Shelter Me (4 page)
Authors: Juliette Fay
The moment was perfect, until Mike got a little frosting on his fingers. Janie saw it coming and wanted to scream, “Don’t!” But, of course, he did. He stopped Aunt Brigid from sawing up the cake and asked her for an extra napkin. Then, with maddening fastidiousness, he scrubbed each finger. Even in his adulthood, sticky hands were still cause for panic.
Janie was mortified by his prissiness, especially in front of Cormac’s friends. She was ashamed of him, and not for the first time. So she huffed, “God, Mike, don’t be such a girl.”
Mike stopped mid-wipe. The big boys snickered and sneered at him, happy to have a new target for their insatiable taste for teasing. And Cormac, a forkful of cake inches from his open mouth, gave her a look of withering disgust. Mike was to be protected, not shot down from within family ranks. This was understood. The shame that washed over her was oceanic. Her first thought was to run home, but that would have called even more attention to the gaffe. So, she did the only thing she could think of that might set things right. She slid her as-yet-untouched cake over to Mike.
“Hey, she doesn’t want her cake? I’ll have it!” yelled clueless Dougie Shaw.
“Shut up,” growled Cormac. “It’s apology cake.”
“Pology Cake?” said Dougie. “I thought it was a Pru cake.”
They all laughed and punched each other and shouted “You idiot!” and “Duh, Dougie!”
And Pology Cake was born.
S
ATURDAY
, M
AY
5
Had to drop off a cake at the rectory for Father Jake. He wasn’t there so I left it in the front hall with a note that it was
from me. It was lemon with butter-cream glaze. Sweet but not gooey. Self-effacing without being overly self-denigrating. It says I was right, but I had no right to say so.
I hope Father Jake speaks Baked-good-ese.
On Monday morning, after taking Dylan to preschool, Janie drove by the church.
Expecting to see what?
she thought.
The flag at half-mast?
Father Jake stood on the shady side of the rectory, garden hose in hand, watering flowers. Janie hung a hard right into the church parking lot, wheels letting out an aggravated squeal. She parked in the shade, prayed for the courage to be meek, and got out.
“I didn’t know you were a gardener,” she said, trying to sound offhanded.
“I’m not,” he said. A question floated behind his standard issue smile. “These are Father Lambrosini’s. When he retired and I got assigned here, he asked me to take care of them.” He watered one of the rose bushes a little too long and a muddy puddle formed. “Unfortunately, he never left any instructions. So I just water them and hope they don’t die.”
Janie stared at the roses as if her next line were written on the leaves. Finally, she said simply, “I’m sorry.” His smile relaxed and he nodded. The relief she felt was extraordinary.
“Thanks for the cake,” he said, and aimed the spray at another plant. “It’s delicious.”
“You don’t have to say that,” Janie sank onto a wrought iron bench by the little plot of roses. “I bake like you garden, just trying not to kill anyone.”
He released the handle on the hose and the relentless spray ceased. The bobbing blooms slowly regained their regal composure. He sat down on the bench next to her. “Where’s the baby?”
“Asleep.” She pointed to the car, parked in the deep shade of a leafy maple tree. The humidity had broken and a cool breeze passed over them.
“What you said the other day,” he said, studying his hands, “it wasn’t totally unjustified.”
Don’t,
she thought.
Please. It’s the first peace I’ve had since you left on Friday. Let’s just enjoy it.
“Nobody’s caught me like that in a long time,” he continued.
Oh, God,
she realized,
he’s going to tell me. And I made him do it. I baited him and now he feels he’s got to answer. Please, please don’t tell me.
“My family was kind of…what do they call it now? Dys-functional? Such a tidy term for something so messy.” His lips flattened into a thin smile. “My mother was an alcoholic and my father was…” He squinted at the rectory walls, as if to assess their height. “He was sick.”
“I’m sorry,” said Janie. “What did he have?”
A mirthless snort burst out of him, and he said, “Cancer of the soul.”
Janie’s thoughts spun out like tops, as she considered the possibilities of this revelation. Her own defenseless children came to mind, and the knot in her stomach tightened.
He glanced quickly over at her. “Boy,” he said, shaking his head. “That was way too much information. Now it’s my turn to apologize…”
“No, I asked for it.”
“You didn’t. You only realized that I have a dark corner in my heart, too.”
“And used it against you.”
“You lashed out, and I happened to be in reach. I know how rage feels, trust me.” He stood and stretched, as if waking from a long sleep. “Hey,” he said with a gentle smile. “Want some cake?”
T
HURSDAY
, M
AY
31
Dylan’s been doing this weird thing. On the way to the library last week, I looked in the rearview mirror and he had his swim goggles on. They must have been left in the car the last time we went to the pool. Which was when, exactly? Can’t even remember. He took them off when we went into the library, but put them on again when we got back in the car. I asked him to bring them in the house so they don’t get lost, and he didn’t say anything, so I assumed he would.
Actually I forgot the whole thing as soon as we got home because Shelly came over to tell me she’d sold one of the Pelham Heights houses and was ordering Thai food to celebrate. It was Friday, so it was okay for her to eat something other than a red pepper or a pomegranate or other single form of vegetation for dinner. I said great, but Dylan won’t eat Thai, so I’ll just make him some pasta. She got a bee in her Neiman Marcus bloomers because “the whole idea of ordering out is that you DON’T HAVE TO COOK.” Not like she ever cooks. I don’t think she even owns a pan.
So I said, okay, how about pizza? But she doesn’t eat white flour, and she thinks she might be allergic to tomato-based products, and cheese is simply unthinkable. It was like I was asking her to eat asphalt. I think Shelly is frightened of food. But we
ordered, and I gave Dylan Pad Thai, which he would not eat until I dabbed it with honey! Thank you so very much, Aunt Jude. When he goes into insulin shock someday I hope she’s there with her ipecac so she can give herself a nice, big dose.
Yesterday, when we were driving to that gas station with the free car wash, there he was with the goggles again. I said, “Hey, Diver Dan, how come you’re wearing those?” He looked out the window and said, “I just like to.”
Fair enough, I thought. What’s the harm? So, now I’m starting to get used to seeing him sitting back there, perched on his booster seat with those big green goggles, looking like some sort of frog prince with curly black hair.
F
RIDAY
, J
UNE
1
It’s June first and that porch builder isn’t here. Probably in Acapulco with my money.
Father Jake came by today on his teabag tour. I wonder how many other lost souls and life wrecks he visits. That could be a lot of tea.
He said he thinks I’m depressed, qualifying it with, “though, I’m not a therapist.” I made a dumb joke about him playing one on TV, and he laughed. I have to admit I appreciate his patience with my sarcasm at his expense. Maybe he’s tougher than he looks. Two months of Friday visits and he still isn’t sick of me. At least he doesn’t let it show.
Today, he told me he doesn’t hear me talking about anything good in my life. He thinks the pain is starting to overwhelm me. I said I can handle it. Plus, good things do happen. I just don’t always mention them. When I told him a kind of amazing thing happened today, his whole face changed. He looked so hopeful. I was glad it was something good enough.
I told him the baby let me stroke her hand. He said, “Really” with that kind of neutral tone that means I have no clue what you’re getting at but keep talking anyway.
When I used to nurse Carly, she would open up her hand and let me stroke it. I would start at the base of her palm and just stroke upward so that my fingertips ended up sort of tickling her little thumb and fingers. The inside of a baby’s hand is the most amazing thing. Warm and soft and silky. Not one thing in this world compares. When she opened her palm and stretched out her fingers, she was letting me into her little world.
But, when Robby died I just shut down. My milk stopped and she had to go on bottles, and she wouldn’t even let me feed her at first. Then, she would let me give her a bottle, but she kept her fists clenched, as if she didn’t want to expose them to pain. Lately, though, little by little, she’s been straightening out her hand, and today she held it out, just out in the air, not to me, or anything. And when I touched it, her fingers closed at first, but then she opened them again. She never looked at me. She just drank her bottle and stared off past my shoulder like she always does. But, she let me stroke her palm. I was so happy for that moment, when life seemed normal again and we were together, not strangers wandering around alone on some airless planet, but me the mommy, her the baby. I was so grateful.
I didn’t think Father Jake got it at first, how big that was to me, because he didn’t react right away. Then he said, “You know, I bet something like that happens every day.” I gave him my best too-bored-to-be-annoyed look, and he said not something that big, obviously. But maybe something smaller might happen. And if I looked for it, I would see it, and maybe that would help. He suggested I write down one little miracle every day.
Actually, I thought the idea was sort of simplistic and Oprah-ish, but tonight after the kids went to bed, I realized that I wanted to write it down, anyway. I probably won’t have another baby, now that Robby’s gone, and when she’s big I’ll
want to remember that sensation of touching her hand, of connecting with her in such a mommy-baby kind of way. So, I suppose for today, anyway, I’ll take his advice and write down my little miracle. If something happens tomorrow, I’ll think about that then.
T
HE SECOND WEEK OF
June turned scorching hot, as if to taunt the palefaced and those without central air. The drastic change made Janie feel weak and sweaty. It was only minimally satisfying to see the other preschool mothers looking damp and blotchy, too. “You will pick me up?” asked Dylan, the goggle-shaped rings around his eyes still noticeable. Miss Marla had given Janie a look of concern when she’d first seen them, but Janie had just shrugged and busied herself with putting his Clifford the Big Red Dog lunch box in Miss Marla’s designated lunch box basket.
When she returned home, the white truck with
MALINOWSKI CUSTOM DESIGN, INC.
on the door was parked in front of the house. The contractor was standing in the yard staring up at the roof. Janie struggled out of the car, Carly in one arm and a grocery bag on the other. Malinowski came toward her, took the bag, and set it on the front step. “What’s her name,” he asked, nodding at the baby.
“Carly,” said Janie. “And you’re…Augustus?”
“I go by Tug,” he said. “I only use my given name for contracts. And elderly clients. For some reason, a guy in his forties named Augustus makes them feel like the world might not be going to hell in a handbasket, after all.”
Standing in the blazing-hot yard with a drip of sweat running down her cleavage, Janie didn’t feel like smiling, but her mouth curled up of its own accord. “Why not Gus?” she asked.
“My father was Gus. Also Gus was one of the mice in
Cinderella.
The stupid one.” Malinowski squinted back up at her roof and ran a hand through his sparse auburn hair. “When I was a kid, some of my friends used to call me Mal, but I wasn’t too big on that.”
“Why not?”
He glanced over at her, his dark eyes seeming almost black as the pupils dilated. “It means ‘bad.’” He looked away, then down at his scar-faced watch and said, “Okay, I gotta go. I’ll be here tomorrow with a backhoe. You have a little boy, right? About four or five years old? Keep him home from school. He’ll love it.”
“H
EY
,
GUESS WHAT
,” J
ANIE
said to Dylan at bedtime.
“What?” said Dylan, tucking the mangy ears of his stuffed bunny under his chin.
“You’re not going to school tomorrow. A guy is coming with a big backhoe to dig in our yard.”
Dylan looked dismayed. “Dig holes? Is that okay? Will he do trouble?”
“No, it’s not trouble,” said Janie. “I want him to. He’s digging holes so he can build us a porch. With a ceiling fan. It’s good.”
“But…I don’t know.” Dylan rubbed a formerly white bunny ear across his cheek. “A backhoe?”
“A big one. And you don’t have to get ready for school, so you can sleep as late as you want. We can all sleep until we’re ready to get up.”
At 5:42 the next morning, Dylan was ready to get up. “Mom?” he whispered, hovering over Janie. When she didn’t respond he delicately pulled up one of her eyelids. “Mom? Where’s the backhoe?”
Janie took him into bed with her and mumbled, “It’s too early. Go back to sleep.”
And it seemed as if he would, until he asked quietly in her ear, “Mom? What’s the guy’s name?”
“Tug.”
“Tug? Like a tugboat?”
“Yeah, now please, Dylan, it’s too early.”
He was still, and Janie dozed and dreamed she was riding a red bike with Carly in the baby backpack and Dylan on the handlebars. She had forgotten to put helmets on them and it was dark.
“Mom? Is that guy Tug a good driver?”
Janie groaned, wondering how she could have been so stupid as to tell Dylan about the damned backhoe. But there was no going back, as she had learned all too well in the past four months. Actually five months today, now that it was the fourteenth of June. You never got a do-over, especially for the stuff that really mattered.
They got up. Janie made coffee. Dylan made a shelter out of couch pillows for two plastic ducks, a goat, a brontosaurus, and a stuffed monkey. The barnyard animals and the dinosaur got along very well. They could share. The monkey was a problem, and was eventually evicted from the compound for “doing trouble.”
Tug Malinowski and his backhoe did not arrive until 2:15 that afternoon, by which time Dylan himself had had several bouts of “doing trouble” in between periods of standing sentry at the living room window, asking “Is that the Tugboat guy?” every time a car passed.
When Tug’s truck finally pulled up in front of the house with a flatbed trailer hitched to the back, Dylan ran out the front door. Janie had to pull Carly out of her highchair still smeared with strained peas and scramble after him, afraid he would run into the street. When she got outside, Dylan was nowhere in sight, and Malinowski was beginning to unchain the small backhoe from the flatbed.
“Dylan!” screamed Janie. The contractor’s head popped up from behind the backhoe. “Don’t move that thing!” she ordered him. “I can’t find my little boy!”
“Here I am, Mom!” called Dylan, grinning from the passenger window of the truck. “This is SO COOL!”
“Dylan, get out of there!” she hurried toward him, the baby bouncing on her hip. The boy’s face fell and his chin began to tremble.
“I told him to,” said Malinowski, coming from around the back of the flatbed.
“The Tugboat guy said to!” said Dylan, his hazel eyes wide.
“He shouldn’t be in there—it’s not safe,” Janie admonished. “He could push some button, turn something on, God knows what—”
“The keys are in my pocket, the emergency brake is on, and there are blocks behind the tires,” said Malinowski. “I just wanted him out of the way of the heavy machinery.”
“You don’t tell someone else’s kid to get in your truck,” said Janie, pointing at him, the baby clutched in her other arm. “I’m his mother. I decide whose vehicle he can get in, not you, not some guy I barely know.”
“Well, then, you need to watch him, because he was ready to climb right onto the flatbed.” Malinowski put his hands in his pockets and stood staring back at her.
“Don’t you tell me…” sputtered Janie, narrowing her eyes at him. “Don’t you dare tell me…You know what? Let’s just call off the whole thing. This was HIS idea, I just…I was just trying to…”
“Hey,” said Malinowski, those unblinking dark eyes taking her in. He was motionless, except for the rise and fall of his chest. Then he said, “You’re right. I should have waited until you came out. He’s your boy. You get to decide.”
Hot air surged in and out of her lungs, and she wanted to keep yelling at him, point her finger at him, fire him. But it was over. He had yielded, though he had managed to do so without sounding like he’d actually conceded anything. Janie had to pull her haywire emotions back into some semblance of control. She looked up at Dylan, his little hands gripping the edge of the truck window, and she let out her breath. “You scared me.”
“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “Sorry big as a monkey.”
Janie, Dylan, and Carly sat on the front step and watched Malinowski maneuver the small backhoe off the flatbed and up the driveway. The thing made sensationally loud grinding noises, like some menacing yellow rust-speckled beast. Malinowski nodded to them
and Dylan waved back, giddy and pulsing with excitement. “This is so cool,” he whispered several times. “Wait till Keane hears.”
Huge chunks of mossy lawn came up in the backhoe’s gaping maw and were dumped into a neat pile on the edge of the yard.
Less grass to mow,
thought Janie,
but more house to clean.
“He’s too hot,” announced Dylan, rising from the step. “I’m going to get him a drink.” He returned with his favorite Clifford sippy cup. Janie could see something dark at the bottom of it.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Chocolate milk.” He moved a few steps toward the backhoe with the cup held out in front of him like a chalice. “It was a tiny bit messy,” he murmured, “but I licked up the puddle. The counter’s all clean again.”
Malinowski turned off the motor, wiped his sweaty face on the shoulder of his T-shirt and hopped down from the machine. “What’s this?” he asked with a smile for Dylan. He took the cup and sucked on the sippy top. “Chocolate milk! How’d you know it’s my favorite?”
Dylan’s grin was so wide it almost toppled him over. He ran back to Janie and hid his face in her lap. Malinowski took the top off and swallowed the rest in one long impressive gulp, Adam’s apple bobbing in his thick neck. When he handed back the cup, he caught Janie’s eye, pointed at Dylan, and cocked a thumb at the backhoe.
She could see that his deference to her was purposeful. He was humoring her, as people tended to these days, and she didn’t enjoy feeling like an oddity for whom others had to make allowances. That was her brother Mike’s role, not hers. But it was tiring to wonder at people’s motives all the time, and Malinowski hadn’t actually done anything wrong, other than present her with a decision she didn’t feel like making. She glanced toward the backhoe, as if it were the source of her concern, not the man standing in front of her.
He seems okay,
she thought.
And I’ll be right here watching.
