Every Other Saturday (14 page)

“Dude,” Dave said softly. He wanted to apologize again for what he’d done, but “sorry” seemed less than inadequate under the circumstances.

He stared at the form in front of him. “Who is your emergency contact? Not your mom?” Aaron was an only child and his parents lived in a retirement community in the North Georgia mountains.

Aaron shrugged. “Usually I put you, but under the circumstances…”

“You’ve never told me that.”

“I never thought it would be an issue. Guess you’d better put Debbie. Unless that makes you want to punch me again, in which case make it Max.”

“Shit. I’m sorry.”

Aaron shrugged again but continued to stare at the ceiling, so Dave wrote Debbie’s information on the form and read a list of conditions Aaron was supposed to say whether he’d had or not. “Kidney disease…arrhythmia…diabetes…headaches. Why do they ask about headaches? Who hasn’t had headaches?”

“I have one right now,” Aaron said. “So I guess you’d better mark it.”

Dave opened his mouth, probably to apologize again, but was forestalled by the appearance of the hot pink nurse. “Aaron Moskowitz,” she called loudly, even though they were the only ones in the waiting area.

Aaron shuffled past her, and Dave followed, handing her the clipboard. She situated them in an exam room with jungle animals painted on the wall and a kids’ table in one corner. Aaron sat on the exam table and Dave plopped into the other seat.

The nurse took Aaron’s blood pressure and made a few marks in the chart. “Okay, Mr. Moskowitz, you were in a car accident?”

“No.”

“How did the injury occur?”

Aaron sighed but didn’t say anything. Dave wondered whether Aaron would lie to protect him, saying he’d walked into a door or something equally improbable. “I hit him,” Dave said.

Aaron looked at the nurse. “We had a fight.”

The hot pink nurse scrutinized the two of them for a moment. “Have you filed a police report?”

“No,” Aaron said. “I’m not going to. But I’m going to let him pay the bill.”

The nurse looked back and forth between them. “That’s fine.” She turned to Dave. “Sir, you need to wait for your…um, friend, in the waiting area.”

“What?” Dave said reflexively. Then he realized that the nurse wanted to ask Aaron privately if he wanted to press charges. “Sure. Yeah, of course.”

Dave flipped through every magazine in the waiting room. It was six twenty when Aaron emerged, the door held by a doctor this time, a dark-skinned man in a lab coat with a thick Indian accent. They were both laughing. Aaron was still bruised, but no longer bleeding. There were two huge butterfly sutures across the bridge of his nose.

The doctor clapped Aaron on the back jovially, and then pointed at Dave. “You, dude,” he flashed Dave a brilliant smile, “save the boxing for the ring, alright? And you owe your ex-wife a new dish towel.”

“Plus the peas,” Aaron said.

“Yes!” the doctor cried, as though this were the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “And the peas! Under no circumstances forget the peas!”

Well, at least someone was enjoying this. And Aaron didn’t seem to be pressing charges. That was something. Of course, the fact that he was relieved about this was an indication of just how low Dave’s life had sunk.

“Want me to take you back to Debbie’s?” Dave asked. They sat at the red light outside the urgent care center, and Dave stared straight ahead at the intersection.

“Not now.” Aaron waved a hand at his swollen nose. “It’s not bleeding, but it’ll freak Lyric out, don’t you think?”

“Probably,” Dave agreed. “She’s a tough kid, but...”

“I know.”

“This isn’t me. You know that. I’m not the kind of guy who fights.”

Aaron raised an eyebrow at him. Dave knew he was thinking of an unfortunate incident in a bar after a close loss in the Georgia-Auburn game.

“Okay, well. That was fifteen years ago. Besides, a bar brawl is one thing. I’ve never hit a friend.”

“I know.”

“Shit, dude. Could you just stop saying ‘I know’ for a minute?”

Aaron was silent.

“Okay, well. You can’t go back to your car. Want to get a beer? My treat.”

“Just take me to my parents’ house. I’ll get a ride later.”

It was early October when Julia got home after Dave’s seventh date, to find him sitting at the kitchen table with her bucket of old vinyl LPs next to him. He sipped a beer, and the crackling original version of the Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter” played in the living room.

“Hey,” he said. “This is some incredible shit you have here. I had no idea you had such musical depths. You have the Sex Pistols’s first album in here, right next to Etta James and Aretha Franklin. I don’t even know how to wrap my head around this collection.”

“Elizabeth’s been gone a while?” Julia asked. The kids’ dinner dishes were piled on the counter and there was popcorn on the living room carpet.

“I got back reeeeally early, so I figured I’d give her the rest of the night off.” He took another swig of beer, noticed it was empty, and then looked into the upturned bottle to be sure. “Figured she might want to go home and bump uglies with her husband.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“It is
not
. You’ve done it. You have two kids. You’ve done it at least twice.”

“I don’t—why were you home so early? You could have taken Lyric home; I would have covered the difference.”

“You would,” he agreed, still flipping through the albums, “but then you might have been tempted to sell off the
original
Pink Floyd
Dark Side of the Moon
!” He held it up to face her. “Did you know you had this? I’m impressed anyone still has this, but you? I never would have guessed.”

“It was my dad’s.” She resisted the juvenile urge to snatch it back from him. “How many of those have you had?”

He considered the empty bottle on the table. “A couple. Three? Want one? You look like you need it.”

She considered asking how long he’d been sitting in her kitchen drinking while their children slept upstairs, and then realized she didn’t have the energy. “Yes, please. Actually, after tonight, I may need something stronger.”

She dropped her bag on the floor and went to the kitchen, pulling the vodka from the top shelf. From the fridge, she extracted another beer for Dave and a half-full bottle of cranberry juice that had been there for several months. She looked at the expiration date. “It’s probably still good, right? It’s acidic.”

“Totally,” he said, not looking. “Wow, the Beatles’s
Revolver
. Is this yours or your dad’s?”

“Mine.”

“You actually have good taste, Mia Mendel’s Mom.”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised, Mr. Bernstein.” She circled the table with her glass and waved it at the records. “So what happened to bring about this unexpected invasion of my privacy? Skip dinner and go straight to the good stuff? Had to get her home before curfew?”

“Got stood up, actually.” He clinked his beer against her glass. “It’s never happened before.”

“Every experiment has outliers.”

“It’s never happened to me at all. Like,
ever
.”

She sat down, putting the albums nearest her back into their proper order. It was a system she couldn’t have explained if she tried, but there was definitely a right way. Where she’d been when she first heard the Psychedelic Furs. Who she was with when she discovered the B-52s in that little shop near the Roxy. Who had broken her heart when she found the Cure.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But really? You’ve never been stood up, ever?”

“Never.” Dave’s ears were pink. “I know it shouldn’t bother me.”

“Oh. My. God. I thought you were kidding. You’re actually
upset
about it.”

“No! I just wasn’t expecting it. And the whole blog thing—I promised everyone eighteen dates and now I’ll be one short.”

Julia almost snorted cranberry vodka out her nose. “That is
so
not it. You’re sitting here
wounded
. Mr. Too Cool for Girls in the Clubhouse got stood up, and now you’re nursing your bruised ego with beer and my record collection. My God, you’re a teenage girl!”

“That’s harsh,” he said, but the corners of his mouth turned up. “I thought PTA moms were supposed to be nurturing.”

“I’m not
your
mom.”

He laughed. “I am being kind of a baby about it, I guess. But I was actually sort of looking forward to meeting this one. I’m not going to stalk her or anything, but she seemed cute. She likes sports, she has a kid—a boy she adopted from Guatemala or somewhere.”

“Wow. I wouldn’t have thought you’d be interested in someone with kids of her own.”

“Why not? That wouldn’t be fair; I have a kid. Besides, that’s probably the only way Lyric will have a sibling…” He trailed off, gazing at the floor across the room.

“I hadn’t thought of that, I guess.”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now. No second chances. Time to move on.”

“What if she had a good reason? Like her sitter canceled or something?”

“I might consider it, if she had contacted me. Which she didn’t. She’s out.”

The Rolling Stones began singing “Let it Bleed.”

“You are a hard lines kind of guy, aren’t you?”

Dave looked at her sharply. “Debbie says that all the time. I’m too black and white. Meanwhile, her whole life is one big fucking gray area.”

Quietly, Julia asked, “She’s still seeing your friend?”

He nodded. “What’s worse is that I don’t blame her. I’m rooting for Aaron at this point.”

Julia considered what to say next. Dave’s whole situation with his ex-wife seemed so complicated, and instinctively she was wary of it. But her curiosity got the better of her. “Does that mean that you’re still…um, in the running? Like for Debbie?”

Dave laughed, so suddenly and loud that it startled her, and put his head on the table. She fidgeted, waiting for him to stop laughing, not sure what to do. Finally she ventured, “You okay?”

“Yes,” he said, still laughing. He raised his head and wiped at his eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s not even that funny.”

“I’m still trying to figure out what’s funny at all.”

“It’s just, when you said it, it sounds so ridiculous.” He laughed again, gripping the table for support. She smiled with him, not sure why. “
Obviously
I’m not in the running, or however you put it. We just got divorced.”

“Hilarious,” she said flatly.

He recovered his breathing. “You know how sometimes, you overthink things so much you can’t see clearly anymore? Then someone comes along, like a little kid, and they see the situation so perfectly. You’re like, ‘Of course.’”

“So, I’m the kid in this scenario?”

“Yeah. But in a good way.”

Julia felt suddenly bold. “Dave, do you want your ex-wife back?”

“No,” he said immediately. “I love her. I always will. But we were poisonous together. Nightmare.”

“It’s still hard to watch her with your best friend.”

“Beyond hard. It’s like they were always supposed to be together and I just…got in the way. Like everything that I thought was my life was just an obstacle to their life.”

They both stared at the
Let It Bleed
album cover, where the band members were all stuck forever in a multi-layered cake on top of a record player. Prisoners of whimsy.

“I’m not nurturing,” Julia said suddenly.

“What?”

“You said PTA moms were nurturing. I’m not, really. I love my kids and I try super hard to nurture them, but it’s not exactly natural to me.”

“You’re kidding. You seem so at home up there behind the podium,” Dave said.

“Totally faking it. This parenthood thing, I don’t have a handle on. With Brandon especially.”

“Could have fooled me.” He raised an eyebrow.

“Some days I feel like I’m fooling everyone. Except Adam and my kids. That’s one reason I got so involved with the PTA, actually, because I am so not a mommy-mommy. I’m not the mom who gets on the floor and plays with them. I don’t find cutesy little projects on Pinterest to do with them. I don’t make healthy snacks in the shapes of jungle animals.”

He laughed. He had a great laugh. Julia went on, glad to confide in someone. “I volunteer to help with something at the kids’ schools each year, because that seems like an easy way to make sure I don’t totally ignore their needs. I guess I feel guilty for the divorce, and for dragging them to the hardware store so much. That sounds crazy when I say it out loud.”

“A little,” he said. She must have made a face, because he rushed to add, “No crazier than what all of us do for their kids. It’s cute, actually. Nice to see this side of you.”

“
Anyway
.” She gave him an exaggerated stern look. The cocktail was hitting her pretty quickly. “When Adam left in January, the Andrews family had just moved and there was no PTA president, remember? I knew there would be custody issues to resolve; I thought I’d better get super involved, so he didn’t try to take Brandon and Mia away from me.”

“Shit,” Dave said. “Would he seriously do that?”

“At the time, I didn’t know what he would do. I don’t think so, but I didn’t think he would ever put his dick in someone else either, so…”

He laughed again, this time throwing his head back in a way that emphasized the muscles in his neck. “I like this potty-mouth version of you. So the PTA president thing is a hoax.”

“Not a hoax. I’m actually doing the work. The school does need someone to do it, and there weren’t exactly people lining up to take the job. I seem to remember the preschool director approached your wife about it.”

“Ex-wife.” He was still smiling, rolling the beer bottle around on its base.

“Anyway, it sounds drastic to say I volunteered for this to keep my kids. I was trying to prove to Adam, and maybe myself, that I could be
this
mom. Do the stuff I’d always shied away from. It’s a lot of work: I have a new appreciation for the PTA.”

“So are you going to do it again next year at the elementary school?”

She grinned at him. “Oh, hell no.”

Dave smiled, too, and it finally seemed to reach his eyes. It was nice just to sit with another human being, talking and laughing after a long day.
I need to get some actual friends
, she thought.

“It’s over,” he said. He didn’t look away, but his smile faded.

“Beg your pardon?”

“The song ended. No music.”

He was right. The old record player in the living room had stopped turning. “Big disadvantage against the iPod.” She rose to flip the album over to the B-side. “You can’t put it on shuffle and let it go for hours.”

Dave had risen with her and returned more of the scattered albums to the bin. “True. But there’s something authentic and gritty about the old way too. All the pops and crackles.”

Julia crossed back to the table but did not return to her seat. She picked up James Taylor’s
Sweet Baby James
album and handed it to Dave, taking a half-step closer. He was only about three inches taller than she, but his presence seemed to loom in front of her. She felt a little light-headed, almost giddy. “I forgot what a traditionalist you are,” she said.

He slid the album into place and turned toward her, their faces just inches apart. “Definitely old school,” he said.

Dave seemed to appraise her for a moment, and put a hand under her chin. Was he going to kiss her? Julia’s stomach churned with butterflies, but more panicked. Locusts. She had not been kissed by anyone in a very long time.

“Wonder Woman,” Dave said softly, moving a fraction of an inch closer.

“Wh-what?” she said, almost a whisper.

“Princess Diana of Themyscira. Wonder Woman.” He stepped back suddenly, grabbing the bin from the table to return to the cabinet under the record player. “This was fun. Thanks for letting me hang around, invading your privacy.”

It felt like less than a minute before Dave had gone upstairs for Lyric and carried her out into the night, sleepily clutching her little Hank Aaron bear, with her profuse curls conveniently hiding her father’s face. Julia collapsed onto the couch when they left, thinking the Rolling Stones must concur with her mood. The song that crackled through the air in her otherwise quiet house was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”