Occupational Hazard

On a Friday, during his inspection of the sludge containment tank at the East Winder Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant, Calvin’s foot slipped off the catwalk—it was raining, the metal was wet—and his left work boot and left leg became submerged up to the knee in treated sewage.

“Whoops,” said the plant manager beside him. The plant had a history of noncompliance, and the inspection had been unscheduled, causing the manager’s big-cheeked Irish face to grow and stay red as Calvin lifted samples. Now the man visibly cheered up. “Occupational hazard,” he said merrily.
 

“Shit,” said Calvin. The sludge plastered his pants to his shin, oozed underneath the tongue of his boot. The manager showed him the hose, and he rinsed most of it off, but he knew the smell—sewage sweetened with chemicals—would inhabit the interior of his battered Taurus for days.

“Fragrant truffle,” said Dave Lott back at the office, sniffing thoughtfully as Calvin passed his cube. “Hints of coriander.”

“Right,” said Calvin.

“Eau de toilette,” Dave Lott said.

Calvin snorted.

It was past five-thirty, and the office—twelve beige cubicles at sea in the middle of a low-ceilinged room—was nearly empty. Calvin parked himself in his cube, which shared a wall with Dave Lott’s, and glumly logged onto his computer. His shin and his foot felt clammy, but he was determined to ignore it for the fifteen minutes he needed to write up his report. Sometimes discomfort sharpened his brain, he’d noticed. On Calvin’s other side, Robin, the sole female inspector, stood to put on her jacket, pulling an arm’s length of thin, flat red hair out from the collar and letting it slap flatly against her back. It was so long that she probably hadn’t cut it in twenty years, like the missionary women Calvin had known in church as a kid. But he always liked watching her
bring it up out of her jacket. It was long enough for her to sit on.

“Nuances of anise,” Dave Lott said. “An-us. Get it?”

“Blow it up yours,” Calvin said.

“Ah, poopy jokes,” said Robin tiredly, on her way down the hall. “They never get old.”

When she was gone, Dave Lott stood and peered at Calvin over the divider. He was a stout bald man with a gray thicket of a beard. The beard was an upside down triangle, shaped like pubic hair, Calvin had thought more than once. But you’d never say that kind of thing to Dave Lott’s face. Calvin liked the guy, but carefully. He reminded Calvin of a cop, the way he could joke around and then get serious, all of a sudden, pulling rank and leaving you feeling like a jerk. Dave Lott’s eyes were as gray as his beard, small and round, tiny gravel pits above gold-speckled half-glasses. The glasses were the magnifying kind you bought at the drugstore. The kind old ladies wore, which was another thing you’d never say to Dave Lott’s face.

“Grab a beer?” Dave Lott said.

“Sorry, man. Got to get home.”

Dave Lott nodded and pushed up the gold glasses, ambiguously, with his middle finger.

“Got to get out of these pants,” Calvin said.

It was Thursday, and Calvin’s wife, Jill, had her GRE class, and he had to watch the boys. Jill hated Dave Lott, though she wouldn’t use the word hate. Everything was dislike, and now even the boys only disliked okra and disliked string beans, which sounded creepy to Calvin, coming from them—too much calm specificity. Jill disliked Dave Lott. She was friends with the man’s first wife in the way he’d noticed women were friends, with the need to designate an opponent so they could know they were on the same side.

“Next time,” Calvin tacked on, but Dave Lott just grinned through his beard and was gone. In a few days the man would be dead, picked off the periphery of Calvin’s life, and Calvin would find himself trying to remember some significant detail about this, their last exchange; but in the moment there was only the dull noise of Dave Lott’s work boots on the cloudy plastic hall runners tacked over the carpet, the suck of the steel door closing behind him, the trace smell of sewage coming from Calvin’s own cube.

At home, Calvin’s boys were in the basement watching their favorite video, a cartoon of The Ten Commandments. Jill stood in the bathroom before the mirror, gripping the cordless phone between her chin and shoulder while she did her eye makeup.

“I know it,” she said into the phone. Her blue eyes flicked over Calvin as he popped his head in, and then she leaned into the mirror and blinked at herself. “I know it. No kidding.” She was pretty, still— not like a movie star but like women on aspirin commercials, trim, sensibly brunette, smiling much of the time. She and Calvin were at war. Jill claimed to want another child, to want to try for a girl, and Calvin had found himself boycotting sex until they talked about it reasonably, which meant, he knew she knew, until he talked her out of it. He felt—unreasonably perhaps—that this desire of hers had nothing to do with him, though he couldn’t prove that, of course, and couldn’t imagine trying to explain why it mattered. Whenever he caught himself admiring her, it pissed him off. Now he wished he’d gone out for a drink with Dave Lott after all.

He headed to the kitchen, opened a bottle of beer and stared out at the backyard. A domed jungle gym rose from the grass like half a skeleton planet. Last year, Calvin had looked away for a moment to tend the grill and Trent, then five, had fallen the wrong way. When Calvin looked back, his son had crumpled quietly to the ground, staring at his broken wrist, more confused than in pain.

Now there was a shuffle on the linoleum behind him. Trent, in the doorway, raised his skinny arms and intoned, “Thou shalt not covet.”

“Hey, bud,” said Calvin, crossing the floor and passing a hand over the boy’s fluffy brown hair.

“What’s covet, again?”

“When you want something that’s not yours.”

“And then you steal it.”

“No, I think it’s just wanting it. They’re separate commandments, aren’t they?”

The boy nodded. “What’s that smell?”

“Wastewater,” Calvin said. He knelt by his son, palmed the boy’s bony chest. Trent smelled a little too, kind of fruity, like he was due for
a bath, but Calvin liked it.

“Can I sip your beer?”

“Nope.”

“Can I hold it?”

Calvin handed him the bottle and took it back when Trent’s lips fitted over the top, moving like a feeding fish.

“What did I say,” said Calvin, standing. “Honor thy father and mother.”

“Drinking’s a sin,” Trent challenged.

“Drinking’s an indulgence. It’s like sugar. It’s fine if you don’t overdo it.”

“Sugar’s a treat,” Jill called from the hallway. “Drinking’s a habit.” Now she was standing in the doorway behind Trent, hands on her hips.

“Anything can be a habit,” Calvin said.

“You’d know,” Jill said.

“I’m sure that’s supposed to mean something,” Calvin said,“but you lost me.”

Jack, their four-year-old, called Trent from the basement and the older boy backed out of the doorway and disappeared. At the counter, Jill began silently assembling her sandwich. Calvin watched the side of her face as she spread peanut butter carefully to the edges of one slice of bread, then matched up the top slice, crust to crust, as if it took great concentration.

Two nights ago, he overheard her tucking in the kids at bedtime. She told them that she loved them more than anything else in the world. “More than daddy?” Trent said, and Calvin found himself automatically curious about how she might answer, and then abruptly not curious at all. He moved quickly on past the door.

Jill looked up from the sandwich and narrowed her eyes. “What’s that smell?”

Calvin extended his foot toward her. His pant leg was dry and stiff. “Occupational hazard.”

Jill nodded grimly. She lifted a knife from the block, carved her apple into quarters, and zipped it into a baggie.

“Dave Lott got it worse than me,” Calvin added, lying without knowing he was going to. “Up to the waist.”

“Yeah, well, you know what I think about that,” Jill said. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

*

The horrible news about Dave Lott came on Saturday night, when the boys were in bed. Calvin was watching Frontline while Jill studied at the dining room table. “Listen to this stuff,” she was saying. “Nine tracks, numbered 1-9, nine dogs, A-I. Dog A must always run in track 4. Dog G must always run beside Dog B, but never beside Dog C. Dog C always runs in track 8. Just to answer one question you have to make a chart, and it’s a timed test.”

The phone rang, and Calvin felt the mean satisfaction of answering it instead of responding to Jill.

“Calvin?” said a woman. For a second he couldn’t place her voice, then realized it was Robin, from work. She’d never called him at home before. “Listen,” she said.

He said, “Sure, hi Robin, go ahead,” wanting Jill to hear how polite he was, what a good guy other people thought he was, the kind of guy people from work could call at home. And there was something about Robin’s tone that made him consider the possibility of something sexual, some signals of a crush he’d missed. He felt tentatively flattered and compassionate. He anticipated telling Jill.

But then Robin kept talking, and Calvin was writing down the name of the hospital as if he needed the note to remember, as if both the boys hadn’t been born there. Dave Lott was sick with an infection. A freak thing, one in a million. A fast-acting strain of strep invading his soft tissue, shutting down the circulation to his limbs, eating him into a coma.

Jill stood in front of the television as he told her, working her feet in and out of her slippers one at a time. “Oh God,” she said. “From the sludge?”
Remembering his lie, Calvin had to shrug. “He had a paper cut,” he said. It could have been true, for all he knew. “He and Dora thought it was the flu, at first.” Dora was the second wife, and Jill rolled her eyes at the name.

“Well, I’m sorry,” Jill said. “It’s awful.” She stretched her mouth into a flat, frank grimace that said she was sorry Dave Lott was in bad shape but that she wasn’t going to change her opinion about him just because he was in the hospital, either.

Part of Calvin respected this—what he thought of as her bottom-line nature. But he disliked this about her too, and just now he wished he could think of something nasty to say, something to wipe the grimace right off her face. Inexplicably, he got a hard-on. He crossed his arms over his lap and leaned forward.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Jill said. “I said I was sorry.”

*

Calvin had always appreciated bacteria, with all their invisible processes. He liked the intricacy of their names—fecal coliform, Escherichia coli, the whole hardy bacillus species. Bacteria were the secret to waste management, after all, allowing humans to live virtually on top of each other. They were nature’s recyclers, breaking everything down to nutrients to be reabsorbed. It irritated Calvin the way people always acted like bacteria were the bad guys, and antibiotics were the good guys, because the antibiotics—their overuse, anyway—were what was screwing up the bacterial balance, tipping the scale toward the pathogenic. He’d shut down a few conversations with this rant. He’d refused to let the doctor prescribe antibiotics for his kids’ sinusitis, insisting that their bodies would take care of it, and he had been right. Sure there were harmful bacteria—everywhere, in fact. If wastewater treatment plants were a bacterial smorgasbord, so was your basic kitchen counter. So was the surface of your skin. Like dormant cancer cells, you carried around any number of things that could kill you if you got cut in the right place, if your immune system were sufficiently worn down. You couldn’t blame bacteria for killing Dave Lott, who was dead by Tuesday, before Calvin had even had a chance to stop by the hospital.

When the secretary sent out the mass voicemail, Calvin was the lone inspector in the office. He stood up and peered over the divider. There was Dave Lott’s dirty coffee cup. There was the picture of his daughter from a few years ago, ten or eleven, her hair pulled tightly into two ponytails. The room’s emptiness felt different, suddenly, and Calvin threw on his jacket and cleared out. We weren’t really friends, he reminded himself. Even before he’d left off the occasional beer after work, that’s all it had been—an occasional beer after work.

Outside, it was wet and chilly, with a substantial wind that whistled through some invisible gaps in the dash of his car. But the heater was enthusiastic, and even with the lingering sewage smell, he spent the afternoon driving two-lane roads he’d known his whole life. He turned on talk radio and didn’t listen. It seemed stupid to Calvin, now, not to have had more beers after work with Dave Lott. It made him feel weak and pushed around by his wife, even though she’d never exactly told him not to. Now he imagined that Dave Lott had seen him this way, weak and pushed around. In his head, Calvin had an imaginary conversation with Jill, in which he told her in no uncertain terms that he would continue to have drinks with Dave Lott and any other friend— acquaintance—he saw fit. Then he imagined another conversation in which he told her something similar, but in a more reasonable voice. Perhaps Jill would have drawn it out into a lengthy battle. Perhaps she would have griped for a few days, then let it go. Perhaps she would have, eventually, admired his loyalty, even to a man she would forever dislike for leaving his wife, her friend.

He’d intended to surprise the Blue Ridge Treatment Plant with a brief inspection, but he found himself passing the facility and turning onto the back road that led to the small farm where he’d grown up. His folks still lived there, though they’d stopped farming and had sold off their acreage bit by bit, for income. Now, radiating from the scabby old clapboard farmhouse were five brick ranch homes for families who worked in town and wanted to build in the country. He didn’t stop the car. Neither of Calvin’s parents was sick, though his father had had a bout with prostate cancer. They were fine. A little shakier to get up from the table after Sunday dinner, maybe, but that was all. Now he slowed down to make sure their truck was in the driveway, and then he sped up, hoping they wouldn’t see him pass if they happened to glance out the window.

*

Dave Lott’s first wife, Pat, and their daughter, Jennifer, lived three hours away in Indiana. “Of course you’ll stay with us,” said Jill into the phone, and they arrived the night before the funeral.

Pat struggled to get each foot out of the car—she was a short, bulky woman—and stood up into Jill’s arms. When they separated, Calvin saw that they were both dabbing at their eyes, though they’d had nothing good, between them, to say about Dave Lott when he was alive. Pat made a sound of perseverance—something like “whoo”—and smiled over at where Calvin stood three feet back on the grass. She reached for him, and he had no choice but to step in for a hug too. “Oh,” she said, patting his back with both hands, pressing herself hard into his stomach. After what seemed like an acceptable amount of time, he pushed back from her, but she gripped his upper arms.“This really brings everything back up for me,” she said. “This really peels the scab off the old wound.” She smiled again, bravely. She had one of those mouths where a strip of pink gum showed above her upper teeth. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t not notice, once you had. She held her smile and blinked at him, hard, until he felt compelled to smile back and nod as if he understood, as if they’d all been married to Dave Lott, as if he’d let them all down and now, on top of it all, he’d gone and died.

Through the open driver’s-side door, Calvin saw Jennifer in the passenger seat, picking at her chin in the lighted visor mirror. When she got out of the car, she let Jill hug her, but the girl looked as if she felt more captured than embraced.

Inside, Jill offered the guest bedroom and the couch.

“We’ll share the guest bedroom,” said Pat.

“I’ll take the couch,” said Jennifer.

Pat gave Jill a prim, significant pucker, which Calvin watched Jennifer ignore. The girl had ragged, dark bangs that fell into her eyes, and the rest of her hair had been drawn into a braid that went down the back of her head and then another inch or two down her neck. There was a name for this kind of braid, Calvin thought. He set the bags in the living room, for the time being.

“I told Jennifer she could watch the boys while the adults talk,” Pat said. “That would be fun for her. Take her mind off things.” She passed a hand over the girl’s forehead, brushing the long bangs out of her eyes. “Right, Jennifer?”

Jennifer’s head reared back from the hand, slightly, like a snake.

“Whatever you want to do, sweetie,” Jill said. “They’re in the basement occupied with a video. You can lie down, or read, or just
hang out with us. Who wants coffee?”

“Did you hear that, Jennifer?” Pat said.

Calvin wished the woman would give her daughter a moment’s peace. She seemed unable to stop addressing the girl. And touching her too. Now Pat was squeezing Jennifer’s shoulders, repeating, “whatever you feel like,” as the girl hunched into herself unhappily.

*

“Are you awake?” Jill asked Calvin that night, entering their bedroom and turning on a low light. She and Pat had stayed up late, talking in the kitchen.

Calvin kept his eyes closed. He heard the zipper of her jeans, and the shushing as she pushed them down her legs. She moved, unnecessarily, to the table on his side of the bed, and rummaged in a drawer. He could smell her. Then she moved to the dresser and he knew she was slipping into one of the short nightgowns she’d taken to wearing to bed ever since she’d gone off the pill. It took two to have a baby, she’d said, and even though she couldn’t force him, she’d informed him that she would no longer do her part to prevent anything.

“They’re having such a hard time,” Jill said. She turned off the light and got into bed. Under the covers, she pulled up the nightgown and pressed her bare breasts against his back. “Jennifer’s in such a difficult stage,” she said, moving her breasts against him. Her nipples grew hard, but just her intention, that she wanted something from him and was trying to get it her way, made her methods easier for him to ignore. “Dave wasn’t much of a father to her, but he was all she had.” She reached under the waistband of his shorts, from behind, moved her hand over his ass, and tried to work it between his legs. Calvin shifted away from her, slapping at her arm as if he were asleep.

“I know you’re awake,” said Jill as she rolled away.“You can’t fool me.”

*

At the funeral home, guests seemed to be dividing themselves up on either side of the aisle by who was friends with Pat, the first wife, and who was friends with Dora, the second wife. It was like a wedding, that way. Since Calvin would know everyone from work, he’d been enlisted to come early and stand toward the door at the back of the funeral parlor with the printed programs. He didn’t mind this, as it kept him far from the half-open coffin. When Jill arrived with Pat and Jennifer, they all stood near him. Dora had taken her seat, already, left of the aisle in the front row.

“Will you speak to her?” Jill asked Pat.

“I don’t know,” Pat said, then, “don’t look, honey,” as Jennifer turned to find the woman. Pat pulled Jennifer close, and the girl kept her face blank. “I guess I’ll have to say something.” Pat turned to Calvin, as if for confirmation.

Calvin said, “Umm.” What did the woman want from him?

Pat turned back to Jill. “I guess I should probably say something.”

“Wait and see,” Jill suggested, shooting Calvin a nasty look. “You shouldn’t feel like you have to.”

Visitors trickled in. Robin arrived with her husband, a thin man with an earring whom Calvin had met once before. They joined the small, stunned group of Calvin’s coworkers who’d shown up early. Calvin had worked with these people for more than five years and had never seen them dressed up before. They’d all greeted Pat, then made their way to Dora, then stood at the far side of the room, inhabiting their clothes awkwardly, unsure of where to sit. Calvin had invited them all to the house, afterward, for a grim sort of reception. He imagined Dora would be receiving guests at her house too.

People who hadn’t seen Jennifer in the years since she and Pat had moved admired, quietly, how she’d grown. Calvin watched the girl answer questions in monosyllables. When she spoke, her lips parted to reveal a chipped upper front tooth.

“You OK, honey?” Pat kept asking her between guests, keeping one square hand on the girl’s back. “She hasn’t said much since last week,” said Pat to Jill. “Have you, honey.”

“I’ve said stuff.”

“Right,” Pat said. “She’s in that phase right now. You know, where everything I say is wrong?”

“I’m not in a phase,” Jennifer said.“I just don’t have anything to say.”

“Last night you had something to say,” said Pat. “That you hated me. Remember that?” To Jill, Pat said, “That’s part of the phase too.”

Jennifer rolled her eyes.

“It’s hard to know what to say,” Jill said. Which in itself was a great thing to say, Calvin thought, and if Jill had looked his way, he might have smiled at her.

“I know,” said Pat. “I know. I just think we could give this phase a rest when something like this happens.” She pushed the tips of her fingers up against her eyebrows until her eyes bugged out. When she let go, the loose arch of skin over each eye reshaped itself slowly. Calvin realized he was staring at this and looked away.

The door had been propped open with a rubber wedge. Outside, the sky was heavy and gray. It had been raining off and on all morning, and he could smell worms and wet pavement. He thought he could smell the storm drains too. There was a finger of cold in the air, as though winter hadn’t given up. He watched a long blue car pull up and drop off a tiny elderly woman encased in a clear plastic rain shawl. She crept through the door with a walker and kissed Pat on the cheek.

“Oh, Miss Evelyn,” Pat said. “Jennifer, this lady used to watch you when you were little.”

“Do you remember me?” said the old woman.

Jennifer nodded and, in the first willing motion Calvin had seen her make, leaned down to hug the old woman. Over the woman’s stooped shoulder Jennifer’s face appeared suddenly nearer to Calvin’s, eyes closed, nose shiny and broad. The skin on her lower jaw looked red and bumpy, and fine brown hairs were growing at the corners of her mouth, the kind Jill tweezed away in front of the bathroom mirror. As if she felt Calvin looking, Jennifer opened her eyes. They were small and gray, like her father’s. Calvin felt for her. Her father dead, her mother hard to take, at best. Before the funeral, at the house, while standing before the closet, looking for one of his ties, he had heard Jennifer’s shower through the wall. He heard the splash and patter against the stall, the rush of water hitting the tub, the squelching of plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner. He was stepping into his pants when he heard something more, almost not a sound, it was so faint. He parted the hanging row of shirts and realized that through the thin plaster, he was listening to the girl cry. There was also a subdued smacking sound, as if she were bringing her hand hard against her forehead.

“Jennifer’s a tough case,” whispered Jill as they took their seats several rows back from the first. “Pat says she said nothing the whole drive down. Five hours. Pat thinks she’s still in shock.”

“I don’t know about shock,” Calvin said. “I mean, she can talk normally enough. Shock is a real condition. With real symptoms.”

“I know what shock is,” Jill said.

“Pat should give the kid a break. Some space.”

“Space,” Jill said, her breath an explosion in his ear. “You don’t give a troubled kid too much space. Did you see that chipped tooth?” Jill glanced toward Pat and Jennifer in the front row to make sure she couldn’t be heard. “Pat found her eating raw macaroni for a snack. Right out of the box. Hard as rocks. And this even before Dave died.”

Calvin nodded at a man and woman they knew casually from church, who lowered themselves into chairs in the row in front of him. Jill smiled at them too, and grasped each of their hands. Then she turned back to Calvin and frowned. “Don’t you think that’s kind of strange?”

“Sure,” Calvin said.

“Pat asked her why, and she said she liked the way it sounded in her ears. The crunching. She said she liked how sharp it was against her tongue.”

“It’s strange, but it doesn’t seem like a huge thing.”

“Pat worries,” Jill said. “And now she has to deal with Dora on top of everything else. That’s a hurt that’s still fresh.”

“She keeps it that way,” Calvin said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“I heard you,” Jill hissed in his ear. “Pat didn’t ask for any of this, you know.”

“What?” said Calvin, as the organ picked up pace and volume.

“You can’t even muster up the generosity to be nice. Don’t think I don’t see it.”

“What?” said Calvin, touching his ear. He knew it was childish. “What? What?”

Jill shook her head and set her teeth.

The hymn was one Calvin recognized, “In the Sweet By-and-By,” and its message was that everything would be OK after everyone was dead. In the front row, Pat’s shoulders started to shake, and she reached for Jennifer’s hands, clutching them to her chest. This pulled the girl’s far arm awkwardly across her body, though she remained facing straight ahead, in the direction of the coffin. This and everything else seemed to Calvin to boil down to resistance—to giving in or not giving in, even when you couldn’t say exactly what there was to be resisted or what made you want to.

*

After the funeral there was a confrontation in the parking lot. Calvin saw it coming. The second wife moving up behind Pat, Calvin’s own nod to her, a woman he’d met only once, causing Pat to turn around on her heel. The second wife was already hugging Jennifer, and when the woman handed her a pocket-size book of collected love poems, explaining that they had belonged to Dave Lott’s mother, Calvin saw the girl’s chin trembling.

“How thoughtful,” Pat said crisply, stepping in between them, extending her hand to the woman. “Thank you.”

The second wife untangled her fingers from Pat’s and passed a hand over her brown bobbed hair, as if it needed smoothing. “I loved him,” she said, not very nicely.

“Fine,” Pat said.

“I loved him,” said the woman again. She turned to Jennifer. “You should know that.”

Jennifer nodded. She looked nervously at her mother, who had begun to nod too.

“You loved him,” Pat said, nodding, “and you want my daughter to know that.”

“That’s right,” said the woman.

“Let’s all take it easy,” said Calvin.

“Pat,” said Jill, “let’s go.”

“You loved him,” Pat said again.

“You wouldn’t know the first thing about that,” the woman said.

“Don’t tell me—” Pat started, but the second wife turned away. “He had a family,” Pat called after her. “So don’t tell me.” The woman kept walking, and Pat began to shake. Calvin thought she might be about to collapse, which wouldn’t help anyone. As he helped her to her rental car, her upper arm felt so soft and old that he found himself compelled to handle her tenderly. This made him cross.

“I’m sorry,” Pat said to no one in particular.

“You were nice to even try to speak with her,” said Jill.“Considering.”

Jennifer stood to the side, trying to fit the book into her small blue purse. Pat sat heavily in the passenger seat but kept her feet on the pavement.

“Put your head between your knees,” Jill said, and helped Pat flop forward.

When she raised herself, Calvin placed his hands on her stockinged calves and folded her legs into the car.

“I’m sorry,” Pat said again. She clutched Calvin’s forearm and closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the headrest.

“OK,” Calvin said, his hand on the door. “We’re all done here.”

“I’ll drive her,” Jill said to Calvin, still angry and not looking at him.

“I’ll go with you,” Jennifer said to Calvin. It was the first thing she’d said to him, and her voice seemed light—too agreeable, like she anticipated being told she couldn’t.

“Take Jennifer,” Jill said, as if Jennifer hadn’t suggested it. The girl was already moving toward Calvin’s car.

Once they were on the road, it began to rain. The windshield clouded over and Calvin turned on the fan. Jennifer stared out the passenger window. She rolled it down several inches, moving her face toward the cool air. They drove in silence for a few blocks. Calvin was trying to decide whether it was a comfortable or uncomfortable silence. He wondered if it could be a different thing for each person or if perceptions about silence were mutual, like an odor in the room no one could ignore.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” he said, finally. “I liked him.”

Jennifer was still looking out the window. They passed a storage facility. Low, putty-colored buildings stretched back from the road for a good two acres. The thought of all that stuff, just sitting there, made Calvin feel heavy.

“You know how he died, right? Basically, he was eaten alive.”

“He was very sick,” Calvin said.

“I didn’t think his job was even dangerous.”

“No, no,” Calvin said. “That’s not it. It’s not dangerous. This was just a freak thing. Hardly ever happens. He could have picked this up at the laundromat or in his own garage. Bacteria are everywhere. All kinds of bacteria.”

“So then everywhere’s dangerous,” said the girl. She shrugged at the revised perspective, rolled down her window all the way and stuck her face fully into the air. Calvin wondered if she was going to throw up. He wondered if he should pull over. Her long bangs lifted straight off her forehead, standing vertically in the wind. He watched her observing herself in the passenger side mirror for a block. Then she jerked her head back into the car and let it fall against the headrest. Her lips moved, and she said something way in the back of her throat. “I hate her.”

“Who?”

Jennifer smiled up at the roof of the car, exposing the chipped tooth. “I do hate her,” she said. The girl’s chest, with her two small beginning breasts, pulsed with what could have been laughing or crying, but she was still just smiling up at the ceiling. “What are we going to do when we get back to your house anyway,” the girl said. “Just stand around?”

That was exactly what would happen. Calvin thought for a moment. “We could stop by the office, first, if you want. Your dad kept a picture of you on his desk.”

The girl closed her eyes. It had been the right thing to suggest or the wrong thing, but it was out there now, and he headed in the direction of work. The rain was coming down hard, and the girl felt for the knob to roll up the window. Calvin adjusted the wipers to medium. Their motion and the rain outside made everything in the car seem more still. He turned off the defogger.

“My mother said that instead of telling her I hated her, I should have taken a dagger and stabbed her in the heart. She said I should have dissolved a bottle of sleeping pills into her coffee.”

“Your mother’s having a hard time.”

“She’s a drama queen,” said Jennifer.“She’s always having a hard time.”

This sounded about right to Calvin, but it also seemed an inappropriate thing for him to confirm. He slowed for a light. The window had begun to fog again, and he switched on the blower.

“If it makes you feel any better,” he said, “everyone hates their parents once in a while. I hated my parents. My kids are going to hate me, probably.”

Jennifer looked at him balefully. Calvin felt old. And depressed. He remembered something he hadn’t thought about in years. “What I used to do? I would pretend my parents had been in a car accident. Not that they were seriously hurt, or anything, just one of those fender benders. I’d be waiting at home, and maybe it would be raining out, like today, and I’d imagine that they slid off the road going really slow, and maybe hit a tree, or a fence. Just hard enough to bump their heads good. Not even any blood.”

The girl was looking toward the window again, following the staggered water drops in their descending horizontal.

“Then I’d imagine them walking in the door, looking just like they always did. My father looks a little like Don Knots. But when they greeted me, it would be different, more polite, like they were talking to someone else’s kid. My mother would ask me what grade I was in. My father would ask me who I liked for the Super Bowl that year. And I didn’t mind telling them. Then I’d ask them if they had any kids, and they’d look at each other and smile and say no, they hadn’t been blessed with children, and I’d know that the accident had taken me right out of their memory, and it felt great. I even kind of liked them.”

“How old were you?”

“What?” Calvin said, pulling into his parking spot. “I don’t know. Fifteen, maybe.”

“I’m fifteen,” she said.

The girl wore no coat, he realized halfway between the parking lot and the door. The rain was not heavy just now, but they had no umbrella, and by the time they reached the entrance, Jennifer’s hair was damp, and the fuzzy wool of her dress showed rain spots.

Inside, in the green fluorescent light, the air was chilly. The office had emptied out for the funeral. It felt like coming in to work on a Sunday. Or like Calvin remembered feeling on the days he’d stayed home sick from school, as a child. Like he’d stepped right out of time.

Jennifer shivered, but shook her head when Calvin offered his coat. She trailed him down the plastic runner toward his cube. One quarter of a ceiling panel had grown soggy with rain, and water gathered into a drop and fell heavily to a puddle on the plastic. When Calvin’s hard-soled dress shoes hit the spot, his feet slipped out from under him, and he slapped at the floor in a kind of undignified tap dance, grabbing the side of a cubicle to regain his balance. He looked back at Jennifer, but she was reading the name tags on each cubicle they passed.

Calvin tapped on Dave Lott’s name tag when they reached it. “Want to sit here for a minute? Take some time?”

“OK,” said the girl. She lowered herself into her father’s desk chair. She opened one of his drawers and took out an enormous ball made of rubber bands. Then she put the ball back in the drawer and closed it.

“I’m just going to be right here,” Calvin said, gesturing to his own cube, but the girl didn’t look up. She was moving her hands along the top of Dave Lott’s desk, picking things up and putting them back down.

Calvin went through some papers. He looked at the calendar on his computer and pulled files for the week’s inspections. Then he saw that his voicemail light was on, so he listened to his messages. One was an announcement from the secretary about the funeral, closing the office for the day. Another message announced the reception at Calvin’s house. When he hung up the phone, he stood and peered over the top of the cube to check on Jennifer, but she wasn’t there.

He stepped out and looked down the aisle. Empty. He called, “Jennifer?” but the only sound was the dripping ceiling and the buzzing of the fluorescent lights.

At the other end of the hall, he knocked on the bathroom door, but it was empty. He stepped up onto Rex Hickman’s chair, keeping a precarious balance over the wheels as he scanned the tops of all the cubes. Nothing. He called her name again, but the room gave off no resonance, the sound dead as soon as he closed his mouth, as if there had always been only the fluorescent hum of the lights and the rain worrying the flat roof. As if the girl had never been there.

He checked the secretary’s office, next to the bathroom. Locked. He crossed to the other aisle, with its identical row of cubicles, and peered into each one, but they were all empty. As if everyone had died, not just Dave Lott, as if a bacteria had invaded the world and he was the only, lonely one with immunity. She wasn’t in their supply closet, and she wasn’t in the equipment room. He left the office and stepped out into the rain to check the car, but she wasn’t there, either. Back in the office he checked every cubicle again. He called her name over and over. This time, when he poked his head back into the supply closet, he switched on the light and found her wedged between the wall and a stack of boxes filled with printer paper.

“What’s the idea?” Calvin said. “I didn’t know where you were.”

Tears formed in the girl’s eyes, and she wrapped her arms around her middle. The closet was on the outside wall, and it was chilly. The ceiling in here dripped, too, into a large plastic bucket that sat on an empty palette. The girl looked miserable and cold.

“Hey,” Calvin said. “Forget it. It’s no big deal.” He reached for her shoulder and patted her awkwardly. When she didn’t resist, he placed both hands on her shoulders and brought her close to him. The girl was shivering. She sobbed three times into his coat and then quieted, like she was forcing herself to stop. “It’s OK,” Calvin said. He moved his hand over her back and then let go, thinking of the handkerchief he kept in his suit coat pocket, a habit his father had instilled in him. But his overcoat was unbuttoned, and the girl reached her arms inside and around him, holding him at the waist. She pressed the side of her face very hard against his shirt. It was as if she were much younger, he thought, a child, or maybe much older. He moved his hand to the back of her hair, where his fingers found and followed the texture of the damp braid. The girl shivered against him, and he wrapped his raincoat around her with his arms. Against the roof, the rain came down steadily, like it was never going to stop. It rained 40 days and 40 nights, once, Calvin’s grandfather used to say when conversation lagged. Calvin was thinking of using the line himself when the girl’s legs parted on either side of his thigh. He thought it might have been an awkward accident, and he shifted, attempting to reposition her hips to the side of him. Beside his face the top box on a stack had gotten wet from another leak in the ceiling. As he tilted his head back to locate the leaky panel, the girl realigned her hips frontally against him. She began moving. First almost imperceptibly, then steadily, then with more and more urgency. It was a seeking need, intense and confused.

Calvin stepped backwards and felt another wall of boxes solid behind him. The girl stepped with him, into him, though he’d turned his lower body to the left, attempting to hold her and prevent her at the same time. She dropped her face to his chest again. He was only semi-erect, but she found this with the outside of one of her thin legs. He pushed her away and tried to look her in the eye, but her eyes seemed to go straight through to the back of her head. There was something vacant about her face too, like nothing you tried to do for her would make any difference. He rested his chin on top of her hair and kept her hips away from him, with his hands. She pushed her face against his shirt, rubbing it there like a cat and making wounded, wanting noises in the back of her throat. When he brought her body close, finally, it seemed like a kindness. It seemed like the only possible help. She went up and down on her tiptoes against him. After a time, still under the cover of his coat, he reached down to her knees, lifted her skirt, slipped his hand between her legs, and stroked her through her cotton panties to the rhythm of the rain until she shuddered, bleating, “I, I, I,” into his shirt.

He held her for a moment more. Then he removed his coat and wrapped it around her shoulders. He tried not to think. He steered her, silently, back into the main room of the office, down the aisle of cubicles, and out the door to the parking lot. In the car, he turned on the heat. He started to speak, meaning to impress upon her how important it would be to say nothing. But the girl was blinking sleepily out the side window, the rain streaking subtle shadows across her face in the dying light, and he closed his mouth and did not disturb her.

*

The first guests had already arrived by the time Calvin pulled into the driveway.

“You OK?” he asked the girl before they got out of the car.

“Yeah.” With the tip of her tongue, she touched the edge of her broken tooth.

Jill appeared at the door, and the memory of the storage room flipped off like a switch in his head. “Where have you been?” she asked, and when he told her, she nodded, and the tough set of her face dissolved. She was moved, and this moved him—his heart—toward her in an old way.

Jennifer entered the house ahead of him. When her mother rose, crying, from the couch to pull her close, the girl went stiff again.

“I’ll get you some Kleenex,” she said to her mother, and disappeared down the hall.

Calvin poured punch and made small talk with Robin and her hippie husband. When the nut bowls needed refilling, he did that. He said the same things about Dave Lott over and over. Nice things, about his sense of humor. And he shook his head with everyone else about the way he’d died. He did not picture the man in his head. The boys returned from the sitter’s, and Trent stuck close to Calvin, closed-mouthed and shy around so many new adults. When Robin’s husband tousled his hair, the boy drew back and leaned heavily against Calvin’s legs, a neediness of the body that brought back the moments in the supply closet with the dread remembering of a bad dream. Calvin passed a hand over his own forehead. He felt Jill watching him from across the room, and when he met her tired eyes, she smiled. Calvin forced himself to smile back. He saw Jennifer approaching her mother on the couch.

“Hello,” he heard her say. He thought by the way she said it—polite and kind—that she must be talking not to Pat but to the woman next to her. Then Jennifer said, formally, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” and he realized she was talking to Pat after all.

Pat reached for Jennifer’s hand, and the girl allowed it to be held. “Honey,” Pat said.

“I’m Jennifer,” she said, introducing herself to her own mother.

Pat blinked at her. Beside Calvin, Robin’s husband was saying something, but Calvin wasn’t listening. He watched Pat’s face turn confused, with furrowed brow and pursed lips. Jennifer kept up her polite, sad, chip-toothed smile. She covered Pat’s hand with her other hand.

Calvin turned back to the man next to him. From the corner of the room, he heard Pat cry out, “Jennifer, stop it.”

“You all right there?” Robin’s husband was saying to Calvin, whose stomach felt bad. Trent looked up at him, his dark eyes questioning.

“Go get ready for bed,” Calvin heard himself say.

“Hey. Hey, Calvin,” said the man. Calvin felt a strong hand on his shoulder.

“I’m OK,” Calvin said. He brought his thumb and forefinger to the corners of his eyes. “I’m all right.”

“You knew him pretty well, huh,” said Robin’s husband.

Across the room, Pat was saying, between great, ratcheting sobs, “I’m your mother.” Calvin watched Jennifer, her face the picture of propriety, touch her mother’s back as impersonally as a funeral employee. He thought he heard her say, “There, there.” Pat dropped her face into her knees and covered her head, and Calvin lowered his eyes like every other guest in the room. He sensed, rather than saw, Jill hurrying over to help.

Calvin thought he might be sick. Then he took a deep breath and said to Robin, to her husband, “I need some air.”

Outside, it was dark and cold, but the rain had stopped. Calvin sank down onto the back cement stoop. He reached behind him into the cinder block of the house’s foundation where he and Jill always kept a fifth of vodka. For some reason it seemed different than keeping the hard stuff in the house.

When he’d told Jennifer about the thing he used to do with his parents, wishing amnesia on them, he hadn’t told her everything. As a kid, when he kept up the fantasy of talking to his parents as if he didn’t know them, something eventually reversed itself. The longer he imagined their benign responses, the more he felt uneasy instead of relieved. In his head, he’d become desperate, leading them down the hall to his room, showing them things that would prove they had a son and that the son was he. His underwear drawer, his private collection of colored chalk dust, meticulously stacked in film canisters along the floor of his closet. In his mind’s eye, his parents kept nodding pleasantly, but without recognition, and this made the young Calvin suddenly, fitfully afraid. He began watching the clock, desperate for his parents to return. By the time they really did come home, he was so happy to see them that he found himself trailing them around the house, more helpful, suddenly, than was his teenage way, just to be near them, just to reassure himself that they knew him, until his mother said, one of these times, that he was behaving like a boy with a guilty conscience.

When Jill found him, sometime later, he was sprawled on the steps, staring up at the night. The sky had cleared in spots, showing stars and a very bright half moon.

“Oh, Calvin,” Jill said, taking the half-empty bottle from him. She zipped up her coat and sat on the step above him. He leaned his head back on her knees, and she brushed his hair away from his forehead, like she did at night with the boys, like she had not done with him in a long time.

“Jill,” he said, but his voice came out cracked and a little wild.

She shushed him. “Just be quiet,” she said, still stroking his hair. Calvin thought he would cry from the feel of her hand. “This has been a day,” she said. “Pat’s a mess in there. Jennifer is a strange bird. She’s saying she fell at the office. She’s saying she hit her head and can’t remember her own mother. She’s way too old to pull this stuff.”

Calvin took the bottle back from her and drank again. “I didn’t see her fall,” he said truthfully. “I didn’t know she hit her head, but maybe she did.”

“OK,” said Jill. “Whatever. Only right now she’s in there asking people if they’ve ever seen that nice woman who keeps crying. As if anyone really gets amnesia, Calvin.” On his forehead, Jill’s hand went still. Calvin closed his eyes. He thought if she would just ask him for something, anything, he could do it. He knew he would be willing, in this way, for a long time.

“Listen to me,” he said, expelling all his breath with the words. Two ragged breaths later he tried again, but Jill moved her hand from his forehead to his mouth. “Help me,” he said into her fingers. But the words were whispered, and she mistook them for a kiss, and smiled.