A Hole in the Universe (35 page)

“No, I can’t. I don’t want a dog. I’ll just leave him, then. Out here.”

The adjacent door opened then and Inez came out onto the porch with her four-year-old granddaughter, who laughed and reached up to let the dog lick her fingers. Her grandmother spoke sharply in Spanish and the girl’s hands flew behind her back.

Marvella had opened her door at the same time. She looked at the dog a moment, puzzled, as if she didn’t recognize it. “Can’t you just take him someplace?” she whined. “Please? Or keep him, I don’t care.”

“No. I can’t. I can’t do that,” he said, struggling as the dog yipped and strained to get to Marvella.

“He doesn’t want your dog,” Inez snapped. “He’s yours. You want to get rid of him, you go do it.”

“Shut up!” Marvella cried. “Just shut the—”

“No!” Inez growled, pointing to the child curled around her legs.

Marvella cringed from the warning. “Oh shit,” she said, taking the squealing dog from him. “Like I really need this.”

“Thank you,” Gordon said when he and Inez and the girl were down on the sidewalk. He explained how the dog had been caught in the bushes.

“You should’ve left him. Better off there than with that,” she spat, then hurried down the street, the child in tow.

Jada was at his door within minutes. She rang the bell, knocked, then tried the back door. She probably wanted to thank him, but that’s all it would take, the slightest civility, just a few words, and she would be right back insinuating herself into his life. He stayed upstairs until she finally went away.

 

 

When Delores called he was eating a tuna-fish sandwich. He had forgotten all about the band concert in the park. When she had invited him two weeks ago his life had been fine, and now it was a mess. He still hadn’t found a job, money was running low, and he had wrenched his back yesterday scraping a patch of peeling paint from the back of the house. Because he didn’t have a ladder, he had climbed onto the porch railing, balancing himself quite well until he heard the wood crack. He’d jumped off, landing so awkwardly that something had pulled in his lower back. It especially hurt when he walked any distance, he was trying to tell Delores, but she said he wouldn’t have to walk far at all. The parking lot was right there on the edge of the park. It hurt to sit for too long, he said.

“You just don’t want to go, right?” she asked.

“No. No, it’s not that. I do. It’s just my back.” He didn’t want to go, but he also didn’t want to make her mad. He hadn’t seen her since their ride to the beach, and he missed her. They had talked on the phone, but she had been distracted, almost cool to him. He was afraid Jada had told her about climbing into his bed.

“All right, I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes, then. Just come out when I toot,” she said, and he hobbled around to get ready.

Here he was now, shivering on a low, flimsy beach chair on the Dearborn Common, listening to a four-piece band playing “Sweet Caroline.”

It was chilly, but Delores wore a sleeveless blouse. She claimed not to be cold. “All my natural layers,” she said, passing him a plate piled with chicken she’d fried, potato salad, beans, and cornbread. The drumstick was still warm and crispy. Delores was a wonderful cook. His mother had hated cooking, so his father had done most of it. Inexplicably, that had changed after Gordon went away. Dennis said she learned to enjoy cooking, but Gordon couldn’t help thinking his absence had made it more pleasurable, a less onerous task without her three-hundred-pound oafish son underfoot every minute.

He had eaten practically everything in the picnic basket. Delores had made an apple pie, but it had been too hot to cut and pack, so they would have it afterward at her house. His back ached. He would rather go home when the concert ended, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and there was still the pie. Fireflies flickered in the distance while barefoot little girls danced around the musicians, who for some reason sat playing on folding chairs below the bandstand. Delores kept waving at different people going by. For someone who didn’t even live in Dearborn, she knew a lot of people here, he said. Many were customers, she said, and a lot were Collerton people who had made good and moved to Dearborn.

“See her?” Delores said with a nod toward the woman walking by. “That’s Dawn Lintz. We went to school with her. She got married the weekend we graduated. Remember? She was so pregnant you could tell even with the graduation robe on.”

“Oh,” he said. Of course he didn’t remember, but once again he let the flow of her voice carry him along through memories that had little to do with him.

“She’s been married two times since. Three kids, one with each guy. Her son’s an Olympic gymnast. Well, used to be. He’s a coach now, I think ...”

It wasn’t so much that he had stopped listening as he was sinking into the comfort of her nearness. Jada couldn’t have said anything, he decided. Delores was just the same as always. There seemed less need to keep up his guard every minute. She probably knew more about him than anyone, yet nothing seemed to bother her.

“. . . so anyway, that’s what I’m thinking. I know everyone in my family’s going to have a fit—but you know what?”

“No. I don’t. What?” He had no idea what she meant.

“
I don’t care!
How’s that?” She laughed. “They all have their own families. So why shouldn’t I? I mean, all this time I’ve been thinking I’m a failure because I don’t have anyone, because I don’t have a family like they all do. And then I was thinking how hard it must be for you. I mean, here you are, coming back here where everyone knows you, but you don’t let that get in the way. You just keep plugging along, determined to start over and make a life for yourself. I admire that about you. I look at you and I say to myself, The hell with what everyone thinks, just go for it, girl!” She was rummaging through her satchel-size purse that had somehow gotten mayonnaise smeared into the straw weave. She handed him a grainy photo of a somber Chinese child.

“Mary Catherine,” she said when he asked who it was. “Well, that’s what I’d call her. Now her name’s May Loo. So what do you think?”

“She’s cute. She’s pretty, but
who
is she? I mean, why are you changing her name?”

“Because I’m adopting her. That’s what I’ve been telling you. She’s almost a year old. She’s from the Holy Mother of Christ Mission Orphanage in Kawang. It takes at least six months to go through all the paperwork. And then she’ll be mine.” She rubbed the picture against her chest and sighed. “I haven’t even met her and I love her this much.” Her voice broke and she paused a moment. “I can’t imagine what it’ll be like actually holding this tiny little thing in my arms.”

He didn’t know what to say. He was confused. She wasn’t married. She didn’t even have a job. He thought of Jada’s pregnant mother, not only unmarried and unemployed, but a drug addict. The world had gone a little more haywire.

“I’m so happy, Gordon.” She reached over and squeezed his hand. “I’ve never been happier in my whole life. About anything. And it’s all because of you. Because you’re such a good, strong man.”

He smiled and for a moment, for just a tick of time, wondered if it might be possible.

 

 

He aimed the remote, scanning the channels. Delores’s enormous television got ten times as many as his did.

“That’s because you’re not on cable.” She put the two slices of apple pie and ice cream on the coffee table, then sat next to him. “You should get it.”

“Why? All I have to do is come over here and watch it,” he said, mesmerized by the cascade of fleeting images.

“That’s right.” For the next few minutes they ate in silence.

“That was delicious,” he said, then realized once again he was finished and she was just starting. “You make the best apple pie.”

“Thank you, Gordon, but, sad to say, I won’t be making another one for a while.”

“Why?” He was embarrassed by the alarm in his voice.

“Because! I have to get healthy!” She picked up the girl’s picture from the table. “I can’t be this big, out-of-shape mother chasing that little bitty thing all over the playground.” She held out her arms. “Look, I’ve already lost ten pounds. The day I made up my mind, that’s when I started.”

“I thought there was something different,” he said, though it wasn’t a weight loss, he realized, but the calm that seemed to have settled over her, a resignation.

Delores leaned against him. “Oh Gordon . . .” She sighed and turned, her heavy breasts dragging across his chest as he turned with her. “Is it all right? Do you mind if we’re here?” she asked, her mouth at his ear, now his eyes, his mouth. “You can go home. I’ll stop if you want. I’ll do whatever you want, whatever you say, just tell me. Tell me what to do. . . .”

How could he? His brain boiled with color and heat. Incapable of thought or speech, he could only grunt and nod in assent and pleasure. She had unbuttoned her blouse. She placed his hand on her breast, then gasped and told him not to squeeze. “Just go easy, easy, easy now,” she whispered, taking his other hand, stroking herself, guiding him lower. Her face blurred through the blinding waves of desire. When he stood up he was naked. They both were, but he couldn’t be sure if he had taken off his clothes or if she had undressed him. Holding her hand, he followed her into her bedroom like a child. Embracing, they fell onto the bed, his entire being lost in longing.

 

 

Gordon’s first want ad attempt had given him the confidence to try four more. The difficulty was explaining away the twenty-five-year gap without actually telling the truth. Petro, the Athens owner, asked only if he knew how to read and write, then hired him on the spot. The Athens Pizza and Sub shop was across the street from Paramount Shoe Manufacturing. Twice a day, at noon and then again with Paramount’s four-thirty shift change, the line stretched out the door. The pizza ovens were manned by Petro, a sweating, bald gentleman whose few English words and phrases shared a common modifier: “Fucking-hot, fucking-ready, fucking-get-out-of-my-way.”

Gordon’s job was making subs. Chad, a seventeen-year-old Cambodian American who was getting his GED at night, was head sub man. For three days the soft-spoken young man patiently trained, then quizzed Gordon in the various combinations. Each sub’s ingredients were listed on the huge sign behind the counter, so Gordon had only to look up if he forgot, but he was constantly on edge. Chad kept assuring him he was a great sub maker, but Gordon’s problem was his size. He was always in the way, particularly of Petro and his long-handled wooden paddle sliding pizzas in and out of the huge ovens. Gordon was getting faster on his feet, flattening himself against the wall beyond the reach of the turning paddle. The pay was better than the Market. He was working full eight-hour days and could eat as much as he wanted. On the fourth day he was cutting a meatball sub in half when Petro rushed toward the sink with his paddle afire. As Gordon leaned to get out of the way, the big knife sliced his palm. No amount of toweled ice would stop the bleeding. Chad wanted to drive him to the hospital, but he refused. Even Petro said he should fucking go and get stitches, but he couldn’t. Dennis’s warnings about not having insurance had come home to roost. One trip to the emergency room could end up costing hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dollars. Chad drove him home. All that night his hand throbbed with pain. The next day, he tried to work with a glove over the bandaged hand, but the bleeding would start with the slightest pressure, filling the rubber fingers with blood. Chad had to drive him home. The next day, Gordon folded a hand towel over the cut, this time binding it with duct tape. He forced on a glove and went to work. The same thing happened. Again, Chad drove him home, but right before Gordon got out of the car, he told him that Petro said not to come in tomorrow. He had hired someone else.

“I’m sorry. It’s not fair,” the young man said softly.

“No. Well, I know. It’s hard, but I understand. He’s got a business to run.”

“But it was his fault!” Chad said.

“What does that matter?”

“It matters a lot!”

“No, it doesn’t. Not really.”

“Well, it does. In this country it does,” he said with the passionate certainty of hard-earned patriotism.

 

 

Delores was horrified. She bound his hand so tightly with gauze and adhesive tape that his fingertips turned blue. “You need stitches.” She snipped away the tape and bandaged it again. “It won’t cost as much as you think. I’ll give you the money.”

“No!”

“All right, I’ll lend you the money.”

“I don’t have a job. As it is I’m a month behind on my bills.”

“Stop being so damn proud. If I needed money, I wouldn’t have any problem asking you.”

“The problem would be me not having any.”

“But if you had it, you would if I asked. Right?”

“Well, yes. If I had it. And you needed it,” he said uneasily, seeing the hurt flicker in her eyes, then vanish as quickly. She was as generous in forgiveness as in everything else. He envied her that, if for no other reason than the actual pain and sense of loss he felt when he had to share or give.

The last time they made love she had told him that she loved him. He didn’t know if he loved her, because he didn’t know what love was. If it was an ecstasy that stayed with him every minute of every day, then it surely wasn’t love. What he felt most with Delores was contentment. He didn’t have to consider every word before he spoke. When she called he was glad to hear her voice. Now when the doorbell rang his chest didn’t tighten with dread. But when he was alone he hardly ever thought of her. Love, he suspected, was the ache that came with thoughts of Jilly Cross.

“Does Dennis know you cut your hand?”

“No. He doesn’t even know I got fired from the Market.”

“Gordon!”

“I figured I’d tell him as soon as I found a new job.”