“Okay, thanks,” he says. “Um, I’ll come in early tomorrow to clean up what doesn’t get done tonight. Don’t worry. I think the fans will really do it.”
Mr. Beardsley looks back out toward the doors. “You think?”
“Yeah, totally.”
“I don’t know. I hope you’re right. Okay, well, go on then. Have a good night.”
“Thanks. See you tomorrow,” Henry calls out over the sound.
Cup-a-Joe is already closed he notes, getting into his Jeep. Most of the stores along the street are closed. Henry starts up the Jeep and puts it right into Reverse instead of waiting the thirty seconds he normally does to let the engine warm up. He hurries along Main Street and soon pulls up in front of his parents’ house.
“Hel-lo? Mom?” he calls out, shutting the door behind. “Mom?”
He hears the refrigerator door closing so he goes into the kitchen.
She is mixing the orange juice into the vodka, ice cubes jingling.
“Hey, Mom,” he says.
“Hey is for horses,” she says. She is alert, her smile full of recognition, but Henry has been fooled before. He steels himself and sure enough the impulse to rush to her, hug her, bury his head in her chest, dissipates as she teeters past him to the living room. Imperious. Regal. And very, very drunk.
“You doing all right? You seem better today. Did you take your pills?”
“Did you take your pills, listen to this. My son doddering over me like I’m an old lady.”
“You okay on groceries?” Henry ignores her comment and goes back to see how they are holding up, food-wise.
“Liquid lunch,” she says, toasting the air in front of her and spilling a little in the process.
“Mom, you really shouldn’t be…”
“Don’t even finish that sentence, Henry Powell. Where’s my Brad? He came by yesterday but only stayed a few minutes.”
“That was me, Mom,” Henry says. “Brad’s in Portland, remember?”
“That was most certainly not you,” she says.
“It was me. You want to watch something? What’s on now?”
“I want to watch something with my Brad,” she says. “He was always so sweet. Did I ever tell you about the time he tiptoed into the kitchen after I’d burned a roast that tasted like an old shoe?” She leaned over conspiratorially as if this were not her own son she was speaking with. “He tiptoed in and whispered to me that he’d liked it just fine. He said it just like that, ‘It was fine, Mom. Just fine.’ So sweet, my Brad.”
A little later Henry pulls his Jeep into space number twelve in front of his apartment building. There are two visitor spots for every unit in his building but his have never been used.
He unlocks the top lock, then the bottom, lets himself in and closes the door. He throws his keys like dice to the counter and reaches for the phone book.
“L, m, n…n…ni…Nichitas…Nicholas,” Henry says. “C. Nicholas. Bingo. C. Nicholas, 452 Railroad Avenue.”
He looks up and squints while tracing the back roads of town in his head. Railroad Avenue should be familiar as he knows where the tracks are and how they cut through town, but he is quite certain the road that runs alongside it is Lock-ridge. The train tracks are not so obvious in their division of the town for they cut through like a knife into a sandwich, separating east from west to no effect. Rather, the real distinction lies between the town’s north and south.
After the cluster of Victorians and small Cape Cods huddling near downtown, the roads wend their way north past larger properties, set farther back from the road. In many cases, tucked nicely in the center of manicured and landscaped lawns, more likely called grounds. Homes protected by gates, some wrought iron, others fashioned to look like barn locks, crisscrossed-and-painted wood. Mallard mailboxes, stone walls, forsythia, boxwood and rhododendron, in different combinations, complete the complexion. Over there the Petersons’, where Henry drank too much beer after their senior prom and passed out in the pool house next to fat Sally Evans, who had vomited up her drinks. Over here the Childers’, where Henry walked in on Steve Wilson, a junior at the time, in the master bedroom with a classmate’s college-age sister. Just up that hill, behind the Alcatraz gates, sophomore Henry brokered a peace agreement between John von Sutter and Kitty Connors, who were on the angry side of the breakup-reconcile pendulum.
In one motion the phone book is closed and keys are grabbed. The light is fading and Henry wants to set out while he can still read street signs.
The Top 40 station is playing “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” and it crosses Henry’s mind that 1985 is not a good year for music. He hasn’t bought a record in two months. Turning from his low-rise apartment complex he drives down Elm to Lock-ridge and follows the tracks, slowing at each intersecting street to read the signs. Mason, Brookridge, Shore and one that has no sign at all but could not be Railroad as it dead-ends into the town dump.
Two verses into Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen” he sees it. Railroad Avenue. He takes a chance and turns right but it is wrong, as all initial directional choices turn out to be. The numbers are going lower from 132, not higher. So he pulls into a driveway in front of a decrepit boxy house and flips the Jeep into Reverse, lowering the radio before backing out.
He slows in front of number 452, a brick apartment building that yields no clues, as he had hoped it would. He parks the Jeep across the street and waits. Other than a discarded plastic bag jellyfish dancing along the sidewalk, filling up then deflating with wind, there is no movement anywhere on the block. An empty Tab can rolls under a car across from his. He turns up the radio even though it’s “Ghostbusters,” a song he hates. He rests his head back and closes his eyes, remembering her trying to blow her hair out of her face. Then shaking his hand. Then saying her name. Cathy Nicholas.
By the time he opens his eyes, “Purple Rain” is ending and it is dark. No plastic bag in sight. Several lights are on in the apartments facing the street and he regrets not getting out earlier to see which is hers. He cannot do it now, he reasons, because someone may have seen him—she may have seen him—and he feels he must go home.
In the dating world there is a finite amount of time in which date requests can be made following random meetings. To Henry’s way of thinking, this period is not greater than forty-eight hours. The sooner the better, he tells himself. And so the next day, the day after meeting her, Henry goes in to Cup-a-Joe before going in to work.
“Hey,” he says once it is his turn to place an order.
“Hi, there,” she says. “What can I get for you?”
“We met yesterday,” he says, coloring. “The flooding? You dropped your keys?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says. But she does not appear to remember. “How are you?”
“I’m Henry,” he says. “It’s Cathy, right? I helped you unlock the store in the morning.”
“Oooh, yeah,” she says, this time with genuine recognition. “Thanks again.” She glances around him to the line that has developed. “What can I get you?”
“Ah, actually I was wondering if you wanted to grab a bite later,” he says. “Lunch, maybe?”
“What? Oh, ah, I don’t know,” she says. “Um, do you mind…I’m not supposed to…um, can I just help this…ah, lemme see.” The stammers are meant to encourage Henry to move over to the side of the register so others can order.
Before he can do this the woman in back of him in line tilts Von Trapp-family-style to the side to catch Cathy’s eye and orders a decaf. Henry now sees the line and moves over.
“I’m sorry,” Cathy says, turning to fill the order, “it’s a really bad time right now.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Henry says. “Sorry. I’ll come back. I’ll try you again later.”
“Yeah, thanks. Sorry,” she says.
“No problem.”
But it does indeed present a problem to Henry, who is now unsure of when he can revisit the topic with her. Did she mean it was a bad time now as in time o
f day, he wonders, or as in time in her life? He decides she must have been alluding to the early-morning rush for caffeine.
Baxter’s is dark and locked, as Henry knew it would be this early. It is eight o’clock, two hours before the store is set to open. Even though he told Mr. Beardsley he would open the store, he had half expected his boss to be there himself to assess the damage.
Henry separates the store key from the others on his key ring and unlocks the door. The smell is like a punch. Mildew. Unmistakable. It reminds Henry of the boathouse at Fox Run where they jockeyed for the newer, less-smelly, life jackets before sailing class.
Henry knows Mr. Beardsley will unravel when he arrives so he hurries over to the phone.
“This better be an emergency,” Tom Geigan says in lieu of “hello.”
Geigan has worked at the local hardware store for as long as Henry could remember. His specialty is cutting keys. There is a sign reading Key Korner above his tiny nook toward the back of the store. Henry at first thought him much older but in fact only two years separate them—Geigan dropped out of high school and Henry assumed this adds to the division.
They met soon after Henry began working at Baxter’s in his senior year of high school, but both seemed to sense his impermanence so, while they were cordial to each other (no smiles, just respectful head nods and the occasional “How you doing?”), they more or less kept to themselves. It wasn’t until Henry was full-time at Baxter’s and found himself sitting on the bar stool next to Geigan that they both spoke to each other in complete sentences and the friendship took flight. Still—Henry being completely honest here—he had the itch of a thought that the friendship was temporary. The feeling that it would not be the sort of friendship to withstand a geographical move or a major life change. There was something that kept them off kilter. Fox Run? Henry was not sure.
“You don’t even know who this is,” Henry says.
“I don’t care who it is. If you’re calling at this hour, it better be an emergency,” Tom says. “There’s a construction site banging away in my head.”
“Yeah, well, get up, it’s an emergency,” Henry says. “You’ve got to come down here.”
“What is it?” Henry can tell Tom’s eyes are now open with yawning curiosity.
“How fast can you get here? Seriously.”
“Seriously, you better tell me what the fuck is so damn important and then I’ll tell you how fast I’ll be,” he says. Another yawn.
“Just get down here,” Henry says and hangs up.
The phone rings before Henry has moved away from the counter.
“I’m serious,” Henry says, sure that it is Tom calling back.
“What? Henry?” It is Mr. Beardsley.
“Oh, sorry,” Henry says. “I thought you were someone else. Actually I was just going to call you….”
“Jesus. How bad is it? Did the smell go away? Is it dry?”
“Everything’s fine,” Henry lies. “I was just going to check in, you know, see how it went last night.”
“I was there until one in the morning,” Mr. Beardsley says. “But really, is it okay?”
“Yeah, sure, everything’s okay. Actually, why don’t you come in late. Since you were here until one and all.”
“So now you’re setting my hours? What’s going on, Henry?”
“No. I mean I’m not trying to set your hours. I’m just saying, I’ve got everything covered here and if you wanted to take your time getting in that’d be fine. Sorry.”
“I am a bit tired.”
“There. See? Just take your time. I’ve got it covered.”
There is a pause and Henry cannot be sure but he thinks he hears Mr. Beardsley stifling a yawn. That, he thinks, would be perfect: if Mr. Beardsley could go back to sleep that would be perfect.
“All right,” Mr. Beardsley says. “I’ll see you in a little while.”
“Take your time.”
Henry hangs up and goes back to the front doors, opening them one at a time so he can unfold the gateleg rubber stoppers that prevent them from closing. Fresh air wafts into the store. He imagines it a fight between superheroes: the strong, evil Mr. Mildew standing, feet apart, hands on hips defying the lightweight but equally powerful Captain Fresh Air, master of all that is good and right and decent, to try to thwart Mildew’s diabolical plan.
Because Baxter’s is a storefront in the middle of the block there are no windows to open. But it occurs to Henry that the backroom door, the emergency door, could be opened. This would create a crosswind. He looks out the front doors, up and down the sidewalk, to make sure gangs of looters aren’t lying in wait for the opportunity to make off with armloads of men’s clothing. Then he moves through the store, dodging displays as if they are players on an opposing team, Henry with the golden football under his arm.
The back door is metal and has a menacing brace across it that cautions it is not to be used or “alarms will sound.” But he happens to know the alarm will not sound because the company that installed the fire door went out of business two years ago. The door is issuing empty threats. The crossbar makes an official-sounding clang as it unlocks the door to Fresh Air’s troops, hurrying in as Henry lowers the bridge across the moat.
“Yo! Powell!” It is Tom. Henry can hear him say Jesus frigging Christ and knows the smell has hit him.
“I’m back here,” Henry yells out. “Hang on. Be right there.”
He is looking for something to prop open the door and finds a cinder block mercifully close to the door in the alley.
“Hey,” he says in greeting Tom.
“What the hell happened? It smells like shit in here,” Tom says.
“Shit.” Henry had hoped Tom would arrive wondering why he’d been called in.
“Beardsley’s gonna freak out, man,” Tom says. He is shaking his head.
“What should I do? You’ve got to help me think of something,” Henry says.
“Did you do this?”
“Did I do what?”
“I don’t know, this,” Tom gestures to the problem area, including a wave of his arms meant to include the smell.
“No! Why would I do this? The store flooded yesterday. With all the rain,” Henry says.
“Why are you so worried, then, man? You guys got insurance to cover flooding, right? Plus it’s not like it’s your store. Let Beardsley worry about it. Why’ve you got your panties in a wad?”
Henry steps out onto the sidewalk to see if it is not windy out or if there is another reason air is not moving through the store as he had hoped. No wind.
“Seriously, man.” Tom has followed him out. “I can’t believe you hauled me down here when you could be dialing frigging State Farm. You should’ve come out last night. Blackie’s was packed. I got two numbers.”
Geigan was perpetually gathering pretty girls’ phone numbers. Even not-so-pretty girls. He held on to them like lottery tickets.
Henry stalks back into the store. It’s one of life’s great mysteries, Henry thinks. How that shitty—yes, shitty, so there—mullet can get women and I can’t. Screw him. Screw State Farm.
Still, and for different reasons, a tiny part of Henry cannot believe he is so concerned with the store carpet. Not because it very well may be an insurance issue but because this is not what he had in mind. That tiny little voice in his head thinks this is not how I thought my life would go. But this only annoys him more so he shakes it out of his head, like a random piece of lint, picked off clothing, that won’t float off from a hand.
It occurs to him that the fans will create what Mother Nature cannot: a perfect crosswind. “Just give me a hand, will you?”
“Did you hear a word I’ve said?” Tom asks, following him to the backroom.
“I heard you,” Henry says, handing Tom a fan. Just drop it, he thinks. For God’s sake, drop it. “I’ve got an idea. Here. Take this one and set it up facing the street up toward the middle of the store. I’m going to plug this one in here so it can get it s
tarted from back here.” He has to yell over the whirring fan as he plugs it in.
Henry comes up to just past sportswear and pushes pants and jackets wider apart to accommodate the fan. “Here.”
“It’s not gonna reach,” Tom says. “Where’s your outlet? You got an extension cord?”
“Yeah, let me go get it.”
“This is stupid, man,” Tom calls out across the store to him. “I’m telling you.”
“Here.” Henry hands him one end and snakes the coil along the floor to the closest outlet.
The second fan starts, taking the ball passed off from a huffing Captain Fresh Air and carrying it to the gray cement end zone.
Henry checks his watch. It is eight-thirty so he has an hour and a half until he should start looking for Mr. Beardsley. He knows Mr. Beardsley will, in the end, not be late.
“I’m going on a coffee run,” he says to Tom, who is lighting a cigarette outside in front of the store. “What do you want?”
“Now you’re talking,” Tom says, inhaling. “Black. Large. Just how I like my women.” Which Henry knows is not true—he has never known Tom Geigan to date a black woman. What he does know is Tom Geigan adds this phrase—just how I like my women—to anything ending in an adjective. If a traffic jam is slow and snarling Tom would follow up with just how I like my women.
“I’ll be right back. Can you stay right in front here just in case?”
Tom nods but says, “In case of what?”
Henry walks over to Cup-a-Joe. This time it is empty. He hurries in when he sees a car pulling up out front.
“Hey,” he says to Cathy.
“Hey,” she says back. She pushes her hair behind her ears and smoothes her apron.
Is she blushing? I think she’s blushing, he thinks. She definitely smiled at me. Be cool. Be cool.
“Could I get two coffees to go?” Henry asks. “Large. Both black.”
While she is filling the first cup, pulling down the black knob on the tall round metal container behind the register, he has the opportunity to appreciate her backside, which, he realizes, is perfect in size. Her Levi’s are tight and faded. With her back to him he works up courage and is surprised at his ability to say out loud what only moments before he had wished he could say. This is an infrequent but welcome occurrence.