Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (22 page)

"Really," I said. "I was just out with a few guys drinking some beer."

"That's even worse," she said. "Drinking is harder on you than sex. When I was your age, Michael, I was a bottle. A real fucking bottle."

She brought me coffee and a doughnut a few minutes later.

"I've worked with a lot of writers," she said. "Thirty goddamn years' worth of them."

I nodded.

"And you're the best one I've seen."

I didn't know how she could tell that from my thirty-second radio pieces, but I was glad she'd said it.

"You say that to all the boys," I said.

"Fuck no," she said. "Most of the boys I tell to get the fuck out of the news business. You? You'll go places," she said. "That's for sure. You won't spend thirty years in this windowless newsroom. Cleanest copy I've ever seen."

It was the reputation I was developing. Cleanest copy. By the end of the day, Gunderson had the morning anchors calling me Mr. Clean. It wasn't the kind of thing you could go out into the world and brag about, but it was nice to know.

Ella and Rusty came over for dinner that night. They hadn't called first and I was pretty plowed when they showed up. I had stopped off after work—at one o'clock—and bought a six-pack of beer. Then I came home, got out a yellow legal pad and some newly sharpened pencils, and tried to write a story. Gunderson's compliment had me thinking that I had this terrible talent and I was wasting it. But when I sat down to write, I knew that I hadn't been wasting shit. I had nothing to say. When Ella showed up at my door with Rusty, some root beer, and a large pizza, the six beer cans and the legal pad were both empty.

"Are you busy?" she called, knocking on the door, then pushed it open before I could get there. She had her own key.

"We got pizza!" Rusty yelled. He made a beeline for the kitchen table.

Ella handed me the hot pizza box and the two-liter bottle of soda and started clearing the kitchen table.

"Were you writing?" she said. "Oh, I'm sorry. We should go."

"No. No. I was just figuring something," I said.

"Figuring?"

"Yeah, yeah. Sit down. How was your day?"

"Full of annoying customers," she said. "Buying shitty books at big discounts."

"Sounds like a perfect day at the Book Nook," I said.

"Are you okay?" she said.

I shrugged.

Ella looked a little disappointed, so I struggled to smile.

"It's just I haven't seen you for almost a week, and once I mentioned to Rusty that we should surprise you with pizza, there was no stopping him."

"Oh, I know, this is fine. It's great. Has it been a week?"

"Are you drunk?"

"No, sit down, sit down," I said. "It's only been a few days."

"You are drunk," she said.

I held up my thumb and index finger to indicate the tiniest amount of something and mouthed the words, "A little."

Rusty was already pouring himself a root beer, sloshing a big wave of it onto the kitchen table. Ella came over and soaked it up with a towel, and then she got Rusty a couple of slices and put them on a paper plate.

"We got pepperoni
and
ham
and
bacon," Rusty yelled. "Because you like meat!"

"Indoor voice, Rusty," Ella said. She motioned with her head toward the living room, then left the kitchen.

"Meat-a-licious," I said. I followed Ella into the living room. The truth was, I didn't want them there. I didn't know why. I didn't know what was wrong with me, which is why, when Ella asked me that very question, I just shrugged.

"Why would you be drunk? Especially this early in the day and all alone?"

"I get up for work at three," I said. "I have to start early."

"I mean, what's wrong with you? Why are you drunk at all?"

I shrugged again.

"Just relaxing," I said. "Just chillin'."

Rusty hollered from the kitchen. "Hey, don't you guys want pizza?"

"Chillin'?" Ella said. "Just chilling?"

"What is wrong with
you
?" I said.

"Your mother called," she said. "She thinks you're in trouble. She says that you're depressed."

"Please," I said. "Please, please, please."

"Are you?"

"At work, they call me Mr. Clean. I've got the cleanest prose they've ever seen."

"That's great," she said. "How nice for you."

"Yeah," I said. I leaned in close. "You want to sneak off and see if you can get Mr. Clean to be Mr. Dirty?"

I buried my face in her neck and sucked the salt off her skin.

"I'd like that more than anything," she said, "if you were sober. But there's a six-year-old boy in the next room who desperately wants you to sit down and get really, really excited about the pizza he's brought over."

"It's a deal," I said, and slunk back into the kitchen.

"Fucking pepperoni
and
fucking ham!" I shouted.

Rusty looked at me with tomato sauce and grease running down his chin. Ella said my name, softly, behind me.

"What's wrong, everybody?" I said. "Come on! Three cheers for three meats! Hip-hip!"

"Hooray!" Rusty cried, thrusting his fist out and knocking his root beer over.

"Oh, that's fucking great," I said. "Hip-hip, hooray!"

Ella went over to the table and wiped the pop off of Rusty first, then went to work on the table. I was drunk enough to find all of this very amusing. I believed we were a beautiful sight. The fucking Waltons, the Bradys, the Cleavers, they had nothing on us. I said something to that effect. Ella packed Rusty up and got ready to leave without saying good-bye. She took the leftover pizza with her.

"See you later," I said. When Rusty was out the door she turned around and flipped me the bird. I didn't know what she was so mad about. It's not like I asked for this. It wasn't like I'd invited anybody over.

I STARTED TO SOBER UP
and felt down again. The house was too quiet. I paced around and looked over the depression pamphlet my mother had given me.
Loss of interest or pleasure in regular activities. Decreased energy. Feelings of fatigue.
I made little marks in the boxes on the checklist. I tried calling Ella before I went to bed. I would say to her, "Look, let's talk."

She didn't answer the phone and I didn't leave a message. After "Let's talk," I had nothing else planned to say.

I slept poorly. I was about fifteen minutes late to work. The novelty of writing for a big radio station seemed to have shut off with my alarm that morning. The prestige of being Mr. Clean had washed off in the shower. By the time I got into my car and headed onto Warren Avenue, it was just work, a shitty-paying job that required me to wake up at four in the morning.

"Late!" Gunderson snarled as I walked into the newsroom. "There was a chemical spill in Wyandotte last night. You've got to get me some tape from the police department PIO for the lead story."

"Why?" I said. "Why do we need a public information officer's sound bite? Will people not believe us if we just say there was a chemical spill? I am so goddamn sick of sound bites."

"Get on the phone now—555-3355," she said. "That's Wyandotte police and fire.

"At two thirty this morning," said the night-shift police sergeant into my rolling tape recorder, "a chemical tanker overturned on the railroad tracks in downtown Wyandotte. Police and fire crews were able to evacuate all residents in the area, and a Hazmat team is on location now. Jefferson Avenue will be closed until at least nine a.m."

"Thank you, Sergeant," I said. I hung up the phone and hammered out a script.

"For your lead story," I said, handing the tape and the script to Gunderson.

At nine o'clock that morning, I got a phone call. I wondered if it was Ella, still mad about how poorly things had gone the night before. But it wasn't Ella, it was the assistant principal at Rusty's school. It seemed that Rusty was sick, and I had been listed as the emergency contact.

The principal must have heard the surprise in my voice. She said, "You are Rusty's stepfather, right?"

I almost told her that I was too busy. I almost explained to her that, in fact, I certainly was not Rusty's stepfather. I almost said, I'm sorry, but I am a news writer and I am in the middle of the morning drive-time broadcast, the station's most important time slot. But then I pictured Rusty on a cot in the antiseptic, yellow-walled nurse's office, and I remembered those poor kids in grade school who would get sick and spend all day on a cot, puking into a garbage can, because there was nobody around to get them.

I nodded, realized the woman on the phone couldn't see me, and whispered, "Right. I'll be there as soon as I can."

I logged off and explained things as best I could to Gunderson. She was still mad at me, but she said, "If your kid is sick, your kid is sick."

"Well, he's not my kid," I said. "Really."

"If the school calls you when he gets sick," she said, "he's your kid."

RUSTY LOOKED MISERABLE.
He was sitting in a green chair and his face matched the plastic of the chair. The school nurse said he was running a fever of 102 and he had been throwing up all over the place. Now, she said, he had nothing left to throw up, so he was probably done with that.

"What do I do now?" I asked.

She looked at me for a second, and it dawned on her that I really didn't know what to do.

"Get him into bed," she said. "He just needs to sleep it off. You can give him some children's Tylenol for his fever. You can use a cold compress on his forehead too. And start with clear fluids. If he can tolerate those, maybe tonight give him some crackers and chicken noodle soup. But if his fever doesn't go down soon, you should call his doctor."

"Who would that be?" I asked.

"I don't know, sir. You would have to know that."

"Right," I said.

I put Rusty in the backseat of my Buick and got behind the wheel. In the rear view mirror, he looked slumped and hot and miserable. I wished Ella had a cell phone. I didn't know what to do with him.

"I'm so cold," said Rusty. He was shivering.

I drove over to Nick's house. It was close by and I knew he'd be home. He was a dad now, and maybe Sunny or Aunt Maria would be there, and between them, they could help me out.

Nick was in the driveway, working on the engine of his red Dodge pickup, which was equipped with a giant yellow plow and a dump bed.

"Welcome to my office," he said. "Did you come over to beg me to let you get in on the ground floor? I'm still seeking an investor, so you're in luck."

"No, not that," I said.

"Is that Ella's kid in the car?" he asked.

"Yeah. He's sick. He has a fever, chills, the whole works. I don't know what to do with him."

Sunny and the baby were out at Sunny's mother's house for the day, and Aunt Maria was back at her place in Livonia, but Nick was pretty competent on his own. He made up the guest bed for Rusty, gave him some children's Tylenol, and brought him a grape Popsicle. He carried the TV in from the kitchen and set it on the dresser across from Rusty's bed. He turned on some educational show with puppets. Rusty was out cold pretty fast. I checked on him every five minutes to make sure he was still breathing. His fever was going down, his face no longer so hot to the touch.

When I finally got hold of Ella, she said she had just come in with groceries.

"I have to go get Rusty from school in a minute," she said.

"Rusty's here," I said. "They called me from school to pick him up."

"Oh, God," she said.

"He's fine," I said. "We're at Nick and Sunny's place. He's in the guest room sleeping. His fever broke."

"I was going to tell you," she said. "About being listed on his emergency form. Margaret is the first contact, but she must have been out too. I didn't know anybody else I could trust, so I listed you second. I never thought they'd actually have to call you."

"It's fine," I said.

"I plan to get a cell phone," she said. "It's just fifty dollars a month I don't have.

"I said it was fine, Ella. I'll bring Rusty home."

***

AFTER RUSTY HAD
had a bath and been put to sleep in his own bed, Ella and I ordered Chinese food. Neither of us had enough cash to pay for it, so we put it on Ella's Visa card. Once we realized that were going to have to charge the meal anyway, we ordered a ridiculously large amount of food, five entrées and three appetizers, laughing about it while we ordered. But Ella looked tired and worn. Her hair was dull and so was her skin.

I told her how surprised I'd been by Nick's calmness and competence.

"Well," Ella said, "he's a father. It's not rocket science. I'm glad he was home."

"Me too," I said.

"I was driving around looking for another job today," she said. "Filling out applications everywhere. You know, a degree in art history doesn't go very far. Especially when it took you three colleges and seven years to finish it."

I helped myself to some sweet and sour chicken, but now the sight of all that unpaid-for food was overwhelming and a little depressing.

"You're going to work two jobs?" I said.

"I'm getting a little too old to win bikini contests," she said.

"No way," I said. "You could win any Wednesday of the year."

"Not that," she said. "I mean, for a while it was kind of poetic—young educated feminist using institutional sexism as a weapon against itself."

"I just thought you were showing off a wonderful rack."

She tossed a fortune cookie across the table.

"Anyway, I can't do that kind of thing anymore. Although I did consider Hooters. I thought I could write a book about working there after a year or so and get rich. I could call it
More Than a Mouthful: A Mammary Memoir.

"Great. It would sell," I said.

"Anyway, I need to do something. The trailer park is not a good place for Rusty. I mean, I grew up with rich parents and a nice place to live."

"You should call them," I said. "Ask for help."

"No way," she said. I could tell there was no room to push the issue.

"Move in with me," I said.