A Hard and Heavy Thing (33 page)

He first went to the unfinished half of the basement with the storage shelves and the laundry machines. He found some taped-up cardboard boxes underneath the stairs, but they only contained Christmas decorations and ornaments. Checking his bedroom next, he grabbed a paring knife from the kitchen and walked down the hall, expecting to find the heavily taped boxes stacked in the middle of the room. When he opened the door, sunlight framed two white-and-blue-striped curtains, which hung mostly closed on a modern stainless steel rod. There were no boxes on the cream carpet, which had stripes from a recent vacuuming, even visible in the relative darkness. Levi didn't recognize the queen bed that took up half the room's right side, nor did he recognize the red, white, and blue striped bedding. The wall on the left held an elaborate modular shelving system, which had been set up around a dresser matching the bed's headboard.

He nearly didn't enter the room at all, thinking maybe his parents had set up a guest room, or maybe they had a strange arrangement with a boarder that he didn't know about, or maybe Paul had moved the stuff in since returning from DC. The bed, however, had a folded note on the pillow, and it was this note that piqued his curiosity enough to get him in the room. He flipped on the light and thought it strange that he should feel like an intruder.

He picked up the note, which was short and written in his mother's handwriting.

•••

•••

He read the note again and turned around to look at the shelving system lined with all the books he had mailed back. Sherman Alexie . . . Charles Bukowski . . . Stephen Crane . . . David James Duncan . . . Denis Johnson . . . Ken Kesey . . . Jack Kerouac . . . Tim O'Brien . . . George Saunders . . . Kurt Vonnegut . . . David Foster Wallace.
Sure enough,
he thought. Everything in order, spines flush. Sitting on top of the dresser and recessed into the shelving system was a small digital safe, similar to the ones found in hotel closets.

He opened the drawers in the dresser and found the T-shirts he had mailed back, all neatly folded. He shook one out and smelled it. His mother had washed the laundry he had mailed back. She had folded it. She had placed it in drawers for him. His heart broke as he pictured his mother whistling and smiling and putting this room together with the best of intentions.

He turned around and rushed to the closet, fearing what he would find. Indeed, when he pulled the string to turn on the light, all the pants and the few button-up shirts he had mailed home hung in a neat row. Several pairs of boots and low quarters sat in a neat row on the floor. His class A uniform had the position of honor. It was encased in plastic that was clear except for the logo of the local dry cleaning shop. Each ribbon and accoutrement had been returned to its proper place on the uniform with care and precision. Levi pictured his mother asking his father a million questions as she tried putting the uniform back together before his dad got tired of answering questions and got up from his recliner to patiently do the work himself, referring his questions about new and unfamiliar ribbons and their proper placements to an Internet search engine.

He pulled the string and turned off the light. He slid down with his back on the doorjamb of the closet until he sat on the floor. He shook his head in disbelief. He wanted to hug them for their sweetness and their unconditional love and their misguided pride and their total obliviousness to everything about him. But did they really expect a twenty-six-year-old combat vet to come home and live in his childhood bedroom?

He was past all that. A grown man. Self-reliant.

He stood and grabbed one of the trunks from the back of the closet and tossed it onto the bed. He flung it open and pulled his pants and shirts from the closet. He threw the clothes into the trunk. He pulled an assortment of books from the shelf and did the same with them. Likewise, he packed a handful of clothes from each drawer. The safe once again caught his eye, and he punched his six-digit numerical birthday into the number pad on the safe. He opened it, and his Glock 19 lay inside. Two loaded magazines and two boxes of ammo lay next to it. He had mailed it home rather than get arrested with it in DC. The magazine well of the weapon was clear, but Levi racked the slide to be sure the chamber was clear. He put the weapon, magazines, and ammo in his trunk. He gave the foreign room one last lingering look before turning off the light and closing the door.

When Nick got home from work, he didn't see the Blazer in the driveway, nor did he see it parked on the street. He crawled into bed with his already sleeping wife. He asked if she had seen Levi since that morning. She mumbled into her pillow. He couldn't understand her so he asked, “What did you say?”

She lifted her head slightly, but kept her eyes closed. “You need to knock this off. Hire another manager already.”

He said, “This again? Should I just start ticking down the list of why that won't work right now? You want to quit your job to get your graduate degree. Great. I'm proud of you, but it's not free. We have renovations left to pay off. Your idea, by the way. We have a mortgage here. Your idea, by the way. The profit margins are nonexistent, and we lost too much with the whole Kathy ordeal. Hired on your recommendation, by the way. Should I keep going?”

“Whatever.” She turned her head so her mouth wasn't smooshed into the pillow. “Then sell the place. You ever do the math? With what you bring home and with the hours you're working, you make like, three bucks an hour.”

“Five years. Five years is how long most businesses in the food industry take to turn a profit. Do we really need go over this again too?”

“Ha.” There was only cynicism in her laughter. “Most businesses in the food industry need to secure financing to open. They need to build from the ground up. Most haven't been around fifteen years before being inherited.”

“Hello?” He propped himself up on his elbow. “You're the one who convinced me to
get
financing for the renovations that were
your
idea. Do you really want to start a fight or throw this back on me now that it's too late?”

She sat up and tugged a blanket from him and pulled it toward her side of the bed. “I agreed to spruce it up a little. I didn't think you were going to tear the place apart.”

He tossed himself back down onto his side and pulled the covers violently around himself. She pulled back, but he had a handful of the comforter at his chest and he held firm. “If I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it right.”

“You and your big dreams for your small town bar. Stop overshooting your demographic. Just pour the beer, put on a game, serve some cheese curds, and they'll be happy. That's it. It's not that hard.”

“If you're so smart, why don't you come run the place? Or at least help out a bit? Or are you just going to deride me all the time? Be the machete that hacks my legs out from under me every night when I come home for a few hours rest?”

“Yeah right,” she said.

“What's that supposed to mean?” He sat up again.

“Nothing.”

“No, seriously. What's that supposed to mean?” He wanted her to say aloud what he knew she thought, that the place was a crummy hole that he never wanted in a crummy little town where he never wanted to live, and now that his grandmother was dead, he had no reason to hang onto it.

“How's a recovering alcoholic supposed to work at a bar?”

He lifted a pillow to his face. He didn't want to look at her and say what he thought, which was,
Stop using your own lack of willpower as an excuse for everything
. “Gimme a break,” he shouted into the pillow. He pulled it away and spoke slowly. “You quit cold turkey, dear. Either you have exceptional willpower, or you're not an alcoholic.”

“The Holy Spirit works wonders on our frail natures,” she said, her voice high and innocent, like a child's. And then instantly biting, “You taught me that.”

He closed his eyes and counted to five. She knew exactly how to get under his skin. “Sure. In that case, you can do it. And it's not like you have to be a bartender. Do the books. Take inventory. Order products. Research cheaper deals. Find ways to cut costs. Just help out a little.”

“You don't get it, do you?”

He said nothing more. He got it. He got it all too well. He had left town as a stupid teenager, partly as a matter of conscience to escape the destructive allure of the booze, drugs, and fast crowd, and partly as an escape from a life running the family business—a life that had been planned for him before he had outgrown Little League. And then what did he get for trying to do something noble and right? Skin grafts, brain injuries, and pins in his leg. All of which sent him right back to the place he had left, just so he could inherit the life he had tried to escape.

Even the silver lining had turned ugly when his old friend and confidante had turned into a beautiful woman and swept him up in a love that he never knew they shared. And then she married him—scars and all—before revealing herself as a clone of her mother. Or more accurately, since she kept it as no real secret, when he allowed himself to recognize what he had always known.

He got it all right. How could he not when she had made it so evident last year? He had come home from physical therapy, and at four o'clock in the afternoon—before most people even got home from work—she was curled around the toilet. She was drooling into the bowl and sleeping with her face squashed against the porcelain rim. She had little chunks of vomit on the ends of her hair. He had woken her, wiped her face, prayed for her, undressed her, bathed her, and cleaned her up. He then sat behind her on the floor and brushed the hair on her lolling head, but when he rose to help her into bed, she slapped his hand away.

She had slapped his face and said, “Don't you look at me like that. Don't you dare pity me.” She slurred and spittle flew from her mouth and she cried, “I pity you.” She wiped her mouth. “I pity you,” she whispered.

Nick did not believe she had said it reflectively, as in, I pity you that you have to put up with a drunk for a wife. No, he believed she had meant she pitied him for his scars, for how he looked, and for how he would always walk like some sort of cripple. And at that instant, in his shock and pain and misunderstanding, he told her she should pity him. He stood and left her there on the floor, and looking down on her he had said, “You
should
pity me. You should pity me that I'm stuck with you. You should pity me that I was duped into spending the rest of my life with someone who only married me because she felt sorry for me.”

He left her there and didn't turn back when she crawled after him. He didn't turn back when she pressed her face against the glass of the living room window and pounded on it as he climbed into his truck. He drove to the bar and slept on a couch in the back office. He was convinced that his marriage was a sham bred from pity. At the same time, he was terrified the end of his marriage was imminent. He wasn't stupid or deaf. He had heard things—rumors about her on the loose lips of heavy drinkers at the bar. It wasn't like this was an isolated incident. Far from it. He had cleaned her up and put her to bed in the same fashion a hundred thousand million times. Gone most evenings. Stumbling in during the early morning hours. Possessive about her cell phone on which she was constantly texting. E-mailing old high school boyfriends. Changing her Facebook passwords. The signs were all there and he had been an oblivious idiot.

He had put a sign on the door of the pub, unplugged the phone, and gone on a three-day bender himself. He didn't go home the entire time, and he didn't hear a word from her. It wasn't until Uncle Thomas finally drove to Bangor, broke a window to get in, and rebuked Nick for his drunkenness, selfishness, and the abandonment of his sick wife—who was now threatening suicide—that Nick finally went home, took a shower, and brushed his teeth for the first time in over seventy-two hours.

Although Nick asked, Uncle Thomas refused to provide counseling because of the family connection. He instead recommended a colleague from across town—Reverend Bartles—to bring them through what he referred to as their dark night of the soul. When they had walked in to meet the man at his church in what looked like a broom closet attached to the sanctuary, he had them sit in two folding chairs.

He immediately launched into a lecture. “If you're sitting in my office for marriage counseling, it means you've reached the point where you need the directions spelled out for you in black and white.” He leaned back in his own metal folding chair, and he put one hand in the white hair behind his head while he rested the other arm across his portly belly. He looked at the ceiling in exasperation.

“Well, I guess it's inevitable sometimes. But when a marriage reaches this point—and I don't care whose fault it was or who said what or who started it or who bears most of the blame—you only have two options left.” He slammed his hands back onto the table. “And this is what they are: The first option,” he said without a hint of irony, “Is that you can be absolutely miserable together.” He made eye contact with each of them in turn. “Would you care to guess at the second option?”

Nick folded his arms and looked down. “I dunno. We can leave the church and get a divorce?”

Once again, Pastor Bartles looked at the ceiling in exasperation, or maybe it was in commiseration with God, as if he were saying, Look, Lord. Look what I have to deal with down here. And these are supposed to be your people?