Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“Saska? She’s home with Emory. Yeah, well.” Over to their right, the skateboarders made their racket, and when one of them fell, the others yelled encouragement. “I got another one coming. My third . Another hell on wheels, I guess.”

“Boy?” Patsy asked.

“Yeah. I think so.”

“When’d you find out?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the ultrasound. . the amnio?”

“Oh, I haven’t had any of that. I’m just guessing. You?”

“This one’s a boy. For sure. I suppose I always knew it, but I did have my doctor do an ultrasound, and she asked me if I wanted the big news, and I said I did, and she said, ‘It’s a boy,’ so that’s how I know.”

“Our medical insurance ran out,” Anne McPhee said. “No ultrasound for me.”

In front of them, a squirrel scurried up the pedestal of the governor’s statue, stopped, then scurried down again. A whistle blew near the construction site’s trailer. Quitting time. The construction worker seemed to wave at them again, two pregnant women sitting in the park.

“I’m sorry,” Patsy said. The man on the steel beam continued to watch her.

“Oh, you don’t have to be sorry for us. It’s not your fault. And in case you’re wondering, I’ve forgotten all about that business with the home loan.”

“Really, Anne, it wasn’t personal. My apologies.”

“No need to be so sorry so much,” Anne McPhee said, mirthlessly laughing. “Besides, it’s not your fault, not giving us that loan. You work for a bank. We went to the other banks. Same thing. Besides, it’s Emory. It’s who Emory is, as a provider. Years ago we had the red-hots for each other and we got married and I got knocked up, and now here I am, sitting on this park bench with you.” She shot Patsy a huge disarming smile. She had a quality of dishonest sincerity. “We kissed ourselves right out of school into having a family before we had prospects. Same old story. Story of the ages. Story of the sower and the seedbed. We couldn’t help ourselves.”

“You get married, you struggle for a while,” Patsy sighed, scratching at her own arm in sympathy.

“It’s different for you,” Anne said. “You and Saul have two incomes. You at the bank, him at the school. No offense, Patsy. Emory and me, we had so much love so fast it just kept us ignorant about other things. The whole rest of the world.”

Patsy nodded. This conversation was like an old cat that wouldn’t get up from the carpet, that wouldn’t move anywhere at all. Anne McPhee scratched and scratched and scratched at her rash. Finally Patsy said, struggling against the silence, “How is Emory?”

“Oh, he’s okay. He’s thinking of getting his equivalency, then going to the Community College, get a degree in commercial art. We’re sort of fine. We’re still happy, you could say. No problem with each other. We worry about money, though.” She touched Patsy on the knee. “ All the time. Which is more your department. You still ever ride that motorcycle you bought — what, two years ago?”

“No,” Patsy said. “Not for months and months. Not since I became a mom. It’s getting dusty in the garage.”

There was a long pondering silence. The silence was about being able to buy a motorcycle that you then didn’t use. It was about that luxury. “Sometimes I wonder,” Anne said.

“Wonder about what?”

“How long it’ll last.”

“What?”

Anne said nothing. She wasn’t talking about the motorcycle anymore.

Her voice now came out very quietly and slowly. “How long it can last without enough money.”

“Depends, doesn’t it, how strong it is?” Patsy asked.

“I don’t think so. It’s strange how I loved him without exactly wanting to. Because of him, I couldn’t help myself back then, all that time when I didn’t have a clue about anything. Sometimes I think he resents me. You ever think that the sex thing is like a trap, that it cages you? Well, considering the way it happened,” she laughed, “you can’t say we didn’t have the grand passions. If love was dollars, we’d be millionaires, and us not even voting age yet. Before I got pregnant again, he was still lovin’ me up so often and so strong I couldn’t hardly sit down in the morning. We’d do it whenever Matt and Saska were sleeping. Pardon my language. Perpetual honeymoon, is what it is,” she sighed. “I’m the envy of the county. How’s that for weird? And me a Christian, too. Doesn’t add up.”

“Married life,” Patsy said. “No one can tell you anything about it.”

“That’s for sure. Listen. I’ve gotta go.” Anne stood, and her son raced in circles around her like a tiny courtier. She was like a princess rising, Venus out of the half-shell, a pregnant Persephone with apple juice stains. Patsy gaped at her. No wonder Emory had carried her off into the underworld of marriage and kept her there. “You and Saul, you sure are the center of attention right now, all these Himmel kids sprouting up everywhere.”

“Oh,” Patsy said. “That’s not about us.” The sun was setting with unexpected speed. Night was racing toward them on its chopper.

“Not what I heard. You should talk to that Brenda Bagley, Patsy. This thing’ll keep growing if you don’t do something. Somebody’ll come along and do some real harm to Saul. I mean it. That kid, that Gordy, he must’ve loved Saul. Or you. Or something. I think it was Saul he loved, though. That’s my theory. All his hatred, that was just love in disguise. I should know. But the other parents, they see this thing growing after Sam Cole got hit by that truck, and they think that you people are responsible. You know how people talk. You know what they say.”

“Responsible? Wait a minute. What do they say?”

“Come on, Matt,” Anne McPhee called out. “Hey, what’s your baby boy’s name gonna be?”

“Theo,” Patsy said. “What do they say, Anne? Tell me.”

“They say you’re cursed. Outcasts of God. Now that’s small-minded. No kidding, Patsy, I’d go talk to Brenda Bagley if I were you. You got some unfinished business over there.”

Driving to Brenda Bagley’s house, Patsy had the disagreeable sensation that Gordy Himmelman was sitting in the backseat, ruminating over his life and the stray impulse that had ended it — just there, slumped beside Emmy, making a minor ectoplasmic pest of himself, unseatbelted, more alive now that he was dead than he had been when he happened to be living. That was his way, his particular posthumous style. She thought she smelled for a fraction of a second the characteristic Gordy scent of pickles and wet dog. Okay, so he was back there. He was like a dog: he always enjoyed riding in cars, hanging around on the front lawn, waiting for a project.

Waiting for a head-pat. As a ghost he was probably harmless. Funny: weeks and weeks ago, after she and Saul had made love, Saul had abruptly said that he wanted to have a dog, but Patsy wasn’t going to get one, not with Emmy around and a new baby coming. Maybe having Gordy would satisfy Saul. Maybe not.

Coming to an unfamiliar street corner, she recognized that she was lost. Because of the city’s loose zoning laws, low property taxes, and the we-won’t-enforce-anything environmental understandings, Five Oaks’s industrial area had grown rapidly on the south side of the city in the early 1980s, and then, with the move to globalization, had declined just as rapidly. The streets were laid out in rosette and slipknot patterns. Boom and bust cycles happened so fast in the city these days that factories were closed months after they had opened; only the chemical plants were still holding their own down by the river, still profitable, still toxic. Now as Patsy tried to figure out where she was, she spotted the Hawkeye plant for school-bus frames to her right — the frames piled like steel skeletal remains near a loading dock. New as it was, the plant was about to close and move to Mexico. Or Honduras. Some damn place where they would work for ten cents an hour. Negotiations were still continuing. The closing of the factory had been major news in the papers, and as a bank officer, Patsy had to keep up with the latest statistics concerning the city’s economic infrastructure and indebtedness. Workers were losing their pensions and their savings and were being advised to move to the South-west. The whole neighborhood had a clammy out-of-work dinge to it. Sooty warehouses that had gone from youth to old age without anything in between were located here, next to parking lots and solitary clapboardexterior bars named The Wooden Keg and The Shipwreck, with their quietly slumped clientele visible through the front windows.