The Household Spirit (22 page)

They
, Howie thought.

Well, he could watch both, anyway. Eventually, Emily might return to her own home. This was not something that they had spoken about.

Emily, meanwhile, was going absolutely nowhere until Howie turned the fuck around. She'd sit there all day, night, week. That was about the shape of it.

She wanted to scream. She knew that Howie's ex-wife had been friends with Peppy, for instance, and she could tell him that, see what he thought about
that
. She knew that his ex-wife had gone over there a lot toward the end, and that Peppy had helped her make the decision to leave. Howie wasn't the only one who knew shit.

But here Emily balked. You evil bitch, she thought. What are you thinking?

It wasn't Howie's fault that he had seen her mother and, anyway, she'd asked for it. Thing was, she implicitly trusted Howie's version of Nancy. Hadn't she always known?

She said that she was sorry.

She knew that Howie heard her. But whatever. She sat at the picnic table; he stood. She wished she hadn't said that thing about the
Playboy
s.

Emily had stopped wearing her mother's ring around Howie about two weeks ago. She'd begun to notice him looking strangely at it: probably the fact that she wore it on her wedding finger. Emily
felt as if she were betraying the only meaningful memory she had of her father by wearing the ring, by potentially exposing the ring to the kind of questions that would destroy the truth of the ring with the truth of the ring. Peppy had known a lot of women. Women wore rings, and complexly married women occasionally took their rings off.

She said, “Hey, you hear me? I'm sorry. Howie, I'm really sorry. Let's go inside. Forget it, OK? We friends?”

Howie calculated the deepest areas of the Kayaderosseras Creek. He moved his mind like a flashlight over the surface of the water; as with Emily's nightmares, it was hard to explain exactly how he found the deeper pockets of water that the best fish called home. Howie could hold his thoughts like other people held their breaths, and he'd watch, wait, forget it, and suddenly know. Friends.

—

The first week that Emily stayed at Howie's house—or, more accurately, Howie's sofa—had been strange. Things were strange now, actually, if Emily or Howie cared to reflect on their situation, to compare or contrast it to the rest of the non–Route 29 world, but back then? Really strange. For the first four or five days they hardly spoke.

Emily had not been well. She was still not well, obviously, but back then she had been worse, and Howie often wondered if he should call an ambulance or a mental hospital or, at least, his ex-wife or Drew or one of the more dependable and discreet colleagues from work. He was in over his head. However, since he had not done any of that the first night, or the second night, then the third, when any responsible and decent adult should have, and since he had not even called the Queens Falls Fire Department
when the house next door to his house had been on fire
, Howie felt that he had likely squandered any right to expect outside support. That window had closed. Emily Phane was his responsibility. Plus, what
would health care professionals or firemen or his ex-wife think when they'd found out that he had kept an emaciated, unwashed, intermittently deranged, and obviously—to others, not Howie—still rather handsome young woman on his sofa? Howie was shy, not naïve. You know exactly what they will think. No, as every day passed, it became clear that this had to be between them and Route 29. Not a secret, necessarily, but something best not talked about. Emily did not seem to care either way. Howie had to make it all better all by himself, and he hoped that he would manage to do so before the police showed up and the news reports began referring to him as a quiet loner. For both of their sakes, Howie had to make sure that Emily Phane did not die.

For starters, he called in sick for that entire week. Since in his thirty years of employment at GE they could count all of Jeffries's sick days on two hands and a toe, various colleagues contacted him, both concerned and, it seemed to Howie, ghoulishly curious. Jeffries out for a full week? You're shitting me. Must be serious. I hope it's not serious. Man, I wonder if it's serious?

Maybe it actually was serious, Howie thought.

Well, sure it was.

He had not been able to settle on a suitable illness. Luckily, a lifetime of studied inarticulation meant he did not need to. But folks called. Drew even texted, and who knew how he'd heard about it—Facebook?

Steve Dube had gotten to Howie first.

“Just heard and thought I'd check in, see how you holding up? You OK, champ?”

“Yes.”

“Good for you.”

Howie said nothing.

“I mean, you don't sound too hot, if you don't mind me saying,” Dube said. Dube went with it: “Not the hot and bothered old Jeffries we know and love, anyways! Ha. No, but seriously, you don't sound too hot at all.”

Howie had said no more than two words of, he thought, neutral temperature, but OK. Howie did not enjoy lying. He very nearly could not do it.

“You there, Jeffries?”

“Sure am.”

But it was also fun. Like a game: making sure that nothing he said was technically untrue—beyond the initial calling in sick, of course, but even then when his manager had asked what was wrong, Howie been able to say truthfully, “I don't know.”

“Doctors, yeah. Tell me about it. Mine gave me six months to live but when I said I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more.”

“What?”

Clearing his throat, “I mean, it's not serious, is it? Um. They having you in for more tests?”

“No.”

On a telephone, Howie disappeared like a foot inside a shoe.

“That was inappropriate. I'm sorry. My doctor didn't give me six months to live,” Howie's manager said. “Just to be clear.”

“That's good.”

“Right. Well then, Jeffries.”

But Dube tried to get to the bottom of it: “Don't want to pry, but we were all wondering here, I mean—we're all concerned. One week, huh? You must be pretty sick.”

“Mmm.” Because mmm wasn't true or untrue.

“I hear you, man. Sure.”

Silence.

“Well, look, I guess, you need anything? Mean to say, is there nothing we can't pick up for you? My wife, she's making me ask, says if you need someone to come by, you know, cook you dinner?
Burn
you dinner, actually, between you and me.” Dube laughed. “Hey, serious though, maybe we could pick you up some groceries? You got a prescription you need filled?”

“I don't need anything, Steve. Thank you. Thank Marcy for me.”

“DVDs, anything, Jeffries. You name it.”

“I have to get off the phone now.”

“Yeah you do. Just calling to say get better soon, champ. You call whenever you need anything, you hear me?”

The only problem was that Emily needed food. Emily did not like eggs. Howie also needed food, but then: What if someone saw him wheeling a shopping cart when he should have been at home, sick? Now, logically, if he thought about this, because he lived almost an hour from the GE Waste Water Treatment Plant he had only once in the last thirty years run into anyone from work up in Queens Falls—and not at Price Chopper but at the mall—well, this should not have been a genuine worry. He hadn't told anyone
how
he was sick. He could have been mentally sick. He could be sick with something that didn't prevent him from going to Price Chopper to purchase food. Howie saw coughing people at Price Chopper all the time. Howie was not in high school. Nobody was going to call his parents or expel him from GE for grocery shopping. But still. It troubled him. Because, further, what if they saw that he was shopping for two people now—what if they noticed that he was purchasing things that he didn't normally eat? Handsome young lady things like clementines, zucchini, and the pineapple? What if they asked Howie about the pineapple he planned on buying Emily? Howie was unused to operating his life within the confines of an easily identifiable falsehood. He drove nearly seventy miles east, crossing the state line to Vermont. The grocery stores in Vermont were as bountiful as the grocery stores in New York, but navigating them, the ever so slightly offness of them, was exciting, and Vermonters, who resembled upstate New Yorkers crossbred with golden retrievers, made Howie feel elated in an embarrassing way. Lots of tail-wagging strangers. Howdy there! He'd been rattled at first. Maybe, he thought, they had known him from work, or from the internet, perhaps they were friends-of-a-colleague or relatives of friends-of-colleagues who had seen internet computer photographs of his stone anniversary party; who knew nowadays?
Howie soon settled into the fact that this was just how Vermont operated. They said, How you doing? Howie told them that he was doing OK, that he was only looking through boxes of rice and grain. Tell me about it, they'd say. He did. They seemed genuinely engaged. They said, Two for the price of one, might as well get two, see what I'm saying? Sure. Some day we're having.

You said it.

Some drive, too. Howie could have gone and driven another few hours to New Hampshire. Driving down a new road toward a new supermarket in a whole new state, it made Howie feel things he would be mortified to feel on his own road, or at home, or around other people. He thought: Maybe you are not as in over your head as you think. First the successful surprise party—he had been surprised, after all, and everyone appeared to have had a super time—and now this clandestine out-of-state shopping for two.

He could not get over how many new things he saw on the side of a new road. He thought: Wait until I tell Emily.

It would be weeks before he would be able to tell Emily anything of the sort, and even then, Howie, by design, would never be the most chatworthy companion. He did not share experience. Looking back, the first few weeks that Emily spent at Howie's place were an accident of exhausted, nervy, almost stunned half conversations and haunted, nighttime TV marathons. Sofa; kitchen; sofa. TV TV TV TV. Sleep. Nightmare. Sleep. Emily made jokes, once in a while, and Howie got wedged up inside himself and, occasionally, even fought his way out with some of the more endearingly whacked-out statements that Emily had ever heard.

For example. Standing in the hall, out of nowhere, he said: “I don't know where the stones on the kitchen table are supposed to go.”

“I was going to ask about those.”

“We need room on the kitchen table.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. Emily had not yet asked what they were doing there in the first place, or why they were smiling. Can of
worms. Because you couldn't stop there, could you? They'd managed thus far playacting
normal
, and she didn't want to rock the boat or get any closer than she already was. The stones were harmless, endearing. She said, “We can put them on the counter?”

Howie thought about that. He said, “Would people be upset if I put them outside?”

“Like, the rock people?” Emily asked. “Would the rock people be upset?”

“What?” Howie said.

Pause.

“No, I don't think people will mind,” Emily said, carefully. “OK.”

He had not asked for help, but she got up. She helped him carry the stones outside. This was the first thing that they did together besides watching TV, and it was the first time that Emily had been out of Howie's house since she'd come over a few evenings before. She felt more solid than she had in months. She liked the solidity of the rocks in her hands; having a task. They'd brought them back by the creek. They followed an overgrown path behind Howie's house. They made a pile. It was unspeakably odd, Emily thought, watching Mr. Jeffries put the stones down, one by one. He made sure that their smiles faced outward and when, once, Emily put a stone down with its face to the ground, Mr. Jeffries waited until he thought she wasn't looking and, with a subtle twist, adjusted the stone so it faced him: big smile. That was something about him, Emily thought. Every movement. So serious. He didn't waste himself. She not only liked him, but she realized that she believed in him. “You know what, Mr. Jeffries, we totally should have buried the fish under these stones. You know, like a grave marker?”

“Fish?” Howie said, as if surprised Emily was even there.

“The dead fish you have in the kitchen, yeah.”

Pause.

Howie said, “The fish isn't dead.”

“I think maybe it is.”

Longer pause. Time enough for a breeze and, above them, some kind of altercation between squirrels. Mr. Jeffries said, “Well, it shouldn't be.”

“I guess.” Then, gently: “When was the last time you looked?”

Howie did not know. How often was he supposed to look? “Yesterday,” he supposed.

“Well, today it's dead. But we can check together to make sure. I'm sorry.”

“OK.” Then, “Do you really think that we should bury the fish here?”

“It probably isn't necessary.”

“OK.”

They finished piling the stones.

“I can't tell,” Emily said. “I'm sorry, but was the fish meaningful? Like a pet?”

“It was a goldfish,” Howie said. “It was a gift. Maybe it was sick.”

“Probably it was just old.”

“It wasn't old.”

“You could tell?”

Of course Howie could tell. He was deeply ashamed. He could not bear for Emily to think that he might be bad at taking care of things, that he let things die alone in jars in the kitchen. He said, “Jars are no place for fish.”

“Especially all alone. How sad.”

“It was a gift.”

“I know, I didn't mean that as a criticism.” But Emily saw an opening: “Who was it from?” she asked.

Howie bent down, adjusted one last stone that didn't need adjusting. He said, “I don't remember.” He really didn't. Lots of folks had been giving him gifts that Tuesday evening. But the shame was now complete. He turned and walked back to the house.