Ordinary Wear and Tear
Carl backed the car down the ramp, and, with little effort, Jed slid the boat off the trailer and into the river, where it tugged gently on the rope and slapped on the current. Carl parked the car and trailer, and came back to the bank carrying the oars. He was crisply dressed in khakis, a tattersall shirt, and a belt that displayed nautical signal flags. Jed, lean, nearly gaunt, with widespread blue eyes, wore a Seahawks sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and flip-flops. He wondered why Carl thought he needed to be so spiffy. Carl took the oars as the river carried the boat downstream. It was a cloudless September day, with a dusting of snow at the higher elevations. The cottonwoods were just changing color and stirred in the morning breeze. This was a new river, the Ruby. Last month, they’d gone down the Gallatin, which had had too many rapids for their limited skills, and they’d barely avoided a wreck. They didn’t fish or take their phones, just chatted as they floated along, a monthly summary. In the winter, they snowshoed in nearby hills or watched football.
Friends in childhood, they’d had an uninterrupted companionship until Carl went to boarding school, a place Jed called a breeding ground for suits. Carl’s parents had been separating for the second time and had thought it best to get him out of the house and avoid a custody fight. They reconciled soon after, but let him come home only for holidays. He had fought to stay in town, where Jed and his other friends were, but eventually adjusted to boarding school and became a star lacrosse player, a game he’d never encountered before. Jed had attended the local Catholic school, though not for religious reasons. He had been adopted, from a hospital in North Dakota, by a Methodist couple, who thought the public school was full of drugs and casual sex and who referred to Catholics as Papists. Jed found the catechism baffling. His parish school, staffed by nuns, was a small island in a sea of Protestants, from the “Bible churches” in strip malls to Carl’s family’s church, St. Andrew’s, presided over by Father John Oliver, who had been a missionary in Ecuador and returned with a souvenir blowgun, a modest knowledge of the Chicham languages, and a beautiful Shuar bride, Nunkui. Nunkui had grown obese and diabetic on American food, which affected her reproductive health, and Father Oliver often lamented the fact that they had been unable to “multiply.” Jed asked Carl if he thought Nunkui had shrunk Father Oliver’s head. “You can’t possibly know how not funny you are,” Carl said as he watched wild geese along the bank complaining about their intrusion.
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Carl’s parents took him on educational vacations during school holidays. One year, while they were in Chichén Itzá, Jed and two friends broke into their house and drank up the liquor, favoring the fruit-flavored bottles, Cointreau and Grand Marnier. None of it stayed down for long. The incident was investigated by the police and written up in the paper as a burglary. Terror made the culprits conceal their ghastly hangovers, which their parents treated as the flu. Jed wanted to confess, at least to Carl, but lost his nerve. Carl’s parents offered a substantial reward, but no one buckled and the break-in remained unsolved. Carl’s mother said, “They shall live with this crime forever.” Jed often ate at their house and joined in speculating about the culprits, trying to frame Gary Fjelstad, a bullying upperclassman. But he was nervous. Carl’s mother complained that he tore his napkin into little balls, which she found uncouth. When they ate Salisbury steak, she challenged him to spell it and called him “Buckwheat” when he failed.
Carl went to Pomona College to get away from his home town and his parents, but it only made him love them more. Jed attended the state university and lived off campus, indulging in a cavalcade of liaisons. He needed R.O.T.C. in order to meet his college expenses. By the time Jed got out of the National Guard, where he crewed on helicopters, Carl was already on his way to a comfortable life. Jed got a job at a title company. Two eligible bachelors.
Shirley Crane arrived from Albuquerque with her parents, who bought the savings-and-loan building on Selfridge Street and turned it into luxurious condominiums that were well ahead of local markets. The family lived in one of the units while making plans for an R.V. campground. Carl’s father had died when Carl was in college, but his mother was available to despise these new people, whom she found shabby. Carl still called her Mummy.
“Gorgeous,” Carl said, the first time he and Jed saw Shirley standing on the diving board at the city pool. “Tawny,” Jed said. Carl soon announced that he’d fallen for Shirley. Jed considered this preëmptive. He said, “I noticed you were sizing her up. I didn’t realize it was a thing.” Carl married Shirley Crane after a very long engagement, long enough for Shirley to adapt to his mother, who, believing Shirley a danger to her son, fecklessly monitored their courtship, but failed to survive their honeymoon, felled by a “massive” stroke in her greenhouse.
Carl’s mother had snubbed Shirley’s parents at the wedding, recoiling from the father’s loud sports jacket with exaggerated disdain. Shirley’s mother now made no secret of the fact that they were glad she was gone, which left Shirley in an awkward position as she tried to support Carl in his bereavement. He couldn’t conceal his grief, and it was months before his mourning subsided.
The newlyweds had travelled all the way to the Dodecanese for the honeymoon, but only Shirley went for a swim. Carl struggled with the time change, and asked Shirley why the locals were all milling around. When they got back and moved into Carl’s family home, Shirley threw herself into becoming a wife, doggedly working her way through her late mother-in-law’s “Joy of Cooking” and transforming herself into an Irma S. Rombauer fangirl. Clearly, Carl and Shirley loved each other, but Carl’s work ethic and his financial striving made their marriage other than Shirley had expected. It was as though marriage were something Carl had needed to get out of the way, a view that explained the couple’s meagre intimacies. Shirley admired Carl’s discipline and met the long solitary days with obsessive volunteering, counselling battered women and cleaning cages at the animal shelter. Carl worried that her work with mistreated women would place him under suspicion. And, channelling “Mummy,” he called her friends at the animal shelter “empty nesters with rubber gloves.” Carl visited the shelter just once, and peered at the animals while holding a Kleenex to his nose. Shirley wanted to rescue a dog, in particular a Corgi mix named Drew. Carl hugged her and said, “No.” She asked him to consider two very small dogs, Sparkle Plenty and Sister Hooch. “No and no.” She pushed him away. He raised his arms. “Now what did I do?”
To compensate for his position on the dogs, he asked Shirley if he might visit the women’s shelter so that they could display their own affectionate and violence-free marriage. “Otherwise, the gals might conclude I’m battering you—something I’ve never considered, as you know,” he said, following this with a joke about batter being the basis of pancakes.
That’s all I need, Shirley thought. The idea was soon forgotten. Shirley had spent years “pulling men’s hands off my ass” but had found them meek when rebuked. She’d never been abused but she heard stories at the women’s shelter that amazed her. When her disgust subsided, she was angry. “If you find the perpetrator,” Shirley said, “get a rope, get bombs, get rat poison.” The women so liked Shirley that they forgave her for not knowing what she was talking about.
Shirley’s exuberant nature balanced Carl’s placid ways, but the marriage turned out to be too much work, and it didn’t last. Carl was sure that his kindly and thoughtful nature, his good manners and solicitous demeanor were way more than enough—until the moment when Shirley announced that she’d had all she could stand. “Was it something I said?” Carl inquired. Jed was touched by this obtuse response when Carl described it on the river. He had long sensed that Shirley was adrift. Carl said, “This whole thing has been a real eye-opener. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.”
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Shirley’s father, well-versed in litigation, brought in a real killer, a lawyer from Albuquerque. Shirley got more than enough money to buy a condominium in Kauai, where she’d spent several happy years in her teens while her father fleeced his partners. The condo was discounted as a result of one of her father’s bankruptcies. Shirley had her future to consider, but the move surprised Jed anyway. “Did you just roll over and play dead?” he asked Carl.
“Don’t be snide. I wanted to make sure she’d be O.K.” Jed saw right through this.
The river narrowed and turned to the right. They picked up speed for a pleasant stretch and swept quite close to the rocky shore, so close that they spent a moment under branches while the shoreward oar tapped on the stones and flushed a pair of sandpipers.
Carl announced, “I married the daughter of unscrupulous developers and paid the price.” It didn’t sound at all like Carl. It was something his parents might have said. Still, Carl wasn’t entirely their product and enjoyed his anomalies. He had a complete set of David Bowie albums and a black cowboy hat. Jed teased him with Bowie imitations—“Bladder control to Major Tom,” and so on. Things could have been worse. There were no children. Jed knew that they were two kind people who were unsuited to each other, hardly a hanging offense. Carl’s ambivalence and grief caused him to make all sorts of ugly remarks, which he’d regret once things settled down. “She’s no dope. She’ll land on her feet.”
“Carl, honestly.”
“She’s in a phase. I’d take her back but she’d need to crawl on her tongue.”
Carl looked stricken, even a little crazy. He began to question everything: he drank more than usual, at least by his temperate standards, and was constantly in church, grilling Father Oliver. Jed told him he’d be better off going to the gym. But Carl was a believer and accepted what Jed called “the whole enchilada.” Jed’s own early indoctrination had evaporated, except maybe the fear of a damnation he hardly believed in, but there it was, a tincture. He wouldn’t have had even that if Sister Calista hadn’t often referred to “the charred doors of Hell,” a phrase that resurfaced in Jed’s mind at indiscreet moments.
Jed was not at all curious about his biological parents. Because of his raw-boned frame, crooked teeth, and blue eyes, he assumed that they were hillbillies. His remote and quarrelsome adoptive parents had left him with an aversion to both marriage and religion. His belief that getting married was a dim thing to do in the first place was likely behind his detached view of Carl’s marital failure. Military service had confirmed Jed’s bachelorhood perhaps as much as the example of his adoptive parents had. He had the dubious standing in town of someone who’d slept with more women who had gone on to marry and start families with other men than anyone else. He keenly admired the children of those women, as though he’d had a hand in their lives; he even kept track of their birthdays. He’d chat these young mothers up, hoping to get a reminiscent smile out of them. It was a pleasant way to live, and new talent arrived regularly.
They passed a cornice that poured swallows overhead. Carl watched them as they spiralled above, but neglected to notice a man fishing from the bank and accidentally rowed across his line. Carl raised his hands from the oars and apologized, but the angler shook an enraged fist. Carl found that merely interesting and said, “Wow!”
Jed said, “Let’s go back and whip his ass. I’m old-school.”
Carl chuckled. “Jed, Jed, Jed.”
These were usually such contented days on the river. They often saw deer come down for a drink and, once, a wolf stared at them over the body of a fawn. They passed a marshy side channel filled with duckweed and blackbirds. Jed thought Carl was hogging the oars, but he wouldn’t give them up.
“I’m sublimating through exercise. I wish Shirley well and I’m resigned to her building her cheeseball with my money. Smart girls prepare for rainy days.”
“She made out like a bandit.” Jed didn’t know why he would say this.
“It rains on bandits, too,” Carl said. “I’m fine with it. Why aren’t you? How else could she afford a condo in Kauai?” Jed decided against saying that the condo might not have been so affordable if her father hadn’t bankrupted his partners.
At the head of a grassy island, a cluster of teal took flight and whistled over the boat. On a day like this, a day of cloudless skies and sparkling foothills, it was not easy to stay on message or relieve tension. Carl was playing his plight for laughs, but his pain was evident. Jed wanted to leave it at that.
“You just need time.” Jed yawned.
“I imagined some residual good will between us, but Kauai makes it clear that she means to move on. I guess they have great weather there. But I don’t think our winters were the problem.”
“She knows she has a lot of years left.” Jed leaned back to watch a hawk overhead, a harrier.
“I’m not tracking her. If she wants to fuck some Polynesian in Kauai, I’ll buy him a war canoe.”
“Oh, dear me.”
Jed was finding Carl’s agitation disturbing. He looked wild-eyed. There was little doubt that Carl had provided Shirley with a life style that most would find dull. Shirley had hoped to learn to ski but Carl had said she’d only break a leg. As for travel, better to read about it; otherwise, it was just sightseeing. He had suggested that she work at his office if she wanted to keep busy, but she had declined. “You have a secretary!” she said, surprising Carl with her indignation.
“Evidently, she wanted more,” Jed said, wondering when this dirge would end.
“Don’t they all? Whose side are you on?”
It was a relief for both of them to laugh heartily at this.
“My mother, God rest her soul, would have liked Shirley if only she’d had more time. We were arguing about having kids. Shirley didn’t want to and she was getting loud. I raised my hand to stop it and said, ‘Halt.’ She accused me of trying to resolve marital disputes with hand signals. Mummy would have loved that. Sarcasm was her favorite.”
Carl carried the anchor up into the streamside willows and Jed put the cooler on the sand. He opened one of the sandwiches and said, “Find these at Ptomaine Gardens?”
“Next time, you get them. It’s hard to shop for a fussy eater.” Carl opened his sandwich to examine its contents, then said, “I don’t know why you’ve had so many girlfriends. Don’t you get sick of it?”
“It’s never the same. The housewives can be quite timid, but the divorcées buck like goats.” Carl held his head and moaned. Jed had thought guy talk would cheer him up. “You should try it. You squeeze them and it’s fun.”
“What in the world do you get out of it?”
“You just never know. Sometimes it’s a thrill. Sometimes it’s customer golf.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand your checkered quest for monogamy.”
“I have hope. It doesn’t sound like you do.”
Their bantering boat trips would go on forever, unless Carl learned that Jed had slept with Shirley within days of the divorce being final. Shirley had been sitting on a bench in the park, watching young people sword fighting with lacrosse sticks that Carl had donated. It was as if she were having a last look at her life in this town. Jed spotted her as he took a shortcut to his office. Her arms were stretched across the back of the bench. She didn’t see him coming.
“You look sad.”
“Oh, it’s you. I’m just watching the kids trying to figure those things out.”
Jed’s heart was racing. “I hope we can stay in touch.”
“I do, too. I’m not proud of how this ended.”
“I assume you loved Carl.”
“I still do. He’s so good. I just can’t live like that.” Jed wondered why Carl was such a poor husband but such a great friend. Maybe the two things were connected.
Jed gazed at her, as if to express that he shared her wish for Carl’s well-being. She held his gaze. They took separate routes to Jed’s house. He would long remember Shirley’s slumberous voice, saying, “Don’t rush. I’m enjoying you.” But, if the occasion was something that Jed liked to replay in his mind, Shirley appeared to want to forget it. She left for Hawaii as soon as she could. The animal shelter threw a nice party with dogs, the women’s shelter a private, even covert farewell that brought Shirley to tears. Jed was left wondering if he’d fallen in love. Maybe he had: he was quite lighthearted about the end of Carl’s marriage. It seemed to him that his dalliance with Shirley was not unlike the time he broke into Carl’s family home with his friends and got sick on Carl’s parents’ liquor. I get it, he thought. I’m going to Hell.
The condo in Kauai looked like a clean break. Even Jed was bothered by it. Carl pretended to shrug it off: “I’ve got a law firm to run.” (He’d hired a young intern from the law school he’d attended, so now it was a “firm.”)
Jed said, “Shirley and I were great friends. I hope to see her again.”
“Be my guest,” Carl said.
“I have been,” Jed replied. Carl assumed Jed meant the sandwiches. To avoid misunderstanding, Jed pointed to them and cautiously took a bite.
Shirley had wanted to take Drew to Kauai with her. The dog had been in the shelter for more than a year and was ready for adventure. But in order to avoid a long quarantine she had to leave the dog with Carl until many requirements were met. She understood Carl’s issues with dogs and warned him that Drew could be very opinionated. Carl accepted, clinging to this last connection to Shirley.
Drew was suspicious of Carl and at first declined to eat, but Carl kept moving through the process, towing Drew on his leash to be microchipped or to acquire a health certificate from a veterinarian, whose face Drew licked. Carl wished that Drew felt the same way about him, but wondered if the licking was sanitary. Carl scheduled two rabies vaccines, thirty days apart, arranged for a proof-of-tick-treatment certificate and a rabies-antibody test. He took pains filling out the animal-import form and mailed it to Shirley at Bali Hai condos, in Kauai. By then, Drew and Carl had become quite used to each other.
The flight to Kauai over Christmas was no picnic, with gruesome layovers. Jed had told his office he’d be travelling. Carl was out of town—Jed didn’t know where. Shirley’s condominium was in a neighborhood that was undistinguished but pleasant, with ocean air. Carl had shown him a picture of it on his phone, one of several brown cottages near the water. Jed had memorized the details—the palms on either side, the crooked walkway, and the red door, which Shirley barely opened to him. A pelting tropical rain had begun to fall, bouncing around the landing. She suggested that he call first next time.
Next time! What about the four-hour layover? She broke Carl’s heart, he thought, but she’s not breaking mine.
It wasn’t true. He clung to a memory of Shirley flinging herself across the bed to check her phone while he gazed ruefully at the wet spot. In some way, he enjoyed the unrequited infatuation, kind of a buzz. Women were tyrants! He vowed to keep the mortifying boarding passes. Better to remember the whole damn thing as a one-off. This brief moment in Shirley’s doorway was a bruising encounter, and he was soaked.
No flights out until the next day. Home seemed across the planet and filled with guileless citizens with strong Western values who would never find themselves in Kauai for unethical reasons. The stucco motel would have to do. It was out of the rain, and he could work on his flight booking. He asked the desk clerk if he could borrow the dryer. “No.” He’d have to hang the clothes. He thought to try Shirley on the chance she’d kept her old number. Staring out the window at the sheeting rain, he dialled. She answered.
“Why didn’t you ask me in?”
“Carl is here.”
His face grew hot. He felt the skin on his back prickle.
“I see. Where is he now?”
“Some motel in town.”
“You don’t know which one?” Jed cried.
“Hey, Jed, take a hint.”
He called the front desk and asked if they had a guest under Carl’s name.
“We don’t share that information. It’s the law.”
“Of course! Just like the fucking dryer. Why did I ask?”
“The use of the dryer is not protected by law. The names of guests are.”
Jed wondered how he’d come to this, taking abuse from some jailhouse lawyer at the front desk. He’d rarely been homesick for his town but he was now. The old trees, the playgrounds, winter days at his office, breakfasts at the drugstore with friends. He should just move on and book a flight. He looked at options on his phone. He grabbed a motel scratch pad with a picture of a pineapple, but the first thing he wrote was “Shirley.” He hunted in vain for non-stops. His thoughts were all over the place, and included the prospect of a layover in Honolulu with an escort service. He’d tried that once and been sent an attractive surgical nurse named Joan. It was too embarrassing, so they just went to dinner. Joan commented on what she called his comical lack of self-awareness. Shirley could have said the same thing, instead of telling him not to rush when he was already rushing.
He called her. “Shirl, I’m so sorry to bother you again, but this could get awkward.”
“No shit.”
“I’m just gonna scoot. But, of course, it would be best if I didn’t bump into Carl. What’s he doing here, anyway?”
“We’re in discussion.”
“Ah, nice. I’m touched by his determination. He’s a great guy.”
“Make your reservation. I’ll do what I can to arrange a clean getaway. And never again confuse a slip with a real event.”
“No, ma’am!”
“Bye, now. Don’t be ugly.”
He had to get out of the room and decided to go once the sun was setting. Walking along the beach and kicking at shells, he met a couple from Indiana enjoying the last light of the day. “I’m from Indiana, too!” he told them. It was a pointless fib but it helped his anxiety. The couple looked rural and Jed wanted to talk about agricultural things. His title company increasingly managed farmland that was going to other uses. But the Hoosiers were obsessed with the new Colts quarterback and the drug problems of the team’s owner and, besides, they seemed troubled by Jed’s restlessness. They moved along, eyes fixed on the water as though something might soon happen there.
When it was dark, Jed left the beach and walked beside the road bordering the sea, wondering why the locals needed so many pickup trucks. How did they even get them there? He began to feel as if he was being followed but didn’t look behind him to check. When he pulled his phone out of his pocket, he saw that he had missed a call. Shirley. He listened to his voice mail. Her voice was subdued; he couldn’t tell if she was being sultry or just careful not to be overheard. The message was clear. Carl had just left. Jed dismissed the idea that he could visit her with impunity. He knew better.
Tomorrow he’d be inching his way home. No first class, but he had an aisle seat. He’d scan the crowd at the Honolulu airport in case Carl had missed his connection and was craning at the display board to find his new gate number. For a moment, he felt solidarity with Carl. Why was Shirley such a problem for both of them? Her blunt decency was hard for guys like them. Why had Jed’s little flutter with her mattered so much more to Jed than to her? Why did it still trouble him?
“Old pal,” Carl said, “we’re restating our vows. At least, I hope we are! Shirley’s a flight risk!”
“Let’s assume once was enough.” If not, Jed thought, I could pop back to Kauai.
In a small town, it’s hard to get people to the same wedding twice. Jed had hoped to recruit some showstopper to accompany him for the occasion—to give Shirley second thoughts?—but couldn’t find anyone willing to go along. It was a modest affair at St. Andrew’s, with business friends of Carl’s, baffled but loyal friends of Shirley’s. Her friends from the women’s shelter seemed to trail the ghosts of the thugs in their past. One was a real looker but not keen to enter some charade with Jed, whose big smile put her off. When he flirted with a schoolteacher he knew—“Well, well, well”—she gently knuckled him in the ribs and told him to get a life. The principals were at the altar now. Father Oliver wore a retro surplice and added sly details about the previous wedding to his homily. Jed wondered how the beaming cleric felt about being dragged through this again. No doubt he viewed it as pure spiritual affirmation. Jed watched Shirley’s lips as she repeated her oath. “May the Force be with you!” Father Oliver concluded.
Jed wondered if the wedding guests considered him less successful than Carl. Probably they did, and, if their values were entirely pecuniary, shame on them. For a moment, Jed felt in pitched battle with his oldest friend, his suit still rumpled from the first wedding, while Carl was crisp, stylish, and formal. Jed was starting to feel that he couldn’t live with this—not the erotic memory, which had hardly faded, but the guilt, which was growing. He feared that it would have to be resolved or he’d be on the horn with Re/Max looking for another town.
Carl led the celebrants out as though they were a platoon. Shirley stayed inside with her friends from the animal shelter and a sampling of battered women. Jed walked toward them and the friends fell away to accommodate him. Did they know something? Jed felt strange and uncomfortable, and thick-tongued as he intoned, “I truly think this is the best thing for both of you going forward.” He was surprised at his own orotund phrasing. Shirley looked at him for a long moment, bemused at this awkward solemnity, and told him to fuck off.
Jed was taken aback. He said, “Ah,” as Shirley joined the rest of the wedding party out front. People were driving away. It was like a drag race. Carl was waving to the departing cars, married again and filled with hope. Jed admired his guileless enthusiasm as the guests shot off, this bit of drudgery out of the way. Father Oliver raised a hand to wave, his cowboy boots squarely planted. Never before now had Jed felt his betrayal so powerfully. Carl was loved in the community, even by those who considered him a sap for lending money to people who came to him with sketchy sob stories. A real Christian, they said out of the side of their mouths. Carl’s housekeeper had had him co-sign a big note at Stockmens Bank, then left town with a handyman who was not her husband. Carl said that he understood her desperation, referred to her as a “poor thing,” and wrote it off. Jed told Carl that he would have followed her to the gates of Hell to get his money back. He hated it when people treated Carl like a sucker and ran up his receivables. “People think you’re a soft touch,” Jed said.
“Oh, probably I am.”
“It’s open-wallet surgery.”
“I know, I know. But, hey, that’s funny.”
The second marriage of Carl and Shirley lasted less than ninety days; it was over before she’d even begun to think about selling the condo. Carl was spared the pain of embarrassment, as he seemed incapable of it. But Jed’s guilt was eating at him. He could scarcely think what it would take to resolve it. This anguish surprised him. He tried without success to see his betrayal as merely something he’d gotten away with.
“What’s this?” Carl said, leading Jed down the corridor to his office. Jed didn’t return the wave of Carl’s secretary, Jenny, even though she had gone to high school with him and they had shared each other’s company out by the cellphone towers in inclement weather back then. “You made an appointment to see me? What on earth!”
“I’ll be quick,” Jed said. Carl stopped for a moment, looking at Jed in concern, but then led him into the office, closing the door. A sign on his desk said “THINK OR THWIM.” Jed sat facing Carl, gazing around at the pictures without seeing them. He was determined to come clean. “I have something I want to tell you.” This was the hardest thing Jed had ever done, but he had no choice. “I have to get this off my chest.”
“Stop right there! We knew you broke into the house. Mummy figured it out in a New York minute. We forgot about it long ago. You should, too.”
Jed sat quietly, unrelieved even when Carl began to laugh. He stared into his lap while Carl went on to summarize some personal news. He was trading in his Taos for a Tiguan, and Shirley already had another companion. “I call him Tarzan, but Shirley’s happy. So . . . so, that’s good.”
“Carl, that’s not what I came to tell you.”
Jed told him what he’d done, blunt and without details. “I’m sorry.” The two sat in silence. Jed couldn’t look up. He let it sink in.
Carl spoke, his voice level. “We never had a chance. You ruined my marriage.” Jed knew that this was not the time to say that the marriage had already ended. “I don’t understand why you did it.”
“Neither do I.”
Jed had never seen this expression on Carl’s face. Carl looked down, tapping his thumbnails against each other. “I need to think about this. I heard you were in Kauai. I thought it was a courtesy call. What did you make of the island?”
Jed’s attempt to speak came out wrong. “A poor man’s Maui.” What could that possibly mean?
“I visited the Breadfruit Institute.” Carl sounded robotic. “All about global food security. I’m not a beach guy. What do you actually care about, Jed?”
“Not enough, maybe.” Jed stood. “May I give you a call?”
“Sure, Jed, give me a call.”
A day later, Carl phoned Jed to propose a formal discussion. He said that he wanted to put this behind them. His disquieting voice hadn’t changed. He told Jed to meet him at the vestry in St. Andrew’s on Tuesday morning. Father Oliver would stand by. “Be there.” It was a command.
Jed’s relief was palpable. He hung up the phone and gave a little fist pump. He dared to think that the friendship could be saved. Nothing else in his life had lasted so long or ever would again.
It was the last snowy day of the year, wet spring snow. Jed started toward the church from his house, a long walk that would allow him to collect his thoughts. He paused at the corner of Cottonwood to watch a children’s snowball fight. Only one girl, in a Wonder Woman snowsuit, could really throw, and it was unclear if they’d chosen sides. A small black dog with a bandanna around its neck tried to catch the snowballs. Jed watched as long as he could but kept an eye on the time. Maybe the children were unable to choose sides. There were five of them, and the odd number would make for awkwardness. Jed stalled to consider this, but he had to get going and stop spinning scenarios. A deputy sheriff pulled alongside him as he walked, calling, “Jed, want a ride?” Jed said he needed the exercise and resumed, avoiding parts of the sidewalk under branches laden with snow. Puffed-up birds adorned the overhead wires. In the morning sun, the street seemed to sparkle.
Father Oliver stopped him on the sidewalk in front of the rectory, coatless, with his arms crossed. “Jed, it would be best if you just go home. Let me work it out with Carl now. We’ll get him some help.”
“Can’t I just go in?” Jed bridled at Father Oliver’s stern gaze.
“You wouldn’t be safe.”
“I wouldn’t be safe? What are you talking about?”
“Just please take me at my word. It’s a bad idea. Carl told me what happened and, if I may say so, Jed, I pray that one day you will find redemption.”
As Jed crossed the park, he felt put upon by Father Oliver taking up Carl’s grievance. His indignation was a relief. He stopped by the swings to greet an old girlfriend, Cathy Chitham, with her handsome toddlers. He didn’t remember her married name, something Polish. He rested his hands on the children’s crowns as she pushed her sunglasses back with a finger. “How am I holding up?” she said.
“You never looked so good.”
“Oh, funny. I suppose you’d know,” she said. Jed was aghast that, in front of these beautiful children, she was leering. It had been a hard day, and he was in no mood to plunge into her gaze. Cathy wore a light sweater. Jed asked if she was cold and she said, “Oh, Jed, give it up.”
“I’ve just been told by a man of the cloth that I’m a bad human being.”
“I already knew that! I’m not surprised you never married, given all the antics. It’s lucky that you don’t know what you’re missing.”
“I like being alone with my faults.” That was true. Jed knelt to say goodbye to the toddlers, who were trying to figure out who he was. “You take good care of Mommy, O.K.?” No reply from them. Jed found them nearly as bland as their mother.
Cathy said, “See you around.”
Jed thought, Yep, says it all. The children continued to peer at him as he walked up the empty street toward home.
In the following days, Jed noticed Carl watching him from a distance, and one night he thought he heard him on the porch. He could see a silhouette from his darkened bedroom. He declined to find out more and waited for the figure to depart before returning to a restless sleep.
Carl received a citation from the state bar association noting his “tireless advocacy for indigent rights,” a baffling accolade, which Carl accepted cheerfully without suspecting that it was the result of an intervention by two lawyer friends who’d learned that Carl was, as one of them put it, “on his way to the rubber room.” Carl sought advice about ordinary life from his secretary, Jenny. It was good to have someone normal at hand. He began to return to the office in order to talk to her, and soon fell in love again. Jenny was forthright about his previous nuptials. She said, “If Father Oliver knew shit from Shinola, he would have talked you out of both of those marriages.” Thanks to Jenny’s guidance, Carl stopped conferring with Father Oliver, whom she described as “medieval.” Carl’s faith had once been a consolation in his life. His secretary’s stark remarks made him turn to her instead. Carl asked where the indigents in town were, and she said, “We don’t have any.” Then, recalling the award from the bar association, she added, “I mean, they’re careful to stay out of sight.” She visited Carl at his home or stayed over, then moved in. People in town began to notice a renewed spring in his step, and were pleased to see his improvement.
Jed and Carl bumped into each other, at the bank, the gas station, and the grocery store. Jed found Carl’s cordial greetings fishy. Shirley had never claimed Drew, and now Carl rarely went anywhere without the little dog. Jed recommitted himself to his work, trying to understand trends as the town changed. His relations with his neighbors may have been formal, but they had begun to check the lights at his house to make sure he was O.K.
Carl accidentally ran over Drew in his driveway and was not seen in his office or elsewhere for nine days. Knocks on his door went unanswered. The cold was extreme, the Alberta Express. Jed scraped his windshield and got in his car. He drove to Carl’s office, where he found Jenny, at her station with her usual crocodile smile, still wearing her hat. Her forehead wrinkled at the sight of Jed.
Jed asked, “What should I know?”
“He ran over Drew.”
“I heard.”
“The dog was the only reason he forgave you.”
“That’s hard to follow, but sure.”
“Carl loves me.” Jed thought that this was probably true. Still, it landed with a thud.
“I heard that. It’s wonderful, but why doesn’t he come to work?”
“When he lost the dog, he got mad at you again, and I didn’t want to hear about it for one more minute—the betrayal, the quote shattered friendship unquote.”
“He said that?”
“Jed, your zipper problems have caused so much heartache in this town.”
Jed thought to stay silent this time on the subject of the eager volunteers, even about the steamy hours at the cellphone towers, where opportunity had illuminated the frosty nights. Of course Jenny’s right, he thought. I’m an absolute pig.
“Maybe Carl thought Drew was a stand-in for Shirley.”
“That hurts, Jed.” Tears filled her eyes. “Perhaps it’s true. I hope it’s not.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you. You could buy him a dog—”
“Why, sure. Or how about a parrot? Or a horse?” Jenny stood, a handful of papers crushed in her fist. Jed quietly excused himself and returned to the snow. He started home, then stopped. It was clear. He’d go and see Carl. He had to.
He had not gone past Carl’s house all winter. He remembered the side window that he and his friends had broken. The replaced glass didn’t match the other panes. Where had those friends gone? Moved away, most likely. Jed wondered if he should be grateful that his dreary job had kept him here. It wasn’t really a question.
He smiled painfully at the security camera and knocked. Carl answered the door in his bathrobe. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.
Maybe Carl would shoot him. It might be welcome, though he imagined it would hurt.
“How’s biz?” Carl asked as he placed a pod in the Keurig machine.
“My secretary earns the only reliable living.”
“As it should be,” Carl said. He led Jed into the living room, where they sat before a rock fireplace with a gas log, and, above it, a painting of a wagon train, a woman in a bonnet driving the oxen. It hadn’t been there when Jed was last in the house. It must have been a reference to Carl’s pioneer family. What an eyesore. “Jenny and I are getting married,” Carl announced. “We’ve been close since I don’t know when. It’s time to act. In a way, I’m grateful that you disrupted my life. It’s been a long way around the horn, but I’m with the right girl now. We have no secrets.” Carl paused and Jed didn’t speak. “I’m at last coming out of a very dark place. Yes, I’m moving toward the light.” He stared into his coffee for a moment, before lifting his eyes and holding Jed’s gaze. “Jed, I’ve waited all this time to tell you to your face that I hate you.”
“I understand.”
That was it. Carl saw him to the door, clutching his bathrobe as the snow blew in. Jed stopped when it shut behind him. Was this, finally, the end? Still, they had the long years of friendship to overcome this mishap. Jed felt it was inevitable that they would eventually reconcile.
Jed read about the wedding and wondered how Father Oliver could have performed the ceremony with a straight face. He had lost his indigenous wife to diabetes and was no longer a social presence in the community, now rarely beaming from the front of the church with indiscriminate benevolence. Carl and Jenny’s sparsely attended wedding was felt to be the end of an era by those who noticed it. The follies that had been cheerful topics for the town had dried up. The principals were starting to look old. At first, people thought Jenny had taken on airs, but she was one of them, and, in the end, they wished she were more pretentious and had a place in Arizona.
Kauai had long since gone from being a subject of gossip to a travel destination, and several neighbors vacationed there, returning with anomalous souvenirs from the Pacific Islands or brochures from the Breadfruit Institute. Global food security was a new topic in this comfortable town.
Carl’s practice—“a big frog in a small pond”—suffered as people now travelled to seek services. A modest trauma center was all the town had to offer by way of medical facilities, and Carl’s office rarely took on cases beyond the town limits. His many friends in the bar association recognized that he could again use some help and arranged for him to fill a district-court vacancy. They’d known him since law school and agreed that he was solid. The court’s residency requirements meant that Carl and Jenny would have to move to Helena—or else decline the position and face a straitened future in a place that seemed to be dissolving. They sold the house, took the furniture and the wagon-train painting, and moved away.
As Jed ate breakfast at the drugstore counter one summer morning, he remembered that it was Carl’s birthday. He thought to make it an occasion and wandered past Carl’s old home. A tricycle and a trampoline stood on the lawn. A dog barked behind a window.
Jed moved along, hoping to bump into someone he knew. ♦