Earl looked funny with shards of computer glass dusted in his hair and his eyebrows, so Jolene left him sputtering in the kitchen and went downstairs. She saw the chopping maul lying in the havoc of the computer screen like a collision between Earl’s and Broker’s worlds, and she laughed harder. Coming back up the stairs she continued to laugh. So he yelled at her to clean up the mess and she told him to go fuck himself and he started to come at her.
So she stabbed the straight finger in his chest again and said, “See, dummy, I told you not to mess with this guy.”
Then that mean glower came over Earl’s face that made him look like a blond Klingon on Star Trek. And he stomped off, and to make some kind of point he took the keys to Hank’s Ford Expedition and drove off and left her alone.
Which suited her just fine and she had to smile. Broker, swinging his axe.
Feeling a little light-headed, she wandered into the living room and allowed herself one twirl. Whee. Sort of. When Hank had been. . normal, the house was more like school and he was the teacher she got it on with between classes. Not really hers.
Now she liked being alone in the house; well, alone with the wreckage of Hank. She liked to walk through the rooms, trying them on.
The idea slowly forming.
Her house.
She turned the volume up on the baby monitor in the kitchen so she could hear Hank. Then she paced the living room and touched the old-fashioned couch with its fat arms outlined with fat brass tacks. For months they’d trolled the St. Croix Valley and western Wisconsin, hitting all the antiques shops, finding Mission Oak furniture and Tiffany lamps. Funny man. He’d worked hard to make the whole place look like an old Humphrey Bogart detective movie. She understood what Hank was trying to do, how he had made up this house like a movie set and arranged her among the furniture. He had reached a certain age and made some money, and he had tried to live his life like entertainment. Which was similar to trying to stay high all the time. Trying to make your life into a story that was smoother or more exciting than it really was.
What, in treatment, they called delusion.
The thing about stories, she thought, was that they have beginnings, middles, and tidy conclusions where they wrap up all the loose ends. But what if you’re thinking you’re in the long, happy middle and real life suddenly comes along.
She’d cut hair with a perky born-again named Sally during her hair-stylist phase, and Sally had two neat kids and a dutiful husband, and one day she opened her kitchen cabinet to reach for the cornflakes and found Death sneering her in the face.
Breast Cancer. Snap. Just like that it zipped through the lymph glands and into the lungs, the liver, the pancreas. And Jesus turned out to be on a different page of her story. Maybe he could raise the dead and turn water into wine in the Bible. But through a frigid Minnesota February he sat back and watched Sally wither and die in slow, irradiated nausea.
At the end of Sally’s story they had to pour gas on the frozen dirt to warm it enough for the backhoe to dig her a hole to be buried in.
“Poor Hank,” she said. She wasn’t sure what Hank believed in, but she didn’t think it was anywhere near Jesus.
To get sober you were supposed to admit you were powerless over alcohol and turn it all over to a Higher Power who could restore you to sanity. So far she’d faked her way through the Higher Power part, saying it was just other people. Mainly it had been Hank. Now he was gone and she wasn’t sure about God, big G. God sounded like another man she’d have to deal with at some point down the line.
So, with Hank gone, it was just natural that her Higher Power was going to be the Almighty Dollar. Until something better came along.
But right now her Higher Power was playing hard to get.
She walked through the living room into the alcove den and confronted the stack of bills on the desk. She’d sorted the envelopes into two piles. The first contained all the maintenance expenses that kept the house running, that Earl had paid for the month of October: mortgage, NSP, phone bill, cable TV, garbage and water, and three VISA cards.
The biggies went in the second pile; the hospital bills from Ely and Regions; the helicopter, the neurologist workup; and the consult, the MRI, nerve testing, the stomach feeding tube. They all had three zeros after the commas.
It all came down to the money. Hank knew that. Realistically, would she have married him if he were going to AA twice a week, working on a loading dock, and holding on by his fingernails?
Her dad had been like that-a good guy who drank a little too much and worked with his hands. Mom changed the locks and got a lawyer and then, when Dad was gone, she went to work as a secretary for the lawyer. Jolene was seven.
When she was ten, Mom married the lawyer and they moved from North Minneapolis to Robbinsdale. Mom had a bigger house with plastic covers on the upstairs living room furniture; she had new friends, she had parties and vacations.
When Jolene was fifteen the lawyer’s eyes would follow her up and down the hall as she got dressed in the morning to go to school. But the lawyer never touched her. Neither did her mom. Jolene always had clean clothes and food and shelter and about a foot of Plexiglas between her and Mom. Jolene broke the suburban plastic pattern and ran away with Earl when she was sixteen.
She stirred the bills with her hand, willfully messing them up. She’d seen this show on the Discovery Channel; these experiments with orphaned chimpanzees where they’d put the apes in cages with mother surrogates which were these constructions and one of them, the wire mother, had food and water but was made of cold steel mesh. The other, the cloth mother, had no food but was heated wood and fabric. The baby chimps would go to the warm mother and hug her and stay there even when they started starving.
And that was the bottom line on drinking right there, it was hugs in a bottle.
Yeah, well, the last Jolene heard, her wire mother was living in Sarasota, Florida, and the lawyer had oxygen tubes in his nose, and fuck her for giving up on Dad.
Jolene fluffed her short-cropped hair, straightened up the bills, found a note she’d written to herself, and said “details.” Then she picked up the phone and called the information desk at the Timberry Public Library.
An hour later, she was in the studio sickroom, turning Hank when the phone rang.
“Jo, it’s Allen.”
“How are you doing, Allen?”
“Well, Earl called me and he said he was a little worried about you. Apparently Broker came back today and they had a run-in.”
“Yesss,” Jolene said slowly.
“Earl did some checking. Have you heard of NCIC?”
“The national crime computer.” She chided herself for knowing the answer a little too quickly.
“Well, before he was a friendly canoe guide he was something else. He’s in the computer. Or someone with the exact same name is who did time in Stillwater Prison in 1989 for assault. There’s some other charges about drug possession and stolen property.”
“And?” Jolene was cautiously curious. A reformed con was a nice concept but was pretty much a liberal myth.
“I just want to make sure you’re all right. Do you want me to drop by?”
Jolene evaluated the courting urgency just below the surface of Allen’s voice and clicked her teeth. Dutiful Allen. Useful Allen. Everybody assumed Hank would die.
What if he didn’t, what if he stayed there for years and years. What were her options, medically?
Allen could tell her when the time came, maybe help her through IT. Briefly she imagined Allen, naked, in bed and she wondered if sex was more natural for him because he was used to putting his hands inside people’s bodies.
“So you think it’s serious?” she asked frankly.
“A police record is nothing to joke about.”
“I could make a pot of coffee if you can get free.”
“I’m in the clinic today, so I could come over for a while in about an hour,” Allen said quickly.
After Allen hung up Jolene turned to Hank and said in a practical voice, “I have to think about the future now. And I don’t want you to suffer any longer than necessary.”
Jolene brewed up another pot of coffee in Hank’s Chemex, following the procedure Hank had taught her. She ground the beans-Cameron’s Scandinavian Blend, distributed in Hayward, Wisconsin-for exactly seventeen seconds. Then she put one of the round white paper filters in the glass beaker pot that looked like something from her high school chemistry lab, added the coffee, and poured in the boiling water.
She stepped back for a minute to let the grounds bloom.
It was the second pot of coffee for the second male visitor of the day.
Moving right along. Her timing was perfect; the last of the coffee was dripping into the pot as Allen’s Saab roared down the drive.
Okay.
She met him at the door wearing her brave smile but, when they came into the kitchen, he saw the twinkle of glass on the floor. Must have dropped from Earl’s clothes and she’d missed sweeping it up. She told Allen what had happened and, at the end of her story, she leaned forward and rested her forehead briefly on his chest.
Like the hot water and the coffee grounds, Allen bloomed.
Then they sat down at the kitchen table and had their coffee, and she confided in him. She told him how she’d got off to a bad start letting Earl back in her life, and now, Broker was just trying to help out and send Earl packing.
She hoped it didn’t get rough.
She said she was really getting tired of having these kinds of guys in her life. Then she and Allen took their coffee to the study and Allen quickly did an examination of Hank, whose lungs were still clear and whose blood pressure was still normal, and clearly he was going to live forever that way.
And so Jolene just blurted it out, not caring how horrible it sounded, how she was afraid when all this was over, the court case and everything, how Hank could go on and on and she’d be-a few real tears creeping out now-a nun married to breathing cadaver for the rest of her life.
And she let Allen take her briefly in his arms. “Don’t worry,” he murmured, “I can help, if it comes to that.”
“Shhh,” she placed her cool finger to his lips and felt them flutter in a faint kiss. “Not now,” she said. “Someday, but not now.”
She could see Allen conjure intimacy in the tone of her voice and in her moist eyes.
Jolene withdrew her finger from his lips and took a step back. “Details,” she said, brightening, blinking away tears. “And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”
“What?” Allen asked.
“The poem you mentioned, remember? It’s anonymous. A doggerel, not really a poem, it’s part of the Real Mother Goose Rhymes. I looked it up.”
Allen was impressed.
As he drove away, he placed his right hand across his heart, like a civilian saluting the flag; except he was touching the place where Jolene had rested her head against his chest.
She had definitely reached out to him on a very delicate matter. And it wasn’t as simple as a Do-Not-Resuscitate or a Do-Not-Intubate order. Hank’s heart and lungs showed no signs of failing.
And he wasn’t hooked to a ventilator, so it wasn’t a case where the care provider could elect to end medical support and flip a switch.
Jolene could try to get a court order to withhold nutrition but that looked mercenary, and there would be a gruesome time element.
But if she did get a DNR-DNI order as a precaution against a future incident, and if he discreetly induced a respiratory arrest-that would work.
Yes, it would.
Earl came in around supper time smiling sweetly and carrying a deluxe Domino’s pizza and an armful of flowers, which he proceeded to place in makeshift vases around the kitchen. She gauged the depth of his insecurity by his needy cow eyes; he was actually watching her for signs that she might be willing to fool around with him.
“What do you have now, friends in the cops? How’d you get on the national computer?” she asked, ignoring his eyes tracking her movements around the kitchen.
“Allen must have called,” Earl said in a distracted voice, arranging flowers, sniffing them like Ferdinand the fucking bull.
“How’d you come up with a police record on Broker?” Jolene asked as she turned on the oven.
“Easy. Those ads on TV for the online background checks: ‘See if anyone you know has a criminal record,’ ” Earl mimicked a hyped broadcast voice. “Well, they’re jacked into NCIC, so, since Broker came on a little stronger than your run-of-the-mill canoe guy, I typed in his name.” Earl folded his arms and looked very concerned. “I think you have to be real cautious around this dude.”
“He likes me.” She held up her bruised wrist. “It’s assholes who molest women that he’s down on.” She put the pizza in the oven.
“Ah, I’m thinking, if he gets rough again, I may need to bring in a war elephant.”
“Who?”
“I was thinking Rodney.”
Aw, God, a name that brought back the dumb old days. While she drove, Earl and Rodney would act out their comic-book fantasies with the guns, and they picked off three desolate 7-Eleven’s in the outer-ring burbs before she and Earl went off on their own and had the bad experience in North Dakota that ended their stickup-artist phase. Jolene shook her head. “Earl, Rodney’s in jail. Remember his bright idea about stealing machine guns from the National Guard?”
“He copped a plea and gave up a bunch of redneck militia types in Alabama, so he’s on probation.”
She shook her head, then narrowed her eyes, calculating. “Rodney’s got bad genes, he’s a second-generation crook, and, for my money, I see him as way too slow to handle Broker.”
“What? Are we taking bets?”
“I’m just saying, Earl, that Rodney is a muscle-bound klutz, and I see Broker as quicker and smarter. And another thing, I don’t want him anywhere near this house. I don’t want Rodney to know where I live.”
“C’mon Jolene. He’s a friend.”
“He’ll eat everything in the refrigerator, then he’ll sleep on the couch. When he wakes up he’ll steal all the major appliances. No way.”
“I’m still going to talk to him.”
“I don’t like it,” Jolene said. But it held appeal as a test. Broker would have to prove himself in the street. She’d alert him, of course, then she’d settle back and watch. She innately understood playing people off against each other, but Hank had explained it was a popular business practice in corporate life, where they cut throats with paper memos.
They called it creative tension, and there was plenty of it to go around in this house.
“How’s that pizza doing?” Earl asked.
“In a minute,” Jolene said, her brow furrowed, thinking it through. Broker gets rid of Earl. Allen does the right thing by Hank. Then, hopefully, after a long, decent interval, Broker and Allen would both get lost in the long shadow of someone with real future potential, like maybe Milton Dane.
One floor down, Hank marshaled all his willpower to thaw his fingers. He felt sensations, little tickles, imbedded deep. Jolene was just a shadow wiping his chin, suctioning his mouth, bringing him his slosh. She flitted in and out of the room.
Hank focused all his energy. C’mon fingers.
C’mon.