Seasons of the Fool (6 page)

“Before or after he hit on me?”

“Oh, God. You’re kidding.”

“Nope.” She settled in on the sofa, wrapping her grandmother’s crocheted afghan more securely around her legs. The nights were getting colder, and this room had always been a problem to keep warm – the heat tended to concentrate in the loft. “And speaking of cavemen, what made you think you needed to pay for the repairs to my house, huh?” Her tone was sharper than she had intended it to be. “Sorry,” she said instantly.

“No, it’s okay,” he said, chagrined. “I deserve it. I admit it was presumptuous of me.”

She relented. “Well, your heart was in the right place. I guess I forgive you. But don’t do it again, okay?”

“Okay.” He paused. “Jule? How
are
you fixed for money?”

She took a deep breath. “Okay for now. I expect at some point, he’ll stop making the support payments. I mean, if the government takes everything, what’s he going to pay me with?” She tried to keep her voice from trembling. “Anyway,” she went on, “I’ve decided to hire out myself out as an editor. Whatever I take in from that should keep the wolf from the door.”

“Good idea,” he said. “If you need a testimonial for your website, I’d be happy to provide one for you. You did a great job on my dissertation.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” she said. “Listen, if I send you a flyer, would you pass it around your department? I was thinking in terms of fiction editing, but of course I can edit academic projects, too.”

“Sure,” he said. “Happy to help you any way I can. You know that.”

She felt warmer despite the chill in the room. “Thanks. It’s nice to have someone I can depend on.”

~

Gradually, life settled into a rhythm. She set up a basic website for her editing business and talked it up a bit on social media. Dave, true to his promise, put out the word at his university. Soon she almost had more editing work than she could handle.

She had to remind herself to set aside time for her own writing, too. After all, that was why she had come here. She was better at striking a balance some days than others.

And the cottage kept sucking up more time than she thought it would. Rather than buy a new futon, she decided to move the twin mattress from her office into the loft; wrestling the mattress up the ladder took most of one morning. With the bed frame disassembled and stowed in the shed, though, the tiny bedroom began to look more like a writer’s space. She moved the shorter dresser with the mirror into her grandmother’s bedroom, and haunted the Goodwill store in Michigan City until she found a serviceable easy chair for reading. She wished, now and again, for her favorite reading chair from the house in Evanston. But she wasn’t about to ask Lance for it. No, she was done with him. Done with that life. From now on, she would rely only on herself.

Unless something broke, and then she would call Ron.

He always made time for her. And he always asked her out. She always turned him down, but he would ask anyway.

“Why do you keep asking when I always say no?” she finally said one day in late November, after he had finished unplugging her bathroom sink. They stood at her front door, his legs straddling her threshold. Only the oak leaves clung to the branches high above them, and it was spitting snow. She could hear the surf loud and clear.

“Because one of these days,” he said, “you’ll say yes, and surprise us both.”

~~~~

~~~~

Julia crossed the street to her mailbox, tucking her chin deeper into her scarf as she cast a wary eye at the sky. The weather guys were calling for lake-effect snow – up to a foot, they said, starting later that afternoon. Fridays were her usual days for a supermarket run, but it wouldn’t hurt to go a day early. Lake-effect storms were notoriously unpredictable. If they got more than a foot of snow, it might be a couple of days before she could get out of her driveway again, depending on how much snow the village plow packed in at the end of it.

Her mailbox contained the usual circulars – she had a stack of them next to the fireplace for use as firestarters – and an envelope from her lawyer.

“Hello, Julia,” Mr. Starek said as he came to check his own mailbox. “They’re calling for quite a storm.”

“Hi, Mr. Starek. I heard.”

“You going to be all right in there by yourself?”

She bristled.
Why wouldn’t I be?
But she remembered who she was talking to, and told herself to settle down.
No use riling up the neighbors. Nothing good ever comes of that.
“I think so, but thanks for asking.” Then she thought of a way to engender a little goodwill. “I’m going to run over to Al’s in a few minutes. Gonna try to beat the storm. Do you need anything?”

“Nope, I think I’m all set, thanks.” But he gave her a genuine smile, and said as he walked back to his own house, “You let me know if you need anything, all right?”

“Will do,” she called after him.

Back inside, she hung her puffy jacket and scarf in the coat closet and tossed the circulars on top of the stack next to the hearth. Then she weighed the letter in her hand. No, she wouldn’t open it now – she’d wait until after she got back from the grocery store. If it was bad news, she would be too upset to drive. Then she wouldn’t get out the door before the storm hit.

~

Pushing her cart through the store, she paused at the end of the wine and beer aisle and debated whether to buy any. Freelance editing, she was finding, was a feast-or-famine sort of business; February seemed to be a dry spell, particularly for academic editing, which had become her bread-and-butter. She had gotten pretty good at making her money last, but it did mean forgoing a lot of little treats. Including, usually, booze. But it might be nice to have a little something if she were going to be snowed in.

As she mentally toted up the price of the contents of her cart and compared it to her bank balance, a familiar figure rounded the other end of the aisle. Surprised, she moved to intercept him. “Dave?” she said when she was close enough not to shout.

His head snapped around. His ravaged expression stunned her. Instantly, she said, “What’s wrong?”

He closed his eyes and shook his head. Without conscious thought, she embraced him in the middle of the aisle. His arms came around her as if he were drowning – as if she were the first stable thing he had found to grab onto.

“There’s trouble in paradise,” he admitted, his voice thick.

“Oh, God,” she said into his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.” After another moment, she pulled away from him. “I’m here, if you want to talk.”

“Maybe later,” he said. “Right now, I just want to get drunk.” He reached for a twelve-pack of beer.

She eyed his otherwise-empty cart. “Do me a favor and get some protein or something to go with that.”

He nodded. “Yeah. I should. Thanks, Jule. See you around.” He moved away from her.

“We’re liable to get snowed in, you know,” she called after him.
Don’t you have somewhere to be? Work? Home?

“That’s what I’m counting on,” he replied, without turning around.

When she got in line at the registers, he was nowhere to be seen. She chatted with the clerk about the upcoming storm, wondering about him all the while.

She emerged from the store into an early twilight, the air smelling strongly of snow.

As she drove past Dave’s house, she noted his car was in the driveway and his kitchen light was on. She slowed, debating as she made the turn onto Nokomis whether to stop in. Then she kept driving.
I’d just be barging in. If he wants to talk, he knows where to find me.

She had timed it just right; not long after she got her purchases put away, the first flakes began to fall. She plugged in her phone and the laptop to charge them, and then sat by the living room windows to watch the storm.

Charging the electronics was another good call. As the storm ramped up in intensity, the power went out.

She dug in the pantry for matches and went around the house, lighting candles everywhere. She could have been writing, but she wanted to save her laptop battery; it might be hours before power was restored. So instead, she went into the room she’d been sleeping in – funny how she still thought of it as her grandmother’s room – and dove under the bed to retrieve a box of half-filled composition books. They were hers, moved here with her other belongings from her childhood home in Schaumberg when it was sold after her parents’ deaths.

She took the box to the living room and spent an hour or so leafing through the notebooks, their pages crinkled with damp. She marveled that she had ever known how to solve quadratic equations, and compared her childish handwriting to her more mature – and somewhat less readable – adult script.

She hadn’t saved these notebooks for the schoolwork, though. She had saved them for the blank pages at the back – pages she had always meant to fill with what her mother had called her scribbling.

She had started using a couple of them, but had abandoned the project when her things were packed to move here. She shook her head over one short story – her first and only foray into science fiction, written when she was in middle school – and smiled at a couple of poems of about the same vintage. She had written one of them during a snowstorm, and her word choice and phrasing echoed down the years.

She glanced out the window. It was snowing so hard now that she couldn’t see the trees at the back of her property. She went to another window, trying and failing to see the Stareks’ house across the street. She thought maybe she could see a glimmer from Ms. Thea and Ms. Elsie’s through the murk, and wondered how the ladies were getting on. Then she thought of Dave – although really, she hadn’t stopped thinking about him since running into him at the store.

She picked up her phone and texted him:
You OK?

She waited a minute or two, and then sighed, chiding herself for the dramatic turn her brain was taking at his lack of a response. He might have turned off his phone to save the battery, or he might have gone to sleep. At the store, he’d looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He wasn’t necessarily ignoring her.

~

You OK?

Dave grimaced and put his phone down without answering.

He had been delivering his first lecture of the day when his phone’s voicemail tone sounded from his pocket. He’d glanced at the number – his daughter’s – and put the phone away, his mind racing along two tracks for the rest of the class period: keeping up with the outline of his lecture on the one hand, so that his students received the education they had paid for; and on the other hand, worrying about what was going on at home.

He listened to the message while his students were filing out of the classroom. Then he brushed past the laggards and ran for the parking lot.

Nina’s cycle was bottoming out, he knew; she was once again taking her medications sporadically, and had drunk enough the day before to have passed out by the time he’d gotten home from a faculty function that evening. As a consequence, he’d had a pleasant night with Ritchie and Randi, all three of them relieved at Nina’s absence.

He taught an early class on Thursdays and had to leave before anyone else was up. But apparently Nina had woken up when he left, and decided that she needed to make up for lost mothering time. She chivvied the kids out of bed well before their alarms were to go off, demanded that they do their homework while she watched over them, and called them vile names when they tried to explain that Dad had helped them with it the night before.

This was not the first time she had gone off on them.

They fled the house while she was in mid-rant, grabbing their backpacks and heading out to stand on the corner in subfreezing temperatures for an hour before the school bus picked them up. They could hear their mother screaming, and the sounds of her tearing up the house, all the way up the block.

A neighbor saw them out so early and invited them in to get warm. It was then that Randi had called him.

The kids were on their way to school by the time he got home. He texted them both to tell them to go to their aunt’s house after school, and texted Nina’s sister Angie to let her know the kids would be there. Then, almost furtively, he let himself in the door.

The kitchen looked as if a tornado had hit it. All the dishes that had been in the sink were broken, their pieces strewn across the floor. The kids’ artwork – pictures that had been hanging on the refrigerator for years – were in shreds.

He went into to the living room. The drapes had been pulled down, their rods hanging at crazy angles. Throw pillows were scattered around the room, stuffing hanging out from rents in the fabric, and the sofa had been upended.

“Nina?” he called softly.

“Go away,” she sobbed.

He followed her voice and found her cowering between the sofa and the wall. “Go away,” she moaned. “Why doesn’t anybody ever do what I tell them to do in this fucking house?”

“Nina,” he said again, and held his hand out to her.

“Get the fuck away from me!” she shouted. “You’ve never loved me! The kids have never loved me!”

“That’s not true,” he said patiently.

She reached beneath her and pulled out a knife. “I said,” she growled, “go away.”

It was not the first time she had pulled a knife on him.

He went back outside and called 911. Then he paced, as much to burn off the adrenaline as to keep warm, until the police and the ambulance showed up.

These professionals had dealt with her before. But this was the first time the cops had had to use a Taser to subdue her.

He called Angie again to let her know the kids would be staying for a while, and he called his department head to let her know he wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week due to a family emergency. He wondered, as he ended that call, how many more family emergencies the university would tolerate before they let him go. He was on track for tenure – a rare enough thing in higher education these days – but he wasn’t there yet. He could still be fired.

He knew he should follow the ambulance to the hospital. He knew he should go in and clean up the house, and be there for the kids. He knew the drill. This wasn’t the first time any of them had been through it.

He couldn’t. Couldn’t do it again.

He got back in the car and drove to Michiana.

It hadn’t struck him, until he was nearly there, what a supremely dumb idea it was. Chicago was due to get only a dusting of snow; the other side of the lake was supposed to get hammered. And yet he kept driving. He needed a break. The kids would be fine with Nina’s sister. He needed – craved – these three days away.

He was just so tired of having to deal with it all.

Then he ran into Julia at the supermarket, and remembered what he could have had, if only his eighteen-year-old self had had the balls to stand his ground.

No, Jule. I’m very much not okay. And I don’t see any way to make it better.

~

Julia picked up the notebook at the very bottom of the stack. “Oh,” she said, very faintly. This one, she remembered.

She had kept a journal during the summer after her senior year of high school. She’d spent it here in Michiana – supervising a kids’ acting class at the Dunes Summer Theatre in the mornings, waitressing at the pizza place on El Portal on weekend evenings. Tim, the oldest of the four of them, was already in the Navy, and Jen, who was next oldest, had snagged an internship in London. But Dave had been here. He had worked as a lifeguard – that was back when the village still hired lifeguards for the beach – and when he wasn’t at the beach, he had helped his father replace their deck.

She and Dave had become very close that summer – so close that they talked about marriage. Both her parents and his were against it; they agreed that the kids needed to have some fun and get an education first, and see if they still felt the same way about each other in four years.

Dave couldn’t see the point – and to be honest, neither could she. They made plans to elope. And then her parents died, and instead of following her heart, she did what they would have wanted her to do. It felt like she would be dishonoring their memory to do anything else.

And then I met Lance, and he met Nina, and the rest is history.

She put the notebook back in the box, unopened, and piled the others on top of it again.

She was freezing, she realized, and it wasn’t from her morose train of thought; her fingers were stiff with cold. She got up and put her hand against the heater vent, and felt no warmth from it.

Oh, great. That’s just terrific.