Summerlong (15 page)

What Charlie decided to do, upon picking up Claire’s two confused and bored kids, who’d been cheated out of a day of swimming by their passive-aggressive, migraine-faking grandmother, was stop at the Hy-Vee for pizzas and root beer and ice-cream sandwiches, plus gin and tonic fixings.

He would throw these kids, and their mother, his friend, a pool party. He announced this aloud and the kids cheered.

Now Charlie wears orange swim trunks and a blue oxford, half unbuttoned. Next to him, there is a sweating tumbler of gin. A triple, like hers? Claire has a desire to gulp her drink. But the kids are there. She needs to slow down. A lime floats among some ice. She already feels more than just buzzed.

“Jesus, now that was a weird day.”

“Do you want another drink?” Charlie says.

“No,” she says.

“How are you holding up? Do you want a swim?”

“In this case,” Claire says, watching her kids jumping in and out of the pool, Taylor Swift playing from the FM radio, “I think I’d need a suit.”

“Probably a good idea. You want me to go to your house and get one?”

“No. I feel better,” she says. The gin, piney and strong, flushes her cheeks warm with blood. A strap from her sundress falls then, baring a shoulder, and she lets it ride. “I guess I had my first panic attack today.”

“Mazel tov,” Charlie says. “I have had so many already. You’re a late bloomer. When I was leaving Seattle, my last few weeks there, I had one every day at five o’clock. Like when everybody would start leaving work, and I had no work to leave, I just got terrified. I was convinced I’d die in a terrorist attack or some natural disaster.”

They clink glasses. “To panic attacks,” Claire says.

Wendy shouts out for them to watch the cannonball. They turn and wait until she launches herself in the pool. When she surfaces, they applaud wildly, Charlie standing up and whistling swift and shrill with his fingers. Claire likes men who can whistle like that.

“Enough about me,” she says. “How was your day?”

“Oh, you know, lots of discovering that my father was a fraudulent and deluded man. That kind of thing,” he says. “But really, Claire, tell me, how are things? Things must be terrible.”

“Ha! Ha! Yes! Yes, they are,” she says. “We’re gonna be fucking homeless!”

He laughs. “Totally,” he says. “Homeless with Kids. Maybe that could be a new reality show? You’re a total MILF. You could totally rock that show.”

“I hate that word,” she says.

“It just means—”

“It just means mothers aren’t real women. So they need a special term if they’re fuckable? Right?”

“Touché.”

They smile these dorky smiles at each other and drink and look at the empty pool and the full trees and the goldfinch and chickadees all about the yard and then Charlie says, “You know, I have a house. Consider it yours.”

And though he swears he is serious, and he repeats his seriousness over and over amid the joyful shouts of her children, she laughs it off, she says it is a ridiculously extravagant gesture, ha ha ha, Charlie, you’re crazy!

Later, the kids swimming in the twilight, Claire and Charlie clear the table, take the dishes and cups and pizza boxes to the
trash before it gets too dark, and as she is stuffing pizza boxes into a trash can inside the garage, Charlie feels a speech emerging from some dark place inside him, an urge to say something, an urge to make something happen, just to see if he can. He feels his father’s blood buzz in his veins.

“I want this. I want a full house,” he says, making eye contact with Claire. Holding her gaze. “I want to help. I want to be near you, in the same orbit, and I want to know when you wake up and when you go to sleep and I don’t expect anything more, Claire, but I want you to come live in this house. I will live out in my father’s office. I prefer to sleep there anyway. It has everything I need. Otherwise, this big house will just go to waste.”

She does not think about it, she simply says, “That is an insane and generous offer.”

And as they are walking back to the pool, Charlie calls, “COWABUNGA!” and breaks into a full sprint, whipping off his shirt, leaping off the pool deck, and finally landing in a colossal cannonball amid her shrieking children. Claire’s hands fly to her face as if she is trying to stop the exploding grin from being a reality.

Charlie surfaces and feels invincible.

Outside, Don Lowry hears shouting and laughter and music. He looks next to him, to ABC, sleeping. If she does love him, if that’s really what she meant when she kissed him and said,
Don’t be dumb
, maybe he can get past the idea that his own wife, the woman he’s loved for nearly two decades, doesn’t love him. It’d be easier to get through all this, just maybe, if he already had his next love lined up.

“ABC?” he says, in a throaty whisper. His mouth is so dry. Outside, the music seems to swell and a wave of laughter, unmistakable laughter, echoes in the yard. His children. His children, laughing.

He gets off the futon, heavy headed, and pulls up the shades of the windows and sees, in the gloaming, his family in a state of raucous and unremitting happiness. Charlie leaping into the pool. His children shouting and splashing.

And Claire, his wife, smiling in a way he has not seen her smile in months. He presses his forehead to the windowpane, though he makes no sound and nobody notices him.

How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?

—Stephen Dobyns, “How to Like It”

Here is Don Lowry, here is the morning’s new light, and here is the U-Haul truck that will take away the only life he ever imagined.

There is Claire on the front lawn, there are the boxes that will be loaded first, there is the Sharpie marker that she uses to write explanations of the contents inside:
BOOKS
,
TOOLS
,
FRAGILE
,
HEAVY
.

What Don wants more than anything is for his wife—she is still his wife despite the circumstances—to walk toward him and hold him and whisper a word—
sorry
—into his ear.

And maybe he’d see her cry—he’s not seen that for a while and it terrifies him. Is it really that easy to fall out of love? Have the last two decades been negated from their memory?

Don imagines that they have hugged, and then cried, and now are wiping their eyes with the palms of their hands as if they could press all the tears back in. But they do not do that. Instead, Claire calls out for the keys. He tells her they are in the truck and goes inside.

What he finds even more unbearable is that soon the kids will wake up, and soon they will see the truck, and they will know that they are moving and they are moving to a place where their father will not come.

Bryan is twelve and that means he’s old enough to help, not cry. He is getting stronger. He can lift heavier boxes now, even heavier
than the ones his mom can lift. He does not have the aches and pains he hears his father complain about.

When Bryan wakes up, Don greets him in the hallway.

“You wanna help us load up?” Don asks. “We could use the muscle.”

But Bryan does not want to help. He doesn’t say this, or anything else, just sulks by Don in silence and goes into the bathroom and locks it. Don stands outside the door. The shower begins to run. Don almost knocks on the door, but then doesn’t knock on the door.

In her room, down the hall from Bryan’s room, Wendy is awake. Don can hear her stirring and he knocks and when she mumbles, “Come in,” he pushes the door open and finds her dressed, looking out her window, sitting on a box packed with her books. You cannot see the front yard from her window, so she has not seen what Bryan has seen: her parents in the morning light, in the long shadows of the U-Haul. But her shades are open and to the east you can see the mottled sun of early morning, the sunrise, which you can always see from this window. Some mornings last winter, when the low, thin clouds in the sky striated across the blue expanse, Don would find Wendy there, staring out at the sky.

“I’ll miss this view,” Wendy whispers and when she says that, Don thinks it sounds like something an adult would say.

Don tightens his face and goes down the hall to the master bathroom to brush his teeth so that he will not cry too. But the toothbrushes have been packed and his weeping attracts Bryan, and then Wendy. Bryan is wrapped in a towel, Wendy is holding a box of tissues. They regard him as if he is someone they don’t know well at all, and maybe they really don’t.

“I had a dream that you all moved without me,” Bryan says. “In my dream, I woke up and found the house empty.”

“That’s the dream I had!” Wendy says. “Almost the same thing.
I came home from the pool on my bike and the house was completely empty.”

“We’d never move without you, kids,” Don says. “That’s impossible.”

“But you are, Dad,” Bryan says. “That’s what you’re doing.”

“Not exactly,” Don says. “I mean, not forever.”

His voice somehow doesn’t sound like his own. He clears his throat. He says the same thing again. And now his own voice sounds even stranger than it did before, as if he is underwater and shouting up toward the surface.

It is hard for Claire not to admit that what she likes most about the new house—Charlie’s house, the Gulliver place—is that it is empty. The clutter of the Lowrys’ lives has choked the energy out of the old place, but they have gotten rid of so much, have schlepped boxes and boxes to Goodwill and have managed to make fifteen hundred dollars at their garage sales. So the move will not be so hard. They will not fill the Gulliver place. There are three bedrooms upstairs and each of them will have their own. Charlie will sleep out in the guesthouse, amid a small clearing he’s made in the chaos of his father’s intellectual clutter, so the children feel comfortable and unconfused.

Charlie and Don move the beds in one at a time. Bryan and Wendy bring in random boxes and odds and ends and ABC is already setting up the kitchen. If you had just driven by and seen the U-Haul, you would have assumed that this was one big extended family helping out on moving day.

At one point, Claire and ABC find themselves out near the pool, taking a break from unpacking. As the temperature climbs toward 100 degrees, the kids have quit helping unpack and have taken refuge in the water.

“Hey, Ma,” Wendy hollers while treading out in the deep end, “I don’t like our new house, I LOVE IT!”

“We should totally go for a swim too,” ABC says, after walking
over to Claire, who is standing outside the guesthouse in a small shaded spot. ABC had been drinking an iced tea in the air-conditioned comfort of Gill Gulliver’s study when Claire and the kids came out and the kids jumped, shrieking with pleasure, into the pool. It seemed antisocial not to come out of the room and chat.

“If I can find my swimsuits. They are packed here somewhere.”

“Hasn’t stopped you before,” ABC says.

“Touché.”

“Anyway, God. I hate moving.”

Claire nods, sips the glass of tea ABC has handed to her. “When you don’t have a choice, it sucks.”

ABC and Claire watch the antics of the children for a bit.

“Look, Claire,” ABC says, “I just want to say, um, I think it’s really cool how you and Don are trying to do this in such a drama-free way. My parents made my life a living hell for six years when they separated.”

“No kid deserves that. It’s strange—nobody I know comes from a family that stayed intact. You, Don, me, Charlie. I mean, what the hell?”

“Do you think it scars us?”

“It makes us incapable of love,” Claire says. “I mean real, healthy, focused love.”

“No,” ABC says. “That’s not true. I was in love once.”

“Yeah, but she died,” Claire says, and it sounds harsher than she intends. “I guess, I mean, maybe she died before you had to deal with the end of love.”

ABC can sense the distance coming from Claire, even on the sweltering pool deck. She feels she has to say something.

“I want you to know that Don and I are just friends,” she says. “We’ve never, you know, done anything. I know it must seem like it, it must be hard to believe, that’s all.”

“I don’t think at this point it would make sense to lie. It’d almost be impossible. And anyway, you and Charlie are obviously together?”

“We’re just friends.”

“With benefits, right? That’s what they say? Or was that a onetime thing?” Claire says. “When we walked in on you?”

“Do you care?”

“No,” Claire says.

“Here’s what matters now,” ABC says. “Don and I are just friends. That’s all I intend, even with all this upheaval. He loves you. You guys have such a good life. Take your time. You don’t need to decide anything.”

“It’s not that good a life.”

“What do you mean?” ABC asks. “I mean, you have such a great family.”

“I don’t think I’ve loved him in a long time.”

“But he—he really wants to make it work.”

“Yes,” Claire says, flatly. “But do I?”

Everything that Don Lowry takes to the home of Ruth Manetti fits, conveniently, into his pickup truck, which he and Charlie had unloaded the day before with minimal effort. Don is proud of the way his family behaved during the relentless heat and stress of moving day—the children had been good humored and optimistic (big new bedrooms and a sparkling pool helped a great deal), Claire had been even and efficiently pleasant, and Charlie and ABC had simply done a lot of lifting, using the strength and energy of youth—they both looked radiantly sweaty all day. And now, it is midafternoon and Don is setting up his own room for the first time in his adult life.

There is an empty guest room at the Manetti house: years ago, the attic had been converted into a guest suite—a small bathroom with a shower stall, a double bed, an easy chair, a small desk, a chest of drawers, and an empty closet awaited Don Lowry.

“Whatever you do, keep it away from the children,” Claire had said the day before they moved.

“What? Keep what away?” he’d asked.

“You and ABC. Whatever you have going on there,” she’d said.

And Don had replied, “I think you’re the one who needs that reminder, Claire.”

The night before, he’d had a dream, and woke up before dawn in a kind of blistering agony. He had dreamed of Claire making love to Charlie. She’d been flat on her stomach on a bed, Charlie
fucking her from behind. Don had been sitting behind a large desk, looking, mainly, at his phone, trying to ignore the sex act taking place in front of him. And then the dream turned into a nightmare when both of his kids walked into the room and started howling with sorrow. It made him sick; he woke up puking into the trash can by his bed.

He knows that Claire will be the first of them to break the bonds of marriage—if any of them are left in any sense other than legal ones. Claire simply had to ask Charlie Gulliver to fuck her and he would. Why wouldn’t he?

Don doesn’t know what ABC thinks of him, not really. He wonders if she is helping from a truly genuine place or if she simply likes the drama of it—of something so miserably adult in her life. Or maybe she does want him. Maybe she would fuck Don Lowry and afterward laugh about it with a friend. He doesn’t really even know her, he just knows she is sad, and that she wants to be dead. Don never understood, not in the past, how someone could fall this low, so low they wanted to leave their life behind.

Maybe now he can.

ABC had helped unpack his things. Everything he needs for work he keeps at his small office downtown, so he has only his clothes, a few books, and a box of things he had wanted to save for sentimental reasons. The Lowrys had rented a storage unit out at the Munger farm—his old pal Ike Munger had built sixteen storage units out there long ago, when corn was not so lucrative for a time—and a lot of the family’s stuff that had not been sold or given away was there. Ike had waived the rent.

There is one thing ABC might not have let Don bring into the house, so he hides it from her: the gun his father had given him remains hidden away in his shaving kit.

Back at the Manetti place, it does not take Don and ABC long to bring up Don’s remaining things to the attic bedroom. They have not even woken Ruth, who is napping in her usual spot, in the first-floor study. It’s a sweltering day, and when ABC appears with
two already sweating bottles of Bud Light, Don is happy to see the beers. He drinks most of his in the first minutes of swigging and ABC, who has been sipping hers, hands her own bottle to Don.

“I actually don’t feel like a beer,” she says. “I feel like a shower and a nap.”

“Jesus,” Don says. “This is too fucking weird.”

ABC goes over and rubs his back the way she might try to calm a scared dog.

“You packed light,” ABC says. “That’s a good sign.”

“Yes. I promise that it’s temporary. We have stuff in storage.”

“For your family’s sake,” ABC says, “I hope it is temporary. But Ruth doesn’t mind. You can stay as long as you want. She told me that. She likes you.”

“And do you mind?” Don says.

“No, I’m glad we could help. I’m glad Ruth could, at least. I’m also a squatter. Anyway, go ahead and get settled in—I’m making tacos for dinner. Will you join us?”

He nods.

“Okay, Don Lowry. Come down around seven thirty and fill your belly.”

With that, she turns, almost like a gymnast might turn, sharp and tight, one foot six inches off the ground and pointed forward, the other foot a pivot. Then she stops and faces Don again.

“If something happens to me,” she says. “You’ll take care of Ruth for a while, right?”

“What’s going to happen to you?”

“If I die, Don.”

“If you take your own life, you mean?”

Don goes to the shaving kit and takes out the small handgun. He has a box of bullets in there too, and he loads one into the chamber and sets the gun down on the desk.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Don!”

“This is a gun my father gave me.”

Without looking up from the gun, he tells ABC the story of his
father, of Matt Good, of the murder, of the strange way he became the owner of this accursed weapon.

“Why do you have it here?”

“If you’re serious about killing yourself,” Don says. “Here. Do it now.”

“What are you talking about, Don?”

“You say you want to die. Stop saying that unless you mean it.”

“Do you want to die?”

“Right now? Yes.”

“Why?” ABC asks.

“Look at me. Look at my life.”

“Don, it’s not that bad.”

“But it is for you. You can go around telling people you want to be dead. Why? Because you’re young and beautiful and that makes it all somehow romantic?”

“Don. Stop.”

“Do you love me? ABC? Do you love me?”

“Of course.”

“I mean, are you in love with me?”

“No.”

“It’s just, when Ruth was on the porch that day, she wanted you to tell me something. Like a confession. And I want you to know I am open to it.”

“To what?”

“To loving you. I know my marriage is still in the process of crumbling, but I can see it. I mean, if that’s where you’re going with this.”

Don fingers the gun on the desk timidly, as if picking it up again would cause it to go off.

“Just don’t kill yourself, ABC. Don’t say that’s what you’re doing.”

“Don. You’re confused. I just—listen, when Philly was alive, we used to joke about you.”

Don starts to unpack some more, and doesn’t look at ABC. It’s
been an exhausting day and the thought of another emotional conversation makes him feel nauseous. She tells him the whole story, though, of Philly, in bed, telling her that she’d come back through Don Lowry.

“Why me? Why did you joke about me?”

“I know. It’s dumb, but—we used to laugh about your billboard. Your slogan.”

“It’s my business?”

“Yes. That. When we were stoned we found that unbelievably funny.”

“Okay.”

“And then one night, after we’d had sex, I felt this overwhelming melancholy—and for some reason I said to Philly, I said, ‘What will I do if you die?’”

“That’s not funny.”

“No, but you know what she said? She said she would send you to get me. She said she’d send you to lead me to the spirit world.”

“What?”

“I know. I mean it seemed like some dumb stoned joke you make in college, but, I mean—that evening when you found me under the sycamore, and I realized who you were, well . . .”

“So you’re friends with me because you think Philly sent me?”

“Is it not a weird friendship?”

“I thought it was a friendship.”

“It is!” ABC says. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I know it’s fucked up, but I mean, how weird is that? And when I told Ruth about all this, she was convinced. She believes somehow you’ll lead me back to Philly. And maybe it’s only in dreams. When we get high, and I fall asleep next to you, I always dream of Philly. Isn’t that weird?”

“It is pretty random.”

“I don’t believe in random things anymore,” ABC says. “Ruth says I have to follow this, see where this leads me, even if it ends in death. I believe she’s out there, in the beyond, waiting for me.”

“Why?”

“Because love like that doesn’t disappear.”

Downstairs, Don hears the voices of his children. They said they would walk over, they wanted to see where he would be living. They wanted to see him in this small rented room, the symbol of his shredded life.

“Yes it does,” Don says. “It disappears all the time.”

“The gun,” ABC says, and just as she says this Don takes the gun, then the box of bullets, and slides them into the desk drawer. There’s a key for the drawer, which he locks at just the right moment, just as the kids come running in saying, “Dad! Daddy! Is this where you live?”