Ten Days (3 page)

Read Ten Days Online

Authors: Janet Gilsdorf

“Black? Cream and sugar? Latte? Whatever’s your pleasure,” he said. Instantly he wished he could retract those words. Had he really said, “your pleasure”? Too sappy.
But, she smiled, the most generous, beautiful smile he’d seen in a long while.
“Cream and sugar will be fine,” she said.
He couldn’t believe he was sitting across the table from the most amazing woman in town. They talked about the Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich, about Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease and the invasion of Chechnya, about his classes, her work.
“I teach English as a second language,” she said. “The students are great. For the most part, they really want to learn and are pretty funny.” An hour later, they exchanged phone numbers.
The next week he learned that
Forrest Gump
was playing at the State Theater. He wanted to see it with Anna. Would she go with him? He debated with himself for three days and finally, his finger quaking, dialed her number.
“Hi, Anna. This is Jake Campbell.” He tried to sound calm.
“Jake. Good to hear from you.” She sounded excited; her voice rang like a crystal bell.
They held hands during the show, laughed together at the silly parts. Anna dabbed her eyes during the sad parts and he put his arm around her shoulders. Comforting her seemed as natural as the sunshine, seemed as if it had been ordained since the dawn of time. Her tense back softened against his arm.
The weekend after that they attended a jazz concert together, rocked in their seats to the music, clapped with the staccato beat. From then on, they were pretty much a couple.
“Chicken’s here.” Anna’s voice coiled down the basement stairs.
“Daddy, come an’ eat,” Chris added. His son’s words sounded like a muffled wind chime.
The table was set with their stoneware dishes. Anna had arranged the chicken pieces on a platter and the potatoes and coleslaw were heaped in serving bowls. Instead of the KFC plastic forks and paper napkins, a stainless fork and knife lay on a cloth napkin beside each plate. In spite of his irritation with her, he had to chuckle. She liked fancy table settings, wasn’t satisfied with the cheap stuff, was willing to spend a little extra time making a routine meal into something special. For him and the boys.
“I figure I’m about halfway done,” he said as he slid a chicken thigh onto his plate.
“Good. It looks nice,” Anna said.
Apparently she wasn’t focused on the crooked tiles anymore. True to form, she didn’t hang on to a grudge for very long. The emotional thunderstorms that hung over them from time to time dissipated fairly quickly.
She cradled Eddie in the bend of her left arm and nursed him as she ate with her right hand. He found the sight of his wife going about her routines with a child attached to her breast to be very satisfying. She was a good mother, in spite of her fastidiousness. She was patient with the children, seemed to enjoy helping them master the myriad skills they learned every day.
“The coleslaw,” she said, pointing her fork at Chris’s plate. “It’ll make you grow strong like your daddy.”
“I don’t like it,” Chris whined.
“Makes hair grow on your chest, buddy,” Jake said. “See what eating salads does for me?” He pulled up his shirt, baring the fuzz between his nipples.
Chris giggled and shoveled several shreds of cabbage into his mouth.
“Good job,” Anna said. “Now, two more just like that.”
“Here.” Chris waved a white tile toward Jake. They had just finished dinner.
“Whoa, buddy.” Jake eyed the grease from the fried chicken on his son’s hands and, then, the oily smudges on the tiles. “Run back upstairs and wash your mitts.”
Through doleful eyes Chris stared at his hands. He turned them palm up, palm down, palm up. Then he coughed, snorted through his stuffy nose, and coughed again.
Poor kid, Jake thought. He wants to help. Just like every other little boy. As a child, he and his father, together with his brothers, had built bookcases, shelves for the garage, a sewing table for their mother. Since he was the oldest, he was the first to learn how to hold the hammer—“At the end of the handle, Jakey, not near the head”—and how to pull the saw—“In slow, firm, even draws. Stuttery little jerks tear the wood.”
Chris, too, was the oldest and would be the first to do everything, while Eddie would be the forever tagalong—eagerly, desperately trying to live up to his bigger brother. Chris would be the first to go to school, to read, to drive, to date. At least, most likely the first to date. He was such a social little guy; he shouldn’t have any trouble attracting the girls.
Eddie was too young for Jake to get a bead on his personality yet. But, already, it was clear he was a mellower baby than his turbocharged brother had been. Eddie seemed to take the more philosophical view. He batted his fists against the mobile toys that dangled over his crib seemingly forever, at least for much longer than Chris had. He tolerated Bullet’s sandpaper cat-kisses better than his brother. Even wet diapers didn’t seem to bother him. At that age, Chris used to holler at the first hint of discomfort. They had learned the drill with their oldest son: Change the diaper, offer the breast, roll him over, wrap him in his favorite blanket, unwrap him, rock him, sing to him. They had applied each comfort measure in turn until he finally settled down. Eddie—quiet, playful, congenitally satisfied—knew how to settle himself.
“Mom.”
Chris called for Anna as he traveled through several rooms upstairs.
“Mom.”
He was only three and still depended on Anna for so much. And, willingly, earnestly, she always complied. Chris stopped calling and yelled, “Lift me up.” The water ran and then stopped. Chris’s shoes slapped on the basement stairs, their clatter interrupted twice by his hacking cough.
He skidded to a stop beside his father and held out his hands. Drops of water glistened on his knuckles, a streak of soap foam lined his right wrist.
“Rub them on your pants.” Jake swiped his hands against his thighs. “Like this.”
Chris mimicked his father.
“Okay, buddy. That’s much better. Hand me a white tile.”
Chapter 3
Rose Marie
 
 
 
 
 
R
ose Marie stepped out to the porch and closed the front door behind her. She didn’t want the chilly air in her living room. From the top of the stairs, she called to the little boy who sauntered down the driveway. “Chris, your blanket’s getting dirty.” The boy—the back pocket of his jeans bulging with the plastic egg he’d brought from home that morning—kept walking.
“Pick it up, honey,” she called again.
Without missing a step, Chris spooled the ragged blanket around his arm; the trailing edge fluttered an inch above the gravel. She watched as Anna opened the rear door of the car, hoisted Chris into his car seat, secured his seat belt, and then waved. Rose Marie couldn’t see the baby. He must be asleep in his infant seat beside Chris.
Anna was sick, had stayed home from work that morning. “Could I bring Chris to your house this afternoon?” she had asked earlier on the phone, her voice muffled from her cold. “I’ll keep Eddie with me.”
The mud-spattered Subaru rolled backward down the driveway, crawled up the street, and turned the corner. Chris was the last to leave for the day. All the children were finally gone, off to their real homes with their real mommies.
She smiled at the thought of Chris chattering about his day to his mother in his high-octane, galloping way—lunch, nap, afternoon story, the cupcakes they decorated, the broken lightbulb, the lack of hot water.
Halfway over the threshold into the living room, she stopped and backed up a step. The name plate was crooked, its letters heading downhill as if they might tumble onto the porch floor. Anna had painted it, a Christmas gift last year. A string of twisted branches and flower blossoms framed her last name, Lustov. She straightened the board. “Strange name,” she said out loud. Lustov was Roger’s name. She had accepted it as hers over forty years ago, but sometimes, especially since his death, it seemed foreign, as if it didn’t belong to her.
She paused a moment longer to feel the fresh, spring breeze against her forehead, the rays from the setting sun against her cheeks. The rhythm of the day, a hectic throb that started with the morning greeting and ended with the afternoon parting, now slowed to a peaceful hum. She needed the quiet. It was hard work for a sixty-three-year-old woman to chase after young children from morning to night.
Her house was toasty inside. She closed the front door against the chilly air, straightened the crumpled rag rug on the floor with her toe. Some days she wanted to quit this work, to escape to a warm, sunny place where pansies bloomed all winter and no one knew what a snow shovel was, a place where she could go on long walks every afternoon—year round—wearing a wrap no heavier than a sweater. Still, child care was a good job for her. She could work in her home, wear comfortable clothes, be her own boss. She’d learned a lot about kids when her girls were growing up—raising them had been her higher education.
Maybe hot water was no longer a problem. She turned the spigot on the sink, let it run for a moment, thrust her hand under the stream. Still cold. Since yesterday the hot water had gradually become cooler, and by earlier this afternoon, it was downright frigid. This morning she’d boiled water in her stock pot to add to the lukewarm water in the tub for her bath and, then again this afternoon, to wash up after the kids.
She couldn’t figure out what was wrong, had tested all the faucets: kitchen sink, bathroom sink, bathtub. All cold. Must be the water heater. When had they last replaced it, anyway? The girls were young, then—maybe thirty years ago.
She switched on the basement light, stepped down the stairs, walked around the furnace. Then she saw it. A puddle. It ran from the water heater to the storage shelves and on toward the washing machine. Her box of canning jars was soaked. So were an old suitcase and the bag of oatmeal cartons she had been saving to make building blocks with the children. A new water heater would cost a lot of money.
Back in the kitchen, she began to thumb through the yellow pages. What would it be under? Plumbing? Water heater? Maybe she should just call Sears. She shut the book. Couldn’t deal with it right now.
“Beefeater,” she called, her hand on the refrigerator door. “Where are you? Time for our constitutional.”
The hot dogs in the meat keeper were for lunch tomorrow, the large, orange brick of cheddar for grilled cheese sandwiches the day after. On the bottom shelf, lime Jell-O shimmered in her CorningWare casserole dish. She moved a package of carrots to get to the bottle of white zinfandel, half full and angled against the ketchup. Every evening she had a glass of wine before dinner. Just one.
How much would a new water heater cost? Four hundred dollars? Six hundred dollars? More? And someone would have to install it. Last time it broke, Roger and his buddy from work spent the day swearing and drinking beer but somehow managed to hook up the new tank. Another two hundred dollars to install it? Delivery fee? Maybe one hundred dollars more. Where would she get that kind of money? She’d think about it later, after the constitutional.
Reaching into the fridge for the wine, she spotted a baby bottle. Its milk looked at least several days old and was probably bad. She swirled the bottle, searched the bluish white liquid for clots.
EDDIE C
was printed in blue magic marker block letters on the strip of masking tape that curled along one side.
No date. She shook her head slowly and made a tsk-tsk sound. A name but no date. She had a rule about that—food brought by parents had to be dated. It was enough trouble to keep track of her own stuff, let alone everyone else’s. Anna followed the rules, but Jake had labeled this bottle, using large, bold letters that demanded immediate attention. Anna’s writing was dainty, almost floral, and often in red ballpoint.
She could imagine Jake writing Eddie’s name in his lighthearted, casual manner. He was always steady, confident, never let on that he was in a hurry. To his face, she always said, “Dr. Campbell.” She wasn’t comfortable calling a doctor—any doctor, even the father of one of the kids—by his first name. But in her thoughts, he became Jake, the name Anna used for him.
She unscrewed the lid of the baby bottle. The milk inside smelled like a blend of dairy product and sour feet. She dumped it down the drain. There was plenty more where that came from. Anna—skinny, flat-chested Anna—brought in more milk than she thought possible.
“Come on, Beefeater,” she called again. Roger had named the dog, a tribute to his favorite gin. Rose Marie thought it was kind of cute. Reminded her of those humorless British soldiers that guarded Buckingham Palace. The name fit the dog’s poker face.
“If you’re on my bed, you’d better get off. Now.” Her voice jutted into every room of her small house. She scolded the dog every evening about the bed but didn’t really mean it. She liked him to be comfortable. When Beefeater had his fill of torture from the kids, he took refuge on her water bed, where he would paw a nest for himself in her feather-and-down—mostly feather—quilt.
She pulled a dirty wineglass from the dishwasher, rinsed it in the still-cold water from the faucet, and filled it three-fourths full with the white zinfandel. She always drank her nightly constitutional in a wineglass—no wine in a SpongeBob juice glass for her. Kid stuff was fine during the day, but in the evenings, on her time, she was committed to being grown up.
She liked adulthood, liked being mature. Over the years, she had been lots of things: the daughter of poor Ukrainian immigrants, a pregnant teenage bride, a tired mother to Julie and Sarah, a lapsed Russian Orthodox, a cranky housewife, a grieving widow, a long-distance grandmother to Julie’s five-year-old daughter, a Republican, a babysitter.
The frosty, pale pink of the wine was the same color as the petunias she planted every spring. In about a month, she would load two flats of seedlings from Walmart into the back of her car. At home she would dig a row of holes beside her front sidewalk and, one by one, jam each plant into a hole. If she waited until after Memorial Day, the plants would be marked down and, if she shopped early in that week, they wouldn’t be too leggy yet.
She poured a splash of the wine into a cereal bowl and called once again, “Beefeater, come here. Wine time.” She set the bowl on the floor in front of the stove.
Click, click, click.
His toenails tapped across the wooden dining room floor.
“Atta boy.” She stroked the smooth hair over his knobby backbone as he lapped the wine, his pointy Jack Russell terrier ears quivering with each swallow. Now that he was old, he was a good companion—even tempered, undemanding, loyal, cheap to feed. He needed only half a scoop of dry dog food a day, in addition to the crackers and bread crusts, Oreo cookies, and orange wedges the children dropped to him.
She opened the back door and took a deep breath. The muddy part of spring was gone, soon to be replaced by the blossomy part. In the distance, the thrum of truck tires on the freeway’s pocked concrete reminded her of connections to the wider world: the mailman, the phone repairman, the cable guy, the plumber. She set the wineglass on the patio table, unhooked an empty bird feeder, and filled it with thistle seed.
The wine had a magical, settling effect on her. After the first sip or two, her shoulders loosened as if someone had pulled a plug and sent the tightness in her muscles swirling down a drain. Then her forehead relaxed. And the back of her neck. Evenings were like stepping into another universe, a more predictable one with no interruptions, no surprises, no yelling kids, no aches. Retirement might be like this all day, every day, especially if she didn’t have a broken appliance to worry about.
She picked at the loose paint on the arm of her lawn chair. That was the trouble with Michigan winters—hard on yard furniture as well as on highways and gardens. She took another sip from the white zinfandel. The inside of her mouth prickled with the wine’s sweet astringency as she wondered about the cost of a quart of paint. That on top of one thousand dollars for the water heater.
In the corner of the patio, behind an empty clay planter, lay the G
O
B
LUE
pennant that Meghan had carried last week in Chris’s parade. Chris had been his usual take-charge self, prancing like a drum major while he yelled, “March. Come on, Sawyer. March.” Meghan had obviously forgotten to put the pennant away. Rose Marie had a rule about toys. No child left her house until everything had been returned to where it belonged. LEGOs in the LEGO can. Blocks in the block box. Crayons in the carton on the shelf. Big wheels lined up beside the fence. Dress-up clothes in the trunk—that’s where the pennant belonged. She took another sip of wine. She had more to be upset about than a misplaced toy.
When she finished her wine, she returned to the kitchen and confronted the yellow pages again. Water coolers. Water damage emergency service. Water gardens. Water heater dealers. The Building Center ad said, “Same-day installation. Complete ordering with one call. Low prices, guaranteed.” That’s what she needed. Surely she could arrange a monthly payment plan. She dialed the number.

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