Fellow Mortals (7 page)

“Have mine,” Billy says.

“I’m not
that
much of a bitch,” she says.

“We’ll share it. It’s a foot-long.”

She smiles at him now, softening enough to take the towel off her hair and shake them out, hair and towel, like she’s shaking off her day. They grab a couple beers and eat together at the table.

Once her hunger wears off and the beer relaxes her a bit, she says, “I’m sorry, all right? I’m just sick of coming home to such a mess.”

“I know,” he says. “That’s why I’m trying to fix it.”

“I think we ought to bite the bullet and hire a contractor,” she tells him for the umpteenth time.

He wants to say it’s too expensive but he’s tried that before, over and over, and she doesn’t want to hear about the mortgage, the credit cards, the car insurance payment, and the stack of other bills that never seems to shrink. Instead she acts like do-it-yourself is the cheapskate’s way of dealing with a problem.

“We’ll take another loan,” she says.

Billy shakes his head. Sheri opens a second beer and lights a cigarette—more smoke, Billy thinks—and something in the twilight catches in her face. She’s beautiful, her haggardness disguised by the glow. A year ago they sat in the yard every weekend, sipping drinks and listening to music after dark, getting drunk and acting flirty till she led him upstairs and, more often than not, pushed
him
onto the bed. Now he has to bring it up or nothing ever happens. Half the time she does it like a job, late at night when both of them are tired: two minutes on her knees, three minutes on her stomach, reaching over when he’s done to set the clock like she’s punching out at work.

Billy stands and puts his arms around her, kissing at her throat. She holds her beer and cigarette out of the way and says, “Billy,” leaning back until her bathrobe opens at the neck. He’s about to reach inside when Sheri notices the drywall piled in the yard and says, “Ugh,” which Billy assumes is her reaction to his kissing.

He doesn’t stop but holds her even tighter. Sheri loses balance, just enough to flail and touch him with her cigarette. Billy jumps away, swatting at his arm. He’s mad enough to yell but tries to keep it in.

“Well, what did you expect?” Sheri says.

He doesn’t know.

*   *   *

“It’s guacamole,” Peg tells Danny, the younger of her sons.

They’re together in the dining room, parents on the one side, children on the other. She was late coming home because the order wasn’t ready and the credit-card machine had “started acting up.” Now she’s sitting in her work clothes, barely out of the car, and the meal feels rushed before they even settle in.

“What are the chunks?” Danny asks.

“That’s guacamole, too.” She scoops some onto a chip to set a good example, but they’ve overdone the lime again and Danny sees her grimace. “It’s good for your cholesterol.”

“That’s okay,” Bob says, shrugging at his wife. “They don’t have to worry about cholesterol yet.”

“That’s because I feed them well.”

Takeout every night. It’s a fortune but she never has time to cook dinner. She forgives herself. She always buys organic at the market. Greek yogurt with granola. Juice for antioxidants. Bob likes to joke about her cage-free eggs, how they love to roll around when nobody can see.

“It’s iguana,” Ethan says, savoring the guac.

“The cheaper places use frog,” Bob says. “They have deals with the local biology labs.”

“It’s avocado,” Peg says, as if it’s seriously in doubt.

She’s so annoyed she fails to notice Danny loading up a chip; he’s not convinced to try it yet but closer than he was. Bob begins to concentrate closely on his food, acting like it’s something genuinely foreign. He does it every meal, be it Mexican or pasta, and it drives her up the wall to see him furrowing his brow.

“Did you get the right order?”

Bob nods in affirmation, shattering his taco with the very first bite.

“I wanted refried beans,” Ethan tells his mother.

“They’re with the rice in your burrito.”

“These are pinto beans.”

“Here,” she says, sliding him a dish.

She makes him wait until she’s rolled another place mat down because she doesn’t want lid steam dripping on the table. Danny spills milk and everybody jumps, backing up before the puddle starts pouring in their laps.

“Paper towels!” Peg yells.

Bob hustles to the kitchen. Danny’s goggle-eyed in fear because it isn’t just the milk. The guacamole fell, too, facedown on the carpet. Ethan sees it while their mother’s still distracted by the drink. He takes a round paper lid, slips it underneath the Styrofoam, and puts it on the table virtually intact. They rub the rest of it away with the bottoms of their feet and Danny smiles at his brother, terribly relieved.

Half a roll of paper towels and the table’s back in order, though it takes Peg and Bob a few more minutes to clean the dribbles between the dining room and the kitchen, wash their hands, and get the boys settled in their seats. Peg doesn’t lecture when she pours another milk, but she puts it in a sippy cup and Danny’s forced to use it.

They sit and try the meal again and no one says a word.

Except Peg. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to have a nice dinner for a change. I remembered that we all liked Mexican the last time we got it.”

“It’s great.” Bob smiles.

The boys nod in agreement, though it all feels obligatory to Peg, who finds a little bone inside her
enchilada verde
.

“Looks like Billy’s hard at work,” Bob ventures through a bite.

“He had better clean it up before it rains,” Peg says, referring to the drywall piled out back. “It’s bad enough he hasn’t finished with the siding or the lawn. At least before the fire they were hidden up the block. Honestly,” she says, “between the damage and the two empty lots, I couldn’t move a property in this neighborhood if they were giving it away.”

“Sam bought land.”

“And if he’d gone with me instead of Marcie Ross, he would have saved five hundred dollars an acre.”

The family falls silent at the name Marcie Ross—a nemesis of Peg’s, rosy and repellent. Bob will never be forgiven for the time he complimented Marcie’s billboard near the CITGO station, and all he really said was that her hair looked better than it used to.

“And remember what I told you,” Peg says to Danny and Ethan. “You’re not to go anywhere near the trailer or the woods.”

“Why?” Danny asks.

“I’m not comfortable having you talk to Mr. Bailey.”

“Your mother doesn’t mean that Sam’s a bad person,” Bob says. “He just wants some privacy.”

“Which I would give him,” Peg insists, “if I could
talk
to him a minute. But he’s always in the woods doing who knows what. I keep leaving notes. He’s never there—he’s like a ghost.”

“He was there before dinner.”

“What, where?”

“In the trailer.”

Peg stands up and marches to the door, still in motion when she bends to get her pumps—hop, pop, double hop—and off she goes, into the darkly falling evening and across the barren plot. She keeps her eyes upon the trailer, moving at a clip, half expecting Sam’ll spot her and rabbit into the trees. When she makes it to the door, she doesn’t hear a thing. There’s not a glimmer of light from either set of blinds. But the strangeness is the reason that she soldiered out at all, and she’s about to follow through when Sam emerges from the door.

Peg retreats until the streetlights are visible again.

“Hi,” she says, frightened of his tall silhouette.

She doesn’t say more until he’s lit enough to recognize. He’s skinnier and browner with a two-day beard; it occurs to Peg she hasn’t really seen him since the fire, that she can’t talk trailer straightaway without condolences.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She really truly is.

“Thanks,” Sam says. “I got your notes. I should have said hello.”

“No, please. We were worried, that was all.”

“How are your boys?”

“They’re fine, they’re shaken up. It scared them.”

“I know.”

He keeps looking eerier the better her eyes become, dangerous and lank, wearing dirty jeans and flannel. There was style to his hair but now it’s scruffy. She can smell him. He reminds her of a homeless man who used to be a student, someone in the very early stages of addiction.

“I heard you bought the land back here,” Peg says. “I wish I’d known. Are you planning to rebuild?”

“No.”

“You’re staying in the trailer, then?”

“I haven’t worked it out,” he says. “It’s only been a month.”

“No, of course,” Peg says. “I only meant to say…”

“Thanks for coming by.”

He turns toward the door, finished with the talk.

“Sam,” Peg says, stepping forward inadvertently.

He stops and they’re together, closer in the dark, in the very tight gap between the trailer and the trees. She can hardly see his eyes but feels the way he’s looking at her, staring down and using all his height to make her small.

“May I ask you a personal question?” Peg says.

He doesn’t tell her no.

“What are you doing for a bathroom?”

“There’s a tank,” Sam says, and she imagines it beside her, there beneath the floor in the damp, muddy gloom.

“It isn’t any of my business…”

“I’m asking you to go,” Sam says.

She doesn’t have a breath, never mind an answer. He leaves her there abruptly, goes inside, and shuts the door. It’s as if he’s really vanished, how she’s instantly alone.

8

“There wasn’t a phone,” Henry tells Ava at the door, panting like he’s jogged the whole way home. Before he says more, Wing’s jumping up between them, Nan’s calling them to eat, and Henry’s kicking off his shoes and walking to the bathroom. He’s muddy, with a crust of dried blood along his forearm.

“Henry…”

“Just a sec, I’ve got to whiz like the devil.”

“You were bleeding.”

“What? Whoop, look at that. I didn’t even feel it. It’s the blood thinners, babe. Lemme wash, just a minute. Start without me,” Henry says, leaving Ava, Nan, and Joan to listen to his stream.

They’ve waited up to eat, growing antsy when he didn’t arrive by six o’clock, and they’re all privately starving except for Henry, who’s drawn and openly starving, so much so that Ava stops herself from questioning him fully until he’s eaten. He marches out of the bathroom and animates the room, more vigorous than all three women put together. He stretches and groans and wipes his face, rocks the chair, clatters silverware, and shifts the whole table when he moves, and even in the dining room the air feels open and the birds outside sound a little more alive. He cuts a piece of meatball and palms it out for Wing, who wolfs it with a smack and grumbles for another. Henry wipes his hand and balls the napkin on the table, then digs into his food with his head mere inches from the plate.

“We didn’t say grace,” Joan reminds them, awed by the suddenness and speed of Henry’s eating. They’re serious meatballs; Joan herself can handle only one.

Henry says the prayer with his mouth full, mumbling under Nan’s crisp enunciation, and then he’s all about the meal, making it look more physical than ordinary eating, bolting it down and smearing the rim of his milk glass with tomato sauce. Nan winds spaghetti very tightly on a fork. Joan cuts her meatball into quarters with a butter knife. Ava’s appetite grows after three or four bites, several hours’ worth of stomach acid blanketed with pasta.

“So he didn’t chase you off,” she finally says.

“He tried to at first,” Henry tells her. “Then he needed help dragging logs off the footpath.”

“Logs?” Ava says, brandishing her fork.

“Well not
logs
,” Henry says. “Just branches and sticks,” and she can see the little man cycling in his head, trying desperately to brake and pedal in reverse.

“The poor guy’s living in a trailer. He’s sculpting whole
trees
. He’s got a sculpture out there … I couldn’t really see it but the arm was sticking up. You’d have sworn that it was real.”

“He’s very talented,” Nan declares. “He sculpted every day.”

“Yeah, it’s good he’s staying busy, right? I guess he bought the land for all the wood. It’s something back there, but man, that trailer’s really small.”

“What did he say?” Ava asks.

“Not a lot. I apologized as much as I could, told him anything he needed…” Henry pauses for a second, glancing up at Ava. “He asked about the fire. He wanted to know what Laura looked like. I almost couldn’t answer but I had to, you know?”

Ava thinks of Laura, whom she never once saw, the woman with the hair Henry openly admired. She didn’t seem real when she was actually alive but Ava senses her tonight, like a presence in the room. Henry withers in his chair and lays his fork beside his plate. She leans across the tabletop and takes him by the hand.

“He didn’t seem to want me there.” Henry sighs.

“You ought to respect his wishes.”

“I don’t know,” Nan says. She folds her napkin into a triangle and looks at Ava. “What if Henry is the person Sam really needs?”

“Or the only one he doesn’t need,” Ava says. “Isn’t that up to Sam?”

“Of course it is,” Henry tells her. “I just can’t tell what he wants.”

“He let Henry stay there for hours,” Nan says. “That doesn’t sound like a man who wants to be alone.”

“It sounds like a man who doesn’t know when to
leave
,” Ava says, sharply enough for Joan—still working on her meatball—to put her knife down and glance around the table in alarm.

“I think it’s up to Henry,” Nan says.

“Are you going there for him or for yourself?” Ava asks him.

“Why’s it got to be one or the other? Look at us. We’re married, you and me,” Henry says, making a you-and-me gesture with his hand.

“You and I,” Nan whispers.

“We love each other, back and forth,” Henry says. “We can’t be selfless all the time or the other person’d get gypped out of
their
being selfless.”

“What does that even mean?” Ava asks.

The light’s turned purple outside, dusky warm and giving the room a saturated hue. A phoebe cheeps. Ava squeaks her chair without moving and the Finns, stock-still, make no sound at all.