Timothy Johnston - The Current

He stood looking at the toilet, the tiles. Eileen standing just behind him in the small bathroom, her face framed in the vanity mirror.

“You know what I’m gonna find when I lift this toilet?” he said.

“A leprechaun?”

“No, a two-dollar gasket about this thick that’s not even squashed. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”

She was watching him in the mirror, the hand he raised to demonstrate thickness, and when he met her eyes he saw what was still there, if he wanted it—just a note, a reminder, just in case. She’d been the first, after Meredith moved out. Four years without a woman’s touch, including the last two years of marriage, unless you counted a woman’s fists as touching, a wife’s crazy little blows at two in the morning—your fault, always your fault that she was drunk. That she was sleeping with another man.

He’d not been looking for it, not missing it; he had his work, his business, a sixteen-year-old daughter to raise. But Eileen had Brad’s money to spend: new water heater downstairs, new kitchen sink upstairs, new fixtures in the master bath… until finally there was no other reason to come over but one.

You can park in the driveway, Gordon. There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing. Is there?

People talk, Eileen .

So let them talk .

What he meant was: they’d talked about Meredith. They’d talked about Brad Lindeman, and now they would talk about Gordon and Eileen, the two cheated-on leftovers running into each other’s arms, for Christ’s sake.

He looked at the toilet again and said, “Shouldn’t be more than an hour, give or take,” and Eileen told him to take his time. She offered him coffee, a beer? but he thanked her no, he’d best get to it, and she smiled at him in the mirror and left him to it.

THE OLD WAX ring came up with the toilet and peeled easily from the porcelain—greasy black but otherwise not much altered from its original shape and thickness, which was one-half inch, as predicted. He replaced it with a Harvey’s No-Seep #5, walked the bowl back into place, felt the wax compressing under it, tightened down the nuts, reconnected the water line and stood watching the tank fill, then watched the water flush down.

He checked his watch. One hour, soup to nuts.

He climbed the snowy risers to the driveway and got his tools stowed away. The stars were out, bright and thick. The temperature had dropped ten, fifteen degrees.

At the front door he stomped his boots and let himself in, then stood on the small rug waiting for her to appear. She’d turned on the lamps in the living room. A light in the kitchen. The house was full of furniture, as if she was expecting a big crowd any second. She and Brad had never had any kids. There’d been a miscarriage or two, people said. Anyway it was now the house of a woman in her fifties who lived alone. Everything in its place.

He took a step and poked his head into the kitchen. “Eileen?”

A TV playing somewhere. Not downstairs, and not in the living room. The only other set he knew of was in the bedroom. He said her name again, louder. He didn’t want to cross the carpet in his boots but he would not take them off. He pawed the soles once more over the rug and crossed the living room and took the two steps up to the landing where the master bedroom was. The smell there was partly her perfume and partly some other scent that was in her skin, in her hair, that made you think of the back of a supermarket where boxes of fruit were stacked and waiting. Or maybe it was because she day-managed the supermarket that made you think that. Anyway the smell was there… stronger when she unzipped her dress, when she stepped out of the dress in the lamplight, years ago, and stepped into your arms.

He would not stay the night, he’d told her back then, because of his daughter. Because of what she’d gone through with her mother, and Eileen understood. But then one night when Holly had gone up to her mother’s for the weekend—Meredith sober then, supposedly, and living with some new man who was not the banker but a contractor with a young daughter of his own—that night Gordon had drunk too much wine and was just falling asleep when Eileen said she wanted to tell him something, something she’d never told anyone, not even Brad. And then she told him about the man who’d given her a ride. Fifteen, she’d been, and the man wore a tie and his car looked like her father’s silver Buick and he wore a wedding band and so when he pulled over she’d gotten in. But when they reached the turnoff for her house the man kept going, fast. Don’t , she said. You’re a nice man . She could tell by his face he hadn’t planned it, didn’t know what he was doing, or even where to take her. She knew it was his first time. You’ve seen me now , the man said, and she said, No, I never did. I never saw this car either, I swear to God . He looked at her and said, Do you believe in God? and she said, crying now, Yes, sir, I do , and the man slowed down. He pulled over and stopped the car. Sat there with his hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead. After a while, Eileen simply got out of the car, shut the door, and walked home.

And you never told anyone? Gordon said after a long silence, lying there in the dark. His heart drumming.

Not a soul, she said. She’d watched the news to see if some other girl would go missing, but none did, not around there.

Dumb, dumb girl, she said in the dark, dreamily, and Gordon said nothing.

Then he said, You should of told your parents. You should of told the police, what in the hell were you thinking?—his heart pounding, his voice rising, until she switched on the lamp and said to him, Gordon, Gordon , as if to wake him from a dream, and he was up on his elbows and she was a frightened forty-year-old woman, and then she understood—Oh, Gordon, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that story… Because his own daughter was sixteen and would get drunk, would get high. Would get rides home in cars he’d never seen before and would never see again, and every night that she wasn’t home by midnight was the longest night of his life and he was all alone in this and had no idea what he was doing, only that he was doing it all wrong.

Anyway it wasn’t long after that night—the night of the story—that whatever it was between him and Eileen Lindeman ended, just ended, like a bulb burning out. And the next time she called him, a year or two later, it was a busted pipe spraying water into her basement, she didn’t know who else to call, and he’d done the job and that was all. Like none of it had ever happened.

Which was how he came to be in her house again today, easing his head around her bedroom doorjamb and saying, over the TV, “Eileen—?”

She sat in the same white reading chair with her bare feet up on the footrest. Only the feet were bare; otherwise she was dressed as she’d been when she let him in, the black pants and green sweater she’d worn to work. A glass of wine on the small table there, its shadow dark red on the white tabletop. The big white bed neat and smooth. The six o’clock news was on the TV and when he looked finally at her face he saw the stains under her eyes—dark streaks on her cheekbones like big fallen eyelashes.

“You all right?” he said, and she looked at him strangely, wet-eyed, and turned back to the TV.

It was a story about an accident, the night before: two young women in a car, just across the border in Iowa. Slick roads. The Lower Black Root River. College girls. One of the girls was local. He knew who she was. He knew her father. Everyone did, of course; he was the county sheriff, or had been, and hearing his name in the news again—or his daughter’s name—opened a crack of memory, of old misery, in Gordon’s heart.