Tom paused to take in the room while at his back the east door opened to the shaded porch light that forever kept the room dim.
“Dad?” he called again, getting no answer.
Behind him he heard the soft chuckle of the boat motor nearing and went out, leaving the spring serenading after the screen door clacked, across the snake-length grass through which a path had been trampled toward the lake. The cabin sat on high ground; he saw the V in the water before catching sight of the dock below, where his dad was tying up.
Wesley heard footsteps on the bleached wooden steps and straightened, pushing back his fishing cap.
“Fish aren’t bitin’ worth a damn. Alls I got is three little pan fish, but it’s enough for two. You come to help me eat ’em up?”
“Sure, why not,” Tom replied, though food hadn’t the dimmest appeal.
He walked out on the dock that shuddered with every footfall, and shuffled to a stop, looking down on his dad’s dirty blue cap and wrinkled neck. The old man carefully removed a hook from his rod and reel, wiped it on his pants, and stored it in his tackle box.
“How come Uncle Clyde isn’t fishing with you today?”
“He had to go into town and get his prescription renewed for his blood pressure pills. He told me he was going to visit the whorehouse, but I says to him, ‘Clyde, what the Sam Hill you gonna do there? Your blood pressure’s high everywhere ’cept where you want it to be.’ Anyway, I know he was going to the drugstore.” Wesley chuckled to himself and rose to his feet, holding a stringer of three large sunfish. “Come on, I’ll clean these.”
Tom followed him to the north side of the tipsy boathouse, where Wesley handed him a blue plastic bucket. “Here, dip me some lake water, will you, son?”
While Wesley scaled and gutted fish on a chunky table made of weather-beaten wood, Tom stood by watching.
“Well, you might as well spit it out,” his dad said. “Standin' there with your hands in your pockets like when you were little and all the kids went out catching frogs and forgot to ask you along.”
Tom’s eyes suddenly began stinging. He spun to face the lake. The fish scales stopped flying, and Wesley lifted his head to study his son’s broad shoulders, slumped as they so seldom were, his hands buried in his trouser pockets.
“Claire and I are separating.”
Wesley’s old heart did a flop like the fish waiting on the tabletop.
“Oh, son ...” He abandoned his work and dipped his hands in the bucket, keeping an eye on Tom. He dried his hands on his trousers, then put one on Tom’s shoulder. “That’s a shame. That’s just a gol-dang shame. This just happen?”
Tom nodded. “Just this morning. We told the kids about an hour ago, and I packed up the car and left.”
Wesley gripped the sturdy shoulder and hung on as much for himself as to offer support. Boy-oh-boy, how he loved Claire. She’d been the best wife and mother Tom could’ve had.
“I suppose this is about that other woman and your boy Kent.”
Tom nodded—barely—still staring at the lake. “She just can’t forgive me.”
“That’s a shame. How are the kids taking it?”
“Not good. Chelsea was crying. Robby was trying not to.”
“Well, that’s understandable. This all happened mighty fast.”
“You’re telling me. One month ago I’d never even heard of Kent Arens, and I had absolutely forgotten his mother.” Wesley heaved a great big sigh. “Well, hell ...” He stood there hurting for his son, for all of them, and after a while, added, “It’s a damned sad thing, breaking up a family.”
Tom said nothing.
“I suppose you’ll be needing a place to stay. Might as well get you settled into your old room.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Mind? Why, what’s a dad for? For the good times only? Come on, I’ll have to see if I can scout up some sheets for the bed in there.”
“But what about your fish?”
“I’ll get to ’em later.”
“Why make the trip up the steps twice? Come on, I’ll help you finish.”
Wesley finished cleaning the fish while Tom rinsed them in the bucket, then buried the entrails. They walked up to the cabin together, Tom with the bucket, Wesley with his rod and reel and tackle box. The situation seemed to call for reverent quiet, so Tom spoke softly as they trudged along.
“I was hoping you’d let me stay. Actually, I brought sheets and pillowcases from home.”
When the car was unloaded and the bed made, they sat down to a lunch of beer-battered fish, sliced tomatoes sprinkled with sugar, and thick, tart slabs of vinegar-soaked cucumbers and onion rings, which they piled onto slices of rye bread spread with butter. Though Tom had imagined himself too overwrought to eat, he did so with surprising relish. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the food, or eating it with his dad, who had no pretensions. Perhaps it was the need to draw himself back to a safer time when he was a boy here in this cabin and the cares of life had not yet affected him. The simple foods like his mother used to serve seemed to do just that.
In the middle of the meal his uncle Clyde came in. He was eighty if he was a day.
Without glancing at the door, Wesley asked, “So how was things at the whorehouse?”
“Whores ain’t what they used to be.” Clyde sat down at the table without being asked.
“Not hardly. They used to be twenty years old and pretty as the dickens. Nowadays the only ones who’ll look at old geezers like us are sixty and look like the underside of mushrooms. You sure you was at the whorehouse?”
“You accusing me of lying?”
“Never said you was lying. I said I agree with you, whores ain’t what they used to be.”
“And how would you know? You was never in a whorehouse in your life.”
“Was never in a doctor’s office either, except for that once when that bullhead stung me and I got an infection in my finger. You ever been in a doctor’s office, Clyde?”
“I have not!
“Then how do you know your blood pressure’s high, and how’d you get that prescription for those blood pressure pills you went in town to get more of?”
“I didn’t say my blood pressure was high. You did.”
“Oh, so your blood pressure’s low?”
“Ain’t low, ain’t high. It’s just right. Everything about me’s just right, and that little whore in the whorehouse said so no more’n an hour ago.”
“Was that before or after she quit laughin’?”
“Wesley, my boy, let me tell you somethin’ ”—Clyde pointed at his brother with his fork tines, smiling slyly—“that wasn’t laughin’, that was grinnin’, and I’ll tell you what put that grin on her face. A man of experience, that’s what.”
Wesley never lifted his eyes. “You ever hear so much bullshit in your life?” he asked his plate while he mopped up tomato juice with a last crust of bread, then pushed it in his mouth. “Comes in here and sits down and eats my fish and the last of the tomatoes and cukes from my garden and tries to tell me his sap still runs.”
“It don’t just run, it spurts!” the old geezer boasted. “That’s what’s got those little gals grinnin’.”
And so it went, on and on for Tom’s benefit. They never changed, Wesley and Clyde. They’d been carrying on this trumped-up pettifoggery for as long as Tom could remember, though where they got the material, he couldn’t guess.
Finally Tom said, “It’s okay, Dad, you can tell Uncle Clyde.”
Everyone hushed. The silence felt harsh in the echo of the brothers’ outlandish palaver.
“I guess you’re right. I might as well tell him.” Wesley sat back in his chair, looking somber. “Tom left Claire,” he said. “He’s moving in with me for a while.”
Clyde looked poleaxed. “No.”
“Not by choice,” Tom put in. He told the two old men everything, and before he finished he was trying to ward off some sharp stabs of pain that knifed through his stomac
h.
He spent the day doing little, going to the bathroom more often than natural, otherwise trapped by an overwhelming lassitude such as he’d never suffered before. He lay on his bed, sleepless though exhausted, hands beneath his head, staring at the ceiling, memorizing the pattern of the dead flies in the light fixture. He sat on a lawn chair on the dock with his outstretched ankles crossed, fingers knit across his belly, staring at the water for so long that Wesley came out to see if he was all right. When his father asked if he wanted to eat supper, Tom replied no. When Wesley asked if he wanted to watch TV, play a little cribbage, start a jigsaw puzzle, the reply was always the same. Energy was something Tom had taken for granted. Feeling it prized away by depression brought him to wonder how he would be able to face a workday and function normally.
His father’s cabin proved additionally depressing. When Tom had first come in, nostalgia had beckoned, but upon settling into the room with its sunken mattress and scarred furniture and the faint smell of bat shit funneling through the cracks from the attic above, he couldn’t help comparing it to the house he’d just left, and he felt the full measure of what he would lose if he and Claire parted permanently: all they had built, bought, and banked—halved, sold, or both; their comfortable home with all its conveniences, favorite chairs, the screened porch they’d added on five years ago, the yard he’d mowed so many times, his garage with all his tools hanging on the wall; the sound system, records, tapes, and CDs representing a lifetime of favorites they’d bought together.
If they parted they would have to divide it all—not just the property and bank accounts but maybe even their children’s loyalties. His eyelids sank closed at the repulsive thought. It shouldn’t happen, ever, not to anyone who’d worked at a marriage as hard as he and Claire had. Oh God, he didn’t want to be single, adrift, alone. He wanted commitment to both his wife and his family.
At 9:15 he called home. Robby answered.
“How’s everything there?” Tom asked.
“It sucks.”
Tom was unprepared for the answer. Somehow he’d expected Robby to remain the blithe one who downplayed the gloomy aspects and cracked jokes.
“I know,” Tom replied throatily. And after a while, “How’s Chelsea?”
“Incommunicado.”
“How’s Mom?”
“She’s crazy, as far as I’m concerned. What did she do this for?”
“Could I talk to her?”
“She’s over at Ruth’s.”
“At Ruth’s.” Probably heaping aspersions on her husband and getting applause for dumping him. Tom sighed. “Well, tell her I called, will you? Just to check and see if everything’s okay.”
“Yeah, I'll tell her.”
“You going out tonight?”
“Naw.”
“On a Saturday night?”
“I just don’t feel like it, Dad.”
Tom understood fully. “Yeah, I know. Well, you get some sleep. You didn’t get much last night.”
“Yeah, I will.”
“All right then, see you tomorrow at church.”
“Yeah, right.”
“And tell Chelsea I love her. And I love you too.”
“I will. Love you too, Dad.”
“Well, good night then.”
“’Ni—” Robby’s voice cracked into a falsetto. He cleared his throat and tried again. “ ’Night, Dad.”
After he’d hung up, Tom stared at the phone. How pathetic, wishing his kids good night by telephone. A barrage of anger hit him, refreshing after the dead calm that had held him prisoner much of the day. What the hell was Claire thinking, doing this to them? Damn her anyway!
As the evening wore on, his emotions swung from high to low, low to high, lassitude and anger, then pain and guilt followed by frustration and helplessness. Sometimes he’d rise to his feet as if Claire were in the room, and in his imagination he’d fire a salvo of blame on her while reassuring himself that he’d done nothing wrong since he’d spoken his vows—nothing!—and she should have been willing to forgive him for his one grave sin before that.
Damn you, Claire, you can’t do this!
Unfortunately, she could. She had.
He slept poorly and awoke to the grim prospect of showering in his dad’s tin shower stall with its soap-coated plastic curtain and gooey walls. He’d always excused his dad’s lack of cleanliness since his mother died, but maybe he’d have to talk to the old man about it if he was to live here indefinitely.
His trousers had gotten wrinkled jamming them into the tiny closet beside the chimney stack, and so had his suit jacket. When he asked where the iron was, he got a relic whose steam holes were packed solid with tartar. The condition of the ironing board cover made him set his jaw with grim determination.
But he was too excited about seeing Claire and the kids at church to complain.
To his dismay and anger, they weren’t there.
He called home afterward and said, “Claire, what are you trying to pull? Why weren’t you in church?”
“The kids were tired, so I let them sleep till a later service.”
They had an argument that led to nothing but more frustration, setting the tone for the rest of the day.
On Monday morning he pulled out more wrinkled clothes and had as little success with the corroded steam iron. Checking his reflection in the mirror before leaving for school, he tried unsuccessfully to get a wave out of the hem of his suit coat by pressing it against his thigh with his hand.
Finally he muttered, “Aw, shit,” and clattered out of the cabin cursing his father for living in semi-squalor. Without a garage his car windows had gathered moisture and the rear window needed to be squeegeed before he could set out, irritating him further when he couldn’t find a squeegee in his car and his dad didn’t have any paper towels. The search for rags made Tom late. When he was finally under way he kept thinking about frost coming soon and how he’d have to scrape his window every morning. He understood now why people said that it never worked when adult kids moved back in with their parents after being out on their own.
At school he was faced with the regular Monday morning faculty meeting, where he arrived five minutes late and confronted Claire without the reassurance of perfect grooming. When he looked at her with desperate longing and a need to be recognized, she gave him nothing.
They made it to the end of the meeting without exchanging any personal words, but his stomach immediately began its nervous dance. He ran into the nurse’s office and begged for some Kaopectate, which he gulped in haste because the school busses had already begun arriving, and the worst disaster in the world that morning would have been to miss Chelsea when she walked through the door. Robby always came in early and worked out in the weight room, so he was already somewhere in the building.
Rushing toward the front hall he actually felt panic at the idea that he might have already missed Chelsea. But he hadn’t, and when he saw her approaching the building with Robby at her side as well, he felt as if his heart had exploded inside him. They came through the door and headed straight for him as if they, too, needed the contact. Their eyes were sad and their faces long. He touched them both and felt heartsick and afraid the way so many of his students had told him they felt when their families were breaking up because of a divorce. Such a parade of sad stories he’d heard in his years as an educator, never believing he’d be the one experiencing them.
He and Chelsea shared a hug, there in the hall with students streaming past while the two of them—helpless victims of Claire’s decision—felt their eyes sting.
He broke free and gripped Robby’s arm. “Come on, you two, let’s go into my office for a minute.”
“I can’t, Dad,” Chelsea said, blinking hard to control her tears. “I didn’t do my homework over the weekend and I need to write something quick for health class.”
Tom turned to Robby. “What about you? Did you do yours?”
“I didn’t have any.”
“Wh
at about weight lifting? Don’t you usually go in before school for that?”
Robby averted his gaze. “I didn’t feel like it this morning.”
Tom hated chiding them first thing, but he and Claire hadn’t been apart for forty-eight hours and already the kids were showing signs of typical divorce fallout.
“Listen, you aren’t going to start this now, are you? No matter what happens at home, you can’t slough off on your schoolwork and extracurricular activities, okay? You just keep on doing everything the way you were ... promise?”
Robby nodded sheepishly.
“Okay, Chelsea?”
She nodded too, but refused to meet his eyes.
“All right then, I’d better let you go,” he said, even though he felt as if he would buckle into a heap and die the minute they walked out of his sight.
Chelsea seemed reluctant to head away.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just ... well, it’s hard to act normal when nothing’s normal at all anymore.”
“What else can we do?”
She shrugged and looked glum. “Can we tell our friends, Dad?”
“If you must.”
Robby said, “I don’t want to tell mine.”
Chelsea finally decided she couldn’t handle getting into this at the beginning of the day. Her eyes were blinking hard and fast, and in a minute her tears would win. “I’ve got to go, Dad.”
She went off without further remarks.
“I’d better go too, Dad.” Robby sounded absolutely defeated.
“Okay. See you later.” Tom touched Robby’s back and watched him drift into the traffic. Left behind, Tom realized that neither of the children had inquired about his emotional state, about how it was staying out at Grandpa’s, if he was getting along okay. They were all so busy coming to grips with their own emotional upheaval that they couldn’t handle anyone else’s. His trained mind realized this was typical, but he couldn’t help feeling hurt that no one seemed concerned about his needs.
Heading back toward his office he made a silent vow that he would never get so wrapped up in his own grief that he grew immune to the children’s.