Shelter Me (10 page)

“Can I get her?” said Barb. Janie had failed to notice the increasing volume of Carly’s irritability.

“Oh. Yeah.” Janie stood up, forgetting for a moment why, and then turning toward the cupboards. “She needs a bottle.” While her hands completed this task, she contemplated asking Cormac to move in with them and also asking him not to come over anymore.
You’re gripless
, she told herself and turned back toward the table, where Cormac held her firstborn, and this woman, Barb, held her baby.

Carly was standing on Barb’s thighs and sticking her fingers in Barb’s mouth.
Jesus!
thought Janie.
Why do grown-ups think it’s a good idea to slobber their nasty germs all over a baby’s fingers, knowing they’ll go right into the baby’s mouth. Would they let someone slobber in
their
mouths?
Then she remembered that that’s exactly what French kissing was and shook herself. Cormac grabbed one of her fingers and jiggled it before she could lambaste his girlfriend, Typhoid Mary.

“Hey, did you know Barb’s a photographer?” he said with more volume than usual.

“No, I didn’t,” she replied tightly.

Before Janie realized it, Barb had taken the bottle. “I am not,” she said with a little flush that Janie knew was probably completely adorable. “Not until I finish school.” Carly assumed a reclined position in Barb’s lap, bottle snug in her chubby hands, limp with contentment as she slurped.

“Before she got into the photography program at Mass College of Art, she was a sous chef at Le Roux,” Cormac explained.

“I used to call it ‘Le Zoo.’ The hours were bizarre, and everybody smoked and slept with each other and had crying jags at work. I just couldn’t handle it.”

“But apparently you’re tough enough for the scone business,” said Janie.

Cormac and Barb found this hilarious, and when their laughter died down, they glanced at each other and started laughing all over again. Dylan laughed too, his mouth revealing bits of partially masticated French fries. Carly closed her eyes and slurped harder.

Christ,
thought Janie and shook her head.

When dinner was over, Cormac put Dylan in the bath and Janie cleared the table. Barb held the sleeping baby in her lap. “This is heaven,” she whispered, kissing Carly’s silky head. “Janie?”

“Yeah.” Janie pitched the takeout boxes into the trash one by one.

“Do you think you would ever let me photograph them? I have this portraiture class and I’m supposed to do a range of ages.”

“Oh,” said Janie, hating the idea, but not sure why.

“It wouldn’t be Olan Mills-y, though. It’s supposed to be creative so I might try some things…if that was okay with you. Actually it would be great if you would be in some of them.”

“Oh…I don’t…” Janie shook her head.

“You’re such a matched set, the three of you,” Barb pressed her point. “I mean you look alike, but also…more than that…you just go together.”

“Do it,” said Cormac, returning to the kitchen with a freshly scrubbed, pajama-clad Dylan. Janie glared at her traitorous cousin. He shrugged. “It’s time for new pictures.”

J
ANIE WOKE IN THE
middle of the night for no reason. The kids were sleeping soundly; the house was making only its usual repertoire of fifty-year-old house noises. To her knowledge she hadn’t been dreaming. Her eyes opened and she was awake.

If Robby were here
, she thought. Her fingers could feel his skin, smooth and warm and slightly moist. Living skin. When she was cold, or less than content for any reason, she would press herself against his back for comfort. If she wanted to wake him, she would kiss the spot just between his shoulder blades. For a few moments
he wouldn’t move, letting her kiss him. Then he would arch slightly, pressing his backside against her, stirring her. It was their signal.

And now her signal went wandering out into nothing, like those alien hunters playing Mozart into space, hoping for a response. Maybe aliens on some distant planet were listening to Mozart, but for Janie there was no receiver. At any rate, there was no response.

Janie got out of bed and went downstairs in the dark, not toward anything really, just away from their bed. She put a load of wet laundry into the dryer, the loping hum of it obscuring her hopelessness. She leafed through two days of mail, most of it junk, some of it bills. There was a postcard from her mother, with a view of Mount Vesuvius, addressed to “Dylan & Carly LaMarche.”

Presto?
thought Janie.
Presto would have been a month ago. “Soon” is such a convenient word when you’re not the one waiting.
She tossed the postcard back onto the pile of junk mail and wandered into the office. When she flicked on the computer and checked her e-mail, there was a message from Father Jake: “Hello, Jane. I was wondering if we could take our walk a bit earlier on Friday. I need to meet with the Worship Committee Chairperson, and 11:00 a.m. Friday was her best time.”

Janie sent back, “Dylan’s in between school and camp this week, so a walk wasn’t really in the cards, anyway. Maybe we should just skip it.”

A few moments later his reply came. “I’d rather not skip it altogether. How about if I come by at 10:00 and we sit in the backyard with the kids?”

Janie tried to picture Father Jake in his darkened rectory, face illuminated only by the indifferent glow of the computer screen. What was he wearing? Pajamas? Probably the kind that come in a set, the top a button-down with a wide collar. Were they black? Plaid? No, maybe white with little black terriers all over them. Maybe the terriers had little red bows around their necks. Janie smiled. Now she wanted to know.

“What are you wearing?” she typed. But just before she hit the Send button, she stopped.
Asking a priest what he’s wearing in the middle of the night?
she laughed at herself.
Are you high?
She deleted the sentence and asked instead, “When do you sleep?”

“A couple of hours here or there. I don’t seem to need that much,” was his reply. “I’d prefer not to skip Friday, if that doesn’t conflict with your plans.”

Plans. Her plans involved getting from one end of the day to the other. Didn’t he know that? He knew that, and yet he acted like he didn’t. “Jake, you know I don’t have any plans. Your little visits are the most planned thing in my life right now.” She hit Send this time, and regretted it.
When are you going to stop being so snotty,
she admonished herself.

“Sounds like I’m pretty important, then,” he replied. “I’ll make sure to be there at 10:00.”

“Sorry,” she sent.

“When do
you
sleep?” he asked.

“I try to keep normal hours, but I get up a lot since January.”

“Your body’s adjusting to sleeping alone.”

“How do you know? Maybe this is what I’m like from now on—the ghost of marriage past.”

“I just know. So 10:00 on Friday, then?”

“You just know? What the hell does that mean?” she wrote. Her cursor hovered over the Send button.
He won’t tell me
, she knew.
At least he won’t send it by e-mail so I can forward it to all his parishioners past, present, and future. He’s vacant sometimes,
but not stupid
. She deleted the lines she had just written and sent instead: “Friday it is. Good night, Jake.”

“Good night, Jane.”

W
EDNESDAY
, J
ULY
4

T
HE NEXT DAY
, M
ALINOWSKI
found rot. When he pulled shingles off the side of the house to set the floor joists, there it was, dark and pungent.

“Janie.” He said it through the kitchen window as she was setting down a plate of toast. She wondered if she’d ever heard him use her name before. “Something I gotta show you.”

She wrapped her blue flannel bathrobe more tightly around her and listened at the bottom of the stairs for a moment. Dylan and Carly were still asleep, exhausted from the late-night festivities. When she came through the front door, he studied her for a moment. “Are you sick?” he asked.

“What?” Her hands went up to her face, searching for what he’d seen. “Oh. No, I just didn’t get a good night’s sleep.”

“Looks like allergies,” he said skeptically. “Fireworks keep you up?”

“Kind of. What do you need to show me?”

“See this?” he waved his hammer toward the discolored wood. “It’s all rotted out. I can’t set the joists against that. It has to be replaced.”

“Replaced?” Janie wished he would explain it after she had a second cup of coffee. Or maybe a third.

“Yeah, I have to pull these boards here and put in new ones. At a minimum.”

“What’s the maximum?”

“Well, if there’s rot down at the bottom, there could be more. Especially if the moisture came from above, which it often does. Could be a buckle in the flashing up by the gutters. Or seeping in around this window. I know the plan was to keep the shingles, but you might want to reconsider.”

No,
thought Janie.
Stick to the plan. Robby’s plan. No reconsidering.
“But he wanted…it was supposed to be…”

Malinowski nodded. “I know.”

She tried to make sense of it. Tried even harder not to cry. “You should have told me…It’s your job to…”

He cocked his head to one side. His patience was infuriating. Even so, she couldn’t quite make it his fault. He had not created the rot, only discovered it. She sat down on the front step, surrounded by unattached floor joists, and leaned her head against her hand. “Okay, you tell me.”

He squatted down near her, his elbows propped on his knees. “If it was my house, I’d pull it,” he said quietly.

“How much will it cost?”

“I won’t know until I see how far it goes.”

She knew there were more questions to ask, but none came to her other than, “Are you good at this?”

He nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Want some coffee?”

“No thanks,” he said. “But I will take a little chocolate milk if you’ve got any. In one of those sippy cups, so I don’t spill? And maybe a baggie of Cheerios?”

She smiled wanly at his joke. “He worships you, you know.”

Malinowski grinned. “That’s a good boy you’ve got there. You’re lucky.”

“I don’t always feel so lucky.”

“Nobody does.”

A
PPARENTLY
J
AKE DRANK TEA
even on really warm days.

“Doesn’t that make you hotter?” Janie asked, as they sat on a blanket she had spread out in the backyard. The spot was shaded by a tree that hung over the fence from the front yard. Carly sat with them, surrounded by toys appropriate for a nine-month-old, chewing on the sunscreen bottle. Dylan hung stomach down on a swing toward the back of the yard, orchestrating a pirate attack in the dirt below him.

“The tea?” said Jake. “It should, I guess. But it doesn’t.” He wore his standard black slacks, but today’s black shirt was short sleeved, and the top few buttons were open, no collar in sight.

Janie shook her head. He raised his eyebrows in question.

“How come nothing affects you?” she asked. “You’re like made of steel. Or PVC, maybe.”

“You know things affect me,” he said, his gaze diverted to a leaf in his hand. He twirled the stem between his fingers. “I just don’t show it very much. You don’t show it that much, either.”

“Oh, come on—I’m a walking wreck and everyone who comes within fifty feet of me can tell.”

“You think that’s true because that’s how you feel inside. But it doesn’t show nearly as much as you think. To most people you probably seem very stoic. Are you still having trouble sleeping?”

“Yep,” she said, and replaced the sunscreen bottle in Carly’s hands with an actual toy. Carly threw it down and picked up the bottle. “How long did it take you to ‘adjust,’ like you mentioned in that e-mail the other night?”

He squinted back down at the leaf. “Six or eight months, I would guess.”

“What exactly were you adjusting from?”

For a long moment he didn’t answer, and Janie’s first instinct was to apologize for asking. But she really wanted to know, so she held her tongue in the faint hope that he would reveal something.

“I don’t usually talk about this,” he said tentatively.

She strained against the urge to respond. In the silence she could hear Malinowski ripping shingles off the front of the house.

“First of all,” he said, “it puts me in a position of vulnerability to gossip.”

Janie’s wall of reserve broke. “Jake, you know ALL about ME!”

“I know a lot about this episode in your life. But you have to understand something.” He looked directly at her, his gray eyes taking on a sudden purposefulness. “We are not friends.”

“Excuse me?” was all she could think to say.

“I am a priest. I hear people’s innermost struggles and shame all the time. It’s my job to listen, to offer reconciliation with God and with oneself, and never to share a single word of it with another living soul. You have no such commitment.”

“Well, no, I haven’t taken any vows or anything, but do you really think I would subject you to gossip? That’s insulting. And I’m not asking you as a
friend
. I’m asking you because you seem to know something about this! Also, frankly, the fact that you may have had a relationship gives you some credibility.” She pointed at him. “Being a real guy might actually make you a better priest!”

He twirled the leaf some more. The shingle ripping had stopped, and the quiet seemed to enshroud them. Jake glanced over at her and then back toward the leaf. “I was engaged to be married. We dated in college.”

Engaged? Father Solitary?
“What happened?”

“I couldn’t go through with it. The closer the wedding got, the more uncomfortable I felt.” He pressed his lips together momentarily, as if to bite back some remnant shred of shame. “I had no vision of myself as a married man.”

“What did you do?”

“Went and talked to an old friend, a mentor really, the parish priest who helped me get into a Catholic boarding school and away from my father. He was going to marry us.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that God was in my feelings, telling me to pay attention. He said that if I wasn’t ready to embrace married life with my whole heart, it would fail. I would end up hurting her more if I married her than if I backed off.”

“So you backed off.”

He sighed and shook his head, abandoned the leaf to the grass. “It was terrible. She was such a good person, and I loved her. But I felt sick to my stomach every time we talked about the wedding or being married. I couldn’t ignore the signs anymore.”

“And you signed up for the priesthood.”

“Oh no. Not right away. That was a year or so later. I wasn’t that clearheaded. I had given up the one thing I thought I wanted, and for months and months I hadn’t a clue as to what to do next.”

“You were adjusting.”

He shifted on the blanket. “In every way.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s married. She was pregnant last I heard, but that was about ten years ago.”

“Any regrets?”

“No.” He looked at Janie again. “You know the one thing that helped me back then? I prayed for her. Every day, every night, I prayed for her happiness. When I heard she was engaged to a good man, that’s when I found peace. That’s when I could embrace my own vows.”

Janie studied her hands, twisted her wedding ring. “And you never get lonely.” She heard him chuckle and she looked up.

“Any priest who says he never gets lonely is a liar. Nothing makes you immune to loneliness. Not God, not marriage, not even sex.” For some reason, hearing him say that word out loud made Janie blush, and she busied herself with straightening Carly’s sun hat. Jake went on: “But loneliness has a purpose. It makes room for something. It’s built to make us reach out. That’s not such a bad thing.”

“It’s not making
me
reach out,” she muttered. “It’s making me a wretched bitch.”

“Loneliness is painful. But suffering is not wrong in and of itself. It’s part of the human experience, and in that way, brings us closer to all people.”

“Thank you, Pope Jake,” she said.

He laughed out loud, a true laugh, she knew, and it lifted her for a moment. “Hey,” he said. “I look good in white—and it beats the heck out of all this black!”

O
N
M
ONDAY
, P
OND
P
ALS
camp started at the Town Beach. Dylan was worried that it wouldn’t be fun and they wouldn’t have good snacks and the camp counselors wouldn’t be as nice as Miss Marla. But when they arrived, Keane was already there, having been dropped off by his mother the minute the camp opened.

“DYLAN!” he screamed, and turned to the teenager who was helping him put stickers on his name tag. “That’s my friend, Dylan LaMarche, and he has big holes in his yard, and he likes pirates. DYLAN, sit next to ME!”

Janie never got a backward glance from Dylan after that, which felt a little strange, but better, she told herself, than having him cling to her and refuse to stay.

When she got home, Shelly was in the yard with Malinowski. She wore an ice blue suit with a large flowered pin on the lapel, which Janie thought was garish, even though she knew it was probably high fashion. The short skirt showcased the length and tautness of Shelly’s legs, an advantage she pressed by leaning one high-heeled jet black pump against the front step of the house. At fifty-three Shelly still had it.

“Hey,” she called, as Janie walked toward them with Carly on her hip. “I just came over to check up on the project and watch Tug work his magic. I like a little beefcake in the morning, don’t you?” She nudged Tug for emphasis. Tug shook his head in mock
disapproval and tried to resume the work of replacing boards on the side of Janie’s now-naked front wall. “Nothing like the sight of a healthy young man using his muscles,” teased Shelly.

“Not so young,” he muttered at her.

“What are you, thirty-six, thirty-seven?” demanded Shelly.

“Forty-five next week.”

“Well, that explains the thinning hair, but don’t you worry about that, that’s just a sign of virility. Testosterone flowing full speed. So, Janie,” she said as Janie tried to sneak by her and into the house. “What’s the deal? I thought we were keeping the rustic look with the shingles and everything. Now I come over and find young Tug, here, ripping things apart. Is that in the budget? I don’t seem to recall it being in the contract, so now I’m worried about your finances again.”

“It wasn’t on a whim, Shelly,” Janie retorted. “Of course I wanted to keep the shingles, but it was all rotten under there.”

“Says who? Tug, did you tell her there was rot? Because every house has rot. Unless of course you live in the desert, and Massachusetts is not, as we know, the desert. We’re at sea level here, for godsake, of course there’s rot.”

“Stop sounding like you’re trying to sell me my own house!” Janie’s voice was rising in irritation, and a vague sense of having let Robby down by succumbing to some myth of decay. “There was a lot of rot, okay? A LOT. And if you’re telling me not to trust him, you’re about two months too late, and I may have to kill you.”

“If I don’t get to her first,” said Tug as he measured another board. He let the measuring tape wind fast into its metal case with a sharp snap.

“Trust him!” Shelly laughed, clearly enjoying herself. “Janie, honey, you’ve been out of the game too long. You can never trust a man this fine, especially if he can make a buck off you.”

“That’s enough,” warned Tug.

Thank you,
thought Janie.

“Oh, alright,” said Shelly, deflated. “I’m just kidding, for godsake. Of course you can trust him. Do you know how much work he has lined up? Probably eighteen months’ worth. You don’t create that kind of demand by being untrustworthy.” She turned on Tug, all business. “So what’s this going to cost her? She’s a widow with two small mouths to feed, living off the insurance money, which won’t last long if you keep tearing her house apart. I don’t want her going back to work at that hospital before she has to.”

“Shelly, you said I was fine, I could afford it!” Janie could feel the tingle of panic on her skin.

“It won’t be that much,” said Tug quickly. “Under a grand.”

“For all this?” Shelly was skeptical. “Under a grand. You’re sure.”

“That’s what I said.” And he started up the circular saw, effectively ending the conversation.

Shelly followed Janie into the kitchen and shut the window to quell the screech of the saw. “Everything okay?” she asked. “Are you happy with his work?”

“It seems fine. I just wish we didn’t have to take the shingles off.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t in his plans,” Shelly said, leaning against the counter as Janie cut up avocado pieces for Carly.

“What, now I’m supposed to feel guilty for keeping him from all his eighteen months’ worth of work?”

“No, not Tug’s plans. Robby’s.”

Janie tried to shrug it off. “What can I do.”

“Nothing,” said Shelly, patting her shoulder. “Just play the hand you’re dealt.”

Janie delivered the little squares of avocado to Carly’s highchair tray and sat down. “What’s new? How’s Pammy?”

Shelly fingered an avocado remnant off the cutting board and slid it in her mouth. “She moved in with her boyfriend for the summer, did I tell you? Her father went berserk, but I calmed him
down by reminding him that he wouldn’t have to pay me child support if she wasn’t living at home. That perked him right up, the skinflint.”