15

Gerald Harbison was a big man with a big voice and a big truck. The kind of bigness that felt welcoming and spacious, as if he could fit the whole of the town inside him and still have room to spare. He seemed to like everyone and was someone whom everyone seemed to like. So when his wife, Peggy, died of breast cancer eight years earlier—a grueling nine-month ordeal that neither he nor Peggy would let anyone refer to as a “fight” (because fights, they said, are fair)—everyone, not just the single women, wondered who would be the first he’d let inside, and when. He simply had too much love that not sharing it with someone felt like a waste. But the years passed, and he showed no interest in Maretta Meyers or Gloria Pflüger, despite their shameless, if well-intentioned, flirting over at the Buckhorn. He showed no interest in anyone, claiming to be fine all on his own. And then something wonderful happened: he sawed his damn finger off.

It happened in his shed, a well-stocked workroom attached to his garage that he’d built when he turned forty-five in an attempt to cut off a midlife crisis at the pass. The shed was the midlife crisis, Peggy assured him with a smile. But she was happy to watch him develop a hobby. Big, burly Harbison, a man who looked like he was forged in fire, was the least handy man in town. By his thirties, after countless failed home renovation projects, his lack of skill had turned into a gentle joke. But he never stopped believing in himself, and somehow thought that creating a perfect shed would manifest the desire to learn and master everything inside it. This, like his earlier attempts, proved untrue. But unlike before, both of them noticed, the summer he spent creating the perfect workspace was an achievement in and of itself. Yes, they decided. That’s what it was. An achievement. Peggy didn’t seem to mind the money spent. In fact, she welled up with pride every time she saw it, despite knowing it was more of an art installation than a functional workspace. She knew he’d be inspired to use it in time; she just had no idea that time would come after she was gone.

Eight years to the day after her death, Gerald caught the urge to build something. It happened one morning as he looked at his naked, sixty-three-year-old body in the bathroom mirror. Decades of shrugged-off commentary about the disparity between his size and shed-related know-how rushed into his mind all at once. Maybe the date was a coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t. All he knew was that he couldn’t look at himself without feeling as though he ought to be doing more with himself. Look at this body, he thought. Look at this worthless body. That afternoon he drove all the way to San Antonio—he didn’t even stop for coffee and kolaches in Castroville—to buy himself a project. He’d been eyeing those expensive cast-iron barbecues shaped like mastodon eggs for a while now, ever since he saw a chef he liked use one on a cooking show one weekend afternoon, and though a sturdy metal stand could be purchased from the same company for a reasonable price (especially compared to the egg itself), he decided to build one with his own two soft hands. If done right, the egg would fill the far side of his back porch and look as though it had been there forever. As though the house itself had been built second, to match the barbecue’s glory.

To his surprise, the young woman in the lumber department complimented his rough sketch of plans and didn’t have too many suggestions when he explained his intended methodology to her in detail. “You designed this yourself?” she asked. He told her that it was a bit of a hodgepodge of other designs he’d seen in the backyards of famous chefs. And though he wasn’t a famous chef, his barbecue was adored by his family and friends. “I could use some good brisket right about now,” she said without a hint of flirtation. He nodded and agreed. So she cut the pieces he required, and he loaded them up on a big orange dolly. “We can’t accept tips,” she said when he handed her a twenty, so he waved goodbye and reiterated his thanks and loaded up his gas guzzler of a truck.

He started by flattening out his sketched-out blueprint and sticking it to the wall with a piece of electrical tape. Then he turned on the oldest object in the shed apart from himself, an AM/FM radio with a two-foot telescoping antenna. A familiar voice began discussing the news, and he shook his head at the first story. They’ll be calling in about this one, Gerald thought, realizing he’d never once called in to a talk radio station. Next up, he’d cut the two-by-fours. These would be the legs. thirty-eight inches long each. The perfect height.

He laid out one of the massive pieces of wood, marveling at the fact that it had once been part of a tree, and measured out the first cut, then the second. He checked the length three times before deciding it was time to move on. Not double-checking was where people got in trouble, he thought. But he would triple-check. That’s how he would become as great as Peggy thought he could be. Satisfied that all the segments would be a perfect thirty-eight inches, he moved to the next step.

The radio host said something about San Antonio’s worthless city council before being suddenly drowned out by the whirr of Gerald’s table saw. A spinning piece of ragged titanium that could cut through wood—not to mention muscle and bone—is almost too magical to be terrifying. Gerald watched it in awe, not just because it was capable of so much, but because so many people in so many places had come together to design the whole setup. Constructing devices for destruction is the job of so many more talented people than he. Fits of this particular kind of existential awe had been happening to Gerald a lot lately, but he was a little too old to blame his recent affinity for feeling on a midlife crisis. Ninety was believable, if unlikely given his family history, but 120? Maybe feeling a sense of wonder was just the first stage of getting truly old, that reverse aging that ends with you helpless as a newborn, all your memories gone. His finger was on the floor by the second cut.

He looked at the pathetic, bloody nub of a thing and gasped softly, not that he could hear it over the saw. The pain took a while to register. He covered his hand with a towel of questionable cleanliness hanging on a hook behind him, picked up the finger, and turned off the saw.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he repeated as he walked to the house. “Jesus, Mary, and goddamned Joseph.” He put the finger in a cup, covered that in ice from the door of his fridge, and somehow managed to grab the car keys and get into his driver’s seat and onto the road before the pain hit.

For ten minutes, he screamed in a low groan, like a dying wild animal who’s not sure whether to give up and drift away slowly or take one final heroic pounce at the hunter who shot him in the stomach. The same host was complaining about the same city council on the radio, but a listener had just called in to debate him. By the time Gerald parked, the conversation had drifted to food stamp regulations for reasons he wasn’t conscious enough to follow.

As he came to ten minutes later, there was Ellie, holding his hand. “Mr. Harbison,” she said, “you passed out in the lobby of the hospital. You lost a lot of blood on the drive here, but the doctors are taking good care of you, all right? Don’t you worry about a thing.” But of course he was worrying. Who wouldn’t worry? Though at least he wasn’t in pain.

“What’d you put in me?” he asked when the maze of IV tubes came into view.

“You needed blood, first of all. Antibiotics, too, and a light painkiller to take the edge off. That one was my idea. The doc wanted to make you suffer.” Gerald didn’t know how to interpret her smile, but he liked looking at it, so he just let her keep on talking. Seemed like she enjoyed the audience.

“What’d you do that made you walk in here without a finger, Mr. Gerald Harbison?”

“I’m an accountant,” he said. When the doctor walked in, the two of them were laughing like middle schoolers.

Eight days later, Ellie answered her phone and heard a kind voice she couldn’t quite place, a voice that not only expected to hear hers on the other end, but one that was clearly thrilled to. When the voice revealed itself as belonging to Gerald, she thought he’d dialed the wrong number. Why on earth would the accountant who lost his finger be calling her, anyway? She wasn’t his doctor. She wasn’t anyone’s doctor! She didn’t need help with her taxes, either. Did the hospital give him her number by mistake? Had that ever happened before? When he finally asked a question—“Would you like to come by the house sometime this week for dinner?”—the sheer directness just confused Ellie even more.

“Do you have extra food?” she asked him, wondering if he’d perhaps planned for a party that had been canceled last minute.

The question baffled him. “Do I have extra food?” he muttered under his breath, forgetting for a moment that phones worked in both directions. He cleared his throat. “It’s not that I have so much food,” he said. “What I mean is that I could. Or not that I could have so much food. I should have put it more simply, though I thought that I had, but in any case, I just wanted to cook for you. Dinner. I’d like to have you over and cook you dinner if you say yes.”

“Why?”

He covered the mouthpiece with one hand and lowered it to his waist, exhausted by the entire ordeal. For a moment he considered just hanging up. Putting this whole thing to bed right away. Then he looked down at the asymmetry of his hands and felt a burst of confidence. Next time, he thought, he could lose an eye—or worse! He raised the phone back to his ear and uncapped the mouthpiece. “You just seemed like someone I’d like to get to know. And if you feel the same, then I think we should get to know each other.”

“So you’re asking me out on a date?”

“I suppose that’s what I’m doing. Yes. That’s what I’m doing.”

Ellie grimaced, as though she’d smelled something rotten. The idea of someone asking her on a date, let alone someone like Gerald—a patient, by the way—filled her with trepidation, but she couldn’t decide where it was aimed. Now, she knew Gerald as well as she knew most people in Billington. She knew which house was his. She sat across the aisle from him at church. She waited in line behind him at the post office. She bumped into his cart at the grocery store in Trevino. She went to Peggy’s funeral, and she saw him at Kenny’s, but everyone goes to everyone else’s funeral in Billington out of a prodding mix of etiquette and boredom. She knew the edges of Gerald, just as he probably knew the edges of her, but filling in the blanks—learning the colors and shadows of a person—took time and energy she conserved for other things, like work. And, lately, Mary Alice.

“I’m sorry,” Gerald said, deflated by her extended silence. “I shouldn’t have called. This is inappropriate.”

As she listened to him cower, a surge of worry came over her. Here was this man being as kind as she knew a man was able to be, being vulnerable to another person; and here she was allowing the shadow of doubt to prevail over how utterly flattered he’d made her feel. “No,” she said, her register clearing into something forceful and intriguing. “Don’t hang up. That sounds lovely.”

She knew where he lived, and he knew she knew, so all he said was, “How’s seven o’clock tomorrow?” As it turns out, seven o’clock tomorrow was just perfect.

And so it went. Dinner at his place during the week, then dinner at her place on Friday or Saturday night. Eight meals, just the two of them, with no eavesdropping neighbors or intrusive servers to get in the way of their conversation. Their conversation! They talked for hours at a time, as the meal was prepared, eaten, and lingered over. They talked about work and television, and they talked about food and the president and the town they had both lived in for so long. They talked about retirement and laughed, then they talked about dead people and cried. Then they talked about Mary Alice.

That Thursday at dusk, just as the fireflies started hovering around Gerald’s back deck, he poured Ellie a glass of red wine that he described to her with the words printed on the label. “She’s your best friend, you’d say?”

Ellie watched the glass fill up, then waited for the ripples on the surface to die down. “I guess I would say that. Don’t know of anyone else who could possibly fit the bill.”

“You go there every morning for coffee?”

“Since the beginning of the summer, yeah. I think she’s been bored out of her mind since they fired her, or, well, since she retired,” she said before toasting Gerald and taking a sip. “I’d wager it was a little bit of both, but the point is, she needed to leave that school.”

“Have you two always been close?”

“Yes and no. When our boys were, we were. And then.” She turned one side of her mouth up in a pitiful half smile. “We were less close.”

“I’m sure that was hard.”

“It was,” she said. She didn’t drink much on her own, and was always surprised by how quickly even the smallest amount of wine made her feel overly talkative and wistful, like she needed to simultaneously shut up and pour out every bit of her heart. “It was. It’s hard to be there for someone when that someone is the person you need to be there for you. Does that make sense?”

“I think so. So she’s your best friend, but have you told her about us?”

Just the way he said it made her wince, the casual confirmation that Mary Alice had somehow become the person she was closest to. A friendship can be so effortless, so free from hesitation and introspection, that it takes a spectator to point it out. She had wanted to tell her about him, but so much of this new stage of their relationship was centered around Mary Alice’s own unhappiness. And revealing a relationship of her own would require a kind of delicacy she hadn’t yet figured out. And now here was Gerald, finally putting a name to it: Mary Alice was Ellie’s best friend. Best friends know about your relationships. But, she said, she hadn’t told her yet. Though she would soon, she assured him. Tomorrow, in fact. She had it all planned out.

This wasn’t exactly the truth, and Gerald could tell, but he didn’t press her for details. He only nodded, and smiled the smile that Ellie quickly learned meant he found her adorable. She still couldn’t believe he’d called her as much that first date night, when he served her a slice of cake for dessert. And she still couldn’t believe that she’d said it back. Lucky for her, he believed them both.

“Sometimes you seem burdened by her,” Gerald said, a line Ellie thought was a little too accusatory this late in the evening.

“What do you mean?”

“Mary Alice. I get that you two are close, and I get you share something that no one else could possibly share with you, but you still seem to walk on eggshells every time she comes up.”

“I don’t mean to. I just don’t want to make her, you know, I don’t want to make things any harder for her than they already are.”

“We’re all grown-ups, Ellie. She can deal with hard. So can you.”

“I know she can, but what’s a friend for if not to make things less hard?”

“I’m just saying that sometimes you making it less hard for her only seems to make it harder for you.”

Ellie set down her glass and shook her head like she was shooing away a fly. “This is getting confusing,” she said. “My friendship with Mary Alice isn’t hard.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, I’m—”

“You don’t know her the way I do . . .”

“Exactly.”

“What do you mean?” Ellie said. She’d heard versions of this before, that Samuel’s death shut her down, made her meaner, nastier, more challenging to talk to and be around. But she’d never heard an opinion from someone as reliable or as generally openhearted as Gerald.

“Ellie, I have known that woman just about my whole life. I knew her before she met Samuel, I knew her while they were married, I knew her in those days after he died. Did she become more, I don’t know, difficult after they were gone? Of course. No question about it. Before then she was just, oh, quiet. But you’re the only person I’ve known in sixty-some-odd years who I’d ever call her best friend.”

Was that true? Ellie wondered. As long as she’d lived in Billington she’d thought Mary Alice was some kind of queen bee, the woman who knew everyone and everything. But as she thought about it, she realized Gerald was right. Mary Alice was more authority figure than friend. She wasn’t a busybody, exactly, because busybodies are only successful if they pretend they aren’t busybodies. She was just busy and in everyone’s business. Everyone’s except Ellie’s.

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying you need to tell her. Not for her sake, for yours. It’s wearing on you, I can sense it. You feel guilty that you’re having fun while she’s sitting at home stewing in her terrible memories. And I understand that. But if this is going where I think it’s going, it’s time.”

“And where do you think it’s going?”

Gerald smiled. “Somewhere good.”

The last time Ellie had sex with someone, the night proved so disastrous to her psyche that she gave up hope that it would ever happen again. One of her old friends from Houston had called to check in on her not long after the move to Billington, the sort of call that came regularly for a couple of months and then tapered off into nothing. “You need to get back out there,” the friend had told Ellie, so she took their advice and went on one date.

She was upfront with him that she had a son, mostly because she wanted to see if it would scare him off. And when it didn’t, she’d thought the best of it. When he invited her back to his place after dinner, she assumed it meant he was the kind of man who was mature enough to date a single mother. Though after he offered her a beer from his otherwise empty refrigerator, it became clear he was just a regular man. The sex was brief, unsatisfying, and, to her biggest surprise, quiet. She lay there watching him in the dark, wondering why he refused to make any noise. Was there something shameful happening between them? Would she be his secret? Or worse, would she be his one-night stand? After he finished, he asked if she knew how to get home. She would never forget the way he said it, pulling his boxer shorts up while sitting on the side of the bed, not even looking up to make eye contact. Of course I know how to get home, Ellie told him. She cried on the drive home, ashamed to have abandoned her son for a night because she was, what, horny? She had no one to tell. No one to remind her that these feelings were OK. That single mothers can date without shame. Mary Alice wouldn’t understand, she thought. Look at her. She’s been single ever since Samuel died. He must have really been something else.

She didn’t think about any of that in Gerald’s bed that night. For the first time in what felt like a decade, her mind was entirely in the present. Gerald laughed as they had sex, he asked questions, he listened. She told him how it felt to have him inside her, and as she curled up into his sheets to fall asleep, she kissed his cheek and said, “Thank you.”

To her surprise he said exactly what she hoped he would. “You’re welcome.”