Year After Henry (3 page)

Jeanie stopped. A patch of silence fell between them. How could it be so difficult, this many days and weeks and months later, to even say that word? Frances poured some milk into her coffee and stirred it.

“Lisa has to think of the baby now,” said Jeanie. From somewhere down the street, the music of the ice-cream truck rang out. It had always reminded Jeanie of church bells over the years of hearing it, years when Lisa and Chad would grab her purse and pester her to
Hurry, Mom, it's coming up the street, it's at the Petersons' already, gimme some money, Mom, please!

“I had some problems when Larry was born,” Frances said then. “Some irregular bleeding, as you call it. But Henry, when he came along, it was an easy birth. I almost didn't know I was pregnant until Lawrence drove me to the hospital.” She smiled, a smile that belonged to another time and place. Would they ever be happy again? That's all that Jeanie wanted to know.

“How
is
Larry?” she asked, wondering if it would be wise. She knew immediately by her mother-in-law's face that it wasn't a good question.

“He's acting the fool, is what he's doing,” said Frances. “I told him right at the start not to marry that vain girl. But Larry never listened to a word of advice from me. Now, if he doesn't snap out of it, he'll be fired from the post office. Lawrence says there are only so many strings a human being can pull. If only Larry had been just a bit more like Henry. Henry was as dependable as they come.”

Jeanie watched as Frances reached for the plate with her raisin square and pulled it back in front of her on the table, the yellow raisins spilling away from the crust in a tiny avalanche of filling.

“Frances, there's something I think you should know,” said Jeanie. Frances took a bite of the raisin square as she looked at Jeanie's face.

“Oh, this
is
good,” Frances said. Then she quickly put her fork down on the table and hid her face in her hands. The sobs seemed longer and more uncontrollable than they did on her last visit. Within seconds, the wave of grief had passed and Frances picked up her napkin, wiped her eyes quickly. “It comes out of nowhere,” she said, and Jeanie nodded, recognizing a truth in that statement. “I'll be fine one minute, talking about rosebushes with Ellen Barnes, and the next I'm crying like a baby.”

Jeanie went around the table to her mother-in-law's chair. She put her arms around the older woman's thin shoulders and the two rocked back and forth, their pain flowing like a hot liquid from one body to the other. Were women meant to do this? Was this in their genes? If they couldn't sit side by side on bar stools at Murphy's Tavern, saying nothing the entire time, did they rock instead, remembering the babies they had held and nursed and soothed in those same arms?

“I'm sorry,” said Frances finally. “I'm fine now, Jeanie. Really I am. What was it you wanted to tell me?”

Jeanie kept the older woman in her arms, not ready to let go. The warm current flowing into her from another body felt good, like a stream of sunlight. With Henry not there anymore to give her a hug now and then, with Chad vanishing into his own cloud of sorrow, what Jeanie noticed most was not being touched.

“It was nothing,” Jeanie said. “Don't forget to bring me that recipe.”

...

It was just coming twilight when Jeanie pulled her car up to the curb across from Evie Cooper's house and turned off the engine. She sat staring at the sign in the front yard,
Evie
Cooper, Spiritual Portraitist,
and at the candlelight that flickered from behind the white lace curtains. This was the time of day Evie did her sessions. Jeanie knew this from the ad she had seen in the
Bixley
Courier
. It was one of the cheaper ads, sure to be missed except by the most desperate and sincere scholars of the unknown.
Spiritual
Portraitist
, it said, and below the words was the silhouette drawing of a woman standing beneath a huge star, like the one that had guided the three wise men to baby Jesus.
Let
me
break
down
the
veil
that
separates
you
from
your
departed
loved
ones. Twenty years of experience. Fifty dollars per session. Call now for appointment.
It wasn't as if Jeanie believed that the dead could be dialed up, paged, summoned forth for a chat. She didn't believe it. But at the same time, she did believe in God and an afterlife. What if there
was
a way to poke a hole in that so-called veil? All she knew for certain was that something like a morbid curiosity had finally drawn her to Evie Cooper's street, some kind of indefinable link. She was more curious about the mistress now, a year after Henry died, than in those months when he was actually having the affair.

Jeanie reached into the paper sack on the seat beside her and found the pack of cigarettes she'd bought at the 7-Eleven. Henry never knew that she had taken up smoking, that same day she found the receipt to room 9 at the Days Inn. Jeanie had lit that first cigarette out of spite, no doubt about it, coughing the harsh smoke back up from her lungs and wondering how on earth any sane person could do that every day without quitting forever. But now, all these months later, she liked the taste of tobacco and the calmness that smoking a cigarette brought with it. Maybe she was even addicted to nicotine. It didn't really matter
why
she smoked. She just did.

Jeanie reached into the same sack and pulled out a margarita wine cooler from the four-pack carrying case. The bottle had perspired in the heat and now the paper sack from the 7-Eleven was damp with humidity. She spun the silver cap around until it broke from the aluminum binding and came free in her hand. She tossed the cap onto the floor on the passenger side, then put her window down a bit to let the smoke leak out. She took a sip of the cold wine cooler and lit her first cigarette of the evening. Birds sang out from the bushes along the street and the muted sounds of traffic floated down from the four-way stop at Foster and Elm. Two women were out power walking, their white fists punching the air in unison as they strode past Jeanie's car. They hadn't noticed her there behind the wheel. Maybe she, too, was disappearing and just didn't know it yet. She exhaled slowly and watched as the smoke left her lips and spiraled up toward the window crack, set free on the night air.

What bothered Jeanie most, what still hurt, what stopped her from finding what the talk shows call
closure,
is that she wasn't sure but what Henry Munroe was still visiting Evie Cooper, in those dark hours of the night when things go bump. Jeanie Munroe wasn't sure but what her dead husband, so attached to the mistress he had unexpectedly left behind, had broken down that
veil
Evie's newspaper ad talked about. Maybe he had forced his way back to the world of the living just so he could touch the life in her again. One thing was certain. Henry's spirit sure wasn't hanging out at Jeanie's house. Not unless you count the leftover smell of Old Spice in an orange hunting bonnet. Jeanie was tempted to walk up to Evie's door and knock on it
bam! bam! bam!
When Evie answered, she would say to her,
I'm getting the number 9. Does that mean anything to you? Yes, he's showing me a nine and a receipt for the Days Inn. What do you think that means?

By the time Evie Cooper's first client of the evening arrived, Jeanie had already finished off the first wine cooler and opened another.

When Larry heard the kitchen door open and close downstairs, he waited another minute until he was certain his mother would be in the garden. Then he unlocked his door and stepped out into the narrow hallway. Sunshine flooded the house, turning it the color of ripe wheat. Motes of dust spiraled up from the rug on the stairs, a universe disturbed, and he wondered if his mother had just crept up to his door again, to listen. The soles of his bare feet slapped on the wooden floorboards as he made his way to the bathroom. With a great sigh of relief, he emptied a bladder that had been pestering him since he woke to the sound of his father's Toyota truck backing out of the drive and whining off up the street. Then he washed his face and brushed his teeth, keeping tabs through the window on his mother in the garden below, her gray hair floating over the cucumber beds like a soft cloud.

In the kitchen, Larry opened the refrigerator door and found a half gallon of milk. He poured a tall glass and drank it as he stood there. He had even dreamed of milk during the night, so thirsty had he been. He dreamed of walking down the aisles of the local IGA, asking clerk after clerk, “Where do you keep the milk?” That's when the IGA had turned into a huge field of talking cows. “Here's where we keep the milk, asshole,” one of them said. Larry had knelt by this talking cow and reached for the teats, hoping to milk her and quench his thirst. Only it wasn't leathery teats hanging from the cow's udder. What he held in his hands, and was still holding when he woke seconds later, was the leather mail pouch. Thinking of this now, in the bright sun of day, Larry smiled as he finished the milk. He rinsed his glass and left it in the sink, not caring that his mother would find it and know he'd been there. An empty plastic sack lay on the table, the kind that came full of groceries from the IGA. Larry opened it and stood before his mother's slide-out pantry. A jar of crunchy peanut butter was the first item into the bag, along with a box of saltine crackers, a jar of pickles, and two cans of tuna fish. He glanced out the kitchen window and saw his mother just leaving the cucumber beds and heading for the sweet peas.

In the silverware drawer, Larry found a can opener, a fork, a spoon, and a knife. They clinked against the cans in the bottom of the sack. From a plate on the counter, he grabbed a chocolate doughnut and bit into it, leaving it in his mouth while he opened the cupboard door where the gallons of water were stored. He pulled one out. On the way back through the kitchen, he grabbed two apples out of the fruit bowl. He had never been a Boy Scout, had never possessed the kind of “group mentality” he felt it took to join such an organization. Henry was more the Boy Scout type and had excelled, his earned merit badges often discussed at the dinner table while Larry scooted a few peas around with his fork, waiting for praise of Henry to subside. It had never really bothered him that Henry seemed cut from a better cloth than he was. He loved his younger brother too much, and love can cushion anything, even jealousy.

Back in his room, Larry made himself a breakfast of peanut butter and crackers and ate it while sitting on his bed, his back propped against the wall. He would save the tuna fish and pickles for lunch. He drank water from the throat of the plastic jug and then selected the larger of the two apples. It oozed a sweet juice the moment his teeth broke through the red skin. He finished the apple in a few quick bites and then reached into the leather mail pouch to select another letter, this one personal. The envelope was yellow and smelled of lilacs. Why did some people odorize and perfume their mail? There were days when Larry's pouch smelled like the perfume counter at Fillmore's Drugstore. He gave a cursory glance at the return address in the upper left corner:
Sheila
Dewberry, 1013 Cedar Grove Court, Sioux City, Iowa
. It had been sent to a
Miss
Stella
Peabody,
the town librarian whose beige nut of a house sat catty-corner on Thorncliffe Street, next to the future site of Bixley's second McDonald's.

Larry took the knife he'd found in his mother's silverware drawer and inserted it beneath the sealed flap of the envelope. He cut his way slowly and neatly along the glued line until the letter was opened. He took it out of its envelope and lay back on the bed, head on his pillow and sheet pulled up to his waist. His own father never opened an envelope without his silver-plated letter opener, a knifelike apparatus that was inscribed with the initials LSM,
Lawrence
Simon
Munroe
, which had been given to the first Lawrence Munroe ever to be entrusted with the government's mail, upon the event of his retirement in 1928. “This will be yours one day, Larry,” his father liked to remind him as he held the silver-plated letter opener up to catch the light. This had been going on from the time Larry was five years old, ever since he could first remember being able to grasp the concept of
letter
. Just as some boys watched their own fathers cut into the silver bellies of freshly caught trout, Larry had watched his father make incisions in the bellies of envelopes, slicing them open with a quick movement of the wrist. He was twelve years old when he knew for certain that he did not want the damn letter-opening thing. And he was eighteen when he told his father outright that he didn't want to be a goddamned postman. He was ready for college, and older, horny women, and
Playboys
all over the coffee table any time of the night or day without fear of retribution. “Maybe another time, another place,” he had gone on apologetically, trying to ignore the fact that his father's face was growing like a long, tanned squash, a sad vegetable elongating, searching out a place for the sadness to take root. Maybe in the old days of postal service Larry would've taken up the call. Those were the days of Pony Express riders, when that dangerous route from St. Joseph to Sacramento was waiting to be ridden, to be broken in. Larry had read about it in history class. Maybe
then,
if he'd had a fast horse, a little excitement, maybe
then
he would have saddled up, grabbed the mailbag, and turned his collar up against those outlaws and bandits and dangerous holes in the black road ahead. In those days, mailmen were heroes. Those Pony Express riders must have gotten all the best, loose women, like modern rock stars and athletes. Trembling virgins probably waited on the edges of towns to lift their dresses at the first sound of hoofbeats. And while it would make sense that a good-looking, modern-day mailman would have all the lonely, bored housewives to himself, what small-town, teenaged boy would want to bed down the mothers of his best friends? “I'm sorry, Dad, but the answer is no,” Larry had said. A month later, he was enrolled at the University of Maine.

By the time things settled down, Larry Munroe had a BA in history and was teaching at his old high school. And he might have persevered, too, might have made it to the old gold watch and a retirement plan, had he not met Katherine Grigsby. May his ex-wife rot in hell for turning him, in his later years—a time when the gray was just coming to his thinning sideburns enough that it might appear to some student that Mr. Munroe actually
knew
what he was talking about—into a fucking mailman! But that's what had happened after he lost his teaching job at the only high school in town, the problem being that little fistfight in the classroom. He had then put on a decent suit and gone out on one job interview after another, holding in his hand the résumé that spoke of a man aged forty-three with no other visible experience beyond teaching history. After four weeks of what might be considered self-inflicted humiliation, Larry had to face facts. The only establishment sincerely interested in hiring a middle-aged ex-schoolteacher was the Bixley Post Office, where his own father presided over the business of deliveries, stamps, money orders, dog bites, customer complaints, and other sundries. They had lost a good postman when Henry Munroe's heart exploded in his chest, so now the Bixley Post Office and Lawrence Simon Munroe III had thrown open those ancestral doors to Lawrence Simon Munroe IV. May Katherine Grigsby rot in Hades.

There were facts to be faced, and Larry faced them. He was struggling to keep up with his child support payments. He was struggling to pay rent on a one-bedroom apartment now that the house had been sold. He was no match for the twentysomething young men who were fresh out of college and snapping up all the good jobs. What choice did he have but to take up the leather gauntlet of his forefathers? What choice did he have but to move back home with his parents? So he had stuffed his pouch with letters and gone up and down the sidewalks of Bixley, for six days out of every week, bringing people good news, bringing them bad news, bringing them Ed McMahon and the chance at millions in the Publishers Clearing House contest, bringing them foreclosures from the Bixley bank, bringing them the world right at their fingertips, whether they wanted the world or not. For seven full, agonizing months he had done this, wishing every day, every step he took up a customer's brick walk, that Katherine Grigsby would burn in hell's most horrible inferno. But she hadn't burned, or rotted, or even smoldered anywhere, at least not yet. Instead, she was now living with Ricky Santino, who had coached basketball at the same high school where Larry taught history. Nice and messy. Leave it to Katherine, who never forgave him for getting her pregnant and forcing her to choose between ballet and motherhood. He hadn't even realized until Katherine left him that those ballet lessons she'd been taking were so important to her. Larry always thought it was her way of getting exercise and attention at the same time. That fluffy pink tutu, those silky shoes the size of rose petals. She had always reminded him of Tinker Bell, pirouetting through the house as if it were some stage. “She's too young for you, Larry” was all his mother had said when she met Katherine for the first time. Larry hadn't seen it that way. What was ten years, after all? He had always wondered if the frequent pirouetting was what caused Katherine to miscarry that first baby, and then a second baby two years later. Jonathan, coming late as he did, had been such a precious gift, at least for Larry.

The truth was that Katherine Grigsby had as much chance back in her early years to become a professional ballet dancer as had Zelda Fitzgerald. And Larry had told her that, the day he came home from giving his quarterly exam on the Roman Empire to find her packed and waiting for him by the door, Ricky Santino's new green Jeep idling at the curb. This was shortly after the Big Italian Renaissance Fight, at least that's what Larry had come to call it. He should've killed the fucking little WOP while he had him pinned to the radiator. That was the day that Larry Munroe's marriage fell down faster than Rome. The worst thing about it, the worst fucking thing that could happen to a high school history teacher in a small town, whose ancestral family he had already failed for refusing to pick up a century-old mail pouch that smelled of sweat and grime, a man whose stomach was beginning to resemble the spare tire clamped on the back of Ricky's idling Jeep, the worst fucking thing that Katherine had done was that she had taken Jonathan, their son.
His
son.

Jonathan. This was a name Larry had wanted for himself as a child, a chance to be different, a prayer to be unique. But they had called him Lawrence. As a boy he would stand in front of his bedroom dresser, look into the mirror with a grave dignity, and say, “Hello, I'm Jonathan Munroe. Good day, Jonathan Munroe here, Jonathan Munroe calling, Jonathan, Jonathan Munroe.” He had envied Henry for possessing his own independent name, this was true. Envious because Henry had not been promised the silver letter-opening knife with LSM inscribed on the handle. And maybe that's why Henry had so willingly taken up the family profession. He had the freedom to choose. But that's why Larry had given his only child, a sweet boy, the very name he'd wanted for himself,
Jonathan
, a name signifying freedom. Larry had given it to his son without consideration of his ancestors because he saw the future every time he looked at Jonathan. He saw the future and not the past. Lawrence Munroe IV had named his own son Jonathan, and he had kept him from letters and postal cards and fliers and
Current
Occupant
catalogs as long as he could. And then, when life without the boy seemed unbearable, Katherine had taken Jonathan Munroe and she had driven away from their home, the only house on Pilcher Street that didn't sport a mailbox. Thinking back on that house now, months after he'd sold it to a fellow teacher, Larry had come to see it as a kind of box in itself. All throughout the fifteen years of his marriage to Katherine, they had bounced from room to room in that small, two-story Cape, pirouetted, like particles of dust trapped in sunlight.

The lilac-smelling letter from Sioux City, from Miss Sheila Dewberry to Miss Stella Peabody, was a love letter.
My
own
darling
, it began.
How
I
have
missed
the
soft
velvet
of
your
sweet
mouth, the silk of your nape, the tender arch of your back, the hills of your snow-white breasts, which my lips have climbed so many times in the past
. It was the last image, of breasts rising up white as snow to someone's lips,
anyone's
lips, even an old maid's, that prompted Larry to reach under the blanket and search for his genitals. They were still there. That Katherine hadn't managed to take them with her was a miracle, since she even took the andirons in front of the fireplace, andirons inscribed LSM and passed down from the first LSM. Maybe Larry should thank Ricky Santino for that, macho guy that he was.
Leave
Larry
his
balls
, he could hear Ricky advising Katherine.
It's all the guy has left, and a man needs his testicles in a small town when his wife has run off with one of his fellow teachers.
But Katherine had taken Jonathan. Larry had watched from the porch as Jonathan walked to the green Jeep, his school jacket slung over one shoulder like a limp arm, his face streaked from crying, his cowlick bouncing in all directions, like a confused periscope trying to determine place, heading, bearing. Not yet ten years old and already with a big mission.