The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  “That’s the idea,” he said. “It’s working pretty well.”

  I asked about his parents. “They don’t mind you mooching off them?” I said.

  “We don’t call it mooching,” he said. “We just call it visiting.”

  “How’s this house going?” I asked.

  “This one’s got a ways to go,” he said. His project for the week was to tear off a rotten screened-in back porch.

  “You should save it,” I said, and then I told him about the one my grandparents used to have when I was little. He really seemed to want to hear about it, so I went on and on: It was a big outdoor room, with a long table on one side and wicker sofas and chairs on the other. There were two ceiling fans, and my grandmother had a collection of potted plants in the corner that got all the sun. We ate almost every meal out there and played board games at the table after dark, the June bugs congregating by the light on the back steps.

  We had built a seven-story apartment complex with the cards and were discussing adding a gym for the tenants when the lights came back on. First the lights, then the sounds. We knocked the cards down in a satisfying flutter, then leaned in at the same time to blow out the candles. I petted Dr. Blandon while my neighbor stuffed the cards back in the box. “Next time, I’ll let you win,” he said.

  I walked him to the front door and thanked him. And then, as he was headed down the front walk, I said, “Hey—”

  He turned.

  “I’m embarrassed to say I forgot your name.”

  “It’s John,” he said. “But everybody calls me Gardner.”

  “Is that because you garden?” I said.

  “No.”

  I looked at him, waiting to hear how he got “Gardner” as a nickname for “John.” And he looked back, waiting for me to figure it out.

  Finally, he walked back to me and leaned over to my ear. I could feel the tickle of his breath as he whispered, “It’s my last name,” and headed off again.

  John Gardner. Good name.

  And Maxie, bless her, waited until after I’d turned the dead bolt before she woke up and cried.

  The next day, during my mother’s morning visit, we chatted a minute before I went in to shower. She was sitting on the porch swing and holding Maxie.

  “He brought a deck of cards?” she asked.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “He’s very cute,” she said.

  “He is,” I said.

  “Much cuter than Dean,” she said.

  “Much cuter.”

  “And taller.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  She arched her eyebrow in a triumphant way.

  “Guess what?” I asked her, unwilling to concede. “I am too tired for love.”

  I had a hard time making myself get out of the shower that morning. I shampooed my hair twice and did some shaving. Then I just stood under the water for a while, telling myself firmly it was time to get out, but staying put all the same.

  When I made it back out to the porch, my hair up in a Carmen Miranda towel-hat, my mother was antsy. She handed Maxie back and was putting her purse on her shoulder when I asked her if she’d seen Dad lately.

  “Actually, yes,” she said. “He showed up at my house a few nights ago.”

  “He showed up at your house?”

  She frowned a little. “It must have been almost ten o’clock. Of course, he never had any sense of time.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He had some leftover papers from your wedding he’d been meaning to return.”

  “That was it?”

  She nodded.

  “What happened?”

  She couldn’t imagine why I was asking. “I took them and went back inside.”

  Then I said, “Are you ever still attracted to Dad?”

  She laughed out loud, startling Maxie, who I then had to shush and bobble a bit.

  “Are you?” I asked again.

  “Attracted to your father? Hell, no!”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  She thought about it. “Well, sweetheart, he just disappointed me too hard.”

  I followed her to the car, and she pulled out a cooler with vegetable-soup containers inside. She’d made them for me to freeze. I thanked her with a kiss, wondering how many months would go by before I’d be able to actually sit down with something like a hot bowl of soup and eat it.

  20

  By August, the armpit of Houston’s long summer, Maxie was over four months old and still getting up at the crack of dawn. Sometimes five o’clock, sometimes four, sometimes even earlier. I’d go in to try to nurse her back to sleep, but if those eyes didn’t close after about half an hour, I knew that was it. We were up.

  And we’d wind up out on the porch. Many mornings, Gardner stopped by with Herman before their jog. A couple of times he even skipped the jog altogether because we talked for so long. Herman got used to the detour pretty quickly.

  On one such morning, I found out why Gardner was not married—anymore. His wife, a former ballet dancer, had cheated on him with her dentist.

  Apparently, she’d gone in to have a crown made, but the Dentist, a perfectionist, couldn’t match the color of her other teeth exactly. She went back again and again and was sent home each time so he could try for a better match. On the day he finally got it right, she was the last appointment of the day. They walked out to the parking lot together, but her car didn’t start, and he waited for AAA with her under an oak tree. Before they knew it, they were kissing, and he was making jokes about inspecting her new crown.

  “She certainly gave you a lot of details,” I said.

  “I asked for them,” Gardner said.

  “Why on earth would you do that?” I asked.

  “I thought I might learn something.”

  “And did you?”

  He nodded. “I’ve learned a lot of things.”

  They’d been trying to get pregnant for two years by then. They’d had two miscarriages, and Karen, his wife, had become obsessed with her fertility cycle. Even she called herself a Sex Nazi.

  “It did take some of the fun out of it,” Gardner said.

  He was working a lot then, and he was almost never home. Looking back, he said, he realized she must have been lonely. But he really hadn’t been paying that much attention. Three months after that first kiss with the Dentist, Karen woke Gardner at two in the morning to say that she was leaving. She told him the whole story, and then she left in her pajamas.

  It had been five years since then, and he hadn’t dated anybody seriously. Lots of blind dates, but no keepers.

  “She has two kids now,” Gardner said. “With the Dentist.”

  “She was wrong to do that to you,” I said.

  “She was unhappy,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “I was a bad husband.”

  “That’s not possible. I barely know you, but I know that’s not possible.”

  “I was,” he said. “I had a different job then, and I was always working.”

  “What was your job?”

  “I was a pediatric nephrologist.”

  I nodded like I knew exactly what that was, which I didn’t. Then I said, “Five years is a long time.”

  He agreed.

  “You need to get back out there,” I said. “It’s a waste of a good man.”

  “When are you going to get back out there?” he asked.

  “Never,” I said. “But women like me are a dime a dozen.”

  It was good to have a new friend in Gardner. Meredith was still distracted by love, and my mother had been hired by the St. Regis hotel to redo their lobby. I was scrambling to find enough conversations to fill up the day. I called the mommies pretty frequently, and I had also made a real friendship with Claudia, who lived within walking distance. My mother couldn’t remember Claudia’s name and just called her my “other Meredith.” It was true enough.

  The other person I saw quite a bit was my dad, wh
o had taken to stopping by a few nights a week on his way home from the hospital. Sometimes he brought takeout or we ordered Chinese. He thought Maxie was “cute enough for TV” and offered to take her on his show. Every time he saw her, he’d grab her by the cheeks and kiss her on the nose, prompting me to say, “Germs!” Mostly, he’d tell me stories from the hospital. But every few days he’d want to talk about my mother, and I continued to give tips and encouragement, despite my better judgment. I could imagine nothing worse for my mother than striking up a fresh liaison with my dad, and I wasn’t so sure this minor obsession was great for him, either.

  But he was so eager, and so sweet.

  The night he’d gone by her house with the paperwork, he’d actually had flowers in the car, but at the last minute he’d chickened out about taking them to her. “Boy, was I glad, too,” he said. “She didn’t even invite me in. Just took the papers and closed the door.”

  “Isn’t there anyone else in the city that you could date?” I asked again.

  “There’s no one else I want to date,” he said.

  “Every nurse in town has a crush on you,” I said.

  “It’s not the same.”

  So we strategized, and psychoanalyzed, and I gave him the woman’s view of things. I encouraged him to be up-front. To tell Mom that spending time with her in the past year had stirred up his feelings, and that he’d like to take her out sometime, that he feared leaving her might have been the biggest mistake of his life.

  “You think that’ll work?” he asked.

  “I think she’ll turn you down flat,” I said.

  He nodded and nodded.

  My mother had not remarried in the fifteen years since they’d split up. After my dad left, she fell apart a little bit and forgot to pay bills and go to the grocery store. We had a swimming pool full of leaves, an unmowed lawn, and a cashier at Jack in the Box who knew our names. It was the only time I’ve ever seen my mother anything other than pressed and perfumed by 7:00 A.M. After she pulled herself together, she never looked back. She’d had a series of semi-serious boyfriends. People to travel with, see movies with, and spend the night with. But not to marry. She was done with that.

  It was hard to be as fond of my dad as I was and not feel a bit disloyal to my mother. For my mother, he was Dean. Worse than Dean. It made me wonder if Maxie would grow up to love Dean the way that I loved my dad—if Dean deserved a chance with her, even though he had blown it with me. He wasn’t a monster, after all. Just a jerk. And a coward. And a disappointment.

  But I loved Maxie enough not to want to deprive her of a daddy, if she wanted one. Which she would.

  In a way, Dean’s timing when he left me was pretty good. Because I was right on the verge of falling in love with someone new. Granted, a newborn baby isn’t going to rub your back before you fall asleep at night or take you out for an expensive dinner, but the love I felt for her filled up my entire body. Time and again, as soon as I got her down for a nap, no matter how much I thought I wanted to be alone, I’d go look at pictures of her. Just because I missed her little face.

  Maxie had lost her newborn hair now, but only on the top, so she had a kind of Friar Tuck hairdo of fringe around the bottom. Her eyes, which had been a milky black, were settling into a deep blue just like my own. She had pink, pouty baby lips. Her legs were like little sausages, and she loved to kick them. Everybody said she looked just like me. “She does,” I’d agree. “But she’s cuter.”

  And the way I loved her was like nothing else. This, I decided, was the love all other loves were measured against. They say girls look to marry their fathers, but I decided after having Maxie that we all, every one of us, were looking to marry our mothers. Sitting on the sofa with her wrapped in a soft blanket in my arms, I’d think, This baby has it so good.

  It just seemed that the love I’d been searching and hoping for all my life was what Maxie already had right now: two big arms and a lap, a warm blanket, the background music of a heartbeat and a pair of lungs, food at a moment’s notice, sleep at every urge, and a person totally obsessed with her, whose every moment—waking or otherwise—was devoted to her comfort and care. Was that so much to ask for?

  In comparison to this, the things I’d felt for Dean seemed kind of paltry. He hadn’t called again since that one night, and I was finally starting to think that he might not be coming back.

  I’d said it to my mother on the porch one morning.

  “I think he’s gone for good,” I said.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I hope so.”

  21

  The weeks went by fast, but the days went by slowly. I changed four thousand diapers a day, replaced Maxie’s outfits after every meal of applesauce (unless I was very tired), and nursed, rocked, and sang to her. We took endless walks around the neighborhood during the day and drives when she couldn’t sleep at night. As much as I carried a kind of hollow spot, I also didn’t have time to think about too much. When I wasn’t busy with Maxie, I was fast asleep.

  Sometimes, when I was rocking Maxie, I found myself thinking about running a trash-and-treasure shop out of our garage. Our house was on a corner, and the garage faced a pretty big street. I could hang a sign out and see who came by. Just in a casual way. Just maybe on the weekends. To have something to do and some reason to interact with people. I imagined making little price tags with 1950s illustrations on them and using an old cash register I’d seen at a junk store on Nineteenth Street. The garage would need a fresh coat of paint. And some better lighting. And some shelves. And maybe a clean floor for Maxie to crawl around on, when she learned how.

  Usually, as I rocked Maxie and let my thoughts wander, I floated from topic to topic, but lately I was caught on the idea of this little shop. It would just be open when I was in the mood. And it would only have to make enough money to pay for itself—here in the beginning, at least, while Maxie was so small. We’d get established and, in a few years, turn it into a moneymaker. For now, though, if Maxie was napping, or I was, we’d just hang up a sign: TAKING A NAP! COME BACK LATER! I could scour garage sales on weekend mornings, fix up and price the treasures at night, and set them out in the shop when I was ready. I wouldn’t buy anything that I couldn’t carry with the one arm that wasn’t holding Maxie. It could work.

  “It’ll never work,” my mother said when I told her about the idea one morning. I’d caught her on her cell phone at a brunch with some of her decorator friends. “You’re so tired, honey. You’re falling asleep in your oatmeal.”

  “But I have to be awake anyway, so why not be at a shop?”

  “I think you’ve got your hands full right now, don’t you?”

  “I do. I definitely do,” I said. “But I can’t quite get the idea out of my head.”

  “I just don’t want to see you get excited if it’s not going to work out.”

  I thought about that one for a minute. “But wouldn’t it be nice,” I said, “to see me excited about something? Anything? Even if it’s not going to work out?”

  She paused, and then she said, “Sweetheart, the shrimp cocktail is here.”

  “It could be this funky, great place,” I continued.

  My mother had to go. She said she’d call me later. But her parting words, with a mouth full of shrimp, were “Trust me on this. It’ll be a disaster.”

  And that was it. It was decided. I was opening a shop.

  Maxie and I had spent the morning lying on a blanket on the living room. At five months, she was great at rolling over, but sometimes she’d get stuck midway and grunt like a piglet until I picked her up. The whole time I’d been on the phone with my mother, she’d been complaining, and by the time I hung up, she was launching into a full-out cry.

  “Come on, muffin,” I said. “Let’s prove your nana wrong.”

  I popped on the baby carrier and marched outside, barely remembering to take my keys with me. In minutes, I was standing on Gardner’s front porch, rapping on the door. It wasn’t until I’d already knocke
d that I paused to think that maybe I should have brushed my hair, or put on some lip gloss, or done any tiny thing to keep from looking like a pasty, dried-out, crazy neighbor. Too late. He was unlocking the dead bolt. I licked my lips and tucked some hair behind my ears. Maxie let out a big belch. We were ready for action.

  But it wasn’t him. The door pulled back and it was a woman. An attractive, clean, about-my-age, not-insane-seeming woman, who smiled and said, “Hi?”

  “We are looking for Gardner!” I said, overly cheerful. My confidence started to fall away. I had just marched over, certain he’d want to see me and Maxie first thing on a Sunday morning. Me and Maxie and Maxie’s possibly now-full diaper.

  “He’s in the shower,” she said. God, she was so clean.

  “Oh,” I said. A new girlfriend!

  “Would you like to come in?” she asked.

  Hell, no! “We’ll just swing by another time,” I said, starting to back up.

  She started to ask if she could get my name, but before the words were even out, I had accidentally stepped in Herman’s water bowl, lost my balance, and pitched sideways. I suppose a person never wants to trip and fall. But a person with an infant in a carrier on her belly really, really never wants to trip and fall. Some kind of primal maternal protectiveness roared up in me at that moment and I twisted myself around in midair like a cat to make sure that whatever I hit the ground with, it wasn’t Maxie.

  I did hit the ground. On my left knee. So hard it felt like I’d crushed the kneecap. But Maxie, to my relief, escaped unscathed. That said, I did everything I could not to cry as I scrambled back up into a standing position. Maxie took another approach.

  Her screams must have been pretty loud, because in seconds, Gardner appeared on the porch, dripping wet, fastening his towel around his waist. He had a little soap still on his neck. I was cringing a little, trying to comfort Maxie, but also not totally able to stand up, and before I knew it, Gardner’s hands were unsnapping the baby carrier and then Maxie was in his arms. I was about to protest, thinking a baby could not possibly want to be with a total stranger more than her own mother at such a time, but he started doing a little dance with her and within seconds she was quiet with her head against his chest.