“Hey, Mom.” Zach side-eyed his mother, who sat at the breakfast table at an angle more acute than usual. “You tired? It’s only seven o’clock.”
She smiled weakly. “Your mother’s getting old.”
Shep could feel it, that for Zach suddenly the whole happy-family playacting was too much. The boy didn’t know that until a week ago his father was about to abscond to the east coast of Africa, and he didn’t know that his mother had just been diagnosed with a rare and deadly cancer, much less did he know that as far as his mother was concerned the disease was his father’s fault. But these hardly incidental unsaids emitted the equivalent of the high-frequency sound waves that convenience stores now broadcast outside their shop fronts to keep loitering gangs from the door. What dulled adult ears could no longer detect was unbearable to adolescents, and the same might be said of emotional fraud. Zach popped his pizza pocket early from the toaster and took his half-frozen dinner in a paper towel upstairs without even bothering with “See ya.”
Roast chicken, boiled potatoes, and steamed green beans. Glynis commended his preparation, but only picked. “I feel fat,” she admitted.
“You’re underweight. It’s only fluid. You have to stop thinking like that.”
“Suddenly I’m supposed to become a different person?”
“You can be the same person who eats more.”
“Your chicken,” she said, “is probably not what I feel so little appetite for.” This was surely true. Given the purpose of food, an appetite at meals implied an appetite for the future.
Just then Shep was filled with the useless but overpowering sensation that he did not want this to be happening. It was almost as if, should he refuse to allow it staunchly enough, much as he had sometimes to stand up to Zach and forbid any more computer games until his grades improved, it would go away. It did not go away, and the feeling passed. He stood behind her chair and slid his hands down her shoulders, leaning to nuzzle her temple with the butt of his head like an affectionate horse.
“This is not why,” she said, “any self-respecting woman would want her husband to stay.”
“Oh, I don’t think I’d have been able to go, up against it. Even without this.” Another small sacrifice – of his opinion of himself. But then, maybe he really wouldn’t have gone to Pemba, in the end. As the Wedding Fountain purling in the next room reminded, he was made of water.
“What if I’d found out a week or two later?” It was understood that they would keep their discourse allusive – never specifying this what is not why any woman wants her husband to stay, go where up against it, found out what a week or two later – in case Zach came back downstairs. Elliptical dialogue that most parents would recognize, it reliably backfired; eavesdropping children filled in the blanks with their worst fears. Little matter. From this conversation, Zach would be hard pressed to infer anything worse than the facts.
“Then you’d have told me,” he said, “and I’d have come back.”
“You just said that you’d never have gone in any event.”
“You were being hypothetical. I was, too. Please, don’t hold onto it.”
The request was ludicrous. Ten years ago her sister Ruby sent a present of a desktop pen set, and a logo on the base betrayed that it was a freebie from Citibank; Glynis had unfailingly recalled the insult on every subsequent birthday. More recently, Petra Carson, her best friend-cum-nemesis from art school, had foolishly taken at face value Glynis’s urging to be critical, and tentatively ventured that her Bakelite-inlaid fish slice was “maybe a little chunky”; the poor woman had been trying to make up for the gaffe with over-the-top compliments on Glynis’s flatware ever since, but to little avail. If Glynis couldn’t relinquish grievances over re-gifting or underappreciative comments about her metalwork, the likelihood that she’d forgive and forget attempted marital desertion was on the low side.
Depleted, Glynis decided to turn in early, and Shep promised to join her soon. Once she went upstairs, he walked onto the front porch. The golf course across the road lost its prissiness in the dark, and could almost pass for wilderness. It was cold and clear. Coatless, he braved the chill, following the course of an airplane accelerating across the stars, waiting until the distant whine subsided and he could see the red taillights no more. Then he went inside, locked up for the night, and padded upstairs to his study. A line of light still shone from Zach’s bedroom, so he closed the door. He unfolded the e-ticket printouts from the bottom desk drawer. They bore today’s date. Sheet by sheet he fed them to the shredder. The maw ground the pages with an intestinal growl; in the basket below, The Afterlife curled to crushed confetti. He’d bought the shredder to guard against identity theft; queer that the machine itself was now stealing who he had been.
Finally, he settled before his computer and went to the Web page whose address the search engine brought up after three keystrokes. When he reached “Survival Rates,” he refused to pause even briefly; taking the plunge without hesitation had always been the best approach to diving into the icy White Mountains swimming hole of his boyhood. He scrolled down. He read carefully to the end of the section, and then read it a second time. Once he shut down the computer, he tried to cry softly, that he not wake his wife.
At Randy Handy – a salacious staff sobriquet so obvious that you’d think Pogatchnik would have headed it off with a company name less vulnerable to perversion – Jackson had adopted a new perspective. He’d let his co-workers make all the sarcastic remarks about Shep and his pathetic “escape fantasy” they liked. Eventually they were bound to find out why the former owner was still yes-massahing Pogatchnik, and then they’d feel bad. Really fucking bad. Jackson was looking forward to it.
He’d concede that in the friendship he’d long played something of a sidekick, but starting with the god-awfully stupid sale of Knack, which demoted Shep from boss to fellow schmo, and now with the plain godawful business of Glynis and the Fall of Pemba, that dynamic had subtly flipped. These days he was Shep’s protector. The role came at a price. He couldn’t ask for anything. When Shep had been the stoic stalwart, he could lean on the guy. No, he hadn’t ever put his hand out (like everybody else in the schmuck’s life). Still, what with Flicka, an on-again-off-again predilection for gambling, and a not-unrelated little difficulty with credit card debt, he’d always been the one with the problems who needed advice. Now he had to keep his mouth shut, and for Jackson keeping his mouth shut, ever, about anything, was unnatural.
That said, there was one subject he’d been tempted to raise for some time, and at least on this point he was relieved to have a better reason to put it off than the usual cowardice. It wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about with other men, even if it should have been, since you sure weren’t going to talk about it with women. Besides, there was something to be said for the restoration of the concept of privacy in a country where at the average bus stop you were as likely to be regaled with the story of some stranger’s abortion as asked for a light. He’d set the date anyway, so there was nothing, really, to discuss.
When they left at 1:00 p.m. for their stingy forty-minute lunch break, Shep asked if maybe they could walk instead of eat; intent on getting straight home to Glynis after work, he could no longer make time for their tri-weekly weight-lifting sessions at the Fifth Avenue Gym. (Jackson was a little relieved to get out of the team workouts; Shep always showed him up.) Though forgoing his sandwich made him