I’ve thought about getting a third job. But it’s hard to justify that when the paychecks from your other two jobs are all chip-clipped to the front of the fridge, waiting to be cashed. Two months’ worth. It’s not a whole lot of money, but in years past I used to drop my checks in the overnight deposit on the way home in the morning and pray they cleared by afternoon. Now they just sit there, worthless in a way. All that time and work is worth nothing now. Strange thing, being rich.
Still, the idea of a third job appeals. You don’t realize how much time there is in a day until you’ve got nothing to fill it with but thought, and there’s plenty to think about, starting with my missing son. My youngest boy, twenty-six years old and, judging by what he said in the newspapers and on TV, not at all right mentally. It’s been three years. He could be dead. I’ve thought about this possibility every day of those three years. Thinking about it brings up all kind of questions that can’t be answered: How? Where? Most of all, why?
This is the sort of thing that gives me trouble with the spells.
So I go to Mr. Miller.
Please, I say, it’s not that I don’t like this Mike guy, and I’m sure he needs the work—
He’s got two little girls, Mr. Miller says, sitting behind his desk with the piles of receipts and invoices and order forms, and the big calculator and the ashtray overflowing with butts. One ten months, the other just turned two.
I’ll give him money, I say. I’ll give him twice what he’s making here a week. If I can just get those shifts back.
Mr. Miller isn’t winking or smiling. He leans back and the springs in his chair groan. He’s got a cigarette between his dentures and he squints as the smoke drifts up into his eyes.
I’m sure Mike would be happy to take your money, he says. But even if he does, I’m not giving you those shifts.
It’s like being slapped. Mr. Miller has never talked to me like this before. We’ve always been friends of a sort, even though he’s quite a bit older than me and I was pretty much a kid when I started working here. Now, suddenly, he feels to me like my old man.
Mr. Miller? I say.
He looks at me for a minute, lights a new cigarette with the stub of the old one. John, we’ve known each other a long time.
Yes.
So I can be honest with you.
Of course. I’m actually a little pissed he feels the need to ask, but I squash it.
And I can say something about your personal life that you maybe wouldn’t let someone else get away with.
Mr. Miller, I say. Pat. It’s your right to make decisions about your business without asking anyone if they think it’s alright. So I wouldn’t ask for the shifts back otherwise. But I’m having these spells. It’s like having a heart attack and a stroke all at once.
And you think working more is the cure?
Served me well in the past. He doesn’t respond, so I keep talking. The spells didn’t start until you gave those shifts to Mike. They’re something to do with all the downtime. Too much thinking about things.
Good that you mention that, Mr. Miller says. He leans forward again and flicks his cigarette. The ash lands on top of the mountain of butts in the tray, then rolls off onto the desk. Because that’s actually what I wanted to talk about. All those things you’ve got on your mind.
My face must darken, because Mr. Miller says: Hey, listen. Don’t tear my office apart or anything. You need to hear this. Believe me, otherwise I’d be happy to keep my mouth shut, just tell you no you can’t have the shifts back, and leave it at that.
I don’t say anything.
John, when was the last time you and Debbie went out for dinner?
That’s not really your business, Pat.
Except that it is, he says, when you’ve known someone for thirty years. When you’ve gone to birthday parties and graduations. When you’ve done for each other like we have. Then, you look at the state of things and realize you’ve got to say something.
My hands clench and unclench.
Go home, John, Mr. Miller says, and tend to your wife. Is what I’m trying to tell you.
He’s right—this is not the sort of thing I’d let just anyone say. I walk out of his office before my anger gets the better of me. On my way out I stop in the kitchen and pull out my checkbook. On the stainless steel table I write a check for twenty thousand dollars and put Mike’s name on it. I shake flour off the check and hand it to Mike.
Are you serious? Mike says. Is this even any good?
Yes.
I don’t understand, he says. Why?
No reason at all, I say, opening the customer entrance, other than that you need it, and I don’t.
I get in the Mustang and since it’s only got eight hundred miles on it and the engine’s still breaking in I take it onto the interstate and open it up. When I was in the service I spent most of my time thinking about a ’66 Shelby GT. I sent my combat pay home to my mother to save up for a blue four-speed with four-point roll bar, steel rims, shoulder harness, the works. The closest I ever got to it was the showroom floor, because when I came home it turned out my mother had spent all the money while my old man was out of work, before he found the job at the cab stand. Now I’ve got the new Cobra R. They made just three hundred of them, and it only comes in red, which I’m not crazy about, but otherwise the thing’s a dream. I move through the slower traffic, mid-thirties moms who hug the breakdown lane and old men in Caddies with veteran’s plates and handicapped stickers. I haven’t gotten around to buying the tires I want, but as you’d expect the stock tires aren’t half bad, and the Mustang jumps all over the road. I get it up around ninety. Not too fast—I know from a careless moment a couple weeks ago that the car has another forty miles per hour in it, easy—but fast enough that I can feel the anger from Mr. Miller’s talking-to begin to melt away. By the time I get off at the Skowhegan exit to turn around I’m feeling calm again, and the only thing that lingers is this: whether or not it’s any of Mr. Miller’s business doesn’t matter, because he was right.
I go home. Debbie’s still at her afternoon spot on the sofa; as soon as Oprah is over she’ll switch to the kitchen table. She looks up and smiles a little as I come in, then looks right back at the TV as the commercials end and Oprah explains that they are talking with people who have recently suffered a devastating loss and are overwhelmed with feelings of sadness and grief.
I have no idea where to start, so I just sit down next to Debbie without saying anything. It’s awkward in a way I can’t really explain, sitting this close to each other. Our legs are touching but we’re both looking straight ahead at the TV.
Oprah is sitting on a sofa, too, with a woman whose husband was killed bungee rocketing, where apparently instead of jumping off a tall object you stand on the ground below the tall object, stretch the bungee cord out, then let go and shoot into the air. In the case of the woman’s husband, whoever was responsible for doing the calculations messed up.
Oprah and the woman are sitting close together, like Debbie and me, but they aren’t awkward about it at all. Their knees are pressed together, and they lean into one another as they talk. Oprah takes the woman’s hand and asks her to reveal to her audience the cruel twist of irony that has made her loss so overwhelming, so difficult to process and put behind her.
At this point the woman tries to speak, but her eyes get teary and she gasps and puts her head down. Oprah pats her hand, says something too soft for the microphone to pick up. Eventually the woman gathers herself and explains that her husband had taken up high-risk hobbies like bungee rocketing and hang gliding after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. But two months after the diagnosis—and just three days after her husband had died—the hospital called and said there’d been a mistake at the lab, that the biopsy sample had been mixed up with another and in fact the husband did not have pancreatic cancer but Von Hippel-Lindau disease, where benign tumors grow on the internal organs but usually aren’t a big deal.
I loo
k sideways at Debbie. She’s sitting with her back straight and her hands in her lap. Her eyes are wet like the women in the studio. She could easily be one of them, in fact, with her short, frosted hair and her turtle-neck.
But that’s not the end of the story, Oprah says. She puts a hand on the woman’s back and rubs little circles between her shoulder blades. Is it?
No, the woman tells her, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. Because when she recovered a little from the shock of realizing that her husband had died because of the misdiagnosis, she realized that the person who originally had gotten her husband’s lab results and had gone around the past two months thinking everything would be okay was now, possibly right at that moment, being told he had terminal cancer. And the woman decided, then and there—she still wasn’t sure why, exactly—that she had to find this person, tell him what had happened, and try to make something worthwhile out of all this heartache.
Oprah looks up at her audience. Which is exactly what she did, she says. Please welcome the wife of the man who actually had cancer, Annie Leboeuf.
The crowd applauds as Annie comes out from backstage sporting frosted, permed hair and a light yellow pantsuit. She sits between Oprah and the woman and as the applause dies down the audience members wipe carefully at their eyes, using the tips of their fingers to remove tears without smudging their eyeliner.
I turn to Debbie and say, Would you like to go to the Open Hearth for dinner tonight?
Don’t you have to work? she asks, without looking away from the TV. There are tears on her cheeks, but her face is blank. I’m certain this is how she looks all the time, and I wonder how I’ve never noticed until now.
Yes. But I can call out. I’ve got about three thousand hours of sick time piled up.
On Oprah the original guest and Annie Leboeuf are sitting practically in each other’s lap, explaining how the two became best friends while Annie’s husband was dying of cancer.
Why would you call out? Debbie asks. She sips from the cup on the end table, again without looking away from the TV. You never call out.
Well we never do anything together. And we’ve got some things to talk about, anyway.
So we do it. Debbie puts on a sweater and a big floppy hat and makes her way slowly out to the Mustang. I open the passenger-side door for her and she takes her time settling into the bucket seat. I drive across town to the Open Hearth. We don’t say anything on the way over.
The restaurant is small, just seven tables, the biggest of which seats four. There’s one bathroom the size of a closet with a toilet and corner sink crammed in there, and a window with a heat lamp that opens into the kitchen. The place has been around since before I was born, serving the same menu of pancakes and burgers and poutine, and I ate here a lot when I was a kid. But it’s been at least ten years, if not longer, since I last saw the inside of the place.
It’s seat-yourself, so I lead Debbie to the table next to the only window in the dining room. Céline Dion is playing, but there aren’t any speakers in the dining room so it must be coming from the kitchen. The waitress comes and pours waters and puts two sticky menus down on the table. We both order Pepsis and the waitress walks off writing on her pad. I watch, a little bit surprised, as Debbie picks up the menu and looks it over. Just like a normal person, I think, then right away feel terrible for having the thought.
What are you going to eat? I ask her.
I’m not sure, Debbie says. I don’t have much of an appetite.
Well I know, you usually don’t, I say. Most of the time she just looks at food like she’s not sure what to do with it. She might poke whatever’s on her plate a few times, bully it around a little, and once in a while a piece will make its way into her mouth almost by accident.
We sit in silence for a few minutes. The waitress comes back and asks if we’re ready.
I look at Debbie. Her eyes go from me, to the menu, to the waitress. I’ll have the fried clam basket, she says.
The waitress scribbles. Baked, mashed, or fries? she asks.
Fries. With vinegar, she says, and then her eyes light up and she looks at me. John, you remember? Before the boys, when we’d go down to You Know Whose on Friday night and have a couple of beers and then right before the kitchen closed we’d order a big basket of fries to go? And we’d take it with vinegar in those little plastic cups and drive up to the airstrip with Patti and whoever her boyfriend was and sit on the tailgate and eat fries and smoke dope and watch the planes come in?
I stare at her. Yes, I say. Of course.
Debbie looks down at her lap. Those were good times, she says.
I’m so surprised that I don’t even realize the waitress is waiting for me to order. And for you? she says finally.
I’ve got no idea what I want. I’ll just have the cheeseburger, I tell her. With mashed instead of fries. I hand her the menus, and she says thanks and walks away.
We sit and wait for a while without speaking. Debbie claps her hands together and smiles that blank little smile and leans over to sniff at her Pepsi.
So there are some things, I say, stirring my drink with the straw, that we probably should have talked about a while ago.
What’s that? Debbie asks, still smiling.
I look up, hoping to see our food under the heat lamps, but the window is empty. Well, I say, like how we don’t spend any time together.
We are now, aren’t we? Spending time together?
Yes, I say. And it’s nice, isn’t it?
I’m enjoying it, Debbie says. She holds her hand out over the table. But I’m shaking. Look at my hand.
Well, I say, that’s probably because you haven’t had anything to drink in the last couple hours. Like, you shake when you get up in the morning, right?
Yes.
Same thing, I say. You don’t drink while you sleep. So in the morning your hands shake.
Huh, Debbie says. She keeps watching her hand until the food finally shows up.
The bun is soggy with blood and the potatoes are obviously out of a box, but I eat with good appetite anyway. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until the waitress put the plate in front of me. Surprisingly, Debbie digs right in too, eating like she means it. She’s got the squeeze bottle of vinegar and she puts a generous amount on the fries and eats them with her hands. She’s kind of ignoring the clams, but it’s still an impressive thing from a woman who’s lived more or less on fluids for the last ten years.
Pretty good stuff, I say.
Well done, she says. Extra crispy.
I catch myself smiling around a mouthful of reconstituted potato flakes. Hey, I say. You want to do it? Go up to the airstrip after this? See if we can’t spot a Cessna or two?
Debbie doesn’t even pause eating. Sure, she says.
It’s incredible, we leave the restaurant laughing, I don’t even know what about. I drive across town again and out to the Webb Road, which runs behind the airstrip. It’s full dark now. Debbie’s mood takes a bit of a nosedive on the way and she asks me to stop at the store and buy a bottle of wine. I figure what the hell. The Quick Stop only has Old Duke and Wild Irish Rose, really bad stuff, but we actually used to drink Old Duke when we were kids so I buy some of that. Back in the car I hand the bottle to Debbie. The rest of the drive she tries to get the cap off the bottle without any luck, so she has to wait until I pull off into the field behind the airstrip and twist it off for her.
I give Debbie a boost onto the back of the Mustang, then jump up beside her. The day was warm for March, and that warmth has carried over into the evening. I’m comfortable even though I left my jacket at home and have on just the sweatshirt that I wear loading trucks in the winter.
We don’t talk for a while. I listen to Debbie drink, the slop of the wine back and forth as she tips the bottle then brings it back to her lap. It’s the only sound. No other cars come along, and there are no planes. The airstrip can go weeks without any business, especially during the winter. In the summer rich people from Boston an
d New York flying in to their summer homes make up most of the traffic. This time of year, it’s nothing. Still, I had hoped.
Rich people. I have to keep reminding myself not to think of them the way I always have: as the opposite of me.
You know something we never talked about, I say.
Debbie’s in mid-sip. What’s that? she asks.
In all the craziness that came after the Megabucks, we never talked about how you actually got the ticket.
She frowns. Obviously I bought it, she says. But what’s funny is I don’t remember buying it.
What else is funny, I say, is that until then you hadn’t bought a lottery ticket in at least five years.
But I used to buy them.
All the time, I say.
Wednesdays and Fridays, she says. It’s coming back to me. Two drawings a week. I played the boys’ birthdays.
But you hadn’t done that for years. At least as far as I knew.
She frowns some more, staring at the half-melted snowbank in front of us, which glows bluish in the dark. I honestly don’t remember, she says.
It’s not a big deal. Obviously the ticket didn’t appear out of nowhere. Just seemed strange that all of a sudden you decided to go and buy one. Stranger still that it ended up being a winner.
It’s nice, though, she says. Having money.
I think about this a minute. I guess.
You don’t like it?
I think . . . that it comes with its own set of problems.
Behind us there’s a faint whirring sound, distant but drawing closer. Do you hear that? I ask her.
Hear what?
I think it’s a plane. A jet, sounds like. Don’t you hear it?
Debbie’s face blossoms slowly into a grin. I do now, she says.
Within a few seconds a small jet comes in overhead. We look straight up to watch as it passes. Red and white lights blink on the wingtips and tail. The plane drifts slowly toward the airstrip, touches down lightly, and taxis over to the small building that passes for a terminal. Three tiny figures emerge and take luggage from the compartment in the plane’s belly. Against the light from the terminal they look like shadows come to life.