Timothy Johnston - The Current

And all this is fine with—your boss? she said, and her son paused then, they both did, as the idea of Gordon Burke came into the room: His smell of earth and copper, a certain kind of deodorant. His big good face. His hands. There’d been a few men over the years, after Roger, but there hadn’t been any for several years, and at forty-three, with two grown sons, she’d been ready to believe that that part was over for her. But it wasn’t, not quite. Gordon Burke’s daughter was still at home, Holly, a moody girl all her life and now a troubled girl who did not make things easy, and so the going was slow. But it was going. When the phone rang these days Rachel’s heart jumped. New bras and panties waited in her bureau. She’d gone down two sizes.

The only reason Danny was out late tonight, with work in the morning, was because she and Gordon had made plans for the following night—Thursday night, a date—and Danny had agreed to stay home with his brother.

I’ll call Gordon in the morning, he now said. Jeff will cover for me.

And me? Rachel said, swatting at him lightly. Danny, we had a deal!

He shrank from her and said nothing. Then he said, You can still go out, Ma. I’ll take Big Man with me.

Oh, you will, will you? Hunting? She stared at him, waiting for one of Marky’s howls to fill his head. Most recently it had been the torn heap of rabbit at Wyatt’s feet, but a mouse in a mousetrap could do the job.

The bedroom window shook with the wind. The dog watching Danny and Danny standing there staring into space, frozen, his plans crashing. She couldn’t bear it.

She shook her head, she sighed, and that was that: he was free. She’d see Gordon Burke in the morning, at the Plumbing & Supply. A change of plans, she’d say. Home-cooked dinner instead. She’d get Marky to turn in early…

But Gordon Burke wasn’t at the Plumbing & Supply the next morning, his van wasn’t in the lot, and Rachel had followed Marky into the store with something childish, something silly and persistent jabbing at her heart.

Big Man! Jeff Goss calling as they came in, and Marky raising his hand for a listless high five before disappearing into the back, stranding Rachel with no good-bye… because he felt what he felt, this boy, and what he felt this morning was that it was her fault Danny and Wyatt had gone off to the cabin without him, and nothing to do but let him feel it until he didn’t.

She’d stood among the pipes and fittings. The smell of the place was a smell she loved: pipe dope and PVC glue and sweated copper and cigarettes and men. She remembered the summer when Gordon and Roger had bought the building and begun fixing it up. Sawdust in the nostrils, freckles of paint on all their faces. Rachel and Meredith had fallen for each other like schoolgirls, the kind of gushy, overnight friendship men don’t even try to understand. They’d both gotten pregnant the same month, and then, five months later, when Rachel and Roger learned there was trouble with the twins—one healthy, one not; they could terminate one to save one, or risk losing both—it was Meredith and Gordon who loaned them money for more tests, a second opinion, the monitoring that saved Danny’s life. He had his heart murmur, but he’d grown strong as a lion. And Marky… well, Marky was Marky. No one had seen that coming.

Twelve years later, Roger was dead. The cancer they’d been fighting in one lung had jumped to the other like a clever rat. Rachel had to give up their share of the business to keep the house. Her and Meredith’s friendship began to falter, and she realized that, after all, it was the men, not the women, who kept the two families close.

Then, a year after Meredith had moved out—had run off, actually, with a banker—here came Gordon Burke again, with jobs: custodial duties for Marky and the secrets of the trade for Danny. Gordon had never gotten around to changing the burke-young sign on the side of the building, and a hyphen that had once said family to Rachel, then loss (a minus sign), suddenly said family again. Gordon was involved with another woman by that time, Eileen Lindeman, but that was his business; it didn’t affect their own friendship, hers and Gordon’s, their history, one bit… and anyway it didn’t last, whatever that was with Eileen Lindeman.

Now, standing among pipes and fittings, Rachel asked Jeff Goss if he knew when Gordon would be back, and the boy replied cheerfully, Can’t say, Mrs. Young. He hasn’t been in yet.

Oh, she said, puzzled—actually bothered by this answer.

Anything I can help you with, Mrs. Young?

And there it was: Jeff Goss had opened up the store. Gordon had given him keys.

She’d thought Danny was the only one.

AT THE FRONT desk they told him she was in the ICU but when he got there they told him she’d been moved to the third floor, and when he got up there the girl at the desk said visiting hours were over and she was sorry but there was nothing she could do, he’d have to come back in the morning.

Gordon stood looking down at the young woman in her chair. Her large brown eyes. A hundred small tight braids drawn back from her temples and collected in a thick snakeball on top of her head. monique rose, said her ID.

“What about the father?” Gordon said, and the young woman’s brows bunched up.

“Sir?”

“Can the father go in there?”

“Into her room? Yes, of course he can. But you are not the father.”

“How do you know?”

“Pardon me?”

“How do you know I’m not him.”

The young woman turned her face a little to one side and spoke carefully. “Because I’ve seen him? Because I know him by sight?”

“You know him by sight.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Sir, I’m not sure I understand—”

“Did you see him tonight?”

“Yes, sir, but…”

She looked Gordon up and down. She was looking for some evidence of his authority, of his right to ask her such questions. He could see that she found none.

“Look,” he said more gently. “I drove all the way up here and all I’m asking now is can you go tell him that I’m here, and that I’d like to talk to him?”

“Tell who?”

“The father. Her father.”

The young woman said nothing. Her mind was working.

“He might be sleeping,” she said, and Gordon looked at her. He tried to give her a smile.

“Trust me,” he said. “He’s not sleeping.”

He took a seat in one of the plastic chairs and sat staring at nothing, the opposite wall, the TV up in the corner, and he stared at the dark screen of the TV for a long while before he realized that the man sitting back in its gloom, as if in another room altogether, or another world, must be himself; when he got out of his jacket in the overheated room, the man in the TV got out of his too. Some minutes later another man came into the image of the room, and into the room itself, and except that he was waiting for this man, expecting to see this man and no other come around the corner, Gordon would not have recognized him, and not because the man wasn’t in uniform. He saw what he’d already known but would have known anyway in that first glance, which was that this man coming toward him was not well. Considerably down in weight, his flannel shirt hanging on him as it would on a hanger, and when Gordon stood he saw that the man had grown shorter too, as old men do, though this man was a good five years younger than Gordon himself. And yet when the man put out his hand, Gordon was surprised by the strength of the grip. Surprised by the blueness of the eyes too, down in the wells of their sockets, blue and sharp as ever.

“Gordon,” said the man in that same rough smoker’s voice.