Shelter Me (27 page)

“Where are you going?” he asked, standing.

“To get Carly!”

“Janie, don’t wake her up. Just go. I’ll stay here.”

“What? No! You can’t…she’ll freak out if she…”

“No, she won’t. Just go.”

Janie grabbed her keys off the hook inside the front door and sprinted for the car. When she careened into the school parking lot, she almost forgot to turn off the motor before she got out. S
chool’s only been open for a week,
she chastised herself,
and already I’m late…Bad mommy, bad mommy…

When she got to the door of his classroom, all the kids were gone except for Dylan, who was holding Miss Sharon’s hand and chewing on the strap of his backpack.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” gushed Janie. “I am so sorry!”

“Did you go to the doctor?” asked Dylan.

“No, I just…lost track…” Her heart was pounding and she had to reach for the doorway to steady herself.

Miss Sharon gave her a look of forced patience. “I know the start of school can be a bit of a transition, but we really need parents to be on time. It’s best for everyone.”

“Yes, I know. I’m really sorry,” said Janie, taking Dylan’s hand and leading him out of the classroom. Miss Sharon’s condescending tone rankled her, but she was more concerned about Dylan. “Sorry, sweetie,” she whispered.

“It’s okay.” He gave Miss Sharon a quick backward glance. “Wait till Keane’s father does pickup,” he said, and put a cupped hand over his mouth to cover his smile.

Carly was sitting in her highchair when they got home, her face still crinkled with sleep lines, eating the grapes that Tug had brought her. He was leaning against the kitchen counter and saying things into his cell phone like, “They have to have it…they
always have it…so call Sudbury Lumber…” He snapped the phone shut. “Gotta go,” he told them.

“Thanks so much,” she said. “For lunch, too. Next time it’s on me, and you’re doing all the talking.”

Without actually smiling, his face seemed to take on a faint glow of accomplishment. “Deal,” he said.

F
OR SOME REASON IT
was the swim lessons, not the mortgage payments or preschool tuition, that made Janie take a hard look at her finances. They were just so much more expensive than she expected. She wondered if she should postpone them until she went back to work and there was some inbound cash flow.

It had been Shelly, with her compulsive attention to detail and divorce-honed sense of self-preservation, who’d set the course for Janie’s financial security. A week after Robby died, she had come over with Chinese takeout (which was never eaten because Janie could ingest nothing more than an occasional pistachio muffin, and it was midweek so Shelly ate only kale or some other odd green vegetable). Shelly had stayed long after the General Gao Chicken had gone cold, sprinkling Janie with gentle but persistent questions about her “safety net.” Robby, the banker, had always handled the finances, so Janie’s answers were, as she now remembered, clearly subpar. She didn’t know how much they had in savings, CDs, stocks, mutual funds, college accounts, IRAs, or 401(k)s. She wasn’t entirely sure where those accounts were, and in some cases, if they even existed.

Shelly grabbed the loose and flapping monetary reins. She discovered that, yes, there were savings, a few CDs, and two 401(k) accounts. She contacted Robby’s employer and negotiated an additional three months of health insurance coverage. She automated
almost all the bills—mortgage, utilities, telephone, etc.—so that Janie would only have to move money into her checking account and pay off her credit card every month. This Shelly had handled herself until around April, when Janie began to seem somewhat less stuporous during their semiweekly online banking sessions.

Shelly had also done all the paperwork to collect on Robby’s life insurance policy and had increased Janie’s own policy significantly, in case it were ever needed, “God forbid.” The payoff from Robby’s policy had seemed enormous—too much, in some ways: Janie had never aspired to wealth and did not have expensive taste in clothes or home furnishings, her main luxury being premium coffee beans. But no amount of money was any compensation for the loss of Robby, and in that sense it seemed a snickeringly small sum.

The swim lessons cost more than she’d paid for anything that hadn’t been on Shelly’s budget spreadsheet, except for the porch, which had somehow never seemed optional. The lessons fell into that “discretionary purchases” column that had remained benignly blank since its creation eight months ago. Janie was now struggling with her discretionary spending skills, blunted from disuse.

“Mom?” said Dylan, standing in the doorway, goggles swinging from an outstretched finger. “Can I wear them now?”

It was time for Dylan to have an actual reason to don his favorite eyewear, Janie decided in that moment. Maybe if he wore them in a swimming pool, he wouldn’t need to wear them around the house quite so much. It would be worth the money just to find out.

T
HE NEXT
M
ONDAY
, J
ANIE
picked up Keane and Dylan and brought them for their first lesson. Dylan had been oddly concerned about which of his two bathing suits to wear. He liked the blue one with the sharks the best. That had been apparent all summer on the rare occasions when both bathing suits were clean (rather than
one or the other of them found balled at the bottom of his backpack like some small, wet sandy animal).

“Come on, Dylan, just grab one. We’re going to be late for school,” Janie had said.

“It’s important!” he’d replied with a tremor of panic in his voice. Finally he chose the red one with the orange waist band.

After pickup, the boys were buzzing with silliness in the back of the car, their booster seats shoehorned in next to Carly’s toddler seat. They poked at each other and howled with laughter when one of them passed gas. “Toot, toot, tootie!” called Keane.

“You’re a fart head!” Dylan sang out.

“No potty talk, please,” warned Janie, knowing that it was all but useless, like sending compulsive poker players to Las Vegas and saying, “No gambling, please.” The boys giggled in the back and whispered their bathroom words to each other.

“Who’s excited about swim lessons?” asked Janie, trying to derail the toilet talk.

“Me!” they both yelled.

“Well, kinda,” added Keane. “I maybe might sink.”

“Yeah, I’m kinda nervous,” said Dylan.

“Why are you nervous?” asked Janie.

“I just am.”

Keane did sink on numerous occasions, his pale white arms slashing at the water as if he were engaged in battle. The swim instructor, a young man with a thick nest of curly hair that he seemed intent on keeping dry, plucked Keane from the chop of his own waves over and over again. Watching from poolside, Carly asleep in her arms, Janie saw that Dylan took these moments to lift his goggles and scan the deck. When his eyes alit on her, he would give a little wave, then keep on looking.

The lesson was over and Janie escorted the boys to the women’s locker room.

“Let’s have these two showers,” said Keane. “They’re right next to each other. I’ll knock on the wall and you knock back.”

Dylan complied, but Janie couldn’t help but notice how quiet he was. Not sullen exactly, but working out some puzzle, perhaps, that distracted him from Keane’s announcements that he was knocking with his elbow, his knee, his butt. When they finished rinsing off, Janie knelt down, Carly still draped limply over her shoulder, and wrapped them each in their towels. Keane sprinted toward the changing room, racing to see who could get dressed the fastest.

“Hey,” said Janie, hanging on to Dylan’s towel for an extra moment. “What’s on your mind?”

His eyes blinked rapidly as he tried to conjure up the right words. “Dad…,” he said.

Janie tucked and retucked the towel. “Yeah?” she said.

“I thought…he always was here before. I know he’s in heaven and he can’t come back, like you said. But we always put our goggles on together, and went swimming together. And it seemed like he might be here…even though he can’t. I wore the red bathing suit so he could see me better…if he came…in case he didn’t recognize me from his trip to heaven.”

Janie nodded, smoothed the towel, readjusted Carly over her shoulder. Tears welled in her eyes.

“Sorry to make you cry, Mom.”

“You didn’t make me cry, honey. It’s just sad. It’s always going to be…disappointing when he’s not here. Even though we know he can’t be here, we’re still sad and disappointed when he’s not.”

“Are you always going to cry?”

“I don’t know. I might sometimes. Does it make you worry?”

“A little.”

She nodded again, pushing at the twisting tension in her throat. This is what the book had said, this is what she knew. You had to keep reminding them. You had to keep talking. “You know how sometimes there’s a right answer and a wrong answer to things? Like your name is Dylan. That’s the right answer. If someone calls you Bob or Bill, that’s wrong.”

“Yeah.” He fingered his goggles, sending them around and around through his hands like worry beads.

“Sometimes crying is the right answer. For me, right now, it is. And then I’ll stop, okay?”

“Okay.” His pale eyes watched her face, studied her tears, a towel-skirted weatherman checking the precipitation. His hands were still now, clutching the goggles, waiting.

“Hey,” she said, her face relaxing, turning to wipe her drippy chin on her shoulder. “Maybe goggles are the right answer sometimes.”

A smile, half embarrassed, half relieved, bloomed on his face.

“I win!” yelled Keane, appearing at the doorway to the dressing area, white-blond hair an electrified frenzy around his face.

“No fair!” called Dylan. He ran to get his clothes on, the tight-wrapped towel causing him to scuttle penguin-like, the goggles flapping through the damp human smell of the locker room.

E
ACH WEEK
, T
UG CAME
for lunch. Sometimes he brought his cooler; other times he might arrive with wicker furniture catalogues or a little toy for Carly or a bag of particularly burly-tasting coffee beans. Janie found herself stocking sliced turkey; a jar of roasted red peppers now sat in the door of her fridge. Tug’s appearances weren’t exactly planned, but nonetheless seemed to be settling into a Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays tempo. He always made casual mention of his softball schedule. Janie and the kids usually made it to the home games, though they rarely stayed until the end.

“How’d you get the name Tug?” Janie asked him one day, as Carly fingered pieces of Muenster cheese on her highchair tray. He would beat the sawdust out of his jeans as he walked toward the house, and Janie could see faint lines across the thighs, a fingerprint here, a darker palm-shaped spot there.

“From Sue,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “My parents always called me A.J.—Augustus Junior.”

“Well?”

“You really want to hear it?” he asked. He ran a hand back across his head. It lingered there a moment then flopped back into his lap. Janie knew this meant he was hesitating for some reason, perhaps because it was painful to talk about, or merely because he didn’t know where to start. Her curiosity about him had grown over the last several weeks. She remembered when he told her that Sue had been the one to initiate the divorce, and at the time it seemed like far more information than she wanted or had a right to. But now he wasn’t just that guy with the power tools out in her front yard, creating maddening clouds of sawdust with the hum of his saws-all. Now he wiped other people’s sawdust from his jeans before he came in. “Up to you,” she answered.

He shrugged as if it didn’t matter one way or the other to him, but she could see two things: it was painful, and he did want to tell her. It reassured her, this quandary he was in. It was her own quandary—being attached to the past, constrained by a rupture that might never fuse; and yet the mail still arrived, children continued to outgrow their clothes, the house demanded maintenance and repair. Connections with other people continued to occur, despite all her intentions to shut them out. Unlikely connections at that. The countless stories that made up her life—and his—hadn’t evaporated, as almost everything else had seemed to. Might as well tell them.

“You probably wish you’d stuck with A.J.,” she said to get him started.

“Nah,” he said. “It’s not like that.”

He and Sue had grown up together in Natick. “Always had a bit of a thing for her, even before I really, you know, thought about girls.” As he described her, Janie saw that she was like Heidi, in that every-hair-in-place, always-wearing-just-the-right-thing kind of way. She was friendly and smart and, unlike Heidi, so rock-solid sure of herself that she was the one most often chosen
to lead the class in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or to take a sick friend to the nurse’s office.

“Teacher’s pet?” asked Janie.

“Not really,” said Tug. “Teachers loved her, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think she ever handed in even one assignment late, including the time her family went to Florida for February vacation and got stuck there for three extra days because the airline went on strike. But she wasn’t a goody-goody either. She was just driven to do things right, be the best. People admired her for it.”

Tug had gathered sufficient courage to ask her out in the seventh grade, after a summer of bamboo-like growth, with a voice that was now an octave lower. She had taken a week to think about it. During that week, Tug could feel himself being pulled into the vortex of her correctness. He studied more, got his hair trimmed, and spent far less time playing desk football with folded-up wads of lined paper during study hall. Suddenly he was aware of how ridiculous he looked with his fingers formed into a mini goalpost when it was the other guy’s turn to try for the extra point.

After thorough consideration, she accepted him, and they dated all through junior high, unlike most of their friends, who changed partners like school was one big square dance. Sue didn’t approve of that. Waste of time, jockeying in and out of “relationships” based on little more than whether your friends thought you looked cute together.

The summer between junior high and high school was a different story, however. Sue calmly explained to him that she thought it was for their own good to date other people and try the many new activities that high school had to offer. She was considering joining the debate team and wanted to be able to concentrate her full attention on being Natick’s first female debate champion.

Tug had assumed there was another guy, and accordingly dated up a vengeful storm that summer and throughout the fall. He was surprised to find that he never got turned down, and attributed this at least in part to Sue. Any guy deemed good enough for her
must be something. And he was something. He could see how she’d molded him into someone with higher standards and aspirations beyond what had been expected of him by others. His grades were good and he had become an excellent third baseman, fairly confident that he could make the high school team in the spring. Sue would have expected nothing less.

But spring was a long way off, and he was having a hard time distracting himself from the rumors of Sue dating the captain of the debate team. The first night of Christmas break, one of his friends had a party, and Sue showed up with the debate captain. Tug was mortified, having come without a date, and proceeded to try and correct the situation with whoever was handy. From across the room, with his fingers safely entwined in those of some girl he barely knew, Tug was stunned to see Sue take a swig from a bottle of beer. Sue didn’t drink.

“She used to say, ‘Alcohol is for people without ambition.’ I found out later she hadn’t done well at a debate. She hadn’t done that badly, you understand, but she hadn’t come in top three, either.”

A few days later there was a huge snowstorm. Almost two feet of snow fell overnight, and the only thing that made it slightly less exciting was that, being vacation, it hadn’t resulted in a school cancellation. Most of Tug’s buddies spent the morning sitting on lunch trays, testing the durability of their spines as they sped down Walnut Hill. Well-trained by Sue to seize opportunity, Tug was making fistfuls of cash shoveling his neighbors’ driveways.