Barefoot (5 page)

The house was quiet. Vicki and the kids were sleeping, and Brenda was outside talking to . . . that handsome kid from the airport, the one who had offered Melanie first aid. It figured. Melanie hadn’t gotten the whole story about Brenda and her student, but it didn’t take a wizard to figure out that Brenda was a loose cannon. Promiscuous. Easy. Look at the way she was touching the kid’s shoulder, then shaking her boobs at him. And he was just a kid, in his twenties, though quite adorable. He had smiled at Melanie when he offered the first aid, like he’d wanted to help but wasn’t sure how. Melanie sighed. When was the last time Peter had smiled at her? She pulled the shades against the sun. The only good thing about pregnant sleep was that she was too exhausted to dream.

Brenda was the only adult awake when the phone rang. She had cleared Aunt Liv’s tea set and all the ceramic knickknacks and enamel boxes from the coffee table so that she and Blaine could play Chutes and Ladders. The baby, meanwhile, would sit in Brenda’s lap for thirty or forty seconds, then climb over her folded knees like Hannibal over the mountains and he was off, crawling across the satiny floorboards, pulling at lamps, fingering electrical cords, plugs, outlets. Somehow, while Brenda was teaching Blaine to count out spaces on the board, Porter put a dime in his mouth. Brenda heard him gagging, and she picked him up and smacked him on the back; the dime went flying across the room. Blaine moved himself forward an illegal fourteen spaces, and Brenda, although desperate for the game to be over, made him move back on principle. He started to cry. Brenda gathered him into her lap, and Porter crawled into the kitchen. At least he was too short to reach the knives. But then, as Brenda explained to Blaine that if he cheated at games no one would ever want to play with him, she heard a muffled thud that sickened her heart.

“Porter?” she said.

He gurgled happily in response.

Brenda slid Blaine off her lap. Aunt Liv’s banjo clock chimed; it was six-thirty. Vicki and Melanie had been in their respective rooms with the doors closed since three. Brenda would have welcomed three and a half quiet hours for herself—but she was not pregnant and she did not have cancer.
Cancer,
she thought. Did the word ever get less scary and horrible? If you repeated it often enough and understood it better, did it lose that Grim Reaper chill?

In the kitchen, Brenda found her two-hundred-year-old first edition of
The Innocent Impostor
splayed on the floor like a dead bird. Porter sat next to the book, chewing on something. The cap to Brenda’s pen.

Brenda cried out. Gently, she picked up the book, amazed that as old as it was, it hadn’t crumbled into dust from the impact. She never should have taken it out of the briefcase—the book, like an elderly person, needed to be coddled. She smoothed the pages and swaddled it in its plastic cover, nestled it in the bubble wrap and locked it up, safe from grubby little hands. She plucked the pen cap out of Porter’s drooly little mouth and threw it, with some force, into the kitchen trash.

Her problems were small beans, she reminded herself. In comparison, that was. She did not have cancer, she was not carrying her cheating husband’s baby. Out of three bad situations, hers was the least dire. Was that a blessing or a curse?
I am grateful for my health. I will not feel sorry for myself. I am here to help Vicki, my sister, who has cancer.
Two hours after the news of Brenda’s dismissal hit Champion’s campus, Brenda had received an e-mail from a colleague of hers at the University of Iowa.
Rumor has it you’ve been axed,
Neil Gilinski wrote.
Rumor has it you committed the only sin that can’t be forgiven other than out-and-out plagiarism.
Brenda’s heart had tumbled. The news of her disgrace had traveled halfway across the country in two hours. It might as well have appeared on Page Six. But she would not feel sorry for herself. She would be grateful for her health.

“Auntie Brenda!” Blaine called out. “Come on! It’s your turn!”

“Okay,” Brenda said. “I’ll be right there.”

At that moment, the phone rang. The phone hung on the kitchen wall; it was white, with a rotary dial. Its ring was cranky and mechanical: a hammer hitting a bell. The sound made Brenda’s breath catch. Fear seeped into her chest. Brian Delaney, Esquire, had already left two urgent-sounding messages on her cell phone.
Call me, please. Dammit, Brenda, call me.
But Brenda didn’t want—indeed, couldn’t afford—to call him back. Every phone call cost her a hundred dollars. If Brian had good news, such as the art restoration professional at Champion had found no permanent damage to the painting in question and the English Department had decided to drop all charges, then he could leave a message saying as much. And if Brian had bad news, she didn’t want to hear it. Every time her cell phone rang, she prayed it would be Walsh. That it should be her lawyer added insult to injury. But the cottage’s ringing phone took Brenda by surprise. She had known the phone number at Number Eleven Shell Street since she was a little girl, but she hadn’t given the number to Walsh or to Brian Delaney, Esquire. Which meant it was probably her mother.

“Hello?” Brenda said.

“Is my wife there?” a man asked. He sounded even angrier than Brenda.

How did people live without caller ID? “Ted?” Brenda said.

“I said, is my
wife
there? This is the number she left on the note. A note! ‘Gone for the summer.’ What the hell?”

“You mean Melanie?” Brenda said. She was impressed that Melanie had bolted with only a note.

“Yes, Melanie!”

“She’s here,” Brenda said. “But she’s not available.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can’t explain it any more clearly,” Brenda said. “She . . . is . . .not . . . available.”

“Put her on the phone,” the husband said.

“No,” Brenda said. She gazed at her briefcase and felt fresh relief that it hadn’t vanished into the purgatory reserved for lost luggage, and then she checked on Porter, who had found the other half of Brenda’s pen. His mouth was bleeding blue ink. “Oh, geez,” Brenda said. When she lunged for the pen, Porter crawled away and Brenda nearly yanked the phone off the wall. In seconds, Porter and the pen were inches from Vicki’s bedroom door. “I’m sorry,” Brenda said. She hung up on Melanie’s husband.

As she buckled Blaine and Porter into the double jog stroller, she wondered,
Why isn’t there an Olympic crawling event for babies?
Porter would win. Then she thought, Melanie’s husband sounded pretty damn entitled for someone who was having an affair.

“I’m hungry,” Blaine said. “When are we having dinner?”

“Good question,” Brenda said. She hadn’t eaten since Au Bon Pain in LaGuardia. There was no food in the house, and it was possible that Vicki might sleep until morning. Brenda ran inside and helped herself to forty dollars from Vicki’s wallet—she’d earned it.

As Brenda pushed the stroller over the crushed shells toward the market, she thought,
I am helping my sister, who is very sick
.
Sick
sounded better than
cancer
. People got sick all the time, and then they got better.
Vicki is sick, but she will get better, and in the meantime, I will take care of everything.
But Brenda feared she wouldn’t be able to handle it. She had visited with the kids often since the previous September, when she moved back east from Iowa City to take the job at Champion—but she’d never had both of them alone for three whole hours. How did Vicki do it—one crawling all over creation, into everything, while the other one asked a hundred questions a minute, like,
What’s your favorite number, Auntie Brenda? Mine is nine. No, actually, mine is three hundred and six. Is that more than fifty?
How did Vicki keep her mind from turning into a bowl of porridge? Why had Brenda thought that spending the summer taking care of the children would be something she would excel at? What led her to believe that she’d have a single quiet hour to try her hand at screenwriting? Melanie had said she would pitch in, but look what happened—she’d nearly killed Porter coming off the airplane and then she dozed off like Sleeping Beauty. That left Brenda holding the bag. Brenda to cover the kids, Brenda to drive Vicki to chemo, Brenda to shop for the food—and cook? This was what Brenda had offered, earnest in her desire to redeem herself, to prove to her sister and parents that she was neither soft nor rotten, she was neither self-centered nor self-destructive. She was not a person who typically broke rules or committed sins. She was a nice person, a good person. But really,
really,
Brenda thought, it wasn’t as easy as that. She
was
soft; she
was
self-centered. And Vicki was asking too much of Brenda this summer; she wanted Brenda to be her
wife,
and what if Brenda couldn’t do it? What she craved the most right now was quiet, even the quiet solitude of her apartment back in Manhattan. But to free herself of the rent, Brenda had sublet the apartment to her best friend in the world, Erik vanCott, and his fiancée. Erik and Noel would be making love in the bed that had most recently been occupied by Brenda and Walsh. Brenda had an exquisite longing in her stomach that was unique to being separated from one’s true love. She could call Walsh, she thought, palming her cell phone. But no. She wouldn’t pitch all of her resolutions into the trash can just yet. It was only the first day!

At the market, Brenda bought milk, bread, a log of goat cheese, some purple figs, a pound of gourmet butter (this was the only kind they had), a bunch of bananas, a pint of strawberries, a bag of Chips Ahoy!, and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food. Thirty-five dollars. Even Brenda, who was used to Manhattan prices, gulped. She gave the bag of cookies to Blaine, snatching one for herself first and one for Porter to gnaw on. As she was leaving the market, she noticed a bulletin board by the door. Yoga on the beach at sunrise, missing cat, room to share.

Yes,
she thought.

She went back to the counter and borrowed an old flyer from the deli and a nearly used-up black marker. In streaky gray letters, she wrote:
Babysitter wanted. Flexible hours, daily, in ’Sconset. Two boys, 4 years and 9 months. Experience required. References. Please call 257-6101.

She pinned it to the bulletin board in a prominent place, and then she strolled the kids home with one hand and held the bag of very expensive groceries in the other. If Brenda had just a little assistance with the kids, she would be better able to help Vicki and she would be able to start her screenplay, which might possibly earn her money and keep her from being a financial burden to Ted and Vicki and her parents. A voice in Brenda’s head whispered,
Soft. Self-centered.

Oh, shut up,
Brenda thought.

That night at dinner—steak tips, a baked potato, iceberg salad—Josh told his father he was thinking of quitting the airport.

Tom Flynn didn’t respond right away. He was a quiet man; Josh had always thought of him as stingy with words. It was as though he withheld them on purpose to frustrate and annoy people, especially Josh. What Josh realized was that in not speaking, Tom Flynn prompted other people—and especially Josh—to say too much.

“It’s boring,” Josh said. He did not share the story about the three women, the woman falling, the baby, the briefcase, or the delivery of the briefcase to ’Sconset, though Josh understood it was this incident that was causing him to think about quitting. “It’s pointless. I’d rather be doing something else.”

“Really?” Tom Flynn said. He cut into his wedge of iceberg lettuce. Always with dinner they had iceberg salad. It was one of the many sad things about Josh’s father, though again, Josh couldn’t say exactly why. It was his refusal to deviate, his insistence on routine, the same salad winter, spring, summer, fall. It was tied to the death of Josh’s mother eleven years earlier. She had hanged herself from a beam in the attic while Tom was at work and Josh was at school. She hadn’t left a note—no hint or clue as to why she did what she did. She had seemed, if not overly happy, at least steady. She had grown up on the island, she had gone away to Plymouth State College, she had worked as an office manager for a construction company. She had few close friends but everybody knew her—Janey Flynn, nee Cumberland.
Pretty lady, runs the show at Dimmity Brothers, married to Tom who works out at the airport, one son, good-looking kid, smart as a whip.
That was his mother’s biography—nothing flashy but nothing sinister either, no quiet desperation that Tom or Josh knew of. And yet.

So at the age of twelve Josh was left with just his father, who battled against his anger and confusion and grief with predictability, safety, evenness. Tom Flynn had never yelled at Josh; he never lost his temper; he showed his love the best way he knew how: by working, by putting food on the table, by saving his money to send Josh to Middlebury. But sometimes, when Josh looked at his father, he saw a man suspended in his sorrow, floating in it the way a fetal pig in the biology lab at school floated in formaldehyde.

“Yeah,” Josh said. “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.” Josh wished he had taken a job off-island for the summer, at a camp in Vermont or something. He liked kids.

The phone rang. Josh finished off his bottle of Sam Adams and went to answer it, since, invariably, it was for him.

“Josh?” It was Didi. It sounded like she was a couple of drinks ahead of him. “Wanna come over?”

“Come over” meant sex. Didi rented a basement apartment in a house on Fairgrounds Road, less than a mile away. The apartment was all hers and Josh liked the privacy of it, though it was always damp, and it smelled like her cat.

“Nah,” he said.

“Come on,” she said. “Please?”

Josh thought of Scowling Sister in the green shimmery bikini top.

“Sorry,” he said. “Not tonight.”

T
he duck-breast sandwich with fig chutney wrapped in white butcher paper from Café L’Auberge on Eleventh Street. Spinach in her teeth. The smell of a new car. Blaine’s preschool field trip to the dairy farm. Colleen Redd’s baby shower. The baseball standings.