Earnest (9 page)

C
HAPTER
14

J
eff was stacking papers into orderly piles on his office desk when his boss, Brian Cooper, knocked at the open doorway. “Here's your application for the ideas competition.” He handed Jeff a folder from Seattle's chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “Send in your drawings. Cedar Place has a great chance to win.”

“Thanks.” Jeff set the folder on his desk next to a leather-framed photo of Anna and Earnest on a bench outside Gamble's library.

“The project going okay?” Brian asked.

“I filed for the permits. Now we wait.”

“Who's your planner?”

“Randy Grabowski.”

“I've heard about him. Sadistic bastard, supposedly,” Brian said.

“That's about it.”

Jeff covered his mouth and stifled a yawn. Last night Anna had grabbed on to his brain like a bulldog and wouldn't let go till dawn. “Got a minute?”

Brian checked his watch. “Meeting at eleven.” He leaned his shoulder against Jeff's shelf of binders for products and codes. “What's up?”

Jeff stood and closed the door, which was nearly always open. Brian looked puzzled by the need for privacy. His bulbous nose and rolling hills of cheeks belonged on an applehead doll, but they were deceiving. Under his salt-and-pepper eyebrows, his eyes were stern.

Jeff cleared his throat. “I've enjoyed working on Cedar Place. You know that. But I'd like to hand it over to someone else.”

Brian's thin lips parted in surprise. “That makes no sense. It's your chance to prove yourself as a lead architect.”

“Something's come up.” Jeff's gaze went to the tight chevrons in the carpeting. “Anna and two of her friends rent the Victorian house we're tearing down on the property.”

“So?”

Jeff hurried through an abridged version of the women's dreams and plans. He explained why he'd put off telling Anna about the project and how she'd found out. “She's upset. She's broken up with me. I moved out last night.”

Brian pinched the bridge of his nose as he seemed to collect his thoughts. “You've got a great design. It's a turning point for you, and it's going to take you places,” he said.

“Couldn't somebody else here manage it?”

“You don't change horses midstream, Jeff. Your client—what's her name? Blackmore? She could move to another firm.”

“I don't think she'd do that. She likes what I've done. She could finish up here with someone else,” Jeff said.

“You know as well as I do that you have to mollycoddle clients. If you skip out on Mrs. Blackmore, she's going to feel betrayed.”

Jeff 's shoulders fell. “That's how Anna feels. ‘Betrayed' is the word she used.”

“She'll get over it. Mrs. Blackmore won't. Cedar Place is a lucrative project for us. It's important for the firm's success. You need to see it through.”

Brian checked his watch again. “Look, I don't have time today for foolish decisions. I can promise you'll regret it if you quit your project. That's how things work in this firm,” he said. “We value you. You've got a great future here. You don't want to lose it. Bailing out would be a big professional mistake.”

“Okay,” Jeff said, though it was unclear what he was agreeing with. He felt as if he'd shrunk from a confident six-foot-two adult to a small, chastised child.

As Brian walked out, he told Jeff, “Think carefully about what I've said.”

Thinking carefully, but bruised by Brian's threats, Jeff slumped into his chair. He knew that a bad professional reputation would sink its claws into him and never let go. If he handed over Cedar Place to someone else, Brian would fire him without a reference, and Jeff would be blackballed in his search for a new job. He had no choice but to see Cedar Place through to the finish.

He stared at two cacti that Anna had insisted he keep in his office—because workplace greenery was supposed to increase productivity by fifteen percent, she'd said. One cactus slumped in its pot like a dejected biscuit, and the other, a frequent source of mirth for Jeff 's male colleagues, jutted up like a triumphant penis.
The cacti pretty well sum up the dynamics between me and Brian,
Jeff thought. At least he'd always know he tried to get off the project.

On the wall above Jeff 's desk hung his University of Washington diploma, which had always added honor to his life. Today, however, the parchment only reminded him of how hard he'd worked to support himself through school. He'd served in dining halls, mopped floors in the chemistry lab, collected tickets at the Varsity Theater, sold shoes at Murphy's, vacuumed Renta-Wreck cars. In summers he'd worked for a contractor, who built shopping centers in Puyallup and Issaquah. Jeff nearly cut off his fingers with a table saw, and he hurt a disk in his back when helping raise a roof beam that an ox might have buckled under.

Every day Jeff had told himself that he would wear like armor the character he was building. He would get through the University of Washington
and
the School of Hard Knocks. He would make something of his life, as men he'd met along the way had encouraged him to do: his high-school basketball coach; his university adviser; Uncle Fred, who'd missed his family's alcoholic gene; Brian Cooper—before he'd threatened Jeff about his job today. They were his collective father figure, the one he'd needed, but missed growing up. Jeff 's father had fallen in love with the bottom of a whiskey bottle and had been a rotten provider.

When Jeff was seven, he'd been invited to a birthday party. The parents of his best friend rented an entire roller-skating rink, called Skateland, and his second-grade class would be there. Jeff had only skated in the street on his cousin's rusty skates. To him, the rink would be a palace. He imagined flying across a gleaming wooden floor, disco music blaring, lights shining like stars from the ceiling, just as he'd seen on TV.

On the Saturday morning of the party, Jeff barely touched his cornflakes. His stomach was already making loops and zipping around the rink. He stationed himself at his apartment window so he could spot his ride as it pulled into the parking lot. He would run down the stairs.

Just before nine o'clock, finally—
finally!
—the car arrived. Jeff leapt to his feet.

His mother, thin from standing at a grocery store's cash register all day, stepped in front of him. “Stay here, Jeffrey. I'll be right back.”

Two stories down, Jeff watched her, a miniature mother, walking to the car. She leaned toward the driver's open window, her hands cupped over her knees. As she talked, the cold turned her words to fog that drifted away. Jeff 's impatience scraped his stomach. His mouth tasted sour.

The driver rolled up her window. As the wipers tossed raindrops off her windshield, she drove away. Jeff 's mother waved. When she returned to the apartment, Jeff 's lower lip was quivering.

“I told her you were sick,” she said. “We couldn't afford a birthday present.”

Jeff went to his room, a converted walk-in closet. He stayed there all day.

His father arrived for dinner, his face flushed, his gait unsteady. On nights like this, Jeff knew to eat in silence and disappear. But his mother needled, “Jeff missed a skating party because we couldn't buy a present. Such a shame.”

His father shoved a bite of tuna casserole into his big mouth and waved her away as if she were a pesky fly. “Just as well he didn't go. He'd have fallen down and broken his ass or something. We couldn't pay the doctor bills.”

Anna was the only person Jeff had ever told this story. Without a word, she'd taken his hand and kissed his palm. He'd never felt so close to anyone as he had to her at that minute. He'd felt exposed and vulnerable, but she'd made it all right.

C
HAPTER
15

A
ll the cleaning was getting old, first purging ashes from Plant Parenthood and now purging Jeff from the condo. With the vacuum cleaner, which Anna and Jeff had bought together—
so who owned it now?
—she assaulted dust bunnies that had burrowed under his drafting table before he'd taken it away. In the closet she went after bits of his ferry passes, dirt from his running shoes, and paper clips from his office. An ill wind had blown all his detritus to the closet floor.
Such an imposition!

His now-empty side of the closet seemed to glare at Anna like an accusatory eye, as did the two faded rectangles on the living-room wall, where his paintings had hung. But what did they have to glare at her about? Jeff was the one to blame.

In the bathroom, Anna curled her lip, disgusted, at globs of toothpaste on his drawer's plastic liner. For a tidy man, the globs were out of character.
He might have left them there on purpose to harass me.
He'd also left half-finished bottles of Listerine and cough medicine, tubes of sunscreen and athlete's foot cream, and half-empty vials of prescription pills for his allergies to povertyweed and prickly lettuce.

Unwilling to keep these reminders of Jeff—
the lingering smell of his shaving cream is bad enough!—
Anna shook open a plastic trash bag. She would fill it with his belongings, then either throw it away or drop it off at Jeff's apartment,
if
she learned where it was, and
if
she could guarantee he'd not be there. Into the bag she tossed the bottles, tubes, and vials. She added socks from under the bed and belts coiled like snakes at the back of a closet shelf. She threw in his baseball hat, lodged between the wicker headboard and the mattress.

But what about photos lined up across his dresser? There was a picture of her and Earnest, searching for sea glass on Heron Harbor's beach. She supposed she could blot out the thought that Jeff had aimed the camera and clicked the button—and she would keep the photo here. She couldn't say the same about the one of her and Jeff in the Village Green's gazebo, plastered together so a thread couldn't slide between them. Anna dumped that photo in the trash bag.

She picked up an eight-by-ten walnut-framed picture of her, Jeff, and Earnest in Waterfront Park on his first gotcha day. She and Jeff were sitting yoga-style in the center of a Blazing Sun quilt. Between them, Earnest, in a pointed wizard hat, was lying in his roosting-chicken position after having gulped down a broiled hamburger patty and two pupcakes with peanut butter frosting. Earnest, Jeff, and Anna were smiling.

On that afternoon, Earnest's favorite pastime, picking blackberries with his teeth, had worn him out. He'd set down his chin in the center of the quilt's star and watched a fuzzy black caterpillar inch toward his nose. When the creature got so close that Earnest crossed his eyes, Jeff caught it in a paper cup and gently poured it on the grass at the edge of Earnest's blackberry thicket. “Take care of yourself. Have a nice day,” Jeff said to the creature.

Anna laughed. How many men would rescue a caterpillar? She'd loved his courtesy and kindness.

But now he'd shown his true nature.
The fork-tongued weasel!
Still, Anna couldn't bring herself to throw away the picture of that special afternoon. She looked at the photo one last time and hid it facedown at the bottom of her sweater drawer.

She had more to sort through, including linens, dishes, and cookware. And what about dividing their herbs and spices, whose jars Jeff had lined up in the cupboard alphabetically after searching for oregano one night?Would he get the allspice; she, the bay leaves; he, the celery seed? It was too much to consider in one morning. Her purge was going to take longer than expected. For now she had other pressing tasks.

Such as wiping their financial slate clean and putting all the condo accounts only in her name. From a drawer of the file cabinet, she pulled out last month's bills, called Puget Sound Energy, and was put on hold. As the wait dragged on, to amuse herself, Anna added up the amounts due for the phone, water, cable, electricity, and garbage pickup. Though she'd paid her half each month, the total stared her in the face and shocked her. She gaped at the number as people do when driving by a freeway wreck.

When she and Jeff had divided expenses, they'd seemed manageable. Sometimes after a slim-pickings month at her shop, he'd bailed her out and paid the bills himself. But now just as she was trying to get Plant Parenthood going again, she'd be responsible for the full amount of the bills
and
rent. Without Jeff, she was up a financial creek.

“Puget Sound Energy.” The customer-service woman sounded bored.

“I need to change a joint account so it's only in my name,” Anna said.

“You have the account number?”

As Anna gave it to her, she heard the smack of gum.

“You're Anna Sullivan?”

“That's right. You need to take Jeff Egan off the bills. He's not living here anymore.”

“Break up?”

“Um . . . yes.”
If you really want to know.

“I've been getting lots of calls like yours. Maybe Mercury's in retrograde.” A click of computer keys. “So Jeff Egan's off the account now. Anything else I can do for you?”

Help me win the lottery
.
Lead me to buried treasure. Find me a consumptive aunt who will die and leave me a fortune.

Anna pictured herself at the top of a circus tent, swinging from a trapeze by one finger—and no safety net was there to catch her.

 

Every time Anna had turned into Puget Sound Bank's parking lot, Earnest had marched his front legs in place on Vincent's seat. He'd hardly been able to wait to dash inside for a Milk-Bone from Marion, his faithful teller. Today, however, he sat there with a brick's enthusiasm and seemed hardly to notice he was about to enter his mansion of treats. Anyone could read his perspective on the situation:
ho-hum. I'd just as soon go home.

Anna had to coax him out of Vincent. Earnest didn't even seem happy to be free of his plastic cone. Inside, he did not dash across the polished floor and skid to a stop at Marion's counter, as he usually did. He walked there with a slump. Anna could have tied a rope around his middle, pulled up, and corrected his posture.

Less than a year from retirement, Marion slumped too. Counting her days, hours, and minutes to freedom, she seemed too burned out to iron her blouse or tuck loose wisps of hair into her disheveled French twist.

“How's my adorable boy?” Marion placed her elbows on the counter, leaned over, and held out a Milk-Bone. Normally, Earnest rose on his hind legs, rested his paws on the counter's edge, and presented his teeth for a chomp. But today he stood there, four paws on the floor. “What's up with him?” Marion asked.

“Jeff moved out.”

“Are you kidding me? I'd have bet an extra year on this job that you two would get married.”

“Not going to happen.” It felt strange to say it out loud.

“That's terrible. No wonder Earnest's not himself.”

“I'm hoping he'll snap out of it.”

“Here, give that boy his biscuit.” Marion handed the Milk-Bone to Anna.

To get Earnest to take it, she pushed it between his two horseshoes of teeth and mentally urged,
Don't be rude
. He dropped it to the floor, no more enthused about it than he'd been about the former hoof, which Anna had finally returned, without a tooth mark on it, to his treat jar.

Just then, a man in a navy sweat suit stepped in line behind Anna, and Marion shifted into business mode. “So what do you need today, Anna?” she asked.

“I want to move twenty-five hundred dollars from savings to checking.”

If the man had not been waiting, Marion might have exclaimed, “Whew! Savings takes a hit.” But she only nodded, official.

Anna handed her a withdrawal slip, and she gave Anna a receipt, which she took with a leaden heart. Her savings for the house had been sacred, but now she needed money for plants and flowers—and the condo's rent and bills.

After collecting the money off Marion's counter, Anna picked up Earnest's biscuit, which lay on the floor like a small, wounded soldier. “Maybe he'll be hungry later,” she said.