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By the time he’d descended the stairs into the front foyer, John gave up trying to understand what had just occurred and pawned the happening onto stress, though deep down he didn’t buy it. That feeling of dread in his stomach was still there. But now, standing at the entranceway to the kitchen and inhaling the aroma of pancakes and bacon, he decided the feeling was more from hunger than anything. He was indeed hungry, but any sign that he had changed his mind and wanted to eat would illicit an unpleasant attitude from Barbara and probably the spark needed to ignite a confrontation, having already asked him once whether he was hungry. It was too early in the morning for that. He noticed a half-full pot of coffee on the counter next to her, so he poured himself a cup and sat at the table.
Barbara was standing in front of an old, but immaculate ceramic stove with her back to him. Her long, blond hair and baggy, gray sweats could not conceal her beauty. She glanced over her shoulder at him momentarily, giving him the don’t drink all the coffee look, then turned back to the sooty-black iron skillet that sang a sizzling bacon song. In her brief glance, John noticed that a lock of curly hair had been draped over and partially hid one of her eyes seductively. It was extremely hard for her to not look gorgeous, even in the mornings, and John reaffirmed his all-too-late realization that it was her beauty—and only her beauty—that had engulfed him when they had first met. Everything else that makes a relationship work had been thrown right out the window. He had fallen head over heels, and that was all that mattered.
Nine years later, she was still as stunning as the day he had met her. Even childbirth had not corrupted
her; yet something had changed. She wasn’t the same woman he married. Or was she? Deep down, he knew that she really hadn’t changed at all. She was as self-centered, egotistical, uncompassionate and abrasive as she was the day they had met. She was like a mirage to a man in a desert, dying of thirst; she had the appearance of everything needed to sustain life, but in the end, there was never really anything there.
Her voice replaced the crackle of the bacon. “It’s as hard as hell to find anything to cook with around here. I finally found a few things, but I’ll need more than just a frying pan and spatula if the kids are going to have anything to eat. I don’t want to hear you bitch if I end up taking them to McDonald’s.”
“There’s plenty of utensils around here,” John countered. “Grandpa used to say, ‘everything in life has its place,’ but where you thought something should go wasn’t necessarily where he thought it should go.”
“And just where did he think kitchen utensils belonged, the bathroom?”
He ignored the comment and just stared down at his cup of coffee.
Actually, he realized that he had been the one that changed, or not really change more so than just coming to his senses. He wanted and needed more than just comfort for his eyes that her appearance so exhaustively gave. He did all along. He wanted a friend, a confidant, a lover. Someone to laugh with as well as cry with. Someone to hold in his arms. Someone to share the love of Abbey and John Jr. with. A constitution as foreign to her these past six years as snow in Tahiti.
He sighed and sipped at his coffee, “Where are the twins?” he asked.
“They're out in the yard, hopefully working up an appetite. Someone’s gotta help me eat this stuff.”
John looked beyond her past a large bay window that looked out into the front yard.
Johnny and Abbey were playing around an old oak tree that stood majestically in the front yard thirty feet from the porch. The largest tree around, it was like the property’s coat of arms. Muted giggles and playful jesting accompanied Johnny’s smiles and Abbey’s flowing auburn hair as they took turns chasing the other around the tree. A shower of autumn gold fell around them, stirred from their roost in the branches above the children.
They were lucky, John thought to himself. They inherited their mother’s unworldly good looks and his personality. Sure he was sour and a bit more melancholy than he’d prefer being, but he hadn’t always been that way, and it certainly wasn’t his natural state of mind. As much as life had taken that away from him, he was a firm believer that life could just as easily give it back. And he hoped that somehow it would. After all, it had given him his children.
Deciding that he’d rather be in the company of his two little roust-abouts than Barbara, he refilled his cup and went out onto the porch to wait for Bill.
John sipped at his cup of coffee as he watched his children at play, then after half-emptying it, put the cup on the railing that enclosed the wrap-around front porch. Because the night had been restless, and the caffeine hadn’t yet kicked in, he inhaled some cool morning air with a yawn.
Seeing their father, the two children halted their bantering race around the tree and ran to him. As he picked the two up, one in each arm, Bill Rensel’s white Dodge rumbled up the rocky drive.
“Who’s that, Daddy?” Johnny asked.
“That’s my friend Bill,” he replied. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember him. He’s the one who puts the smelly stuff in his mouth and spits a lot.”
“E-e-e-w-w!” they both cried out.
“I haven’t seen him for a long time, so I told him to stop over for a while this morning. In the mean time, Mommy made you two breakfast, so you better get in there before it gets cold.”
“What did she make?” Abbey asked. “French toast I hope.”
“Nope. Pancakes and bacon, I believe.”
“Oh,” she said, her voice trailing off into disappointment. She stuck out her lower lip and said, “Mommy never makes them good. They always taste like Elmer’s Glue inside.”
Johnny made a nasty face and nodded in agreement.
“And how would you know what Elmer’s glue tastes like?” John queried with an up-turned brow.
Abbey bit at her lower lip and looked away as if tapping her vast reservoir of good excuses, trying to come up with an evasive answer to her self-incrimination.
But before she could come up with a wonderfully spun tale about Johnny casting a magic spell on her tuna salad sandwich, turning it into glue as she put it to her mouth, John said, “Well I’m sure that this time they’ll be just fine, so get your hinees inside and eat some grub, okay? If not, then I’m sure Bill won’t mind sharing what he’s got.”
“No, no, no!” Abbey exclaimed.
“Pancakes and bacon, then?”
As he let them down, they both nodded in unison, kissed him, one on each cheek, and scurried into the house.
Once he made sure they were inside, John walked over to Bill who had just closed his truck door, and each slapped the other on the arm as a welcoming gesture; a ritual they had performed since their teens.
Bill still looked as gangly and his hair as fiery red as when they were kids growing up together. He was put together as if he had pipe cleaners for bones and could twist and contort his body in every conceivable direction without the slightest discomfort. His brown eyes still held that mischievous vivacity that had kept John’s mouth in a constant grin throughout their life-long friendship.
“I was wondering if I was ever going to see my best friend again,” Bill said with that crooked smirk that was his trademark. “I was beginning to get a complex. You know how easily my feelings are hurt. I’m a fragile man.”
With a smile of his own, John replied, “I apologize. I haven’t exactly been keeping up on my end of the bargain with keeping in touch, have I?”
Bill waved his hand cynically, “Ah, you big shot college professors never have time for us little guys.”
“That’s right,” John replied with a jeeringly proud look. “We’re too busy attending stuffy luncheons and bedding any students who need passing grades.”
“I always knew you weren’t all work and no play.” His smile faded quickly as he said, “Seriously though, I wish the circumstances were better, but I am glad to see you.” He studied John intently for a moment, looked up at the house, then looked back at John. “How—how you holding up?”
He shrugged his shoulders noncommittally. “It certainly has been an El Nino year,” he said referring not only to his grandfather’s death but about intimacies of which Bill was not yet apprised.
“He was a damned good man, your grandfather. Not many like him.”
“Not many left now, either,” John replied somberly.
The wound was still fresh, and he had to push back a lump in his throat. He hadn’t seen his friend for quite a while and didn’t want to start things off with an ugly display of emotion. That would be done in private. But he knew it’d reassert itself eventually. In a pitiably surreal sort of way this was, after all, Amos’ day. For the present, he decided to change the subject. He took in a long, deep sigh as he perused the country side that was awakening around them. “It’s been a long time.”
“Nearly a year,” Bill said.
“That long, huh?”
“You missed me, right?”
John said nothing, but his look confirmed the answer. He then added, “Can’t say that Barbara missed you much, though.”
Bill feigned surprise. He knew the woman never liked him. He was too unrefined, too puerile, too—boorish, and she could never understand how John could be friends with a Neanderthal like him.
John said, “Even to this day she’s appalled by the Bachelor Party Incident.”
“Does she still hold that over my head?” He was not really surprised at the pettiness of Barbara’s perturbation, only at the length of time she coddled those embers. “My god, every best man takes the groom to a topless bar the night before the wedding.”
“She took it very personally that I’d even consider looking at another woman when I had her to look at.”
“Hey, just because you have truffles at home doesn’t mean you can’t go to the bakery and look at the, uh—donuts.”
“If memory serves me correct, most of those dancers had bodies like donuts.”
“Hey, I happened to like those donuts.”
“You like any candy.”
“I can’t help it I have a sweet tooth.”
“Well that sweet tooth of yours is going to get rotten and fall off one of these days, if you don’t watch out.”
“I’ll marry a dentist.”
John smiled. He was surprised at how easy it was for himself to get into the old flow of things. It made the difficult times at hand at least marginally easier to bare. He was so glad Bill had come over. He could always count on him for a laugh, even if the humor itself was somewhat juvenile in nature, and he desperately needed to laugh. He was perched precariously at the brink of a black chasm of despair. With the disintegration of his families—the one that he created and the one that created him—each day had him stepping ever closer to that cliff’s edge. At least laughter and fraternity seemed to arrest his progression. For the moment, anyway.
“You know,” John continued remembering, “when I told her at the reception where we had gone, she was so irate that I was certain we’d never have sex again.”
“Well, two kids prove otherwise.”
“Yeah but they’re twins, so I wasn’t far off.”
“Well at least you're still alive. I figured that her kind killed after mating.”
John grinned amusingly as he looked back at the old house. The smile abated. The curtains in the bay window quivered slightly as a shadow slinked away from them. Finally, he said, “Mind if we take a walk?”
“Let me guess, she doesn’t want me in the house while she’s there.”
“Quite frankly, I don’t care what she wants or doesn’t want, it’s the twins. I don’t want them to be subject to one of her tirades, which I’m sure she’d have and not care who heard it.”
Bill nodded. “Sure. Let’s walk.”
They strolled leisurely past the great oak that loomed over the front yard like a giant umbrella, beyond which was the meadow. To the right of the giant tree was an admixture of apple and cherry trees and underbrush that ran helter-skelter to the river. A ten-foot wide path was cut through the trees and brush and ran down to the river’s edge where it met up with an unused stretch of railroad tracks where Amos liked to fish. To the left and behind the tree stood an old utility shed, a dingy, soot-black structure with a tin roof and pocked with knot holes from the barn wood used to build it.
As they passed it, John felt as though Bill was purposely guiding the two around the far side of the tree, keeping as much distance between them and the
foreboding shed as possible. It made sense for Bill to feel apprehensive about going near the structure, because that was where he had found Amos dead. It was almost as though the shed itself had taken on its own golem spirit, coming alive, causing Amos’ death and getting too close would be jeopardizing their own lives.
John peered around at what the fog had earlier masked. The gauzy landscape was now replaced by one with sharper images, and the fullness and richness of the property was now displayed in full bloom with fall splashing colors around with reckless abandon. And above the lush green pasture was a vast, blue, burning sky, almost neon in its radiance. Its only blemish was a wispy layer of cirrus clouds on the north-west horizon.
As they walked, John took another deep breath, not sighing but smelling. “This has got to be the cleanest air I’ve breathed in a long time.”
To that Bill replied, “I don’t know how you do it. Born and raised a country boy, yet you live ten minutes from the center of Erie. I’d go crazy living that close to town.”
“Country boy? Bill, we spent our entire teenage years walking around downtown Oil City. We spent hardly any time in the country. And besides, Erie’s not that big. It’s not like Pittsburgh or Cleveland. Yeah, I live close to the inner city and a block-and-a-half from the paper mill, but I also live ten minutes from deserted, old country roads, too.”
Bill appeared not to have heard John’s comment. He stared bewildered—brows furrowed, freckles scrunched—at the ground rambling on, more to himself than to John. “I mean absolutely no privacy. When you can lean out your kitchen window and spit on your next door neighbor, you live too damned close. But if you could see into a bedroom window or the bathroom or something, well . . .” He looked up John. “Hey, didn’t you say a single lady lived next to you?”
“Bill, she’s a sixty-year-old widow, for crying out loud.”
Again, ignoring him Bill said, “You could go to her house everyday asking for a cup of sugar or something, hoping to catch her in a slinky negligee.” His face turned into a twisted smile. “Maybe I could live in town.”
Trying to get Bill’s digression back on track John said, “Well, now that Amos’ house is mine, maybe the twins and I can come up a little more often, take it easy, relax. Stay the weekend without feeling like we’re intruding.”
“John, you know dammed well Amos never felt that way,” Bill snapped, obviously not ignoring that comment.
Instantly, John felt ashamed at what he had implied.
Bill hesitated for a moment but continued on admonishingly. “It was Barbara. No secret that the two didn’t like each other. He loved having you and those tikes of yours around, but her, well . . . And he did his best to put up with her and the cold remarks, the dirty looks, the holier-than-thou attitude. Would have put up with a hell of a lot more, too, just to have you down more often.”
“He told you this?”
“We went fishing a lot.”
“Sounds like you did more talking than fishing.”
Bill shrugged his shoulders.
“He didn’t like her much, did he?” John said in more of a statement than a question.
“Hated her,” Bill smiled. It faded. “But he loved you and the twins.
John soughed quietly. He had loved his grandfather dearly. Even though he had begun to see his mentor less and less as he grew into adulthood, husbandhood, fatherhood, there was an unspoken bond they had shared that no amount of space could ever unloosen. Yet even so, he still wished that he could have spent just a little more time with him. The things he would have said, should have said . . .
After a moment of quiet contemplation John finally said, “Well, it’s too bad that I didn’t come to my senses sooner. He would have been able to spend more time with his great grandchildren before he died. They would have liked that.”
Bill looked somewhat puzzled by John’s last remark. “Exactly what do you mean by ‘come to your senses sooner’?” he prodded.
“I guess it has been a while since we’ve talked.” He paused a moment, but then it came out. “Barbara and I—we’ve separated. We’re getting a divorce.”
“You’re kidding me?” This time Bill was genuinely shocked.
John shook his head and kicked at a patch of moss dolefully. “She moved out six months ago. We—I should say, I—tried to go to counseling, somehow work things out, but it was no use. Her career was too damned important to her. She kept canceling her sessions because of working late and doing interviews for the TV station’s news cast. No doubt most of those interviews were being queried atop her office desk.”
The initial cheerfulness that John had shown at the sight of his best friend suddenly dimmed with the current topic. His face grew slack as he recounted that gut wrenching day almost nine months earlier. Being told of infidelity could not hold a candle to actually encountering the act yourself. Of all the problems that the marriage had sustained to that point, the blade of her unfaithfulness had cut him the deepest. It was only then, after that sad fact had been revealed, that he knew the marriage was irretrievably broken, along with his heart.
John said, “I guess I just got fed up, you know? She was too busy for her family, I was going nuts trying to play Mr. Mom and teach while she was off doing god knows what, we constantly fought, sex was almost nil—I now know why—and in all honesty, cold showers don’t work nearly as well as they claim.”
Bill laughed. Actually, it was more of a terse chuckle, deciding that maybe the comment hadn’t been meant to be funny. Then he asked, “How are the twins taking it?”
Before he continued, John picked up a stone about half the size of a baseball nestled in the still-damp grass and heaved it out across the meadow as far as he could, as if that very rock was the source of all his aching, and the pain would decrease exponentially with the distance the rock was from his heart.
“About as good as can be expected, I guess,” he said after a moment. “Can’t miss something that was never there. We’ve agreed to joint custody until the divorce is final, but I’m losing ground with my fight for full custody. Seems she has friends where I don’t. The judge thinks I’m more of a detriment to the children than she is because he believes alcohol abuse is worse than infidelity.”
Bill blinked. “Alcohol abuse? You?”
He paused a moment to put his thoughts into perspective. It was still a difficult and deeply private matter to talk about. But finally he said, “With the stress of finding out about the affair, the inevitable separation and worrying about the twins, I was an emotional wreck, couldn’t sleep. Days without a wink. I tried every over-the-counter drug I could get my hands on, nothing worked. It began to affect my teaching, so I-I began drinking before bed, usually a glass of Scotch or two, no more and only before bed. The kids never saw me drink, I made sure of that, and I never got drunk. It was just enough to help me relax and sleep. Barbara had found the bottle in my night stand and asked me about it. I never thought she would use that against me, but she did. And successfully, too.”
“Unbelievable. She’s a work of art, that woman.”
“That’s not even the half of it.”
Bill gazed at him expectantly.
John paused deep in thought for a moment, as if pondering whether to tell Bill what was coming next. He let out a deep breath then said, “I’ll tell you something that I’ve never told anybody else—no one. When we found out she was pregnant she went ballistic. Her career was just taking off, and journalism was her life, you know. Of course it was all my fault. Well, she was considering an abortion, and—”
Bill shook his head, partly in disbelief and partly in disgust.
“—I was absolutely opposed to it. I mean, hell, I was happy about being a dad. Well, eventually after she found out they were twins, she dropped the issue, but she never really wanted children. That was something we never discussed when we dated. I guess I just assumed, you know—who wouldn’t want kids?”
“And now she’s fighting for custody?”
“Isn’t that just the biggest slap in the face? Hell, they spend most of their time at her parents house when she does have them . . . and I’m the bad parent?” He shook his head in frustration. “Why the hell didn’t I see this before we got married?”
“Let’s face it John, she’s drop-dead gorgeous, and you were just thinking with the wrong head. Besides if you hadn’t met her, you’d never have gotten those two cute, little rug rats and don’t forget that.”
“They’ll never let me,” he replied with a genuine smile.
After a while of digesting all that John had told him to that point, Bill’s look became perplexed. “Well having said all that, why is she bothering to come to Amos’ funeral? She hated the man.”
“One last knife twist in my belly before the divorce is final, I suppose. Anything to get under my skin. She said she didn’t trust anybody I’d get to watch the twins while I took care of the estate matters.”
They stopped at the edge of the meadow. The whole eastern and southern line was surrounded by a thick foliage of glistening fern and prickly briars. These were towered by tall firs, oaks, maples, and an occasional birch. Heavy shadows clung in the spaces between the trees letting little if any light from the beautiful day break through. The only movement within the woods came from the tendrils of fog not yet consumed by the warmness of the morning sun.
Just now realizing how far away from the house they were, Bill turned a bit pale, more
etiolated than he usually was, making his freckles appear more like sun spots. As he took out a can of Copenhagen and opened it, putting a pinch between his fingers then slipping that into his lip, he stared back at the old shed which was about fifty yards or so away. A deep penetrating stare.
“You okay,” John asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“Huh? Oh yeah I’m fine, I guess,” he said as he wiped away residual tobacco from his fingers. “It’s just that shed—.”
“What?” John pressed.
“Oh hell, I don’t know. All this depressing talk’s getting to me, I guess. I know it sounds crazy, but just being here gives me the willies.”
“I know. I kind of feel the same way,” John replied as he eyed the solitary attic window, something strange up there hidden in that gloom. He flexed the hand that has held the strange key. It still prickled as though thousands of tiny needles were being inserted into his palms.
“Funny about you mentioning your insomnia. I couldn’t sleep for a while either after I—I found him in there. We were supposed to go fishing that morning, you know. He wanted to try out a new Shakespeare he’d bought. I was in the kitchen, having a cup of mud that he called coffee,” he said with a weak smile, “and he went out to the shed for his tackle box.” He glanced ruefully at the ground. “After twenty minutes, I figured I’d go out and see what was taking him so long.”
That was all he could say.
They both took sight of the shed and eyed it silently for a long moment the way a child would eye an unfamiliar animal at a petting zoo before offering a hand to pet it.
Melancholy had set in. And John was a bit surprised by Bill’s uneasiness, not because of who was saying it, but because he now sensed it as well with the advent of the happening in the attic. A happening that he would, no doubt, revisit later to quell this boyish fear that now felt.
“Maybe I just need a beer,” Bill at last said, breaking his trance to spit tobacco juice onto the ground.
“At eight-thirty in the morning?” John asked.
“Especially at eight-thirty in the morning.”
“How about holding off on the beer until we get Amos laid to rest. Maybe we can get together for a few beers later on. I’ll call Barbara’s bluff and have her watch the twins tonight. Besides, I can use a night off. We can catch up on old times.”
Bill’s sullen features came to life once more. “The best idea coming from your mouth in a long time,” he said with a renewed vigor. “Tell you what, meet me down at the Mediterranean tonight about eight. I’ll be in the bar chilling some Coors for us. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds good. I’ve got some things to do around here after the funeral that’ll keep me busy most of the day anyway.”
The funeral service would begin in another hour and a half, so the two departed, deciding that it was time to start getting ready.
©2003 StoriesByEmail.com
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