Long Drive Home (11 page)

When the manager got back, I told him I wanted to go month to month. Liz took me aside and pointed out that a longer lease would be more convincing to a judge. I said I was planning to find a better place when we weren’t in such a rush. She was too wrung out to argue. I signed a check for the deposit and first month’s rent, the last one I’d write from our joint account.

Things moved quickly after that. On Monday, we finished the paperwork for the separation agreement and sent it back to Braun, at which point my name was on its way to being off of anything that mattered. On Tuesday, I called the cable company about internet service, stopped by the post office to change my address, and finished packing. On Wednesday, while Sara was at school, Helen arrived from Philadelphia in her Volvo with two suitcases and a frozen meat loaf.

“An apartment-warming gift,” she said, handing it over. Then she stared at the file boxes stacked in the mudroom. “You’re really going through with this?”

“Between you and me, I don’t think it’ll last.”

I loaded the car before I went to pick up Sara so we could go straight to the apartment after I finished my crossing-guard shift. She had told her friends I was moving—“for a while,” she was always careful to add—and by then most of the parents must have known, too. I was embarrassed to think they’d heard the ridiculous excuse Liz and I had given Sara, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to tell her our marriage was in trouble. I told Liz that would be an even worse lie.

A few of the parents paused long enough in the crosswalk to say they were sorry to hear about Liz and me, or they hoped things worked out. It was awkward. Sara was about to become the only kid in her class whose parents weren’t together. I wanted to tell them what I’d told Helen, that it wouldn’t last, but they probably would have thought I was in denial, so I just said thanks. There wasn’t time for much else. The fact that I was busy doing my job made things easier for everyone.

The apartment building’s elevator was out of order, so Sara glumly held the emergency exit open as I carried in boxes from the car, her voice echoing after me in the stairwell—“Do you really have to do this, Dad?”—every plea a pinprick in my heart. Then we went back to the house for more. My suitcase was still open on the bed, half packed. Chairman Meow was curled up inside.

“Looks like you’ve got a stowaway,” Helen said.

Sara lay down next to the suitcase. “He doesn’t want you to go. Or he wants to come with you. So you don’t get lonely.”

I said I didn’t plan on getting lonely since I’d be seeing her every day. But she was suddenly fixated on having the Chairman become my roommate, so I packed up the cat food and litter box and put him into his carrier. He wasn’t mine to take—Liz and I had found him together, under the porch of our duplex in Cleveland Heights—but I could always bring him back if she wanted.

Sara and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the apartment. The Chairman stayed in the carrier for a while before he worked up the nerve to explore, keeping low and close to the walls. I unpacked my clothes. Sara went through a bin of toys and games she was planning to keep there. We built a fort out of empty moving boxes. She heard a train coming and decided we were runaways. The people on the train were trying to put us in an orphanage, she said. We hid in the fort, then unfolded the sofa bed to make a bigger fort underneath. She said the runaways were starving and sent me out to find food. When I came back with a box of crackers, which was all I had, she said, “Are you and mom taking a time-out?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

She said Lacy had said that sometimes when moms and dads weren’t getting along, they decided to take a break.

“We’re not taking a break,” I said. “I just need a place to work.”

“Well, when are you coming home?” she said, trying not to cry.

The trying was what really got me. “Soon,” I said, hating myself for it. But Liz and I had agreed this would be our answer for as long as we could get away with it. She didn’t want to tell Sara it would be two years, and I couldn’t go behind her back and tell Sara otherwise.

“A week?” she said.

“Probably longer.”

“A month?”

“It’s hard to say.”

She was holding a marker from her toy bin. She stabbed the back of my hand, hard, and crawled out of the fort. I went over to the window where she was standing and put my arms around her. Beyond the railroad tracks, next to a ball field, an ambulance was trying to get through traffic, but none of the cars were pulling over. The ambulance’s siren echoed back and forth across the field until it sounded like there were five or six of them. Sara looked at the red dot on my hand.

“ ‘Soon’ isn’t a real answer,” she said. “ ‘Soon’ doesn’t mean anything.”

Liz had said I shouldn’t meet her train anymore. She’d walk, or take the jitney, or drive herself. I’d said I had to bring Sara
home anyway, so why wouldn’t I be a decent future ex and pick her up?

On the ride home, she put on a brave face for Sara. She asked how the move went and nodded along, too enthusiastically, as Sara told her what a big help she’d been.

“But the window is painted shut,” Sara said. “And the toilet doesn’t flush all the way. I don’t think Dad should move in until they fix everything.”

I parked the station wagon in the garage, loaded a couple of boxes into my old hatchback, and came inside. Helen had a pot of chili going. I could feel Liz watching me as I got the sour cream out and started grating some cheddar. She put a hand on my arm.

“You should go.”

“Braun said no spending the night. He didn’t say anything about dinner.”

“He said it has to be clear to the court that we intend to divorce.”

“The court’s not here,” I said, and suggested a compromise: the minute there was a lawsuit, I wouldn’t so much as set foot in the house.

In the end, she didn’t seem to want to kick me out any more than I wanted to leave. I stayed for dinner and helped with the dishes, then the four of us played Parcheesi in front of a fire. It wasn’t so different from any other time Helen had visited except that Sara kept looking at the clock and insisted on sitting on my lap for the whole game.

When it was bedtime, I tucked her in and said I’d see her in the morning.

“But you won’t be here.”

“Not when you wake up.”

She started crying, abject sadness and need, asking me in between sobs to rub her back until she fell asleep. It took her almost an hour to settle down, but I was in no hurry. I sat there on the edge of the bed, trying to make out her face in the moonlight, thinking of all the times she’d called me in the night to take her to the bathroom or rescue a stuffed animal that had fallen on the floor.

It wasn’t like we’d never spent a night apart, though. She’d spent weekends at Helen’s; I’d traveled for work. This is nothing, I told myself.

But of course it didn’t feel like nothing.

I was on my way out when Liz stopped me at the back door to ask how I was doing for money. She’d guessed how few hours I’d been billing since the accident.

“I can give you cash,” she said, “but only under the table.”

I told her no thanks, I was fine, and said I’d call in the morning, after I met with Tawana’s attorney.

She shook her head. “You never called the lawyer I found, did you? You said you would.”

“Our assets are being separated,” I said. “Just like you wanted. If I get sued now, it’s my business.”

Helen cleared her throat. She was sitting on the patio with a cigarette and a glass of sherry. She said she didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but she didn’t see why we were so worried about getting sued. “It sounds like it was the guy’s own fault.”

“It was,” I said, “which is why there won’t be a lawsuit.”

“Not that we can take the chance,” Liz said.

“How long you do you want me to stay?” Helen said.

I told her the statute of limitations was two years.

Liz wasn’t amused. “Just until I can find some help, Mom.”

Helen lit another cigarette. She said she’d stay as long as we needed her.

Five minutes later, I was parked in front of the apartment building, staring at the red dot on the back of my hand. It was almost ten o’clock. Ten and a half hours to go before I picked Sara up for school. There was still unpacking to do, and I was falling further behind in my work, but I couldn’t stand the idea of being alone in the apartment.

I wouldn’t have minded a beer and some company, but most of my friends were back in Ohio and Kentucky. The people I knew in New Jersey were clients, neighbors, parents of kids in Sara’s class—no one I could really talk to. I thought about calling my parents to tell them what was going on, then decided to wait, hoping I’d be back home before they ever found out.

I started the car again, thinking I might get some groceries, but eventually I found myself pulling up across the street from Derek’s Custom Auto Body. I was surprised to see lights on at that hour. The Suburban guy was in the showroom, restocking shelves from open boxes on the floor. The sign on the door read
CLOSED
. I realized the place must be his—only an owner works that late. The idea of him passing for a respectable citizen disgusted me.

After a while, he put away the boxes, locked up, and drew a metal grate down over the window. The Suburban’s headlights swept across my windshield as he was pulling out, and it occurred to me that he wouldn’t recognize my car because I was driving the hatchback now.

I gave him half a block and tried to keep that distance between us as I tailed him past the bus depot, past the cemetery, and up into Montclair, but at some point he realized he was being followed. Maybe he was on guard, headed to a night deposit box with the day’s receipts, or maybe I’d just been too obvious. He pulled over and waited for me to pass, then fell in behind me, his high beams filling the car’s interior with light. My heart was going hard. I turned onto a side street and watched with a sinking feeling as he did the same, but I continued to drive as if nothing were going on, taking it easy, and eventually he gave up.

By the time he passed Sara’s school, I was waiting for him.

* * *

He lived one street over from the school in a narrow two-story house with vinyl siding that had started to come loose under the eaves. He parked in the driveway and stopped for the mail on his way in. The porch, listing to one side, had two plastic chairs but no toys or bikes, nothing to suggest kids.

The lights came on downstairs, then upstairs.
What the hell am I doing here?
I thought. The answer was, nothing. It’s not like I was going to
do
anything. But there was a satisfaction in watching him, as if I were gathering information that would be valuable to me in ways I didn’t yet understand.

He was in the house for only a few minutes. When he came back out, he’d changed from his jeans and T-shirt into a track suit, just like he’d been wearing when I first saw him. This one was Adidas, unzipped at the neck to show off a gold chain. He peeled the magnetic sign off the door of the Suburban and tossed it inside.

I was more careful this time as I followed him to a nightclub on Bloomfield. There was a sandwich board on the sidewalk advertising a comedy open mic night. I gave him five minutes, then paid the cover, stood back by the bar, and ordered a beer. He was sitting with a baby-faced woman at a table up front. She had her hand on his neck and kept leaning her head against his when she spoke. They looked happy.

The show had already started, emceed by a deejay from a radio station I’d never heard of. Each comic got five minutes
on the small stage, but I was so intent on the Suburban guy that I hardly noticed them. At some point the bartender told me there was a two-drink minimum. I ordered another beer. When I turned back around, the Suburban guy was making his way toward the stage. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be one of the comics, but it should have—who else goes to an open mic night? Seeing him up there smiling and waiting for the applause to die down, all I could think was, what an asshole.

I wanted him to flop. Someone would heckle him, he’d lose his temper, the police would come. But he’d done this before, you could tell. After introducing himself—he was Derek Dye, owner of a custom body shop—he started in with some jokes about having a storeroom full of spinning wheel covers nobody wanted anymore.

“Remember these?” He had one with him. He got it spinning and pretended to hypnotize somebody at a table up front. “You are getting very sleepy,” he said. “Your Escalade needs a shiny new set of chrome spinners.”

People were laughing. They kept laughing until his five minutes were up, and then they applauded and high-fived him as he came off the stage. If he had hiked his jacket and shown them his pistol, they probably would have laughed at that too. It was eleven-thirty, about the time Liz and I normally would have checked in on Sara before we went to bed. Derek and his girlfriend were heading toward the bar. Somebody clapped him on the back. Somebody else handed him a beer. I slipped out the door.

* * *

Liz called at five the next morning. She said she’d been up half the night worrying about my meeting. “Just call and say you can’t do it until you get a lawyer.”

I told her again that I thought showing up with a lawyer would only make it look like I had something to hide.

“Hello?” she said. “You do.”

The Chairman was on the kitchen counter when I hung up, sniffing Helen’s meat loaf, which I’d left out to thaw. I unwrapped the foil, put a little in his bowl with some cat food, and heated a slice for myself. Then I took a shower and tried to get some work done, but I was counting down the minutes until I saw Sara.

I ended up leaving early and had to kill time driving around the neighborhood. It was the coldest morning so far that fall. I came to a school bus with its sign out and stopped, but the two cars behind me went right on around. The bus driver then angled the bus so that he was blocking the street. Three kids got on. Two boys in the back, not much older than Sara, stared me down.

Helen had a cup of coffee waiting at the house. Liz gave me the lawyer’s number again and offered to call Braun for more references. Sara came running down the stairs with a mouthful of toothpaste, greeting me as if I’d been gone for months before remembering to pretend she didn’t care.