“I don’t know.”
“Keep your chin up, kid,” Hugh says.
“If we’re giving out advice, you better be careful. Hanging out with crazy people.”
“Crazy rich people. Anyway, she’s an idealist.”
“An idealist who tries to kill cops. That’s the new kind, I guess.”
“Not new at all,” Hugh says.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sally-At-The-Window hands Grayson his time card, which he slides under the face of the clock where it takes a snap.
One of the other women in the office is saying something from behind the glass and Sally says, “Oh, yes. You got a message to call someone. I wrote it down at my desk. Catherine?”
“Really? She called today?” Sally nods. He hands the card back to her for her to initial the overtime and walks to the pay phone in the breakroom, then realizes he doesn’t want to call from a phone where guys will be walking by, maybe yelling and swearing, she might think he’s in a barroom, so he barges out the door and across to the employee parking lot. He salutes a couple of the boys who are shooting the shit, hops in his 1967 GTO and rolls away.
Does she want to say ‘Happy Birthday’ he wonders? He won’t call her, because she could say that and then hang up. He’ll have a better shot at changing her mind if he’s there in person. He hopes.
He imagines her giving him one more chance and it brings a smile to his face.
“Wouldn’t that be a nice birthday gift?” he says.
But the smile flies out the window when he’s sucker punched by a realization.
“Oh, no.”
Maybe it isn’t about his birthday at all, maybe she is going to tell him she is serious about this Braintree guy, whoever he is.
He has dismantled his life, torn it apart, and for what? He wants to get out and smash his head against the curb.
Instead he composes himself and continues his drive to Catherine’s brick duplex, to get the word, whatever it is. He climbs the steps to the front door as if heading to the gallows.
He rings and Mrs. Chrisolm appears in the doorway and smiles at him through the storm door and pushes it open.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she says. “It’s seems so funny that you ring the bell now. You don’t have to, you know.”
She backs up to let him in. Mrs. Chrisolm is a battle tested veteran of life, scarred, widowed, but not hardened by an alcoholic husband, “Wilfred-God-Rest-His-Soul,” and four daughters, three of them married.
Grayson says, “Why, good evening, Mrs. Cleaver. My, don’t you look nice. Enchanting, if I may say so.”
“You can skip the Eddie Haskell stuff, Michael Grayson. I’m glad to see you. I told Catherine she was crazy to break up with you. But who listens to me?”
He follows her down the hallway which smells of chemicals, maybe bug spray.
“This is just a bump in the road to happily ever after,” Grayson says. “I’m thinking she wants to holler at me a little bit more, and then we’ll be all set. She say anything to you?”
She cocks her head as if she can’t hear him. “Oh, yes. She says today is your birthday. Happy Birthday!”
“Thanks. I’m getting old.”
“How is your mother, the poor thing?” Mrs. Chrisolm says.
“She’s hanging right in. She’s tough.”
“Give her a hug for me.”
She pulls him to herself, gives a squeeze and pats him on the back. The smell of chemicals is coming from her hair.
“Thanks, I will.” He looks at her hair. “Your hair looks nice. Did you go to the hair-do saloon today?”
“Yes, I had a permanent.” She chuckles. “It’s salon, not saloon.”
“Oh,” he says. “You have a date tonight?”
“A date! Lord Jesus, no. Way better. I’m celebrating the announcement of my seventh grandchild,” she says.
“What?”
“Yes, Maura called and she and John Webster are expecting their third. I hope I get a boy this time. Six granddaughters is a lot. Are a lot.” She waves a hand. “Is a lot. The nuns at St. Pat’s would kill me.”
“That’s great. Tell Maura and John Webster I said congrats. Cee in her bedroom?”
“No, she’s ironing, down in the rumpus room. Go down. Tell your mother I’m praying for her.”
He opens a door near the kitchen and fishes around under the winter coats for the light switch at the top of the cellar stairs and flicks it on. No light. He starts down, then turns and goes back to the kitchen where Mrs. Chrisolm had put on long-sleeved, yellow rubber gloves before starting in on the dishes in the sink.
“You want me to put a bulb in the cellar light? I can reach.”
“We’re out of bulbs. I have to pick some up at Purity Supreme,” she says.
“Want me to take one from the living room lamp until you do?”
“Well, if you feel you need it,” she says, visibly uncomfortable. “Just, please. Take your shoes off before you go in. I hate to see people walk on the rug.”
He pulls off his shoes in the hallway and walks over the white shag to an end table. Mrs. Chrisolm stands in the doorway, arms folded, and keeping an eagle eye on him, in case he goes insane and thinks it would be okay to sit on the couch while he screws a bulb out of a lamp.
“The room looks great,” he says.
He looks around, at the console TV, with the built-in AM/FM radio and record player, the mirrored wall and the satiny wallpaper. A durable clear plastic cover encased the upholstered living room set. She loved him, he knew, but not enough to leave him alone with the couch or the rug. No occasion in memory had risen to a level that warranted a full-scale usage of the living room. Certainly no one under the age of thirty has been allowed in unattended since she’d had this room, and part of the cellar, done over with some of her late husband’s insurance money.
At the top of the cellar stairs, he puts the bulb in and then heads down to the basement, passing by the oil burner and tank, and knocked on the door to the rumpus room before he opens it and sticks his head into the room.
“You down here raising a rumpus, Miss Chrisolm?”
“Yes. If you call ironing my uniform and watching TV a rumpus.”
Herman Munster is clopping around on the screen of an old TV that has rabbit ears on top.
“Finally,” he says. “I got you turned on to The Munsters.”
He steps into the room, closes the door and stands on the other side of the ironing board. The knotty pine paneled room smells of hot metal, steam and spray starch.
“Not really. This only gets one channel now,” she says.
He’d first seen her on opening day of kindergarten and he’d tried to see her at least once every day since. Seeing her that first time had thrilled him and had ignited strange and strong feelings that he didn’t know what to do with. This beautiful woman was the same little freckle-faced girl who had kissed his cheek, pinched his arm and ran away. He had chased her to this house that day and then ran back home and got his bike and rode back and forth on her street, “no hands,” until he’d crashed into a parked car and put a wobble in his wheel. That year his mother had often packed his favorite snack of green grapes, but this bewildering feeling he had for Catherine Chrisolm was so strong he could not resist chucking the grapes at her. Her face is thinner now, the freckles are almost gone, and her hair has darkened but her sandy green eyes are as they always were, and when she ran away now it was on the best legs he’d ever seen.
“What’s up?” he says. “You ready to admit your mistake and come back to me? Well, forget it. You’ll wait a long time before that happens.” He pretends to look at a watch he isn’t wearing. “Okay, that’s long enough.” He holds out his arms. “Baby, you’re the greatest.”
She looks at him briefly and back to her blouse. “Thanks.”
“So, let’s get married. Strike now, while the iron is hot. Get it?”
She continues ironing and doesn’t look at him. “I’m pregnant.”
/> His head snaps back, and he takes an involuntary step to keep under it. “Oh, wow.” She doesn’t look up. “Jeez.” He moves closer to her, bends down and tries to look up at her face. “You okay?”
She nods but doesn’t look at him.
“Okay,” he says. “Well then.”
He moves toward her, but she stops him with a look.
“Don’t,” she says.
He goes over to the broken-down upholstered recliner that sits by the bulkhead stairs, still awaiting removal years after it had been taken out of service. He turns the chair to face Catherine and sits on the front edge of the cushion. If he sat all the way back on this chair it would flip over and send him ass over teakettle, as it had done many, many, many times to an always surprised Mr. Wilfred Chrisolm. Each time it happened, he picked it up, and climbed back in, refusing to throw it out or fix it.
“So, okay. Here’s what we do,” Grayson says.
“Why don’t you ask me if it’s yours?”
He winces, just as she looks up.
“Don’t say that. Christ. It’s not the Braintree guy?” he says.
She readjusts the uniform on the ironing board and steers the iron along a seam.
“If it was his, why would you call me?” he asks. “You wouldn’t. So, let’s trot up to Sacred Heart and get Father What’s-His-Name to say his mumbo jumbo to us.”
She looks up from her blouse, but not at him. “My father drank until it killed him, and my mother was a mental case until well after he died. What did my sisters do? They ran out and married guys just like him.”
She presses a button on the iron and it hisses steam.
“I guess they missed the drama,” she says. “But I’ve had my fill already, enough for me anyway. I want a good life. Not like the princess in a fairy tale good, but good, you know?”
He nods, looking at the floor.
“Maura wanted to be a veterinarian,” she says, “Jan was going to be a nurse, and Sherry wanted to cure cancer. And I wanted to marry you, and you’d have a quiet, regular job, like an accountant, or something in an office.”
She looks away from him.
“We would get married, and we would be happy,” she says.
He knows the prayer, but she is saying a slightly different version of it; the tenor has shifted from a promise to nostalgia.
“You’d get home at the same time every night,” she says.
“We’ll go to our kids Little League games,” he says.
“We’d live away from here, in our own home, way down in Marshfield,” she says. “With a big yard.”
“With Big Wheels and doll carriages in the driveway,” he says.
“Our four kids would be sweet to each other, do things together,” she says.
“We’ll have a big mutt that goes everywhere with them.”
“My kids are going to have a father who comes straight home from work every night.”
“And reads them bedtime stories,” he says.
“They will not worry they might find him dead drunk on the sidewalk when they go off to school.”
“I’ll cook breakfast on Sunday morning,” he says.
“We’d go on a two-week vacation in Falmouth, at the same cottage, every year,” she says, her voice cracking. “Every, every, every year, like Ellen King’s family did.”
He is silent. Hoping. She stops talking, and ironing, but is still looking at her uniform. On the television, Herman Munster runs through a brick wall leaving a perfect silhouette of his big, goofy self.
“No,” Grayson says, “I hear you, Cee, I want all of that, too. That sounds great, like a terrific life, for us and our kids.”
“I can’t do that married to you. I’ve known that, really since high school, but I thought I could change you.”
“Of course, you can,” he says. “Do that, I mean.”
“You’d come home drunk, or not at all. Even when you want to come home, you won’t be able to. That’s what happens.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Grayson says. “But be careful you don’t ask for something to be perfect. You know? It’s bad luck.”
And now the tough chick from North Quincy turns up to defend the wistful girl.
“Yes,” she says, “I should leave some good things for heaven. Like the two weeks in Falmouth.”
“Okay, so what are you going to do? Are you taunting me? Or are you telling me you’re marrying this Braintree guy? What?”
“Go,” she says. “I have to get to work. One of the girls didn’t show up.”
“Did you even tell him?”
“Tell him what, exactly?” she says.
“That you’re having a baby? Have you told anyone?”
“Go, I said.”
“You are going to have the baby, right?” Grayson says. “Right?”
She grabs the can of spray starch and wings it at his head. He pulls back to avoid it and the chair starts falling over backwards, and he with it. The chair follows an arc back, then tilts to the side and crashes. It happens in slow motion and he’s surprised that he can hear the can rattling as it bounces off the walls. The chair lands but he continues on, rolling once on the floor before jumping to his feet.
“Hah!” he says. “Missed me!” He pretends to dust off his pants.
“Too bad. Go. Just go.”
She means it and he looks down and shakes his head.
“What do you want from me?” he says. “Huh? What? You call me and I come over. You tell me you’re pregnant, I say, great, marry me, and next thing I know, you peg a can at me.”
“Thanks for coming, now leave.”
“You came back to me that night, for a reason,” he says.
“Because I had heard about your mother. I wanted to comfort you. I should have left you alone. I’m sorry.”
“Wrong. Because I’m the guy you’re going to spend your life with. Why not just accept it? It’s fate.”
“Yeah? That’s what you think? Well, screw you, and fate.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Back at his apartment, Grayson takes a shower, puts on his sweatpants and a tee shirt, drinks a bottle of Pepsi, and heads to the couch. He is tired, ashamed, dispirited and dying for a drink. He can’t sleep in his own bed; he’d been battling insomnia for weeks and weeks now. He can fall asleep readily everywhere else, which was how he wound up on his brother’s couch after the 2AM last call.
Lying on the couch all he can think about is how he can fix everything he’s screwed up. He wants her and the baby without question but is troubled when he wonders if he’s capable of being a good father and husband. He thinks of himself as an idiot and the only reason everybody he knows doesn’t think that is because he knows himself better than they know him. He shuts his mind off by turning on the TV.
Now, somehow, Grayson is only awake enough to know he isn’t awake. There is light on the outside of wherever he is. There is a voice speaking. He tries to push through to consciousness. He is swimming up but it takes a great effort. He gives up, floats back down, feels sick, and has to try to go up again. It’s hard work. He hears the voice again. He opens an eye for a second and sees it’s the TV.
“And over in jolly old England this weekend, Queen Elizabeth will ceremoniously open the new London Bridge. We hope a jolly old time is had by all. Next! Jolly old Len Berman with all the sports.”
Now a heavy hand grabs Grayson’s forehead and moves it side to side. He has to work his whole face to get his eyes open. When he does, he finds himself stretched out on the couch, facing the TV. On the tube, in a kitchen someplace, someplace that is flooded with early morning sunshine, impeccably dressed Happy Dad sits at a breakfast table with Happy Little Jane and her Happy Brother Dick in their spotless home. But then, Happy Mom set a small plastic tub of something on the table, and the Happy Family looks at it closely, and their happiness is no more.
Here in their gloomy living room, roommate Ron Kerr looms above Grayson, blotting out the light.
“Grayson
,” Kerr says. “Wake up.” Grayson sees what looks like a clean, empty dinner plate, but, in fact, it is Kerr’s face.
“Hey, Curly,” Grayson says. He sits up and rubs his eyes.
“Why are you sleeping on the couch?”
“I’m going out.”
“Maybe I’m wrong, I doubt it,” Curly says. “But I remember that we, all of us, collectively, took a vote then made a rule about not sleeping on the couch. Am I crazy or did that occur?”
“Both. Sorry. It was unplanned. It just happened. Unintentionally. Sorry. I have to go out.”
He rushes around, getting ready to go out and he makes a lot of noise, opening and closing dresser drawers, gargling, slamming the medicine cabinet door, and then the bathroom door. He’s slapping his big bare feet along the hallway floor, when the door to Ron Kerr’s bedroom opens.
“Grayson!” Curly shouts in a stage whisper.
“Hey,” Grayson says. “What’s up? Why are you whispering?”
Curly has a shoe brush in one hand and a shoe on the other. He uses the shoe to point to Dave Barry’s closed bedroom door, and then beckons Grayson into his room.
The bedroom is well ordered, the bed is made up and it looks like a place where an actual human being slept. Curly’s Cheech and Chong poster is gone, and so is the pile of dirty clothes that could have hidden a VW bug. Also, Curly is shining his shoes. These clues reveal that Kerr is going through another “adult” phase, where he is trying to behave as he thinks a responsible adult male would behave.
Curly closes his door and displays his serious face.
“Dave is sleeping. He’s in bed with his ears,” he says. “Again.”
“Shit. I thought he was still out. I’ll be quiet.”
“I told him, he should get his tonsils and adenoids removed.”
Dr. Curly puts the brush down and picks up the other shoe, puts both shoes on his dresser and fits a pair of plastic shoe trees into them.
“Oh, right,” Grayson says. “You got the job, huh?” Early in the week Curly had mentioned an interview he had lined up for a job as assistant manager at the Mug and Muffin. His oldest brother Dwight manages it, and their mother owns it.
“What? Oh, yeah, I did.” He turns to the closet. “Look at this special hanger I got just for neckties.” He holds up a complicated metal object. He looks at it as he twists it around. “I guess you just hang the clip over one of the little bars here.”
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