Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Facing Nora in the kitchen and murmuring into the sizzle of the small chicken she’d just lifted up from the oven, he said, “I spoke to Jeremy’s teacher. The nursery school woman.”

“Muriel Preston.”

“Yes. She didn’t see the cape. I think she thinks maybe one of the children stole it.”

She said, “They don’t need it.”

“No.”

“Jeremy does.”

“Yes, he does.”

“I mean he really needs it.”

He nodded, then went to the counter on the far wall for the hardwood cutting board and the carving knife and fork that he and Anna had given to them when Nora’s husband, Jeremy’s father, was home. He dripped juice from the bird on his shirt and along the floor.

“Sorry,” he said.

Nora said, “That’s all right.” She tore off pieces of paper towel so that she could clean up the juice, but she held the paper, watching him, and she finally set the crumpled squares near the sink. Bing told himself to remember to wipe the floor after dinner.

“I’ll let the chicken sit awhile,” he said.

She said, “I should have bought some cloth someplace.”

“For what? A new cape?”

“Maybe I could have persuaded him. I asked, but he flew into a rage. He said it wouldn’t be — Hey, Jeremy, honey. Hi.”

He held something like a white, yellow, and red pistol made of the locking plastic bricks. He solemnly offered it to his grandfather.

“Look at that,” Nora shouted.

“Good job,” Bing said, holding it as you’d hold a handgun.

Jeremy said, “It’s a angle iron.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “What do you do with it, honey?”

Jeremy took it from him and held it against the side of the refrigerator. With the eraser end of a pencil, he made measuring motions. “You get it straight,” he said.

Bing said, “Yes, you do.”

“I love how you didn’t mark the fridge up,” Nora said too loudly. “Thank you.”

“It was pretend. Arnie does it real.”

“God, doesn’t he,” Nora said. Arnie Holland was the country man in his thirties who was as celebrated among the women of the village for the effects of his shirtlessness while he worked as he was for his achievements at rough carpentry.

Bing, slicing a drumstick and going to work on the thigh, said, “Arnie was here, then?”

“At Lindsay Delano’s.”

Bing had dropped Jeremy there after school so that Nora could stay on at work in the hospital admitting office, where a flu had cut into the staffing. He had driven from Lindsay’s back to school, then from school to Muriel’s house, and from there to the Quik-Mart for his guilty cinnamon gum, and from there to his daughter’s. He was becoming a local, he thought. It was time to go home. It was time to get back to work. He hadn’t checked for messages, he hadn’t called the office, he hadn’t even opened his briefcase in nearly a week. He was moving with his usual long-legged, slow-motion lope — that had been Anna’s description of his progress through the world — but he was really on the run.

Nora said, “What, Daddy?”

He looked up to see Jeremy staring at Nora as Nora stared at Bing. He had separated drumstick from thigh and thigh from the carcass. He had cut off the wing. He had carved the breast meat into semicircular slices, and he stood above this orderly disposition as if he had come upon an accident, a wreck.

“No,” he said, “I was thinking.”

Jeremy said, “You looked sad.”

“Sir,” he sang at the boy, “I was glad . I was glad to know you and in a transport of delight to be carving up this great big slice of bologna for your platter. That’s the matter.”

He waited for a smile. He had hoped for laughter, but a little smile across the dull white cheeks, pushing at the dark pink bags beneath the eyes, would have satisfied him. Jeremy only watched him with his usual care, and Pop-Pop served up breast meat. Then he talked to Nora about a textbook they had to revise, for school board adoptions in Texas and Arkansas, because the sections on evolution referred to the immutable cycles of mutation . “Far be it from me to deny a biology professor his zippy little pun, his toothsome academic oxymoron,” Bing said. “But that Texas guy with the bullwhip on his office table in Congress — truly, a big black bullwhip — summoned us to Washington. I didn’t go. I refused to. But I did have to send two of the kid editors. Adoption means huge sums. Do you care about this, honey?”

Nora’s eyes, as dark and liquid as Anna’s, looked miserable. “Like you said before,” she said, “I was thinking.”

“About what — besides textbook adoptions?”

“How you’re telling what somebody else ought to be hearing. But that can’t be, can it? And how I’m listening to you while I ought to be hearing a different somebody else.”

“Somebody else,” he said.

Nora said, “Somebodies. The case of the missing somebodies.”

“But that can’t happen,” he said.

“Apparently not.”

He said, “Apparently not. But ,” he said, “do I not get to gobble Jeremy’s dessert?”

His grandson looked up expectantly, but not with resistance in his eyes, or a willingness to joke that moved on his chapped, bitten lips. He was waiting, Bing understood, to find out whether the world intended to take away his wedge of pineapple upside-down cake.

“Oh, baby boy,” Bing said.

Nora sat with Jeremy while Bing cleaned up dishes. He worked in a trance of hushing hot water and the simple process of scrubbing at pots and the roasting pan while the dishwasher made a grating noise behind which he sheltered the way someone is private behind a high hedge. He thought he understood everything about his loss of Anna — the complaints, the physical exam, the tests, the results, and then the roaring speed of it. He knew what he thought and felt about every grim inch of the cornering, the pinning-down, every day, into a smaller and smaller space, of the tall, tough Englishwoman he had known for so many decades. Whatever he understood about his life was through what she’d seen in him and how she had told him of what she had seen.

But something had happened, and no one but he and Anna had witnessed it, and he thought he would never understand. It filled his chest, it pressed him breathless, to realize that he could ask only his forever-vanished wife what she had meant in the artificial dusk of their bedroom as she, on their bed, opened her eyes to find him in a chair beside her, weeping.

He sighed, now, in Nora’s kitchen, as he recalled the discovery. Anna’s mouth had tightened, and her dark eyes had scratched like fingers at his face. He remembered straightening in the chair as if expecting a blow. And he’d received it.

Her weak whisper spat from the yellow crepiness of her face. “Jesus, Bing,” she’d said in the darkness, “can you give me a break here. Give me a hand , old boy, and push me off.”

So why not think of synagogues and mosques? he thought, turning his hands beneath the water. Why not wonder about churches? Besides the nighttime hauntings at home, were those not where the truths of the dead were said to reside? No one but Anna could tell him what she had wanted of him, and what it was that he couldn’t provide. She hadn’t asked him to kill her, he thought. Or had she? If he had understood that, would he have agreed? Had he tried, out of fear, not to understand? Was that the way he had let her, in her agony, down? Or was it something different, maybe even something, somehow, more?

He had never told Nora. He wouldn’t, he knew. Jeremy knew the most, he thought, about feeling failed. His hands opened in surrender under the hot, rushing water. If he and Jeremy made it another twenty years, he thought, he might try asking his grandson the meaning of the loneliest moment of his life.