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CHAPTER NINE

The Eternal Husband

Reece's family was going to Connecticut to visit relatives for the weekend, so Friday night Mick had no place to go but home. Last period Friday a note was delivered to him in History. It said,
Your
father will pick you up at south gate 3:05.

Brittany Allen, after leaning over his shoulder to see, made a general announcement to the rest of the class: “It's from his daddy. His daddy's driving him home after school.”

This played to smirks and chuckles all around.

“At least I know who my daddy is,” Mick said, which kept the smirks coming.

Mr. Cruso, the history teacher and Mick's adviser, was popular. He had dark, longish, perfectly groomed hair and a trim black beard. Some of the girls who hung around his class before school called him “the happy bachelor,” and it seemed as if he was. He was an easy grader, wore more or less cool clothes, and drove a vintage emerald green Porsche. But mostly he just seemed to like people, students and teachers alike, fat ones and slim ones, smart ones and slackers—they all seemed to amuse him. His chief weapon of classroom restraint was irony, and for this occasion he said, “Civility, children, is the outer garment of inner peace.”

“Whatever that means,” Brittany Allen said, which drew a few more laughs and a mugging frown from Mr. Cruso. Everyone, student and teacher alike, was glad to be released by the last Friday bell.

Mick shuffled books at his locker, went to the second floor, and gazed out at the playing field—empty—then headed for the windows that gave onto the south gate. His father's optic yellow 2002 was there, parked along the curb. He started to step away from the window and head down to the car, but something stopped him, something not quite right. He looked again. There were two heads in the front seat, not one.

Nora.

It was his father and Nora.

Mick moved away from the window, hurried downstairs to the north exit, and fled the campus by back streets. He wandered around Plan B for a while, went to Bing's for fries and a Coke, then went to a phone booth and looked up “Doyle.” There were nineteen of them. He found addresses for three nearby, jotted them down, and walked by each, trying to stare into the windows without appearing to stare in the windows. He didn't see anyone inside any of them.

Finally he walked to the Jemison library and sat down with
The Eternal Husband,
which was on the World Literature extra-credit list. It was by the same guy who'd written
Crime and
Punishment,
which Mick had liked even though after the crime it seemed to take an awful long time to get to the punishment.

This one was much shorter, but it was confusing to start with. The narrator was a cranky upper-class guy who realized he was being followed around by a little ordinary man wearing black crepe on his hat, which meant he was in mourning for someone who'd died. But after that it got interesting, and Mick kept turning pages until the lights flickered on and off—the sign that the library would be closing in ten minutes.

Mick walked home in a cold drizzle. Nora and his father were sitting in the living room when he came in. Nora was stiffly holding a pair of knitting needles and counting stitches, which always required moving her lips. His father had his hands wrapped around a full cup of coffee, as if for warmth.

When Nora stopped counting, she said, “We waited for you after school. We thought we'd drive out to the Glassworks for dinner.” It was an old-factory-turned-Italian-restaurant his father liked, mostly because you had to drive way out of town to get there. Two-lane country roads were what the 2002 was meant for, he said.

“Sorry,” Mick said without a trace of sorrow in his voice.

“You didn't get the message?” Nora said. “No one delivered you the message?”

“You sent a note? How did you send it?”

“School courier.”

“Sorry,” Mick said again, “but school courier's pretty much a message in a bottle.” Nora wasn't buying this, he could tell, but before she could pin him down further, Mick's father said, “Where were you tonight, Mick?”

“Library,” Mick said.

“On a Friday night?” Nora said.

He eyed her. “That's right. I was reading an extra-credit world-lit book.” He didn't owe her an explanation, but all of a sudden he felt like giving one. “It's a pretty good book. It's about a guy whose wife dies and while going through her stuff he finds love letters to a mutual friend written in the middle of their marriage, so the husband begins following the mutual friend around trying to decide what to do.” He shrugged off his wet backpack and pulled out the book. “
The Eternal Husband
by Dostoyevsky. I'm not quite done with it, but I'm hoping the husband whacks the guy.”

Nora started moving her needles in and out of the brown yarn and his father sat silent. Finally Nora said, “And that's where you were all night—sitting in the library reading a book by a dead Russian?”

Mick was beginning to enjoy this. “Well, no. First I went to Plan B and looked around and then I went to Bing's and got something to eat, and then I went to the library where I read the book by the dead Russian.” He stared at her. “That's the real truth, not that taffy kind you were telling me about that can be stretched any way you want it.”

In a sharp voice his father said, “Okay, that's enough, Mick.”

Mick looked down. There was a little pool of dripped water where he'd been standing. “I'm freezing,” he said. “I'm going to go change.”

Mick took a hot shower, checked his e-mails (nothing from Myra), and then quickly tried his new list of possible passwords to Nora's e-mails (no luck) before going to his room. He was reading the last chapter of
The Eternal Husband
when his father knocked gently on the door and poked his head in.

“You real busy?”

“Not really.”

His father's progress into the room was tentative, like a stranger's who'd never been there before. He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands or where to sit. Finally he put his hands in his pockets and leaned against Mick's desk.

“I'm not very good at this kind of thing,” he began. “But you're acting real different, Mick.” He let his eyes settle on Mick. His eyes seemed old. Mick just waited. His father said, “I know I don't know beans about the things kids go through these days, but I want you to know you can talk to me about anything and I'm not going to be mad.”

“Yeah, I know that, Dad.”

When Mick didn't elaborate, the room grew dense with silence. Finally his father said in a soft voice, “This isn't anything to do with drugs, is it, Mick?”

Mick couldn't help but laugh. “C'mon, Dad. I mean, it's out there and everything, but that's just not my style.”

Again in the soft awkward voice his father said, “You didn't get a girl in trouble?”

Another laugh from Mick. “Jeez, Dad.”

“Well, then, what's going on?”

“Nothing.” Mick knew that wasn't going to be enough, so he said, “I just think that it finally dawned on me how I'm getting closer to, you know, being out on my own, and how I'm not exactly the brainiest box on the shelf, but I still want to go to college and maybe law school and now's the time to start, you know, kicking butt at school.”

He stopped. It had sounded pretty good.

His father was nodding. “Okay,” he said. “I can follow that.” He pushed himself away from the desk, but he had one last question. “Would it kill you to be a little nicer to Nora?”

Mick looked at his father with the soft, old eyes and said, no, it wouldn't kill him.

His father said, “Nora and I're going up to Tug Hill with the cross-country skis tomorrow. It'd be a lot more fun if you'd come, too.”

“Can't, Dad. I'm working tomorrow. It wouldn't look that good to miss my first day.”

His father was nodding in agreement. “Work first, fun second.” He turned his eyes on Mick and his whole expression softened. “Night, Mick.”

“Night, Dad.”

But his father didn't leave. He said, “You know how when there was some little problem like a broken water heater or a late mortgage payment, I would always say, ‘It's not my wife and it's not my life'?”

Mick nodded.

“Well, I said it that way because I heard it somewhere and it has a nice ring to it, but the truth is, I should've said, ‘It's not my life, it's not my wife, and it's not my kid.' ”

Mick felt his throat getting tight.

His father took a deep breath. “I know you're reading and everything, but do you think you could just come downstairs and play the piano? I'd like it and I know Nora would like it, too.”

Mick looked at his father, then marked his place in his book. “Sure, Dad.”

Nora had made popcorn, and Mick took a handful when the bowl was offered. He drank the hot chocolate she gave him. He started one of the Inventions, but then pulled out an old book of ragtime tunes. There was one called “Solace” that he liked because it was slow and sad and easy enough that as his fingers moved, his mind could float. Images appeared of Lisa Doyle's coppery red hair, and of Myra Vidal's breasts, and of the dream Nora standing at the top of Reece's stairs. Mick turned to Nora sitting on the couch knitting something brown and fuzzy, probably thinking of Alexander Selkirk. She was like a replicant in one of those movies, a body inhabited by an alien.

When he finished, Mick's father said, “That was good, Mick.” He winked. “Gooder than good.” He turned to Nora. “How about you play one of those études?” He made it sound almost like two words. Aye. Tudes.

“Let me get to the end of this row,” Nora said, holding the needles closer to her face and slipping their points in and out of the moving yarn. Then she stabbed her needles into the ball of yarn and said, “There.” She found her Chopin book, and if it was an alien playing, the alien had Nora's piano style down cold. She played as she always played, impressively fluttery on the trills, impressively massive on the fortes.

Nora finished, Mick and his father clapped lightly, and she turned the page to play one more. She was wearing tight Levi's and a beige, soft-looking sweater. She sat with perfect posture, erect, which made her breasts more pronounced. Tomorrow, Mick suddenly thought. Tomorrow he would actually talk out loud to Lisa Doyle.

Tomorrow.

No ifs, ands, or buts.

CHAPTER TEN

Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho

Maurice Gritz grinned at the jeeps huddled in front of him. It was eight o'clock Saturday morning and they'd all been issued flannel-lined Village Greens parkas and Village Greens work gloves, but they all stood before him cold and wooden faced. He took a quick roll—everyone was there—then he snapped a pink bubble and said, “Well, let's just pretend it's balmy and everyone's happy to be here.”

Everyone seemed too cold to respond except the boy named Traylor, who chuckled to show that he actually was happy to be there. Mick noted Traylor for a half second—he had a loose-jointed, eager-to-please look to him—then turned back toward Maurice, who had pulled out his clipboard.

“Okay,” Maurice said, “let's check the nature of this morning's jeeply fun.”

While Maurice silently read through the page attached to his clipboard, Mick sneaked a glance at Lisa Doyle, who stood opposite him in the half circle. She was looking down at her boots, so he was able to let his gaze rest fully on her. She'd dressed for work—her red hair was braided and she'd worn a turtleneck thermal under her T-shirt. She looked in fact like an advertisement for the health benefits of outdoor activity—chopping fire-wood or cross-country skiing, say—and Mick was lost in thoughts of schussing along a snow trail with nobody but her when she slowly raised her eyes and looked directly at him.

Mick was paralyzed.

He tried to smile, but couldn't—what he was doing with his lips felt more like some kind of weird rubbery facial contortion, something you might do in the dentist's office under the influence of Novocaine. It didn't matter, though. Lisa Doyle was smiling back.

All at once the strangest, pleasantest feeling coursed through Mick's body, expanded, seemed to fill him up. It was like helium— he thought if he kept staring at her, he might float away. He lowered his eyes.

Maurice put aside his clipboard. “Okay,” he said. “The first fun of the day is the cotoneaster bank.” He pronounced it ko-tone-ee-as-ter. He scanned the jeeps. “Now what do you suppose that is? The cotoneaster bank.”

Mick had no idea what a ko-tone-ee-as-ter bank was because he had no idea what a ko-tone-ee-as-ter was, and didn't really care because Lisa Doyle had just smiled at him.

He suddenly noticed the others turning toward him.

Maurice said, “You paying attention, Nichols?”

Mick flushed and said, “I think right then at that exact moment I might not've been.”

Snickers from the group.

Maurice stared. “I asked you to tell us what a cotoneaster bank is.”

Mick said, “A place where you go to deposit your cotoneasters when you've saved up enough of them?”

This drew more snickering laughs from the other jeeps, but one of the laughs had the smoother modulation of a girl. Maurice shot a glance at Lizette—she was stone-faced—and then at Lisa, whose face was in the elastic aftermath of laughter. Maurice composed a fixed smile and turned back to Mick. “I appreciate your attempt at levity, Nichols.” He waited. “But what I notice about funny guys is how often their funniness is meant to hide how little they actually know.”

The group fell still, which seemed to please Maurice. “Okay, then. Who can tell me what a cotoneaster bank is without making funny?”

Traylor said, “A bank that has cotoneaster growing on it?”

“Thank you, Traylor,” Maurice said. “Now the problem is, we have some other things growing on our cotoneaster bank, and these other things are called dogbane. As you may have noticed, many Lilliputians are pro-poodle. Last year we were sued for not ridding the common areas of dogbane, which a poodle-owning gent claimed had poisoned his little doglet.” Maurice grinned and snapped another bubble. “Bad news is, dogbane is also poisonous to jeeps, so wear gloves.”

As they dispersed, Mick considered whistling the first bars of Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, but decided against it.

The bank was huge. Maurice led the jeeps over to its base, leaned down, and with a gloved hand snapped off a branch from a woody, low-growing shrub with ruddled leaves. “This,” he said, “is cotoneaster.” Then he yanked hard on a shrubby, red-stemmed plant beneath it. He shook off its roots, held it in front of him, and said, “This is dogbane. And if you haven't got it by the roots, you haven't got it.”

Mick thought Maurice had probably watched a lot of John Wayne movies.

Maurice glanced up at the sky—the faintest mist fell, just enough to wet every surface—then he began to assign different jeeps to different sections of the bank. “This way,” he said, “we know who's been picking 'bane and who's been picking his nose.”

He gave Lizette the most overgrown section and Traylor a section that was almost clear. He put Lisa at the bank's east end and Mick at the west end. Mick saw her glance his way as she set off for her section, or at least he thought she glanced his way.

The work was messy but mindless, and Mick floated through the next two hours yanking up thick-stemmed bunches of dogbane, which oozed a milky liquid he half expected to burn through his gloves, and chasing round and round his thoughts about Lisa Doyle. Occasionally some stray troubling thought or image of Nora would interfere, but then he'd quickly reroute back to Lisa. His thinking was this. She'd smiled at him, and that meant she wouldn't mind him trying to talk to her. But if he was going to talk to her, he needed to have an idea of what he might ask her to do, something definitely casual, like maybe studying together at the library or meeting at the mall or something. Or maybe he should just talk to her and wait till next Saturday to ask her to do something. Or, or, or . . .

None of the jeeps talked. Maurice had gone away in the truck without saying when he'd be back, and nobody wanted to be caught talking when he returned. So they all kept yanking and tugging. Sometimes the roots pulled easily from the wet soil and flung mud onto their faces and parkas. It stayed cold—the clouds had packed tighter and darkened since this morning and the mist kept floating down. Occasionally Mick would stand to straighten his back, and once when he did this he saw Lisa standing, too, straightening her back, turned his way. Then they both leaned over again and resumed work.

When Maurice returned midmorning, the bank was nearly done. He walked from section to section scrutinizing the jeeps' work in silence until he got to the area where Lizette Uribe was still working. Nearly a third of her section was still covered with blue-green leaves and red stems. Lisa, who'd finished her section, had moved over to Lizette's. Maurice stood watching the girls bent over and tugging for a few long seconds before he spoke.

“What're you doing, Doyle?” he asked.

Lisa stood and turned. She looked scared but spoke up clearly. “Lizette's area was a lot worse than mine, so when I finished my area I just started helping her out.”

“Gomez needed help?” Maurice said.

Lisa said, “Not exactly. She—”

Maurice held up his hand to cut her off. He let his smile move among the group that had gathered nearby. “Two lessons here. First, to Doyle's credit, she did what all of you should do. You jump in to finish the job.” He kept his smile fixed on his lips. “And lesson two is that if one jeep slacks off, all the other jeeps pay the price. Just to refresh your memory, your future pay depends on my written evaluation of your work, and nothing on that evaluation is more important than efficiency.” He turned now to Lizette. “You know what efficiency is, Gomez?”

Lizette looked confused. “Working hard, I guess.”

Maurice smiled. “It's the effect of working hard. It's how much work gets done in how little time.” He popped a bubble and kept his eyes on Lizette. “In this case, everyone finished his section with one exception, and that exception is you.”

Mick, without thinking, said, “But her area had a lot more dogbane.”

Calmly Maurice moved his eyes from Lizette to Mick. “Thank you for your input, Nichols. In the future please be reminded that when him who is Maurice wants your opinion, he'll ask for it.”

The crew stood in frozen silence.

Mick thought, Him who is Maurice? And then he thought, Actually, it should be He who is Maurice.

The mist had increased to a drizzle. Drops beaded on the hood of Mick's parka and dripped to his face. Maurice said, “Now I suggest you all get up into Gomez's section and help her finish.”

They clambered up the bank with their barrels and began tugging. Mick kept peering out his parka and worked his way closer to Lisa. When he was within a few feet of her she glanced up. Her hair was wet and so was her face. She looked miserable.

Mick didn't know what to say, but he knew he had to say something. He said, “I'm thinking maybe we assassinate him who is Maurice.”

A quick laugh burst from Lisa, which she stifled at once, but it wasn't soon enough.

“Something strike you as funny, Doyle?”

Lisa's face froze. She looked down the bank at Maurice.

He was smiling. “Perhaps you'd care to share with the rest of us.”

Lisa stared at him bleakly. She opened her mouth, but no words came out.

Quickly Mick said, “Someone up here passed some pretty rich gas, is all. I asked for the air freshener.”

Maurice eyed Mick, then Lisa. “And that struck you as comical, Doyle?”

Lisa said, “I guess it did, kind of.”

Maurice nodded and smoothed out his smile. “Well, it's nice to know what kind of thing can tickle a redhead's fancy,” he said, and looked into her as if he was saying one thing and thinking another.

The drizzle was turning to rain. Maurice looked up at the sky and widened his smile. “You're in luck, jeepsters. What we've got here is perfect weather for fertilizing.” He looked beamingly at the crew. “This is how we make green pastures greener.”

For the next hour the jeeps were fertilizing front lawns on both sides of five different streets. Mick's job was to keep the spreaders filled with fertilizer so that the other jeeps would have a full one waiting when they returned with an empty. The chemical fertilizer came in sixty-pound bags. He cut them open and poured the white crystals into the next spreader. The rain had soaked through his parka and his pants, and what wasn't muddy was now dotted with white fertilizer stains.

Mick was wet and he was cold, and he knew everyone else was, too. The only good thing was that Maurice had left and he could say something to Lisa every time she came back with her spreader empty. Once he made her laugh by whistling “Don't Worry, Be Happy.” He'd decided the next time she came for a refilled spreader he would say, “Hey, how about if we go to Bing's for some fries or something after work?”

But this time as Lisa was approaching, a voice rang out behind him.

“Schoolgirl!”

Mick glanced around. It was Janice Bledsoe, sitting warm and dry alongside Maurice in a covered golf cart. She said, “Our guy's a whole lot nicer than your mean old Maurice. Our guy told us to clock out, get our checks, and go home.”

Lisa smiled gamely. Water streamed down her face and neck.

Janice looked down the street at the other jeeps and said, “Hey, you guys look like a fertilizer-spreader drill team.”

Maurice laughed. He seemed slightly different than he had all morning. Happier. More alert to sudden possibilities. He said, “Maybe we'll enter our little fertilizer-spreader drill team in the next Fourth of July parade.”

Janice laughed as if there were some wit hidden within the remark that only she recognized. Then she turned again to Lisa. “Anyhow, my mom's here. Want us to wait for you?”

Lisa shook her head. “That's okay. I'll just call home when we're done.”

“You sure?”

Lisa nodded. “I'm sure.”

“Okay,” Janice said and then, turning a playful smile at Maurice, she said, “Home, Jeeves.” As they were U-turning, she looked back over her shoulder and yelled one last thing to Lisa: “Good luck tomorrow with tall, dark, and Mormon. Save me all the juicy details!”

After they were gone, Mick said nothing to Lisa as he rolled a refilled spreader toward her. Before he'd felt happy, but now he just felt wary, and Lisa must've sensed it because she began to explain.

“It's just some guy who's coming to dinner tomorrow,” she said. Then she said, “He's a missionary, so it's not a date. He brings his own date, really. Another missionary guy.”

Mick nodded stiffly.

“Missionaries go two by two, like on Noah's ark.”

He nodded again. He didn't know why she was doing all the explaining, but he did know that the idea of asking her to Bing's for fries had been a mirage that disappeared upon approach. “Hey,” he said, trying to grin, “tall, dark, and Mormon seems good.”

She looked at him. He hoped she would say something that would make him feel different, better, the way he'd felt just a minute or so earlier, but when she said, “My mom invites them every month,” he didn't feel better.

Still, even here on this gray day, with her hair wet and stringy, and with a smear of dirt across her cheek, her eyes were a brown so deep and dark they seemed to pull him into them. “Well,” she said, “let's make the green pastures greener,” and then she turned away and pushed her spreader up the street toward the next lawn.

At 12:30, when every member of the northeast crew of jeeps was uniformly cold, wet, and hungry, Maurice Gritz said, “There's other work we ought to do, but let's save some of the fun for next time. So let's just clean up the truck, store the tools, and call it a day.”

He passed out their paychecks—he'd clocked them out at one, “an extra half hour for working wet,” he said—then began to walk away. “Oh,” he said, stopping and turning back, “and when you're done, I need Traylor and Doyle to stop by my place for a minute.” He pointed to the tin-roofed cottage beyond a small gully and next to the maintenance shed. “Just give a knock on the green door.”