Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

  * * *

  Two days later, as the rest of the kids at Dutch Kills were hustling to homeroom, George and Peter set off in George’s fifteen-year-old Ford Fiesta that leaked oil all the way down the New Jersey Turnpike. George had gotten new clothes for the trip, and at McDonald’s he made a show of tucking napkins all around his collar and spreading them over his lap. Peter wore one of the collared shirts he always wore to school, but George asked if maybe he shouldn’t put a sweater over it, to look more collegiate. Two and a half hours later they came upon a long wooded road that ended at the iron gate that marked the entrance to Elliott College.

  Together, George and Peter walked from the parking lot to the admissions office, where a young woman greeted them and offered them refreshments—“Thanks, honey,” George said when she brought out a plate of fruit and cookies—and told them all about the school’s core requirements, some of which Peter could place out of thanks to AP scores. Peter shot George a brief look of apology but George was rapt and didn’t appear the least bit bored. When they finished up in admissions, the same young woman walked them over to the track, where the middle-distance coach was waiting for them.

  “George Stanhope,” George said, and extended his hand before immediately stepping back behind Peter. “As you can see I don’t do much running.” Coach invited both of them to his office, but George waved them off. “I’ll take a look around,” he said, “and leave you to it. Peter, I’ll see you tomorrow.” He read a plaque about the football team while they walked off. Once they disappeared inside the field house, George headed over to make small talk with a security guard, ask a few questions of his own. Were they nice kids, mostly, from what the man had seen? Were there any regular kids or all silver spoons? The guard said there were a lot of weirdos but they were nice enough, mostly. As for him, the pay was the same as anyplace despite all the college’s bragging about fair wages, and if he got his chance, he was going to take a job in Toms River, get closer to the ocean.

  * * *

  “How was it?” George asked when Peter got in the car the next morning. George had pulled up to the stadium a bit early, had watched Peter stretching in a circle of kids just that little bit older than he was. He watched them pull off their sweaty clothes in the cold November air and root through their bags to find dry ones that looked exactly the same, which they pulled over their heads as they talked. Peter was alabaster white, George could see, but stronger looking than he seemed with his shirt on. Finally, Peter broke away from the circle and jogged over to George’s car looking entirely like himself—warm-up pants, his old turtleneck, his cheeks apple red. George wondered for the first time if Peter had had any fun in high school. It had all sped by so quickly. Never once had he come in late, or come home drunk, or brought a girl home. Didn’t kids smoke anymore? Didn’t they cut class? When Peter used a dish, he washed it. When he used the last of the toilet paper, he went down to the store and bought more. Sometimes he let his heap of dirty clothes get too big—and Jesus did they stink sometimes—but the one time George teased him about it Peter looked so embarrassed and George felt terrible. He went up to the Laundromat that very night with his drawstring laundry bag and a book, insisting that had been his plan all along. He hadn’t known a thing about laundry when he first moved in, but George had shown him, and the women at the Laundromat had shown him, and now he could treat and soak and press and fold like a 1950s housewife. George wondered if he still felt like a guest in the apartment or if he’d come to think of it as his home. He’d never even asked to put up a poster or a picture. It struck George now that he should have told him it was okay anyway, just in case.

  “It was fun,” Peter said, tossing his bag on the back seat. He’d stayed with a group of sophomore runners, and he’d gotten the same impression he’d gotten at all the schools he visited, that the students were performing for him a little. These particular students spent part of the night talking about a time the year before when they’d all gotten drunk and shaved their heads. They’d asked Peter his best times, about where he’d placed in sectionals, at states. When they heard his times, they grew quiet. One asked why the hell he was thinking about running for Elliott.

  “But,” Peter said as George merged into traffic, “I think maybe I should stay in New York. It was fun for a night, but I was thinking I might take a year or two off before college. Figure out all the financial stuff.”

  He thought—though he’d not mentioned it to anyone yet, not Coach Bell, not Ms. Carcara—that he could work with the ironworkers for a year or two, bank the money, and then go to a top school without having to take on so many loans.

  George was quiet for a long time. He wondered if it was about the boy’s mother. Peter hadn’t seen her since she was moved upstate. Anne didn’t want to see him, but George could tell that the boy didn’t know she’d made it official, that she’d refused to put her son’s name down on the list of visitors. In fact, she didn’t put a single name on the list. George didn’t know whether he should just tell him now or wait until he made plans to go, and then either talk him out of going or drive him up there so he’d be with him when he got turned away. The Capital District Psychiatric Center had stricter protocols, was run much more like a prison than the hospital in Westchester had been. Maybe it comforted Peter in some way to live in the same state as she did, even if he didn’t see her. Then George wondered if it was him Peter worried about, that he’d be lonely or something. He tried to think about how he’d see this decision from where Peter was standing, that maybe to a kid who’d been dealt the cards Peter had it was more important to stay put in a place—who knew? At eighteen a boy can only see forward, and can’t imagine looking back. Then George thought of his brother and felt rage settle in his body. For years now he’d been scrolling through his memories to find evidence that Brian was capable of this titanic degree of selfishness. At the exact moment the boy needed him most, he’d looked at a picture of a golf course and taken off.

  The cornfields and peach orchards of central New Jersey rolled out behind them in the rearview mirror. Peter, who hadn’t been expecting an answer anyway, stared out the window with his chin on his fist.

  By the time George spoke, they’d wound through all the local roads and were merging onto the parkway. “Hey, Peter, I’m not your father. I know that. But in my humble opinion, you don’t take a chance like this, then you’re a real dummy.” George had just started worrying about college, believing all that didn’t get decided until the end of senior year. Here it was only fall. He’d been meaning to tell Peter that he’d help him however he could, but when he talked to the accountant the union used to organize retirement benefits, just for a little advice, it seemed like the only practical help he could give Peter was to cosign for a loan. And, privately, George knew that probably wouldn’t be possible, not with his credit. He’d been chipping away at it, doing all the things he should have done years earlier so that Brenda would have stayed, but it wouldn’t happen soon enough to help Peter.

  Peter felt the blood rush to his cheeks.

  “What?”

  “Are you a smart kid, Pete? Like all these people say you are? Or are you dum-dum?”

  “Are you really asking?”

  “Which are you?”

  “I’m a smart kid?”

  “Yeah you are. Now use the brain God gave you.”

  ten

  IT WAS FRANCIS WHO decided they should have a party. All in one week the cold ended and the heat began and they talked as they did every year about how that’s not the way the seasons used to work. The day he thought of a party they’d opened the windows of the house to let the air in and ended up keeping them open while they slept. Kate went to school in a sweatshirt on a Monday and by Friday she was wearing some thin thing with straps as narrow as shoelaces, and he asked her if it was meant for under another shirt, like a—but he got caught up on the word bra and she knew it, cracked a wide, delighted grin.

  “It’s a tank top, Dad,” she said. “I
t’s fine.”

  “It doesn’t seem like enough,” he said, but she was still laughing and didn’t listen. He was too busy to notice these things with Natalie and Sara, but now he was not busy. It was like he’d stepped through a hinged door, and on one side his life was made up of rushing, rushing, rushing: to get in the shower, to run a razor down his cheeks, to get a cup of coffee, through traffic, through paperwork, to a meeting, to another meeting, looking for a parking spot, arguing down the telephone, back into the car, out to find a perp, out to make an arrest, back into the car, back to the coffeepot, over and over and over. And now there was mostly silence, the flap of a bird going by in the morning, the rumble of the garbage truck making rounds, the tulips he’d planted as bulbs before Halloween now pushing through the hard earth like a row of green blades.

  The party would be for Lena, really, though he suggested it for Kate’s graduation. “You?” Lena said. “You, Francis Gleeson, are suggesting a party?” She seemed astonished, like he’d suggested a walk on the moon, and he wondered if all along he’d been a grumpier person than he realized. They could invite everyone, he said, all the girls’ friends, all of Jefferson Street, the people they knew from St. Bart’s, the people at the small, local insurance company where Lena had been working full-time since the start of Kate’s senior year. They could get a tent if weather was too much of a worry. They’d invite far more people than could fit in the house, and that would be half the fun of it. Something about sending Kate off to college felt to him like the beginning of a new time—better or worse was still to be seen—but it would also be like a big thank-you, he said, for the meals people brought and the help they gave and all the well wishes that had come his way over recent years.

  “We have thanked them,” Lena said, studying him as was her habit now. “I would never have left it this long.” She didn’t often ask if he was feeling okay anymore, but the question was always there. “But I’d love to have a party. You’re sure? It’ll be expensive.”

  “I’m sure. Invite everyone.”

  They hadn’t slept together in going on two years, and before that had been before he was hurt: another two years. He was home enough now to know this was the sort of thing discussed with an air of tragedy on daytime talk shows, but he couldn’t find a way to bring it up to her unless he blurted it out over dinner or while they were watching the news, and that would only make everything worse. And anyway, the time for bringing it up had passed. Once, he’d gotten up out of his chair and walked over to the couch where she was reading, and pulled the book out of her hands. Before, that’s all it would have taken. But now, she’d looked up at him in confusion. “Are you okay?” she’d asked, reaching up for him to hand the book back to her. So he gave it back. Two years was a bewildering length of time to think about in total, but it had slipped by day by day, week by week, month by month, until the time piled up and they got used to it. He’d never been a man who kept track of these things. They’d always just fallen into sex before, sometimes a few days in a row, sometimes not for a whole week, but it never mattered because they were always searching for ways back to each other. That last time, they’d been in their bedroom, morning, the girls at school, Francis sitting on the edge of the bed, Lena crouched at his feet. She’d been helping him with his socks because two years ago he still got spells of dizziness whenever he bent over—it was most likely the drugs, the doctors said, not something about his brain that hadn’t recovered. She’d put her hand on his thigh to steady herself and he’d drawn her up, drawn her closer. He put one hand on her warm neck, the other on the sliver of skin between the top of her skirt and the hem of her sweater. The longer he kept his hand on her bare skin, the more he remembered his old life, and for a few minutes it felt as if he could will himself back to that life, stroke by stroke, push by push. She made herself do it, he could feel it, but he didn’t care. She didn’t kiss him like she used to. She didn’t touch his face. She just reached under her skirt, pulled down her underwear, and carefully, gingerly crawled forward so that she was on top of him. There was nothing to be afraid of, he told her then, but she’d gotten so used to caring for him and worrying about him that it reminded him of what she’d been like when the girls were toddlers, when she spent her days clearing paths, following them up the stairs.

  He hadn’t seen her fully naked since before he was shot. She’d begun changing in the bathroom. In the cooler months, she climbed into bed each night in head-to-toe plaid, her face scrubbed clean. In the summer she wore a T-shirt that came nearly to her knees. She was considerate, more considerate than she used to be. Now, she’d never ask for the light to read by if she thought he might be drifting off to sleep.

  That one time, the last time, once he’d finished, she leaned forward and pressed her forehead to his. She didn’t try to coax him to keep going, and that’s when he knew she’d done it only for him and not at all for herself. “Lena, love,” he’d said when he realized she was crying, and tried to catch hold of her hands. But she stood up, shimmied her underwear back on, went into the bathroom, and ran the water for a few minutes. And then she went downstairs.

  Since then he’d waited for a sign that something would flare between them again, and sometimes when she bobbed her hips along with the music coming from the kitchen radio, or curled the phone cord around her finger while she talked, a longing opened up in his chest like a blossom. Everyone told him how lucky he was, and he knew they weren’t wrong. She’d tended to him from the very first moment the shot rang out, and refused to leave his side. In those early weeks, before he could walk, she never let him be; she was always taking a limb in her hands and massaging him so that he wouldn’t get a clot. She fed him and kept him warm and smeared Vaseline on his lips and checked his IV and his wound site, and when she didn’t like what a nurse or doctor told them, she asked to speak to another. “You’ll be fine,” she repeated to him over and over and over, and because of her, he never doubted it. But now, he could see, she’d gotten too used to being the caretaker and him the patient. She no longer went pale every time he made for the stairs, but she’d placed him in a category alongside the girls, the mortgage—another thing to worry about.

  In most ways, he was back to himself. It had taken a full four years but he’d finally arrived more or less where he began—minus an eye and with some paralysis in the muscles of his face. One side of his body grew tired more quickly than the other. A run-of-the-mill head cold always felt to him like an infection. But he began taking up the odd jobs he’d done before. He began mowing the lawn again. He trimmed their trees and bushes and hauled the dead brush to the curb. When he worked hard he sweat, and when a drop of sweat dripped from his brow down his face, it felt completely different on the left side than it did on the right. He shoveled the snow when it fell, and seeded the lawn in the spring and fall, and he soldered the basement pipe that had been weeping for years. When he hung the Christmas lights along the roofline, Lena held the ladder and scolded him the whole time, that he shouldn’t be up there, that it wasn’t worth it, what if he got dizzy, that he’d better come down that instant. But he’d done it and it was all fine.

  And still, they couldn’t seem to fight their way back to each other. Not once since he came home from the hospital did she roll up against him in her sleep, not once did she slide her hand across his chest like she used to and settle there. When he thought about it too much, he felt like a child for letting it bother him. “Hug me!” Kate had shouted at Lena once as a little girl. Someone’s German shepherd had gotten loose and had chased the kids around the block, trying hard to nip their heels through his muzzle. Terrified, Kate had run inside. “Hug me!” she’d demanded of Lena, opening her little arms. Lena, smiling, had hugged her tight.

  Once in a while, at night, he tested himself against her boundary to see what might happen, but it was getting more difficult all the time. Just the other night he’d run his fingertip along the ends of her hair, which was hanging in a sheet over the edge of her pillow. A
whisper-light touch in the dark. All she had to do was not move and he might have tried something bolder. “Sorry,” she said, her back to him, and quickly flicked her hair out of his way. “Are you okay?” she asked over her shoulder.

  But now Kate was leaving, and the house would be theirs again. He could barely believe how quickly it had happened. For twenty years they’d been talking about putting on an addition, maybe, like so many neighbors had done, but then they’d looked up and discovered they didn’t need it anymore. Used to be he’d come home from work and shout at everyone to pick up their markers, their papers, their sweatshirts, their backpacks, and then one day he’d looked around and there were no backpacks thrown anywhere. And during the day now there wasn’t even Lena. She worked at the insurance company from nine to five and when she came home, she went straight to the kitchen, started chopping and boiling something for dinner. As a young man, as a young father, he’d never imagined there’d be a time when he’d be alone in his house every day. He thought about Ireland more and more, tried to remember if there was ever a day in his life when his own father didn’t have something to do. Sometimes he kept the TV on for company, and one day as he was flipping through, he came upon a scene where a woman and a man were kissing in what looked to be a hotel room. He stayed on the channel. Next thing, just as the man began to undress the woman, he turned her around, pushed her onto the bed, and entered her from behind. Francis was never one for porn, but this was different. It was cable. He couldn’t actually see anything, just the suggestion of something. Watching, he slid his hand inside his pants and touched himself until he came, and that started a stretch of months that reminded him of being fourteen again, disappearing to a remote field where he could curl up and slip his hand inside his pants in privacy because there was no place to be alone in the crowded house.