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Kissing Games of the
World a novel
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SANDI KAHN SHELTON
Three Rivers Press new york
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2008 by Sandi Kahn Shelton Reading Group Guide © 2009 by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York in 2008. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shelton, Sandi Kahn. Kissing games of the world: a novel/by Sandi Kahn Shelton. — 1st ed. 1. Single mothers— Fiction. 2. Women Artists— Fiction. 3. Widowers— Fiction. 4. Single fathers— Fiction. I. Title. PS3619.H4535K57 2008 813'.6— dc22
2008012253
ISBN 978-0-307-39366-1 Printed in the United States of America Design by Lynne Amft 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 First Paperback Edition
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Kissing Games of the World
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Pa r t One
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chapter 1
H
arris Goddard’s life ran out on an otherwise ordinary afternoon in the middle of May, on the very day it seemed the rest of the planet was pulsating with life. An unexpected warm front had blown toward the coast overnight, pushing out the last remains of the long, wet Connecticut winter and nudging the buds into a frantic, hurried bloom. By 11:00 a.m., the thermometer on the side of the barn read eighty-six damp degrees, and Harris, standing on a ladder and scraping the peeling paint off his house, felt as though he might have missed out on the news flash that the world had slipped into the third circle of hell. But he was a proud and stubborn old cuss and had never once changed a plan without a fight, so he stayed up there on rung number eight, squinting hard in the sunlight, picking and scratching at the hide of his house, and watching the paint chips drift to the ground like old sunburned skin. By the time he decided to let himself break for lunch, he was cranky and thirsty and his left arm was tingling from holding the scraper. He still had his winter blood, that was all this was. “Hey, you,” said his housemate, Jamie McClintock, when he went
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inside. Harris let the screen door bang behind him for once and fumbled his way into the sudden dimness, feeling the sweat cooling quickly on his face. Jamie was a blur of pink standing at her easel. Always at her easel in the morning, God bless her. “Hey, you,” he said back. With slight difficulty. He could feel her looking at him. “Harris, are you all right?” He nodded and went over to the soapstone sink, where he found he couldn’t remember certain things, like exactly how it was you turned on the cold-water faucet. Two bull elephants were standing on his chest, but that was nothing. He’d felt worse. Christ, he’d had hangovers that were worse than this. “No, really. Are you okay?” she said. He sent over the words I’m fine, but they must not have gotten there, because then she said, “I know what. Why don’t you sit down a minute? Let me just give Al a call.” Al was the doctor. He’d known Harris so long he made house calls for no extra charge, and often stuck around for dinner. “No. Just frungy,” Harris said, and of course Jamie made a big deal out of that little slip of the tongue. She came right over, put her hand on his arm, and stared into his eyes like she was looking to see the insides of his brains. He couldn’t remember what word he had meant to say. Fried? Hungry? Grungy? Actually, nothing made much sense just now. “Come on, at least let me help you sit,” she said. “You don’t look right.” “I’m just hot,” he said, a little out of breath. “I need a drink.” She turned on the faucet for him, got a glass out of the cabinet, and filled it up. “You want some ice?” “Nah.” As it was, the water she gave him felt like a lump of melted snow going down. Anyway, what he’d meant was that he wanted something with alcohol in it, a gin and tonic, that’s what. That and a chance to sit down in the cool, have a little persuasive talk with these damned elephants. “Whew! So what is it, you think, about a thousand degrees out there?” she said, and even through his haze he could tell she was
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speaking in that high little voice she used when she was trying to pretend everything was normal. “And wouldn’t you know, I sent the boys off to school in corduroy pants and hoodies. Can you imagine? They’re going to melt.” “The boys” were Jamie’s son, Arley, and Harris’s grandson, Christopher. They were five years old, and at the thought of them, Harris’s chest tightened even more. If they were here, there’d be none of this sitting around, waiting for the strength to get up and make a gin and tonic. No, he’d be laughing and chasing them around the room, and they’d be giggling and climbing all over him. They saw him as a piece of living, breathing playground equipment, and he didn’t try to make them see any different. Every afternoon since they started kindergarten in the fall, he’d met their school bus and spun them around in the driveway, then pretend-raced them to the back door, where Jamie was waiting for them. It made him tired to think of it. But he’d be better by 3:15, when the bus came. Of course he would. He exhaled, wondered if Jamie would get all crazy-alarmed if he slid down onto the floor, maybe curled up there beside the table until the boys came home. He didn’t feel like walking to the couch now, and all he needed was a nap. Jamie was squinting at him, giving him that look that said he was a pathetic old man, which was ridiculous because he was only sixty-eight years old, and he happened to be— he’d actually looked this up— only two days older than Robert Redford. And did he really need to remind her that hardly anybody would dare put Redford in the pathetic category yet? Hell, he still got the girl in most movies. Harris took another swig of ice-cold water and looked at her, managed one of the sly grins he was sort of famous for. Ever since he’d walked out on his wife and son, back, oh, during the Pleistocene era, and had taken up with the new receptionist at the construction company where he’d worked, he’d somehow had this image to uphold: as somebody who couldn’t stay away from women. People in town wouldn’t hear of him acting any other way. Even now, tired of it all, he still had to be the town’s sexy old rascal, still had to wear his jeans tight
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and his hair long, and he had to at least leer at younger women, even if he didn’t actually do anything with them. But what the hell? As assigned roles went, this one wasn’t all that bad. Better than being seen as priggish, like his old business partner, or paranoid, like his friend Frank Cooksey. Besides, Harris still looked damned good, a hell of a lot better than Redford did these days, according to Harris’s own private opinion. Redford seemed a little puffy, doughy around the middle, if you looked close. But this rockhard body Harris had— well, he had a lifetime of doing construction to thank for that, plus the fact that when he got to retirement age, instead of sitting down or going fishing, he had taken on the real task of life: raising his grandson. He’d tell anyone: if you want to stay young, keep up with a toddler when you’re in your sixties. That’ll either kill you or keep you going. For him, it had been the tonic he needed, saved him from all the guilt that had gnawed away at his insides. Nobody could say that taking on that kid hadn’t made up for his litany of crimes against his family. All that— absolved. All those screwed-up days he’d spent around the time he left Maggie, when he just had to leave or else die in this house. Die of the boredom, because there was a whole catalog of ways to be bored married to Maggie: sitting in the dining room, listening to the forks clicking on the wedding-present china; listening to the piping voice of little Nate, who always needed something, always wanted to play catch outside, always wanted to help Harris bang the hammers on the nails; or listening to Maggie talk on and on, pursing her lips and looking at him across the table, smiling as if she was a member of some smug little Housewives’ Club, jabbering on about Olivia’s meat loaf recipe, and should we have the Simpsons over; and him thinking, Yeah, let’s do. I slept with June Simpson just last month when I was there redoing her kitchen. God, it was everything: the heaviness of the light, the future bearing down on him so hard it was like no air was left in the room— but it had been bad to go; they hadn’t deserved what he did to them, he knew that now, knew so much more now.
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And then, out of the blue, there was the grandbaby coming to save him. It had been horrible, really, the way it happened, this blessing coming in the worst possible way— Nate’s wife getting herself smashed up in a car accident when the baby was four days old, and Nate freaking out big time, and Harris, not knowing what to do, aching, panicking, saying to his hollow-eyed son, “Go! Go get yourself together. I’ll take the baby for you, and you come back when you’re ready.” All by himself then, he’d figured out formulas and modern baby bottles and easy-flow nipples and disposable diapers and wipes, not to mention colic and teething— stuff he’d never even had to think about when Nate was born— and then he’d graduated to thinking about baby gates and walkers and tricycles . . . and then preschool, and now the kid was almost through kindergarten, and Harris had grown along with him, now understanding such things as the need for Velcro sneakers that light up and backpacks with monogrammed initials, and DVDs. Yes, DVDs. People always saying, Wow, that Harris is something, such a great guy, taking in that baby when his mother died like that and his father ran off. But he knew it wasn’t that simple. The truth was he’d done exactly what he’d wanted to do. He hadn’t wanted to give the baby back, simple as that. He’d kept Nate away, slammed the door, and not let him back in. The elephants kicked him so hard now he nearly buckled, and his eyelids were painted with red and purple flashing stars. “Maybe you’re hungry,” Jamie was saying. He brought himself back to the present and saw that she was somehow across the room now, standing by the stove. He was sitting down— when did that happen?— and he was surprised to see that he was still holding his glass of water. “Shall I make you some lunch?” she said. “Nah.” He pointed to his middle, grimaced. “Got some . . . some . . . indigestion.” The light was dappling across the tabletop in a way that made his head hurt. She was frying up something on the stove, something that smelled
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evil, like garlic and onions and olive oil, but now she turned off the burner and came over and sat down across from him and studied him. He looked back at her. She had light curly hair that went wild on her— she was always having to whip it into shape with scarves and clips and sometimes even chopsticks— and she had a wide, creamcolored face— the kind of skin his wife would have said was in danger in the sun— and serious gray eyes. Everything about her was serious, was the truth of it. She even walked serious. When she’d moved in a year ago, he’d assumed it would be only a matter of time until he slept with her, but he’d been wrong about that. She didn’t take nonsense, that was what. Had none of that do-anything-once spirit to her that he found so necessary in the women he slept with. Lighten up, baby. Smile every once in a while, why don’t you? “Indigestion, huh?” she said. “Listen, I tell you what. Why don’t you go upstairs to my room, the good room, and turn on the air conditioner and lie down up there for a while and get cooled off? I’m going to call Al and have him check you out.” “Nah,” he said. “Don’t.” But she was already heading for the phone, marching over to the counter like somebody who had been prevented long enough from doing what she knew was right.
they’d met last year at the Junior Campfire Boys Club for Preschoolers, or whatever the hell it was called. He never could remember the exact name of the thing; it was one of those make-work things people today couldn’t get enough of, was his loudly voiced opinion, but apparently you had to join stuff these days if you wanted your kid to make it in the world. Further evidence of the decline of American civilization: you couldn’t send kids out to play on their own anymore. You had to enroll them in play, arrange all their friendships for them. Playtime had gotten to be like a business meeting. He and Jamie had been the outsiders right from the beginning.
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Everybody knew they were different: they stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. She was a newcomer to town, a member of the socalled new wave of artists who all the locals said had ruined the downtown, bringing in art galleries and massage therapists and coffeehouses with untenable things like soy lattes where there had once been hardware stores and clothing shops. Plus, she dressed as if she’d gone into her closet and started pulling random things out of it and putting them on without looking at them— layers of shirts with lace edges poking out from underneath and wisps of scarves and little crocheted vests, skirts and leggings, or else jeans so old they were torn up and paint-spattered. So naturally nobody knew how to talk to her— all the other women in their khakis and polo shirts, with their foldeddown white socks and tennis shoes, turning to look at her as if she had three heads. Even Harris, who was not exactly up on fashion, knew women well enough to know that nobody was going to try to befriend her if she insisted on wearing that patchwork skirt. But what the hell? He didn’t fit in himself, being a gray-haired grandfather instead of one of the young dads, so it wasn’t as if anybody knew how to act around him either. The whole thing was ridiculous, and he would have left if Christopher hadn’t had such a good time there. He dragged himself to the meetings, and stood around feeling out of place, and then one day— might have been at the fourth meeting— he was standing across from her at the back of the room, watching all the ridiculous parents who were trying too hard to make sure their little tykes got to be first and best in everything. He looked over at Jamie, and their eyes met. Her shoulders started shaking with laughter, and she put up her hand to hide her face. He felt himself light up: he was not alone. There was a kindred spirit, even here, in this stupid gymnasium, at this stupid meeting. It wasn’t until after they’d been going to the meetings for a few months and taking the boys out for ice cream afterward that she told him she was looking for a new place to live on account of her sister Lucy had let some guy move into the apartment they shared,
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and this guy smoked, and Arley had asthma, and oh, it was a big mess over there. She wasn’t complaining or anything, just telling him like this was a neutral story about her life. No whining. He liked that. He’d looked down at his hands and cleared his throat a few times and then told her that if she really needed a place . . . well, the fact was he had some room, he and Christopher were pretty much rattling around in that big farmhouse of his. After he said it, he was immediately scared she’d say yes. She didn’t. She said she appreciated the offer and she’d like to think about it, was that all right? He’d been both relieved and disappointed, he realized. But then, when she did accept his offer a few days later, he understood it had been a damn good idea, one of his most inspired moments, actually. The boys were already best friends, and even though Harris was doing fine on his own, he was sick of his own cooking and his own company. A week later, she and Arley had arrived with their stuff, and Harris had even been moved to give her the master bedroom upstairs, the room with the air conditioner; they laughed and called it the “good room.” He’d started sleeping on the sunporch, downstairs. He didn’t mind. She needed to be near where she could hear her boy breathing in the night. Harris’s friend Cooksey— who also happened to be the police chief, so he had about five times the number of suspicions that other people had— told Harris he’d better be careful, letting some young woman move into his house. “You think it’s because you’re so irresistible to women, but what if she’s one of those New York golddigger types and is really out to take you for all you’ve got? Eh? What then?” he’d said. That had cracked Harris up. He’d wiggled his hips suggestively, which made Cooksey madder. Aw, so what? Let Cooksey think that Jamie was hot for him. What the hell did Cooksey and the other old coots know about being friends with a woman anyway? And the part about the gold digging— now, that was a laugh. There wasn’t any gold to be dug. Jamie had had some bad luck with men, but she was down-to-
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earth and practical, and— how could he ever explain this so Cooksey could understand?— it was great, it was enough, to have her standing barefoot in his kitchen at night when the boys were in bed, painting her landscapes from photographs and listening to classical music. Things were calm around her, as if she had her own private force field. Besides that, she cooked wonderful food and she knew how to play with the boys, and she listened, really listened to all his stories, and told him stories back, and she laughed at his jokes and poked fun at him. She thought he was wise; so why mess that up by sleeping with her and proving her wrong? She and the boys— they were his family now, and here was the truth: they’d tamed him. His eyes welled up, thinking about it. “Harris, go on upstairs,” she was saying. “Go on, you crazy old man. Listen. I’ll even throw in a back rub.” A back rub. He laughed. “Yeah. Laugh all you want, you old galoot. I’ve been trained in them,” she said. “Adult-ed course. Nobody better than me at it.” He felt a little flicker of wonder through his haze. Did back rub really mean back rub to her, or had she picked this moment, when he was more bent over and washed up than he’d ever been in his whole life, to take things up a notch and . . . well, do it with him? That would be some kind of weird but lovely irony, wouldn’t it? He looked over at her, at her wavery gray eyes wide with feeling, saw her brush back her little curlicues of hair and tuck them behind her ears like parentheses. He could barely catch his breath, he felt such a vast expanse of love just then— for her, for everything. Love, that was all there was. It sounded so ridiculous, but this whole kitchen, this whole town, the soy lattes and everything, everything was made up of it, and he couldn’t think why he hadn’t seen it before. He saw a flash picture of his wife, Maggie, by the stove, halflaughing at him over something he’d said, the old wife-o-saurus he’d called her then; then, flash, the picture shifted and he saw Nate standing here cradling the newborn baby and, oh no, Nate is crying,
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sobbing, wearing an old ratty T-shirt and four days of beard growth; and shift again and it’s Harris holding the baby, but the baby isn’t poor motherless Christopher, it’s Nate, who’s just been born, and Harris doesn’t know how to make him calm, so he’s singing his high-school fight song, which doesn’t work; flash, the red linoleum is all curled up in the corners and he loves it, that and even the worn place where Maggie had stood so many days and nights washing dishes at the sink, and the peeling paint on the walls, the wainscoting coming loose in the corner, all the things he didn’t do are still not done, but it doesn’t matter. Harris can see all the winters and summers here, all rolled into one big moment: himself walking up the path from the pond the first time he caught a trout, the wood smoke from the stove, the way the buttery sunlight comes slanting in and hits the kitchen cabinets just so on autumn mornings; he feels the snap in the air, and now the heaviness of the wet humidity, so heavy today it slams into you and you can’t breathe it in, but it’s okay. All of it is good. All so very good. There’d been no need to fix all this; it was right, it was perfect, just the way it was. My God, he thought, it was love. Who knew it was love all along? He leaned forward to touch Jamie, tipping himself into the depths of her slow, patient gray eyes, as wide and deep as ponds, and he said happily— even though his voice felt like it was stuck somewhere in his throat— he said, “One thing to know.” She looked at him. He tried to remember what he had been about to say about all the love. “I’ll help you up the stairs,” she said. “Bring,” he said. A moment went by. He started again. “Bring,” he said, “a gin and tonic.” “I will,” she said. I will. Like what they say at weddings. He exhaled a long, slow, sacred breath and made his way slowly up the stairs, the beloved, worn wooden stairs.
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chapter 2
S
o he went upstairs and dropped dead. First, though— and this is the part Jamie thought she would never come to understand or explain to anybody— he took off all his clothes and lay down in the middle of her bed. He sprawled himself out on the Indian-print bedspread and stared up at the ceiling like a man awaiting a visitation from something in the overhead light fixture. She didn’t know this right away. She came into the room— her bedroom, the one he’d given her a year ago— carrying the gin and tonic, with its ice cubes clanking against the side of the glass, her hand shaking a little from the heat, or from nerves. She’d spent the morning thinking about a painting she wanted to do, a new one— she wanted to paint the beat-up old wooden kitchen table, with its scars and cracks, and the daisies sitting in the green glass jelly jar just off-center. She’d been distracted and excited all morning, her mind going over and over the rich catalog of ochres and tans and browns she’d buy at the art-supply store, impatient to begin now that she had the idea— and then Harris had come stumbling inside looking like a bologna sandwich that had been left out in the sun, and she’d once again fallen
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into the pit of dread. She was the mother of a little boy who got sick suddenly, so she knew this feeling, the fear that everything is going irrevocably wrong and that she’s powerless to stop it. It was the familiar territory of her nightmares. Her room with the shades down was dark and still hot, and the window air conditioner, which Harris must have turned on, was wheezing away as if it was responsible for breathing enough for the two of them and could barely keep up. “So do you want the back rub first or the drink first?” she was saying as she came in. She’d called Dr. Al’s office before she’d come upstairs, but Violet had said the doctor was running far behind today and couldn’t come to the phone. Maybe he could come and check Harris out after work. They’d both agreed that would probably be fine, although Jamie had been less sure. “You feeling any better?” she said, moving toward the bed, but Harris didn’t stir. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and that’s when she realized. She put a hand over her mouth. His eyes were open but unseeing, and he had one arm flung across his chest and the other at a weird angle on the bedspread. Then she saw that he was naked, and she was so startled that for a moment all she could do was stare at him. Naked! What had he been thinking, taking off all his clothes? Could he have imagined that a back rub required nudity? She couldn’t help but glance down at his poor old penis, flopped over like a tired featherless bird sitting on its mossy nest. His chest was hairy, with gray brambles rising everywhere, only now it looked caved in, as if somebody had sat on it and dented it. That was it: he looked deflated, like a black-and-white drawing of himself. She made herself lean down, put her hand on his heart, and feel the silence there. Maybe, she thought, she should try to do CPR, but she couldn’t remember what she had learned in that course so long ago, a Girl Scout course back in seventh grade, wasn’t it? Why hadn’t she ever thought she’d need to know this? And anyway, she knew it wouldn’t work. He was already gone. Her blood started whooshing in
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her ears. She folded her arms close to her body and wished somebody else was there, somebody who could tell her this was going to be okay. And she wished his pants were on. She was shivering, even in the heat, and it was hard to breathe. It was as though the air had grown thorns that caught in her windpipe as it went down. The phone. She had to call someone. She had to stop standing there being scared and look for the telephone, which had never once been in its stand when she’d needed it. Harris always called the phone charger the mother ship. “Come back, o ye telephone!” he would call out. “Come back to the mother ship!” The phone turned out to be underneath a pile of her clean laundry on top of her dresser, next to her hairbrush, bottles of moisturizer, tubes of eyeliner, and a bottle of vanilla massage oil. When she could trust herself to speak, she called 911. Her hand was so sweaty and shaky that the phone kept slipping out of her grasp, and finally she had to wrap it up in the hem of her skirt so she could hold on to it. The person who answered already knew her address when she tried to give it. Of course they knew the address. That was what 911 was. She’d called 911 for Arley a couple of times when he’d been having one of his asthma attacks. Once it had been a false alarm— he’d been choking and had gotten panicky, but then he was fine so she had simply hung up the phone without giving an address, but even so, the EMTs showed up, all of them rushing toward her with alertness in their eyes, ready with oxygen and medications, wanting to be of use. She’d wanted to throw her arms around them, serve them tea and cookies, to show how grateful she was for their effort. When she got off the phone, she stood there and looked at Harris. Then she eased herself down onto the side of the bed, careful not to touch him. The pinkness was leaking out of him now; he was gray and waxy-looking. “Oh my God, I’m so very sorry,” she said out loud. “I should have called 911 right when you said you were frungy. That is not a real thing people say.” It was hard to look at him, and yet it was also hard to look away.
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This was the first time she’d seen a dead person up close this way. A corpse. The body. How could he just be . . . gone? Not here anymore, not himself. Just like that! She reached over and touched his arm softly, which already didn’t feel like something that was quite alive. She drew her hand away. There were a couple of tiny details she wished they could have discussed. Like, what she should do about Christopher. Why hadn’t he turned to her in the kitchen and, instead of talking about a gin and tonic, said something practical to her, like, “Here’s what I want you to tell Christopher, and here’s what Nate needs to know. And oh, by the way, here’s where Nate’s phone number is located, and here’s where I’m to be buried.” She covered her face with her hands. She had the wild feeling that maybe she could rewind the tape of this day, zoom backward to him and her in the kitchen, do it right this time. She would take him by the hand, she would insist with Violet that Dr. Al come right over, she would find the phone numbers of everyone who needed to know. She was starting to cry now, tears backing up in her throat. Damn. Where were Harris’s people? How was it that she, a housemate picked because she happened to have a kid the same age as his grandson, had come to be his closest human being? She could hear the sirens now in the distance. When the ambulance crews came and took over, then she would go and get in her car and drive to the school, and she would tell Christopher as gently as she could that his grandfather had died today. The words would come from somewhere. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. The trouble was not in how to make him understand— he knew plenty about loss— but how to make the world seem like a place where you were safe to love people, when so many had disappeared on him. He was only five, but he’d lost his mom, his dad had run away, and now his grandfather . . . gone. Who could bear to tell a child this? Harris had told her once that it was only by being with Christopher that he’d learned to forgive himself for all the mistakes he’d made with his wife and his own son. It was only by loving Christopher
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that he’d learned not go to around having to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” to himself all the time. “Sometimes you get a second chance,” he’d said one night on the porch swing. “And when you get a second chance in life”— she remembered the way he’d stopped and smiled at her— “well, that’s just grace, honey, is all that is.”
the sirens screamed to a halt outside the house, and she jumped up. What had she been thinking, just sitting there? She should have realized what the rescue people were going to see when they got in here: Harris, nude, stretched out on her bed, and the gin and tonic sitting on the dresser right next to the vanilla massage oil. Already she could hear the banging on the front door, and then before she could even think to go downstairs and let them in, the ambulance people were coming through the unlocked door, calling, “Hello? Hello?” and pounding the wood floors, as though they were running through the house looking for the trouble they’d come to fix. The house seemed to shake from their footsteps. How many of them had come— the whole town? Everybody who owned a police scanner? She might still be able to put Harris’s shorts on him— no, no, she had to put his shorts on. All she had to do was flip him up and slide them right up his legs and over the rump, the way you did for little kids. But the voices were getting closer, there was running on the stairs, and then she could hear that the first contingent had arrived upstairs— the first emergency guy was just outside the room, in the hallway. No doubt it wouldn’t work to call out, “Just a minute!” in a little singsong voice as if you’d been interrupted in the bathroom. She grabbed the gin and tonic. At least she could get rid of this. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it— run with it down the stairs, pour it into the trash can, stash it under the bed, drink it— she was trying to make up her mind, and then it was too late. The door was flung open, and she was standing over Harris, holding both
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his pants and the glass in midair, looking toward the doorway with what she knew was a startled, frozen, horrified look stuck there on her face. The emergency guy looked just as horrified. They stared at each other. “He’s dead,” she said. Her voice was so thick she didn’t even recognize it. “I think he died.” The room was suddenly full of people, all working on him, talking, hooking him up to things, listening to him, thumping his chest. She was in the way, so she kept moving to the side, fading backward into the woodwork, mashed against the dresser for a while, and then she was in the way there, too. Somewhere she’d let go of his shorts, but she held onto the melty gin and tonic as if for dear life. People were talking, and their walkie-talkies crackled with little bursts of static, perhaps other calls that would probably have to be made at some point when this was over. Occasionally someone would look over at her as though she were a piece of furniture that had acquired the power of movement somehow, and so she kept squeezing herself into smaller and smaller spaces, trying to get herself to the door and out of it. To go down the hall, down the stairs, and out into the sunlight. She absolutely had to go get the boys. That was the main thing now. She couldn’t bear the thought of them arriving home on the school bus like on any ordinary day, walking up the driveway with their little lunch boxes swinging, expecting Harris to meet them, and instead finding . . . this. She finally made it over to the doorway and inched her way out into the hall, where there was air again, and sunlight. She felt so lightheaded she thought she might actually fall down. But then she heard someone mumble from the bedside, perhaps unaware of how voices could carry: “Wow, we know what this is, don’t we? A clear-cut case of a man being fucked to death.” There was an answering low, dirty laugh. “Yep. Coming and going at the same time.”
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More laughter, then talk she couldn’t hear. She stared into the gin and tonic, wondering if she could stop shaking long enough to go in there and scream, or if it would do any good anyway. Somebody else said, “So, hey, looks like old Nate the Great is gonna have to come and raise his own kid. Wonder how he’s going to take that.” “Oh, boohoo,” somebody else said.
and then cooksey arrived. Frank Cooksey had been Harris’s best friend since the two of them were in second grade, or as Harris had once put it, since God himself was in short pants. They were complete opposites in personality, but after sixty years that probably didn’t matter much. By now, they were glued together by history, which was way more important than temperament. Harris was easygoing; he broke things and put them back together all slipshod and never worried about a thing, just drank beer and told long, colorful stories. Cooksey had always specialized in a kind of pessimism, and somehow his ability to worry had driven him straight up through the ranks of the police department, until he’d become chief. At least that’s what Harris had told Jamie. Now Cooksey saw himself as the arbiter of the town’s deportment, which was a source of constant disappointment to him. All these artists moving in and displacing farmers and other decent folks, taxes going up, people drinking lattes instead of regular coffee, and going off getting in car accidents because they didn’t have the sense not to talk on their goddamned cell phones while they drove their kids to soccer practice and art lessons. All this change, this stupidity— it made him tense, gave him agita. What was even worse, Harris had told her, what was really at the core of Cooksey’s personality disorder was that he and his saintly wife, Julia, had raised four daughters, and not one of them had managed to make a go of it out in the world. Go figure. That was Cooksey’s real
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grief: the fact that his daughters were constantly coming back home, leaving their husbands and boyfriends or being left by them, weeping and moaning, dragging their children with them, moving back into the spare room so Mama could take care of them. Cooksey never had any peace and quiet. Nobody kept their marriage vows anymore, he liked to say. Half his sentences started with “Kids today . . .” Why, he’d been forced to start organizations like the damned Preschool Campfire Kids just so his grandkids would have some contact with healthy adults. That was the trouble. Here all Cooksey wanted was to sit on the porch alone with Julia drinking whiskey sours and raising show dogs, and not have to answer one more emergency phone call. He was sick and tired of saving people from their own stupid mistakes. Why couldn’t they act right for a change— suck it up and be adults? And now this. He came walking in the front door, his uniform all perfectly pressed, as always, his bars and ribbons lined up just right, as always, his bald head gleaming. Jamie had never been so glad to see him. “Oh, Frank, thank goodness you’re here!” she cried out, and then, too late, saw his face, twisted and terrible. His eyes were livid, and as he came up the stairs, she felt the wind go out of her. How could she have forgotten that he didn’t like her? He wasn’t going to want to join with her in mourning Harris; the truth was he didn’t think she had any right to be living there in the first place. Now she remembered: Harris had once laughingly told her that Cooksey was sure she was a gold digger and that she and Harris were having wild sex day and night on the kitchen table. They’d had a good laugh over that one. But the truth was she was so distraught that even though warning bells were going off all over the place, she couldn’t stop talking. “It’s so terrible! Harris was outside in this heat, working on the house, and I don’t know what happened, but he came inside and he could barely talk, and when he did, he said the wrong words— I can’t
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remember what he said, but it was all weird— ” She faltered, seeing the way he was glaring at her, and she took a different tack. “He was so great, such a wonderful person, but you know how stubborn he was, and he shouldn’t have been working outside today on the hottest— ” “Weird?” he said, drawing back, as if that had been the only word she’d said, and it was an unbelievable insult. “Harris dies, and that’s what you call it? Weird? Well, I have a weird question for you. Why the hell didn’t anybody try to get him out of the hot sun? Huh? Just where were you when this was going on?” “I was— ” He looked down at the drink she was holding, and her eyes followed. “What’s this?” he said. “Enjoying a little toast, were you?” She didn’t know what he meant. “Or is this what you killed him with?” He reached over and took it out of her hand, which had begun to shake like crazy. “Matthews, come take this. We’ll need to test this in the lab,” he said. What? What? He thought she’d killed Harris? She almost started to laugh. She could feel the bubbles of hysterical laughter coming up. “Wait a second,” she said. “Now just wait. You— don’t thi— ” A cop materialized by her side, and Cooksey handed him the glass. “I want to know what’s in this. Run it in for me, will you? And you stay right here,” he told Jamie. “I don’t want you to move a muscle until I’ve checked things out.” He went into the bedroom, which had grown silent. People had all been listening to him talk to her; they had stopped their conversations, and now it seemed they were even falling away from the body, making way for Cooksey to get to the bedside. There was a long, hideously quiet moment, during which Jamie squeezed her eyes shut and leaned against the wall, and then Cooksey said: “What the hell is this? He was naked? What the hell was going on here? Christ in heaven! Scanlon, where are you? Take that woman downstairs and
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make sure she does not leave the premises. Get her statement, and make it good.” Somebody said something else too low for her to hear, and then Cooksey yelled, “Who the hell knows? Just keep her here for questioning. Find out everything you can. Okay, now get everything wrapped up here. I’ve gotta go figure out where that son-of-a-bitch son of his got to and notify him. And then I want a squad car to go pick up Christopher Goddard at school and take him to my house. I’ll call my wife and tell her to get a bed ready for him.” He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Jesus God in heaven, Harris. What the hell were you thinking, old man?” People started rushing around. She could see inside the room, where someone had brought the sheet up over Harris and someone else was moving the paramedics’ machines to the corner. She wiped her hands on her skirt, smoothed down her hair, and went to the doorway. When she got there, she said, “No.” Nobody seemed to hear her so she said it again: “NO.” Two or three of the technicians looked in her direction, little nervous flicks of glances. Cooksey was reading a clipboard, and he ignored her. Take a deep breath. Don’t fall over. “Nobody else needs to pick up Christopher. I’m going to get him,” she said in as strong a voice as she could muster. “I’m going to get him, and then he’s staying with me.” It was unimaginable, being without Christopher tonight. He needed her, and she needed to be with him. Just in the last few months he had started letting her cuddle him at night while she read him and Arley a story. And sometimes lately, every now and then, he’d forget and call her Mom, and then— this broke her heart— he’d dip his head down and lick his lips nervously, as if he was scared of being corrected. He had to be with her! Cooksey could not be allowed to take him away, not on this day of all days. He had to stay here. Cooksey let out a long sigh. “No,” he said. “For once you’re going to do what you’re told. You don’t even know where you’re going to
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be by the end of the day. I might arrest you here and now, you know that?” “Frank, look at me. You know I didn’t do anything to hurt Harris,” she said. “He wasn’t feeling well, and I offered to give him a back rub, that’s what this was— ” “Go on downstairs with Scanlon and fill out your statement. You’re not the one calling the shots here. Foster, you go over to the school before it lets out— and, Sullivan, find Nate Goddard, and then call my wife.” “No! Please. Listen to me. I’ll make out a statement, and I’ll tell you exactly what happened,” Jamie said, “but then I want to go pick up the boys from school.” He had turned away, but she went around him and stood in front of him. “Please! Frank, it’s important that Christopher stay with me and with Arley tonight. He’s going to be scared enough, and he shouldn’t be separated from us.” “Scanlon, take her downstairs.” “We’re the people he lives with and knows the best.” “Scanlon!” “Besides, this is what Harris would have wanted. You know it is, Frank. He’d want Christopher to feel safe and to be at home.” “Harris would have wanted to be alive, too,” he said. “But he didn’t get that privilege, did he?” She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Why are you doing this? You know I didn’t do anything to hurt him. I tried to help him.” “Yeah, I know the kind of help you were offering. What the hell was Harris doing in your bed with no pants on, Jamie? Try to stand there and tell me I’ve been wrong about you and Harris all this time.” She looked around, aware that every medical technician and cop in the place had turned to statues. She lowered her voice and stepped closer to Frank, licked her dry lips, tried to summon up moisture in her mouth. “Listen, I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not true. It wasn’t true. We weren’t lovers, I promise you that. You know we weren’t. I offered him a back rub, and then when I came upstairs— ”
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“I don’t know anything anymore! I know what’s in front of my face. What the hell did you want with an old man, anyway?” he said. “Why couldn’t you have let him be? You and your sister— what is it with the two of you? Why can’t you go back to New York, or wherever the hell you came from, and leave this place alone?” She looked straight into his face, praying that she wasn’t going to faint or lose her nerve. He had a little piece of white spittle on his lip, and she stared at that. “Please, Frank. Listen to me. Harris and I were friends, that’s all. Good friends. Now let me take Christopher for tonight. He’s going to be so scared if he has to go somewhere else. Come on. Please. Just for tonight. Think of what Harris would say— he’d want him to be home with us.” “Oh, you think so? That kid has got a father, you know. Not much good, if you ask me, but he is going to be notified, and then he’s going to come here and take him, God help us all.” “I know. Just until his father gets here. That’s all I ask.” He let out a big sigh, looked skyward, and blinked a few times. Oh, God, he was going to cry. But instead he cleared his throat, turned away, took control of himself. And then, praise the Lord, his cell phone rang, buying her a little more time. He yanked the thing out of his pocket and walked a few steps away so he could talk. She stood there feeling the sweat trickling down the sides of her body, listening to the squawking on the other end of the phone. She didn’t have a single intention of losing this battle; she stood there, coolly, staring at him, certain of winning. By the time he finished the call and snapped the phone shut, she had his number. Here he’d lost his best friend and, instead of letting himself feel bad and join with other people who also felt sad, he needed somebody to blame for it. It was too hard even to think that Harris’s heart had simply given out. No, it had to be somebody’s fault. He pushed his sunglasses up on top of his bald head and rubbed his eyes. She watched his jaw muscle working back and forth. Then he said heavily, “Goddamn girls. Another one on her way home
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tonight with three kids.” He sighed. “What a day. Of all days.” He stared down at the clipboard for a moment and then said in an aggrieved tone, “Okay. You can keep Christopher overnight. But when Harris’s son gets here, you’re out. You understand that?” “Sure. Okay.” “Because this is his house and his boy. I don’t know what you were after with this old man, but this isn’t yours— none of this is. There’s no money for you here, you know that.” “I would never— ” she started and then thought better of it. He was an ignorant old man. The world was all black and white to him: everything was either for sex or money. “Yeah. Of course. I never thought . . .” For a moment he stood looking at her, his eyes sad. “Goddamn it to hell. He just didn’t know he was mortal. Thought he could have young chicks all the way into his hundreds.” He wiped at his eyes. “Go. Get out of here.”
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