A lazy snowfall had started when Flora climbed into the backseat, slamming the door behind her, and when I turned to greet her, I saw her stick her tongue out at a boy crossing the street.
“Is that your boyfriend?” I teased, even as I thought: Don’t tell me it’s starting already!
“Boyfriend?” said Flora, spitting out the word. “That’s Tyler Renfield. That’s the new kid I told you about—the grossest boy in the class.”
“What makes him so gross?” asked Jenny, watching the boy pull a stocking cap out of his jacket pocket and tug it over his red hair.
Flora tsked loudly, as if asking, Isn’t it obvious?
“Well, first of all, he’s a big show-off. If he’s not called on during math, he throws a little fit, and then he says back where he used to live, he went to a private school with only boys in it and he says he wishes he could go back to it, because all-boy classes are just naturally smarter, and then he plays the saxophone in band, and the way he plays—I’m not kidding—sounds like a really bad baby crying.”
Jenny laughed into the collar of her pea coat.
“And today when Miss March asked what people were doing over Thanksgiving, he raised his hand and blurted out—even before Miss Marsh called on him—that his mom and dad and little brother are going to Hawaii ‘for a little Honolulu getaway.’ Isn’t that show-offy and stupid, saying ‘a little Honolulu getaway’?”
As I pulled into the street, I was about to respond, but Flora wasn’t done talking yet.
“He said, ‘My parents like to do things spontaneous,’ and then Miss Marsh corrected him—ha!—and said ‘do things spontaneously.’
“And then he said, ‘We do spontaneous things all the time. It’s the Renfield way.’”
Flora’s voice was coated with scorn, and I could understand why; this kid sounded like a real jerk, who’d grow up to be the kind of adult who’d brag about being led through the casbah by a line of belly dancers during his latest vacation and then ask to see the photos of your recent trip to Duluth.
“Is he familiar with the Andreson-Pratt way?” I asked, pissed off at this little creep, who admittedly had made me question the last spur-of-the-moment thing I’d done.
“Yeah,” said Jenny.
I smiled at my cheerleader on the passenger side of the car as a wave of spontaneity crashed over me and I switched the right-turn signal I had just turned on to the left.
“Where’re we going, Papa mon Joe?” asked Flora, noticing the change of direction.
“Well,” I said, reaching over to take Jenny’s gloved hand, “if this beautiful woman is agreeable, I think we should go get married.”
The hinges of Jenny’s mouth were unscrewed. We had in fact just taken the very big step of getting our marriage license the week before, in anticipation of a wedding whose time and place we thought—but hadn’t yet planned—would occur in the spring.
Thankfully, the screws tightened quickly and her mouth widened into a smile. “We’ll have to go home to get our license.”
“In my wallet, dear lady.”
“Hot diggety,” she said, “today is my wedding day.”
Flora cackled in the backseat.
“The Andreson-Pratt way,” she said, the implication being Take that, Tyler Renfield.
Seeing a florist shop on Cedar Avenue, Jenny insisted we stop.
“Come on, Flora, help me pick out some flowers,” she said as I pulled over to the curb. “You will be my flower girl, won’t you?”
“Certainement!” she said, and as I watched both my girls run into the shop, a blue shadow fell across my happiness as I remembered the trip I had taken to a florist with Darva, shopping for a homecoming corsage for Shannon. The shadow flickered as I laughed, remembering the look on the clerk’s face when Darva revealed her date was the football quarterback about to undergo transgender hormonal treatments.
“And now look where we are,” I said out loud. “Your daughter—our daughter—is going to be the flower girl.”
Three months after we stood in front of the clerk in a small courthouse room whose smell of burnt popcorn rode over the perfume and cologne left behind by the brides and grooms who had gone before us (“Sorry,” said the clerk, “the break room’s right down the hall and our microwave’s kind of iffy”), Jenny found out she was pregnant. Counting back the weeks, I was certain that we had conceived on Christmas Eve, but she reminded me that the entire month of December had been one long extended honeymoon and we could hardly pinpoint one particular day.
“Say what you will,” I said, pulling her toward me, “but I remember hearing something on the roof just as I was coming.”
Jenny laughed, kissing me. “And that gives your argument credibility how?”
I drew my head back and frowned at her ignorance.
“Well, it was obviously Santa Claus I heard. Santa Claus dropping off our present.”
Twenty-one
And we’ve got Charlene from Birmingham. Good evening, you’re On the Air with God.
Finally! I kept getting a busy signal for over an hour!
How can I help you, Charlene?
Well, Kristi, what do you do as a Christian woman when your own child says he’s not a believer?
Is that what happened to you, Charlene?
(Sniffling) Yes. My very own son who I raised in the Baptist Church now tells me religion is “the opiate of the masses.”
Is your son new to college, Charlene?
Well, yes he is, ma’am. He’s a freshman at ’Bama.
I wouldn’t take him too seriously then, Charlene. College is a time of discovery, and it sounds like he’s out there flexing his brand-new wings.
But I don’t want him to flex his wings! I want him to love the Lord!
Which he probably will do, Charlene, once he gets this rebellion out of his system.
But he tells me things like, “religion is all a matter of geography—if we lived in India or Japan, we’d be Hindu or Buddhist!”
That’s probably true, Charlene, but fortunately for you, you were born in America where it’s easy to know the truth of Jesus.
You know what my son would say to that? He’d say, “Well, what about those Hindu people or those Buddhists? It’s not their fault they were born in places where it’s not so easy to know the truth of Jesus.”
And that’s why we have missionaries, Charlene. Now, in the meantime, just be patient with your son and pray for him. If he’s been raised with a good Christian foundation, I guarantee he’ll come back to it.
I hope you’re right, Kristi.
The point is, Charlene: God is.
At the twentieth reunion of the Ole Bull High Class of ’72, a guy named Keith Pugh had a heart attack. I knew him slightly—he hadn’t been in any of my classes, but I’d asked him questions for one of my Roving Reporter interviews—and had spoken with him that night in the buffet line. He had told me he had his own athletic and exercise equipment store called Buff Stuff and that he’d give me a good price on a treadmill or weight machine if I was interested.
Jenny and I were out on the crammed little dance floor, bopping away to Three Dog Night’s “One Is the Loneliest Number,” when there was a flurry of motion below the little stage where the DJ spun his records and someone yelled, “Get Marcy!”
The former valedictorian, now a doctor, pushed through the crowd of people who twenty years ago had teased her for being a nerd.
She knelt down beside the prostrate alum and, after checking his pulse, ordered someone to call 911 and began CPR.
“Someone should call Kristi Casey,” said Charlie Olsen as we watched the EMT crew load him on a stretcher. “That guy looks like he could use a miracle.”
In her absence, Kristi was nearly as popular a topic as jobs and kids and divorces, and throughout the night I heard people talking about her.
“Did you know she’s a regular on that HCL show?”
“It’s a bunch of crap, but I tune it in for her. She’s still a
fox, but I can hardly believe what comes out of her mouth.”
“Yeah,” said Blake Erlandsson. “If she’s never tried marijuana, I’d sure like to know what she was smoking all those times in my dad’s car! I’ll bet if she’d known I’d become a pharmaceutical salesman, she’d never have broken up with me!”
“How come she never comes back here?”
“Probably because she knows we’re wise to her.”
“Hey, people change.” This was said by Shannon Saxon, who had traded in her philandering chiropractor for a TV weatherman. “Although I never saw anyone change as drastically as she did.”
“I thought she was the most fantastic creature I’d ever seen,” said Leonard Doerr, with his lovely German wife at his side, “until she opened her mouth and said something nasty to you. Which she did to me on average of…oh, every day.”
Greg Hoppe, who had flown here from an assignment in Hong Kong, said, “You were pretty good friends with her, weren’t you, Joe?”
“Yeah, but just to get in her pants,” I said, and everyone laughed at the joke they were sure I was making. The smile Jenny offered to those standing in that little conversational circle looked innocuous enough, but I could read its message: You have no idea.
Remember, I’d shared a lot with Darva, but because she had always been smart enough to see through Kristi and because she could never understand my friendship with Kristi in high school (“How can you hang out with that self-absorbed little snot who thinks cheerleading is somehow relevant?”), I had never told her everything. There are just some things you need to protect your friends from (even stronger was my need to protect myself from my friends’ reaction), and Kristi’s and my strange sexual history was one of them.
But Jenny was my wife, and even though a lot of couples keep secrets from each other, we weren’t among them. Our intimacy went far beyond the bedroom and into the past, into the mind, into the heart. I knew all about her ex-husband’s inability to make love with her unless she had just showered.
“Can you imagine how that made me feel?” asked my beautiful wife, whose sweat was an aphrodisiac to me. “Even on our honeymoon—and you know what honeymoons are like—he’d make me shower if we’d made love an hour earlier and were thinking about doing it again.”
“He sounds pathological,” I said.
“He was strange about his hygiene,” said Jenny. “He would use only one particular laundry detergent—no substitutes—and every night when he’d get home from work, he’d brush his wing tips and put them on a shoe rack.”
One night after we’d listened to On the Air with God, I told Jenny about Kristi and watched as her eyes and mouth opened wider and wider.
“She gave you blow jobs in school?”
“Well, twice in a car.”
“Gee, and to think the wildest thing I ever did at Ole Bull was skip history to go to the donut shop.” She snapped her fingers. “And there was that time we snuck out of the hotel during our band trip.”
“See, we all have our sundry pasts.”
She laughed, to my great relief. As I told her all the things I hadn’t told anyone, I often had to look away from her face, so afraid was I of her reaction.
“So it’s…okay? You don’t think I’m a…?”
“A high school boy? Because that’s what you were—and what high school boy wouldn’t be lining up to get what Kristi gave?” She shook her head. “Boy, to hear her on the radio…Anyway, even when the two of you got it on when she was here for that revival, that was what—five years ago? What’s that got to do with you and me now? What do Eric and I have to do with you and me now? All I’m interested in is you and me here and now.”
“Here and Now,” I said. “Isn’t that the name of a candy?”
Jenny leaned toward me and kissed me. “Man, you need to spend more time in your candy aisle. It’s Now and Later.”
It was my turn to kiss her now. “Here and Now, sweet and fruity.” I kissed her again. “Now and Later. Tart and tangy.” Another kiss. “It could be a never-ending candy cycle.”
At the reunion, Jenny was visibly pregnant, and as the summer ripened, so did she.
She was bella bella bella in my book, but her constant assessment was, “I’m as big as a house!” and she voiced that same appraisal now as we lay in bed.
“You’re not,” I assured her. “Just your stomach is.” I slipped my hands under her nightgown, rubbing my hands across the curved expanse of her belly and then upward. “And your breasts, they’re pretty huge.”
“You like that, don’t you?”
I sighed. “I’ll put up with them if I must.”
Jenny shifted her position, and I thought she might be responding to the kisses I was planting on her big luscious breasts and her big luscious belly, but instead she reached for a music book on the nightstand.
“Honey, I’m too hot and too uncomfortable to do anything but figure out this stupid music.”
“Fine,” I said in the kind of petulant voice that means exactly the opposite, but I was only kidding; really, at this stage of the game, her wish was my command. Turning over on my back, I put my hands behind my head, content to lie next to her. “Having any luck?”
Jenny had become a popular soloist, playing at weddings, parties, and receptions, and was trying to choose the music for a couple who had requested that she play nothing classical at their wedding. “We still want it serious, but fun,” they’d explained.
“How about ‘Moon River’?”
Staring up at the ceiling, I pondered this. “It’s serious,” I agreed. “But not serious and fun.”
She turned a few more pages. “How about ‘Fly Me to the Moon’?”
“Fun…but not serious.”
She made a frustrated growl and then, after flipping through more pages, snapped her fingers. “I know—I’ll give birth the day of their wedding!”
She had no labor pains the day of the wedding—a good thing, really, considering the baby wasn’t due for another month—and so on a September afternoon, Jenny, in a rust-colored dress that was color-coordinated with the autumnal colors of the trees surrounding the property, found herself standing on a balcony amid pots of asters and marigolds, playing “Love Me Tender” as the bride passed the groom the tissue that he needed but she didn’t.
The program said that the vows followed Jenny’s song, but to me, the real action was up on that balcony. If I was available, I accompanied her to weddings; the food was usually good and I liked hearing her play music that led couples into their new lives as married people.
It was a spectacular day, with a mild sun shining in a deep aching blue sky and the soft resigned air of fall. The wedding guests were sneaking peeks behind them to look at the source of the lovely, serious, but fun music (I don’t know how she did it), and I could have just about burst my shirt buttons with pride, thinking, That’s my Jenny.
When she finished the song, she lowered her flute past her big belly and winked at me, and it was then that I got my idea.
“I’m going to build a balcony off the office at the store,” I said as we drove the winding road that led away from the house by the lake. “That is, if we ever get home.”
“We’ll have to get home,” said Jenny, “so I can go to the bathroom.”
“You should have gone before we left.”
“I did. But it won’t be long before I have to go again.”
This was true; her bladder of late had the holding capacity of a thimble. “Do you want me to turn back?”
Jenny lifted her heavy hair off her neck as she shook her head. “Like I said, I don’t have to go yet. But I will. Now tell me about this balcony thing.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to read a street sign before I turned. “You know how much people like the little contests at Haugland Foods—”
“People love them,” said Jenny. “I love them. I mean, if you hadn’t let me win that apple pie years ago, who knows where we’d be now?”
“Dam
n,” I said, realizing I was driving the same loop I thought I had just turned off of. “Whoever designed this road has a sick sense of humor.”
“Turn there,” ordered Jenny, pointing.
I obeyed and we were out on the main road.
“Don’t worry, dear,” she said, patting my knee. “You’re still manly. Now go back to the balcony.”
“I was thinking,” I said, “how nice it would be to shop while listening to real live music played by real live musicians. Wouldn’t you like to shop while a guitarist or a saxophonist or a flutist played music? Wouldn’t that just be the ultimate in grocery shopping?”
“I don’t know about the ultimate, but it’d be pretty cool,” said Jenny. “Besides the flutist, where’ll you get these musicians?”
Another idea bloomed in my head.
“From the customers. I’ll advertise—maybe hold a little talent show. Hell, maybe I’ll even start a little Haugland Foods band!”
Jenny laughed. “Catchy name.”
I had wanted to build the balcony off my office, but Linda decided the space wouldn’t work as well as the space by Banana Square.
“We can build it on this wall,” she said, “about six feet from the floor. It’ll have a railing around it and a staircase on this side.”
I agreed, and she designed it and contracted the work—all for free.
“You know what this entitles you to, don’t you?” I asked as we stood admiring the finished project, a six-by-eight-foot platform with a railing around it. “A free cookie from the bakery every time you shop.”
“Oh, Joe,” said Linda, “I couldn’t.”
“Well, then how can I pay you?”
“You can let me hold Ben.”
“Then consider us,” I said, passing the sleeping baby to Linda, “paid in full.”
I was throwing a party at the store both to celebrate the completion of the balcony and to introduce our son to the greater world.