Here to Stay (22 page)

“He’d love it,” Erik said.

Will rolled his sleeve down, then pointed down the lake’s shore to the property next door. “See that house?”

“I see that house every day, dumbass,” Erik said. It was a pretty Dutch colonial with an impressive deck facing the lake.

“It’s coming up for sale,” Will said.

“How do you know?”

“Because the owner is a private client of my wife’s. And my wife, God love her, has been on a mission of ingratiating herself to said client. And I think it worked because she’s made an offer.”

“Who made an offer?” Erik said. “The owner or Lucky?”

“The owner offered to Lucky to make an offer.”

Erik burst out laughing. “Dude, you are lit.”

Will smiled. “The point being,” he said with careful enunciation. “How do you feel about me maybe being your neighbor? Not to get too ahead of the game, but for shits and giggles let’s say it happened.”

“You can afford it?”

“Maurice made sure of that.”

“Really?”

“I saw his lawyer before I went to the tattoo parlor.”

Erik twisted around, surveying the distance between the houses. “Would you be able to see my bedroom window from yours?”

“Oh, hell yeah.”

Erik sat back. “How could I refuse?”

They sat in the quiet, listening to the lake lap against the dock posts and the song of the spring peepers, called tinkletoes in New Brunswick.

“Is it weird?” Will said. “The four of us?”

“What about us?”

“Wanting to live close together.”

“No.”

“It can’t be, right? We need each other. I mean, don’t tell me in the entire history of mankind, there’s never been a friendship like ours. We’re not weird. We’re probably nothing but typical.”

Erik gazed at the vista opening before him: his best friend living yards, not miles away. Nights out on the dock like this. Dinners on Barbegazi’s screened-in porch if he ever got around to building it. The Kaeger kids running between the houses. Knowing if one family went away, the other would keep an eye on things. Help always at hand.

The four of them.

Doing it together.

“I don’t care if it’s weird,” Erik said. “Buy that damn house.”

ERIK KEPT WORKING ON his French. He had a good ear and while he still struggled to put a sentence together, he at least knew what it was supposed to sound like.

“He has no game,” Will said. “But it sounds like he has game, which technically is half the game.”

Whenever Erik saw Francine, she took care to use slow, simple sentences and crystal enunciation. It drove Joe crazy.

“You’re talking to him like Charles de Gaulle,” he said.

“Charles de Gaulle spoke beautiful French,” Francine said.

“De Gaulle addressed his wife as vous.”

“So do you sometimes.”

“When I’m begging for mercy.”

“Well, that’s every night,” Francine said.

Joe glanced sideways at Erik. “Cover your ears.”

Erik laughed. “I actually followed all that.”

At home, Erik found it easiest to practice with Jack and Sara Kaeger. Their corrections didn’t make him feel as stupid. They didn’t show off or educate. They just talked to him.

At least, Sara talked to him.

“Sara will talk to a garden hose,” Will said.

Jack was a harder nut to crack.

Erik and Daisy expected a lot of adjustments being back together. Nobody expected Jack Kaeger to have such a hard time with it. He didn’t like Aunt Daisy having a live-in boyfriend. Didn’t appreciate someone on the side of the bed he’d claimed as his own. Didn’t care for this stranger in the midst.

Fini.

The engagement was a catalyst for a string of bewildering awkward moments. Sullen behavior and rude words at the communal dinner table. More than once Will ended up sending Jack to his room, then calling him down later for a forced apology that made everyone feel rotten.

Daisy tried to make extra special time alone with Jack, but it only seemed to make things worse. Erik walked a constant careful line, not being unapproachable but not being overly hearty and uncle-ish either.

“Dude, I’m sorry,” he kept saying to Will.

“No, no. He has to deal with it. But damn, who the hell saw this coming?”

“He’ll work it out,” Lucky said. “Everyone just keep being nice. We have to keep up a united front. He doesn’t have to love it, but he can’t be nasty about it.”

“When did your mother start to date again?” Daisy asked Erik. They were in the yard, edging the garden beds.

“I was in middle school, I guess,” he said. “She went out more openly when I was in high school. Like when I was a sophomore, this guy she was dating came for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“How did you feel about it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t feel bad or angry. I guess by that time I was done with any fairytale notion my dad was coming back. And done with any jealous ideas she couldn’t have anyone new. All her relationships seemed really casual. I don’t know if they were or if that was the front she was projecting for me and Pete. They were all nice, but no one guy was on the scene long enough for me to get attached.”

“Until Fred.”

Erik rested his hands on the end of the shovel and set his chin on top. “Right away I sensed Fred was different. I liked him and I liked how he treated Mom. I remember playing basketball in the driveway with him one day and it was fun and relaxed. And I kind of exhaled and thought,
This guy is different. I got a good feeling about him.”

“I wonder if your mother was waiting for that moment. Waiting for your permission. Kind of like you felt Fred was waiting for yours.”

But Erik had lost his train of thought while looking at her. Her eyes were brilliant turquoise. Her cheeks were pink with fresh air and bits of leaf matter were stuck in her hair. He reached and picked them out, the moment vibrating in his bones.

“I got a good feeling about you,” he said.

The Kaegers closed on the house next door. Two more Adirondack chairs appeared at the end of Barbegazi’s dock. Jack and Sara ran back and forth freely between the yards, repeatedly slamming the pergola gate at the center of Barbegazi’s wooden fence.

“That fence is infested with something,” Daisy said. “I don’t know if termites or carpenter ants, but every time the gate slams, you see a cloud of sawdust.”

“The fence is fine,” Erik said. “Whoever built the pergola didn’t know what they were doing. It needs to be replaced.”

“Well, get on it,” Will said. “You’re diminishing my property value.”

Erik flipped him off. “Get on this, asshole.”

Not a week later, Jack came tearing through the fence, letting the gate crash closed behind him. The pergola teetered back and forth before majestically toppling to its death. Luckily Erik was right there, cutting back the rose bushes. He yanked Jack out of the way, sending the two of them into a rolling pile just before the pergola hit the ground and disintegrated in a rubble of wood.

For a minute, neither of them said anything, lying on the grass breathing hard. Looking at the mess then at each other. Jack’s eyes were doubled in size and he appeared on the verge of running for his life.

“You all right?” Erik said.

Jack nodded slowly.

“I think we best keep this our little secret.”

Jack nodded harder. They got up, brushed off, and surveyed the mess.

“Well, that saves me the trouble of knocking it down,” Erik said, kicking at the structure.

“What will you do?” Jack said.

“I’ll build another one.”

“You know how?”

“Sure.” He went to the garage to get the wheelbarrow, not looking to see if Jack was following. He rolled back and started chucking the broken-up wood into the well. Jack reached for a piece.

“Ah ah,” Erik said. “You’ll get splinters. Go get your gloves.”

Daisy had bought Jack and Sara little garden kits, including kid-sized gloves. Jack fetched his and helped Erik pick up every piece.

“Thanks for the help,” Erik said, checking his watch. “Now I have just enough time to run out to Home Depot. See if I can get another kit.”

He walked off, pushing the barrow, again not looking back. Hardly six steps when he heard the voice behind him, along with the sound of a tiny nut cracking.

“Can I come with you?”

Erik smiled over his shoulder. “Go ask your mother.”

He built the new pergola during his next two days off. At first Jack just watched. But soon he was measuring and marking, holding and bracing. Erik tightened the straps on his extra pair of safety goggles until they fit the boy’s head. Then he coached Jack with the Makita drill, keeping his hands on top. Jack flinched at the sound and the vibration only a few times before he was confidently sinking the screws.

“Let me do it alone,” he said.

“Nope,” Erik said. “Not until you’re ten. That was my dad’s rule.”

“Where’s your dad?”

Erik paused. “He went away.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

The screw dropped on the ground as Jack looked back over his shoulder. “He went to forever? Like my pépère?”

“Kind of.”

“Were you sad?”

Erik nodded.

Jack looked down. He picked up the screw and set it carefully against the drill bit. They went back to work.

Jack stayed all day. As the sun slipped behind the trees, a rich garlicky smell drifted out of the house, beckoning.

“I made spaghetti and meatballs,” Daisy called out the kitchen door. “You want some, Jack?”

Together he and Erik washed their hands in the mudroom sink and he had dinner with them.

“Want to sleep over?” Daisy asked afterward.

Jack made a show of thinking about it. “Where would I sleep?”

“In the guest room.”

He was quiet and a little moody, but he slept over. The next morning, Daisy discovered Erik and Jack in the galley closet in the office, in deep consultation.

“What are you guys up to?”

“Uncle Erik says he can build a bed in here,” Jack said.

Erik and Daisy exchanged a single telepathic glance.

“You can?” Daisy said, eyebrows high.

“I think so,” Erik said. “Right under these eaves.”

“I can lie in bed and look out the window,” Jack said, standing on tiptoes to see out the compass rose porthole.

“A bunk bed?” Daisy asked, her elbow grazing Erik’s side.

“I was thinking a loft bed with a desk underneath,” Erik said, elbowing her back.

“It’ll be my room when I sleep over,” Jack said.

“It’ll be your office,” Erik said.

They sat at the kitchen table and drew plans. Then they built it together, hammering and nailing through a month of Sundays. Daisy went to flea markets and found a handsome patchwork quilt, a pair of reading lamps and an old radio. She hung a bulletin board over the desk and lined up mason jars with colored pencils and crayons. Erik put up tiny Christmas tree lights around the porthole window.

Jack’s only request concerned the doors. He didn’t like them shut. “Then it’s too tight in here,” he said. “It feels far away.”

Erik took the doors off their hinges and Daisy hung heavy curtains in their place.

“’Night, Uncle Erik,” Jack said, tucked up in bed. He leaned and hooked an arm around Erik’s neck in a quick hug.

“See you in the morning,” Erik said softly, rubbing the little boy’s head. He backed through the doorway and let the curtain fall.

And exhaled.