But then she glanced up at the clock. It was quarter to twelve already and he’d be home any minute now. Suddenly all the rage she’d generated over the Frinstell Corporation was gone, extinguished as quickly as it had arisen, and she felt a wild rush of affection for her man, her husband, for Willis — the poor guy, out there in all kinds of weather, working like a man half his age, providing for her and protecting her…and she’d been hard on him at breakfast, she had. What he needed was a nice lunch, she decided, a nice hot lunch. She set the Home Weather Center back in the box as gently as if she were lowering a baby into its crib, and then she wrapped the package up again, retaped the seams, and went to the cupboard. She poured herself a glass of wine from the jug and then fastened on a can of split-pea-and-ham soup — she’d heat that for Willis, and she’d make him a nice egg salad on toast….
Toast. But they were out of bread, weren’t they? There was nothing but that sawdust-and-nut crap he’d tried to pawn off on her for breakfast. She thought about that for a moment and a black cloud seemed to rise up before her. And then, before she knew it, the fury of the morning swept over her again, the tragedy of the TV and the cheat of the Home Weather Center doubling it and redoubling it, and by the time she heard Willis’s key turn in the lock, she was smoldering like Vesuvius.
If she was testy in the morning, if she lashed into him for no reason and jumped down his throat at the slightest provocation, by lunchtime she was inevitably transformed, so that an all-embracing cloud of maternal sweetness wrapped him up as he stepped through the door, and then ushered him out again, half an hour later, with a series of tender lingering hugs, squeezes and back pats. That was the usual scenario, but today was different. Willis sensed it even before he shambled down the hallway to discover her in the kitchen fussing over a can of soup and a box of saltines. He saw that she was still in her nightdress and housecoat, a bad sign, and he recognized the stunned, hurt, put-upon look in her eyes. He just stood there at the kitchen door and waited.
“Willis, oh, Willis,” she sighed — or no, moaned, bleated, wailed as if all the trials of Job had been visited on her in the five hours since he’d seen her last. He knew the tone and knew it was trouble — anything could have set her off, from a stopped-up drain to the war in Bosnia or teary memories of her first husband, the saint. “Honey,” she cried, crossing the room to catch him up in an embrace so fierce it nearly ruptured his kidneys, “you’ve got to help me out — just a little favor, a tiny little one.” Her voice hardened almost imperceptibly as she clung to him and swayed back and forth in a kind of dance of grief: “Everything is just so, so rotten.”
He was seventy-five years old and he’d been working since the day he climbed out of the cradle. Most men his age were dead. He was tired. His hips felt as if an army of mad acupuncturists had been driving hot needles into them. All he wanted was to sit down.
“Honey, here,” she said, cooing now, nothing but concern, and she led him awkwardly to the table, still half-clinging to him. “Sit down and eat; poor man, you’re probably starved. And exhausted, too. Is it raining out there?”
It was a question that didn’t require an answer, a variant on her luncheon monologue, a diversion to distract him from the true subject at hand, the crisis, whatever it was — the shattered TV screen, was that it? — the crisis which required his immediate attention and expertise. And no, it wasn’t raining, not yet, but it was blowing like holy hell out there and his morning had been an unmitigated disaster, a total waste of time. The framers hadn’t showed — or the damn plumber, either — and he’d spent the whole morning in the skeleton of the house, which was already behind schedule, watching the wind whip the waves to a froth and batter the seawall as if it were made of cardboard instead of concrete. He’d called the sons of bitches five or six times from the pay phone out front of the bank, but they weren’t answering. Pups, that’s what they were, afraid of a little weather. He glanced up and the soup appeared on the table before him, along with a platter of sardines, six neat squares of cheddar, saltines, and a glass of apple juice. Muriel hovered over him.
He took a sip of the juice, fingered his spoon and set it down again. Why forestall the inevitable? “What’s the trouble, sweetie?” he asked.
“I know you’re not going to like this, but you’re going to have to go to the post office for me.”
“The post office?” He didn’t want to go to the post office — he wanted to get back to the torn earth and wooden vertebrae of the rising house, to the mounds of rubble and refuse and the hot sudden smell of roofing tar. He thought of the doctor and his wife who’d hired him, a young couple in their forties, building their dream house by the sea. He’d promised them fifty-five hundred square feet with balconies, sundeck and wraparound view in six months’ time — and here two months had gone by already and the damn frame wasn’t even up yet. And Muriel wanted him to go to the post office.
“It’s the Home Weather Center,” she said. “It’s got to go back. And I mean today, immediately, right now.” Her voice threatened to ignite. “I won’t have it here in the house another minute…if those bastards think they can—”
She was working herself up, her ire directed for the moment at the Home Weather Center, whatever that was, and the unnamed bastards, whoever they were, but he knew that if he didn’t watch himself, if he didn’t look sharp, the full weight of her outrage would shift to him with the sudden killing swiftness of an avalanche. He heard himself saying, “I’ll take care of it, sweetie, don’t you worry.”
But when he glanced up to gauge her reaction, he found he was talking to himself: she’d left the room. Now what? There were sounds from the dining room — a fierce rending of tape and an impatient rustle of tissue paper, followed by the sharp tattoo of her approaching footsteps — and before he could lift the spoon to his lips she was back with a cardboard box the size of an ottoman. She swept across the room and dropped it on the table with a percussive thump that jarred the soup bowl and sent the juice swirling round the rim of the glass. Outside, the wind howled at the windows.
“Just look at this, will you?” she was saying, her elbows leaping as she tore the package open and extracted a long slim wooden plaque with three gleaming gauges affixed to it. He had a moment of enlightenment: the weather center. “Did you ever see such junk in your life?”
It looked all right to him. He wanted soup, he wanted sleep, he wanted the doctor’s house to rise up out of the dunes and bravely confront the sea, perfect in every detail. “What’s wrong with it, sweetie?”
“What’s wrong with it?” Her voice jumped an octave. “Are you blind? Look at this”—a blunt chewed fingernail stabbed at the middle gauge—“that’s what wrong. Junk. Nothing but junk.”
He frowned over the thing while his soup got cold and then he fished his glasses out of his shirt pocket and studied it. The barometer needle was pinned all the way down at twenty-eight inches — he’d never seen anything like it. He lifted the plaque from the table and shook it. He inverted it. He tapped the glass. Nothing.
Muriel was seething. She went off into a tirade about con men, cheats, the Japanese and what they’d done to her brother, not to mention the American economy, and all he could do to calm her was agree with everything she said and croon “sweetie” over and over again till his soup turned gelid and he pushed himself up from the table, tucked the package under his arm, and headed out the door for the post office.
The wind was up, whipping the treetops like rags, and the smell of the ocean was stronger now, rank and enveloping, as if the bottom of the sea had turned over and littered the shore with its dead. A trash can skittered down the street and a shopping bag shot across the lawn to cling briefly to his ankles. As he settled into the car, the package beside him, the wind jerked the door out of his hand and he began to realize that there would be no more work today. At this rate he’d be lucky if what they’d put up so far was still there in the morning. No wonder the framers hadn’t showed: this was a real blow.