Random Acts of Kindness (14 page)

Jenna stumbled a few steps, and then, realizing she didn’t have full control of her own body, she pressed her forehead against the wall and felt the sweat on the raw wood. The head of a nail protruded, digging into her skin, and the sharp feeling brought her back to the garage. Jenna tried to figure out what she was feeling. She found herself imagining Theresa striding out this garage door while tossing a flaming Molotov cocktail over her shoulder. She should be angry like that. She had a right to feel as angry as that.

She didn’t. All she felt was shock. The sensation slowly ebbed until she could feel the throbbing hollow in the place where a piece of herself was now lost.

She’d come here in the hopes of changing Nate’s mind by telling him how much she loved him. She’d come here to tell him the truth. What she hadn’t known was that from the beginning, the situation had been beyond her control.

She pushed away from the wall. The small muscles of her neck and shoulders unclenched. She’d tried her best, for Zoe’s sake. And there was something to be said for the value of finality.

She took a deep breath and summoned the plates of mental armor she needed to click over her brain, her ego, her heart. “I’ve barely looked at the papers since the day you handed them to me. I’ll have to read them again.”

She turned around to find him sitting on the floor, his back braced against the edge of the workbench. At the sound of her voice, he looked up from under the shade of his hands, his expression unreadable. His eyes were bloodshot.

She said, “I’ll need to hire a lawyer.”

“Not necessary.” He dropped his hands so they hung between his knees. “We can work out a settlement.”

“No, I need to hire a lawyer. But I’ll have to replace my phone first.” She patted her purse only to realize she was patting her hip because she’d left her purse in the car. “I’ll call you when I have a phone and a lawyer. In the meantime, you can make another appointment with yours.”

Jenna scanned the garage. She took visual inventory of the back shelves, which held soccer equipment, a basketball, a bucket full of children’s rain boots, an old pink bike with rainbow streamers.

How do you split a life?

Nate uncurled himself from his seat on the floor. “Will next week work?”

So fast. “Yes. Before we go to Pine Lake.”

Nate said, “About Pine Lake…”

Then she realized—
of course
. He wasn’t going to fly out to Pine Lake to spend a week with her family this year. They couldn’t share her childhood bed for seven days. And if he slept on the couch, that would invite questions. Jenna felt a little flutter thinking about her mother’s reaction to this news. Her mother had always adored Nate. No doubt her mother would see the divorce as just another failure by her oddball of a daughter.

He said, “Zoe could spend the extra week after camp vacationing with your family, like she usually does. We’ll figure out an excuse for not being there. Then you and I can take that week to work things out here before Zoe comes home.”

“So thoughtful of you.”

He absorbed that comment on a beat. “Your parents could put Zoe on the plane. We’ll pick her up at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport together.”

“But I’ll be in Pine Lake,” she said. “Claire and Nicole have my car. And I’d always planned to spend that week with Zoe and my parents.”

Nate’s pause was full of the unspoken. Irritation rippled through her. Yes, she and Zoe hadn’t had the best of relationships lately. Yes, Zoe would rather starve herself in her room than share a meal with her mother. That didn’t mean Jenna was going to avoid spending time with her daughter—quite the opposite. The real problem, she suspected, was that Nate didn’t trust that she could keep her mouth shut about the impending divorce until they had a chance to tell her together.

The situation was getting ugly already. “You keep telling me that there’s a right way to do this.”

“A united front.”

“Then trust me that the last thing I want to do is hurt Zoe. While I’m in Pine Lake, I won’t say a word about our divorce.” The word left a residue in her mouth, a slime she couldn’t scrape off. “In the meantime, we have to figure out a way to break this news to Zoe together.”

Nate didn’t say anything. He sagged against the workbench. His thumbs tatted on the surface. The muscles of his shoulders tightened underneath the stretch of his black T-shirt.

Her suspicions swelled with each passing beat. “Tell me you didn’t already tell Zoe about the divorce.”

“Zoe doesn’t know about the divorce.”

The way he spoke the words, Jenna could tell they were true but that he’d left something out. He turned his face away so she could only see his profile. His throat worked. He kept glancing at that old upholstered chair, the overstuffed armchair that they’d bought for five dollars at a garage sale in the early days when they had a house and no money to furnish it. Later, they’d relegated it to the garage when the fabric had torn, exposing the stained foam of the stuffing.

More than once she’d wandered in on a Saturday to deliver lunch while baby Zoe slept, only to end up pressed naked across it—

No.

In her mind, a new film reel flickered: Zoe bounding across the driveway with a school paper fluttering in her hands, calling out over the sound of music in the garage,
Daddy, Daddy, look what I got on my English test
, throwing the door open—

“No.” Jenna slammed the back of her hand so hard against her mouth she bit into her skin. “Nate—tell me
no
.”

Chicago, Illinois

T
his is why we came to Chicago?” Claire exited the elevated train at Addison station and saw the banks of lights above Wrigley Field. “To go to a baseball game?”

“Not just any baseball game.” Nicole marched through the crowd like a pilgrim on the way to Mecca. “We’re going to a
Cubs
game.”

Claire struggled to keep up with Nicole’s city pace as they took the stairs out of the station. Claire had been struggling to keep up with Nicole in a lot of ways since they retrieved Jenna’s car from the Iowa mechanic. Nicole spent all her nondriving time on her cell phone, making calls, answering texts, reserving hotel rooms, buying tickets, breaking out in laughter now and again, in a manic way that gave Claire pause. Claire’s offer to head straight-arrow to Pine Lake had knocked Nicole back into her über-efficient mode, but the effects were making Claire breathless.

“So,” she said, tugging on the hem of Nicole’s faded Cubs T-shirt in an effort to slow her down, “you’re telling me we drove seven hours to watch a bunch of millionaires throw a ball around?”

“Claire, when we were in Salt Lake City, did we visit Temple Square?”

“No, we saw Jin.”

“When we were in Wyoming, did we stop to see the Devils Tower?”

“No, but—”

“When we passed through Iowa, did we pull over to visit the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk?”

Claire didn’t respond. She’d been particularly scornful of that suggestion, as she had been of most tourist traps.

“Listen,” Nicole said, “I’ve got nothing against roadside pool halls, tacky museums, and friends’ pull-out couches. And hauling out to Kansas to chase a ghost pretty much convinced me that you’re a back-roads kind of traveler. But it’d be a crime if we continued to blow on past some of the country’s high points, especially if they’re right on route.” Nicole paused at a kiosk to peruse the regalia. “So, today, we’re doing something touristy.”

“Must we?”

“Baseball is America’s quintessential pastime.”

“You read that on the back of a Cracker Jack box.”

“You’re such a heathen.” Nicole grinned as she tried to catch the vendor’s attention. “You realize that we’re here because of you, right?”

“How did I screw up?”

“Back in Iowa, you reminded me that baseball makes me happy.” Nicole swept her gaze over the blue-shirted crowd of fans, and the hawkers of hats, bats, and little shirted bears, to the sight of the curved wall of the stadium. “You should think up something that’ll make you just as happy. Something that you won’t be able to do when you’re finally home in your thirty-acre wood.”

Claire frowned. She
had
been doing what made her happy—poking about the countryside, meeting up with old friends—right up to the moment Jenna went back to Seattle and Karma completely shifted.

Not going there.
“Don’t change the subject, Nic. You lured me to Chicago under the pretense that you wanted to do something specific, something you’ve never done before.”

“I did say that.”

“But you’ve been to Wrigley Field before.”

“A hundred times, and each time better than the last.” Nicole directed the vendor to what she wanted and then she dug out cash. “Claire, just take a good look around you. Look at all the folks here who are excited to watch a bunch of millionaires throw a ball around.”

Claire did glance around to view the river of humanity heading toward the gates of Wrigley Field, but her gaze didn’t catch on the clusters of bros and the college girls in team T-shirts or the fathers lifting their toddlers so they could better see the red sign that said “Wrigley Field, Home of the Chicago Cubs.” What snagged her attention were the same sights and sounds she’d been assaulted with since they’d first driven into the city: an odd, plinking music that reminded her of the hollow wooden ping of a Thai
ranat
but turned out to be an unshaven man making music with rubber bands stretched on a wooden frame. And a rattling of metal that turned out to be a homeless man, thin and stumbling, making the rounds shaking a paper coffee cup.

Sometimes, among her friends, she felt like the little boy in the movie
The Sixth Sense
, seeing the ghosts that others couldn’t.

Nicole plopped a Cubs baseball hat on Claire’s head and gave her a look, the kind of look you give a kid when offering a lollipop before a vaccination.

Claire tugged on the bill to settle the hat on her head. “So this is it, then? There’s nothing else on your agenda for Chicago?”

“Patience, little Buddha.” Nicole’s grin was that of a sixteen-year-old pitcher confident she could close the game. “That other thing has to wait until dark.”

Claire fell into Nicole’s wake as she headed for the will-call booth. Nicole retrieved the tickets then waved them under her nose, bouncing on her toes in excitement. Then she turned and led her through the gray bowels of the place.

“Popcorn and peanuts.” Nicole savored a deep breath as they approached the entrance to their section. “This is the perfume of my coming-of-age.”

Claire thought it smelled like urine and beer, or like a circus just after the elephants had left, but she kept quiet so as not to shatter Nicole’s reverie. They climbed up the concrete ramp into the early evening light. The lawn, bottle-green, was scattered with players. An usher checked their stubs, and they followed his directions up the gum-sticky, stained concrete steps into the shade under the upper deck. Peanut shells crackled under their feet as they sidled past a group of skinny young guys with their hair gelled up into blue mohawks.

A shout of dismay rose up around them as something happened on the field. “You’re going to have to guide me through this.” Claire squinted at the field to watch a player run. “I went to your high school softball games to hear the gospel of Nicole, not to watch the scoreboard.”

Nicole perched on the edge of the seat. “And here I thought you wore that T-shirt on purpose.”

Claire glanced down. She was wearing a shirt from a hospital walk-a-thon, swag she’d earned in a fund-raiser while Melana was still alive.

“Saint Jude,” Nicole explained, gesturing to the emblem on the front. “You know, the patron saint of lost causes?”

Claire gave her T-shirt another rueful look. “If I’d known there was a Catholic saint designated just for me, I might have converted years ago.”

But it was true that Claire knew a lot about lost causes. In her opinion, big cities like Chicago concentrated all the lost causes of the world. As she and Nicole had driven through the city earlier, Nicole had shown her the redbricked, copper-roofed public library, the rusting steel supports of the overhead trains, and the slate-blue stretch of Lake Michigan. Claire could barely raise her gaze above the streets. She’d glimpsed a tattered woman lying in the Gothic doorway of a church and felt a piercing guilt for the bag of pretzels that lay open, half-eaten, on her lap. She’d wanted to stop the car and donate one of her growing collection of hats to the man standing in the open sun, his bald head gleaming, while he dug through the garbage for soda cans. She couldn’t even appreciate the Egyptian cotton sheets and the Jacuzzi in the pricey room Nicole had insisted on, the one where they’d left Lucky with a doggy sitter. It’s hard to enjoy a luxury hotel when she could see, just outside her window, a young man holding up a sign to cars:
Will work for food
.

Nicole leaned forward to hail a peanut vendor. “There’s a lot of praying to Saint Jude that goes on here. The Cubs are Saint Jude’s most hopeless cause.”

“Jenna’s mom always said it was the Red Sox who were hopeless.”

“The Red Sox killed that curse by winning the World Series after eighty-six years. The Cubs have it worse. It’s been more than a century since they won.”

Nicole handed her a bag of peanuts. Between cracking and chewing, Nicole told her the whole history, from the Curse of the Goat in 1945 to the time in the 1969 World Series when a black cat came out on the field and stared down some guy in the batter’s box. Nicole told her about 1984 when a ground ball went through another player’s legs. She told her about 2003 and some guy named Steve Bartman.

“Holy bad Karma,” Claire muttered when Nicole had finished. “So they’ve never won once?”

“Not since nineteen oh eight. No one alive has ever seen these lovable losers win.”

“Maybe this is why I don’t understand sports.” Claire stirred her bag of peanuts and tried not to think about the hungry men panhandling outside. “Wouldn’t it be more fun to follow a winning team?”

“Yeah, I suppose it would.” Nicole paused with a handful of peanuts halfway to her mouth. “But it’s not always about winning. Well, maybe it is for the guys on the field. And the ones in the back office.” Nicole rattled the peanuts in the palm of her hand. “But if you’re going to condemn yourself to root for a team like the Cubs, you have to do it for reasons other than winning.”

Claire waited for an explanation as Nicole ate her peanuts and then pulled unshelled ones out of the oil-stained bag. She watched Nicole dig the edge of her fingernail into another seam, crack out the two peanuts, toss the shells onto the floor, and then eat the nuts, still chewing as she reached for more. Nicole’s rhythmic concentration reminded Claire of saffron-covered Buddhist monks clicking their prayer beads as they counted a mantra.

Nicole said, “You know when you work really hard for something? When you spend a lot of time and effort and money in an attempt to be really, really good—only to discover that you’re hopelessly bad at it?”

“Story of my life.”

“It’s like when I’m coaching a pee wee baseball team and
that boy
arrives.” Nicole cracked open another peanut. “I can always tell which boy it is by the way he shoves himself in the middle of the huddle. This is the kid who sleeps wearing his batting helmet. He shows up an hour early for every game. He stands on the bench yelling encouragement to his teammates. Yet he can barely run a straight line without tripping over his own sneakers.” Nicole gestured to the team spread out on the field. “That boy is the Cubs. Clumsy, overpaid, underperforming strivers. For the whole season, the fans hold their collective breath hoping the team will just this once—
just this once
—make it to the postseason. And if ever they win the World Series”—Nicole’s eyelids fluttered closed, her chest rising and falling in a sigh of imagined
ecstasy
—“it’s almost too much to consider. It’s the triumph of hope over good sense.”

The crack of a bat echoed through the stadium. A tremendous cry rose up around them as the crowd leapt to its feet. Claire winced at the screaming as thousands of eyes followed the trajectory of the ball against the pale sky until that ball—launched by a Cubs player, Claire surmised—cleared the ivy-covered wall. The roar turned to the thunder of approval and stomping and applause.

Nicole settled back in the seat, still clapping. “There’s a tradition here I should warn you about. If one of the Phillies hits a home run into the stands, we can’t keep the ball as a souvenir. We have to throw it back onto the field.”

Claire eyed Nicole’s flushed face, brighter than she’d seen it the whole trip. “You really love this.”

“These are my people. I love the ball hawks on Sheffield Avenue scrambling after baseballs hit out of the stadium during batting practice. I love the rickshaw cyclists who line up after a game to pedal all these suburban fans back to the far parking lots. And I love these peanuts.” Nicole stopped to bury her nose in the bag. “I don’t even care that they get stuck between my teeth, or that for the rest of the night my breath is going to smell like sixth grade.” Nicole leaned back and pointed to the overhang above them. “Somewhere up there is a peanut-free zone, but I can’t imagine coming to Wrigley without grabbing a bag of these and eating them here, one by one, tossing the shells. It’s a tradition. It’s part of the whole Wrigley Field ritual that keeps all of us masochistic saps coming back.”

“I don’t remember you following the Cubs in high school,” Claire said. “How long have you been a fan?”

“Since freshman year in college.” Nicole patted the wooden arm of the chair between them. “This place we’re sitting in is like the temple of my youth.”

“And here I thought the temple of your youth was Pine Lake.”

Nicole’s phone suddenly rang. She fumbled for it and glanced at the face. “I have to take this. Watch the field for me and tell me what I missed.” She stood up and shuffled past the mohawk twins. “I’ll be right back.”

As Nicole left, Claire gazed over the emerald field, the ivy-covered walls, the rickety seats, the engaged crowd, in that moment sensing the history of the place in the echoes of the rafters. Wrigley Field must look and sound much the same now as it had a hundred years ago. For Nicole and all the rabid fans, Claire supposed nothing much had changed here since their very first game.

It was funny how the constructs of youth persisted. Sometimes, in the late hours when none of them could sleep, Nicole would rhapsodize about returning to Pine Lake. Nicole’s Pine Lake was an Eden of pine-scented backyard parties and cold-lake swims, of endless campfires, of tense softball games played out on dusty mounds as the mountain sun beat on her head. Claire’s memories were a little earthier, except for one. Sometimes when Claire thought about returning home, she found herself imagining arriving at her old deep-woods house to find her sisters—
all
her sisters, laughing and lively—helping her mother put dinner on the table.

For a moment that image fluttered in her mind like the enormous luna moths that emerged at night in Thailand, when she would awaken to find flocks batting the air around her like ghosts in the darkness.

She remembered that Jenna would talk about Pine Lake, too, during those restless evenings. Jenna returned every year, so she’d kept tabs on the place. She’d mentioned that the grove by Bay Roberts had been chopped down and the public fire pit removed for insurance reasons. That a Starbucks had popped up on Main Street right down the street from Ricky’s Roast. And she’d mentioned that her daughter, Zoe, had once ridden her bike on Nicole’s old softball field, which had been relandscaped in favor of a soccer field.