The Big Door Prize

by M. O. Walsh

  Yet Douglas not only remained friendly and kind when he’d had a few but also seemed younger, somehow, the kind of drinker genuinely interested in everyone around him. He’d talk to strangers or call up old friends and say smart and encouraging things. Instead of seeming teacherly, which, Cherilyn had to admit, he could sometimes do, he’d instead have this brand of enthusiasm that made you feel like you were learning along with him. It felt contagious, like you were sharing in his amazement at some new aspect of the world and this was always nice, Cherilyn understood, no matter who you shared it with. And if they were out on the town and there was a jukebox or band Douglas would dance with her and whistle along and inevitably threaten to play some invisible instrument when they sat back down at the table to rest. Just for a second. Just to tease her. Just to let her know that he was still the type of guy this might actually play some wicked air trombone right there in front of everybody. To let her know that, just because they’d been married so long, that didn’t mean he was above embarrassing her. And he would do this just long enough for Cherilyn to look at him, for her to smile as if she could indeed still be mortified after all these years by anything he might cook up, and then he would stop. And Cherilyn loved this about him, so she would grab his hand at the table, where she knew Douglas would squeeze hers back in return, again and again, in perfect time with the music.

  When she didn’t hear anything else from the den, though, she did worry he might have hurt himself and so she put on her robe and left the bedroom. She turned on the light in the living room and saw Douglas lying facedown on the carpet, the trombone by his feet, a basket he’d knocked off the coffee table overturned on the floor. He was facing her direction and opened his eyes with the light. He looked up at her without moving his head. He smiled.

  “Oh, hi there,” Douglas said.

  “Hello,” Cherilyn said.

  “I think I might have tripped,” he said.

  “Is that a fact?” she said.

  Cherilyn approached and knelt beside him and saw that Douglas already had a little knot on his forehead, reddening above his right eye. It wasn’t anything serious, she could tell, but it would leave a bruise. She looked at him a minute and all those worries that had kept her from sleep were temporarily gone. Her sweet Douglas and his unexpectedly drunken smile on a Thursday. Where had this come from? An excellent trombone lesson? Was this a bit of happiness for Douglas? The idea pleased her, and she patted his back.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said.

  “You were playing a trombone,” she said.

  “I suppose that’s true,” he said.

  “I’ll get you some ice,” she said.

  “Oh,” Douglas said. “That would be splendid.”

  Cherilyn went to the kitchen, where she saw Douglas had kicked off his shoes by the pantry, put his socks by the phone, and set his belt on the stove. On the counter, an open box of cookies. Next to this, Cherilyn saw, the bag from Johnson’s Grocery. She looked inside it. Eggplants and olive oil. Lemons. Tahini. A bottle of wine. At least that was something. Dependable Douglas.

  She returned to the den and knelt beside him. She placed the ice pack on his forehead and he opened his eyes.

  “Well, there’s an interesting sensation,” he said.

  “You have a good time tonight?” she asked him.

  “I did,” Douglas said.

  Cherilyn looked him over and smiled. He was splayed out like a chalk drawing of himself, arms raised above his head as if he’d been fleeing in terror when he hit the floor. A foot away, she saw, sat his beret, where it had apparently popped right off his head.

  “You’re not paralyzed or anything, are you?” she said.

  Douglas wiggled his pointer finger. “Check,” he said. A moment later, he lifted his heel. “I’m just a little sleepy, I think.”

  Cherilyn gently pet his back. “You want to come to bed or you good out here?”

  “You know, I believe I’m good right here, honey,” Douglas said. “Thank you. And how are you?”

  Cherilyn smiled again and touched his cheek. “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m glad you’re home.”

  She then pulled the blanket off the couch and laid it on top of her husband. He would indeed be fine right there and, rather than try to convince him otherwise, Cherilyn understood the kindest thing she could do was let him be.

  She stood and put the basket back on the table. She then looked down at him and wagged her finger playfully. “No more of that ­rock-­and-­roll music, young man. You hear me?”

  “­Ten-­four, good buddy,” Douglas said, and closed his eyes.

  Cherilyn turned out the light and went back to bed.

  She did not sleep well after that. She first thought of her husband and his little surprises. A trombone after midnight? A belt on the stove? ­Ten-­four, good buddy? These were all nice thoughts. But, when they ran out, Cherilyn had to return to what she herself had been doing that evening.

  She’d spent a few hours at her mom’s, cleaning up a bit, calling Douglas to see if he might also pick up some wine for dinner, but got no answer. Her mom had been joking earlier, she claimed, about thinking Cherilyn was trapped in the attic. She was just giving her a hard time. But Cherilyn had seen that strange look in her eyes, the one that made it seem as if her mother was perhaps watching two different movies at once and puzzling out which one to focus on. She said she was fine, like she always said she was fine, but it was honestly so hard to tell. It exhausted Cherilyn to think about. And as they sat on the two ancient recliners in her mother’s living room, watching TV, not saying much, Cherilyn was overcome with guilt for talking to that other man on the computer. She could rationalize it all she wanted, that it wasn’t that big of a deal, that she hadn’t done anything that a million other people do every day, she was sure, that she hadn’t cheated in any sort of legal or even technical way, that no jury on this planet could convict her. Yet her heart kept twisting around it.

  So, she decided to dig through her mother’s cabinets and pull out some candles. She heated her mother some soup and put the candles in the same bag she’d used to bring her leftovers that afternoon and then walked back home, determined to make a night of it with Douglas. She would cook her new dish and he could help her out with it, chopping or slicing, and she could light the candles and they could have wine and talk about his trombone lesson. They could watch baseball if he wanted. Read together in bed. Perhaps even do other things in bed and she would not ask for an encore this time. She would instead bury herself in their wonderful normalcy, which she found herself missing, for some reason, and wipe the start of that day away. Maybe she would even tell him, if the moment was right, about her readout. About Tipsy’s readout. And how maybe there was something to this.

  But instead she got home to hear a message on the machine that Douglas was having drinks with Geoffrey and so she fiddled around with her birdhouses, made herself a simple meal, and soon became dizzy. This was not a happy feeling. It was instead the awful and increasingly familiar dizziness that made her nauseated, the sudden and unpredictable one that caused her to nearly swerve off the road those past weeks. So heavy in her limbs that she felt pulled to the earth. And when this feeling came, as it always did, it dominated all else. She steadied herself on the table and took deep breaths until it eased. She then popped an Excedrin and walked a glass of water to their computer. She clicked her cursor onto the search bar and typed in “WebMD.”

  This was one of the only other sites besides Etsy she’d spent much time on, but never out of her own curiosity. It was instead concern about her mother that had previously led her there. Douglas sat beside her on that occasion and they quickly diagnosed her mother with just about every illness known to man, which Cherilyn found insultingly easy to do when you typed “forgetful,” “erratic,” and “female” into the search bar. Douglas had warned her of the hypochondria this si
te could cause.

  “You know what they say,” he told her. “WebMD: Where You See Things You Can’t Unsee.”

  So, Cherilyn didn’t put much stock into what it said about her mother. There were just too many options to choose from: dementia, Alzheimer’s, blood clots, menopause, pregnancy, dehydration, normal aging. A person could be as sick as they chose to be.

  This time, though, she was looking for herself in those pages. She typed in symptoms like “dizziness,” “migraines,” “tingling,” and “cramping,” and such a wealth of horrific options appeared that she decided she would make an appointment with Dr. Granger tomorrow. Enough was enough. Yet all those terrible options followed her to bed, where she opened her husband’s book about royal families and stared right through it until she fell asleep and awoke to the sound of elephants.

  When morning came and the birds started up, she found Douglas standing beside the bed, fully showered and dressed for work. He smelled wonderful, Cherilyn thought, the masculine scent of his soap and cologne, just as he always did at this precise moment of their mornings together. His thin hair was combed neatly over his head, and below his right eye, where the blood had drained, was a big purple bruise.

  “Ouch,” Cherilyn said.

  “You should have seen the other guy,” Douglas told her. “He was a basket.”

  “You don’t look so good,” she said.

  “I’d pay to feel as good as I look, if that tells you anything.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I think I’ve gone blind,” he said. “It’s like my eyeballs have stopped working. How did we used to drink like that all the time?”

  “We were young,” Cherilyn said. “We skipped class the next day.”

  “You’re still young,” he said. “Just wait until you hit forty. That’s when it all goes to shit.”

  “I’ll be sure to live it up until then,” Cherilyn said.

  Douglas went to the dresser and picked up his beret. Cherilyn shifted in the bed to watch him. He looked at himself in the mirror and put it on. What was that face he was making? So serious, it seemed, when he looked at himself. What pose was he hoping someone would find him in? Who was he trying to impress? Did she do the same? Douglas then fished out a pair of sunglasses from the bowl on the dresser and slid them over his eyes.

  “Class,” he said to the mirror. “Today, we are going to talk about hangovers.”

  Cherilyn rolled to her side. She hugged a pillow between her legs.

  “Hey, Cher,” Douglas said. “Sorry about last night. I know you were hoping for eggplant. I’m not sure what got into me.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I had spaghetti. I was more just wanting to hang out with you. Talk to you about some stuff. Do you feel like we haven’t talked in a while?”

  “We talk every day,” he said. “I spilled my entire guts to you last week.” He studied his face in the mirror. “Hence this ­weird-­looking upper lip. I still can’t get used to it.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Cherilyn said. “I don’t know what I’m thinking. I just feel like we have stuff to talk about. I feel kind of distant.”

  “That’s my fault,” Douglas said. “But I know what you mean. We should talk. I’m sorry. I should have come home.”

  Why did it bother her, his answer?

  Cherilyn felt immediately irritated with Douglas but had no idea the reason. He was being kind, she knew, taking the blame for something he didn’t even do wrong. But maybe that was it. Couldn’t it be something that she had done? Couldn’t Douglas allow her to be wrong for a change, to be distant, to be at fault? Doesn’t everyone have a right to be wrong?

  “Let’s talk tonight,” he said. “We can eat all the eggplant and talk about all the stuff. I have to get to work, though.”

  “Okay,” Cherilyn said.

  Douglas leaned over the bed and kissed her on the forehead. He moaned as if this was too much movement for anyone in his condition and then told her he loved her. After he left, Cherilyn lay on her back and looked up at the ceiling. She began her body check: Feet, okay. Hands, okay. Head, okay.

  After a moment, Douglas rushed back into the room. He was nearly out of breath.

  “Here’s a problem,” he said. “I don’t have a car.”

  And then, as if to answer him, the doorbell rang.

  15

  Up in the Morning, Work Like a Dog

  Pete never made it to bed.

  He’d grown quiet since seeing Trina through the car window and said little other than ­good-­bye as Tipsy dropped off the other guys on his way to Pete’s house, where he agreed to pick him back up in the morning. Pete thanked him and stumbled inside with his head down. He kicked his shoes off in the laundry room and went straight to the back porch, where Mayfly was waiting with her nose pressed to the screen door. Mayfly was a ­beige-­and-­white mutt, a gift to him from a friend after Anna passed. She was part ­Black Mouth Cur and part Lab, he was told, and was a good dog although old now and, Pete suspected, not too bright. This, however, is a decent attribute for a yard dog, and Pete admired her simple nature. Mayfly required little other than access to food and water and for Pete to occasionally throw a ball in one direction so that she could bring it back in the other. Pete could provide this for her and so Mayfly loved him, which is the great and selfish comfort of owning a dog.

  Pete opened the screen door a crack and sidled his way out so Mayfly wouldn’t run in. He said, “I know, I know,” and watched her uncoil into a bundle of energy. She turned in circles and wagged her tail and licked Pete all over his hands when he tried to pet her. “Settle down,” he said, and this is what Pete meant by her not being too bright. He could tell Mayfly missed him. He knew she wanted to be petted. She got so damn excited, though, even after all these years, flapping around like a fish and staying just out of reach, that it made the very thing she wanted impossible. “Calm down, now,” he said and clicked his tongue. “Daddy’s home.”

  Pete patted her hard on the side and scratched her back end and then sat heavily into the lone lawn chair on his porch. He looked out to the yard. The dim porch light above afforded him only a glimpse of the dark grass, the outline of the oak trunk that stood by his fence line, and Mayfly buried her head in his lap. Pete took a deep breath. The frogs were singing. Bugs bounced around the porch light. This was a welcome scene. He scratched Mayfly behind the ears until she grew satisfied enough to run off and find the ancient tennis ball she adored. It was a ­nasty-­looking thing, turned brown and nearly bald long ago. He’d often tried to give her an upgrade, buying her some fancier toys with squeakers, some of them running upward of ten bucks at the grocery store, but she quickly eviscerated them to get the squeaker out. The more expensive the toy, it seemed, the faster Mayfly destroyed it. It was inevitable. And on these days Pete would come home to find her in the yard, the ­space-­age rubber ball supposed to last a lifetime scattered like a plane crash at her paws, and say, “You know, this is why we can’t have nice things.”

  Mayfly returned from the dark and set the tennis ball beside him. Pete looked at her. Her ear was cocked to the side, her tail straight out as if frozen. “What are we going to do about that girl?” Pete asked her. Mayfly did not respond. So, Pete leaned over to pick up the ball and almost fell off the chair. He then sat back up and chucked it mightily into the air where the ball went too high and knocked out his porch light. The naked bulb popped like a firework and sprinkled its light to the ground like rain.

  “Careful, now,” Pete said, “there’s glass,” and fell asleep in the chair.

  He awoke covered in dew, Mayfly still in his face. Had she even moved? He had no idea. He swept up the bulb and showered and dressed and the memory of Trina lurking outside of that house returned to him like regret. He said his morning prayer and did his penances, twenty extra ­push-­ups, thirty extra curls, but had no time for the jog as he
fought back a familiar but not insurmountable headache. Pete then went to the kitchen, made a ­fried-­egg sandwich with hot sauce and mayo, and picked up the phone. He’d decided to call Lanny’s house, to see if he could talk to Trina before school. He hated that he didn’t have her cell phone number. If he could catch her early enough, though, maybe they could set up a meeting in his office, have a talk. He could give her a chance to explain.

  Lanny answered.

  “This better be Publishers Clearing House,” he said.

  “Morning, Lanny,” Pete said. “Pete here.”

  “Shit,” Lanny said. “Has it been a week already?”

  “I’m not calling about the truck,” Pete said. “Is Trina there?”

  “Took her to school,” Lanny said. “Why else you think I’m up at this hour?”

  “A lot of people are up at this hour,” Pete said. “It’s the daytime.”

  “Speaking of,” Lanny said. “You know you got a little wiggle on your front end, don’t you? Alignment’s all off. You must have hit a mighty big pothole. Probably going too fast, I’d guess. Maybe driving without your headlights.”

  Pete looked at the clock. He understood Lanny had likely done something awful to his truck in the short time he’d had it but was more struck by what Lanny had said. “Seems early for her to go to school, doesn’t it?” Pete asked him. It was ­seven-­thirty. “Morning bell’s not until eight.”

  “Some sort of assignment,” Lanny said. “She was all up in my face about it. Started on me last night.”