Shelter Me (29 page)
Authors: Juliette Fay
“You can’t do this!”
“Do what, exactly.”
“You can’t want so bad to be here! It’s too hard!”
Tug slammed down the thermos with the chocolate milk in it. He shook his head, struggling for words. “Do you think I like this? This was not what I had in mind when I took this job, believe me! I didn’t even want the damned job once I knew…what…that he…” He jammed his hands in his pockets, took a breath.
“What do you mean you didn’t want the job. You showed up here with a signed contract and told me you were starting the following week! Which you didn’t, by the way. You blew me off for a month!”
“That’s right, I gave you a whole month to back out. Why do you think I did that?”
“Because my little porch is so inconsequential and you had bigger fish on the line!” Janie said pointing her finger at him.
“No, because your husband was dead. And my wife of twenty-some-odd years was divorcing me, and I couldn’t stand to be around someone else in pain. I had enough of my own.”
Janie’s mouth dropped open. “Well…then why did you take the job?”
“Because he wanted you to have it!”
“And how was that your responsibility?”
“Jesus, Janie!” He shook his head in frustration. Fury clamped around his eyes and jaws. “Jesus,” he muttered again, then took a deep breath and exhaled. “I was somebody’s husband once. And if I had died with a gift for my wife in my pocket, I sure as hell would have wanted someone to take the damned thing out and give it to her before the lid closed on my coffin.”
Janie felt weak all of a sudden, and her eyes began to sting with a warning of tears. She sank down onto a kitchen chair. Carly was in the living room, the discordant notes of her little piano floating through the house.
“I’m sorry,” Tug muttered. “I don’t mean to be the guy who wouldn’t go home.”
“No,” Janie shook her head, stared at the coarse-grained oak table. “You’re not mostly.”
“Mostly.”
Her face softened and she glanced over at him. “You just have to be clear that I’m not…looking for more than friendship.”
“I know,” he said. “Neither am I, really. I should stop coming by so often.”
“No!” She said this with a vehemence that surprised them both. She did want him around. And while she knew that misunderstandings and hurt feelings were possible—probable even—it seemed to be the going price for having him to talk to on Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays. And for a standing invitation to all his home games. And for those pats on the hand, which she really didn’t mind so much.
“Listen,” she said. “If I tell you something, can you take it the way I mean it?”
He nodded, watching her and waiting, she knew, for a bomb to drop. She didn’t like it, this power she now seemed to have to hurt him. But if she wanted the balance of power restored between them, she had to hand over a little piece of herself, an embarrassing fact that would offer him some small protection from the damage she could do. “I missed you at the party last night,” she admitted, barely able to look at him. “I wished you were here.”
His relief was palpable, and a slow smile started around his eyes.
“Don’t smile!” she cringed.
“Then next time,” he said, leveling a gaze at her like a dare, “invite me.”
F
OR
H
ALLOWEEN
, D
YLAN WANTED
to be a knight.
“Not a pirate?” asked Janie.
“No, I’m bored of them now.”
So she cut cardboard into the shape of a shield and stapled a cardboard strap to the back. She fashioned an empty wrapping paper tube into a sword. And she covered these and his bike helmet with aluminum foil. Dylan was so excited that he convinced her of his need to “try it out a little bit.” Within twenty-four hours, the foil was off the helmet, the strap was off the shield, and the sword was bent in so many places it looked like a large, shiny elbow macaroni.
“Can’t we just buy one?” he asked, after a brief and unconvincing expression of regret for ruining all her work.
“There’s a ton of costumes at Target,” offered Tug. His noon lunch with Janie had been delayed until two o’clock by a surly plumber, whom Tug had eventually fired. Tug had to admit to himself that the guy’s making him late for lunch had played a small but pivotal role in the termination.
“What were you doing at Target?” asked Janie. She could imagine him at any hardware store in town, but Target, with its comforter sets and Crock-Pots and entire aisle of hair accessories, seemed completely un-Tug-like.
“When a man needs new boxers, he needs new boxers.”
“Too much information!” she said, putting her hands over her ears.
Tug laughed. “Oh, get over it.”
“Did you get a costume?” Dylan asked Tug.
“Uh, no. I don’t usually go out for Halloween, buddy.”
“Why not?”
“Uh…” He looked to Janie for help.
“Yeah, why not?” she teased.
“You could come with us!” said Dylan.
Again, Tug looked to Janie. Did he want an out or an invitation? she wondered. And what did she want? “Come,” she said. “You can help me carry all the costume pieces when Dylan gets tired of holding them.”
M
ONDAY
, N
OVEMBER
5
It can’t possibly be November. But it’s getting cold and rainy, and the supermarket has turkey basters and cans of pumpkin in the center aisle, so maybe it is.
Halloween was fun. Dylan was a “nice knight, not the bad kind” and very happy with his plastic sword and shield. Aunt Jude came across a toddler-sized ladybug costume in the clothing donations at Table of Plenty. Not exactly what the well-dressed homeless person is wearing this season, so she nabbed it for Carly. Barb came over with her camera. Among the close-ups of antennae and sword handles, I’m sure there are some very cute pictures. Tug came, too. He was dressed as a guy who’s not covered in sawdust with a tape measure clipped to his jeans. He looked nice.
And now we have more Milk Duds and Tootsie Rolls than we could ever eat in a lifetime. Tug stuck around and took care of a couple of chocolate bars after I put the kids to bed. He still hasn’t told me why Sue divorced him. The obvious reason is infidelity, but I just don’t see it. He doesn’t seem like a cheater. Maybe she wanted to have kids and he didn’t? But he loves
kids, couldn’t be more thoughtful with mine. There’s always money, I guess, but he seems to be making a pretty good living. The longer he doesn’t tell me, the more I want to know.
I went to the soup kitchen with Aunt Jude on Saturday. I brought a bunch of the candy Dylan collected but doesn’t like (and even some he does). I’ve learned that alcoholics like sweets, and eating sugar helps stave off the craving for booze. So I was very popular for a few minutes there.
Beryl was back. She told me about her recent travels up north. She stepped across the border into Maine and stepped back into New Hampshire again, then crossed and recrossed. She likes the feeling of getting to choose over and over where she will be. She likes to change course suddenly, just because she can and no one can stop her.
But then apparently someone did change her course. “A distinctly indecorous gentleman” who caught her sleeping beneath the awning of an office building tried to “press his advantage.” It sounded pretty scary, but she preferred not to say too much. She did leave Portland “posthaste” and returned to the relative safety of Pelham.
I have this strange notion that I could take her home, give her a shower and a haircut, put her in one set of clothes (not three), and take her to tea at the Ritz. No one would know that she wasn’t some genteel older woman with season’s tickets to the ballet. My question is who was Beryl before she was home less and a little crazy and incapable of staying in any one place for more than an hour? Was she like this as a little girl? Did something happen that traumatized her so much that her brain chemicals got flowing in the wrong direction? Who was Beryl before she was Beryl?
Malcolm’s younger sister in Oregon is getting worse. He had me write a sad, desperate letter to his nephew begging him to stay by her side and be good to her. He hinted that he knew his sister hadn’t always been easy to live with, that perhaps she
wasn’t the best mother she might have been under other, better circumstances. Malcolm implored his nephew to set all that aside, to imagine her in her earliest days, “unstained by hard ship.” Malcolm remembered her as a very beautiful, sweet-tempered child and wished that he could give these memories to his nephew so he would know that his mother had been good. A baby is the purest thing there is, he said, and everyone was a baby once. “She was my baby, the only one I’ll ever get, so please, please take care of her.”
I cried. I couldn’t help it. The impulse to avoid pain, even other people’s pain, is so great. And yet there we are, Aunt Jude and I, almost every Saturday. Otherwise who would type the letters?
L
ATER THAT WEEK
, C
ORMAC
and Barb stopped by with the pictures from Halloween. “Just a few,” said Barb. “The ones you’d like.”
“What about the ones I wouldn’t like?”
“Oh…No, I…,” stuttered Barb. “There aren’t any you wouldn’t like, so much as they wouldn’t…interest you.”
“Artsy shots,” interjected Cormac, giving Janie a Watch Yourself look. “You know, antennae and stuff.”
“They might interest me,” Janie said. “Who doesn’t like antennae?”
Barb looked to Cormac for interpretation, and found him rolling his eyes and smirking at Janie. “You wouldn’t know antennae if they bit you on the ass!”
“At least I know that antennae don’t
bite
, biscuit boy!”
Cormac turned to Barb, “That’s it, she’s out of the wedding.”
“What?” said Barb. “It’s only seven weeks away—”
“Oh please, Cousin Cormac, please,” Janie mock whined. “PLEASE can I be in your wedding?”
“I hate it when she begs,” he said to Barb. He swung an arm around Janie’s neck and pulled her in tight, grabbing her chin in his other hand. “Okay, but you better be good, understand? No
bad girls in the wedding, chickie.” It was all in fun, but the message was clear.
“I swear on a stack of cookbooks,” she puckered at him, “I’ll be good.”
They looked through the pictures, and it wasn’t hard for Janie to be enthusiastic and appreciative. Barb seemed to have an uncanny knack for making her subjects show themselves: Dylan, sword held high, practically channeling King Arthur; Carly hurling herself across the room, looking for all the world as if the ladybug costume were meant for actual flight.
There were sweet pictures and funny pictures of various groupings, and one last picture of Tug coming in the door. He was looking at Dylan, who was prepared to engage him in battle, the two of them facing each other with an unlikely combination of aggression and warmth.
That’s right,
thought Janie,
his shirt was plaid.
It was a button down, with pale tracings of green and tan intersecting each other in pleasing combinations. And it smelled good, she remembered from standing next to him on countless doorsteps, as she held Carly, and Dylan practiced his trick-or-treat manners.
He must use laundry detergent with a nice scent.
It took a moment for Janie to realize that she was in the picture, too, standing to the side and a little behind Tug, her gaze directed toward him. She was smiling, but there was more than that. There was a look of…what? She remembered feeling happy, almost relieved, when he arrived. His enthusiasm for the kids’ costumes had been very sweet. And he wasn’t intrusive with them, the way so many adults were with other people’s children. He didn’t force interaction. Dylan talked to Tug if he felt like it, and if he didn’t, Tug let him be.
It was easy, Janie realized, looking at that picture. Tug’s cautious but steady march toward further involvement in their lives had mostly been easy, save for the occasional minor skirmish between the two of them. Not so minor, really, but over now, and
each one had served to clarify their relationship, to make further contact easier.
Gratitude,
she realized, studying the picture.
That’s me being grateful.
I
T STARTED OUT WITH
a headache, the kind that made Janie momentarily wonder if she was experiencing some sort of rapid-onset blindness. Her eyelashes hurt. It was painful to turn her head. As heavily caffeine-dependent as she was, however, the feeling was not completely unknown to her. It was the kind of headache she’d had a couple of times before when, for various reasons, she’d neglected to drink her usual three or four cups of coffee.
One time, she and Robby had been camping, and the coffee grounds had been “forgotten.” Robby thought it was a good opportunity for her to “detox.” Janie responded by climbing back into the tent, dosing herself with the emergency Benadryl from the first-aid kit, and sleeping for six hours. That was after she broke up with him and hit him in the back of the head with her hiking boot.
This time, Janie had had her coffee. But she drank another two cups just to be sure, and took some Tylenol. The headache got worse and spread to her back and arms. By the time she got the kids off to bed, she was shivering and pale. Her dreams that night came in snapshots: the kids and her on a rotting raft at night in the middle of a river; pellets of rain beating down on their unprotected heads; Dylan’s horrified face, beads of sweat exploding from his pores; Carly biting her own arm.
As the sun began to blare through her bedroom window, Janie roused, wrapped her comforter around her and reached for the phone. “Aunt Jude.” Her voice sounded as if she had recently been dug from a glacier and defrosted.
“Janie? Janie? Is everything alright? Are the children—?”
Janie winced and held the phone away from her ear. “I’m sick.”
Aunt Jude began a relentless litany of her sick friends, the illnesses she’d heard about, and the illnesses her sick friends had heard about. “Do you want me to come over? I could get the children dressed, feed them some breakfast, do you have any milk, I could bring some—”
“Just come.”
Some time later, she had no idea how much later, Janie heard the snap of the screen door on the porch. Some time after that she heard voices on the landing outside her bedroom. “Mommy’s sick, honey, she needs her rest.”
“Can I see her?”
“We don’t want to wake her.”
“But can I just SEE her? With my EYES?” Her bedroom door opened slowly, and Janie squinted across the room at them: Aunt Jude holding Carly in her little pink Easter dress; Dylan with his black curls wet-combed across his head from a newly made side part.
“Hi, Mom,” Dylan whispered loudly. “You’re sick, right?”
“Yes, sweetie,” she croaked.
“I’ll take him to school, and Carly can come home with me,” said Aunt Jude. “I’ve got the car seats and the diaper bag. Are you okay?”
“Probably just a twenty-four-hour thing,” Janie murmured, though neither of them really believed that.
After they’d gone, Janie wished she’d asked for a glass of water. Then she was rafting again with the kids, who were tied to a mast without a sail. The rotting wood was slippery and Janie kept losing her balance and sliding to the edge of the logs, the swirling water black as tar by her feet.
Later, a man’s voice came from the bottom of the stairs, and Janie thought,
Thank God.
“Tug,” she said, trying to raise her voice, knowing she hadn’t.
His work boots made hushed thuds on the stairs. “You alright?” he said from the doorway.
“I feel like hell,” she said.
He came forward into the room, moving across it tentatively, as if crossing the border of an unknown country. Stopping by the bed, hands in his pockets, he asked, “Fever?”
“Can’t find the thermometer.”
She saw him hesitate for a moment, then decide to sit on the edge of her bed. He reached out a hand and placed it gently on her forehead. It was cool and leathery, and she could feel her own heat seeping into it. Then he had both hands on her cheeks. Again the coolness, the momentary relief. He reached under the blankets, searching for something, and took her hand. His fingers pressed on her wrist while he studied his battered watch. “Janie, girl,” he said shaking his head at her, “you are in tough shape. Your pulse is racing and you’re putting out enough BTUs to melt your hair.”
“Just put your hands on my face again,” she murmured. He smiled as he reached for her cheeks.
He asked her about her symptoms, if she’d taken any medication, was she drinking water, did she have any ibuprofen, where exactly would it be? He left and returned. Ice water, a cool wet washcloth, little reddish-brown coated pills. As she struggled to sit up, he arranged her pillows behind her so she could lean back and still be sufficiently upright to drink.
“These blankets have to go,” he said. “You’re cooking yourself.” One by one he pulled them off, folded them neatly and laid them on the chair, which was still covered with all the clothing and undergarments she’d peeled off the night before. He left her only the top sheet.
“Freezing,” she said from under the cold damp of the washcloth.
“Sorry. It’ll be okay once the ibuprofen kicks in.”
