Jake (5 page)

I was tired of being called “the boy.”

“I’m Jake,” I said.

“Of course you are,” he said, making his voice sound like Santa Claus. Hearty. “I know that.”

His eyes flicked over me once more, and then I knew where I’d seen that look—on the new kids in class. They looked nervous and sort of eager in the same way. They nearly always said something stupid-sounding. The wrong thing, anyway.

“I know it must look strange to you,” he said to Mrs. Buttermark, “that Jake and I don’t know each other better.”

“Please don’t worry about the kind of impression you’re making on me,” she said. “It’s not important.”

“When my son died—Jake’s father—” He had Mrs. Buttermark hooked now. Me too. “Liz didn’t call me then either. It was some stranger on the phone.”

“Oh, I see,” Mrs. Buttermark said, putting a hand on his arm. “This took you back to such a painful time. I wonder if you know that the doctors sedated Liz right away. They had to pack her leg in ice to keep the swelling down. And of course Jake couldn’t call. He didn’t have your number. Neither did I.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” He looked at me then, not that flickering thing but a real look. “Are there any other people you ought to call for your mother?” my granddad asked. “Anybody she’d call to come and visit her if she were awake to talk to them?”

“Yeah, but they aren’t in town now.”

“That would be Ginny and a friend, Suzie,” Mrs. Buttermark put in helpfully. “Jake, what about work? Did your mother have a deadline to meet?”

“She takes a little time off for Christmas,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s going to be here longer than that.”

“When we get home,” Mrs. Buttermark said, “we’ll call her editor and let him know she might need an extension.”

“By this time tomorrow, she’ll make decisions of that kind for herself,” Granddad said. He wasn’t rude exactly, just awfully firm.

Mrs. Buttermark didn’t back down. “I’m not so sure. If they don’t operate until tomorrow—”

“They’ll operate in an hour or so,” Granddad said. “As it happens, the surgeon Liz needs is a personal friend of mine. When I called him, he came over to the hospital. His surgical nurse arrived a few minutes ago.”

Mrs. Buttermark said, “That’s a handy fellow to know.”

He said, “We were in the service together. He’s an old friend.”

Mrs. Buttermark said, “I think your mom will want to see you before she goes to surgery, Jake. Why don’t we all go sit by her bed?”

I nodded.

“Well, good you’re here if Liz wakes up in the next few minutes,” Granddad said. “I have to make a trip out to my car.”

Mrs. Buttermark said, “You rented a car?”

“I drove up,” he said. “It was a lot easier on the nerves than the sitting and doing nothing of taking a plane.”

“A man of action,” Mrs. Buttermark said, sort of like she admired that.

When he went outside, Mrs. Buttermark said we ought to check Mom’s calendar at home. In case there were appointments that had to be postponed.
Mrs. Buttermark was in planning mode. “Everything you shopped for must be frozen solid by now,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “At least we know the ice cream didn’t melt.”

She laughed and ran her fingers through my hair the way she does. The same way Mom does, which usually makes me feel like they like me. At that particular second, it made me wish somebody besides Mom could’ve fallen and broken their leg.

That old lady in the parking lot, maybe.

Which was a terrible thing to think, I know. Worse, I didn’t even feel bad about it. I just wished it was Mom who was ruffling my hair.

Some nurses were
busy with Mom. They’d pulled a curtain around her bed, and when we came to the door, they told Mrs. Buttermark we’d have to wait.

We found a waiting room down the hall. Somebody had put this sickly little Christmas tree on the coffee table. It looked like they’d been taking it out of the hospital attic for about fifty years. All its shine had worn off.

Mrs. Buttermark’s Christmas tree isn’t new either, but hers looks like she means it. It looks cheerful and plump. Like somebody hopes Santa will come down the chimney, even after so many years of living in an apartment with no fireplace.

When Granddad came back, he carried a newspaper. He smelled like he’d been smoking. I sort of liked it. Mrs. Buttermark explained that we hadn’t
seen Mom and then said, “Ned, where are you planning to stay?”

“I haven’t checked in anywhere yet.”

“Liz has a sofa bed in the room she works in,” Mrs. Buttermark said. “I think she’d like for you to use it.”

It took me a minute to understand I wasn’t going to spend that night on Mrs. Buttermark’s couch.

The surgeon came down the hall then, and talked for a few minutes about the kind of broken leg people can get if their leg gets caught in a ladder while they’re falling off it. Twisted.

It’s the same broken leg people get from slipping underneath something when they fall. Twists are much worse than what he called a clean break. That’s why they had to operate instead of just set the bone. Mom would have to exercise a lot as it got better. By next winter, she wouldn’t know anything had ever happened to her leg, that’s how fine she would be.

I said, “Can I see her?” because I knew I should. I didn’t like the idea of talking to her knowing her leg was twisted.

“She’s already prepped for surgery,” the doctor said, which sounded like a no. “She’s going to be good as new. There’s no need to worry.”

I got a sick feeling from being glad I couldn’t see Mom sleeping that way again. It was probably another horrible thing to think, but I was already hoping I could wait until she woke up. The doctor left us.

Mrs. Buttermark asked Granddad a bunch of questions about where he lived in North Carolina. Mainly I found out he lived alone. And he was retired, like Mrs. Buttermark. I was glad she was there to figure out what to say to him.

Then we sat for a while and looked at magazines. There weren’t many, and none of them were any good. Granddad turned to the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. Once in a while he asked Mrs. Buttermark for a word, but she never had a good answer.

Me either. I would’ve liked to know one to give him, but I couldn’t even understand the clues. It began to seem like we’d been there all afternoon. I said, “How long has it been?”

Granddad looked at his watch. “Forty-eight minutes.”

I wanted to groan. The doctor had said it would be about four hours before they had anything more to tell us.

Mrs. Buttermark said, “I’m going down the hall to find a restroom.”

Granddad and I sat for a long while, probably a minute, until he set aside his crossword and said, “So what interests you?”

“I’m kind of a computer geek.”

“These days, everybody your age is a computer geek.”

I shrugged.

“What sport do you play?”

“I’m not too good at sports. That’s why Mom got us to take karate.”

I was starting to feel like Mrs. Buttermark, with no right answers. I knew Granddad was trying to make conversation and all, but maybe we could talk about the weather or something.

“So you don’t play. What do you like to watch?”

“Watch?”

“On TV. You watch games, don’t you?”

“Chess.”

“Humph.”

I gathered chess games didn’t count. “And karate tournaments.”

He leaned forward a little and said, “How about that kickboxing?”

“Master Kim says it lacks grace.”

He sat back. “You don’t say.”

I could see this conversation was about to run downhill. I tried to remember anything Mom had ever told me my granddad liked or admired. “I’m a Republican,” I said, because I think Mom once said he is.

This got a look.

Only a look. It was just as well. I had no idea what Republicans said to each other. The opposite of what Democrats say to each other, most likely, which was all
I
ever heard.

Since I agreed with almost everything I heard Mom and her friends say, I figured I’d told my granddad a lie. I could live with that.

“You get shoved around at school?”

“Not much, no.”

“So how come your mother made you take karate?”

“She said I lived in my head too much,” I said. “She said she does too, and it would be good for us.”

“Karate,” he said, like he’d have said “computers” when he was my age. Like he wasn’t sure if somebody was making something up.

“She didn’t
make
me take it. She gave me a choice. Karate, swimming, or tennis.”

“So why’d you pick karate?”

I shrugged. “It sounds cool. Cooler than ‘I can swim,’ anyway.” Besides, I don’t like the water. Not that I was telling him.

I added, “And karate uniforms are cooler than white shorts.” I’m not crazy about the idea of balls coming at me at fifty miles an hour either.

Maybe they’re even faster than that, not that I want to know. There might be some life-or-death reason I’ll have to play tennis someday, and really, that kind of information won’t help.

“So how long you been voting Republican?” he said, and made me smile.

Mrs. Buttermark sat down with us then, and he went out to his car. He came back smelling like cigarette smoke again, so I figured that was why.

Mrs. Buttermark had it figured that way too. So after the second time, which was the third time if you counted the one before the doctor talked to us, she said, “I believe there’s a smoking room near the lobby. You won’t have to stand around in the cold.”

“My dog’s in the car,” Granddad said. “I run him around the parking lot a few times to warm him up. Pretty sure he could just about freeze to death, the way that wind is whipping around.”

“Oh, my,” Mrs. Buttermark said. “I had no idea.”

Granddad said, “Windchill must be brutal. I went down more often during the night.”

“I mean,” Mrs. Buttermark said, “I didn’t know you had a dog out there.”

“Me either,” I said. “It’s got to be awful cold.” Like the basement where the elevator sits.

“Max. Goes everywhere with me.”

“Well, he can’t come in here,” Mrs. Buttermark said. “Let’s drive him over to the apartment, rather than let him suffer.”

“He’ll be fine,” Granddad said in this gruff way. I was sure Mrs. Buttermark wouldn’t argue with him.

She surprised me.

“
I
won’t be,” she said, “now that I know he’s there. Put your jacket on, Jake. We’ll be back here way before your mother comes out of surgery.”

Granddad acted like Mrs. Buttermark was in charge of both of us. Maybe he really really wanted to get his dog in out of the cold, only he didn’t know how to say so. If I was right, there was a kind of surprise in this.

I hadn’t known Granddad long. He looked like a certain type of person, though, the type who can
always say straight out what they want or how they think things ought to be. Like Aunt Ginny.

Somebody who felt shy about asking somebody to help him take care of his dog was not that type of person all the way through. He was more the type Mrs. Buttermark could boss around a little bit.

I spent the whole elevator trip to the ground floor reasoning this out. Over my head Mrs. Buttermark asked what kind of dog did Granddad have, and he said it was a Heinz 57.

Before I could ask if that meant a wiener dog, she said, “Max. Wonderful name for a dog,” the way she does about a lot of things.

From some people this would seem to be the polite thing to say. Mrs. Buttermark always makes a person feel like she noticed them especially. Everybody I know who ever met her feels this way.

I didn’t get all that cold walking through the parking lot. Granddad was right, though, that wind was whipping our scarves every which way. We had to pull them up over our noses to breathe.

Somehow, all these things came together to make me feel better, even though Mom was upstairs being operated on.

So it was a shock to see Granddad’s dog wasn’t the friendly kind. I mean, at first it huddled in the driver’s seat looking cold and very small under a blanket. Like it was hibernating. I noticed it wasn’t a wiener dog. It was silver-gray and bristly, like an allover mustache.

Then Granddad pushed the button on his keypad so the doors unlocked and that dog was up like a jack-in-the-box.

A crazy mad jack-in-the-box.

Okay, maybe there was an instant where it expected to see Granddad. Then it saw Mrs. Buttermark and me.

It went berserk. It barked and snarled like it had rabies or something, throwing itself at the window.

I yelped too, and fell against another car. Mrs. Buttermark grabbed me and held on. We both held on. I’m usually not afraid of dogs anymore, if they aren’t too big. Especially since I’m taller than most dogs I meet now.

I got beaten up by a dog once, though.

Don’t laugh. It wasn’t funny.

That dog stood nose to nose with me at the time. It wanted to play some kind of dog game of run and bump each other. Like bumper cars with those big rubber bumpers that keep you from having a real
crash. Except I was four and I didn’t know about bumper cars yet.

I didn’t have any bumpers either.

I had a babysitter who was busy looking at magazines in the park.

I got knocked over every time I got up to run away. I kept trying because I thought that dog might eat me if I stayed down. And every time I got up, that dog thought I was saying,
This is fun, let’s do it again
.

It was a horrible nightmare of trying to catch my breath, wanting to cry or yell for help, and getting knocked over and losing my breath again. When I couldn’t get up again, the dog came over and laughed in my face. That’s how it seemed to me. Probably it was a dog’s way of saying,
Good game, huh?

That’s when this older kid rescued me. He came over and shoved the dog away. When he pulled me up off the ground, he brushed me off and patted my shoulder and wiped my face with his sleeve. I kept on crying.

He said dogs like to play a bumper car game. He’d been throwing a Frisbee for his dog, only I must’ve looked like more fun. I remember him telling me all of this.

Looking back on it, I guess it was a brave thing he did. Not shoving the dog away. It was his dog, after all. Wiping a little kid’s snotty face on his own sleeve was pretty brave.