The Laws of Average (7 page)

So when they called the game right then and there, and all the people slid-stepped back to their cars, and the fruit snacks and granola bars and rack of weird little bulbous water bottles remained absolutely still in the back of Coach Noah's pickup truck, not a single Juice Box scaled the big tires to hop over the side. Not a one. No one had to instruct them otherwise. Some things, they learned that day, are absolutely clear and require no sound.

And then, one afternoon, they sat on a squat set of metal bleachers and figured it all out. Everything that had gone wrong and why, every disappointment and hurt feeling tallied, every argument and curt exchange in the entire history of their relationship scored and settled like an accountant's balance sheet or itemized list of charges on the monthly phone bill. All disputes settled, all whys and whatnots aired and retired. They looked one last time and breathed. The aluminum underneath them absolutely quiet as neither shifted weight even the slightest fraction.

“I hope it was worth it to you.”

“It wasn't.”

“So what happens next?”

“What do you mean?”

“Next. Where are you going after this?”

“Home.”

Her eyes widened but she said nothing. She just stared.

“Home.”

“And where is that now?”

“Nowhere. That's gone.”

“No it's not.”

She turned her wrist and unlatched her elbow from her side, so she could move both at the same time.

“Stop it.”

The aluminum groaned one last time before his tinny footsteps pittered away.

He sat one spring afternoon munching on his lunch. He had to run an errand to Boise and he thought he'd stop by Del Taco and grab himself a Chicken Macho Combo, mostly because it was the only drive-thru burrito to use the word “macho.” He looked at the bible on his dash and chuckled. The book was always within easy reach on his dashboard to pass time during the push-pull of his commute or for quick reference when the kid or the girlfriend or the other girlfriend were acting up. Except that day. That day required some explanation.

It was a winter day, if he remembered right, the first time all that torridness happened out in the hangar, out in that slutty little town just north of Bliss; his hometown; someone else's secretary. It was in the pickup, the big red Dodge, the one on permanent loan from his dead father, with the extended cab and short bed, where the seats lay back just enough to get a woman to arch her back in just the right position. He kept the book at the ready to pull out when he needed that extra special verse that he just couldn't quite think of to remind the ex-wife, the kid, the girlfriend, the other girlfriend, the new girlfriend, about how knowledgeable he was in the whole God and eternity thing. It never left the dash except to open and close, his fingers like fleshy butterflies, cradling the delicate cocoon of belief inside its shell. It never asked to go inside his little apartment and spend the night on the water-stained nightstand next to his bed, the one ringed and ringed by the same stubby glass over and over again, roaming and shifting on the buckling and peeling paint. Things that happened next to the nightstand in that broken down old bed were not acceptable for it to be witness to. It would no doubt erupt in protest just stepping up to the threshold of his apartment, unable to comprehend all the things that it might see or overhear while marking the path of the sun on the nightstand. This bible, after all, started out as an innocent boy's way to fit in all those years ago, given to him by his grandfather before his death. The boy had asked specifically if he could have it, remembering seeing it every week tucked under the rigid old man's arm as he walked into the church, the one without the cross on the steeple.

But there is another book in this story. The one he borrowed from his ex-wife, the one she thought she still had in her grandmother's bible bag that was in her hope chest but wasn't because he had it. And make no mistake: he had to have it, as a totemic piece of her. So there it was, hidden, stowed in the center console of his pickup, that little piece of her that he carried with him everywhere he drove. He knew he wasn't supposed to have it but he couldn't help himself. Temptation took over. It was the bible given to her in high school by one of her friends who was trying to convert her. It really wasn't a bible per se; it was a rendition from the church she had attended as a young girl. The church that he had grown up in, and was, as he routinely professed to her before/during/after their marriage, “valedictorian” of.

And just as the one bible on the dash didn't go in the house to lay on the nightstand, the other bible didn't go into the center console; they were kept separate. The one wasn't allowed to see what the other was allowed to see, and neither were allowed to see what the nightstand was allowed to see. All of these things were kept separate from each other. Just as he had kept separate the wife and kid from the girlfriend, the girlfriend from the other girlfriend, the work from all of the above.

Later that night of the one day, he swore he had made sure to cover the dashboard bible up as he always did with whatever happened to be in the truck that day, usually work orders for the sleepy little lumber company he worked for. When all the heavy breathing and moaning had stopped, though, he noticed the bible peeking out of the papers.

After it was all said by someone else's secretary to his then-wife, that one day cost him his marriage, cost him his family, cost him his home. And the bible watched it all and never saved any of it, and he wondered why. And it was the very fact he could still wonder at all which led him to realize that that one day had not cost him his faith. It was a for-real revelation. The new girlfriend, the one he allowed everyone to see and find out about but not ever give up, she was the one the bible didn't get covered up for.

Rephrase: she was the one the bible wanted to see.

Maybe the dashboard bible knew in hindsight that it couldn't save either one of the people that were in the truck on that one day. Which was something the console bible almost certainly also knew. And maybe since neither bible saved him, his marriage, his family, maybe it was their fault. After all, this was what his grandfather taught him about faith, in the stilted phrases the old man used: “pray on this,” “sincere heart,” “clear intent,” and “truth of all things.”

Fuck you, bible, he thought to himself, making sure not to say it out loud, where it would be harder—but not at all impossible—to deny he had said it in the first place. Maybe the bibles had been talking after all, he thought, and he instantly felt the satisfying warmth of conspiracy rush through his head, ways that maybe he could convince someone else it wasn't his fault. Maybe that would work, like it had so many times before. I mean, valedictorian of seminary had to be an important title, and you don't get called something like that for nothing.

Have as many or as little children as you like now. There is no more worry about financial, social or ethical responsibility any more. You are dead. Your dead children were born dead and will remain dead for their rest of their dead lives. This isn't anything to be sad about in the ways that living parents and living children are sad, or are supposed to be sad, or whatever. Fuck them. They are living. And all living people really ever want to do is fuck anyway, you know, so let ‘em have that, and let ‘em deal with the consequences of all their fucking.

When an unexpected gift arrives and it doesn't have your name affixed to it, you must resist scratching the impossible-to-reach itch dead center in your back that this event/ object will inspire. Try practicing this by preordering something small on
Amazon.com
, like a yet-to-be-released DVD or book or whatnot, and the longer a gap between when you order it and when you receive it the better, so as to maximize the reliability of your experiment; destroy immediately all proof that you ordered the item at all, and make it impossible for yourself to uncover later that you did so. Put Sig.Other's name on the package, and strengthen the test by electing to have it gift-wrapped, in relatively expensive wrapping paper with a high mirror finish and the largest red velvet bow the shipper/handler offers. The extra expense you incur here will totally be worth it, by the way, granted you can restrain yourself from opening the package when it arrives in the future, and granted, also, of course, that you haven't already bungled things past the point of no return, and if you think this (meaning: the bungling, not the opening) might even remotely be possible in your situation, it's probably best to order something that's really for yourself, so when you fail your test and open what you weren't supposed to open you will have a for-real Silver Lining Moment, or, at the very least, something new and shiny to cling to when you probably need it most.

Roy grabbed Mary's keys and moved toward the screendoor.

“If you're really going, at least pick up some cigarettes on your way home!” she barked from the back of the house, her voice pushing through the dim hallway. Roy didn't turn around or slow a single step. Mary's daughter was already perched in the driver's seat of Mary's Thunderbird, hands at 10 and 2 on the leather-wrapped steering wheel which was at least two full shades of red darker than the rest of the behemoth's sticky interior, sweaty from the 100-degree temp.

The girl grinned wide at him as he picked his way through the broken concrete of an otherwise perfectly serviceable sidewalk, thick tufts of broadleaf weeds and crabgrass anchoring themselves into the gaps and cracks. The previous winter's cold had already done its damage, freezing every speck of precipitation the area had been lucky enough to get. And now it was the summer's turn, evaporating every drop of precipitation the area had been lucky enough to get. The piano-black paint on Mary's T-Bird had long given up to the inevitable creep of oxidation, which was long before Mary's T-Bird belonged to Mary, which was just about the time Roy belonged to Mary.

Roy creaked the car's big door open and sat down. He passed Mary's keys to the girl.

“Same as last time, Roy?”

Roy didn't answer her as he fumbled through the glove-box, unearthing a rumpled pack of cigarettes, shrinkwrap still intact. He slapped the box down, just to the left of a large crack which ran all the way across the dash and had begun carving its way past the airvents above the push-key radio, the plastic gapped just far enough for the foam to show, an orangey sponge-crust drying and hardening with each successful rotation of the sun. He sighed loud enough that only he could hear.

“Yeah,” he said without looking back at the girl.

“Same way, Roy?”

“Yeah.” He made a mental mark on the dashboard, noting the exact position of the box. “Two right turns.”

“Same
deal
, Roy?” The girl turned square and leaned towards him a little bit, more determined to turn his eyes towards hers. Roy sighed louder this time, making sure the girl could hear him pull the air full cycle, all the way from inside the car and past his long nosehairs and down into his charcoaling lungs and back above his yellowing chin.

“I ‘spose,” he said. Mary's daughter jingled the keys in the ignition, her jaw a full sentence of smile punctuated by shiny white teeth.

“But,” Roy said, now turned perpendicular to the girl who had no interest in matching his eyeline to hers. “Them smokes move even a creep towards that crack, you stop. And I drive. And you walk.”

Mary's daughter had heard this instruction set before. Had walked before, too. Keep the car moving straight but slow to the stop sign, and turn sharp but slow through the right-hand turn that took them past and away from Mary's house on 6
^th
Ave E, straight but slow through the next two intersections, and turn sharp but slow one more time, straight but slow a final blow, to The Beacon Pub + Grill where Mary bought cigarettes a pack at a time because she was always two stogies away from completely cold-turkey. If the girl successfully navigated the course without sending the pack flying across the dash of Mary's T-Bird, Roy drove her to Some Boy's house on 8
^th
Ave W, where the girl was allowed a five minute porchstop visit. Mary didn't know about the Some Boy part; Roy figured he was tempting fate enough as it was just teaching the girl how to drive. And the girl, well, unfortunately for Roy, the girl was as smart they come. Moreso, even.

Mary's daughter lit the engine up with a big turn of her thumb and index finger and the car shook awake, grumbling and yawning until settling into a low-rumbling idle. The red leather seats massaged their inhabitants, and the coardboard pine tree vibrated below the neck of the yardstick-long rearview mirror, the boxy aftermarket kind inset with mirrored squares pitched at awkward angles, promising a panoramic view of whatever the driver was constantly leaving behind (but always failing to deliver on said promise). The girl pushed her flip-flop into the brake pedal and paused for a second to check her reflection in one of the mirrored squares. She pouted her lipstick-less lips and flashed her big chocolate eyes back at herself. Roy didn't pretend that she was merely checking her 6.

“Really
look before you put this bitch in gear,” he growled. The girl ignored him but went through the motion anyway, checking the framing of her bangs she'd spent the better part of 45 minutes brushing and spraying with Mary's giant can of Aqua-Net. Roy watched her glance back up at the rearview mirror; he couldn't be sure she had actually looked but she'd played the part well enough. When she gripped the steering column's shifter, he threw his head back over his seat anyway.