A Tapless Shoulder (3 page)

“
Give me the phone,” I said harshly, but she stood, turned,
and moved slowly and wisely away from me. I stood with my hand
aimed at her back. “Let me talk to them,” I repeated, this time
louder, hoping they would hear, not that it would have changed
anything or been enough to drop the hell I was balling up in my
head for the sole purpose of throwing at them:
from my face to yours, FUCKERS.
I was about to really yell and
swear. The moment of truth was upon us, I thought at light speed,
anger moving me quickly, as past experience reminded me the moment
was now, and if they didn’t suffer now, I would suffer
later.
Katie
, I
thought,
I’ll yell, ‘pull’,
you toss the phone and I will punch it out of the air. Go, and as
soon as it leaves your hand, yell, ‘see you
tomorrow’
. She wasn’t reading
my mind… or even looking at me.

I wanted to
pluck the phone from her hand, let the water drip on it, and yell
into the phone,
“WHAT?”
I wanted to
then smash it with ice, yes; I’d push the entire sheet of ice from
the roof down onto the phone. I had no idea why; it would not have
been reasonable or professional by any means, and maybe that was
just what I wanted. They weren’t being professional with her, so
why should she be with them? I knew for certain I would have liked
to at least have given them my fucking headache.

“
I don’t know
what to do, so I really don’t know how long it’ll be,” there was a
pause, and then she said again very softly, “yes, I’ll try.” She
hung the phone up and wiped the tears from her face with both
hands.

“
Are you
fffffffflipping
kidding me?” I asked as anger poured gasoline down my face
and struck a match.

It took me a
little over an hour to deal with the ice on the roof. A friend who
worked on roofs for a living gave me a little lesson over the phone
about what he called ice damming. Basically, it’s something like
the snow on the roof melting and then freezing, so while it’s in
the eaves, and the water and ice get under the shingles and freeze
again, the ice expands, which pulls the roof right off the effing
house. I informed him us home-owners referred to it as ‘the fucking
bullshit’; which was fairly unanimous with a number of things
though, so one had to be specific and add something defining like
‘the fucking bullshit roof.’ He said he saw it often, and by the
end of our conversation I felt rather silly for having been as
alarmed by it as I had been. At his advice, my effort was to focus
solely on diminishing the amount of water that was going to come
into the house, which of course meant reducing the ice as well. So
I had gone and hacked at the ice haphazardly with the axe, and then
threw salt at it, which fell right back down into my eyes. I swore
a lot before standing off to the side and trying again from there.
The water coming in would stop overnight when it froze again, and
then I’d see what it did tomorrow. Hopefully, the ice that had
caused the gap that let in the water would melt away, letting that
gap close. I also went out and bought a little heater, figuring we
would try to dry what we could inside the house. A tower of sorts
was erected, coffee table at the bottom and topped by a wooden
chair from the dinner table, two boxes of diapers, and then
several
phone books
. The heater oscillated on top, aimed toward the
top of the wall and bottom of the ceiling.

“
Try plugging
stuff in,” I suggested to Katie as my face flinched and I curled
away in the opposite direction. She got my joke and giggled, and it
warmed us both.

I was glad to
have her home with me, even if the reason was lousy, and even if
her boss had been an idiot about it. We had been stretched thin
since she’d gone back to school. Time together was scarce to say
the least, which was something to which we were not accustomed. She
spent her mornings at the college, came home for two hours, and
then went to her afternoon job. I was so very proud of her for
taking on all she had. I thought she was amazing for doing that. It
was a big deal, and I knew it would mean more when we one day
looked back years from now and thought, how… how, how, how,
how
? Two little boys, and both of us working; it seemed like
quite the schedule even before adding her courses to it. Maybe it
wouldn’t matter; we were learning more and more that the present
was where we were and what mattered most, and the past was never
going to be a place for us to look should we ever need to find
ourselves.

Katie brought
a sandwich in from the kitchen. I smiled at her like she had
brought it for me though she hadn’t. I would tell her I was proud
of her when she had a moment
or
when I remembered.
I was sitting at the table with Ding Ding now because it was
farther from the leaking ceiling, which I couldn’t keep myself from
checking every three minutes for signs of improvement and then
damning myself for doing so.

“
Here’s your
sandwich, Ding Ding.”

“
It looks
like a seven,” he said.

“
It does look
like a seven,” she agreed, “Can you look like you’re eating a
sandwich?” She smiled at him brightly. I laughed.

Katie sat in
the chair next to me. She shook her head and looked at the window,
“So what do you think will go wrong next?” she asked.

“
Nothing, but great job going to school.” I winced, the
moment had been spoiled. “Mm, crap, I meant to colour that better
and stay in the lines,” I said glumly. “But anyway, okay, so I had
a teacher in grade school that yelled, like
really
yelled, and when she stopped yelling at us, it was to tell
us
things happened in
threes
. She may have only
yelled at us three times but took a year to do it, who knows? I’ve
been thinking about our situation and how all this crap seems to
keep happening to us; we must be doing
three
groups
of three crap
things. Now that really sucks for us, but at least once we’re
through it; that’s a minimum of three good things coming our way,
right?” My fingers were crossed before me in the air,
“
maybe
we’re in for three groups of three good things,”
I said hopefully. “Please tell me that’s what she meant. We never
had any follow up questions on that or anything else. Raising your
hand during yelling was like saying, ‘hey, can you focus on just
me’,” I said, finalizing it with a confident nod of my
head.

“
Three groups
of three bad things, yeah, okay, I’ll buy that, so where in that
are we exactly? You think we’re at the ninth bad thing? How did you
figure that out?” she asked, looking a little more doubtful than I
would have liked.

“
Oh,
I am calling it
number nine
,” I said
defiantly, “if we’re not at nine right now, our divorce will make
nine. Desperate measures, my love, for our own survival; we need to
get our luck back. I love you, but enough is enough. We can’t
afford to live like this, financially, mentally, hell, probably
physically too.”

She was
laughing, and half agreed. “But I love you, and kind of like this
family,” she said as if to say, so now what?

“
Oh,” I
answered, “I won’t be leaving; the divorce will be costly enough,
just a straight up divorce, but no, no one’s going
anywhere.”

“
Okay, so
we’re not getting divorced?” she asked, a bit confused.

“
Oh, we’ll be divorced, but that’s it, nothing will
change
. Hell, my love, we’ve got a good thing here; the chemistry
is perfect, but the world around us is falling apart. We may as
well see if a divorce is all we need to get our luck back and go
from there.” I paused. “Maybe it’s actually supposed to be,
‘
desperation
measures,’ you know, like,
‘desperation
measures my
love’
, and what we’ll be left
with will be less than what we can get by without or something.
Yeah, or maybe not, I don’t know what that meant, now that I’ve
said it and heard it out loud.”

Katie looked
at me like she still found me rather amusing. “I
really
don’t know what you’re talking about sometimes
either,” she said and shook her head like she was trying to shake
the smile off.

My phone
rang, I looked at it; there was a picture of a rock I had taken in
the backyard last summer. It meant Nate was calling me. I answered
with an unimpressed, “Hello.” Had I given it much thought, it would
have been as I feared: he had called me yesterday. He had told me
to go to the bar and of course he had not shown up to meet me
there. I felt defeated and feared things would only get worse. It
seemed we were both alarmed by this, but in opposite directions:
his had energy, while mine was just tired. He seemed very
distracted and not just because he was driving. There were cautious
pauses in his speech, and I just wanted to curl up and sleep inside
each one.

I sighed like
that sigh was going to be my last one ever and smoothed the phone
over my head. Without listening to what he was saying I said, “No
way – do you know what you did? Shut up and I’ll tell you. You had
me waiting
forever
and for fucking
nothing
,
nuth
-
thing
,” I said
bitterly.

“
Yeah, but,
look, man, you don’t understand, I had no choice,” he said in his
defense.

“
And then I was up early this morning with the boys,” I
continued, “and they wanted to have a dance party just inside my
eyes, right near
everything
that was hurting inside my head
. So there was that, that kind of sucked, and my wife was
quite displeased, to say the least; that really sucked. She had to
load up the boys last night for a trip to pick up their drunken
daddy. What? Why? Uh, because of three hours Nate, three bleeding
bloody hours – I got so hammered I got in a fight with my wife and
nearly punched my waiter just to surprise him. And I mean, like,
yeah, I got hammered and I got in a fight and that, not together,
but all separate events, you know what I mean, they were completely
unrelated incidents. I’m just trying to explain how I was a victim
of my environment, really, one that you put me in. That makes you a
big douche bag. Because she’s standing right beside me, okay? She’s
my ‘go-to’ person, that’s why I called her. Apparently I
was
yours, but you wrecked it. Of course I’m going to say that.
Look I don’t want to talk about it. Long story short, you fucked me
over. Sorry love,
not
you
; my wife, and my kids,
what is wrong with you, Nate? Did you seriously just say, ‘thank
you’, when I said, ‘
sorry
love
.’ Man, Nate, my kids are
here. I’m swearing and they are looking at my face, I am sorry to
them for that. That was not for you, why would I apologize
to you
? Why, Nate, why, what is going on? And, dude, no love,
just…” I paused, it was becoming too much, I felt like I couldn’t
breathe for the lack of sense in the conversation. I was being
strangled by a stupid man over the phone. He was still convinced I
had to meet up with him.

“
Not an effing chance, not happening,” I said, “I am not
doing that again. I had a few drinks waiting for nothing last
night, asshole,
oh
yeah
,
that’s right
.” I was angry again, but my head still hurt so I tried to
be quiet too. I moved the phone from my face, “Sorry,” I said to
Katie who had raised her eyebrows and motioned toward the boys.
“You are kidding. You are dumb.” I was talking to Nate again. “So
just tell me now. No. No.
No.
When? Fine, but,
listen, I’m punching you in the face if my kids start swearing
anytime soon, just so you know, it’s all on you. Okay? And if they
punch someone in the face, I’m throwing you out of a moving
vehicle. No, it stops there; they won’t know what that means. Look,
just, I’ll see you soon.”

Katie stood
staring at me, not sure if she should laugh or ask me to leave.
“Nate?” she asked, her question hooked sharply with
sarcasm.

“
No,” I shook
my head, “your mom.” I said it with a straight face, which was easy
as I was still trying to process Nate’s side of the
conversation.

“
He’s picking me up,” I said casually. “Turns out it was him
yesterday, of course, I should have known, all signs were
indicating
stupid
. This morning
I was thinking that it might have sounded a bit like Pete, I was
way off. Anyway, something has him losing his ever loving mind, and
last night he
forgot
to come meet me in favour of driving
to his parents’, two hours away, to hide out there. He called in
sick to work today. He’s just now on his way back. Don’t worry,
he’s picking me up; I told him there was no way I was waiting for
him anywhere ever again.” My pace changed as I became anxious,
“What the hell do you think this is about? It’s
NATE
. It
could be anything from him having seen a squirrel, to, buddy, bring
a shovel, gloves and your lifting arms.”