THE RAIN WAS STILL COMING DOWN when Bruce left Doug Reed’s place, freezing to slush on the windshield before the blade could clear it away. It was the second week of December and ten inches of snow was on the ground, coated with a thick layer of ice now, shining like glazed porcelain in Bruce’s headlights at five P.M.
“Whattya know about them roads?” Leonard asked when Bruce walked into the Lookout. He tossed a cardboard coaster onto the bar in front of him. “You want your regular?”
“Nah, I’ll take a Coke,” he said, though in fact he did want a beer. He’d promised Kathy he wouldn’t until after she’d ovulated and they were in the clear. They had been trying to conceive a baby for six months. Kathy had brought it up the first night they were married, how badly she wanted to have kids, asking him whether he wanted them too. He had answered that he had them already, but Kathy just looked at him with a funny expression.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m talking about your own kids,” she persisted.
“They are my kids, Kath,” he had said.
“You know what I mean,” she replied.
And he did. An infinitesimal hairline crack of him did. Besides, who was he to stand in the way of Kathy’s dream? They began immediately. Kathy had been keeping records of her cycles for months, tracking her ovulation and menstruation, monitoring her cervical mucus and her luteal surge. Initially, Bruce took this as a sign not so much of her determination as it was a reflection of her profession as a cow inseminator, though he quickly learned that he was wrong. She wept each time she got her period, bitterly remorseful for having waited until she was two weeks shy of her thirty-fifth birthday to even begin to try.
Bruce did what he could. He held her and stroked her hair and reassured her when she cried. He drank tea with her in the evenings called “Fertile Blend.” He took vitamins with zinc and avoided hot baths and had sex with her only missionary style and only on certain days, according to the demands of the chart she kept on the last page of her journal. And at last he even agreed to call her psychic, Gerry, and submit to a reading over the phone. “I sense a presence,” Gerry declared the moment Bruce finished giving him the numbers of his credit card.
“Could it be the baby?” Bruce asked.
“No!” Gerry shouted, changing his mind already. He had a Brooklyn accent, though he lived now in upstate New York. Kathy had met him years before, improbably, at a conference for people who raised and worked with cows. They had been drawn to each other immediately, she had told Bruce, seeing that they were of the same ilk, recognizing each other by their numinous jewelry. He was a small-time guru, holding workshops on occasion in a converted barn on his farm. Kathy had gone there once and camped out in his yard for a week, learning how to read rune stones and tarot cards. She showed Bruce a picture of Gerry she had glued inside her journal. He was a chubby, graying man who looked more like a college professor to Bruce than either a farmer or a psychic, his pink face pocked with old acne scars. “It’s not a presence. Not a person,” he continued with Bruce on the phone. He spoke with agonizing precision, making every few words its own sentence. “It’s an idea. A thought you’re having. It’s getting in the way. It’s blocking the road. There’s a logjam in the river. A mud slide on the path, so to speak.”
“A thought?” asked Bruce, trying to empty his head of everything he knew and believed, not wanting Gerry to divine what was inside, just in case he actually could.
He didn’t believe in psychics or crystals or any of this New Age business, but when they got off the phone, Bruce knew that, in a sense, Gerry had been right. He did have a thought. He had it each time he and Kathy made love during her fertile week, each time she got her period again. It was the thought that when he’d had the idea to marry Kathy, this was not what he expected. He realized now how ignorant and self-absorbed he had been, but Kathy’s desire to have children had taken him completely by surprise, so much was their courtship focused on his grief, his life, his wife and his kids and their loss. Kathy had been his counselor and confidante, his shoulder to cry on. She had been warm and female and sexually available, expert at drawing him out of his shell, back when the shell he needed to be drawn out of was composed entirely of his eternal love for Teresa Rae Wood.
When they married, all of that changed in a day. Teresa was no longer his wife, Kathy was. “Kathy Tyson-Gunther,” she decided to be called. And even Claire and Joshua seemed to belong to him less than they had the day before. Kathy referred to them as his “late wife’s kids,” a shadowy dejection coming over her each time Claire or Joshua came up in their conversations, though she would not admit her mood had anything to do with them. All through the summer and early autumn, they had talked in an abstract way about having Joshua and Claire over for dinner, though nothing ever came of it. Finally, in November, he and Kathy extended a tentative invitation to them for Thanksgiving dinner, but then they learned that Joshua was going to be a father and their plans dissolved.
“It isn’t that I’m not happy for them. I am,” Kathy said to him sincerely, after having wept over the news. “It’s …” she struggled to think of what, exactly, it was. “It’s that seeing Lisa’s belly will bring it all to the forefront. How we’ve failed.”
“We haven’t failed,” he told her.
“How about they all come over for Christmas?” she suggested.
“Josh could be in jail by then,” Bruce said, and he could. His court date had been scheduled at last. Joshua had been arrested in August and charged with possession of marijuana, though Bruce had sighed a breath of relief when he heard the charge. All summer long, he had been hearing things around town, rumors that Joshua was dealing for Rich Bender and Vivian Plebo, and not just marijuana, though he had allowed himself to ignore the talk until he got the call from Claire. She had been distraught when she called, almost begging him to come to Blue River, where she was. She had driven up from Minneapolis the night before and spent half the day going from the bank to the courthouse and back to the bank again, getting money and notarized statements and filling out forms so she could bail Joshua out of jail. But Bruce hadn’t gone to Blue River. He couldn’t, he explained to Claire, especially since she already had it covered. He had a job to finish and then, that evening, a softball game to play. It was the regional semifinals and the Jake’s Tavern team had made it all that way.
A few weeks later, he and Joshua were going in opposite directions on Big Pile Road. They stopped and talked to each other through the open windows of their trucks with their engines idling, the way they had taken to doing since Bruce had married Kathy and Joshua stopped coming home.
“What you doing with yourself these days?” asked Bruce, not wanting to mention his arrest directly.
“Pulling out docks for Jack Haines,” Joshua answered.
“That’s good work.”
“It’s just till the lakes freeze up,” said Joshua, and then they looked away, out their windshields, both of them thinking that by the time the lakes froze up Joshua might not need a job anyway, because very likely he would be in jail. He had been busted with a fair amount of marijuana, Claire had told Bruce. She kept him up to date on the tug of war between Joshua’s court-appointed attorney and the county prosecutor. He saw her about once a week, when he stopped in at Len’s Lookout. She worked there now, picking up her mother’s old shifts, living in the apartment above the bar, the way she had when Bruce had met her as a child. She had moved to Midden when Joshua got arrested, wanting to be nearby to assist in his defense. There was some debate as to whether the marijuana that Joshua had in his possession was for his personal use or for sale. On the eleventh of December, the judge would decide and sentence him accordingly.
“Bruce!” Claire called to him now on the evening of the ice storm, a moment after Leonard handed him the Coke that Bruce wished were a beer, though she didn’t stop to talk. Instead, she glided past him with several plates in her hands and went to a table of customers he didn’t recognize. Bruce followed her with his eyes, nodding to the few people he knew and glancing briefly at the people he didn’t—city people up to hunt. He took his wool hat off and set it on the bar. “You’re busy, for the roads being what they are,” he told Leonard.
“It’s these dumb Finlanders,” Leonard said, and laughed because he was a Finn himself. “They think they know how to drive. Them and the city apes. The Finlanders got the balls and the apes got their big fancy trucks.”
Claire approached and thumped Bruce on the shoulder. Something caught inside of him and kept him from hugging her. It caught every time he saw her. “What’s new?” she asked.
“Not much.” He took a sip of his Coke. “How about yourself?”
To his surprise, she sat down on the stool beside him. “Did you get your hair cut?”
He shook his head truthfully. He hadn’t cut it recently, though months before, he had cut his ponytail off.
“It looks like you did,” she said. “Or that you’re doing something different to it.”
He combed his hair with his fingers, feeling self-conscious. Kathy had bought him a special conditioner and, after being repeatedly encouraged by her to try it, he’d started using it the week before. It made his hair softer, fuller than it had ever been. He wasn’t going to admit this to Claire. He took his hat from the bar and put it on, remotely regretting that he had stopped by. Since he married Kathy, whenever he saw Claire he got a little nervous, like she was watching his every move, analyzing his every word, like nothing he could do or say would be right. He felt the same way around Joshua. They were a committee, a club, an injured gang of two. He knew without needing to be told that they reported back to each other about him. That they’d look at each other with skeptical smiles and say, So guess who I saw.
“Are you ready for tomorrow?” she asked, referring to Joshua’s court date.
“I thought we couldn’t go in with him.”
“I told you!” she said vehemently. “We can’t go in to the judge’s chambers, but we can go to the courthouse and sit outside in the hall.” She looked at him fervently. “Don’t tell me you’re not going to be there.”
“I hope to,” he said. “But I got to finish up at Doug Reed’s place and if we can’t go in anyway, I don’t see why—”
“For moral support, Bruce,” she interrupted, and then a bell rang back in the kitchen, Mardell signaling that an order was ready. Without another word, Claire bolted away from him, through the swinging doors.
Bruce was relieved when she left. He was almost always relieved when she left, though it was her he came into the Lookout to see. He preferred to talk to her in fits and starts, in the pleasant exchanges they could manage as she strode past him bearing food or dirty dishes or stood waiting for Leonard to make her drinks at the bar. In this manner, he talked to Claire about once a week, though seldom did they actually talk. Kathy didn’t know that he saw Claire as often as he did, didn’t know that when he stopped off after work, he was stopping off at the Lookout. Sometimes, without directly lying, he let her believe that he had gone to Jake’s Tavern. It was their place.
“I told Lisa we’d meet her and Josh at the courthouse at noon,” Claire said a few minutes later, returning to stand next to him with an empty tray, as if his presence the next day had been agreed on. “Can I get three bourbons on the rocks?” she asked Leonard. Together they watched as he lined up the glasses and poured the drinks. Bruce had the feeling that Claire was waiting for him to speak, silently daring him to dispute her or praying he would agree to go, one or the other, so she could respond.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said as she placed the drinks on her tray.
“Did she tell you what came in the mail today?” Leonard asked Bruce before she left again, and then turned to Claire, “Why don’t you tell your dad?”
“Oh,” she waved her hand in front of her face, as if she were embarrassed to even think about it. She looked tired and pretty, like her mother, only darker, now that she’d dyed her hair brown to cover the bleach blond she’d done last summer. “I finished those classes I had to take. I did them online. So now I have my degree.”
“It came in the mail today,” repeated Leonard. “A fancy piece of paper with calligraphy and a big golden seal.”
Claire stared at the bourbons on her tray. “It’s a little behind schedule, but at least I can say I finished up.” She looked at Bruce with the eyes she looked at him with lately, private and tentative, as if she were peering out at him from behind a curtain.
“That’s right,” he said. “Better late then never.”
Her eyes flickered away. “True.”
“Your mom would be proud,” said Leonard, more to Bruce, it seemed, than to Claire. She took her tray and walked away from them and he was glad again, in a remorseful way. “I’m proud too,” he said to nobody, though Leonard heard him and nodded. He went to the till and began to count the day’s money, stacking the bills into neat piles and binding them in rubber bands.
“How’s Mardell doing?” Bruce asked.
Leonard paused in his counting and glanced up. “Her sister’s coming for Christmas. The one from Butte. How’s Kathy?”
“She’s good.” He took the last sip of his Coke and shook the ice in the glass. Since he’d married Kathy, he detected the slightest disapproval from Leonard and Mardell, the slightest lowering in their esteem. “Well, what about the kids?” Mardell had huffed back in June, when Bruce had told her the news, as if they were still in diapers. And then, before he could reply she said, “I can take them, if need be.”
“Take them where?” he’d asked sharply, not caring whether he hurt her feelings, though she’d always been something of an aunt to him and Teresa.
“Take them in,” she exclaimed, and then looked at him with undisguised shock and disdain. Her hair was sheer white and styled into a dense yet airy bush, like cotton candy spun around a cone. “They need a mother, you know. Or at least a mother figure.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” he said, softening. “I got married, that’s all.”
“Oh, Bruce, I know,” she said apologetically, and began to cry. She took her glasses off so she could wipe her eyes. He put his hand on her arm. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that …”
“It’s that you miss Teresa,” he said.
“I guess that’s it,” she said, with a tone that told Bruce that that wasn’t it at all—or rather, that was only part of it. That behind her longing for Teresa, there was judgment for what he had done so soon. He’d heard it already, all around town, without actually having to hear the words. So soon, so soon, like an inane bird swooping over his head, calling to him everywhere he went. It made him love Kathy more, or at least to feel more protective of her, like it was the two of them against the world.
Leonard hadn’t been there when he’d told Mardell about marrying Kathy and he made no mention of it the next several times Bruce came into the bar, until one day he asked Bruce how Kathy was in a voice as plain as day, as if he’d asked that same question for a thousand years.
“Hey, Len,” Bruce said now, standing and pulling his coat on. He opened his wallet and set two dollars on the bar. “I better get home before the roads get worse.”
“You’d better,” he agreed.
“Tell Claire I said bye,” he called as he walked to the door.
Leonard waved him off, signaling he would. It’s what he did all the time.
• • •
“There you are,” said Kathy when he got home. “I hope you’re not too hungry,” she said and smiled, sly and flirtatious. “Or I should say, not hungry for food.” She pulled him to her and kissed his ear. “I got a positive on my ovulation stick, which means we have to do it now.”
“Now?” he asked, running his hands up her sides. She laughed and pulled him into their room. Despite their troubles with conceiving, they always had fun in bed.
“What do you think?” he asked, when they were finished.
“About what?” She was lying the wrong way on the bed, her feet propped up on the headboard in an attempt to assist his sperm in their mad journey to her egg.
“About being pregnant. Do you think this was the one?”
She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, pondering the question. A few months before, Gerry had told her that she would know when it happened. That she would feel a bolt of energy or a shot of light: the spirit of their future child, taking root.
“I feel something,” she said, and opened her eyes. “A kind of intensity in my womb, but I don’t know if I can say for sure.” She turned her head to face him, keeping the rest of her body perfectly still. “What about you? What do you feel?”
He felt sleepy and hungry and he yearned for a cigarette, but he thought it unwise to mention any of those things.
“I feel like maybe this was it,” he said, and she smiled and big tears blossomed in her eyes. He hovered close but didn’t touch her, afraid that to jostle her would ruin their chances of conception, but then she began to cry harder and he placed his hand on her arm ever so delicately, as if her flesh were wet paint, waiting to dry.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her face with her hands. “It’s that sometimes I just … I mean, how ironic can it be that I inseminate cows for a living and I can’t even get myself knocked up?” She looked suddenly at him, her eyes bright with offense, as if he’d contradicted what she said. “It’s my job, Bruce. And I can’t manage to get it right when it comes to myself.”
“It’ll happen,” he soothed.
“It will,” she said emphatically, her mood shifting suddenly. “It’s that I’ve gotten all off-kilter. That’s why it’s not happening.” She sat up even though thirty minutes hadn’t passed since they had finished making love. “I need to find my center. I need to do a reading. Would you mind, honey, if I went over and spent the night at my cabin?”
“Just for the night.” She stood and began to dress. “Kind of like a retreat, so I can get centered.”
“You could do it here,” he offered. “I could sleep out on the couch.” He went to her and tried to hug her so as to prevent her from putting her pants on, but she only patted his arms and continued on with what she was doing.
“I need to get centered, Bruce. This baby stuff has put me off balance. It’s taken over my entire psyche with negativity.” She pulled a sweatshirt over her head.
“But it’s cold there. It’ll be freezing, Kath.” He had the feeling that someone was pressing a boot against his chest.
“I can start a fire. I did it for years.” She came and put her arms around him. “This will be good for both of us. It will give us perspective on this whole journey.”
“What about the roads?” he pressed, though she only chuckled at him and walked from the room. He followed her into the kitchen, where she was loading her backpack, taking a container of yogurt and a banana, some rye crackers, and a few bags of Fertile Blend.
“Now, don’t forget to drink your tea tonight. And there’s a casserole in the oven. I set the timer for you.” She looked at him and laughed at the hurt expression on his face. “You’re being silly, hon,” she said, pushing her hand into his hair.
“It’s that I’ll miss you,” he said. This was the second time she had left him. She had done it back in September on the night of the equinox, and he had hated it then too.
“Love you.” She kissed him and began to walk out the door.
“And I wanted to talk to you about something too,” he said, to keep her home.
She turned abruptly with her backpack slung over her shoulder. “What?”
“Josh’s hearing is tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” she said with some surprise, though he had told her about it weeks before. She set her backpack on the kitchen table, still holding onto the straps. “What do you want to talk about?”
He shrugged. “Whether we should do anything.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged again, not wanting to mention that he could go and sit on the bench outside the judge’s chambers with Lisa and Claire, not wanting Kathy to either encourage him to go or get moody and defensive because he had suggested it. He didn’t know which she would do and he didn’t want to know.
“I’ll hold him in my thoughts,” said Kathy, lifting her bag again. “I’ll burn some sage.”
After she left, he put his boots and coat on and sat out on the porch with the dogs. The rain had stopped by now. For several minutes he listened to the ice clattering and tinkling in the branches of the frozen trees and then he lit a cigarette. He smoked out here again, the way he used to do when Teresa was alive, though Kathy hadn’t asked him to. It seemed like the right thing to do, the civilized way to live, and it gave him an excuse to be off by himself, which he liked to do most nights. He didn’t like it this night, however, with Kathy off at her old house. His enjoyment of his solitude depended entirely on Kathy being thirty feet away, dozing in their bed, he realized now, feeling a swell of anger toward her rise inside of him, though he knew he didn’t have the right to be mad. Before they had married she’d warned him that this might happen, that from time to time she would need her space and he’d told her that he would need his too. It felt true then, but it was a lie. He didn’t need his space. His space was a box of grief, the place where Teresa lived now, and he wanted more than anything to keep it closed. When he was alone without Kathy he had too much time to think, too much silence to fill the void, and Teresa would come at him in the smallest, most penetrating ways.
Without wanting to, he remembered her now, remembered a particular meaningless day the autumn before when she had made batches and batches of zucchini bread and how, later, they’d driven around together, bringing a loaf to everyone they knew, bringing a loaf, even, to Kathy, who hadn’t been home. They’d left it on her porch, on top of a pile of neatly stacked wood. He could see it there now, feel the damp heft of it in his hands, which he shook to break the memory loose. He was grateful he had only his memory to keep Teresa around. Grateful that Claire and Joshua had packed up everything that had belonged to their mother and taken it away. When he’d walked into the house after they’d gone his body filled with a daffy joy. He was free, or so it seemed. He could start anew now, with Kathy and Kathy only.
But he hadn’t been freed entirely. On occasion something that had been Teresa’s would emerge from the depths of the house: a dried-up pen that said REST-A-WHILE VILLA on its side, a leather bookmark embossed with her initials that Joshua had made in school, a tube of pink lipstick that she’d worn when she went to work or town. The sight of each of these things stopped him short, though he had to pretend otherwise if Kathy was in the room. It was like coming across a bear in the woods: you were supposed to stand still and remain calm, against every impulse. He couldn’t bring himself to throw Teresa’s things out. When he had the chance he secreted the things he’d found out to his truck, where he put them in the glove compartment and never looked at them again.
He went back inside the house after smoking two cigarettes and stood in the fluorescent light of the kitchen. The timer Kathy had set had gone off already. He turned the oven off and opened the door, the heat hitting his cold face like a fist, and removed the casserole. The top had baked to almost black, but he could see it hadn’t been ruined entirely. He set it on top of the stove to let it cool and got a beer from the refrigerator, not caring whether it would impede his sperm. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and began removing all of its contents. He and Teresa used to call it his office—his wallet—because Bruce kept it so packed full of important things. Bids and business receipts, notes about his customers. Months ago, he had put a tiny blue scrap of paper there that had Joshua’s cell phone number written on it. At last he found it and picked up the phone.
Joshua’s voice sounded alarmed, once he recognized who it was. Bruce had never called him before, though he’d meant to whenever, in his passes through his wallet, he’d seen the number.
“How you doing?” he asked Joshua.
“Not too bad.”
Bruce removed a tack from the corkboard near the phone, trying to think of what to say. This was possibly Joshua’s last night of freedom for a while, though Bruce could not convince himself to believe that was true. The judge would see how young he was and take pity, despite his crime. It’s what Bruce had thought all along, since the phone call from Claire back in August.
“Is everything all right with you?” Joshua asked tentatively.
“Yep.” He jabbed the sharp end of the tack into a callus on his thumb and didn’t feel a thing. “So I guess tomorrow’s the big day,” he said, though Joshua knew that Bruce knew this for a fact. “It sure came up quick.”
“Yep,” said Joshua. There was a rustling sound, as if he were going from one room to another.
“I was thinking I’d come over with Claire, you know, but I got this job out at Doug Reed’s place, back by the Paradise Town Hall. They’re weekenders,” Bruce explained. He pulled his pack of cigarettes out and lit one up. “They got a big house that they just redid and I’m finishing up with the small stuff, some shelves and cabinets. I was going to say you could stop out there tomorrow morning on your way, in case I can’t make it to the courthouse after all. I’m going to have to play it by ear, to see how much I can get done.”
“I got plans in the morning,” said Joshua without any emotion in his voice and then he added, more gently, “with Lisa.”
“Of course you do, bud. I was just saying, if you had the time. I know your hearing’s not till the afternoon.”
“Twelve thirty,” said Joshua.
“Right,” Bruce said. He took another drag from his cigarette. “I told Claire you should bring some of your drawings to show the judge. The ones of cars and things,” he suggested. “It would help the judge see you’re a good guy. To sort of build your case.”
“Maybe,” said Joshua, though Bruce could tell he wasn’t even considering it.
“Well, good luck if I don’t end up seeing you.”
“Thanks,” Joshua said.
Bruce sat there long after Joshua had hung up, the silent phone pressed to his ear. He sat so long the telephone became a part of him, an extended plastic ear—warm and vacant, expressive and familiar. At first he had the sensation that he was on hold and simply waiting, that someone would come to him eventually on the other end of the line. And then, after several minutes, the notion that he was on hold left him and another feeling took its place, that he was about to either cry or punch the wall, or that he would do both in quick succession, but his fear of doing either roused him from his trance and he put the phone back on the receiver.
He went to the refrigerator and got another beer and then went to the stove and stared at the casserole and poked a finger into its center. It had cooled entirely now, but he wasn’t hungry anymore.
They came clattering into the kitchen, running and then sliding on their nails when they reached him, loving him the way nobody else did, the way they always had.
“Dinner,” he said, and set the casserole down before them on the floor.
The road was a frozen river the next morning as Bruce drove down it, slow and steady, in the first gray light of day. When he turned into Doug Reed’s driveway he lost his concentration and his truck fishtailed and skidded into the mailbox mounted on a metal pole that didn’t budge. He shifted into reverse and backed away from it and crept up the driveway. His glove box had sprung open with the impact and he reached over to push it closed, though it wouldn’t go because something was jammed in its hinge. Teresa’s lipstick, he saw, and let it be.
Doug Reed’s house smelled like new carpet and glue, fresh paint and sawdust. There were slate floors and ten-foot windows that faced out over Lake Nakota, and a hot tub sunk into the floor. The kitchen was especially state of the art, with a special machine that could chill a bottle of wine in five minutes and a garbage disposal that could grind even the thickest bones. George Hanson had put in the garbage disposal the day before and, afterward, he and Bruce had stood around testing it out, pushing in kindling from the bucket near the fireplace and listening as it ground the wood to nothing in the depths of the sink. Bruce was the last man in, the one to finish up, installing the kitchen cabinets he’d made and building in bookshelves.
He walked through the house to the living room along the sheets of plastic that had been set down to protect the carpet and turned up the thermostat and then went into the kitchen. He poured coffee from his Thermos into the little cup that served as its cap. Through the huge windows, Lake Nakota was spread out before him, covered with a layer of gray ice. He could see the cross atop the church on the opposite shore, almost a mile away. He wondered what Kathy was doing now, if she was even awake yet. He hadn’t slept well without her. Their bed was like a ship that had become unmoored. He kept waking and remembering that he was alone and then it would take him some time to fall back asleep. He dreamed of Teresa, but he didn’t recall the dream and didn’t try to. Kathy always remembered her dreams and then wrote them down in a little notebook she kept in the drawer in the bedside table. She would tell him about them each morning, while he showered and dressed and made his coffee, following him from room to room.
He poured another capful of coffee and drank it down like a shot, then opened the cabinet where he’d stashed his tools.
It was eight and then it was nine thirty. Bruce told the time by the radio as he worked, moving through his day the way he always did, listening to one show after another, to the national news and Northland Beat, to Native Rhythms and A Woman’s Place. At ten thirty he stood up and stretched his back, still holding his hammer. If he wanted to make it to Blue River by noon, he should leave now. The thought played in his mind lightly, like something skittering across the ice before falling out of sight. He would work another hour or two and meet them afterward, he decided. He’d take them all out for a big late lunch, Claire and Lisa and Joshua too, he allowed himself to assume.
But he didn’t do that. He worked past noon, when he normally stopped to eat his sandwich, and past twelve thirty, when Joshua would be meeting with the judge. When it was nearly two, he heard Teresa’s voice and he turned the radio up, though by then she wasn’t speaking anymore. She had said only a single sentence, the introduction to her old show, fading out as the broadcaster spoke over it. Bruce had heard the same thing twice yesterday. It was a teaser, an advertisement for a marathon of Modern Pioneers that the station had in the works. Bruce had received a letter from the station manager, Marilyn, the week before, explaining that they would be broadcasting the top ten listener favorites of Teresa’s show in January. There was a poll on the station’s Web site, Marilyn had written. She encouraged Bruce to visit it and cast a vote for his own favorite show. He didn’t have a favorite show. He loved them all. Loved the sound of his wife’s voice as it had come to him every Tuesday at three. He had listened to it again on Thursday evenings, if he happened to be working late, not caring that he had heard the show already. Sometimes on Tuesdays, after she asked the question at the end of the show, he would call in and tell her the answer, though she would never allow him to say it on the air, reserving that privilege for her less intimate fans. She would put him on hold and he would listen as she signed off—“Work hard. Do good. Be incredible. And come back next week for more of Modern Pioneers!”—and then she would come back on the line and ask him what he was doing. “Working hard,” he would tell her every time. “Doing good. Being incredible.” Teresa had borrowed the lines from his mother, after having come across the card she had given him for his high school graduation in a box of his old things.
He turned the radio off and went out to his truck and took the two sandwiches he’d packed that morning from his insulated lunch bag. Usually, he ate inside, but today he sat in his truck, idling the engine and running the heat. When he had started it up, he thought he would start driving to Blue River, eating along the way, but then he realized it was too late for that. They’d be on their way back to Midden by now, knowing whatever they knew about Joshua’s fate.
He saw his open glove box and reached over to slam it shut with more force than he’d been able to that morning as he drove, hoping the tube of lipstick would be knocked out of the way, but it wasn’t. He picked it up and examined it for several moments. There was a crack along the plastic cap. He didn’t know whether it had always been there, or whether it had happened when he’d tried to close the glove compartment on it. He pulled the cap off and rotated the tube, and a pink triangular nub appeared. It struck him as deeply familiar, like a face he had known and studied without being aware of it. Its angular silhouette suggested to him not only Teresa’s mouth, but other, deeper, more intimate things about her that he couldn’t bring solidly to his mind, but rather that resided somewhere else inside him, present but unreachable.
He held the lipstick to his nose and inhaled. It smelled chemical and slightly fruity, like Teresa used to smell in the last moment before she stepped out the door when she was going somewhere. He’d hated to kiss her when she’d had it on. He’d hated the taste and the fact that it would leave pink marks on his face. He traced a faint line of it on his hand now, as if testing the color, and then he drew another line and another, making each one darker, until he’d colored in half of his hand. The pink was softer there than it appeared in its solid form. It was the way it had been on Teresa’s lips—translucent and shimmering, the palest rose. He almost kissed it, like a teenager practicing how to make out, but then he looked away from his hand, to get ahold of himself, feeling ridiculous and driven, stupid and compelled. He didn’t cry, though he felt his sorrow roiling up from his gut. He didn’t cry at all anymore, or listen to Kenny G, or allow himself all the kinds of things he’d wallowed in during the spring before when he could scarcely get out of bed.
He got out of his truck and threw the lipstick as hard as he could into the trees at the side of the house. It skated along the icy surface of the snow and then came to a stop and rolled back down the slope of the land, almost all the way back to him. He picked it up again, meaning to throw it farther away, but instead he turned back to his truck and reached into the glove box and pulled everything out—his insurance papers and owner’s manual, old napkins and receipts—until he found the other things that had belonged to Teresa, the leather bookmark and the Rest-A-While Villa pen. He carried them into Doug Reed’s house and went to the kitchen and pushed them down the sink and turned the garbage disposal on. Its grinding sound was not as loud as it had been yesterday, when he and George Hanson had shoved the sticks of wood down, and it did not go on as long.
He listened to it until it finished its job, and then he turned it off and stared at his hand, smeared with pink. He ran the water as hot as he could bear, attempting to scrub it off, but it had little effect. He went into the bathroom and pumped out soap that Doug Reed kept in a pretty blue bottle, lathering his hand with it, scraping the lipstick off with the blunt edges of his fingernails. He caught glimpses of himself in the mirror as he worked and then he stopped and looked closely. Without a thought, he punched his image. The mirror didn’t break, so he punched it again harder. It occurred to him that the mirror wasn’t glass, but rather some high-tech material that would never shatter, which made him want to wrench it from its screws and break it all the more. He grabbed one of Doug Reed’s towels and scoured his hand dry with it, until there was only the faintest pink shadow.
He heard the sound of a car engine outside and he went to the door and out onto the front porch, watching Claire park her Cutlass. He could see, even from this distance, she’d been crying. She got out without a coat on, her arms crossed in front of her chest to keep warm.
“Where were you?” she yelled, coming toward him, slipping a bit on the ice.
“How’d it go?” he asked, stepping off the porch.
“Where were you?” she screamed more loudly.
“Claire. I told you—”
“No!” she boomed, and came at him with an intensity that made him believe she might tackle him when she reached him, but instead she only clutched onto his arm, as if she needed help standing up. “Why weren’t you there?” she stammered. “Why weren’t you …” Her teeth began to chatter so hard she couldn’t go on. This had happened once before, when she was twelve and she’d fallen through the ice of their pond, thigh deep in the water, though he knew this time it wasn’t from the cold. He almost laughed with the strangeness of it, the clownish clank of her jaw, but then she began to gasp for air. He grabbed the points of her elbows, but she pulled away and huddled into herself, trying to talk again, despite it all. “You … you … you,” she panted.
“Claire,” he said, pounding on her back, as if she were choking on something.
“You,” she panted again, and then made a terrible noise, an injured howl that dissolved into several more gasps in which it seemed she could not get a single bit of air.
“Breathe,” he said to her, and then he gently shook her. “Listen to me. Take a breath in.” Her eyes went to his, wary and feral, like those of an animal whose trust he would never win, but he could see that she was listening to him, so he went on. “Breathe out. Now in … and out.” He waited and watched her breathe. “In. Take another one in. And out.”
She stood up and turned away from him, calmed now, and put her hands over her face, her teeth still chattering lightly, her hands trembling.
“You lost your breath,” he said, not wanting her to be embarrassed. “Just don’t think about it. If you think about it, you’ll get all worked up again. That’s probably how you got started in the first place.”
She took her hands from her face. “Why weren’t you there?”
“I never said—”
“Why weren’t you there?” she demanded.
“I had to work, Claire. I—”
“Oh no, don’t say that. Don’t give me that crap, Bruce. Please, just don’t even …” A sob escaped her and she took another breath to gather herself and she spoke again, stronger now. “You don’t want to be our dad anymore.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know why—”
“You can’t even do the bare minimum, can you? You can’t even do that.” She looked at him, tears rising into her eyes.
“Yes, I can,” he said softly.
“What?”
“The bare minimum. That’s what I can do, Claire.” Once he spoke the words they exploded in his chest, so true he almost wept.
He pulled her to him and held her and stroked her cold hair, aching to make her happy. He wanted to promise her something, to say that things would go back to the way they were, or that they would be different than they had become, but he loved her too much to lie and needed her too little to make it true.
“Where’s Josh?” he whispered, after several minutes.
She pulled away, stumbling back a step, and looked up at him. Her eyes were blue and endless and scared. “In jail,” she said at last, her voice wavering. “He was sentenced to eighty-five days.”
The words entered Bruce like dull bullets, though nothing in his posture changed. He took Claire’s hand and held it, as if he were shaking it to say hello or goodbye. “You did what you could,” he said.
She nodded, still holding his hand.
“You did, Claire. You played every card. You did the same thing when your mom was sick. You were always there. You never let us down.”
He squeezed her hand and she squeezed his back and they repeated it a couple more times, as if they were speaking a secret silent language, a long-known code, and then they both let go. She was breathing normally now. He could see it like smoke in the cold air. Her breath, his. Thin ghosts that appeared then vanished, as if they were never there.