Jolene Sommer hung up the phone and paused for a moment with her palm on the plastic receiver where his voice had been.
Broker, the guide.
She sat at the kitchen table, exhausted, taking refuge in a cup of coffee, staring out the window. At the edge of the backyard patio, a red cardinal was inspecting an empty feeder that dangled from a barren tree limb. She knew what Sharon Stone wore to the Academy Awards last year, but she didn’t know what kind of tree it was. She never caught the knack of feeding the birds. She barely remembered to feed the cat.
Hank had. .
She looked away and restarted her thoughts. Broker. She had a notion of him from up north, paddling with Allen through the night in an effort to save Hank.
He was not smooth and all tucked in like Allen. He had a deep-set tongue-and-groove muscularity and he was at home in his body, which was important. He had a quiet voice; simple perhaps, but direct. She tried to remember his weathered face, the light, courteous touch of his hand that day at the hospital.
Jolene was good at first impressions. She was also good at puzzles, the ones with pieces. She wasn’t so good at crossword puzzles-yet-because her vocabulary needed work. She believed you liked a person in the first seconds when you met them or you didn’t. She had liked Phil Broker. He possessed a solid, old-fashioned quality, like he’d been made to last.
Her eyes moved across the spacious kitchen and back out the window past the bird feeder to a jumble of oak rounds strewn on the dead grass by the woodshed behind the garage. A heavy splitting maul was imbedded deep in one of the upright rounds. Rust had formed an orange scab on the wedged blade.
A muffled crash echoed up from the basement and that was Earl dropping his barbells on the carpet. Earl had installed himself downstairs, where, like a bilge pump, he’d siphoned away just enough of the bills to keep the house-and her-afloat.
Earl was a creature of habit. And so, to her regret, was she. When things fell apart, when she realized she was facing this crisis literally broke, with nothing for resources but a couple of credit cards-she’d reached out to Earl.
Which had been a large mistake.
Jolene rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. After all these years about the only thing she could say about Earl was that he’d peaked early and still looked good with his shirt off.
They just couldn’t seem to break the pattern-she’d go off on her own and wind up drinking too much. Earl would step in and pull her back from the brink. Her part of the deal was to manage Earl’s temper so he didn’t go berserk on people.
This dynamic spun in circles for more than thirteen years, since high school; except for the year and a half when Earl went off on his own tangent in the army. That was after the mess out in Washington. He’d signed on to Desert Storm, trekked deep into the Iraqi desert with the 24th Mech, eager to redeem himself. Spent six months battling nothing more serious than sand and fleas, and he came home without any real medals, just one sandy case of the clap. All his life Earl just couldn’t catch a break.
Until now.
Jolene finished her coffee and put the cup in the dishwasher, added detergent, and tapped the start button. Then she paced the kitchen, touching up the table, the island, and the counter with a damp washcloth. Her life had turned into one of those ads from a woman’s magazine at the check-out counter. Be thinner, richer; live in a beautiful house. .
Right.
The first few days she had been stunned and needed Earl to guide her. But now she was over the initial shock and not real sure she wanted Earl back in her life, living in her basement, playing his mind games, waiting for her to lose it and start drinking again so it would be old times again. Him calling the shots.
Well, she wasn’t going to drink today. She had fourteen months of sobriety in the bank. And not a penny more. Hank had tied up every cent he owned in the trust.
Trust had sure turned into a funny word around this house.
Jolene took a deep breath. Earl always started out intending to do it by the rules. Just trying to help, he’d taken Cliff Stovall off for a heart-to-heart, to convince him to open the trust. She didn’t know the details, but she could guess. Earl got mad. So far, no cops had come snooping around.
And the bills. .
Jesus Christ, when she faced the idea of the bills she thought of the scene in Jaws when Roy Scheider first sees the shark and he jerks back-like whoa. Now, like Roy, she needed a bigger boat.
She shook her head and let her eyes drift back out the window to the woodpile. She could not imagine Earl yanking out the maul, splitting the wood, stacking it in tidy rows. He enjoyed watching it burn, all right, in the fireplace but it never occurred to him to go out and split more when it ran out. For all his pampered muscles, Earl refused to sweat outside a gym. He was the future, he’d said. In the future, the third-worlders would do the physical work. Mexicans, probably.
She looked out the window for a few more moments at the hungry cardinal and the brown leaves and the gray sky. The morning was like a moody song from an oldies station: sentimental. Perfect for feeling sorry for herself. Perfect for stinking-thinking.
It was one of her favorite alcoholic fantasies: being rescued. And a lot of men had come to grief on it, walking into a dark barroom and seeing her marooned on a bar stool.
That’s what had been so perfect about meeting Hank. She met him sober. I know I was bad, but just give me this one chance and I promise I’ll be so good. .
Hank had rescued her, all right, but Jolene saw right away that his ex-wife had handled the finances. Hank was lost around money.
The hammer fell about ninety minutes after she got to the intensive care unit at Regions in St. Paul. A neurologist had been called in to evaluate Hank; his workup and consulting was costing hundreds of dollars a minute.
Then this square-shaped lady in a maroon and black business suit had trampled though the blue-garbed medics like a rhino trashing a patch of petunias. She had pointed out that Hank Sommer’s Blue Cross policy had lapsed because of nonpayment of premiums.
Private pay.
Boy, those two words could empty a hospital ward of smiles real fast.
Well, no way could she keep him in the hospital at two, three grand a day. Milt Dane protested, said she couldn’t just take him AMA-against medical advice. Jolene, mad, said, “Watch me.” Hank had already had a feeding tube inserted, so Earl borrowed a wheelchair and they brought Hank home in Earl’s van.
A bad move that almost alienated Milt, which she could not afford to do. Now she was smoothing that over; in the meantime, until Milt put Hank in a fancy nursing home, she was working round the clock, playing nurse. And while she was sure that Milt worried about her not sleeping, the real reason he wanted Hank in that home was so he could check on him without running into Earl, whom he despised.
Riiiinggg.
An alarm went off. Every two hours alarms went off. Feeding alarms, turning alarms, range of motion alarms, bathing alarms. She heard Earl coming up the basement stairs.
“Great. Another nice guy who just wants to help out. Oh, I can drop off the Ford, no problem,” Earl said, mimicking Broker’s voice. “I hope him and Allen don’t trip all over each other.”
Earl wore an electric-yellow T-shirt with a War Wolf logo in Day-Glo blue. He’d scissored out the sleeves to show off his biceps. The shirt was a size too small and clung to his torso and wadded around his hips, clearly revealing the deep-cut ripple of his abdominal muscles and the curve of his belly above the tops of his jeans which he wore without underwear and very low on his hips, with a shadow of pubic hair peeking up and over.
Earl was unshaven and his hair was moussed and he was into looking like Brad Pitt in Fight Club this week. The stud in his ear and the cannabis shine to his blue eyes had the same tight sparkle. Jolene didn’t really care for Earl swinging his abs back and forth in her kitchen. “You’re losing your pants,” she said.
Earl smiled. “You didn’t used to mind that.”
“Why don’t you grow up,” she said.
“Aren’t we sounding grandiose today,” he quipped back. He knew all the AA jive and where all her buttons were. He’d started patrolling the house, peeking in cabinets and drawers, looking for hidden bottles of vodka.
A static sound between a dry-heaving pant and a raving growl shushed their little spat. The sound came from a white plastic baby monitor on the counter. The monitors were Jolene’s idea; she had placed them throughout the house to help her keep track of Hank.
Earl said, “C’mon, it’s feeding time.”
To him it was a fairy tale. He was Jack and he’d climbed the beanstalk and had stumbled on the mythic goose and now all he had to do was keep the goose alive until it squeezed out the golden egg. Hank’s care and feeding were a serious, round-the-clock commitment.
They went down a flight of circular stairs, through the bedroom, and out on the full-season porch that ran most of the length of the back of the house.
Hank was pink-cheeked and clean shaven, with spittle drooling down his chin. He wore a pair of diapers and a hospital gown and was propped up in a railed Hil-Rom hospital bed, fidgeting slightly back and forth. His neck twitched, his eyes rolled back and forth in their sockets. He could move his lips and tongue. The feed bag hung on an IV tree above him and a strap buckled his chest as a precaution against pitching off the bed. Allen said the movements were just spasms, involuntary. Sometimes Hank’s eyes would burn on her so intensely that she was sure he was in there, watching.
Jolene squared her shoulders and went into the room.
Actually, it was good that he lurched around; it gave him a fighting chance against the bedsores. For the last five days she had followed a strict schedule that included turning and repositioning Hank side to side every two hours-feeding and hydrating him, manipulating his arms and legs in passive range-of-motion exercises twice a day, bathing him, constantly swabbing his mouth and gums with a suction wand, and changing his diapers, which Allen referred to as adult pads.
First she wiped his chin and checked his throat. She picked up the electric suction wand and cleaned away excess saliva and mucus from his teeth and gums.
Earl took a can of Ensure from a case of the product, opened it with a church key, and dumped it in the continuously running gravity drip which spiked off the bag that connected to his stomach tube.
He tossed the can at the wastepaper basket by the door. Missed. The empty clattered on the hardwood floor. Earl licked a finger. “Yum, yum. Prune dip, my favorite.”
“Knock it off, Earl,” Jolene said. “And pick up the goddamn can.”
Earl grumbled and retrieved the can and tossed it in the basket, backhanded. “He scores.”
She cut him with a stare.
He sneered back. He didn’t like it when she’d sheared off her hair. Or when she’d brought in the single bed to sleep next to Hank at night. He thought the hair and the single-bed routine were overwrought theatrical gestures.
“Hey, c’mon; we need a little gallows humor to break the mood around here,” he said. Laughing, he backed off and then, goddamn him-just to be coarse, he tipped a few books from the bookcase as he was going out the door, like a mean little kid.
Jolene smoothed a hand through her shorn hair, took a deep breath to steady herself, and, as she swung her eyes around the room, she met her reflection in the mirror framed in the bookshelves. She was sunken-cheeked, haggard. Red around the eyes like a speed freak on a long burn. Still. .
Mirror, mirror on the wall.
She’d known she had it when she was about seven. By the time she got to high school it could ripple over her face like a dark wind.
Even now, strung-out exhausted, she had it. For half a beat she engaged the rare expression before it sparked away. It was something a good photographer had to sneak up on because she couldn’t duplicate it on cue. This was America-so the way you really knew you had it was if you could sell it.
She had logged some shoots and she had a portfolio. She’d been told that, if she put in the work, she could give New York a try. But she kept waking up in cheap rooms with a hangover and Earl in the bed next to her.
And then she met Hank.
Jolene turned from the mirror and studied the wreckage of her husband.
Once she’d thought the worst thing in the world could only happen directly, physically, to her. Now it had happened to someone else, and she was definitely feeling it. She’d cut her hair to honor the emotion.
“That’s a change. You taught me that,” she said under her breath.
As she reached over and eased the sweaty mop of hair away from Hank’s wild eyes she wrinkled her nose. She was getting used to the diaper smell. Dutifully, she changed him, and, as she wiped him clean, she noticed how the muscle tone was already turning to taffy. Her hard old Hank was spreading into a puddle of flesh.
She deposited the diaper in the diaper caddy and kneaded the residue of white talcum powder between her fingers. One of life’s safe things. For a moment, she almost remembered the fragrance from infancy, from before walking and talking. She pursed her lips. “Hank, you tough old fart, now that you’re not here anymore I think I’m starting to appreciate you.”