Fellow Mortals (2 page)

Henry’s forty-five years old, short and powerfully built, with forearms bigger than some men’s calves and a paunch that makes him grand instead of flabby. His walrus mustache crinkles when he grins; he wipes it, top to bottom, watching Ava fold a sheet. She spreads her arms and snaps the cotton tight across her bosom. Any other month he’d have hugged her on the spot, wrapped her in the sheet, and bounced her on the bed. But the Finns are downstairs and so he helps her with the laundry, staring at the wall instead of what he’s doing. He folds the same towel twice and even then it’s unacceptable. Ava picks it up without a word and does it right. He lifts a pair of boxers from the heap and puts them on, tipping most of the pile off the mattress with a flump.

He lunges for the clothes and jabs her in the ribs.

“Sorry! Shoot—I’m sorry, Av. I didn’t mean to get you there.”

“Sit,” she says, blowing up her bangs. “Let me do this.”

He watches her. She’s amply built, proud of her hips and breasts, and unafraid of wearing bathing suits. Her hands are like a milkmaid’s, buttery and strong. She’s a lab tech and Henry often views her as a nurse. He’s seen her with a needle in a vein, all precision, but she’s really at her best when she’s tightening a tourniquet.

He sits and dips the bed. Ava stabilizes towels. He stands again and rearranges pictures on the dresser. Wing’s at his heels, certain he can help. Henry hasn’t worked his postal route in a month, the longest stretch of unemployment he’s endured since the age of sixteen. They’ve suspended him with pay, though it may as well be jail, and he would get another job but Ava’s certain he’d regret it.

“It’s all you know,” she says. “You’d have to work retail and stand all day.”

“I could stand all week.”

“You can’t stand
still
,” Ava tells him, and she’s right. He’s pacing back and forth even as they talk. “They’ll reinstate you,” she insists. “They can’t fire an employee with a single black mark on his record.”

“It’s a big mark.”

“It was an accident,” she says. “A terrible, mind-bogglingly stupid accident, but after twenty-one years they owe you better. Thank God for unions.”

The union steward from the National Association of Letter Carriers was with him during the USPS disciplinary hearing, and although the fire occurred because of a broken code, he’s kept his job and is, in fact, liable to get his route back after months of union counterpressure.

Now today. Now the jury. Public opinion had swung in Henry’s favor from the get-go, cameras having caught him at the scene, the sight of a crying mailman touching some sentimental nerve. The Finns were interviewed on the evening news, Nan poised amid the ruins, Joan pitiful and tearstruck, the first of many to commend him for his quick-thinking rescue. People pitied the Finns and Henry, too, sorry for the tragedy, sorry for it all, absolving him in ways he couldn’t understand. The district attorney took it easy and the jury no-billed the case.

“It means you’re clear,” the lawyer told him on the phone this afternoon. “No trial.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” the lawyer said, and Henry closed his eyes, barely holding the receiver.

He was advised against contacting anyone from Arcadia Street, but Henry took his chances and reached out to everyone. The Finns had been a no-brainer. Their insurance covered hotel expenses, but Henry and Ava agreed they needed an interim home instead of anonymous lodgings, and Nan and Joan accepted the offered guest room the very night of the fire. Henry’s gotten used to the faster-emptying fridge, the public radio, the smell of medicated lotion, and the necessity—learned the hard way—of putting on pants before he saunters through the kitchen. He isn’t used to tears, though, and Joan’s been getting in a handful of serious cries every day for a month. Nan, on the other hand, has yet to cry once. They’re weirdly good to Henry—Joan appreciative and childlike, Nan ironclad but temperate—as if he rescued them from something that he hadn’t been the cause of.

Joan and Ava get along, comfortably imbalanced—a helpless little lady and the woman of the house.
Nan
and Ava, on the other hand, bristled from the start. They’re electrically polite, vying for dominion, Nan asserting her rights within the boundaries of decorum, Ava mastering her home with limits and concessions. This morning they offered each other first use of the washing machine with so much crackling generosity that Wing tucked tail and hid beneath a table. Henry senses it whenever he walks up- or downstairs, right around step number eight, the invisible threshold between Ava’s realm and Nan’s.

He and Wing, more and more, spend their hours in the yard.

At least the Finns are here. Peg Carmichael said she wasn’t allowed to speak to him, then chewed him out for five minutes, talking about her two sons’ nightmares until he felt like the boogeyman himself. Billy Kane said thanks but declined any help.

As far as everyone’s concerned, this is how it has to be. There’s still the matter of civil suits from all the victims—the Carmichaels, the Kanes, Sam Bailey, and even the Finns, who’ve been more or less strong-armed by their insurance company. Joan cried when Nan informed her, but Henry and Ava understood it wasn’t personal and didn’t worry about the money, since all fees and settlements were to be handled by the postal insurer and USPS-retained legal firms, the fire having occurred with Henry on duty as a government employee. Incredible but true, he won’t pay a penny out of pocket, win or lose.

Ava folds the laundry heap and puts it all away, sock balls and underwear, shirts with the arms crossed over like mummies. She turns her back and Henry watches how she crooks an arm and unzips her dress, dropping her shoulders—left, right—so it slips to her waist. She unclasps her bra, hunching it forward onto her arms, and with another couple tugs, her dress is at her ankles and she steps out, one foot at a time, like she’s stepping from a puddle. He sees the side of one breast, then the underside of both when she bends down low to get her panties off her heels. Her legs have gotten softer, her skin less resilient, and her moles too numerous count. She walks into the bathroom, running her fingers through her hair so it falls back messy to her shoulders, and when she shuts the door behind her, Henry slumps to the floor, and he doesn’t start to cry until he’s positive she’s standing in the shower.

*   *   *

Ava pauses in the bathroom, breathing easy after fifteen hours in a bra. She pulls Henry’s towel off the rod and wipes the floor. The shower mat’s soaked; she’ll have to wash that before it molds. The toilet water’s yellow. She considers letting him know but she can feel him out there, dwelling on the accidental rib shot he gave her. Everything he does since the fire weighs him down. She sends him to the market and he buys the wrong peppers. Has him mop the kitchen and he blinds them with ammonia. She tries to give him jobs that she can fix or doesn’t care about, anything to make him feel useful for a while.

She’s nostalgic for the summer like it’s already gone, missing the board games and wine on Friday nights, the regular beach trips, Henry mowing the lawn, copper-shouldered in the heat. Every now and then, she even misses his cigars.

She showers and her hair disentangles in the rinse. The soap is slippery in her hands, softening her skin, down in all the right places with her fingers and her palms. She thinks of being younger, barely out of school, diving underwater with a boy she doesn’t know, and yet her evening in the bathroom—this particular moment, with the warm scent of phlox on the outdoor breeze—is the closest Ava comes anymore to rolling unbuttoned in the sun.

Stepping out, there’s Henry in the bathroom door. Ava jumps a quarter inch, only partially surprised. The knot beneath her shoulder blade doubles up tight. He stands with a tilt from carrying mailbags and has a permanent furrow on his shoulder from the strap. His mustache is tidy but his hair’s all mussed. He’s strong enough to lift her and she wishes that he would—just grab her in a bear hug and hold her in the air.

“I ought to call the Carmichaels again.”

“Henry…”

“I know, I know. They want to be left alone. I didn’t talk to Bob, though,” he says, referring to Peg’s husband. “And the Kanes…”

Ava sighs extra long.

“All right,” he says. “Forget it. I’m worried about Joan, though.”

“Joan has Nan.”

“She started crying after
Wheel of Fortune
.”

“You can’t expect people to bounce right back, even when you’re helping.”

“How come Nan never cries?”

“Because her sister does,” Ava says. “Maybe she cries in bed.”

She rolls up the mat and puts a dry towel in its place. Henry leans against the sink, ear cocked toward the floor, as if he’s listening for Nan’s faint sobbing in the distance.

“We could buy a swing set for the Carmichael boys.”

“Henry.”

“Anonymously,” he says. “Like the big turkey in
A Christmas Carol
.”

“They send their kids to Dunne Keating. They’re richer than we are. Plus they already have insurance and they’re sure to get a bundle from the civil suit.”

“But this’d come from me.”

“Anonymously.”

“It’d still be from me,” he says, lowering his head, his hair a bit thinner at the crown than several months ago.

She moisturizes her face and fires up the hair dryer, cutting him off so matter-of-factly that he doesn’t take it personally. He’s standing too close; she can barely move her elbow. She gives him a warning blast with the dryer and backs him out of the doorway.

Wingnut stands at the bed, unsure of what to do. He doesn’t wag a lot these days, tuned as he is to Henry’s overall mood, and even though he’s finally adapting to the changes, he keeps hoping Henry’ll make Ava laugh and they’ll relax, maybe let him snuggle in the middle of the bed. He’s gotten used to Nan, who likes him more than anyone expected, Nan herself included. She sneaks him toast dipped in coffee, compliments his smile. All Wing wants to do is see people happy. He smells the hamper and the hair dryer, comforting and warm, and can’t imagine why the house feels so bad.

Ava combs her hair, raising heat along her scalp, and then she brushes her teeth and rinses, prickling from her soles to the bottom of her tongue. Henry follows her to bed, where she sits and pats the quilt, and then he joins her, hip to hip, and Wing flops down around their feet.

“I need you to pull yourself together,” Ava tells him.

He looks at his hands as if the pulling-together’s real, something he can physically accomplish if he tries.

She touches Wingnut’s head as if to grant a benediction. Henry lies back, breathing at the ceiling. There’s only one cricket outside, and the air’s so humid it’s congesting in the window screen.

“We can’t go on like this,” Ava says. “Don’t apologize—stop. If I hear you say ‘Sorry’ one more time I’m going to light
myself
on fire.”

She turns and holds a palm to each of Henry’s cheeks.

“You’re the best man I know,” she says. “But helping the Carmichael boys won’t work. You need to find Sam.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“Ask Nan. She knows about everything.”

Oatmeal cookies, vegetable shortening, ironing, bleaching, fiber, dogs—all of her knowledge slightly out-of-date but basically correct, like one of those old Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia sets they come across at yard sales. But Ava asked for help today and Nan’s been making calls. It’s the first thing the two of them have thoroughly agreed upon.

“You think he wants to see me?” Henry asks.

“He probably wants to kill you. But it’s that or killing yourself for the rest of your life.”

She pecks him on the lips, pressing into his mustache, and then she holds him there and opens her mouth, kissing him for real. Henry kisses back and yet he’s hesitant, submissive. She straddles him and sits, reaching into his boxers.

“Ava.”

“Shh.”

She squeezes for effect. He’s strong enough to throw her off but never to resist her, and he stares up, teary for a whole new reason.

“We need this,” she says.

“It doesn’t feel right.”

“That’s the problem,” Ava whispers.

“Nan and Joan…”

“They’re asleep.”

“What if they wake up?”

“They’re old enough to understand.”

She guides him in and plants her weight. Henry holds her hips.

“You took your pill?” she asks, tensing for a moment in his lap.

Henry nods. Ava moves, leaning forward till her hair’s in his eyes and then she hugs him up close, with his face between her breasts, smothering the fire just like that.

*   *   *

Joan Finn is unsettled by the creaks overhead. She’s sitting in a small upholstered chair, wearing rose pajamas and a bathrobe and reading
People
under a lamp. The guest room is crowded with a bureau, a separate nightstand for each sister, and a bed that Henry bought so they wouldn’t have to sleep on a pullout. There’s a single window out the side that Nan keeps open for the air, but anyone could break through a screen, Joan thinks, here at ground level after dark. She waits for Nan to return from the bathroom and says:

“I hear something.”

Nan puts a glass of water next to her rosary beads. She pulls a single dead leaf off a marigold she rescued from their yard, listens for a spell, and says, “It’s nothing to worry about. Read your
People
.”

Fifty years ago, Joan had boyfriends—she was briefly engaged once upon a time—but she’s been living with her sister so long, it takes an extra minute for the lightbulb to finally flicker on. Once it does, she rustles through her magazine, trying to mask the sound, as if by hearing them together she’s infringing on their privacy. She’s seen plenty of lovemaking in movies and did, in fact, have sex with a man half a century ago, but the intervening drought, deepened by religion, has resulted in what her sister calls secondary virginity. It’s a true state of grace, listed in the catechism.

“They’re married,” Nan reminds her. “They’ll be done in a few minutes.”

Joan’s impressed that Nan can estimate a time frame. Her sister seems privy to a universe of secrets, even though Nan herself retained her primary virginity and was rarely attached to a boy longer than a high-school prom.