Chapter 4.

For the next few days, Josh’s plan seemed to be working. The weather turned vacation-perfect. Josh rode his bike in the fresh, bright mornings and spent the hot, bright afternoons on the beach. The surf was free of rip currents, seaweed, and jellyfish, and Josh was careful to leave before five o’clock, when the lifeguards abandoned the beach to the dog people.

Then one morning, Josh woke up to the sound of rain on the roof and a muted, underwater green daylight. Outside the open window, leafy branches swayed like seaweed in the downpour. So—maybe this was the day for another vacation activity: sleeping in.

Last night, back at his apartment after food, beer, and a Red Sox win, Josh had fallen asleep easily. But now his mind refused to return to vacation mode. When he closed his eyes, he seemed to be in a room with several closet doors cracked open, offering him topics it was better not to think about. There was the ex (almost) wife, Tanya, closet. The dead dog, Molly, closet. The last place of employment, Westham Middle School, closet.

Josh rolled over, trying to fool himself into a doze, but he was awake. Not in a ready-to-go, jump-out-of-bed way, but in a state of dull antsiness. Rolling onto his back again, he stared at the dots on the acoustic tile ceiling. He dropped his gaze to the round plastic smoke detector on the opposite wall and the sign underneath it: NO SMOKING IN OUR HOME!

Flinging back the nubby bedspread, Josh swung his feet onto the linoleum floor and padded into the bathroom to brush his teeth. A plywood shelf over the sink jutted out above the faucets. Josh was forced to stoop and twist his head sideways, like a flamingo, to spit.

Still, with clean teeth, Josh felt a little better. Maybe three percent better, as Ron Watanabe’s anti-depression list suggested. Ron was a friend from Josh’s long-ago MAT program, now teaching in California. At the beginning of the friendship, part of their bond was admitting to spells of paralyzing gloom. Ron had shared his list of gloom-dissipating actions, with the percentages of psychic lift you could expect from each one. One item on the List: Brush teeth—3%. Back then Josh had fallen off his chair, laughing.

He smiled now, remembering the first item: Get up—10%. Hey, he was already 13 percent ahead of the game. Thinking of Ron and his List made Josh feel even less gloomy—say, 11 percent less? Josh should tell Ron to add his List itself to the list.

Morning coffee must be on the List. If it wasn’t, it should be. Coffee implied getting dressed. (Get dressed—7%.) Josh could have brewed his own coffee in the kitchenette, but he flinched from spending any time in that dreary little alcove.

A short while later, Josh drove up Main Road, headed for a Cumberland Farms gas station opposite the Mattakiset town hall. He passed a blue sign, Coastal Canine, sporting a cartoon dog on a surfboard, and he remembered the kennel mentioned to him by the older woman on the beach. In a different state of mind, he might have been tempted to apply for that job.

Inside the Cumby’s store, standing in line with his coffee and granola bar, Josh watched the clerk at the register. Her voice was pleasantly husky, with a cheerful note. And—he remembered with another uptick in mood—it was now okay for him to flirt.

This clerk, blonde with a dusting of freckles on her face, seemed to know all the other customers, and she kept up a rapid back-and-forth while scanning and ringing up their purchases. Josh was eager for his turn to banter, to make her flash him a smile. But when he set his cup and snack on the counter, all she had to say was, “That it?” and “Have a good one.”

Turning away disappointed, Josh took a restorative gulp of coffee. What else was on Ron’s damn List?

Just inside the door, a stack of newspapers, the Mattakiset Mariner, caught Josh’s eye. On the front page a man in a tree reached for a meowing cat. “Department of Good Deeds: Local Hero Saves Kitty by Whisker.”

Now Josh remembered another List item: Do a good deed—20-50%. What good deed could Josh could accomplish, without climbing up a tree? As he sat in his car munching granola, it came to him. “I’ll visit Mom,” he called to the backseat.

In March, Martha Hiller had moved into Northport Commons, a senior residence on the North Shore. Vicky had helped their mother with plans and arrangements, and for the move itself, she’d recruited Josh to carry furniture and hang pictures. Josh felt guilty for not being more helpful—but he thought his mother and sister must understand that at this point, he could hardly manage his own life.

After the move, Josh had only seen his mother a few times. They’d talked about once a week. . . . Maybe it was once every two weeks. Their conversations tended to go, “Hi, Mom, how are you?” “I’m fine—how are you, dear?” Once she’d lowered her voice, as if she were going to ask whether he had regular bowel movements, and said, “Josh. I don’t want to pry into your finances, but if you need something to tide yourself over until you find other . . . work . . .”

“I don’t.” Josh’s answer came out sharper than he intended, and he added quickly, “But thanks, Mom. I’m fine.” It got to be more and more of an effort for Josh to pretend he was fine.

But now that Josh was on the upswing, beyond the reach of the psychopathic Westham Middle School principal, almost free from his marriage with Tanya, he could satisfy his mother with a visit. He got out his phone and called to make sure she’d be there today—“I’m always here,” she told him—and headed for the North Shore.

After two hours of driving through the rain, Josh signed in at the reception desk at Northport Commons Senior Residence and rode the elevator to the fourth floor. Martha Hiller peered out the door of apartment 421, waving. She was neatly and attractively dressed, as usual, but she looked paler than the last time Josh had seen her, which hadn’t been that long ago.

Josh hugged her carefully. Didn’t she used to be as tall as Vicky? “How are you, Mom?”

“How are you, dear? I’m sure you didn’t want to drive all this way in the rain. Although it’s been several weeks.”

“Several?” Josh was sure it hadn’t been more than three weeks since he’d seen his mother. Three was “a few,” not “several,” wasn’t it?

Martha beckoned him in. “Sit down for a minute. They don’t start serving lunch until 11:15. Tell me about your summer place.”

Josh joined her on the love seat in front of the TV. “My new place. Yeah, it’s really nice.” He gazed around Martha’s living room, which actually was nice. The ceiling was high, and French doors opened onto a balcony. “I’ve got a whole wing of a nineteenth-century farmhouse. No cable TV connection, but that’s good; it’ll help me concentrate on firming up my plans.”

“Yes, I want to hear about your plans.”

Shit! Why had he mentioned plans? But Josh plowed on, “Teaching was great for a while, but you know, I got fed up with all the layers of bureaucracy in the school system. . . . I’ve pretty much decided to go out on my own.”

Martha Hiller waited with worried eyes, but Josh had already described the extent of his plans. Reaching into a pocket draped over the arm of the love seat, he fiddled with the TV remote.

“On your own?” asked Martha. “You mean, start a private tutoring service? I guess there’s a demand for that, with all the competition over college applications, but—”

“Tutoring—yeah, that’s one possibility. Or maybe something entirely different, some other field.” Josh saw his mother give an anxious little sigh, and he added, “I’m looking for the right opportunity.”

Then they both jumped as the TV blared into life. Josh must have pressed something on the remote. “Sorry!” He grabbed it out of the pocket and pressed what he thought was the power button, but it only changed the channel. “Sorry,” Josh repeated.

Pulling the remote from Josh’s hand, his mother cut the power. “By the way, Vicky told me that Molly had to be put down. That’s too bad, dear. You must miss your dog.”

Josh flinched. He started to say that he was sad, but Molly had a good life, etc. Instead, he blurted, “I couldn’t believe Tanya did that to me. While I was gone, without even asking me.”

“Well, I hate to say this, but I’m not surprised.” Gazing down at her knobby-jointed hands, Martha Hiller adjusted her wedding rings. “There was always something . . . hard about her.”

Josh should have been glad that his mother was taking his side against Tanya, but instead he wished he hadn’t given her the chance. Talk about “hard”—look at Martha’s expression. It was just as unforgiving as the expression Tanya had turned on him, the last time he saw her.

He glanced at the clock on the cable box. “Look at that, eleven twenty-three. We better go down for lunch.”

As soon as they were seated in the dining room, Josh wished they were back in his mother’s apartment. The man across the table had a racking, phlegmy cough. A woman next to Josh and the woman on the other side of Martha traded loud complaints about the food. Josh made some attempts at conversation, but his mother seemed to have removed herself mentally from the scene, smiling vaguely as she worked at her food. Maybe that was the best way to deal with mealtimes at Northport Commons.

After dessert Josh escorted Martha to the elevator. He said lightly, “I guess I’ll skip the lunch next time.” Martha was walking with her face toward the carpet, leaning heavily on her cane, and he wasn’t sure she’d heard him. He added, “Mom?”

His mother poked the elevator button, still not looking at him. She said plaintively, “I’m too old and tired to have to worry about my children.”

As if he could have mended his unraveling marriage and halted the downward slide of his teaching career, if only he’d considered how much they were going to bother his mother! Escaping to the parking lot, Josh slumped behind his steering wheel. So much for the good deed intended to lift his mood. “I don’t know about Mom,” he said to the backseat, “but I feel 19 percent worse.”

Josh felt old. As if the two hours at Northport Commons had aged him thirty years. No—it was more as if he could now see all the way down the length of his life. The very end, which before he’d pictured as discretely out of sight, over the horizon, now stopped at a wall.

On top of that, it was still raining, and the distance from the North Shore to the South Coast was still two hours’ drive.

 

Back in Mattakiset, Josh stopped at the library to use their Wi-Fi. The Harrison Library was a quaint brick building with a weathered blue-green copper dome, tucked in between the newer (but not new) structures of the Mattakiset Elementary School and the Mattakiset Middle School. A sign taped to the copy machine in the vestibule read, Pay at Circulation. In larger print, it added, YOU MUST PAY FOR YOUR MISTAKES. Josh thought, I knew that.

Just inside the main room, Josh stopped to look over a section of books for sale. The bright yellow cover of Small Business for Dummies caught his eye, and he pulled it off the shelf. Only two dollars, couldn’t hurt. Maybe he would start a tutoring service.

 

 

 

 

You call to a dog and a dog will break its neck to get to you. Dogs just want to please. Call to a cat and its attitude is, What’s in it for me?

Lewis Grizzard