs it on a wheel in the window through to the kitchen. She comes back with the pitcher, with Hen’s soda. “She’s about your speed, right?” Rena asks, after she’s sitting back down at the bar again. “About the right age?”
“She doesn’t strike me as a big reader,” he says, pouring the beer.
“That’s what you’d want her to do to you? Read?”
“Here,” Jack says, handing her a glass. “Drink this. Leave me alone.”
She smiles at him, clinks her beer against his. “To Gubbio’s,” she says. “To you and Hendrick.” She takes a long sip, wipes the foam off her mouth with her wrist. Hendrick stacks the sugar packets in a little rampart around his Sprite glass. Here’s what’s wrong, or what isn’t: They feel like a family. It doesn’t feel anything like a date. It just feels easy. “Tell me where you and the world-famous Sarah Cody sat,” says Rena.