This is Just Exactly Like You

Table of Contents

 

 

 

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,
New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Drew Perry, 2010 All rights reserved

Excerpt from “How to Like It” from
Cemetery Nights
by Stephen Dobyns. Copyright © Stephen Dobyns, 1987. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Perry, Drew
This is just exactly like you : a novel / Drew Perry
p.cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-19004-3

1. Marital conflict—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction. 3. Parents of autistic children—Fiction.
4. Parenthood—Fiction. 5. Autistic children—Fiction. 6. Parent and child—Fiction.
7. Suburban life—Fiction. 8. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.E7929T47 2010
813’.6—dc22 2009042562

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

But the dog says, Let’s go make a sandwich.
Let’s make the tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.
And that’s what they do and that’s where the man’s
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept—
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

—Stephen Dobyns, from “How to Like It”

Oh help me, please doctor, I’m damaged—

—The Rolling Stones, from “Dear Doctor”

 

 

 

F
rom the half-insulated attic—a space he’s been wanting to carve out as an office if he can ever even
get some goddamned drywall up at least, Jack, please
—he calls over there. Lets it ring. His big plan: Run bookcases down the sides, replace the windows in the two gable ends, put a desk under each window. Maybe set a couple of upholstered chairs out in the middle, and a rug, and it’d be nice up here, a place they could sit in the evenings, have a drink. She’d like that. Ice in glasses, sprigs of mint. Coasters on little low tables.
How was your day, dear?
That’d be just grand as hell. It rings. Six times. Eight. He’s calling to tell Beth that he needs to come by to drop Hen off. It’s Canavan who finally picks up.

“Hey, Jack,” Canavan says. He sounds sleepy.

“I wake you guys up?” Jack says.

“You’re calling for Beth,” says Canavan.

He doesn’t feel any real need to answer that. “No jobs this morning?” he asks. Canavan cuts trees down. Likes to call himself a tree surgeon, like there’s a medical degree that goes with it.

“Not till later on,” says Canavan. “Slow Friday.”

Jack can hear sheets and blankets, and then also what sounds like dishes, like plates. “You two eating breakfast in bed?”

“No,” Canavan says. “It’s dinner.”

Jack checks his watch. “It’s eight in the morning.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s from last night. Beth made us soup and bread. Campeloni.”

Somewhere in the background, Beth says, “Cannellini.”

“Cannellini,” Canavan says. “Apparently.”

“Beth made you soup and bread,” says Jack. Beth is not a huge cook.

“Cannellini,” he says again, as if it’s some kind of explanation. “Tomatoes in it. It was pretty good.”

Jack holds the phone out in front of him, like he’ll somehow be able to look in there through the little array of holes and see them in bed, his wife and his excellent friend Terry Canavan and all the plates and bowls from soup and bread. At least she doesn’t have a suitcase with her yet. Every time he’s come back home this week he’s checked the closets first thing. All the suitcases are still right there. And her clothes, too, he’s pretty sure, or most of them. Which only means she’s probably over there wearing some old sweatshirt Canavan’s found her, or his Carhartt fucking jacket he’s so proud of, the one with the zip-off arms. Zippers everywhere. That’s how Jack pictures her, then, little panties and the unsleeved vest of Canavan’s jacket. Hair all in knots. “Gimme Beth,” he says.

“Yeah. Hang on.” Canavan puts the phone down and Jack hears them talking, but can’t make out the words. Then Beth picks up.

“Hey, Jackie,” she says.

“Hey,” he says back, and just stands there. In their attic. He doesn’t know why he came up here to make the call. Sometimes he does things like this. Now he feels a little like zipping his own arms off.

“You called me,” says Beth.

“Yeah,” he says, recovering some. “I need to drop Hendrick by. I’m going in to the yard.”

“I have a class,” she says. “Summer session started yesterday. You know this.”

The way she says it, like he’s a kid.
You know this.
“You couldn’t take him with you?” he asks her.

“What, to my class? I don’t think so, Jack. And anyway, why can’t he go with you? He went with you yesterday. And Wednesday.”

“Fridays are crazy,” he says. “Plus with the weather like this, the line’ll be out off the lot. We probably won’t even get to break for lunch.” He picks at the windowsill, can’t really believe he’s having this conversation. “It’s not like I’m dying to come over there and, what, help you two clean up your dishes from last night, maybe straighten the covers for you, put a mint on your pillow—”

“Stop it, OK?” she says, her voice gone all brittle. Just like that. “I’ll figure something out. I’ll take him. Let’s not do this right now.”

“Hey, I know: Let’s not do it at all.”

“Jack,” she says, and then quits.

He waits for her to start talking again. A piece of someone else’s conversation breaks in on the line, then disappears. On her end, there’s something like the sound of Canavan rearranging the dressers in the bedroom. Or bowling. “I’ll be by, then,” Jack says finally, to fill up the space. He checks his watch again. “In half an hour.” And instead of waiting for more quiet, he hangs up on her, stabbing at the button on the handset a few times, which just makes him feel a whole lot better.
Bitch,
he thinks, and right away feels sorry for that, or stupid about it, or both. One more thing done wrong. He puts the phone in his pocket and goes downstairs to find Hendrick. Whatever else there is, there’s this: She will have been gone one week tomorrow.

The weather’s been perfect, actually, like it’s spiting him somehow, the end of May into June and cool weather hanging on after a weird warm winter, the seasons all out of whack. He’s got windows open all over the house still, breeze blowing in from everywhere. It’s been fiercely sunny, daylilies coming in, everything greening over, everything in bloom. It’s not even supposed to make it much past 80 degrees today, a kind of Chamber-of-Commerce forecast, which means by ten o’clock the line will be out to the highway, pickups and trailers and minivans bumper-to-bumper back behind the Shell station next door, past the Dumpsters and down the gravel side lane the county put in for them on 61. Everybody taking Friday off to buy flowers and soil and mulch. Hardwood, pine, dyed pine, pine bark, pine needles. Everybody in a fight against weeds, against the hot and the dry that’s got to be coming. He’ll have been doing this four years this fall—hard to take in that it’s been that long—and they’ve got it to where the thing will almost run itself. A day like this, and Butner and Ernesto could have moved sixty yards of mulch and soil by the time he gets in, maybe more. Butner: His right-hand man, his heavy lifting, his lot manager. He’s been with him nearly the whole time. Ernesto’s been on a year and a half, conduit to the Spanish-speaking landscape crews, a genius with the plants. He can bring anything back to life. Last summer he grew peppers in a plot next to the greenhouse—hard little orange things the size of golf balls, wrinkled green witch hats, ten or fifteen other kinds. Jack had no idea there were that many varieties of pepper. Butner grows heirloom tomatoes, has every year. The two of them sold produce out of the office all last season. One more way to bring in money.

Patriot Mulch & Tree. Butner named it. The first week after he hired him, Jack deep in the red and already paying bills out of their savings account, Butner took him out there, stood him in front of the old sign that said HIGHWAY 70 MULCH SUPPLY, said
Here’s your problem right here. Go get you fifteen American flags and run ’em across the front of the property. Rename it something patriotic and people’ll buy whatever you sell.
Business doubled in six months. Butner and the flags and the location. It’s on the same lot as the Shell station, in Whitsett, on the only real road that’s not the interstate anywhere nearby. Twenty minutes east from where they live in Greensboro, ten minutes west from where Beth teaches, Kinnett College. PM&T sits just up from the Holy Redeemer International Church of Whitsett and the First Whitsett Church of Jesus Christ Our Only Lord, both prefab metal buildings, built right next to each other. International flags on poles around the Holy Redeemer, competing semi-apocalyptic sign marquees out front of each: IF YOU THINK IT’S HOT HERE, JUST KEEP ON GOING. GODANSWERSKNEEMAIL. PREVENT TRUTH DECAY—BRUSH UP ON JESUS. Bible verses, threats, prayers for the living and the dead, for storm survivors, for soldiers. Ride a few hundred yards past the churches, and there are Jack’s fifteen American flags, Jack’s two yellow loaders, his red dump truck, his low gray office shed, his small mountains of pine bark and gravel and leaf compost. The little world he’s made for himself.