Fellow Mortals: A Novel Read online

  “Sx pty sun”—what the fuck, Billy thinks, positioning the phone exactly as he found it. He simply can’t imagine any safe interpretation, and the sender’s name, Southsider2005, is maddeningly definite and vague all at once. The stubble of a stranger in a real backseat. Sheri’s hand on the zipper of a real pair of jeans.

  He’s been trying so hard since the night she got drunk. He finished up the living room and rearranged the furniture, paid to get a Dumpster right away like she wanted. He’s been doing all the garbage, all the dishes, all the laundry, and he’s never once expected her to thank him or acknowledge it. He calls her at the diner just to say hello. Buys her wine. Buys her cookies. Gives her anything she wants. He’s been trying even harder than the year when they were dating and he can’t just tell her he’s been reading through her texts.

  He takes her out a beer and pops it at her side.

  She didn’t hear him coming. “Jesus,” Sheri says.

  She peels her body off the lounge chair, cross-hatched pink, not the least bit rushed to grab her top and cover up.

  “I brought you a beer,” Billy says.

  She flops back down and says, “Put it on the grass.”

  “Your phone made a noise.”

  “It’s probably work.”

  “I think it was a text.”

  “I’ll check it later,” Sheri says.

  They’re interrupted by a power saw. He’s heard it on and off today without a second thought, assuming it’s the Carmichaels’ latest renovations. Billy sees a man cutting lumber on a table. Before he registers the tree house or either of the kids, he tips the bottle with his knee and says: “Sam … what the hell?”

  The saw quiets down just as Billy says it, and the one word—hell—carries on the air. Sam looks around, sees him crouching there, and nods, and then he’s picking up a two-by-four, apparently too busy to walk across the lots and say hello. Another man waves more broadly from the tree.

  “Holy shit. Is that—”

  “Henry Cooper,” Sheri says, muffled through a towel. “They’ve been there all morning.”

  “They’re building a tree house? Peg’s gonna flip.”

  “She already did. Sam calmed her down.”

  He tries to get his head around it—Cooper there at Peg’s—and feels as if his skull is physically contracting. Billy presses on the lounge until it buckles at the joint. Sheri lifts her head, squinty in the light.

  “Honestly,” he says. “This is totally insane.”

  “Right.” She yawns. “What kind of monster does a nice thing for kids?”

  “Gimme a break,” Billy says. “I could have built those kids a tree house.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  Billy looks at her and frowns, kneeling in the beer. He picks the bottle up. An ant waves faintly from the rim.

  “I’ll get you another one,” he says.

  “Why don’t you bring them a couple beers while you’re at it.”

  Every bone in Sheri’s back disappears when she relaxes, like her body isn’t real—like she’s made of soft rubber. Billy holds the bottle, staring at her spine.

  “Do you have to do this today?”

  “What?”

  “At least put your top on. They’re right there. He’s right there.”

  “Let him look,” Sheri says. “You’re standing in my sun.”

  He isn’t but he steps back anyway, conscious of his shadow and distracted by its shape, how the edges seem bristly and distorted in the grass.

  Billy goes inside, opens a beer of his own, and watches Henry Cooper out the upstairs window. He drinks until the power saw’s buzzing in his ears, and when he finally hears Sheri clattering the screen, he slumps downstairs and meets her in the kitchen. She’s standing at the table, closing up her phone.

  “Who was it?”

  “Mary-Kate.”

  She opens the fridge and pours herself a lemonade.

  “What are we doing tomorrow?” Billy asks.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “I thought you said we might be doing something.”

  “What?”

  Billy shrugs. He glances at her phone, longer than he should, and yet he’s stunned when Sheri notices and guesses what it means.

  “You read my text?”

  “What? No,” he says, nasally and odd. “It was laying right there and made a noise. I couldn’t help it.”

  “It’s a flip phone, Billy.”

  “So?”

  “You have to flip it open.”

  Sheri cocks a hip, waiting for an answer.

  “I didn’t know it was such a big deal. You’re the one who’s acting all sneaky.”

  “It was Mary-Kate,” Sheri says. “I covered the end of her shift last night. She had a date.”

  “What’s the party, then?”

  Sheri folds her arms, still in her bikini, with her long bare feet planted on the floor.

  “It’s a Sox doubleheader. Mary-Kate’s brother’s having us over.”

  “I’m not watching baseball with a bunch of your work friends.”

  “‘Us’ is me and Mary-Kate.”

  “Is Jake going?” Billy asks.

  Sheri skips a beat, honestly perplexed. “What do you care?”

  “Think about that.”

  “What.” Sheri coughs. “You’re jealous of Jake?”

  “You talk about him enough.”

  She holds a palm against the table, going squiggly at the knees, with her face so clenched it’s like she’s hurt instead of laughing.

  “He’s a sixty-year-old vet,” Sheri says. “He hasn’t cut his beard all year … he’s like a pirate!”

  Billy staggers there and snorts. “How was I supposed to know? You throw yourself at everyone except around here.”

  Sheri reddens and her face looks greasy from the sun. The temperature and beer start fizzing in his head.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Like the yard,” Billy says. “Laying outside with Cooper leering over.”

  “Leering,” Sheri says.

  “I saw him out the window.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Who cares?” Billy asks. “This place sucks because of him.”

  “What do you want from the guy?” Sheri yells. “He offered to help us out, you said no. Now it’s bad he’s helping other people?”

  “You want him helping over here? I’ll ask him right now.”

  She rolls her eyes until her head begins to swivel.

  “Fine,” he says. “Sprawl around naked all day.”

  “Well I didn’t think he’d rape me.”

  Billy lunges at her chest. She bumps her head against the wall, limbs helter-skelter and her hair thrown messy at the edges of her face. She’s slippery from the tanning oil, hard to get a handle on. Billy grabs a wrist, her other hand scratching at his arm until he catches that, too, and holds tight, pressed between her drawn-up legs when she squats. He tastes blood—he must have bitten his lip—and Sheri fights back, smelling dangerous and hot.

  “You think he’s so great,” Billy says. “You think he’s so great. Say it, why don’t you say it?”

  “Get the fuck off me. Asshole!”

  “Say it.”

  Sheri grunts.

  “Say it,” Billy says. “You think he’s so great.”

  “Stop…”

  “I dare you to. I dare you to. You think I’m shit and he’s so great, go on. Go on and say it. Say it.”

  Sheri shakes her head with more defiance than he wants, so he bumps her own hands into her forehead and lets go, sitting on the floor and breathing through his mouth. The second Sheri’s free, she covers him with slaps, a crazy burst he can’t fend away until she scrambles over his shoulder, trying to escape. Billy hooks her foot and Sheri falls behind him, but after a few blind kicks to his ribs, he lets her go again and curls into a ball, grinding his knuckles into his eyes until the colors start swirling in the dark.

  Sheri runs upst
airs and slams the bedroom door. It’s quiet outside: not a tool, not a bird. Billy sits with his heartbeat thrumming in his ears, thinking how her sunburn whitened when he grabbed her. He doesn’t notice when she comes downstairs, doesn’t even know she’s left the bedroom until the front door clicks and Billy hears the car out front, peeling off and revving up the street.

  * * *

  Henry and Sam spend the better part of three days working in the Carmichaels’ yard and finally, on Monday afternoon, Sam drives the last roofing nail and Henry helps him out of the safety rope and into the finished tree house. They sit knee to knee, sweating in the shade, in a room with a maple tree rising up the center. It’s true at every joint, big enough for two boys and a chest full of weapons, soda cans, and books, with plenty of space to lie about and share an hour’s worth of solitude.

  Sam takes an overhead look at Laura’s garden, where a pumpkin vine has grown twenty feet unassisted. Her tomato plants have withered but her flowers have exploded—foamflower, coral bell, peonies, and hostas. She brought them home in April, trayfuls of pots with little tabs, and when he helped her from the car, jogging back and forth, they laid them in a pattern on the long kitchen table. They’d been living in the house for almost a year, but it was that particular morning something clicked and he imagined they would live there forever, sharing holidays and meals, airing out the rooms, pausing every spring with a garden on the table.

  Sam and Henry pass the only remaining Coke back and forth, breathing in the fresh-cut fragrance of the lumber. Before they get the boys, they take a minute to themselves and for a second, just a second, Sam’s perfectly content.

  “I’m sorry I knocked you down,” he says.

  Henry stiffens up.

  “When you first came around,” Sam says, “I thought you were trying to get yourself off the hook. Do some work, make yourself feel better. It pissed me off. And then you came back and I wanted to hurt you. I really did. But not for the fire. I wanted to hurt you for apologizing.”

  Henry looks down. “I shouldn’t have apologized?”

  “I’m out there trying to make sense of what happened. Blaming fate, blaming the fire. Then you come along saying, ‘Sorry, it was me.’ You must have known what would happen. But you kept showing up.”

  Henry gazes at a cloud, so white it’s faintly haloed. The soda can ticks and fizzes on the floor. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure,” Sam says.

  “How you holding up?”

  Sam lays his hammer down without letting go. He leans against the wall, stretching out his legs, seemingly at ease but rigid as a plank. There’s a tiny thread of sunlight coming from the wallboards, running like a crack down the middle of his face.

  “I don’t know,” Sam says. “It’s like an aftershock of aftershock. It’s scary looking back and worse looking forward. Fifty more years of ordinary days.”

  Henry gazes at the grass through the open trapdoor, trying hard to empathize and feel it for a moment. Last night around three, he’d woken up and turned to Ava. She was sleeping on her side, face toward him on the pillow, and her head looked perfectly cocooned by her hair. He wasn’t accustomed to the silence of the middle of the night, how his thoughts, made clear, had the quality of whispers. The crickets outside seemed near enough to touch but there was something in the lulls that went beyond the room, past the neighborhood and town and everything he knew, spreading like a great broad emptiness around him.

  “You religious?” Henry asks.

  “No,” Sam says. “I don’t know. How do you mean?”

  “You think Laura’s in heaven?”

  “As opposed to where?”

  “I didn’t mean … of course she is,” Henry says. “I just wanted to know … you know.”

  “If I believe it.” Sam sighs, pulling into a crouch. “Even if that were real—whatever that’d be, heaven or souls and all that—I can’t feel her anymore. It doesn’t help me. The sculptures do,” he adds. “All the work along the way. I get a lot more meaning out of doing it than finishing.”

  “I felt the same way about my route,” Henry says. “It was good most days just shouldering the bag.” He feels a subtle wave of vertigo, enough to shut his eyes, and an uncanny sense that the tree’s started moving.

  Sam drops the hammer through the door and takes the ladder. Henry follows him and doesn’t feel secure until he’s down.

  The Carmichael boys hurry outside, bang-bang out the back screen door.

  “Is it done?” Danny asks.

  “Done!” Henry shouts.

  Sam laughs at their expressions—saucer-eyed, panting, almost like Wingnut’s face around food. They sprint away and scramble up the ladder, Ethan jumping onto the rungs and Danny climbing at his heels. Sam begins to wonder if they should have built it lower. But they make it up fine and shut the trapdoor, yelling and stomping around with more barbarian joy than Sam’s ever seen from either one of them.

  “Success,” he declares.

  He feels relieved and full of summer, clean sweat prickling in his shirt, the smell of sunlight rising like a warm bloody nose. He thinks of bike-tire rubber, waffle-cone drips, the fragrance of a small backyard after dinner.

  Bob saunters out and meets them on the lawn. He grins and shakes his head, enchanted by his sons, who spot him on the lawn and wave before ducking back down, keepers of the tree, perfectly at home.

  “I always wanted one of those.”

  “It’s strong enough to hold you, too,” Sam says.

  “That’s good to know,” Bob murmurs, nodding at the thought. “You guys ought to go into business. That thing’s a work of art.”

  “You ought to see the cabin,” Henry says. Then he pales.

  “What cabin?” Bob asks, eyes widening and darting. “You don’t mean…”

  Sam sighs. “I’ve been keeping it a secret.”

  “Wait till Peg finds … ah. Well, she doesn’t need to know.” Bob straightens out his shirt and offers Sam a hand. “Thanks for this.”

  “You’re welcome,” Sam says.

  Bob turns to Henry, who refuses to be thanked.

  “Not a word!” he says to Bob. “It’s the least that I could do.”

  “Did the boys says thanks?”

  The three of them pause to look at the tree, where the unspoken gratitude is wonderfully apparent.

  “Listen, Henry,” Bob says. “The way Peg’s been acting—don’t take it personally. There’s sides of her I married, sides of her I’m married to. She has her own moral compass and it doesn’t…” Here he pauses, taking time as if to see the tiny compass in his mind. “She’s a good woman,” he says. “Good people make mistakes.”

  He and Sam look at Henry, who accepts it with a nod.

  Bob remembers something else and perks back up.

  “Peg just called. Nan and Joan pulled the trigger.”

  “Holy smoke,” Henry says.

  Sam stares across the lots.

  17

  Ava moves the Finns’ new table again, just a few more inches to the left with her hip, before deciding it was better as it was. She has a bag full of spice—cinnamon, oregano, rosemary, ginger—and readjusts her grip so she can pull the table back. It was Henry who had pointed out the humor of it all, Ava’s fussiness in rearranging someone else’s home. He’s said it more than once, right in front of Nan, and she’s been conscious and embarrassed of the fact ever since.

  Nan carries a tray of silverware into the kitchen, with its bleached sink, avocado fridge, bare countertop, and this—the table Sam built them as a housewarming gift, complete with two straight-back chairs that fit the Finns’ posture to a T. Joan cried when Sam and Henry unexpectedly revealed them, and even Nan grew tearful after weeks of practicalities and paperwork and paperwork. They can make a new home from a table like this, organize the kitchen in relation to its placement and from there … well, from there, the whole house will come together.

  Wing hurries through the kitchen, cla
ttering his nails.

  “Slow it down!” Ava scolds, speeding him along.

  He’s come from out front, weaving through a maze of cardboard boxes and dashing into the yard, one of many paths of action he’s been trying all day. He’s sniffed his way around the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and dining room, thrilled by the newness of the house and by the constant activity of Henry, Ava, Nan, Joan, and Sam moving furniture and boxes from the truck—a truck with a ramp that he can scamper up and down. He looks around the yard and trots back in as if the thrill of going out were all he really wanted.

  Nan fills a water dish, inordinately pleased with the pressure of the stream. She turns the spigot once more, just to hear the hiss.

  “Oh…,” Ava says—she wants to say shit. “I forgot the nutmeg.”

  “I’ll put it on the list,” Nan says.

  “I had it on the list. I should run back out.”

  “I can see the story now. Two elderly sisters were abandoned this weekend without nutmeg.”

  Ava grabs her in a hug, too impulsively for Nan to see it coming, but it’s Ava who’s surprised and off-balance when they separate.

  “I’ll help you with your garden next spring.”

  “I mapped it out last night,” Nan says. “I’m growing red bell peppers just for you.”

  “I hate that we gardened all summer and now you’re here with an empty yard.”

  “Tabula rasa.”

  “Terra firma,” Sam says, easing in behind them.

  He lays a box on the table, squaring up the corner like it’s staying there for good, and easy as that, the table itself looks faultlessly arranged. Ava smiles at him, standing with his handmade gift. He’s done the lion’s share of lifting for the sake of Henry’s heart but looks as ready to assist as if he’s only just arrived.

  Ava worries what’ll happen when he learns the secret news—such a coincidence, in the very week the Finns are moving out, that she can’t stop trying to interpret it as fate.

  “Coming through!” Henry yells.

  He bumps a box through the door and shoves it on the counter, knocking all the spice jars askew. A bottle of vanilla extract shatters on the floor.