Fellow Mortals (21 page)

He takes his shoes off now and feels the cool white linoleum. Once Wing is done with the yard, Henry opens a can of Alpo, cleans the newspaper off the floor, and roams around the house, unsure of what to do. He hangs his uniform and wonders what they ought to have for dinner. Chicken cutlets in the fridge, asparagus and corn. Cooking’s out of the question, much as he’d be willing. He could barbecue the chicken but he doesn’t know a thing about seasoning, and while he’s pretty sure asparagus and corn are both boiled, he doesn’t want to risk doing something wrong. He spreads the food across the counter, along with a stick of butter, salt and pepper, and utensils. He shucks the corn and finds the little corn-shaped holders, rinses the asparagus, and preheats the grill. When he starts through the house to wait up front, Ava walks in before he’s gotten to the door.

“You’re home!” he shouts, and Wingnut’s ballistic all over again, pressing up close and jumping on her legs. “I saw your car,” Henry says. “I thought you said…”

“I changed my mind.”

She has a cooler in one hand and a bag in the other, and she’s clammy and disheveled and younger than he’s seen her all season.

“Let me take that,” he says, grabbing the cooler before she lets go and almost pulling her over. “You look great, look at that sunburn. Hey, you’re wearing Sam’s shirt,” he says, noticing a small familiar rip along the shoulder.

She blows her bangs and Henry feels it.

“Mine was bloody,” Ava says. “Sam cut his finger.”

“How? What happened?”

“He’s fine.”

“Is it bad?”

“I handled it,” she says.

Henry takes her bag and smacks her on the lips. She tastes like Spear-O-Mint and sun, Banana Boat and sweat.

“It went all right today?” she asks.

“Yeah, I gotta say, all things considered. It was weird to see your car! Wing pooped on the papers, he’s been jumping out of his skin wondering where you were. You should have taken him along, he would have loved it.”

He dumps her items on the couch. Ava’s bag topples open. Wing tinkles on the rug, too excited to contain himself, and Ava doesn’t notice till she’s kneeling on the spot.

“Dinner’s ready if you’re hungry.”

“Really?” Ava asks.

“Yeah, I laid it all out! The barbecue’s on, everything’s set to go,” and when he shows her in the kitchen, proud of his array—what a breeze it’ll be to whip it all together—he doesn’t understand why she looks so deflated. Are you supposed to shuck the corn
after
it’s been boiled?

Ava says, “You’ll have to wait. I want to shower. I’m disgusting.”

“No, you look great. But sure, go ahead. I don’t mean to rush you. You want me to start boiling the water?”

“Leave it,” Ava says. “Can you towel up the pee?”

“Wing peed? Where?”

“Never mind,” she says, reaching for the cleaner under the sink. “Why don’t you watch the grill. I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”

“Take your time,” Henry says, frowning at the food, struggling to identify the part he got wrong.

She sprinkles powder on the rug and goes upstairs, where she shuts and locks the door in case Henry and Wing decide to follow her up and loiter. But she really is relieved he had a good day back. She should have left a note and hurried back to greet him, but he’s obviously fine, even happy that she went.

She strips out of her clothes and sets the T-shirt aside so it doesn’t get lost amid the other dirty laundry. Then she showers and a day’s worth of forest rinses clean, drawing out the color in her face and arms and making her hair feel womanly again. She towels off and gets her bag, looking for the brush, and there’s a folded piece of paper hidden in the bottom.

It’s a handwritten note (“Sorry. Thanks. —S”) wrapped around a pair of twenty-dollar bills: money for the shirt she ruined with his blood. She folds it back up and slips it into her purse, and then she roots around the corners of her underwear drawer, digging out the bathing suit she hasn’t worn since the previous summer. It’s wrinkly and a horrid shade of red, almost fuchsia, but she tries it on in front of the door-length mirror, smoothing at her tummy, tugging at the straps to elevate her boobs and twisting round to see … no, absolutely
not
. She takes it off and puts it away. She’ll have to buy another. This time of year there’s a good chance of clearance and the Walmart is open well before nine. She can stop along the way, hurry in, and try one on. Something cute, maybe blue. She even has the money.

20

Billy hears a car pull up, rare for this hour on a dead-end street, and goes to the window thinking it might be Sheri. He’s in his boxers when he looks outside and sees a woman—Ava Cooper—walking from the street like she’s heading for the beach. She’s wearing sandals and a cover-up, semitransparent, over a powder-blue bathing suit and shorts. But there’s style to her hair, enough to show some effort, and she doesn’t look around like a stranger dropping in. Henry’s back at work—Peg told him all about it—so she must be here alone. She must have been invited.

Billy presses on the screen, memorizing everything, especially when she passes and he sees her from behind. She walks around the trailer and continues into the trees and then she’s gone, swallowed up by the darkness of the leaves. Maybe Sam’s getting even. Maybe Ava got bored. He draws the blinds and takes his boxers off, actually in pain until he stretches on the bed and works it out. It’s not enough.

He showers for the first time in two or three days. He combs his hair and splashes aftershave in several different places, anywhere his heat will activate the scent. The laundry isn’t done but one of his polo shirts smells clean enough to wear, so he puts it on with jeans, adds a belt, and laces up his work boots.

He walks out back and heads toward the trail, cringing from the sun until he’s made it to the cover of the trees. All he means to do is ramble out and say hello, and how can Sam resent it when he’s talked to everyone else—everyone but him, who’s tried to let him be. Ava will appreciate his neighborly concern. She’ll offer him a soda and encourage him to stay. And if he comes upon the two of them together like he thinks, he can’t be held responsible for anything he sees.

He steps as carefully as possible to minimize the noise. They might have wandered off at any point along the way; the trail could lead to nothing but the ATV. Whenever there’s a gap, Billy listens more attentively, studying the ground and peering into the trees. Once he hears a bird that might have been her laugh, and when he stops to look around, turning three or four times, he can’t remember which direction he was going when he stopped. He feels ridiculous and stupid getting lost on the trail, but then he seems to get his bearings and continues on his way. He’s preoccupied with checking to the right and to the left, and he’s amazed to look ahead and see a cabin in the sun.

How could nobody have known? Maybe everybody did know. Maybe
he’s
the only person no one bothered telling. He’s astonished by the thought that Henry helped him build it.

After waiting half a minute and deciding he’s alone, he crosses to the door, knocks gently just in case, and opens it enough to have a reasonable peek. There’s a chest and a table and a set of plastic chairs. He steps inside and finds a bookcase, partly full of books but also bottles, cans, and packages of nonperishable food. Lot of beans, lot of soup. Beer and jugs of water. There’s a kerosene lantern hanging from a rafter, and a mattress and a pillow in a loft above the door.

He notices a small plastic bag behind a chair. He picks it up—it’s from a drugstore—and studies the receipt. Hairclip, chewing gum, vitamins, conditioner. The hairclip’s missing but the rest of it is here. He opens the conditioner and blots it on his hand, giving it a sniff before he rubs it into his skin. The chewing gum’s open, several pieces gone. He peels the foil back, picks one out, and puts the rest of it away exactly as he found it.

After checking the windows and deciding that it’s safe, he leaves the cabin, shuts the door, and wonders where to go. He chews the piece of gum and puts the wrapper in his pocket, wishing he had read the flavor on the package. Some kind of berry, probably a mix, so delicious that he swallows it and wishes there were more.

*   *   *

Ava made the mistake of bossing Sam around the second day, saying “Careful with the bag” after he had volunteered to carry it, along with the cooler, all the way back to her chair. He’s been calling her the goddess ever since and Ava’s taken to the name, accepting compliments and favors and behaving like a muse. Yesterday he struggled with the newest sculpture’s leg—it was forced, too unnatural and crude above the ankle—and he finally had to ask her if she’d model for a minute. Ava held the pose, tilting forward on the chair, while he scrutinized her leg and told her how to flex. She’s been glancing at her calf on and off ever since.

The sculpture is a maiden weaving on a loom. She’s sitting on a block, leaning forward in a dress, delicately balanced on her fine white toes. Her body’s spindly, not a bit like Ava’s aside from the calf (and possibly the mouth; Ava’s studied it and wondered), and her face wears a look of desperate concentration, focused on a loom Sam fashioned out of sticks.

The roots spreading open from the overturned trunk are growing from her back, right between the shoulders—four crooked limbs, spidery and wide. They’re hideously jointed and appear to be in motion, and he’s hung the web of grapevine everywhere behind her. It’s an intricate design, interwoven from the trees, doubled by the great skein of shadow on the ground.

Ava stretches in the sun, admiring his work. She’s enjoyed watching details emerge throughout the week, how the swells became the shoulders and the angles turned to elbows, and even though the roots have made it hideous and strange, it’s gorgeous in its way and easily her favorite.

Sam fiddles with the web and stabilizes knots while Ava tells the anecdote, lovingly embroidered, of the day she met Henry in the middle of a china shop.

“An actual china shop?”

“More of a dinnerware store,” Ava says. “I needed plates.”

He was the youngest mailman she’d ever seen, without a mustache in those days and skinnier by twenty-five pounds. She paid him little mind when he walked into the store with a handful of letters, but he claims to have noticed Ava right away and lingered at the counter while he chatted up the owner. His laugh annoyed her first—she had thought the word
guffaw
—and when she turned and caught him staring, Henry waved instead of hiding. Ava, being gracious, felt compelled to wave back, and that was all it took for Henry to approach her.

He’d been a shortstop in high school and still had the walk—the bowlegged saunter of a player with a cup. Ava held a plate, pretending not to see him. He was handsome, she admitted, but his brashness put her off. In a moment of distraction, just before he spoke, she fumbled with her hands and bobbled the plate. Henry lunged to catch it and collided with her breast. She’d later accuse him of copping a feel—he never did deny it—but the grope was hardly noticed in the thousand-dollar crash. Henry’s mailbag snagged along the corner of a table and a pyramid of china—yes, literally china—had collapsed upon itself and shattered into bits.

But he had caught the plate. He gave it back to her intact and his expression seemed to indicate that
she
had been to blame. He made her wait ten minutes while he settled with the owner, who liked Henry enough to let him pay the damages in interest-free installments. She was mortified, prepared to make the finest of apologies, but then he grinned at her and said, “I hope our second date’s cheaper.”

“And you dated after that?”

“No, of course not,” Ava says. “He saw me one day a couple of weeks later and followed me home. Once he knew where I lived, he got my name out of the postal directory. He didn’t call me but he followed me around, especially on the weekends. I’d see him at the movies and the market … he’d come to my favorite diner on Saturday morning. But he didn’t try to hide it. Every time he saw me, he would wave and yell hello. Eventually I just got used to seeing him around. One day at the diner, I said we might as well share a booth if he planned to stare at me the whole time. He bought me breakfast. That was our first date.”

She eats an ice-cream sandwich, nearly melted in the cooler. By the last few bites the cookie’s soggy in her fingers. The trees look luxuriant, heavy with humidity and late-summer green, and there isn’t a breeze so much as a lazy flow of air, syrupy and spreading in a sweet, amber glow.

“How did you and Laura meet?”

“She was working at the drugstore in town,” Sam says, tightening another loose section of the vines. “Not in the pharmacy yet, only checkout. She was finishing her degree and I was still working toward my MFA.”

“You were kids,” Ava says.

“Yeah, we were,” Sam agrees. “So I was standing in line behind an old woman with a folder full of soda coupons.”

“I know that lady. There must be a thousand of her.”

“Laura was at the register trying to explain why certain coupons didn’t work with other discounts, and I found myself staring at her throat. There was something about it, maybe the collar of her shirt, maybe the little gold pendant she was wearing. It was summer, I don’t know—she looked really good.

“And I kind of spaced out and suddenly the coupon lady wasn’t there, and here’s this girl at the register giving me a frown because I’m obviously ogling her and two or three people are behind me in the line. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m a sculptor. I was studying your neck.’ One of the customers groaned but Laura said, ‘That’s okay. I’m a model. I’m only working here to make sure they carry all my magazine covers.’

“So I hopped out of line and got a three-pack of soap. I paid at another register, went in the parking lot, and carved one of the bars into a rabbit like the pendant she was wearing. I wrote my name and number on the back of the receipt, wrapped it up with the rabbit in my shopping bag, and gave it to her at the register. I left before she opened it. She called me that night and asked me out. We had dinner a few nights later and I asked her what she thought about the soap. She said it dried her skin too much and that I ought to switch brands. I couldn’t believe she’d
used
it. I thought she might have done it just to mess with me a bit. But later on it seemed sexy … really intimate, you know? She was playful like that, at least in the beginning. Everything was thrilling. Just a shower. Just dinner.”