Read Ernie's Ark Online

Authors: Monica Wood

Tags: #United States, #Northeast, #Community Life, #Abbott Falls, #New England, #Short Stories (Single Author), #General, #Literary, #Fiction, #Short Stories, #Travel, #Social Interaction

Ernie's Ark (10 page)

BOOK: Ernie's Ark
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“See what?” In the waning light my little brother’s eyes appeared older, blunted by the hours.

“I half-believe that thing might float,” I whispered.

Timmy sat up, very slowly, the vinyl seat groaning around him. And we waited.

Ernie’s ark did not rise up and float away that night. I hope it doesn’t matter. I hope what matters is that we believed it might. That we waited there together in the dark. I hope my little brother understood why it was not possible for me to apologize, and that he will remember me, as I will remember Ernie, as one man doing the best he could against uncontrollable forces. This is my hope. Meanwhile I’m the one sending postcards, one every seven days, the way Noah sent his dove in search of dry land.

The Joy Business
 

Cindy Love, proprietor, Showers of Flowers

Six days after Cindy’s first divorce, the door to her flower shop jangled opened and in walked another man. He wanted flowers, he said. Help me.

“For your wife?” Cindy asked.

He laughed. “Hardly.” He drummed his long, ringless, privileged-looking fingers on Cindy’s counter. “Tenure party,” he said, making the words sound dull and obligational, but to Cindy they had a different tang altogether. The college, only forty minutes away by car, occupied a world rarely felt here.

Bruce Love was his name. He taught studio art, he told her, though he himself was a sculptor. Beautiful teeth, an artistic nose, a shiver of well-cut hair. She recommended something showy—bird of paradise, stargazer lilies—and he went for it, watching as she added lobelia and baby’s breath, wrapping the bouquet in tissue so fine it could line a bird’s nest.

When she was finished, Bruce Love asked if she might consider delivering the flowers in person, as his date. Love to, she said, ringing up his order, her ten childless years as Mrs. Danny Little dropping away behind her, drifty as rose petals. His wallet contained pictures of children, a boy and a girl. His check showed
that he lived here, in Abbott Falls, only blocks from where she’d moved back in with her mother. She envisioned a long, glamorous string of tenure parties—plus free courses at the college and two brilliant stepchildren who adored her—waiting at the misty end of the evening. Yes indeedy, she said. Tonight. You bet.

The party unfolded in excruciating flats of time, like acts in a bad play. At one point Don Pratt, the party’s host, hauled up from his cellar six bottles of old wine. He poured the first glass for his wife, Ann Pratt, in honor of her bitterly gotten tenure. There were twenty guests, including an English professor with tiny eyes named Barnes Parke or Parke Barnes, and his girlfriend, also a professor, with the first name of Marina and a last name that sounded like
Perestroika
but couldn’t be. The others were introduced so rapidly Cindy couldn’t remember even one of them, though she prided herself on her good memory. The evening became more theatrical as it wore on, with smart people drifting in and out of doorways, trailing ribbons of perfectly timed one-liners and intelligent-sounding laughter. The wine smelled vaguely of dirt. Cindy left most of it—about fifty dollars’ worth, she guessed—sitting in her glass.

“Leave it to Bruce to walk in for flowers and walk out with the florist,” Don Pratt said suddenly. There was something aggressive in his long, thin smile.

“That’s our Bruce,” said a woman in spaghetti straps who had been introduced to Cindy as a “fellow.” She raised her glass in an ambiguous toast.

“Do not get your hopes up,” added Marina Perestroika, in her heavy, alluring accent. “Bruce is the ladies’ man.” An edgy murmur of laughter followed.

“They’re all drunk,” Bruce laughed, sliding his arm over Cindy’s shoulders. “Don’t listen.”

Cindy opened her mouth to say something, but Parke or Barnes leapt in with a joke she didn’t get, and they were off and running without her.

Cindy, however, was no fool. The instant the words “tenure party” had escaped Bruce Love’s beautiful lips, she’d taken him for a man uneasy in his skin. Five minutes in this house had revealed to her how much he disliked his colleagues. She understood that Bruce had brought her here to play the working-class gal in the flared skirt—she’d seen enough movies. And she didn’t mind being flaunted. Cindy planned to woo Bruce Love by playing her part beyond his expectations. She planned to tell the story of her flower shop, Showers of Flowers, how everyone in her ex-husband’s family said she couldn’t do it, she with no head for numbers. She planned for someone to squeal, “Isn’t that just the most
darling
name for a shop!” and ask her opinion on a houseplant they couldn’t keep alive.

She did not plan to feel overlooked and outclassed. But there it was. More than half the guests drifted out the door without so much as catching Cindy’s name.

Then: “I’ve got something
fun,
” Ann Pratt said, getting up and carrying her wine into the den. Her husband, following her, rolled his eyes and said, “She’s hooked on that infernal game,” and the remaining guests, following Don, said, “What game?” except for Cindy, who noticed, with the relief of a drowning victim, a flame-orange box floating on the glass top of Ann and Don Pratt’s coffee table. The box housed two stacks of four-inch-square cards containing riddles, conundrums, word puzzles, twisters of every stripe. “MindMelt,” Cindy said, pretending to read the box. “Huh.”

“Boys against girls,” Ann gushed, moving people into chairs.

“This is
so
Ann,” Bruce whispered into Cindy’s ear. “You want to go?”

“No,” Cindy said. “I want to stay.” Bruce looked nervous. She wondered whether he feared his own humiliation, or hers; either way it endeared him to her.

Parke-or-Barnes selected a card and read: “Question: If your house is freezing and you have a kerosene lamp, six candles, and a coal stove, what should you light first?”

Ann, Marina, and the Fellow conferred frantically.

“Time!” the men shouted.

Cindy said quietly, “A match.” Everyone looked at her. She shrugged prettily. “You light a match.”

There was a pause. Oh, for God’s sake, the women groaned, how could we have
missed
it, it was so
obvious
, so
easy
, hooray for Cindy!

Bruce looked at her. She snapped her eyes away, possessed of a secret.

The ladies kept their turn.

Don read this time: “Question: How did the hiker get killed by the pack on his back?”

Cindy sat by as the women mulled some ridiculous possibilities. “It’s a trick question,” Ann fretted.

The men were laughing. Bruce was laughing, too, and for a moment, as he leaned back in Don Pratt’s tapestried love seat, one leg crossing over the other, he looked exactly, exactly like Don Pratt, until he caught Cindy looking at him and shifted position, his elbows crashing down on his knees, wineglass gripped like a beer mug between his hands.

Don flipped the card over, snorted, and said, “They’ll never get it.”

But Cindy knew the answer. She knew all the answers, and felt a penetrating jolt of gratitude toward her ex-husband. As a couple they had suffered a string of disappointments both vague and obvious, odd eruptions of mutual blaming, and finally a long, difficult parting. She was glad for all of it now. Danny’s family—a chummy band of millworkers and their kids—had played endless rounds of MindMelt on Friday nights, teams arranged and rearranged, running tallies posted in all the kitchens. Once they’d exhausted all five hundred cards, they transformed it from a game of knowledge to a game of memory.

And thank God, Cindy thought. Thank God for those Friday nights.

“It’s not a backpack,” she said. “It’s a pack of wolves.”

“By gum, she’s right again,” Don said, just like a professor in a play. He grabbed another card: “How far can a dog run into the Lincoln Tunnel?”

Ann frowned. “What kind of question is that?”

“Halfway,” Cindy offered calmly. “After that, the dog would be running
out
of the Lincoln Tunnel.”

The women gaped at her. The men were beginning to sulk.

On the next few questions Cindy allowed her teammates a few foolish guesses, and then she didn’t, spitting out the right answers like
that,
like
that,
like
that,
until Bruce turned square around, bestowing upon her his full and frank attention.

Surprise, she said with her eyes. I’m good at games.

If all had gone well in the three years after the wedding, if she had set out on the stimulating trail she’d imagined on that first day, Cindy might have carved out a moment in which to confess the tiny fraud she’d perpetrated at the home of Don and Ann Pratt. But Bruce was not above a little fraud of his own, as it turned out. He had nothing saved. He had not sold a piece in five years. He had yet to get tenure. She found a note to a female student that could be taken more than one way. She saw another move in his future, another divorce in hers. This knowledge muted the days, but she had children to think of now: a girl named Francine who regarded her as if she’d floated in on Glinda the Good Witch’s bubble, and Francine’s older brother, Kenny, whom Cindy believed would just as soon have dropped a house on her.

She spent her happiest hours at the shop with Francine, who joined her after school, stocking the cooler and recording invoices while Cindy manned the counter. Cindy was teaching Francine to arrange poinsettia baskets when the call came. It was Bruce, with an invitation from Ann and Don Pratt.

“Remember that stupid game?” he said. “Mindsweeper or something? The new version’s out and they’re looking for a rematch.” He laughed. “Couple against couple, Ann says. This is war, baby.”

Cindy smiled. These intermittent moments she called intimacy felt like a series of dots that might still connect into a picture that made sense. He took a noisy sip of something: she pictured him in his small office adjacent to the art studios, drinking coffee. Who else was there? Who else waiting? “Shouldn’t we let them win?” she asked hopefully.

Something in the air hovered disagreeably; Don Pratt was on Bruce’s tenure review committee. “Fuck, no,” Bruce said. “We bury the bastards.” She could hear an arty-sounding commotion in the background, easels being put up or taken down. “I need you, babe. I need my girl with the answers.”

But Cindy was out of answers. She hung up and glanced around the shop. “Francine,” she said, “do you think you could hold the fort? I have to run out for a minute.”

Francine—a myopic, unlovely eighth-grader—brightened, her hand on the phone. “If a really big order comes in, can I take it?”

Cindy shrugged on her parka and swung her purse from a hook. “You can sell the place if you get a good enough offer.”

“I’d never do that,” Francine said, shocked. Then: “Oh. A joke.”

Cindy sighed. Francine, who was whip-smart and better than any of the part-timers Cindy had hired and fired over the years, had been born with absolutely no sense of irony. Her adoration, guileless and unconditional, made Cindy feel too powerful most of the time, an irony she could barely stand to contemplate.

Two hours later, after panicking through Woolworth’s, Flint’s, Rite-Aid, and the strip mall on Libby Road, Cindy pulled back in front of her shop empty-handed. As she sat in the cold car considering her options—there had to be a MindMelt II somewhere in this town, there had to be—she spotted her ex-husband, Danny Little, coming down the sidewalk with a yellow dog.

She felt extravagantly glad to see him, someone who had known her before she’d been granted the wish of a different life. “You got a dog,” she said, getting out of the car.

“Your replacement,” he said, not bitterly. “How’s life on College Row?”

“We never moved.” She lifted her chin toward the shop. “You should stop in once in a while, you’d know these things.” Since the divorce, Danny and his entire family had managed to avoid her altogether.

“I’m not much in the market for flowers,” he said.

“Nobody is,” she admitted. The mill had been on strike for ten months now. She’d seen Danny on television the night before, caught on the slushy picket line with his face scrunched up like a tin can, wielding a crowbar and spitting onto the greasy window of a pickup during shift change.

BOOK: Ernie's Ark
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ads

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