Shelter Me

T
UESDAY
, A
PRIL
24

T
HURSDAY
, A
PRIL
26

J
ANIE CLOSED THE
89-
CENT
black-and-white-speckled composition notebook. It reminded her of one she’d had in third grade for the purpose of practicing her cursive writing. She would sit at Aunt Jude’s kitchen table after school, gripping the pen as if it might get away from her and do some certain but unspecified damage. All those loops and slanty lines. So messy and complicated compared to the clear clean strokes of the printing she had been used to.

The doorbell rang, jolting Janie from her memory. She tucked the notebook in the cabinet above the refrigerator and forced herself to face the intrusion, hoping it wasn’t another pity offering of quiche or lasagna or baked fucking ham. Friends and neighbors had stopped coming by, sensing, she knew, that their company was all but unbearable to her. It was just too hard to answer that stupid question over and over. “How are you?” She could barely keep herself from saying,
Still shitty, thanks for asking. Care for some ham? God knows I can’t eat it.

The man who now stood at the door carried nothing but a smudged manila folder. He scratched his fingers through the caramel-colored hair over a recently healed scar on his forearm. “Hi,” he said, squinting into the room’s relative dimness, the faint lines around his eyes clustering against each other. “Rob around?”

“No,” said Janie.

“Uh, well, can you give him this?” He held out the folder. “I told him I couldn’t start ’til summer, but then another job got postponed, so I’ll start here next week. Permit’s already pulled.” He checked his watch, the crystal so scratched it must have been hard for him to see the face. “I’ll pick those up tomorrow. If he wants to call me, the number’s there.”

The man waited for a response, which was not forthcoming. Janie stared back at him for a second, then glanced away. “Okay,” he said, his lips flattening into a confused smile. He walked quickly to his truck. When he opened the driver’s side door, Jane saw “Malinowski Custom Design, Inc.” written in curling maroon script on the door panel. “Pelham, Mass.” was in smaller type below it.

He’s from here,
she thought. Not that it mattered.

“Who was that?” Dylan asked, the little metal Monopoly dog bounding around the board.

“Some guy,” said Janie, and tossed the manila folder on the stairs.

T
HURSDAY NIGHT

S
HELLY
M
ICHELMAN BANGED ON
the front door, opened it a face-width, and yelled “Hey!”

“It’s open,” Janie called from the back of the house. This was not very far. It was a small house, a Cape, the modern version of a Colonial style that had been built with zeal throughout the Boston suburbs in the 1930s and ’40s. The front door opened directly into the living room. To the right was the kitchen, just big enough to hold a round butcher-block table and four chairs. The painted white cabinets, and counters devoid of all but the most necessary small appliances, kept it from feeling claustrophobic. A staircase divided the living room from the kitchen and led up to two bedrooms on the second floor, their ceilings slanting down toward eaves on the front and back of the house. Janie was in the tiny office behind the living room rummaging through bank statements.

“I know it’s open,” said Shelly, her heels clicking authoritatively on the muddy green manufactured tiles. “I opened it. What are you up to? What’s that? Good God, this room’s a mess.”

Janie found Shelly’s relentlessness exhausting, but Janie found most people exhausting these days. “I don’t even know,” she said.

“Pfff,”
said Shelly with a flick of her hand. “For a man who worked at a bank, you’d think he’d have kept his files better. Look at this, these dates are all mixed up. What are you in here for, anyway?”

“This guy came by yesterday…Malineski or something. I guess Robby hired him to build a screened porch on the front of the house.”

“Ohhhhh,”
said Shelly, uncharacteristically still for a moment. “Tug.”

“Pardon me?” Janie said, irritated.

“The builder. He did my renovation, remember? Very clean. You never have to clean up after him. Well, you know you have to vacuum all the time when you’re under construction, but other
than that, I mean. No little slivers of wood or bent nails. No cigarette butts under your rhododendrons. You cannot
believe
what builders will do to your landscaping.”

“Shelly…” Janie wondered how it was that this woman, the next-door neighbor with whom she had managed a strictly wave-from-the-driveway relationship for the better part of six years, was suddenly in her house all the time now, issuing orders like the commander of a ship taking on water.

Shelly tapped the back of her index finger delicately under her nose. “Robby asked me for his number last fall. I think it was supposed to be a surprise.”

Janie felt the familiar tingling in her gums and the tightening of her throat. “You think maybe this was something you could have mentioned?” Janie told herself to calm down, take a breath. But that never worked these days. “You know, now that he’s DEAD?”

Shelly gave her a mildly apologetic nod. “I definitely would have, bub. You know, if I hadn’t been distracted with coordinating all those meals people were bringing and driving Dylan to preschool and all.”

Janie’s laugh served to help her exhale. “God, you’re such a bitch.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Shelly. She leaned closer and bared her teeth. “Spinach for breakfast. Any stragglers?” Janie inspected the big too-white teeth and shook her head.

“I have two houses to show, Pelham Heights,” Shelly said. Pelham Heights was a wealthy neighborhood on the north side of town. “Then I’m back to deal with this disaster. Just get the bank statements in order. That’s chronological, not alphabetical or astrological, or however the hell they’re organized now.” She tapped her mochaccino-colored plastic nails on the only clear spot on the desk. “Get them all straightened out and put them in a pile right here. Then have a cup of coffee and take the baby out in the backyard. It’s a beautiful day, for godsake.”

Janie stared at the pile of bank statements.
Goddamn him
, she thought, as her eyes began to ache.

Shelly patted Janie’s disheveled black curls with her perfectly manicured hand. “Have the coffee first,” she said. Then she clacked back through the living room and slammed the front door.

F
RIDAY
, A
PRIL
27

A
T ELEVEN O’CLOCK
, J
ANIE
heard the unimpressive hum of Father Jake’s car in the driveway, the careful latching of the car door, the muted squeak of what she knew were rubber-soled black shoes coming up the asphalt. Those shoes. So him. Not sneakers, no, that would be too casual, almost disrespectful. But they weren’t the standard-issue black leather shoes the previous pastor had worn. They were youthful, yet somber. So him.

Janie made sure to be at the door before he gave two light raps with the front of his knuckles, a sound that made her want to open the door just to slam it at him. Not one, not three, always two infuriating raps.

“Hi,” he said, as if the way she whipped the door open and declined to look at him was how all parishioners greeted him. She strode toward the kitchen, and he followed. “Baby asleep?” he asked.

No, she’s out weed whacking the yard,
she thought.
She’s always asleep when you come, and you always ask me the same dumb question.
“It’s her naptime,” Janie replied, running water into the teakettle and landing it hard on a stove burner. She put an empty mug before him as he sat at the kitchen table.

“Thanks,” he said, and pulled a small packet out of his pants pocket. Black jeans, not slacks. Janie pinched the back of her hand
under the table to keep from rolling her eyes. Out of the packet came a teabag, a further expression, Janie sneered inwardly, of his utter lack of impact. When he left, there was no indication that he’d ever been there. You weren’t even short a teabag.

He stayed for an hour. At noon, as he always did on Fridays, he rose from the round butcher-block kitchen table that Robby had assembled from a kit, placed the dead teabag in the trash, and put the mug in the sink. By the time his somber black sport shoes were squeaking back down the driveway, Janie could not remember one detail of their conversation. Not that she tried.

A
LITTLE PAST NOON
, Shelly returned peeling a grapefruit, its pale yellow skin a perfect match for the brighter streaks in Shelly’s short, perky hairdo. Strangely, it also matched the silk shell she wore under the tailored beige suit. Was this purposeful? Knowing Shelly, as Janie had come to do in the three and a half months since Robby’s death, it was a definite possibility. The woman’s attention to detail was maddening.

After they’d pinpointed the payment Robby had made to the builder and determined that Janie could, in fact, afford the porch, Shelly announced, “I’m going out to Amherst tonight.”

“When will you be back?” asked Janie, hating the faint tremor of panic that rippled through her.

“Sunday. Pammy’s got a play.”

“She’s in a play?”

“No, she’s on the sound crew. I’ll be sitting in the audience watching
other
people’s children perform a play called
Beth and Dawn and the Metaphysicality of Cheese
.” Shelly flicked the under-side of her nose and shook her head. “As you know, I wouldn’t eat cheese to secure peace in the Middle East. I think the last time I had cheese I was wearing a training bra. What a stupid invention. Like boobs need training. Like they would act up if you didn’t teach them to behave. Anyway, I’ll be having a cocktail or three before the curtain goes up.”

Janie had to smile despite herself. “Are you staying with her?”

“In the dorm? Are you insane? Do you have any idea what those dorms smell like? No, the minute Pammy got accepted to college I dug up an adorable little bed and breakfast. Arts and Crafts style, set back from the street, exposed wood beams. Very quaint, very Berkshires, but without the…you know…nature.”

A
T
12:52, J
ANIE STOOD
outside Dylan’s preschool classroom holding Carly, who was chewing noisily on a pink pacifier. The previous week Janie had taken her for a long-overdue checkup at the pediatrician’s office. It was one of those group practices where you might get your actual pediatrician, the one you chose with such anxious care when you were still pregnant and naive. Or you might not. You might get the one who was just a little rough when putting your baby on the scale. Or the one who was not nearly as funny and endearing as he thought he was.
Or,
thought Janie,
you might sit in the waiting room with six or seven other mother-child pairs, in various states of impatience and snot coverage, while Dr. Whoever-Is-Next-on-the-List lights up a cigarette and checks the personal ads.

Janie had not been late to pick Dylan up the day of the doctor visit, mainly because she had driven like a teenaged boy exiting a high school parking lot on a Friday afternoon. But she was the second-to-last mother to arrive at his classroom door, by which time he was clutching his teacher’s hand and chewing madly on the dangling strap of his backpack. He lunged toward Janie, forgetting to release the viselike grip on his teacher, yanking her forward so that she banged her shin on the sand table.