“Bye Dad,” I say. “I’m going to jail.”
He toasts me with his steaming coffee.
Then I start back toward the house. The stairs creak under my feet. The door to our bedroom is closed. I start to knock-then I grab the knob and open the door. Lisa looks startled. She’s staring out the window, chewing her thumbnail, her phone at her ear.
Wearing her heavy coat. She looks back and sees me. Her eyes are red and bleary. “I have to call you back,” she says into the phone. She closes it and turns to face me.
Our big suitcase is open on the bed. Nothing in it. I don’t know what this means. Has she not packed yet? Or changed her mind? Or is she expecting me to go?
She looks up and I catch her eyes-green, frightened.
I look down at the bed underneath that suitcase. “Lisa…I…” What do you say? Where do you start? “I am so sorry.”
CHAPTER 30
BANKRUPTCY TURNS OUT TO be like an outdoor concert Lisa and I went to once. The gates were thrown open suddenly and we sprinted down this hill, way too fast, the crowd out of control, and I squeezed Lisa’s hand and we ran, but we could’ve slipped so easily, fallen, gotten trampled. “Don’t look back,” I just kept saying, “just keep moving forward.”
It turns out they have a Chapter 7
The day before we are officially served with eviction papers by a sympathetic Sheriff’s deputy, we have a big garage sale, and watch people haul away the shit we should’ve gotten rid of years ago. It’s almost cathartic. I think Lisa does pretty well with her compulsive shopping boxes, maybe even turns a profit on the plush toys. I’m happy for her. The boys sell a bunch of their old games and toys, too, and make enough to buy a Wii. I’m happy for them, too.
And then…we move. Or at least I move, with the boys, to a two-bedroom apartment in a shrub-covered 1970s triplex on a busy street twenty blocks from downtown.
Lisa needs some space. Some time. The old me would’ve pointed out that they’re really the same-space and time, on a four-dimensional smooth continuum that theoretically allows for even more dimensions and explains such phenomena as time-dilation (although this relativity doesn’t explain the munchies) and I’d have been halfway to string theory as she was loading up her car. But the new me-quiet, humbled-just says, “Okay.” And, “Take as long as you need.”
She moves in with Dani, although I imagine she spends her
nights at Chuck’s. We agree that I’ll keep the boys in the apartment with me for the time being, until she gets settled. Since my apartment is near her optometrist’s office, Lisa will come by after school every day and stay with them until I get home from work-which is often quite late. When I get home she goes to Dani’s-or to Chuck’s. I don’t ask. This way, we hope, our split will disrupt the boys as little as possible. Sometimes when she’s there I’ll walk to Dad’s nursing home-which is less than a mile away-and watch TV with him. The boys aren’t happy about any of this; we tell them that sometimes Moms and Dads just need a little time apart, but they know. They take turns with self-pity and surliness, like video game controllers they hand back and forth.
I’ve yet to go back to our old house since we lost it…but Lisa confesses that she sometimes drives through our old neighborhood. I wish she wouldn’t torture herself that way. One night, when we’re having pizza in the apartment with the boys-we decide to keep having dinner together once a week, for their sake-Lisa tells me with disdain that our house sold at auction for three-fifty, two thirds of what we owed. “Doesn’t that make you furious?” she asks.
It might make me angry if I drove by the house and saw for myself, but since my car went back to the bank I travel by bus now and it would take at least one transfer and…I don’t know…I guess the truth is that I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be reminded of all that I lost, all that I gave away. I slowly replace the furniture that we lost or sold at our garage sale with second-hand stuff; I hook the boys’ Wii up to an old 19-inch TV. After our second dinner with the boys-fish sticks and fries-Lisa teases me about my latest purchase: an orange couch with cigarette marks on the arms. I explain they were out of moss green, cigarette-burned couches. The apartment’s best feature is a balcony, which is built at tree-level, and when we’re done with dinner we move our chairs
out there and sit. I tell Lisa that I can’t wait for spring, to sit out there and watch the boys ride their bikes. She smiles politely.
On the grass in front of our triplex is the big wooden Frontier Fort, which I had moved over from the house. The boys hardly ever play in it but there are two rotten neighbor boys who are younger (and who swear like teenagers) and they seem to like it. And
Teddy hates sharing a room, but I think Franklin likes it. He sleeps better with someone else in the room. Every morning I walk them to school, and then take the bus to Earl Ruscom’s real estate office building, where he’s opened the little headquarters of
My old dying newspaper just keeps laying people off-half the staff is now gone, including Ike, who has gone back to school to be a teacher-so there’s no shortage of writers for me to hire to do upbeat freelance stories for almost no money. In spite of Earl’s mandate that we write “positive business stories,” we find ourselves doing a lot of stories about businesses going under. I think we might last a couple of years ourselves before Earl gets tired of losing money and I have to write a cheerful story about our own demise.
Every time I take the bus to work, I recall how our old house was around the corner from a bus stop, how I used to watch that big bifurcated bus roll past every day without giving it much thought; I certainly never thought I’d be on it. I do remember
seeing people at the stop and sometimes I’d catch their eyes, think vague thoughts about their lives, and get a surge of my old atrophying empathy. What were their lives like? Was it awful to be so poor? I’d see kids sitting with their parents, waiting for the bus, and I’d feel worst about my own pity for them, my passing-by-at-forty-miles-an- hour-in-heated-leather-seat pity.
The first time I waited for the bus I felt self-conscious, as if I were watching myself with that same pitiful detachment. A car went by my stop and I saw myself in a woman’s eyes as she passed:
