Fielder. It was the deli where we normally got lunch most days, all of us on Bylina’s staff. I watched them all walk in and gradually sit down at a big table by the window, leaving two of the guys up front to order. Fielder sat down with the girls, who were laughing and chatting together about who knows what. The hollow feeling I’d fended off the night before came back full-bore. The old-Cade part of me itched to walk across the street and say hello— schmooze and network, ask about job openings, establish connections. But I couldn’t do it. I’d just seen what I looked like right then, and I didn’t want them to see it, too, Fielder especially. He’d give me shit about where’d my tan go, was that cow barn he smelled, how was the little woman these days and had I heard how Stan was doing lately.
My stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten since the drive down and knew I had to be hungry, but I didn’t feel like eating, and anyway I barely had enough cash to get a cheeseburger. So I just watched them through the window for a couple minutes, then slid out the door and hurried back up the street to the offices I hadn’t hit yet. I tried to psych myself up to project confidence, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. And after another hour of that I got back in my car and headed back toward 295 North. God knows I didn’t want to go back to New Hampshire, but it was obvious enough I didn’t have a life in D.C. anymore. Everyone I knew had moved on, and here I’d vanished from their minds without a trace, as if I’d never even mattered to begin with.
It wasn’t any mystery how I’d gotten to this point, and it didn’t all have to do with Elias. Even after Jill and I moved in with my folks, even after TJ was born, I was completely bound and determined to come back to school the next year. And then TJ got the first ear infection. And the second. And the third. Every time it happened we had to throw another wheelbarrow full of money onto it, as if it wasn’t bad enough already that we had the bills from his birth. I’d gotten some money out of my folks to pay for that, but I couldn’t keep asking them, and then they dropped the bomb on us about the surgery. Driving away from D.C., I thought about it nonstop, and the whole thing made me feel gloomy as all holy hell. Between the debt I was carrying and how shitty I’d felt since my brother died, it seemed impossible that I would ever pull it together enough that I could come back to where I belonged. I’d try to distract myself thinking about something different, but every time I drifted back, my brain wanted to crawl off to the corner and curl up in a ball. So I turned my mind to the subject I’d tried to keep it off lately, ever since I’d cleaned out the shed and tried to make good on my promises to Jill. I started thinking about Piper.
At the funeral she’d told me she was at the University of Vermont. A little bit of internet searching had informed me she was the president of a service group that did Christmas in April and Harvest for the Hungry and those types of things. It gave me a pang to see that, knowing that she might be impressed with the career of service I had ahead of me, if I’d still had it. At first I told myself I was just curious what she’d been up to, but in no time at all she had taken over my brain. At work, when I wasn’t watching basketball, I daydreamed conversations with her. Driving through Frasier, past all the familiar spots, I mused over the high school memories. And more and more, my thoughts had been drifting to her when I was with Jill. It wasn’t personal and it wasn’t even deliberate. I’d be making love to Jill, letting my mind wander to buy some time, and then Piper would get in there like smoke drifting in around a door.
As I came off the New Jersey Turnpike onto 95, I batted around which way to go, then took the exit toward Vermont. I didn’t think too hard or too deeply about it, just merged right. And then I kicked the radio volume up and didn’t think about much at all for the next few hours. It was as if I was finally able to turn my brain off, maybe because it had gone into total shutdown mode, like nuclear power plants do when a catastrophe is looming.
It was late evening when I pulled up in front of Piper’s dorm building. I knew it was hers because I’d stopped in the Student Union and looked her up in the student directory at the front desk. That’s where I was that day: desperate in the job search, a stalker in my downtime.
Sitting there outside that old stone building, I knew she might not even be in there at all. But I didn’t care that much. Didn’t get out of the car and try to hunt her down. All I wanted to do was sit there and look at the things that were familiar to her. The giant oak. The light pole with the Ramones bumper sticker plastered to it. The fat guy in a trench coat with a head of wild, curly hair, walking out of her building and then, later, back in with a plastic grocery bag. I wedged my knee against the dash and smoked my last few cigarettes one after the other, watching for her, drinking in her world. Men walked by, and I wondered if any of them knew her. I kept picturing her face the way she’d looked at the funeral, her eyes all big and somber and seeming to hold a complete knowledge of what I’d lost. But watching the students come and go from the dorms made me think about Jill and me, too. I looked up at the lights in those windows and thought about the people who must be up there together, careless and whiling away the time as if it was nothing. Jill and I had been that way once, and not all that long ago, either. Almost as soon as I met her, I fell so hard for her. I knew I still loved her the same way now, but I felt as though I’d set my feelings for her down somewhere and forgotten where I’d left them.
Sometime after midnight I put the Saturn back in gear and drove the rest of the way home. When I finally crawled into my own bed, thanking God that TJ was in the laundry basket and not all sprawled out on my side, Jill wiggled backward and nestled herself against me. I kissed her on her shoulder and she made a contented purr.
“How’d it go?” she whispered.
“Fine.”
“I’m sure it did,” she said. “You’re still the most handsome bastard in the world.”
I managed to smile, and she slid her bare foot down my leg. As I made love to her, very quietly and with the last little bits of energy I had left after that bitch of a drive, I thought about the extra hours I’d spent away from her and TJ and all the extra money I’d burned up on gas. I felt lousy about it, but I was glad I still had enough of a human soul to recognize when I was being a selfish asshole. Little rags of it seemed to be getting sucked away into the black hole that had opened up in me after Elias died. I didn’t know how much longer what I had left would last me.
The next night, after TJ and Jill had gone to bed, I got back to work in the shed. Now that I could forget going back to Maryland anytime soon—forget ever doing anything but scrape along enough to maybe stay just ahead of all the bills—there was no reason to hold on to the fantasy that I could lobby for change like a real person. I was never going to raise my hockey stick over my head while everybody cheered, coasting along on my skates under that blue sky, not ever again. That alone was a sore, open wound, and I was one shallow bastard that I felt that way.
But where Elias had been screwed over—that was something that mattered. It was a mission I had—to state unequivocally that what had been done to him was unconscionable and corrupt and morally wrong. The fact that the fire of it still burned in me was a sign that I still had a human soul, too. And I wasn’t cheating on anybody in my heart when I kept that flame alive. On the contrary, I was keeping the faith.
Chapter 26
A couple of weeks before the craft fair, Leela asked me to take her down to Henderson, south of where Cade worked, to buy supplies. Scooter, who had just come in the door from helping Dodge repair the rental house’s faulty dishwasher once again, asked if he could hitch a ride. Before I’d arrived in Frasier he’d had free use of Elias’s Jeep, and now he was reduced to bumming rides from all of us. I tried to be a good sport about it. He never complained about his circumstances, but I knew it was a tough life for him—reluctant to move too far from his grandparents’ nursing home, but unable to scrape together much of a living alone in this small town. He was lonely, and sometimes, watching him work with Dodge, I suspected he maintained the tenuous friendship more out of desperation than actual fellow feeling.
He was quiet for the whole ride down, tipping little puffed apple crackers into his palm for TJ to pick up one at a time. Glancing at him in the rearview mirror—at his impassive face, at the light that glinted off his glasses and obscured his eyes—I mused over whether I dared to ask him if he knew what, exactly, my husband was up to these days. Ever since his last trip to Maryland, Cade had begun hiding in the shed again, night after night. Just a day earlier, as I cleaned out his jeans pockets before doing the wash, I closed my hand around a dozen aluminum nails.
