The Sweetheart Deal

by Polly Dugan

  “Hey, yeah, it was no problem,” I said. “I didn’t want to start working until everyone was up.” I had no idea what we were going to say to each other, what I should say to her. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt more awkward with a woman.

  “Garrett,” she said. I didn’t want her to say anything—couldn’t we both just say nothing? Ignore it like we were kids?

  “Audrey, you don’t have to say anything,” I said. “I should say something but I don’t know what. I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” she said. “I owe you an apology. I was out of line and I’m so embarrassed. I’m obviously spiraling out of control, and you were in the way.” She started to cry. “I just don’t want to ruin this, to screw up anything. I’m so grateful you’re here, and I treasure your friendship. Jesus, I sound like I’m nineteen years old.”

  I wanted to say something comforting and wise, but I couldn’t imagine what would make this less uncomfortable. Six hours ago I slept with my best friend’s wife and I liked it.

  “I think you’re doing the best you can,” I said. “I think we’re all in unchartered waters here and it’s likely some unexpected things are going to happen.” I got up to refill my cup and stood in front of her. I wanted to touch her, but it seemed like the last thing I should do. “Let yourself off the hook. I could have stopped you. I could have and I didn’t. We’re okay, Audrey. Right?”

  She looked up at me and wiped her face. “I’ve got to make sure the boys are up,” she said. “Go ahead and start working if you want.”

  Well, that went well, I thought. I suppose it could have been worse. At that moment I felt like any woman I had any involvement with was subject to some measure of ruin, and I would have given anything for Audrey not to be one of them. I wondered whether if she knew what Leo had asked me, it would have made any difference.

  Christopher

  In April, Ben turned seventeen. When he was a kid, his family had moved from Denver to Portland, and to help with the transition, his parents had made him repeat kindergarten. I never knew he was a year older than the rest of us until middle school. Since he had already had his driver’s license for a year, for his birthday he had told his mom, told Colleen, he wanted to drive us all downtown and go to the movies, and she said he could. That night we all met at Ben’s house.

  All seven of us were there with presents and cards, some of those that played a song when you opened it, and we sat in the living room waiting for Ben to open them all before we left. Everybody was cracking up at the cards. Colleen lit candles on the mantel over the fireplace and sat next to Mr. Maguire on the couch, and they kept looking at each other and smiling with each present Ben opened, and smiled even more and laughed when all of us hooted at what he got. You could tell they were like, Our baby is seventeen, all grown up, can you believe it. I’d seen the same look on my mom’s face.

  I couldn’t look at either of the Maguires. I was standing between M.H. and Meredith, and as we stood there watching, I could feel Meredith move closer to me. I couldn’t really move away from her because M.H. was on my other side. If I had moved, I would have done the same thing to M.H. that Meredith was doing to me, and that wouldn’t have been good, so I just stood there. I felt pinned between the girls. I had to do something. I wanted to sprint from being in the same room with Colleen and Mr. Maguire and Meredith.

  “Mrs. Maguire,” I said. “Can I go get a glass of water?”

  “Sure, Chris,” she said. “Help yourself. Any of you guys, help yourselves. Ben, you guys are going to have to leave soon if you’re going to make the movie.”

  “I know, Mom,” said Ben. “I just have two more.” He was having a blast. He was all right, really he was, but looking at all of us there in his living room, knowing that I had brought him into the group not because of him but because of Colleen, I felt like shit.

  The kitchen was through the dining room and around a corner. I was glad to get away from feeling like Meredith was trapping me between her and M.H. I half expected Meredith to follow me, and since I couldn’t see the living room from the kitchen, I listened for her, for anyone, but I didn’t hear anything. The Maguires had those water and ice dispensers in the door of their refrigerator, and I picked up a glass from the dish rack beside the sink and filled it. I pretty much wanted to leave and get going to the movie so I wouldn’t have to worry about Meredith standing so close to me, and trying not to look at Colleen or Mr. Maguire, but it wasn’t my call, so instead I stalled in the kitchen.

  Like everybody, the Maguires had a gallery of stuff on the front of their fridge, stuck there with magnets. There were a few school pictures of Ben and his younger brother Will, and some of their dog at the beach and one of their whole family. There were sports schedules and school schedules, the beginning of a shopping list. Because it was so small it took me a while to see a photo of Colleen and a woman I didn’t know—a friend or her sister maybe—taken in one of the photo booths with the curtain you have to cram into and never get a good picture from, but this one of Colleen was really good. She looked like a girl, not like anyone’s mom or wife. I wanted that picture. After I had drunk the first glass of water, I pressed my glass against the lever and refilled it and listened again. I heard the mood in the living room shift; Ben must have opened the last present. I downed the second glass and put it on the counter next to the fridge.

  I pulled the picture of Colleen and the other woman out from under the magnet and shoved it in my pocket, and picked up the glass and filled it a third time and kept staring at the fridge, now at the empty space where the picture had been.

  Meredith came into the kitchen. “We’re getting ready to go,” she said. “This is going to be great! Come on.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Cool.”

  All of us clustered by the door. Colleen and Mr. Maguire, too. Their foyer wasn’t small, but I felt like we were packed in there, all ten of us, closer than we needed to be.

  “Ben,” Colleen said. “Text or call us if you need to, okay? You guys have fun. Be careful, okay?”

  I wanted to call or text Colleen. I had the picture in my hand in my pocket. My hand started to sweat.

  “I know, Mom,” said Ben. “Can we go?”

  “Yes, yes, go,” Colleen said. She grabbed Ben around the neck and kissed his hair. “Okay, go, have fun. Remember—”

  “I know, Mom,” Ben said. “Call or text, be careful. Let’s go, guys.”

  The eight of us left the house and got into Colleen’s minivan. I was in the middle of the bunch of us, so I ended up in the backseat behind Ben; Meredith, Rose, and M.H. were in the third row. “Shotgun!” said Theresa, so Joe and Mike sat with me. Ben backed out of the driveway and Theresa and Mike rolled down their windows. We all waved back to Colleen and Mr. Maguire standing in the doorway.

  “Let’s get this party started,” Ben said.

  Theresa turned on the radio and put her iPhone in the dock. “What do we want to hear?” she yelled into the car, and everyone started shouting suggestions.

  I wished I were sitting in the front seat instead of in the back like a kid. So I nabbed shotgun for the ride home, and we did have a pretty fun time, but for the whole night I hoped the picture of Colleen wouldn’t slip out of my pocket.

  Garrett

  We couldn’t go back to the way things were before—you never can—but I tried. Fake it till you make it. The next day I cut in the second coat by myself, and later she rolled it out, alone, and the bedroom was done. Then in the days and the weeks after, I worked more steadily than I had been, took every one of Gallagher’s offers to help, and concentrated on trying to act the same with Audrey as I had for twenty years. I still had dinner with them, then went back to work afterward, and Audrey was guarded and careful. When we all ate together she seemed as if she’d spent the day thinking about what she’d say and how she’d say it. She still asked if I wanted a beer or a glass of wine, but we didn’t linger over our dri
nks and talk, easy, like we had before. I went out for beers with Gallagher, and a few times another firefighter joined us. I wondered if any of the single ones considered courting Audrey after a respectable amount of time had passed. I thought about telling Kevin what had happened—all of it, Leo’s outlandish request, and Audrey and me—especially after what he’d shared. But for what, his approval? Advice? I didn’t even live in Portland. I was a grown man and I knew Audrey better than I knew Kevin, but I wondered what he would say, and if I was honest with myself, I didn’t tell him anything because of what I was afraid he would say.

  After a week of our newly navigating each other, I told Audrey I wanted to take the class at the school, so I could volunteer, and asked her what I needed to do.

  “The Call to Protect class?” she said. “Garrett, you don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to do it,” I said. “If Andrew has a field trip or whatever, Brian too, I could go if they invited me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s so ridiculous. The need for such a thing makes me so angry.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but if it’s what I’ve got to do, it’s what I’ve got to do.”

  There was a class scheduled the following week at another parish, so I signed up, and I saw what Audrey meant. I could see it was a safeguard—after the unspeakable things priests everywhere had done—but I felt simultaneously insulted and empowered. God knew I didn’t want anyone to suspect anything untoward about my behavior around kids—I was an educator myself—but I appreciated being charged with looking for signs or tendencies in others. That made it feel worth my while.

  When I got back to the house, Audrey was working in the front yard.

  “You survived,” she said. “Awful, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That creepiness sticks with you for a while. Now I’m looking at everyone like they’re a predator.”

  She laughed, and it was the first time we’d felt a little like our old selves.

  “Hey, let’s go get lunch, want to? We can go to the carts on Mississippi. It’s too nice a day to not be outside,” she said. “We should enjoy it while it lasts. I can work more when we come back.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Okay.” So we went. We had to eat, after all.

  Audrey

  It hadn’t occurred to me when I said we should go to lunch, but when we got to the food carts on Mississippi, it felt like a date. The courtyard was full of couples and friends and groups, and I saw how women looked at him as we walked through and I felt possessive—He’s with me—which was absurd and irrational. But as we approached an empty table, he put his hand on the small of my back.

  “This is okay?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We sat down. “What’s good?” Garrett said.

  “I’m having barbecue,” I said. “But get what you want. All of it’s good.”

  “No, barbecue’s good,” he said. “Tell me what you want. Lunch is on me.”

  “Garrett, I can buy my own lunch,” I said.

  “Stop, I’m starving.” He laughed. “Come on, you’re not making me pay rent.”

  In Portland, the question wasn’t if you would run into someone you knew when you went out; it was how many of them you would run into. While we ordered, I saw Chris’s classmate, Meredith McCann, and her mother, Julie, at another table across the courtyard. I used to see them both every day for years, before the kids were in high school. The last time I’d seen them was the funeral.

  We sat back down with our food. “It’s nice to be out,” I said. It was the first time I had been out like this, eaten out, since Leo died. We had eaten at the carts a lot.

  “Yeah,” Garrett said. “The weather was starting to get to me. I didn’t know spring could be this nice. God, this is great.”

  “It can be,” I said, “you never know. Tomorrow it will probably pour again. You get used to it.” It was such a cliché, that we were out on what felt like a date, but wasn’t, talking about the weather, Garrett joking about rent. It was a place to start.

  We were quiet for a few minutes, eating. It wasn’t an unpleasant silence, but I didn’t love it. At that point, neither of us had more to offer about the weather, or about anything else, to keep the insignificant talk going, and there was the food to work on.

  “So, you know—” Garrett said. “Man, this is good.” He wiped his mouth and sat sideways on the bench. “I don’t want to get in your business, but have you thought about going down there? Maybe visit the station? I get from Gallagher that they all wonder how you’re doing. Maybe you and the boys go down there, just say hello. I think it would mean a lot to them to see you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

  I didn’t feel like I was on a date anymore. I felt like I was back at the reception at the Pittock Mansion, fielding condolences in my suit from Ann Taylor.

  “I just wanted you to know, he told me they were asking about you,” he said. “I don’t have an opinion. I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. It’s just, they’ve asked. You’ll go, if you want, when the time’s right. You know what you’re doing, Audrey.” It all sounded like an apology.

  I had no idea what I was doing. As I sat in the sun and watched Garrett, I wondered, could a person rebound after their spouse died, like after a romance ended? The idea seemed so profoundly wrong, and I was ashamed at the thought, but that was what I felt like I’d done with Garrett. I would never have gone out somewhere and picked up a stranger, but there had been an opportunity that I’d created, then taken advantage of, and I wasn’t sure of my own motive. What was the motive when someone rebounded after a heartbreak? To temporarily fill the absence and postpone dealing with the loss that only time would make less acute—it was an unwise choice, emotional self-medication for which even the most unlikely but available person would do. Everyone who ever rebounded, or knew someone who did, knew that. But with Garrett, it was something different, because we had a history—we knew each other, we had both loved the same man, and I trusted him. He wasn’t disposable. So what did that make it?

  Out in the light, in the air, part of a crowd, I wanted to say something to him about what had happened. In a neutral, public place—that’s where people went when they needed composure and structure for confronting a delicate matter—I wanted to tidy the mess of the business between us that I had started. I didn’t know what to say, but I just wanted it said.

  Before I could say anything, though, Julie and Meredith walked over to our table.

  “Hi, Audrey,” said Julie. I stood up and she hugged me.

  “Hi, Mrs. McGeary,” Meredith said.

  “Hi, Meredith. This is Garrett,” I said to them both. “I don’t know if you’ve met.”

  Garrett stood and Julie and Meredith shook his hand. “I remember you from the funeral,” said Julie. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  Garrett and I sat back down.

  “We’re on our way out. Off to the dentist,” Julie said. “I just wanted to say hello. I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”

  “Thanks, Julie,” I said. “It’s nice to see you both.”

  “Take care,” said Julie. Meredith waved, and when they left I returned to the thoughts I’d been having before they came over, no clearer than I had been about them before, or what to say to Garrett.

  Audrey

  I wasn’t ready to go to the fire station. It was too much of a step. The station had been his second home, and I had enough trouble being in my own house without him. Although, maybe Leo would have wanted me to go—the expression drove me crazy, but I thought it anyway; it had a life of its own, out of my control. When I planted new vegetables that spring, were they what Leo would had wanted? When I talked to Andrew’s principal, had I done what Leo would have wanted? Changing the bedroom’s paint color—but then I couldn’t think any more about that because of what the painting had triggered between Garrett and me. Some days when I couldn’t stop the loop of that question
in my head and I imagined what Leo would have wanted, I came up with only one response: I would have wanted you not to sleep with Garrett, and also I would have wanted not to be dead. Not necessarily in that order.

  The wives offered me no comfort either. Some had reached out from other parts of the state—beyond just Twenty-Five and Multnomah County—I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, their emails said, yet there wasn’t a single thing any of them could do for me. But I was a hard sell, I knew that.

  As a college freshman my entire happiness had hinged on joining a sorority—it was the only thing I’d wanted—and it hadn’t happened. Subject to my own naive whims and ignorant of the political stakes, a one-night tangle with the wrong guy had sealed my exclusion. I had gotten over that particular painful rejection, but I had learned something from it: those women and the guy hadn’t known me at all beyond one fact that didn’t define me, but my poor judgment, insignificant on a large scale, had cost me. So since then, I’d always been suspicious of a collective mind-set of women, and had no interest in being a participant. As a result, I’d never embraced a membership in the firefighter wives’ cultural sisterhood.

  We were all in the same boat—single parents for days on end when our husbands’ shifts dragged, and the worst weeks made any one of us crazy. But when the wives got together, the bitching and griping could be magnified into sport, and after Leo died, I wanted to tell every one of them, Save your fucking breath. Wait until he’s dead, then you’ll really have something to complain about. And the group offered no immunity. Turning on each other was not rare: on the one who had dared to wear that to an event, on the one who’d had too much to drink and flirted with the wrong husband, on the one who’d dressed her husband down in front of God and everybody.

  I should have been kinder. I knew many other firefighters didn’t accommodate their wives with the flexibility Leo had given me when I needed it—two days at the coast alone, or a visit with Charlotte in San Francisco by myself for a week. Even so, when tension in our house built up, I unleashed my own wrath on Leo rather than share it with other wives. We had some terrible rows the times I’d come to the end of my rope because of the job, and because of the lifestyle of the job. But women could be awful. I learned that early on. I didn’t want their pity or anything else they had to offer, contrived or genuine. I didn’t want to be fodder for their gossip. The food they’d sent was the extent of what I would accept. Of all of them I had been the closest to Alyssa Gallagher, but when Leo died, what had been mutual was erased. She was still a firefighter’s wife and I was a firefighter’s widow, and I saw no way to maintain the friendship under those new conditions. If I changed my mind later, I could only hope that she’d still be receptive.