Crossing the Bridge (27 page)

I’d contacted the greeting card guy who lived down the street from Iris and ordered an assortment of his home-printed work. This shipment had just arrived and Tyler and I struck a four-foot display to put them up. The order consisted of two vastly different styles of work. One was on glossy white stock with pen-and-ink drawings on the front in black and red. Lots of sharp lines and bold images. The other was on marbled paper with brushstrokes in metallic ink and calligraphic writing. Many of both sets of cards were blank inside, which was what I liked. Those that did have sentiments were crisp and clever in the former case and understated in the latter.

“These are fabulous,” Tyler said, reading one before putting it on display.

“Here, listen to this,” I said as I opened a card. “This one reads, ‘I think you pressed my reset button. ’”

“Hey, I know what he means.”

“Or this: ‘I’m not celebrating this birthday. I’m celebrating all of your birthdays. Thanks for being alive.’” I picked up a marbled card and read, “‘I love you because of the spaces.’ If I were going to buy cards with writing in them, these are the kinds I would buy.”

“But you wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Wouldn’t buy cards with writing in them.”

“Anything’s possible.”

I opened another package, peered inside the top card, and put it on the rack. The title cut from the
Lucy Kaplansky album came on, an achingly romantic song about a couple’s tenth anniversary.

“I love her,” Tyler said.

“Sarah?”

Tyler laughed. “Maybe her, too. But I was talking about Lucy Kaplansky.”

“Yeah, she’s great. And this is a great song. You love Sarah?”

“I think I might,” he said, smiling. “I think there’s a very real chance that I might. We have a lot of range. I mean, it hasn’t been that long, but we have all of these modes and all of them seem to be in good working order.”

“Could be love.”

“Could be.”

It was that easy for him. A woman comes into the store, they start talking, they go out, discover how much range they have, and fall in love. And while there might be complications there that Tyler wasn’t telling me about (or maybe wasn’t even aware of), the opportunity was available. I wondered if Tyler realized how lucky he was to be in this place. I guessed that he probably did.

Brian, the guy handling the register up front, walked over to let me know that his shift was supposed to be over fifteen minutes ago. I’d lost track of time. The ever reliable Tab was scheduled to take over. I asked him if he could hang on for her arrival and he rolled his eyes and returned to the counter.

Tyler and I finished putting up the new cards and then stood back to admire them. This little four-foot section of the store seemed transformed by them, though the cards looked a bit incongruous
juxtaposed against the others in the section. In an effort to announce their arrival, Tyler and I arranged a few cards against easels on the front counter, moving a spinner rack of costume jewelry that had been there since before Tyler was born. As we were doing so, Tab arrived.

“More new stuff,” she said as she walked through the door. I turned to see her looking at the display indifferently and a surprising spurt of anger shot through my system.

“Is that code for, ‘God, I’m so sorry that I’m late and that I’ve forced Brian to stay here after his shift is over?’”

She shrugged. “I’m not that late.” She nodded and smiled at Brian. “And Brian could probably use the extra cash, right?”

I looked at my watch. “You were supposed to be here forty minutes ago,” I said.

“It’s okay, Hugh,” she said. “I’m here now.” She started to walk behind the counter and I realized that I’d been harboring some form of grudge against her from nearly the moment I met her.

“Go,” I said. Obviously, Tab thought I was talking to Brian, because she didn’t react to this.

“Tab,” I said, “go.”

She had been putting her purse under the counter and she looked up at me. “What?”

“You don’t work here anymore. Go.”

“You’re firing me because I came in a little late?”

“I’m firing you because you think forty minutes is a little late. To name one of several hundred reasons.”

She stood up, switching her weight to her right
leg. “I don’t think you can do that. Don’t you have to talk to your father or something first?”

“It’s done, Tab. Leave. I’ll mail you your last check.”

She looked to Tyler and then to Brian. She seemed surprised and a little flustered, truly the most emotion I’d seen from her the entire time I’d known her. Then she simply took her purse from under the counter and walked out.

“That was the right thing to do, right?” I asked Tyler after she left.

“That was the right thing to do six months ago.”

I told Brian he could leave and Tyler and I walked behind the counter.

“Steve and Chris, too,” I said. “I’m gonna get rid of all the people who are barely conscious around here.”

“Wow,” Tyler said. “The Terminator.”

“Yeah, the Terminator.” I went toward the office to get Steve and Chris’ phone numbers. “Do you have any idea how to go about hiring people?”

I was varnishing the first of the display cases that night when my mother came down to the basement. We hadn’t spoken all that much lately, though she’d begun to show a certain amount of interest in the chess matches I was having with my father.

“Looks nice,” she said, running a hand along a dry side of the case. “This is for the store?”

“I’m replacing the Formica display in the front. I talked to Dad about it.”

“He told me. Are you enjoying doing this stuff again?” She looked over at the woodworking station.

“I am, actually. It’s coming back to me.”

She sat down on the rotating chair. “I remember when we bought this equipment from Ben Truesdale down the street when he got new things. He asked your father what kind of work he was planning to do with it. When your father told him that this was for you, Ben said, ‘these are not toys, Rich.’ I think he was seriously considering giving your father his money back and selling this equipment to someone else. Your father took great pleasure in inviting him over to look at that lamp you made for us.”

She’d never told me that story before. “Ben was kind of a lump, wasn’t he?” I said.

“A nice man, but definitely a lump. And it was a very beautiful lamp.”

“Thanks.” I turned back to my work.

“You always loved building things. Even when you were a little kid. I think your first major project was a robot – at least you said it was a robot – that you made out of Play-Doh and Popsicle sticks for your brother right after he was born. When Chase was about one, he thought that robot was the greatest thing in the world. He’d carry it all around with him. One day he was running and he dropped it and it broke into dozens of pieces. He cried for twenty minutes.”

I had no memory of this at all. I wished in some ways that I could remember what the world felt like when Chase arrived. It’s a funny thing that the birth of a sibling is such a huge event in someone’s life, yet many of us are too young when it happens to have any recollection of the event.

“Play-Doh and Popsicle sticks. I should have considered that medium for this display. Maybe the next one.” I concentrated on finishing a side panel while my mother sat there quietly watching.

“Your father says you’re doing some other things to spruce up the store.”

“A few things, yeah. It needed the sprucing.”

“I’m sure that’s true. It would be hard for us to see that after all this time.”

“I know; it always is. Hopefully it’ll help increase buyer interest in the store.”

“That hasn’t gone well at all, has it?”

“That’s a kind way of putting it.” I finished the first coat on the first side and moved toward the back. “Was there a reason why you came down here?”

“No reason, really. I was just curious that you’d taken to doing this again and I thought I’d come down to see what you were working on. You never let me sit here like this when you were a teenager.”

I remember thinking of her visits back then as invasions. The last thing that most teenaged boys want is their mothers peering over their shoulders while they work at a hobby. “I’m easier about that kind of stuff now,” I said.

“I appreciate it.”

She continued to sit there while I put the first coat of varnish on the rest of the case. I would apply another coat tomorrow night and a third the night after that. When I was finished, I cleaned the brush and went back to the workbench where she was sitting to get started on another piece. When I did, she got up from the chair and kissed me on the cheek.

“I know you’ll be gone again soon, Hugh,” she said. “But it’s good to have you here with us now.”

She kissed me one more time and then went back upstairs.

It was the first unseasonably warm afternoon of the early spring. The kind of weather made for irrational behavior. As had become a habit in recent months, since I had no classes on Fridays, I came down from Emerson for the long weekend. I’d only realized a few weeks earlier that I was doing this to spend more time with Iris and Chase. And particularly to spend more time with Iris. I was no longer kidding myself that I was fascinated with her. That bit of self-delusion had ended on the drive back to Boston after Chase told me that their weeklong breakup had ended. I’d finally admitted to myself that, during that entire week, I had been intrigued with the notion that Iris was a free agent, even as I counseled my brother on trying to get her back. Still, I was aware of the boundaries and I never intended to cross them. I could never have done that to Chase, no matter how much Iris filled my thoughts.

On this particular Friday, Chase came back from school, grabbed a beer with me while we caught up on the week, and then left the house again. He told me that Iris would be by soon and asked me to
entertain her until he returned. He’d been doing this with increasing frequency and it didn’t feel like an imposition. I’d even begun looking forward to it. I would get Iris something to drink and sit with her on the couch exchanging clever thoughts about school, politics, and her boyfriend until he returned. When Iris and I were together like this, I could almost imagine that she had come to see me. I even began to sense that she liked having a little time with me before Chase swept her back into his world.

On this day, though, whether it was because of the air, or my increased consciousness of my attraction to her (exacerbated by the tank top and short skirt she was wearing to celebrate the warm weather), or the fact that Chase didn’t come back for a very long time, things were different between us. I found myself nervous around her, more aware of what I was saying and what I looked like. My eyes kept traveling furtively to her knees, and even when I wasn’t looking at them, I envisioned the curve of her calves. And I thought I sensed, though I was sure I was imagining it, that she seemed a little more nervous around me, that she was aware that something was passing between us that hadn’t been there before. I had absolutely no idea what to do with these feelings and wondered if I needed to prepare better for them in the future.

“Where did he say he was going?” Iris said after an uncertain silence.

“Chase tells you where he’s going?”

“I guess that was a silly question.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “The two of you are so different.”

“You’ve noticed. Of course there is no one in the
world like the singular entity known as Chase Penders.”

“You’re right about that,” she said amusedly. She offered me another meaningful glance, though perhaps at this point, I would have considered any glance from her to be meaningful. “You do okay, though.”

“Hey, everybody needs a straight man.”

She leaned slightly in my direction and her expression softened. I’d seen her look at Chase this way when she was trying to convince him to take something seriously and I always thought that I would have taken anything seriously if she looked at me that way.

“You don’t really think that’s all you are, do you?”

“Did I say it like it was a bad thing?” We had never talked about me in this way and I wasn’t entirely sure how to handle the attention given everything else running through my mind.

“Yes, you did,” she said, smiling. “And if you’re just doing the modest thing, that’s cool. But I sometimes think you really don’t get it.”

“What am I missing?”

“The caring, the sensitivity, the intelligence, the wavy brown hair. Hugh, you’re a great package.”

“You mean like Doritos?”

She laughed. “I mean like a really interesting guy that lots of people would want to know and some people would want to know really well.”

Hearing this from Iris when I was feeling the way I was feeling was all too intoxicating. I stood up and walked around the room.