My primary-care doctor informed me I’d “exhibited no risk factors.” I was as unlikely to develop ticker trouble as I was to start an affair.
In any case, all my jokes about Jean borrowing trouble have stopped. We linger with each other now, squeezing as much as we can out of life. I’ve tried to reduce my daily stress, but our town is small, and I can’t help running into Bill.
One day, he and I arrived at the same time to pick up Haley at Boys and Girls. Jean had told me Haley was going to spend the night with us; Bill had the date wrong. Haley handled the moment better than we did. She looked at us, shrugged, then went on chasing her pals in the parking lot. “It’s my night,” Bill said, anguished. He scratched his sandy hair. “Okay,” I said, and told Haley goodbye.
I drove away, damp with sweat. I was shaken already: earlier that day, I’d shampooed the carpet at home (this was before we’d ripped it out); now, I was convinced Haley’s kitten had licked up the cleaning fluid. I should have locked her in a back room until the carpet dried. No doubt, I’d return to find her dead. Haley would be inconsolable.
I passed a restored apartment house. Increasingly anxious, I remembered a former student of mine who had lost her dog to a fire there, a year or two ago. Still thinking of Haley and Bill, I felt irrationally responsible for the dog, now, too. If I’d been a better teacher, more at ease in front of groups, not futzing around and keeping the class overtime, damn it, somehow that dog would still be alive. God forgive me.
At home, I found Haley’s kitten sitting happily on a windowsill, staring at the broken windows of the Levin place.
Haley had been pissy all week, upset about her homework, picky at dinner. One night, when we’d told her she’d watched enough TV, she paced the den. The heels of her sandals slapped the hardwood floor. “Bored bored bored,” she said.
“Why don’t you sit in the window,” I suggested, “and draw the old Levin place?”
“Why?”
“It might be gone pretty soon. If that happens, your drawing will be one of the few records the city will have left of it,” I said.
“I don’t want to.”
We went back and forth until I wore her down. She got out her gel pens and sullenly scratched a few lines on a sketchpad: the broken rain spout, unhinged doors, tilted window frames. “Done.”
“Terrific.”
“It’s stupid.”
“No no, sweetie, this is wonderful, this is — ”
“I mean the house.” She grabbed her blankie and started upstairs for her room. “It’s not even worth drawing.”
The day before show time in front of the planning commission, Haley was with her dad. Jean and I came home from classes, made love in the late afternoon. We were more in the mood with Haley out of the house. “I’m afraid she can sense it, from three rooms away, if we even kiss,” I’d told Jean one night. “She’s way beyond her years — ”
“No. She’s right at her years,” she said. “That’s the problem.”
She ran her hands along my chest. I tried and tried to feel something. Finally, I turned my wet eyes toward the wall. In the day’s wavering shadows, tinged by the last of the sun’s red light, I could make out a faint square in the plaster — though we’d painted — where one of the Virgins had hung. Jean’s brown hair splayed across my belly. She clung to my hips. “Neighborhood compatibility,” I whispered, and we laughed.
For a while we lay half-asleep, then, “Time to get ready,” Jean whispered. “Okay, I’m awake,” I said, feeling for my pulse. We showered, dressed, fed the cat, then drove downtown to Barton’s, a musty restaurant full of leaden foods and blue-haired organ music. Its claim to fame was that Hillary Clinton had stepped out of a limo here during her husband’s ’96 campaign. For ten minutes she shook diners’ hands. God knows what she was doing in Comalia. Maybe her publicist thought a photo op in a small-town eatery would wrap up Texas’s ag votes. For me, the restaurant was notorious because its former owner, just my age, had gone face down one day into a bowl of four-alarm chili. Dead of a heart attack.
Jean and I would never have set foot in the place, but our neighborhood association wanted to meet here tonight — it was quiet, rarely crowded. The students in town preferred Taco Bell, out by the interstate.
Rex Smithers, the association president, a retired car dealer, asked the six of us who showed to read our prepared testimonies. We’d have five minutes each in front of the planning commission, he said. We made revisions, cutting the fat, making sure our points didn’t overlap. Rex passed out a list of words. “Spice your speeches with these,” he said. “They’re positive, attention-getting — the kind of thing I’ve heard the commission really responds to.”
I glanced at the sheet:
continuity
stability
identity (sense of history, place, culture)
character
style
community
quality
livability
human scale
home
Mentally, I added “chicken-head.”
“We don’t want to be negative,” Rex said, “overly emotional, or sacrilegious — ”
“You better believe that padre’ll have a crack legal team with him,” said Andy Nelson, a dentist who lived two doors east of us. “That is, if he’s stopped diddling little boys long enough to put together a team.”
“Andy,” Rex said, blushing. “That’s precisely the kind of talk we have to squelch.”
“I know, I know. A joke.”
“Please.”
“I know.”
“He doesn’t need a legal team,” Jean said. “He’s a lawyer himself and very articulate. Don’t underestimate him.”
She and I excused ourselves early and began discussing where we could get some healthy food when we spotted the Wards in a booth. They were sitting with a thin woman in a blue scarf, just like the one Mrs. Ward wore. In front of them were great platters of buttery mashed potatoes, chicken fried steaks, creamy, heart-clogging pies — what are those people thinking?
Are all locally owned places, with historic ties to the city, worth preserving?
We tried to slip past, but Don spied us, though he pretended he hadn’t. As we approached the table, determined not to hide — now that we’d been caught — the thin woman, facing away from us, removed her scarf and touched a large, grainy scar on the side of her head. It appeared to flake a little. “I’ll never get better,” she said mournfully. Then she noticed us and swiftly tied the scarf back into place. For a minute none of us moved. I remembered Don’s words: We’re old people. Finally, Jean touched Mrs. Ward’s wool sleeve. “I hope you’re enjoying your new home,” Jean said. “Thank you,” Mrs. Ward said and patted Jean’s hand.
The meeting took place in a conference room in the city’s new fire station, a two-story red brick building with automated doors for wheelchair access, banks of computer monitors behind the receptionists’ desks, and vintage photos of horse-drawn wagons on the walls. A list of fire-safety tips — “Hot Topics”—wilted in a wall-bin labeled TAKE ONE! The station sat catty-corner to a Hollywood Video. Frat boys squealed their tires, pulling out of the lot, sneaking soft-core DVDs back to their tents, no doubt, or to the underpasses they were forced to huddle under, since — according to Father Matt — cheap housing was so scarce in our mean little burg.
The commissioners looked well-fed: their shirt-buttons strained under too-small blazers, most of which were orange or black, the colors of the college’s athletic teams. Probably these guys all ate at Barton’s.