The Wait

by Frank Turner Hollon

  I hate to think I said it hoping the news would get to Kate, my ex-wife of ten years, the wife of Russell Enslow, the woman who packed up and left me while I was sitting in economics class. But who knows why I said it. Maybe the motivation was pure. Maybe I just wanted to share it with my girl.

  “Daddy’s got a date,” she said out loud to someone in the room with her. I couldn’t hear what the other person may have said.

  “Where are you taking her?” Gretchen asked.

  “You got any ideas?”

  “You’re the Plan Man,” she said, and laughed like the other person in the room with her shared the thought.

  “Maybe not anymore. Maybe it’s time to stop planning anything at all, just wake up and go through the day. Whatever happens, happens. Carefree. You can call me Mr. Carefree. Who knows? Maybe I’ll buy a horse and become one of those people who rides the horse real fast around barrels.”

  “That would be fun,” she said. “I think you should get a horse.”

  I should have kept Kate locked away in my mind. I shouldn’t have ruined her with all that impossible reality. Some things need to be left alone. The memory, the memory of her before that night outside the bar on the street curb could have been a great thing to visit. A place to go when I needed her, in between parts of my life, anytime I wanted.

  I stood at Samantha’s door, as nervous as a bird. The house was huge, in a fancy neighborhood. My modest car looked pitiful in the driveway next to the white Mercedes. Samantha Kilborn was rich, or at least somebody was.

  I knocked on the door. A boy, maybe ten years old, Gretchen’s age, opened the door. He was dressed neatly, and we looked at each other for a moment.

  “Is Samantha Kilborn here?” I asked.

  The boy turned and walked away, leaving the door open. I heard him call out, “Mom.” There was whispering, and then Samantha and the boy came to the door together.

  “Early Winwood, this is my son Allen, Allen Jr.,” she said. “Allen, this is Early Winwood.”

  “Hi,” I said, again too eager, like a big, over-friendly dog.

  We all stood there. Allen Jr. said, “Early? That’s a weird name.”

  Samantha scolded him. “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

  I tried to be funny. “Better Early than late.”

  It was brutal. Nobody laughed. We stood there like three well-dressed mannequins in a window. I ended the brutality with a simple, “Okay, are we ready to go?”

  Samantha and the boy retreated inside. More whispers. I caught a glimpse of a third person, a babysitter maybe. And finally we were outside in my modest car going to a restaurant. I wanted to know everything about her. I could feel myself begin to surface from the disconnection. Someone new. The excitement. The sexual undercurrents.

  We laughed a lot at dinner, which is good. She remained relaxed, gentle, and told me she was divorced from Allen Kilborn. Allen Sr., she called him. They’d been divorced for three years and she really hadn’t dated much. She didn’t work outside the home because Allen Sr. wanted her to raise their only child, Allen Jr., who was eleven years old and struggled with his parents’ divorce.

  I told her about me, leaving out most of the weird parts. I dwelled on simplicity and Gretchen, skipping all the stuff about Kate, and the oddness of my conception, and my father’s death, and my vow to be average and invisible. As I edited my responses I wondered how much Samantha edited what she told. I looked for signs of mental instability, pent up anger, propensity toward misery. I analyzed and over-analyzed everything she said, but at the same time tried with all my might to keep it light and fresh.

  At one point, when she had a piece of chocolate cake on her top lip, I wanted to kiss her. I wanted it more than anything I’d wanted in a long time. And my mind took off on its own with a quick sequence of imagined sexual events, starting with the kiss in the restaurant, and my hand sliding underneath her shirt, and me falling to my knees with my head under her skirt, and finally the two of us up against the far wall next to the painting of the Italian landscape, knocking the painting off the wall.

  “Where does your ex-wife live?” Samantha asked.

  “She lives in California. Sacramento.”

  “Do you get along with her?”

  I thought about the question. “We don’t really talk. Gretchen’s old enough to talk for herself, so we don’t need to. What about you? Where does Allen Sr. live?”

  “He lives outside of town.”

  Her face revealed the slightest sign of tension when she spoke of her husband. Just enough to show.

  “Do you get along?” I asked.

  “Yes, I suppose,” she said, and wanted to say more, but didn’t.

  After dinner we parked downtown and walked around looking in the windows of the shops. Maybe it was the wine, maybe the cool evening, but there was no discomfort between us. No sense of wanting to get away from each other to assess the situation and organize thoughts. We were walking along and came to a crosswalk. Samantha took my hand as we hurried across ahead of the cars. When we arrived on the other side of the street, she left her hand in mine, and it felt really good. I kept my mind on the moment. Tried not to let it slip into the fear that I’d misjudged again, and it might be good for awhile, but then confusing, and eventually unbearably painful, and I’d be rolled up in a ball again on my living room floor crying until I coughed.

  Driving home I wrestled with the idea of the goodnight kiss. Should I try in the car? Should I wait until we’re at the door? But I didn’t want to freak out the kid. He already seemed freaked out enough by his mom going out on a date. Maybe skip the kiss. Ask her on a second date. Plan the kiss. Location. Circumstances. Eliminate the possible complications.

  I walked Samantha to the door. She reached for the knob and the door swung open. Standing in front of us was a large man. Maybe six foot three, two hundred thirty pounds. His face was hard, and that’s the way he seemed to like it. I felt the potential immediately. The posture of the confrontation. I knew it was Samantha’s ex-husband. The man she wanted to tell me more about, but didn’t.

  Samantha wasn’t prepared.

  “I didn’t see your car,” she said to the man.

  “I guess you didn’t,” he said back, in a voice matching the body. A crushing tone over the words as he looked down at us.

  “Did you leave Allen with a babysitter again?”

  Samantha’s demeanor had changed. She was more childlike, apologetic, like she’d been caught sneaking a cookie.

  I stuck out my hand. “My name is Early Winwood.”

  He looked down at my hand and left me standing there.

  “Early Winwood?” he repeated, like he was making a mental note of the spelling. Like he’d be checking me out and needed to remember the name.

  My hand was still out. I decided to leave it there.

  “Do you see this house?” he asked me.

  I looked across the door frame. “Yes,” I said.

  “I bought this house. Just like I bought that car in the driveway. Just like I bought everything inside the house. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t really care.”

  He’d been a bully all his life. I could tell. And all his life it worked. People did what he told them to do. He’d raised intimidation to an art, believing himself superior in size and intellect. It must have scared away so many competitors. So many potential problems. Like one of those big black gorillas in the rainforest pounding a fist against the dark flesh of his chest and howling.

  If I shrunk away, Samantha and I would never see each other again except perhaps with uncomfortable sideways glances in the grocery store from time to time. It was terribly early in our relationship for such a test, but there it was before me, and I decided to leave my hand extended in front of him, without moving. There was no way to pull it away with dignity. I was back at the cafeteria table so many years ago with the senior leaning over, emptying a mouthful of chocolate milkshake on my lunch tray.

  “My name is Ea
rly Winwood,” I repeated.

  The big man looked over my head to the street. I turned to see a car pulling up in front of the house under the streetlight. He walked past me, past my outstretched open hand, toward the car.

  I stared at the back of his head and had a clear vision of the future. Something bad would happen, and it would be me, and not him, to make it happen. I heard the first click of the machine in my head, the first microscopic movement toward a plan. A detailed, mapped-out, absolute plan. The man walking across the green lawn would ultimately affect my life, perhaps more profoundly than any other single person.

  Samantha and I watched him. Allen Kilborn looked back at me over the top of the car before he climbed inside and went away. My hand was still outstretched.

  “I’m sorry,” Samantha said. “I should have told you.”

  “Can I kiss you?” I asked. It came out quickly, before I could think about it.

  She seemed surprised by the question. She seemed surprised I hadn’t run away like one of those smaller gorillas in the jungle, looking over my shoulder.

  “Yes,” she said, “you can kiss me.”

  And so I did.

  four

  I looked forward to seeing Samantha. She spent the night at my place whenever Allen Jr. was staying with his father and Gretchen wasn’t in town. It was our time, alone, without distraction, free from ex-husbands and

  ex-wives, free from the complications of children and potential stepchildren. It was always the time I knew for sure I wanted to marry her, and live together, and not be on my own anymore.

  She was funny. And in the bedroom Samantha didn’t just wait around for things to happen. I’d forgotten how wonderful it could be with the doors locked, a few glasses of wine, a mischievous look in her eye as the panties come off.

  But even at my own home, with the doors locked tight, I found myself peering out windows expecting to see Allen Sr. sitting in the big white truck outside my house. I knew he wasn’t the kind of man who would ever allow another man living in the same house with his son, taking his place as a father figure, taking his place as the husband he could never be to the woman now outside his control, no longer dependent upon his money.

  My plan was slow and patient. I took a business trip to Chicago. It was a seminar on new investment opportunities. On a Tuesday afternoon I skipped a class on alternative fuel source investments and rode a taxi to the far side of the city. At a Salvation Army store I got a pair of brown cotton gloves, khaki work pants, a button-down flannel shirt, a pair of thick dark socks, and a pair of cheap boots. I made sure none fit me well.

  Next door, at a hardware store, I had a key made. The morning before leaving home I had taken Little Allen’s key to his father’s house and slipped it in my pocket. While the man in the hardware store cut the key, I made small talk.

  “I’ve never really figured out how that machine works,” I said.

  “It’s easy,” the man said. “You just stick it in here.”

  I didn’t pay attention.

  “Can you tell where a key was made?” I asked. “I mean, if I found a key on the street, would there be any way to tell what machine, in what state, at what store, cut the duplicate key?”

  “Naw,” he said, “there’s not a secret number on it. It’s just a key.”

  When I arrived at the airport, I put the shoes, pants, shirt, socks, and gloves in the trunk underneath the spare tire in the wheel well of my car. That evening, over at Samantha’s house, I waited for Allen Jr. to go outside and then replaced the key to his father’s house back where I’d found it, later hiding the spare in my own house.

  While in Chicago I toyed with the idea of buying bullets for a .357, but I couldn’t get them home on the airplane and didn’t want to risk sending a package through the mail. Surely Allen would keep his gun loaded. He was the kind of man to have a loaded pistol in his house, or at least bullets nearby in the special drawer in the kitchen.

  I hadn’t seen Eddie Miller in years. He still lived in town and worked for a rental car agency, but we never seemed to be in the same place at the same time until we ran into each other at a doughnut shop one morning.

  It was good to see him again. He’d gained weight, probably from hanging out too often in the doughnut shop. We talked about being kids and the stupid stuff we did. We talked some of college days, but not a lot, and I told him all about Kate. He already knew most of it, but shook his head and listened anyway. He seemed happy for me finding Samantha.

  We left the doughnut shop promising to go drink a beer together soon. We exchanged phone numbers and shook hands. His smile was the same as it always had been. Wide but reluctant, like he wasn’t sure it was appropriate to laugh at certain things. Like maybe the world wasn’t supposed to be a funny place, even if he found it funny sometimes.

  The days kept passing and the plan kept moving forward by itself. On Samantha’s calendar hanging on the refrigerator, a date was marked in red. I pointed with my finger and said, “What’s happening here?”

  Samantha leaned over to see. “Oh, Allen’s father is taking him deep-sea fishing. They leave at five a.m. and get back around seven at night.”

  It was three weeks away. Suddenly my plan had a date, a day on the calendar marked in red. It became more real. Part of me hoped something would happen to change the course of events. The other part of me knew there were no alternatives. The next night, perhaps purely by coincidence, I was reminded of this fact.

  Samantha and I were having one of our nights alone at my house. We had candles around the bathtub, and a bottle of wine, and the blinds closed tight. She bent over for me in front of the big bathroom mirror, and I was grateful for the chance to see us that way. A few minutes later, after midnight, while Samantha stretched out in the bathtub, I snuck out my back door to the secret porch in total darkness to smoke a cigarette. I was naked, and it felt good to be naked in the cool evening, the backyard surrounded by a privacy fence.

  I kept a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches hidden in a crack between two boards above the door. Samantha didn’t know I smoked a cigarette every few days. I’m sure she wouldn’t have cared, but it wasn’t how I wanted her to see me. I never smoked in front of anyone else, and sometimes went months between buying a new pack.

  I reached up, fished out a cigarette, and lit it quickly. I held the menthol smoke inside my lungs, breathing out slowly, thinking about the woman in my bathtub, surrounded by candles. Thinking about the look on her face in the mirror, bent over with me inside her. I closed my eyes and let the smoke roll freely from my nose.

  In the quiet, from the darkness twenty feet away at the far end of the screen porch, the voice said, “That’s some sweet pussy, wouldn’t you say?”

  The shock of not being alone, the instantaneous outright fear, shot like electricity up my legs and into the core of my naked chest. I spun around, lost my balance, dropped the cigarette on the floor and fell against the door leading back into the house. It wasn’t until I got through the door I recognized who it was, the voice.

  I ran to the hall closet and grabbed a baseball bat. From the bathroom Samantha said, “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I answered quickly, and then pulled on a pair of shorts, the fear hardening into a brick of anger. How long had the son-of-a-bitch been there? Did he watch us through the tiniest crack in the blinds at the bathroom window? He had seen me smoking, naked, on the back porch, eyes closed?

  I flicked on the kitchen light and swung open the back door to the porch, now lit from the lights through the windows. He was gone. My cigarette still lay on the tile floor, smoke rising slowly up and circling.

  I heard Samantha coming up from behind. Before she could see, I picked up the cigarette and shoved the butt into the dirt of the big houseplant by the screen door.

  She was wearing only a towel and carrying a glass of white wine.

  “What’s going on?” she repeated.

  I decided not to say.

  “I
t smells like somebody’s been smoking out here,” she said.

  “I know. I thought I heard somebody. Probably just kids.” I turned my head away so she couldn’t get a whiff of my breath.

  She stretched her neck to look around the doorframe.

  “You’ve got a bat,” she said.

  I wondered whether Allen Kilborn was somewhere out in the darkness watching us, maybe even close enough to hear our conversation. The moment solidified my resolve. He deserved to die. He earned it. Sitting on my back porch in the middle of the night. I wasn’t Samantha. He wouldn’t intimidate me with his bullshit. And I remembered Allen Jr. was staying at his house that night. The man had left his eleven-year-old son alone in the house. What if the kid woke up? What if he had a bad dream and went to his father’s bedroom for comfort? His father wouldn’t have been there. Instead, he would have been on my back porch talking nasty about the mother of his son. Scaring the holy shit out of me.

  Two days before the date marked in red on the calendar, I drove in the very early morning hours to two designated spots. I put on the Salvation Army boots and walked approximately fifty yards to each place into the woods. I took a small gardening shovel I’d found a few weeks earlier at the local dump. With the shovel I dug two holes, one at each location, about two feet deep, in the soft soil. I piled up the dirt around the backside of the holes, careful not to leave any mud or dirt around the front of the holes, and careful to remove any dirt from the bottom of the over-sized boots before the boots were placed back in the wheel well. No cars passed on the secluded backroads while I dug the holes.

  Later that day I burned all my written notes and plans, along with the diagram of Allen Kilborn’s house, and the maps of the backroads. I lit them on fire inside a ceramic pot, and after each piece was burned, I poured water into the pot, stirred it around into a black mess, and poured it on the flowers in the backyard. I burned the entire notepad in case anything I’d written or drawn had traced onto a bottom page. The diagrams reminded me of the drawings I’d made so long ago of the drugstore—locations of mirrors, the pharmacist, the candy bars, Eddie’s lookout point. I’d forgotten the janitor, and learned from my mistake.