Fellow Mortals (17 page)

“What the hell is this?!”

She’s wearing heels and hasn’t put her portfolio down, having walked through the house, seen Henry in the yard, and marched straight out in one brisk motion from the car. She doesn’t stop until she’s right in front of Henry, who stumbles backward over the two-by-fours, landing on the wood with his sneakers off the ground.

She sees the lumber, the platform, her sons overhead, Bob with a Wiffle bat and Sam with a drill, unable to parse it all and focusing on Henry.

“I’m calling the police. This is trespassing. This is harassment. Get down,” she says to Danny and Ethan. “Did he touch you? Did he touch you?”

“I said it was okay,” Bob says, barely audible but shocking her anew, and then she goes to work on him, gesticulating so wildly that most of her portfolio scatters on the ground. Bob holds the bat feebly in defense.

Henry’s on his back, dark red, almost crying—is he crying? No, but terribly familiar in his fear. Peg snaps her papers up, squatting in the grass with her slacks stretched tight along the furrow of her buttocks.

“Get down!” she tells the boys, angry they’ve defied her.

“No one’s steadying the ladder,” Ethan says.

“I don’t
care.
”

Bob holds the ladder till the boys reach the ground.

Sam breathes through his nose, helps Henry off the wood, and picks a paper off the ground, handing it to Peg.

His being there confuses her and forces her to focus.

“Sam,” she says, almost like an answer to a question.

“This was my idea,” he says.

“What idea? What?”

She blows away her bangs except they tumble round her eyes again.

“The tree house,” he tells her. “I wanted to do something nice for Danny and Ethan.”

She watches him but never stops grasping at the ground. He’d like to chuck the folder like a Frisbee at the tree. Instead he helps her finish and says, “Come on, let’s talk a little closer to the house,” guiding her over by the elbow and trying not to squeeze.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says. “I should have let you know.”

“You’re goddamn right.” She struggles for composure. He can see it’s quite a battle by the sharpness of her pupils and the count, one to five, she takes to calm herself down. “I don’t understand.”

“It was an impulse,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about your boys. How the fire must have scared them.”

Yes, you’re right.
Peg nods. “I had to make a rule: no more talk about the fire. It isn’t healthy, dwelling on something negative for weeks on end. My college roommate’s a psychologist now, she told me the same thing. We’ve been trying to redirect them.”

“Exactly,” Sam says. “Give them something fun, something built instead of burned. I’m pretty good with wood and thought, What about a tree house?”

“I appreciate the concern, I really do…”

“Peg,” he says, lowering his voice. “I want to be honest here.”

“Okay?”

“I meant what I said, about doing this for them. But I’m also doing this for me. I haven’t been myself. The fire’s all I think about. I thought if I could build this tree house, if I could force myself to be around people for a change…”

He clenches both eyes until it looks like tears.

“Sam…”

“You’ve been so good to Nan and Joan, helping them find a new place. We’ve all pulled together,” he says. “Now it’s my turn. We were a neighborhood. A real community. I know you can appreciate that.”

“I’ll be honest, too,” Peg says, drawing herself together like a proper truth-teller. “I don’t think it’s safe.”

“Oh,” he says dismissively. “This is what I do. They’ll be safer up there than in your actual house.”

Peg blanks a few seconds, wobbly in the grass, until her heel sinks deeper in the lawn like a stake.

“Not with him,” she insists.

“It has to be him,” Sam whispers, sounding both weary and mysteriously wise. “Like it or not, Henry’s part of this. Why do you think the Finns are letting him help? Listen, Peg,” he says, moving in close. “I’m not saying you have to forgive him, but you see the way he is, how he’s always showing up. If we let him do this, for you and me, for Danny and Ethan … this is everybody’s chance to move forward. One tree house and we can all get on with our lives.”

She gazes at him, sweating at the corners of her eyes. A heat bug’s drone seems to issue from her head.

“How long?” she asks.

“Three days.”

“That’s what the siding people said.”

“Trust me,” Sam says.

“He doesn’t speak to me. He doesn’t come inside, not even for the bathroom.
Especially
not for the bathroom.”

“He’ll use the trailer. I appreciate this, Peg. If there’s anything else that I can do…”

“No, you’re doing enough,” she says, sounding like she’s giving him a break from obligation. “Danny, Ethan. I want you out of the yard.
Now
.”

Henry and Bob, unsure of where things stand, huddle arm to arm when no one gives them orders.

“You can stay,” Peg announces to them both, sanctioning Henry and banishing Bob with one all-encompassing decree.

Sam smiles at the boys. They discreetly smile back.

As soon as Peg takes them in and shuts the door, Sam says, “We’re back in business,” clapping his hands Henry-style and grinning at the two men’s amazement.

“What did you say to her?” Bob asks, looking at Sam as if he’s some kind of mystic.

“I appealed to her decency,” he says, raising far more questions than he answers, and it’s only then, having tried whatever he could to win her over, that he finds himself believing everything he said.

*   *   *

hey hot stuf. tnx 4 lst nt. Sx pty sun.

Billy reads the text on Sheri’s phone several times. All he did was hear a chime and pick it off the table. Now he’s trembling in the heat, breathing shallower and shallower, caught between a double urge to sit and walk around.

He sees her out the window, lying on her stomach in a candy-red bikini with her top pulled off.
Hey hot stuf.
She was late last night—ninety minutes, unexplained—and she didn’t say good morning when she shuffled to the yard.

“
Sx pty sun
”
—what the fuck
, Billy thinks, positioning the phone exactly as he found it. He simply can’t imagine any safe interpretation, and the sender’s name, Southsider2005, is maddeningly definite and vague all at once. The stubble of a stranger in a real backseat. Sheri’s hand on the zipper of a real pair of jeans.

He’s been trying so hard since the night she got drunk. He finished up the living room and rearranged the furniture, paid to get a Dumpster right away like she wanted. He’s been doing all the garbage, all the dishes, all the laundry, and he’s never once expected her to thank him or acknowledge it. He calls her at the diner just to say hello. Buys her wine. Buys her cookies. Gives her anything she wants. He’s been trying even harder than the year when they were dating and he can’t just tell her he’s been reading through her texts.

He takes her out a beer and pops it at her side.

She didn’t hear him coming. “
Jesus
,” Sheri says.

She peels her body off the lounge chair, cross-hatched pink, not the least bit rushed to grab her top and cover up.

“I brought you a beer,” Billy says.

She flops back down and says, “Put it on the grass.”

“Your phone made a noise.”

“It’s probably work.”

“I think it was a text.”

“I’ll check it later,” Sheri says.

They’re interrupted by a power saw. He’s heard it on and off today without a second thought, assuming it’s the Carmichaels’ latest renovations. Billy sees a man cutting lumber on a table. Before he registers the tree house or either of the kids, he tips the bottle with his knee and says: “Sam … what the hell?”

The saw quiets down just as Billy says it, and the one word—
hell
—carries on the air. Sam looks around, sees him crouching there, and nods, and then he’s picking up a two-by-four, apparently too busy to walk across the lots and say hello. Another man waves more broadly from the tree.

“Holy shit. Is that—”

“Henry Cooper,” Sheri says, muffled through a towel. “They’ve been there all morning.”

“They’re building a tree house? Peg’s gonna flip.”

“She already did. Sam calmed her down.”

He tries to get his head around it—Cooper there at Peg’s—and feels as if his skull is physically contracting. Billy presses on the lounge until it buckles at the joint. Sheri lifts her head, squinty in the light.

“Honestly,” he says. “This is totally insane.”

“Right.” She yawns. “What kind of monster does a nice thing for kids?”

“Gimme a break,” Billy says. “
I
could have built those kids a tree house.”

“But you didn’t.”

Billy looks at her and frowns, kneeling in the beer. He picks the bottle up. An ant waves faintly from the rim.

“I’ll get you another one,” he says.

“Why don’t you bring
them
a couple beers while you’re at it.”

Every bone in Sheri’s back disappears when she relaxes, like her body isn’t real—like she’s made of soft rubber. Billy holds the bottle, staring at her spine.

“Do you have to do this today?”

“What?”

“At least put your top on. They’re right there.
He’s
right there.”

“Let him look,” Sheri says. “You’re standing in my sun.”

He isn’t but he steps back anyway, conscious of his shadow and distracted by its shape, how the edges seem bristly and distorted in the grass.

Billy goes inside, opens a beer of his own, and watches Henry Cooper out the upstairs window. He drinks until the power saw’s buzzing in his ears, and when he finally hears Sheri clattering the screen, he slumps downstairs and meets her in the kitchen. She’s standing at the table, closing up her phone.

“Who was it?”

“Mary-Kate.”

She opens the fridge and pours herself a lemonade.

“What are we doing tomorrow?” Billy asks.

“Nothing. Why?”

“I thought you said we might be doing something.”

“What?”

Billy shrugs. He glances at her phone, longer than he should, and yet he’s stunned when Sheri notices and guesses what it means.

“You read my text?”

“What? No,” he says, nasally and odd. “It was laying right there and made a noise. I couldn’t help it.”

“It’s a flip phone, Billy.”

“So?”

“You have to
flip it open
.”

Sheri cocks a hip, waiting for an answer.

“I didn’t know it was such a big deal. You’re the one who’s acting all sneaky.”

“It was
Mary-Kate
,” Sheri says. “I covered the end of her shift last night. She had a date.”

“What’s the party, then?”

Sheri folds her arms, still in her bikini, with her long bare feet planted on the floor.

“It’s a Sox doubleheader. Mary-Kate’s brother’s having us over.”

“I’m not watching baseball with a bunch of your work friends.”

“‘Us’ is me and Mary-Kate.”

“Is Jake going?” Billy asks.

Sheri skips a beat, honestly perplexed. “What do you care?”

“Think about that.”

“What.” Sheri coughs. “You’re jealous of
Jake
?”

“You talk about him enough.”

She holds a palm against the table, going squiggly at the knees, with her face so clenched it’s like she’s hurt instead of laughing.

“He’s a sixty-year-old vet,” Sheri says. “He hasn’t cut his beard all year … he’s like a pirate!”

Billy staggers there and snorts. “How was I supposed to know? You throw yourself at everyone except around here.”

Sheri reddens and her face looks greasy from the sun. The temperature and beer start fizzing in his head.

“What is
that
supposed to mean?”

“Like the yard,” Billy says. “Laying outside with Cooper leering over.”

“Leering,” Sheri says.

“I saw him out the window.”

“Who cares?”

“Who cares?” Billy asks. “This place sucks because of him.”

“What do you want from the guy?” Sheri yells. “He offered to help us out, you said no. Now it’s bad he’s helping other people?”

“You want him helping over here? I’ll ask him right now.”

She rolls her eyes until her head begins to swivel.

“Fine,” he says. “Sprawl around naked all day.”

“Well I didn’t think he’d
rape
me.”

Billy lunges at her chest. She bumps her head against the wall, limbs helter-skelter and her hair thrown messy at the edges of her face. She’s slippery from the tanning oil, hard to get a handle on. Billy grabs a wrist, her other hand scratching at his arm until he catches that, too, and holds tight, pressed between her drawn-up legs when she squats. He tastes blood—he must have bitten his lip—and Sheri fights back, smelling dangerous and hot.

“You think he’s so great,” Billy says. “You think he’s so great. Say it, why don’t you say it?”

“Get the fuck off me. Asshole!”

“Say it.”

Sheri grunts.

“Say it,” Billy says. “You think he’s so great.”

“Stop…”

“I dare you to. I
dare
you to. You think I’m shit and he’s so great, go on. Go on and say it.
Say it
.”

Sheri shakes her head with more defiance than he wants, so he bumps her own hands into her forehead and lets go, sitting on the floor and breathing through his mouth. The second Sheri’s free, she covers him with slaps, a crazy burst he can’t fend away until she scrambles over his shoulder, trying to escape. Billy hooks her foot and Sheri falls behind him, but after a few blind kicks to his ribs, he lets her go again and curls into a ball, grinding his knuckles into his eyes until the colors start swirling in the dark.

Sheri runs upstairs and slams the bedroom door. It’s quiet outside: not a tool, not a bird. Billy sits with his heartbeat thrumming in his ears, thinking how her sunburn whitened when he grabbed her. He doesn’t notice when she comes downstairs, doesn’t even know she’s left the bedroom until the front door clicks and Billy hears the car out front, peeling off and revving up the street.