Crossing the Bridge (8 page)

“My dad had another heart attack this morning.”

Tyler’s eyes opened wide and he was temporarily speechless. “Is he okay?”

“I think so. The doctor seemed pretty even tempered about it, though he doesn’t know how it happened.”

Tyler shook his head and he had a dazed expression. I began to wonder if I should have delivered the news to him more carefully.

“I don’t know what I would do if I were in your shoes,” he said.

Until that moment, I hadn’t particularly considered how this was affecting me. I was concerned for my father and worried that my mother was borderline unstable, but I didn’t think of myself as part of the dilemma.

“You just go through it and hope for the best,” I said.

“Man, if my father was having multiple heart attacks, you’d have to peel me off the walls.”

I shrugged. “I think it’s different when you’re actually in the middle of it.”

The store was especially quiet on this morning, as though people had heard that Richard Penders had had another heart attack and just assumed that his stationery store wouldn’t be open for business. A Muzak version of a song I ultimately recognized as Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” played ever so softly on the radio. In the first hour I was there, we couldn’t have had more than half a dozen customers. I gave some thought to leaving, but I really didn’t have anywhere to go. Things picked up around lunchtime and actually got busy for a while. When a new shipment of cards arrived, Tyler and I reassigned Tab to the cash register so we could restock the displays.

We had been at it for a couple of minutes when Tyler laughed and handed me a card that showed a couple caressing while a huge gorilla loomed behind them. The inside of the card read, “It’s never as easy as you think.” I chuckled and handed it back to him.

“There are a bunch in this line that are pretty clever,” he said.

“That’s an improvement. For years, the only humorous – and I use the term loosely – cards my father stocked either had pictures of wrinkled fat men or fart jokes.”

“Wow, sorry I missed that era.”

Until that point, I hadn’t been bothering to read the insides of the cards while I put them up. Now I opened another that showed a post-apocalyptic landscape and read, “Sorry about last night.” I laughed, shared it with Tyler, and then checked the back of the card for the name of the line.

“What kinds of cards do you like to buy?” Tyler asked me.

“I don’t really buy a lot of cards.”

“Really? You mean it’s not in your blood?”

“Must skip a generation. If I ever need a card, I tend to go with blank ones on nice paper. Sometimes I leave them blank.”

“Yeah, well if there’s a picture on it, you’ve got a thousand words right there anyway, right?” He pulled the plastic wrap off another package, glanced at the sentiment, and then put them up on the rack. “I used to buy cards all the time when Elizabeth and I were together. Hopefully she didn’t keep them. Some of the stuff I wrote to her was pretty embarrassing.”

“Yeah, you only make that mistake once, I would imagine.”

“That one anyway. I can’t believe how convinced I was. I guess it happens to everybody.”

“Just about everybody, anyway.”

Tyler nodded. “I think my parents kind of spoiled me. They started dating when they were high school seniors and they’re still kinda sickeningly affectionate with each other thirty-something years later. As much as it made me feel weird sometimes to have my parents nuzzling in front of my friends, I sorta just assumed that that was the way things would go for me.”

“Until Elizabeth tore your heart out.”

He snickered and pulled the wrappers off several packages at the same time.

“Actually, I tore her heart out. I went on this trip during spring break and wound up sleeping with some girl from Duke. I figured it meant that I wasn’t as totally in love with Elizabeth as I thought I was. I couldn’t even tell her why I was doing it, but I just started backing away from her. It took me something like a month to break up with her. Now that I think about it, I can be pretty sure that she didn’t keep my cards after that.”

“Well at least something good came out of it.” He smiled at me and we focused on the card display. A few minutes later, I looked up to see that a line had formed at the cash register.

“I better go help Tab before she sprains something,” I said to him.

He gave me a little salute and went back to work.

When I got to the hospital that night, they’d moved my father back to a semiprivate room. He was awake and had a bit of color in his face. He even seemed somewhat relaxed, though my mother didn’t appear any less uneasy than she had looked when I left her that morning.

I leaned over to kiss him on the forehead. This was something I had never done before this trip. When we lived under the same roof, we rarely touched at all, and after I moved out, I would shake his hand in greeting. When I’d seen him lying in bed in the hospital that first day, it hadn’t seemed right to reach out for his hand and so I simply leaned over and kissed him. I assumed I would stop doing this when he returned home.

“This room looks better on you, Dad,” I said.

“Fluorescent lighting flatters me.”

“I guess you must be doing all right if they moved you back in here.”

My father shrugged. I looked over at my mother, who was in the process of squeezing my father’s hand tighter.

“I have okay news and lousy news,” my father said. I didn’t respond in any way other than moving to sit down next to my mother. She looked at me briefly with a thin-lipped smile.

“The doctors say the second heart attack came from a blockage that they’ll be able to clear up with a procedure tomorrow morning. After that, they think I’ll be in decent shape for a while. That’s the
okay news. The lousy news is that once I get out of the hospital, I’m going to have to curtail strenuous activity. The bottom line is that I’m not going to be able to work in the store any longer.”

For some reason I took this harder than I might have taken more dire news about his condition. If he had said, “the doctors tell me I have six months to live,” I wouldn’t have been easily able to fix that prognosis in my mind with the ultimate outcome. But I had literally associated my father with the store for as long as I had known him. And as stultifying as I found the place to be personally, I knew that he thrived there, that in many ways he identified himself through it.

“Wow.”

“I’m having some trouble believing it myself.”

My mother rubbed my father’s hand. Her expression was grim. If she had at any point during the day tried to keep his spirits up, perhaps suggesting the things they would be able to do together in their retirement, that time had passed.

“What are you going to do?” I said.

My father tried to sit up a bit more in his bed, but even that seemed to take a lot out of him. I stood up to help him rearrange his pillows, but he waved me off.

“Your mother tells me that you’re between jobs.”

“We can talk about that some other time, Dad.”

“She also said that you were thinking about leaving Springfield.”

“Yeah, I am.”

Still holding my father’s hand, my mother turned to
face me. Her expression was less grim, but not less serious.

My father continued. “The two of us were talking and we wanted to know if you would be interested in taking over the store for me.”

I couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d asked me to play a round of tennis with him. I couldn’t possibly have been equivocal in any way about my feelings for that kind of employment and surely both of them had to know that what I’d been doing for them in the store over the past few days was out of a sense of responsibility and not out of any level of interest.

“You want me to take over the store?”

“You know your way around; you know the way I like to do things.”

“That’s true, Dad.”

“And coming home to Amber would be good for you. Give you some roots.”

It didn’t seem appropriate to tell him that I wasn’t particularly concerned with roots and that even if I had been, the last place I would want to be rooted was Amber. For the first time, it occurred to me that they might have absolutely no idea what had been running through my head for the past ten years.

But beyond that, I couldn’t possibly imagine spending any length of time at the helm of Amber Cards, Gifts, and Stationery. I tried to envision myself after twenty years of such unrelenting tedium. It wasn’t difficult with my father sitting in a hospital bed.

“I’m not sure that would be a good idea, Dad.”

His expression tightened. “I would be a silent partner. Give it a little thought.”

“I really don’t need to. I know how much the store means to you, but I don’t have the same feelings about the place and I can’t imagine that I ever would. I’m not cut out for that kind of work.”

He stiffened. “What kind of work are you cut out for?”

I put my head down and laughed humorlessly. “That’s a good question. I don’t have a good answer for you on that. But I know what I’m not cut out for and, if anything, the last few days in the store have proven it to me. I’d go postal there.”

My father leaned his head back in his pillow. For a few minutes, none of us spoke. Then my father turned to my mother.

“You have to call Howard Crest tomorrow. We’ve got to get the store on the market.”

“Not tomorrow, Richard. Your operation.”

“The next day, then.”

“Don’t rush anything,” I said. “I can’t do this for the long run, but I’ll take care of the store while you sell it. I don’t want you just taking the first offer that comes in. This is your nest egg.”

“You won’t go
postal
?” my father asked. I wondered if sarcasm qualified as strenuous activity.

“I’ll be all right for a while,” I said, forcing myself not to react to his disapproval. “It’s not like this is going to take six months to do, right?”

“It could take a couple of months.”

“I’ll be all right for a while.” I stood up and looked at my mother. “Shouldn’t we be letting Dad rest up for tomorrow’s procedure?”

She looked in my direction only for a second before turning back to my father.

“You go ahead if you want. I’m going to stay here until visiting hours are over.”

I remained diligent about watching the store for my father for a couple of weeks after that. One day, though, I stopped by only long enough to tell Tyler that I was not going to stay. I needed to get in my car and get away for the day – it was either that or stick around for another week or so and let things get to me to the point where I just drove off permanently.

My father came home from the hospital three days after a successful procedure opened the blockage. He spent his time adjusting to lean meats and dramatically reduced sodium and working up his courage to ascend the stairs. I wouldn’t have thought his infirmity would have intimidated him so badly, but he slept several nights on the couch rather than making the climb, and on the nights when he did sleep in his own bed, he would stay there until close to noon the next day. His doctors told him that he needed to step up his level of exercise gradually, and at their suggestion, my mother purchased a stationary bicycle and a treadmill. But even though she placed them in the den where he was spending the vast majority of
his time, my father hadn’t been on either. He said he wasn’t ready.

I wondered how much of my father’s response to recovery related to my refusal to take over the store. It hadn’t even dawned on me that my father making this proposition to me was as much a commitment of trust on his part as it was a convenient way to keep the business in the household. By turning him down, I suppose in some very real way I had announced to him that his trust didn’t mean much to me.

If I had felt out of place in my parents’ house earlier, I now felt flat-out repressed. Anything I did (or, for that matter and much to my surprise, my mother did) could be interpreted as a disturbance and therefore a hindrance to my father’s convalescence. I could read or listen to my iPod in my room, which made me feel like I was still in high school, or I could watch television with the two of them. I chose as often as possible to do neither.

But spending evenings out of the house was equally unfulfilling. None of my old friends lived here anymore. Amber wasn’t the kind of place that one moved back to. You could grow up here or you could discover the town later in life and choose to settle down, but once you left, you only ever returned for a visit. I reacquainted myself with several of my friends’ parents only to learn that all of those friends had moved to Boston, New York, or out of the Northeast entirely.

And so I took to going out at night by myself, something I was never fond of but which I had grown accustomed to doing over the past decade. I went back to the bar that Tyler introduced me to and
outside of which Iris and I kissed. The music was listenable, the bartender was funny, and I didn’t feel particularly conspicuous if I found no one else to talk to. I also spent a fair amount of time at The Muse, a bookstore/café just off Russet Avenue. The espresso was good and, while it was clearly a place where locals got together to meet, there were always several people sitting by themselves with magazines or novels. After my third visit there, I decided to find out if it would take me longer to read all of John Updike’s fiction than it would take Howard Crest to sell my father’s store.