Thunder Bay (26 page)

“I’m sorry about all this,” she said.

“Me, too. But we’ll figure it out, okay?”

“You’re not mad?”

“I’m not exactly ecstatic.”

“Complicates things, huh?”

“Sit down.” I pulled a chair from the table. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Jo had come back from the kitchen, and she sat down, too.

Jenny began in a calm, rational voice, but before long she was crying, and it was clear she didn’t know at all what she was going to do.

When I was a cop, people cried in front of me all the time. Because they were scared or grieving or trying to manipulate. It almost never bothered me. Jenny’s tears were like drops of acid on my heart. She slid into her mother’s arms and sobbed.

The doorbell rang. Oh, joy.

I opened the door. Lane Pflugleman was there, with Virginia and Sean at his back.

I’m not tall—just under six feet—and Lane Pflugleman is a head shorter. He’s slender, congenial, though generally quiet, and he wears a mustache, mouse brown going gray, that always puts me in mind of a moth with spread wings resting on his upper lip. I’ve known him all my life. He’d been a couple of grades behind me in school, and I wouldn’t have taken much notice of him except for his wrestling. In his junior year and again in his senior, he took state in his weight class. In Aurora, wrestling wasn’t like football or basketball. It didn’t have the same mystique. There weren’t cheerleaders. There weren’t fast breaks or Hail Mary passes or that sudden momentum that can sweep spectators up in a frenzy of hometown pride. The gym was never packed for meets. In fact, the team as a whole did poorly. Lane
was the only bright spot, and he did his glory work in relative obscurity.

I watched him wrestle only once, the year after I’d graduated. I was home on a break from college. My mother was a friend of Lane’s mother, who’d invited her to a meet. She asked me to accompany her, thinking that because I was a guy I’d understand the sport and could explain.

There wasn’t much to Lane Pflugleman. He wrestled at 119 pounds. I’d been a football player. On the football field, Pflugleman would quickly have been reduced to a red smear on the green grass between a couple of white chalk lines. On the mat in the high school gymnasium, where less than two dozen people watched, Lane Pflugleman performed physical magic. You didn’t need to know anything about the sport to admire how he moved, worked his opponent, understood his own body and what he could ask of it. I admired, too, his behavior after he easily won his match. A decent winner.

“Come in,” I said and stood aside.

Sean walked behind his father. He was a tall kid, taller than his father, lean and strong, with thick black hair and a handsome, studious face. He wore wire-rims and had the haunting look of, I imagined, a poet. It was easy to understand why Jenny had been drawn to him. As he passed, he avoided looking at me directly.

“I brought coffee cake,” Virginia said and handed Jo a platter covered with aluminum foil.

Virginia taught math at Aurora Middle School. Jenny had been one of her students. I remembered conferences with her, how pleasant she’d been and how complimentary of Jenny’s work. She was a pretty woman, and it was from her that Sean had gotten his height.

Jenny had dried her tears, but it was obvious she’d been crying. She sat between Jo and me. Sean and his folks took places along the other side of the table.

“Coffee?” Jo asked. “I have orange juice, too.”

Lane said, “Coffee, thank you.”

“Yes,” Virginia said.

“Sean?”

“Juice, thanks.” He spoke toward his lap.

“I apologize for the hour,” Lane said. “I know it’s early.”

“We were all up anyway,” I said.

Things went quiet while Jo brought coffee and juice from the kitchen. She cut and served the coffee cake. In that awful stillness, the kind that often precedes uncomfortable discussions, I could hear cardinals singing in the maple out back. I stared through the window at the grass wet with dew, sparkling, as if my backyard was full of diamonds. I wanted not to be at the table, not to be a part of this torture that would test the love we had for our children and for one another. I knew Jenny and Sean were miserable. Lane and Virginia looked as if they hadn’t slept at all. I was dreaming about being somewhere else, anywhere else. Only Jo seemed calm, but I’d seen her in court take ridiculously bad verdicts without batting an eye, then cry in the privacy of her office.

“I’m glad we’re together this morning,” Jo began. “Sean and Jenny have some difficult decisions ahead of them. The truth is, it’s a tough situation for us all.” She looked at her daughter with great compassion. “You know that Jenny had planned to leave for the University of Iowa in a couple of weeks.”

“Sean was supposed to go back to Macalester,” Virginia said.

“I’m not going.” Sean’s voice was quiet but definite.

“What do you intend to do instead?” his father asked. “Go to Paris? That’s ridiculous, especially now.”

“Is it? People in Paris have babies, too.”

“Is that what you want, Jenny?” Jo said. “To have this baby and take it to Paris?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Lane cleared his throat. “What I don’t understand is why you weren’t more careful. I’m a pharmacist, for god’s sake. I have a store full of contraceptives.”

“I told you, Dad. We were using condoms, all right?”

“Pregnancy rates with condoms can be as high as fifteen percent. And that’s when they’re used correctly.” Lane eyed Jenny. “Why not the pill?”

“That, she’s way too Catholic for,” Sean said, as if it ought to be glaringly obvious. There also seemed to be blame in his voice, and I wanted to reach across the table and take a handful of his shirt and shake him until his teeth rattled.

“It seems to me the obvious choice here is marriage,” Lane said.

That was answered with silence all around the table.

“You can go back to Macalester as a married student,” Lane continued, “finish up there, and come back here to a partnership in the pharmacy.”

“I don’t want to be a pharmacist. I never wanted to be a fucking pharmacist.”

“Sean!” Virginia’s face went red. From shock maybe or embarrassment. Her eyes, full of sympathy, shot toward her husband in a way probably meant to signal,
He doesn’t mean it.

“It’s what makes the most sense, Sean,” Lane pushed on with admirable evenness in the face of his son’s hostility. “From what I understand, you were thinking of asking Jenny to marry you anyhow.”

“That was for Paris,” Sean snapped. Then he seemed to realize how that sounded. “I mean ...” He looked cornered. “I don’t want to be a pharmacist, okay? I want to be a writer. I want to see the world. I don’t want—”

“A baby holding you back,” Jenny finished for him.

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s what you haven’t been saying since I found out I was pregnant.” There wasn’t any accusation in her words, just a kind of dull, sad truth.

He faced her across the table, his soulful eyes full of the pain that was supposed to produce great poetry. “I love you, Jenny. I love you so much. But . . .” For a young man who wanted his life to revolve around words, he was suddenly at a loss for them.

“But a baby wasn’t part of the bargain,” she finished for him.

“Look, if you want to have this baby, I’ll be there for you.”

“You’re a liar, Sean.” She said it quietly, as tears rolled down her cheeks. “For you, this baby will always be something that trapped you and killed your dreams.”

She got up and rushed from the table to the kitchen.

“Jenny!” he called hopelessly after her.

The hinges on the screen door squealed, and the door slapped shut as Jenny left the house.

Sean jumped up to follow her, but his father reached out to restrain him.

“Let her go. She doesn’t want to talk to you right now.”

“What do you know?” Sean eyed us all. “What do any of you know?”

He turned and stomped his way out the front door.

I saw Stevie sitting on the stairs in his pajamas, his dark eyes wide with interest.

“I’d hoped that would go better,” Jo said.

Virginia laid a comforting hand on her husband’s arm. “He doesn’t mean all that, Lane. He’s just upset.”

Lane stared down at the coffee cake, untouched, on his plate. When he lifted his face, I thought I saw something of the wrestler in him that I’d admired a long time ago. Only now he wasn’t dealing with an easy victory.

“I’m sorry,” he said to us.

Stevie left the stairs and tentatively approached the table, his eyes locked on the coffee cake. “Is that just for adults, or can a kid get lucky?”

It wasn’t funny, really, but it made us laugh.

Jo had a pretty good idea of where Jenny might have gone.

St. Agnes is an easy walk from our house. Father Ned Green, the young priest, opened the doors early every morning and encouraged his parishioners to drop in and start each day with quiet, personal prayer. Jo occasionally did that. Lately Jenny had taken to going with her, for reasons I now understood better.

She was in a pew near the back of the sanctuary. She wasn’t using the kneeler, just sitting and staring up at the stained glass above the cross on the altar. It was a sunny morning, and the glass was brilliant.

“Mind?” Jo said as she sat down beside Jenny.

Our daughter shrugged.

I sat behind them, leaned forward, and kissed the back of Jenny’s head. That morning we had the church to ourselves.

We sat together for a while without speaking.

“Sean doesn’t want the baby,” Jenny said.

“What about you?” Jo replied.

“I want to keep my baby.”

“Then that’s what you’ll do.”

She looked at Jo, then back at me. I saw so much child in her still, the little girl who loved to pet goats at the children’s zoo in Duluth, who cried when she read
Little Women,
who fell in love with a mating pair of Canada geese who’d wintered on Iron Lake and who she’d named Romeo and Juliet. But I saw, too, the woman she had become and the one she was still becoming.

“What about college?” she said. “All your dreams for me.”

Jo said, “We hope they were your dreams, too. Now you’ll have different dreams. They’ll include someone else, someone I guarantee you’ll love amazingly well. And it doesn’t mean college is out of the question.”

“I don’t want to get married.”

“Then you won’t.”

“People will talk.”

“Hell,” I threw in from behind, “you’re an O’Connor. They already do.”

“What about Sean?”

Jo put her arm around Jenny, two blond heads touching. “He’ll always be the father even if he isn’t a husband.”

“He doesn’t want to be a father.”

I thought about the story I’d heard from Meloux the night before. I wished Sean had loved Jenny as fiercely as Henry Meloux had loved Maria Lima. Different people, different times. Still, for Meloux, being a father mattered, even across decades of absence. Maybe someday the same would be true for Sean.

“Give him time,” I advised. “When he sees this baby, he may change his mind.”

“Or not,” Jo said. “In any case, you won’t raise this child alone, we promise.”

Up front, the priest came into the sanctuary from the door that led to the church office and classrooms. He saw us, nodded, but made no move in our direction.

Jenny said, “You guys mind if I talk to Father Ned?”

“Go ahead, sweetheart,” Jo said. “You want us with you?”

“No.” Then she managed a smile. “You always are.”

She stood up and left us.

I walked home with Jo. The morning was warm already, pointing toward a hot day. “We made it sound easier than it’s going to be,” I said.

“There’ll be plenty of time for her to come to terms with the hard stuff.”

I took her hand as we walked. “Know what the hardest part for me is?”

“What?”

“Lord in heaven, I’ll be married to a grandma.”

I
picked Meloux up first. He had an old gym bag full of clothes and a few things for overnight. I didn’t know if Ernie had gone back to the old man’s cabin or simply loaned Henry what he might need. Walleye padded along beside him. Meloux sat up front. Walleye hopped in back and lay down on the seat.

“Get some sleep, Henry?”

“I rested,” the old man said.

“Stevie’s looking forward to taking care of Walleye again.”

“The boy needs a dog.”

“Don’t go there, Henry. I’ve already been through this with Jo.”

“Sometimes trying to talk sense to you, Corcoran O’Connor, is as useful as trying to talk a fart out of smelling.”

“Is this a subject we’re going to be stuck on the whole trip, Henry?”

“Stephen’s dog? Or farts?”

We left Ernie Champoux’s place, and Meloux stared out the window as we drove down the shoreline of Iron Lake. The road was thickly lined with trees, pines and poplars mostly. Pieces of broken sunlight slid off the windshield.

“We all need friends,” the old man finished. “I will say no more.”

“Stevie has friends.”

The old man looked at me, tired despite what he said about resting. “Are we going to be stuck on this subject the whole trip?” He settled back and closed his eyes.