Ernie's Ark (21 page)

“I’ve been looking at condos,” James said.

Ernie picked up the saltshaker and rolled it in his palms. “I thought you liked where you were, son.” He blushed; the word
son
sounded hammy and wrong, as if he were auditioning for a part in a family movie.

James looked up. “Not for me. For you. They have these retirement communities.”

“You mean in San Francisco?”

“Walnut Creek,” James said. “I’d be a stone’s throw away.” His voice was heavy with obligation, rich with it.

“I’m sixty-five years old, James,” Ernie said. “I’ve got better things to do than play bingo with a bunch of people who can’t remember what work is.”

“What are you so busy doing?” James asked, gesturing around the kitchen, which did need a cleaning. “It doesn’t seem like you’re exactly thriving.”

Ernie sat back, folding his arms, eyeing his son. He didn’t want to argue with him, for with Marie gone there was no telling what they might say. He missed her acutely, her influence, the way she softened the edges of everything. “You’re in this house ten minutes and you’ve got the picture, is that it?”

“I thought you’d be relieved,” James said. He turned his blue eyes—he’d always had frank, appraising eyes—toward Ernie. “Do you have friends?” He seemed embarrassed to have to ask.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” Ernie said, which did not, he knew, answer his son’s question. “I have friends,” he added, but in truth he could think of only two right off the bat: one was dead and the other was going on fourteen years old. He was angry with James, mostly because it was true: he’d been here ten minutes and gotten the picture.

“What do you do all day?” James asked rhetorically. “Where do you go?”

“As a matter of fact,” Ernie said, “I seem to have taken up tap dancing.”

James looked as if Ernie had just announced his candidacy for governor. “It’s excellent exercise,” Ernie went on, “especially for older people.”

“Tap dancing?” James said. “Seriously?”

“I won lessons. Francine sold me the ticket.”

James looked as if he might want to smile, then didn’t. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

Ernie got up slowly and showed his son a shuffle-hop-step. He bit his tongue gently, concentrating. “They call that an Irish,” he said. “I’m not selling this place.”

James looked exhausted and confused. His suit was travel-rumpled, his fragile hair mashed down on one side, and his eyelids had begun to thicken with age. James’s life was not easy, Ernie knew. He spent most of every day in a car; he lived in a place where fat men did not do well; he’d sired a daughter who courted trouble; he’d married a woman who did not adore him. Ernie himself had had a far easier time of things. “I’m trying to do something right for a change,” James said quietly. “It’s a little late, I know.”

“Well, I don’t need taking care of. You can rest easy on that score.” Ernie put his hands on the table, flat down, thinking he might slide them over, but instead he picked up the sympathy cards and placed them into a neat stack. “It’s not your fault we’re like this, son.” There it was again, that word; he could not stop saying it.

James wiped his face hard with his hands. He stared at the cards on the table. “I think of her a lot, Dad. I hope you know that.”

Ernie had always thought of his son as cold, but here, now, in his soft, travel-worn clothes, he did not seem cold at all. He watched as James leafed through the cards.

“These are nice,” his son said. “Thanks for getting them out.”

Ernie shrugged. “I just got down to opening them myself yesterday.”

James didn’t look surprised. He took off his sports jacket and hung it on the chair-back. This took almost a minute. There was nothing else to say, and two days to fill, and Ernie’s feeling of burden doubled with the knowledge that his son felt the same way.

“I’ll tell you what you can do for me,” Ernie said, getting up. It felt good just to move. The air stirred, and that was something.
“You said you wanted to do something. Well, I’ve got something, if you meant what you said.”

James looked up, apprehensive. “I meant what I said.”

“You can help me fix up the ark.”

James seemed bewildered. “The front steps are a mess,” he said. “Your gutters are clogged, the garage needs painting. If we’re going to do a fix-up, Dad, there are a hundred other places to start.”

“You want to do something, this is the thing needs doing,” Ernie said. “Your mother’d have a cow if she could see how I let the thing go.” He took his cap from a peg next to the kitchen door. “You in or out?” He lingered at the door, feeling suspended, waiting for his son.

James got up reluctantly, picking up his jacket. “All right. Sure. I’m in, sure.”

“I thought maybe we take the table saw up from the basement,” Ernie said. “Rip us some batten strips out there in the sunshine, cover those gaps.” Time loosened just then; the millions of stalled minutes since Marie’s passing stuttered open. “You’ll need some easier clothes,” he told his son.

They set up in the yard with some fudge, a bite of lunch, and the table saw. Ernie ripped a series of strips and handed them up to James, who stood on a ladder in Ernie’s clothes.

When Francine came back with the dog, she unhooked the leash and placed it on the sunporch steps in a neat coil. She stepped into the unmowed grass, looking at them. “I’m finishing the dance lessons, Mr. Whitten,” she yelled over the whining saw. “My stepmother gave me the money.” Then, to James: “How long are you staying?”

Ernie stopped the saw so they could hear each other. “Not long,” James said. He never stayed long. Looking up at his son’s awkward work, Ernie saw what James had inherited: wrapped tight to himself, his fine mouth slackened by unmet promise, James was the man Ernie might have been but for the steady love of a good woman.

“If you’re still here on Friday, you can come watch the class,” Francine said, then turned for home.

James flashed that smile again—Marie, Marie—and called after her, “I don’t think I’m ready to see my father in tap shoes.”

“You’d be surprised what a man is ready for,” Ernie said.

“They’re just regular shoes,” Francine insisted, her voice sailing over the gate. “You don’t get taps unless you want them.”

“Right-o,” James said, chuckling a little—a pleasant, foreign sound, easy on the ears. Ernie dug into the work, feeling good, a flimsy breeze easing across his shoulders.

The remains of the afternoon felt reminiscent of the first time he’d been up here, hammering and nailing and showing off for his wife. He cleared out some debris from the biggest gaps, leaving alone the ones that looked like active nests. Car horns sounded here and there throughout the afternoon. “What’s all that?” James asked. He had his sleeves rolled up, his white forearms, though not strong, looking a lot like his father’s.

“Victory,” Ernie said. He started to tell James the story of the town’s long, unhappy road to working again, but as it turned out, there was too much of it he didn’t know, and so his story was short, not much more detailed than what he’d read in the papers. He would have to get out, ask around, get the lay of the land again.

“Dad,” James said, wiping his forehead, “there’s standing water all over this thing. Shouldn’t we be waterproofing the wood or something?”

“That’s a loser’s game, son,” Ernie said. “There’s no staying ahead of it.”

“It’s going to rot away eventually.”

“I imagine so,” Ernie said. “But there’s nothing wrong with looking handsome in the meanwhile.”

James shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, patting the ark’s broad side. Above them the afternoon sky floated smooth and blue as a tablecloth.
Ping,
went their hammers.
Ping,
went their nails. They worked long into evening, father and son, battening down the hatches, two by two.

Thank you, Natalie Harris and Andy Dephtereos, two-thirds of a small but mighty writing group, for reading multiple drafts of these stories with such generosity and goodwill. I also thank my brother, Barry, whose life and work influenced parts of this book. Although Abbott Falls is a composite of paper-mill towns and cities all over the country, I owe a special debt to my hometown of Mexico, Maine, and to the old friends and neighbors who remain close to my heart.

Thank you, Jay Schaefer, Gail Hochman, Dan Smetanka, and Allison Dickens, for such kind attention both to my work and to me; and a belated thank you to Meg Drislane and Julia Flagg, whose talents I have so appreciated. Thanks also to Laura Lovett for her generous eye. My love and gratitude, as always, to Dan Abbott.

Some of these stories have previously appeared in print: “Ernie’s Ark” in
Glimmer Train Stories
and the
Pushcart Prize Anthology 1999;
“That One Autumn” in
Glimmer Train Stories;
“Take Care Good Boy” in
Yankee;
“The Temperature of Desire” in
Orchid;
and “At the Mercy” (under a different title) in
Confrontation
. My sincere thanks to the editors of these publications.