Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

It did not relieve Sheila, however. She could no longer blame Harold’s body. She had to blame her own. One by one, month after month, she ticked off the list all the possible causes of her body’s inability to conceive a child: ovarian cysts, pelvic infection, blocked fallopian tubes. None of these. Until finally, after being examined by a female gynecologist at St. Mary’s Hospital in Troy, she learned that her uterus was scarred from endometriosis, caused by a burst appendix when she was fifteen. The chances of her ever conceiving were pretty much nil.

By now sex with Harold had become a self-conscious chore for both of them, an obligation with a defunct purpose. They ceased making love altogether. Then one spring afternoon, while Harold was down in the valley excavating the foundation for the new Keene firehouse, Bud Lincoln dropped by their place to borrow Harold’s backhoe for one of his jobs, and Sheila had sex with Bud for the first time.

The affair intensified and continued for nearly a year, and on a cold dark February night Harold found himself drinking late and alone up at Baxter Mountain Tavern, idly watching a Rangers game that wasn’t carried by his home satellite service. Harold had played serious hockey in high school and rarely missed a televised Rangers game. One of Bud Lincoln’s old girlfriends, Sally Hart, was tending bar that night. There were no other customers, and the owner, Dave Deyo, had gone home early, so Sally shut off the outside lights and poured herself a rum and Coke and took a stool at the bar next to Harold.

The subject of Sally Hart’s ex-boyfriend came up. Harold said, “What’s with ol’ Bud, anyhow? I haven’t seen him up here in months. He avoiding me? Or you?” he said and laughed to show he wasn’t serious.

In the two years since Sally and Bud had split up, she had gone through two subsequent boyfriends and was five months pregnant by the third, whom she planned to marry. So nope, Bud wasn’t avoiding her. “Me and him are still pals. You, though,” she said, “different story there, Harold.”

“What do you mean, ‘different story’?”

She hesitated, then said, “Look, honey, I hate to be the one to say it, but somebody’s got to. When you leave here, I’m supposed to text Bud so he knows you’re on your way home.”

“Why?”

She exhaled loudly and looked up at the TV. “All my choices always seem to be bad choices.” She was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I guess it’s so you won’t run into him when you get there, Harold.”

He didn’t say anything. He put down his beer, paid his bill and zipped up his parka. The hockey game was almost over. The Rangers were down three. When he got to the door he turned and said, “You might as well send Bud that text now, Sally. I don’t want to run into him any more than he wants to run into me.”

When Harold got home Bud was gone. He stood at the open door and told his wife what he had learned at Baxter’s. Sheila sighed and said that she had fallen in love with Bud. And it was more serious than just a love affair. She said she would have his child if she could.

He said, “Sounds like there’s no turning back now. Sounds like you’re planning a whole different life, Sheila.”

She said, “That’s right.”

She packed a single suitcase and drove her old rusted-out Honda to Bud’s apartment in his parents’ house down in the valley. Harold did not contest the divorce. A year later Sheila and Bud Lincoln were married.

A LINE OF VEHICLES was parked the length of the long, switchbacking, freshly plowed driveway to Sheila and Bud’s house at the broad crest of the hill. Harold pulled his pickup into a cleared spot close to the mailbox, got out and walked slowly up the driveway between two rows of shuddering white pines. It was close to four thirty in the afternoon, and the sun was setting behind the mountains. The invitation had said the Christmas party was from three to six, so he figured he was not too early, not too late.

As he trudged past the parked cars and pickup trucks he recognized most of them. Nearly everyone at the party would be a friend or at least a neighbor. He never knew what to say to strangers, especially at social events, so was comforted. But he knew that nearly everyone attending the party would be checking out how he and Sheila and Bud behaved together in public, and that annoyed him. Well, let them, he thought. Sheila and Bud didn’t invite him to their Christmas party because they wanted a confrontation, and he hadn’t accepted their invitation because he was still angry at them. People move on. What’s over is over and done with. The past is past. That’s what this party is all about, he thought.

At the top of the hill the driveway straightened and led to the two-car garage below the house proper and the wide deck and huge brook-stone fireplace chimney and the soaring glass-fronted living room. Harold stopped for a moment and, breathing hard, took it all in: the snowy meadow, the woodsmoke curling from the chimney, the high-peaked roof and floor-to-ceiling two-story windows facing the mountains. Rose-colored light from the setting sun bounced off the glass front of the house and tinted the field and the snow-draped firs at its edge.

He was looking at Sheila’s dream house, the house he knew she had always wanted, which he would never have been able to give her. He was an excavator, that’s all. A guy who dug holes for people who were contractors, people like Bud Lincoln, who were smarter and better educated than he was, who knew how to negotiate and estimate cost and profit, who could talk easily to people and turn them from strangers into clients. All Harold Bilodeau knew was how to run machines that dug foundations and trenches. He had started out in high school buying a used lawn mower at a yard sale and mowing his neighbor’s lawns and shoveling their walks in winter and had gone on to borrow his father’s tractor and cut people’s fields and meadows and plowed their driveways, and after graduation he had bought a used backhoe and a few years later a ten-year-old bulldozer and flatbed trailer and got the artist Paul Matthews to make him a sign, Harold Bilodeau, Excavating . The sign was bright yellow, like a highway sign, and had a black silhouette of a backhoe on it that Harold liked enough to have tattooed onto his left shoulder. At first Sheila thought the tattoo was sexy, but after a while she decided it was ugly and cheap and told him he ought to get it removed, which he was planning on doing when he found out about her and Bud. After that he decided to keep the tattoo.

He walked up the stairs to the front deck and entered the crowded living room through the sliding glass door. At a glance he recognized nearly everyone. People smiled and nodded at him, but their attention was on the Christmas tree in the far corner of the room, a ten-foot-tall blue spruce, heavily decorated and brightly lit.

Harold stood by the door for a moment, trying to get his bearings. Finally he shrugged out of his parka, found a pile of coats behind one of the sofas and dropped it there. He made his way to a long table that had been set up as a bar and asked the pretty kid tending it for a beer.

She said, “Sure, Harold, but you can have whatever you want. They got hard stuff. Eggnog even, with bourbon in it.”

He said a Pabst would do fine. The girl worked as a waitress part-time at Baxter’s, and he wished he could remember her name, but he didn’t know how to ask her for it without seeming like he was hitting on her. She had a tattoo of a thorny rosebush on her arm that disappeared under the sleeve of her black T-shirt and reappeared with a bud at the side of her neck just below her ear. She’d probably like his backhoe if he showed it to her.

Sheila was beside him. She was wearing a red dress with a bow on one shoulder, which reminded Harold of a valentine. She kissed him on the cheek, which surprised him; she had never kissed him on the cheek before, or anyone else that he could remember. She said, “You’re almost too late to help decorate the tree. We’re practically finished, except for the star at the top. What’d you bring for a decoration?”