In the living room, Carol leans to her side in an easy chair that seems absurdly large for her withering form. There’s an afghan draped over her legs, and a clear plastic line strung from her ears across her wrinkly white-pink face to bring oxygen to her nostrils. My wife Wendy’s high school senior portrait—braces, bangs and all—hangs in a frame on the wall behind her. A talk show plays on the TV, and the volume is so high that I nearly have to shout.
“Carol, how are you?”
She turns to me with her wet, red-ringed eyes, takes in my lip with a blink, and returns her gaze to the talk show.
“Arthur, you’re going to kill yourself on that motorbike,” she mutters.
Arthur is Carol’s younger brother. And if my memory of family lore serves, Uncle Art sold his motorcycle just before leaving for his first stint in the Vietnam War.
Lauren puts her hand on my shoulder. “It’s Neil, Carol. Your son-in-law.”
Carol stares at the television and coughs. “There’s something wrong with the fuse box still,” she says. A wadded up tissue is clutched between her brittle fingers. “That’s three boxes of fuses Dick’s had to buy this summer.”
“I’ll take a look, Mom.”
“Fix it, will you?”
“I’ll see what—”
“Just fix the damned thing!”
To the best of my knowledge, Carol never, ever used to swear.
Lauren pulls me out to the dining room and frowns. “She wasn’t so cranky earlier,” she whispers. “Are you going to look at the fuse box?”
“This house hasn’t had a fuse box for at least twenty years,” I say. I’m leaning in close as we talk, which is ridiculous because—even if the TV wasn’t on at maximum volume—Carol is so deaf now she wouldn’t be able to hear us anyway. Lauren still has her hand on my arm, and she’s looking up at me.
“You should take a look just to make her feel better.”
“There’s nothing to look at.”
“Sure there is. Tell her you’re going downstairs to take a look. I’ll come down and hold the flashlight.” Lauren smiles and bumps her knee into my leg. She’s still gripping my arm.
“No way. What is up with you lately? No way.”
“Yes way. I need to. Now.” Lauren is still smiling up at me, looking at me, nodding her straw-colored ponytail into a bounce. “Now, now, now.”
I shake my head and suppress a laugh, and peer back to the living room. “Going to check that fuse, Carol,” I call. No answer. Lauren grabs a flashlight, and when I click the light switch at the top of the ancient basement stairs, Lauren snaps it right back off again. This time I let myself laugh.
“Fuse box, Neil,” Lauren says, jabbing me with the flashlight from behind as we descend.
“Is that what we’re going to call it now?”
“Shut up.” She nudges me, through the cobwebbed dimness under heavy, sawn beams, toward a sagging couch at the far end of the basement. Raw copper pipes and electrical wires run between the joists above. I sit, and Lauren, standing before me, head cocked and half smirking, undoes her pants and lets them drop with her underwear to the floor. She kicks her feet free from the clothes, and shakes her head when she sees me glance beyond her to the stairs.
“Carol’s not coming. She’s not going to see.” Lauren props her hands on her bare, slender hips, pale skin glowing in the next-to-nothing light.
“Just what is it that she’s not going to see?”
Lauren rolls her eyes as she straddles me on the couch. “Do I have to say it? You really want me to say?” She reaches behind her head and, with a serpentine movement of her neck, frees her hair from the elastic tie that’s been binding her ponytail. She presses her forehead to mine, spilling her hair over both of us, and when I flinch as she starts to kiss me she draws back.
“Shit. I’m sorry. Did that hurt? I’m sorry.” She brushes her fingertips over my mouth, quite a bit less professionally this time, before reaching down to unbutton my jeans. I bring my hands there to assist, changing myself from passive observer to active participant. Equally culpable.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, eyes closed, and in a way that seems out of place in a situation that already seems far too brazen for the Lauren I thought I knew, she presses her lips to my ear and says: “We’re safe now. Safe. You want me to say it? Okay. Let’s fuck, Neil. Let’s fuck.”
And, for a lack of anything better to call it, that’s exactly what we do.
From: [email protected]
To:[email protected]
Sent: September 7, 4:01 pm
Subject:poppies
_____________________________
W-
Thought you’d like to know that even though Chris managed to accidentally mow them down to nothing last spring, those orange poppies you put in on the west side of your mom’s house are THRIVING. Beyond thriving, even. Every year they seem to grow more indestructible. Anyway, they’re ready to blossom a third time this season, and my fingers are crossed they don’t get zapped by an early frost. I know how much you love them. I think of you when I see them.
-N
CHAPTER THREE
My mood is not the only one brightened when Lauren and I go back upstairs; Carol is smiling too when we reenter the living room.
“Hi kids,” she says, fiddling with the oxygen cannula under her nose. I’m not sure if she knows who I am now, or where she is in space and time, but I don’t want to disrupt her perception of things from before.
“Checked the fuses, Mom,” I say with a little too much cheer. “Everything looks fine.”
“Wonderful, terrific,” she says. Then, with no pause: “That black man came by again.”
“Excuse me?” I’m searching my memory for any family stories that might fit, and coming up with zilch. It’s odd to hear her say, too; I’d never known Carol or Dick to be racist, but a person’s skin color is just not the sort of thing she would have pointed out before she got sick. “Who came by?”
“That man, you know him, he stopped in….” She waves her hand at nothing. “I told him I was too tired to talk.”
“Just now?” Lauren asks. “Right now while we were….”
“Downstairs?” I finish for her.
“No, no. Dick had a word with him, I believe.”
Old memory. Whew. Lauren shrugs, her face lit with relief, and my mother-in-law offers nothing more. Just another phantom from years past, in and out of her world like that. I tell Carol that Christopher will check in with her tomorrow, and Lauren walks out with me through the garage to the driveway.
“Jesus, she had me scared,” she says with a nervous laugh. “I mean, I didn’t hear anything upstairs….”
“We can’t do that over here again,” I say. “Ever. That was really stupid.”
Lauren pokes me in the stomach. “Jerk. You didn’t seem to think it was so stupid at the time.”
“You didn’t give me much of a choice. What is up with you lately?”
“Nothing’s up with me lately.” She pokes me again. “Did I tell you I got almost fifty miles to the gallon coming back Tuesday?”
“No kidding?”
Lauren’s three-quarters of the way through studying to become a Certified Nurse Practitioner, and has to make the four hour trip down to Michigan State’s main campus in Lansing and back once a week this semester for coursework. Her old Astro Van was a drivers’ ed film waiting to happen, and after weeks of my urging her to upgrade to any vehicle of a recent vintage (and offering to loan her the money to make a down payment), she finally settled on a new Prius. So far, she seems to be quite pleased with it, even if now I bug her about the possibility of unintended acceleration.
“It’s great. And that was with a thousand pounds of Ikea stuff in the back.” Lauren grins, nodding toward the car, and I notice now that the back seats are folded down under a pile of cardboard boxes. “Bookshelves. Which I’ll coerce you into assembling, if we can get them up the stairs.” She glances dow
n the long driveway, then takes my hand and starts to pull me back to the garage. “Come here,” she says.
“What, again?” I’m laughing, but still. “And you tell me nothing’s up.”
“Stop it. I’m not…you jerk. Come here.” We reenter the garage, and Lauren throws her arms around me by the trunk of Carol’s old Buick. “Come here,” she says again, pressing her face into my shoulder. “Nice surprise. I didn’t think I’d get to see you until tomorrow.”
“I was pretty happy to see your car when we drove up,” I say. My arms are around her too, and we’re rocking, barely, from side to side. “Chris is gone ‘til late tonight, if you want to coerce me into bookshelf assembly. Or anything else.”
Lauren looks up at me, shaking her head. “Too late. Going to a movie with Danielle. Shelving must wait. And I need to get back inside to finish up with Carol. Like now.”
“So I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” She presses her face back to my chest and sighs. “Tomorrow. It’s good I got you for a little bit today. It’s too hard to wait for Saturday sometimes.”
Back at my house, I find Alan Massie’s old balloon-tire bicycle leaning against the new fireplace. It’s rare for a day to pass where I don’t see him at least once.
“Alan!” I call as I approach my open front door.
“In the kitchen,” he calls back, and we meet in my living room. Alan is shorter than me, on the muscular side of stocky, and has kept his thinning hair in the same crew cut he had when he was flying as a captain for United Airlines.
“I was leaving you a note,” he says, waving a piece of scrap paper before noticing my face and lifting his eyebrows. “You take an elbow to the lip?”
“Yep.” I learned long ago not to question Alan’s near-mystical way of just knowing things. If nothing less, it’s a nifty thing to see him show off at parties.
“Thought so.” He grabs me by the chin and turns my face from side to side. “You’re fine.”
I’m expecting him to make some nonchalant reference to my recent sexual relations as well, but he says nothing. He probably knows that too. Alan crumples the paper in his hand. “Wanted to see if I could borrow your truck tomorrow,” he says. “Do you need it?”
I laugh at this. My friend’s use of “Borrow your truck” here is in fact shorthand for “Get a ride to my destination,” while “Do you need it?” means “Are you free to take me?” Three years ago, Alan lost his pilot’s license after suffering what looked to his co-workers like an epileptic seizure during a layover. He hasn’t had anything like it since (he swears he just dozed off in the terminal), but as part of the process of getting his medical certification reinstated he has to show that he can remain convulsion-free—without medication—for some arbitrary period of time. And because he insists it will show the mercurial Federal Aviation Administration how seriously he takes his non-condition, Alan has voluntarily stopped driving cars as well. Thus the need for my chauffeur services.
“I haven’t talked to Chris,” I say, “but I don’t think we have anything planned. Where am I taking you?”
“Lumber yard. Does early work?”
“Early works. But—” It dawns on me that the fireplace is completely obstructing my truck’s exit from the garage. “We need to move something first.”
Alan follows me out to the shipping pallet and prods it with his toe. “No problem,” he says, rubbing his chin. “We can move it.” He examines it from all sides. “You might have a problem fitting it into that space you guys built.”
“Don’t tell me this now,” I say.
We stare at the fireplace for a couple minutes at least, plotting our moves or maybe wishing the pallet would sprout legs and carry the whole load over to the doorway on its own. But it doesn’t, so Alan and I crouch down and begin to shuffle the thing from side to side toward my front door, crunching driveway gravel as we go. We’re stopped almost as soon as we begin, however, by a growing motorized buzz off to the south that snaps Alan straight upright.
“That son of a bitch,” Alan says, shielding the sun from his eyes with a hand to his brow. “He got the Two-Ten. Son of a bitch.”
“Two-Ten? Who got what?” I rise and look in the direction he’s gazing, toward the growing sound.
“Leland Dinks got another airplane. He was talking some shit about getting a new Cessna last week.”
“Son of a bitch,” I say, as it dawns on me that Leland is very possibly the black man who paid Carol a visit earlier. Just then a small blue and white plane roars over the trees and buzzes my house, passing so close over our heads it seems like I could hit the windshield with my spit. The plane circles over the field out back and comes over again, prompting Alan to give the aircraft—along with Leland and his pilot—the finger as it screams over us.
“Beat it, Leland!” he shouts. “Go crash in the lake!”
“Alan, jeez.” I know he doesn’t mean it, but still.
“That guy….” His voice trails off with the fading sound of the plane, and he shakes his head. All that’s left in the air is the buzz and rattle of insects in the tree line.
“Let’s move your thing,” he says.
Alan throws himself back into moving the fireplace with extra vigor. I understand his frustration; Leland Dinks owns the chunk of property immediately to the north of both of us, and has been pressing us to sell him our land for the past couple years. He’s in the early stages of building a lakefront condominium and golf course development, and each new offer to buy seems to come with increased urgency at an increasingly higher dollar amount. Every time, we’ve refused. Leland’s been coming at me with kid gloves, though: I’ve got the beach frontage he covets, more than a mile of it, and he doesn’t want to piss me off. He doesn’t care so much about Alan, though, and has accordingly built a parking and maintenance area for his big construction machines just beyond the river demarcating their shared property line. Worse still is the airstrip he’s put in over there, the final approach for which brings the private planes of Leland’s prospective buyers and investors buzzing right over Alan and his wife Kristin’s house. Alan has a right to be mad, I think.
It takes us another ten minutes to get the pallet to the foot of my front porch steps. Just as we’re trying to figure out the best way to move the thing up the steps and inside we’re interrupted again, this time by a shiny black Ford truck with tinted windows coming up my drive. The truck loops around and comes to a halt in front of us, the engine cuts off and the door swings open to reveal Leland Dinks inside. He’s wearing dress pants and a white button down shirt, the lower buttons just barely showing some strain at the belly.
“What, bothering us in that plane wasn’t enough?” Alan says, dusting off his hands on his pant legs. Leland ignores him completely as he jumps down from the big truck.
“Leland,” I say as we shake hands, “were you over at Carol’s house earlier? Bugging her about—”
“I was just checking in to see if anything had changed.”
“The only thing that’s changed is that all the paperwork’s done, I’m handling Carol’s stuff now, and if you need to talk about the orchard, you can talk to me. Not her.”
“Well let’s talk then. And what the hell happened to your face?”
“Not important now. I’m telling you, like I have a thousand times before, there’s nothing to talk about. We’re not….” I stop myself, and look at the fireplace. “Wait. I’ll make you a deal. We can talk about it.”
Leland’s expression brightens. “Really?”
“Really. But you have to help us move this thing inside first.”
He laughs, rapping the top of the fireplace with his knuckles. “That’s all? That’s nothing. Let’s see where you’re putting it.”
He follows me inside, with Alan behind, and I shove the couch and chair to the sides of the living room to give us a clear path to the hearth. Leland looks around the room.
“You’ve been doing some work, Neil,” he
says. ”Looking pretty good in here.” I realize, as he says it, that it’s been years since Leland Dinks has been inside my home. We used to run together, back when our kids were little, and he and his wife Sherry would come over for dinner once in a while. Our sons were close friends then, all up through middle school, and we saw them a lot. Then Leland got more wrapped up with his real estate dealings, all my stuff happened, the boys stopped being friends and we stopped seeing each other. Things change like that. Especially when you have kids. You don’t really mourn the difference, you just accept that things have changed and move on.
“It’s a never-ending project,” I say. “Chris and I need to nail up the trim next. Maybe this winter.”
“I can get you a break on materials,” Leland says, turning slowly to take in the room. “You should call me. I’m set up with a bunch of suppliers.”
Alan snorts at this. “You want to help him fix up his house so you can tear it down to build condominiums? That makes a ton of sense.”
Leland holds out his hands and shakes his head. “You guys need to hear me out. I’m not asking to buy everything this time. You can keep your houses, keep a big piece of your property, and I’ll still give you both a deal on a condo. We’ve got it all mapped out. I can show you the drawings right now—”
“Fireplace,” I say. “Let’s get it in here, then you can tell us everything.”
“Right,” Leland says. The three of us move the thing inside easily (only after Alan and Leland take a moment to bicker over whether or not it will fit through the door), and come back outside to hear Leland’s pitch. It doesn’t take long for him to become very enthusiastic, waving his arms over the set of blueprints he’s rolled out and weighted down flat with rocks over the hood of his truck. He’s offering as much money as he did the last time, a sizable amount of it, but for only half the land; he wants roughly to split the orchard diagonally to take the northwest corner (including all of our beach and the old Olsson guest cottage), along with the northern half of Alan’s farm.
The Banks of Certain Rivers Page 3