Nelson dials his son’s number, sits down, and lets it ring. On the fourth ring, Earl answers. “Hello?”
“Good morning,” Nelson says.
“Oh, hi, Dad.”
“I was just wondering…”
“Yeah, look, I’m sorry. I got sidetracked here, some people came by and we got talking. Listen, you gonna be there all day today? I can come by later more easily, if that’s okay?”
“Well, the snow…”
“Yeah, I know. You’re right. That is good wood. Be nice to get it home here, before it gets buried and all.”
They are silent for a few seconds, then Earl says to his father, “How about I come out there next Sunday? Or maybe an afternoon this week after school. Yeah, that’d be better all around for me. Though you won’t be there then—but we can get together some other time, right?”
“It don’t matter much to me one way or the other how you do it—it’s your wood, not mine.”
“Right.”
“All right, then,” Nelson says in a voice that’s almost a whisper.
“You okay, Dad?”
Nelson hesitates a second, ten seconds, twenty. He opens his mouth to speak.
“Dad? You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m… I’m fine.” His thoughts are burning and whirling, as if there were a fire inside his head. “I… I wanted to ask you something,” he says.
“Sure. What about?”
“I guess about your brother. About Georgie. You. Your mother. Your sister.”
“Fine,” Earl says. “Shoot.”
“No. I mean, not— Well, maybe we oughta talk about this stuff over a few beers or something, you know?”
Earl says, “Hey, fine with me. Anything you say, Dad.”
“Well, I was wondering, see, about Georgie. About why he’s so mad with me,” Nelson blurts, and the fire inside his head roars in his ears, stings his eyes, fills his nostrils and mouth with smoke and ash.
His son says, “You should be asking him that. Not me.”
“Yes. Right, of course. You,” he says, “you’re not mad at me like that, are you? For leaving your mother and all? You know … you know what I mean. All that.”
Earl inhales deeply, then slowly exhales. “This is weird. This is a weird conversation for us to be having, Dad. I mean, you— Look, I made my peace with all that years ago, and Georgie hasn’t, that’s all. From his point of view, you ruined his life or something. But that’s only how he sees it.”
“I didn’t, though. I didn’t ruin anybody’s life. You can’t ruin a person’s life. I just left, that’s all.”
“Yeah. It’s only a figure of speech.”
“I didn’t ruin anybody’s life.”
“Yeah.”
“Not your mother’s. Not Louise’s. Not yours, Earl. Not Georgie’s, either.”
“No, Dad, not mine. You can be sure of that. Listen, I got to get off, okay? There’s people here. I’ll be over to dig that wood out sometime this week, some afternoon this week, okay?”
Nelson says fine, that’s fine with him, but Earl will have to do it alone, because he is home only on weekends, now that winter’s here. “I been staying the week down at Seabrook lately,” he says.
“No kidding. Where?”
“I got a room in a motel over in Hampton. It’s nice. Color TV. You know. Kitchenette.”
“Nice,” Earl says.
Nelson says, “I… I’m sorry, about that other business, Georgie and all.”
“Hey, no sweat, Dad. Look, I gotta go,” he says. “Talk to you later, okay?”
“Fine.”
“Love to Allie,” he says, and then good-bye, and the phone is dead, buzzing in Nelson’s hand.
He looks up and sees that his wife is staring at him. He places the receiver on the hook and walks to the sink, pours himself another vodka, only a few ounces, half the glass, and drinks it down with a single swallow. This time he leaves the glass in the sink and the bottle on the drainboard.
“How many’s that?” Allie asks in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, as if asking him the date. She sips at her tea and over the rim of her cup watches him ignore her. Then she says, “Earl’s off in his own world. Don’t let him bother you.”
“He doesn’t bother me. That damn wood bothers me. That’s what bothers me.”
“Earl doesn’t really need it, you know. He lives in town, he just has that little bitty fireplace of his—”
“That’s not the point!” The point, he tells himself, is that the pile of wood looks like hell out there in the yard, and under the snow it looks somehow worse, because it’s no longer clearly firewood but may as well be merely trash or sand or brush or landfill, the dumb, shapeless residue of a job halted when winter came on. Abruptly, Nelson unlatches the gate, passes into the cool, dim living room, and walks upstairs to the bedroom. In a short while, he is dressed in heavy, green twill pants and wool shirt and snow boots and has returned to the kitchen, where he pulls his mackinaw on, then his black watch cap and thick work gloves.
“You getting the paper?” Allie asks from the table. The dog has settled at her feet.
“Yeah,” Nelson grunts. Quickly, he walks out to the barn, where, with the door to Allie’s office closed tightly behind him, he shoves open the large, sliding door at the front, flooding the darkness with sudden white light and swirls of blowing snow. For a moment he stands, hands sunk in his pockets, staring down the driveway to the road, his back to the green rear deck of his Pontiac station wagon and the gloomy darkness of the cavernous barn beyond. He moves around the car to the front door on the driver’s side and opens it, reaches under the seat, and draws out a half-full pint of vodka. Unscrewing the cap, he tips the bottle up and drinks. It makes no difference—he feels no better or worse after having taken the drink. All he has done is avoid feeling as bad as he would have felt without it. When he has replaced the bottle under the car seat, he turns and bumps against the chopping block, a stump with a steel splitting wedge and single-edged ax driven into its corrugated top. He laughs at himself, and his voice sounds strange to him, an old man’s voice—Ho, ho, ho!—mixed with a drunkard’s voice—Har, har, har! Hesitating a second at the door, he turns back again, retrieves the bottle from under the car seat, and slides it into his mackinaw pocket. He leaves the barn and, like an Arctic explorer setting out for the North Pole, plunges into the snow.
It’s deeper than he expected, eight or ten inches already and drifting, a heavy, wet snow driven by a hard northeast wind and sticking to every surface that faces it, trees, houses, barns, chimneys, and now Nelson Painter, working his way down his driveway from the huge open door of the barn, a man turning white, so that by the time he reaches the woodpile he’s completely white, even his face, though he’s pulled his head down into his coat as far as he can and can barely see through the waves of wind-driven snow before him.
He leans over and with one gloved hand grabs at a chunk of wood, yanks at it, but it won’t come. He brushes snow away, grabs at another, but it, too, won’t give. Standing, he kicks at the first log, and it breaks free of the pile and rolls over in the snow. He picks it up, lays it against his chest, and kicks at the second log. He kicks twice, three times, but it won’t come loose, so he takes the first stick, and holding it by one end, whacks it against the second, until it breaks free. He’s out of breath, sweating inside his coat, cursing the wood. He picks up the two sticks and goes to work on a third, which he eventually kicks loose of the pile and picks up and stacks in his arms, and then, when he kicks at a fourth piece of wood, he loses his balance, slips, and falls, and the pieces roll into the snow. Slowly, on his hands and knees, puffing laboriously now, he gathers up the three logs and stands, his left hip burning in pain where he fell against it, and starts back toward the barn.
Halfway there, retracing his nearly filled tracks, he sees on his left the door to the house push slowly open against the blowing snow, and Allie steps onto the sill and waves an arm at him, indicating that she wants him
to come inside, to the kitchen. He can’t make out her face, but he knows her look, he’s seen it lots of times before, a mixture of anger, hurt, and concern, and he can’t hear her because of the wind, and his cap pulled down over his ears, but he knows what she is shouting to him: “Come inside, for God’s sake, Nelson! You’re drunk! You’re going to hurt yourself!” The dog appears beside her and, not recognizing Nelson, bounds outside, barking ferociously at him, leaping eagerly through the snow toward him, barking with great force at the snow-covered stranger in the yard, and when Nelson turns to avoid the animal’s rush, he slips on the wet snow and falls again, dropping the wood and scattering it. Suddenly, the dog recognizes him and retreats swiftly to the kitchen. Nelson reaches into his coat pocket, pulls out the bottle, works the cap off, and takes a long drink. Recapping the bottle, he places it in his pocket and looks back toward the door, but it’s closed. He’s alone again. Good. Slowly, he retrieves his three sticks of wood one by one and stands and resumes his trek to the barn. It seems so far away, that dark opening in the white world, miles and years away from him, that he wonders if he will ever get there, if he will spend years, an entire lifetime, out here in the snow slogging his way toward the silent, dark, ice-cold barn, where he can set his three pieces of firewood down, lay one piece of wood on the floor snugly against the other, the start of a new row.
Quality Time
Tires crunch against the crushed stone driveway, and a flash of headlights crosses Kent’s bedroom window, waking him from a light sleep. But he wasn’t asleep, he tells himself. Merely resting, eyes closed. Listening. Just as, when Rose was still in high school, he lay in bed after midnight and listened for the sound of a car—his, or the current boyfriend’s, her girlfriend’s father’s car, sometimes even his ex-wife’s car—bringing Rose home to his house, where she spent the weekend, Kent’s every-other-weekend, or her spring-break week, or her two-week midsummer visit. In his house in his town, his turn to be the custodial parent.
Quality time, they called it. He would greet her at the door and make sure she wasn’t drunk or high or sad, and when she was suffering from any of those conditions, he tried to treat her condition rationally, calmly, realistically. Kent was a physician, a trained scientist, as he thought of it, and also a man of the world. He knew what kids were dealing with out there. He sympathized. Even today, a decade later and more of an administrator now than a physician, Kent still sympathizes.
He hears the thump of Rose’s clunky Doc Martens against the front deck, the jingle of the house key, and the slammed door. In three months Rose will be thirty, and she still slams the door when she comes in, no matter how late the hour. And Kent still checks the car for scratches and dents the morning after she borrows it. Especially this car, his brand-new Audi, silver and sleek—his sixtieth birthday present to himself. He’s already reminding himself to examine the car in the morning before he leaves for the office, so he won’t discover the ding in the fender or the broken taillight late in the afternoon in the clinic parking lot, which is where she’ll insist it must have happened, since she has absolutely zero recollection of any fender-bender occurring on her watch. He’ll accept that. He’ll have to. He turns on the bedside lamp, gets out of bed, and walks to the closet. But she’ll be lying. Or worse, she won’t really know one way or the other how it happened, and won’t care, either. He pulls his bathrobe over his pajamas and pads barefoot down the hall to the kitchen.
“Hey, babe. Nice time?” he says and plucks a bunch of purple grapes from the fruit bowl on the breakfast table. She’s sprawled at the table, thoughtfully drinking milk from a half-gallon container. Kent likes this kitchen, the only truly up-to-date, architect-designed room in the house. It’s an orderly arrangement of stainless steel, ceramic tile, overhead pot racks, and butcher-block islands. He had it renovated top to bottom back when he first got serious about gourmet cooking and enjoys telling people that the kitchen is state-of-the-art. The rest of the house is more or less the way it was when he bought it fifteen years ago, the year after the divorce. Since then, though he’s enjoyed several long-term romances with women, good women his own age, marriageable women, he’s not shared his house with anyone—except his daughter. Hasn’t wanted to. A nineteen-fifties, midlevel mafia capo’s suburban ranch, is how Kent likes to describe the house to strangers.
He pops the grapes one by one into his mouth. He’s been unmarried now for nearly as long as he was married, and the fact freshly surprises him. He drops the grape stem into the trash compactor.
“I wish you’d use a glass,” he says evenly. Julia, his ex-wife, gave her that habit—drinking orange juice, milk, whatever, straight from the carton.
“Sorry, Pops, I forgot. It’s been a while,” Rose says. She shrugs and smiles up at him, sheepishly, or maybe mockingly, he’s not sure which. It hasn’t been that long since she last visited him, has it? Barely half a year.
She stands and crosses to the glassware cabinet, where she takes out a tumbler and fills it, leaving the carton on the counter. Rose is a tall, large-boned woman with burgundy-colored, shoulder-length hair. Her skin comes from her mother—skin so smooth and strikingly pale it seems washed in a hazy blue light. When Julia was Rose’s age, he remembers, she tied her hair back the same way and in summer favored sleeveless, V-neck blouses. Julia then, like her daughter now, showed as much face, throat, and arms as possible. If you’ve got it, she used to say, show it.
Kent doesn’t know how Julia does her hair now or if her skin is still as beautiful—he hasn’t seen her close-up in over seven years. He imagines that she’s changed in that time as much as he and in most of the same ways. In seven years your whole body replaces itself, cell by cell.
He picks up the milk carton and returns it to the refrigerator. “So how was it tonight, with your old pals?”
“Okay,” she says. “It was fun.” Then, “Not, actually. Not okay. Not fun.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Eddie and Jeanette and Tucker and Sandy? They’re not my old pals. Not really. And they’re married, they’re couples, et cetera. And they’re definitely on the boring side. Tep-id.”
“They are?” he says in a low, sad voice. He wants to let his disappointment show without having to say it.
“Yeah. I didn’t even know them, you know, till after the divorce. I mean, I knew them, we hung out a lot when we were teenagers, but it was mostly summers, Dad. A few weeks at a time.”
He understands. It has to be hard for her, five hours on a Trailways bus to visit the old man every six months or so for a long weekend or maybe a week. Then being alone with him at his house (her house once, as he often points out, but, as she insists, not hers anymore), until he fears he’s holding her against her will, so he starts pushing her to go out on her own, go ahead, borrow the Audi, visit some of her old pals. Most of the local people her age, because they’ve not left this small, upstate town for more promising climes, have married one another and have settled for much less than Rose wants for herself. She’s right. They are boring.
Rose is an artist, a sculptor who has already had two one-person shows of her work, the first at Skidmore in Saratoga Springs, where she went to college, and the other at a small gallery in Litchfield, Connecticut, where Julia lives. Julia and her second husband, Thatcher Clarke, the executive director of the clock and watch museum there, helped arrange it. When Julia first met Thatcher, a few months before her divorce from Kent became final, he was the director of the Adirondack Arts Council and had already been hired to run the clock and watch museum down in Litchfield, one hundred twenty miles to the south. Within weeks of the divorce, Julia followed him there. Rose went with her. Because of the schools. That’s when the need for quality time arrived.
Kent honestly believes that Ol’ Thatch, as he calls him, is perfect for Julia, and he’s been a good stepfather for Rose. He’s a hale fellow well-met, in Kent’s words, and a liberal New England Republican. Kent, on the other hand, is proud to be neither. He spoke with Ol’ That
ch briefly at Rose’s high school graduation, renewed their slight acquaintance when she graduated from Skidmore, and saw him a third time last fall at the Skidmore show.
Julia didn’t attend the opening. She was at a health spa in New Mexico, Rose explained. Was she okay? Health-wise? “Oh, sure,” Rose assured him. “It’s about weight. As usual.” Julia had mailed the spa her fifteen-hundred-dollar deposit months earlier and didn’t want to lose it, so Rose told her to go, for heaven’s sake. She could see Rose’s new work on her own anytime. Two months later, Rose had the show in Litchfield.
Rose kisses her father on the cheek, says good night, and saunters down the hall toward her room, flipping off lights as she goes. Her bedroom is situated on the opposite end of the house from Kent’s master bedroom. It was originally meant to be guest quarters, but the first weekend Rose spent with him in his new house, when she was fifteen, Kent turned the guest bedroom, dressing room, and bath over to her. He did it casually, as if it were something that occurred to him only when it was happening, but it was long-planned and for him a memorable event. It was his first chance to feel like a father, a real father with a house large enough to give his teenage daughter her own bedroom suite, where she could play her music and watch TV and talk on her own phone without interfering with his music, TV, and phone. He was no longer a middle-aged single guy subletting a semifurnished garden apartment in a complex filled with young professionals. He’d hated that. He was a proper family man now. His house, his daughter’s rooms, and her regular, ongoing presence at his house proved it.
He needed that visible evidence of paternity, and he believed that Rose did, too. The divorce was harder on her, he feels, than either Julia or Rose herself is willing to acknowledge—Julia because she still feels guilty for the several careless little love affairs that led up to the divorce and ostensibly caused it, and, too, because she was the one who afterwards moved away; and Rose because she doesn’t want her parents to worry about her any more than they already do.