Ben Greenman - The Slippage

“Oh,” he said. “Hi.”

“Coffee,” she said. “Just tell me. I need a cup and I’m tired of waiting in lines behind people who are trading tips about how to avoid the bad science teachers in middle school. And that’s not even the worst of it. Today there was a little girl, maybe seven, ordering coffee for herself. Can’t parents go to jail for that?”

“Where are you?” he said.

“I’m at the mall on Gerrold Street. Do you know it?”

“Do I know it?” William said. “I know it like the back of my own hand, if my hand had lots of clearance sales. There’s a great out-of-the-way place about six blocks from there.”

“You have no interest in joining me,” she said, hanging the sentence by a tiny question mark.

“Sure,” he said. “I have a meeting but I can cancel it.” He went outside. A kid was playing basketball in the Zorrillas’ driveway. He vaguely remembered that cousins were visiting from Ecuador. He walked by Louisa’s car, which seemed huge to him. Why had they even bought a four-door?

When he arrived at the mall, Emma was sitting on a bench outside the frozen yogurt store. “I’ve had it with driving,” she said. “Will you do it? You can give me a tour.” And then she was in his car, in his passenger seat, pulling the belt across her midsection. Her hair was dark gold where it was matted to her head by the heat. He drove north on Ashmore, past an elementary school where kids ran wild in the concrete yard. “If you were a teacher, you’d work there,” he said. A block later, there was a hospital. “If you were a doctor, you’d work there,” he said.

She pointed at a post office. “If I worked there, look out,” she said. “Postal, postal, postal.”

“What?” he said. “You’re not settling in the way you had hoped?” He tried to keep the thrill from his voice.

“Stevie’s out of town.”

“Oh,” he said. “Business trip?”

“Sort of. He writes songs, and he’s always had this thing about getting them out there so that they can be heard by the people they way they were intended.” She put up quotes, though he wasn’t sure where they were supposed to go.

“I saw him playing guitar one morning in the garage.”

“Right. Since we’ve been here, he’s gotten obsessed with having Arrow buy one of his songs as its identity music.”

“You mean to replace the regular Arrow theme?” William hummed the melody, which like most Americans he’d known since childhood: it had a run of high notes and a run of low notes, with a beat of silence splitting the two.

“Yep. That’s all he’s been able to talk about. And because marketing is now separate from everyone else, it means he has to go back to Chicago once a month or so for meetings with the media buyers and the outside ad people. Whenever he’s there he wakes up, goes to the gym, and calls me to pump up his confidence. I’m never awake and never happy to hear from him. If Arrow buys the song, he says it could validate him as a songwriter, but I think he’s mainly thinking of the payday. And money isn’t music.”

“Very small amounts of it jingle,” William said.

Emma laughed, but not like she had in Chicago. That had been like light on the surface of water. This was like being pulled down into it. “There’s a problem here,” she said. “It’s a place where I know nothing and I have nothing. I’m cut off from my life, my job, my friends. And all Stevie can do is talk about new starts. For him, maybe.”

Emma took off her coat. She was wearing an old-fashioned pink dress, the kind of thing William would have expected to see in an advertisement from the 1950s. Beneath it there was a telltale swell of belly. He could do nothing at first. Then he could speak but had nothing to say. Then he had something to say, and he said it. “Well, that looks like a new start.”

“It is,” she said softly. “I’m due in September.”

“Congratulations.”

“I wanted to tell you at the party, but we’re not telling anyone yet. I had a miscarriage a few years ago, so we’re waiting as long as possible.”

“Right,” he said. “Good plan. Better safe than sorry. It suits you, though. That was my one criticism of you in Chicago: not pregnant enough.” This time her laugh was better. “You don’t know boy or girl yet, right?”

“No. I hope it’s a boy. I know how much trouble girls can be. Stevie says he doesn’t care. Maybe he doesn’t. But the money worries him. He keeps saying that a baby is a capital expenditure, that it’s a way of spending money now but earning more back later.”

“I know what a capital expenditure is,” William said. “I work in financial writing. That’s forward thinking. Promote that man.” His hands felt loose on the ends of his arms. He was still trying to see his way around the small hill.

“For me, I’m more focused on other things. I feel horrible half the time, and then the other half is like I’ve been plugged into some universal outlet. My hair has gotten healthier. When I drive by restaurants, I can smell what’s cooking in the kitchen. My libido has gone completely haywire.”

“It has?” William missed a turn.

“It has. It used to be a predictable thing, a steady line. Now there are days where sex is the farthest thing from my mind, and days where I’m at its mercy.” She inspected her fingers. “Where I’m absolutely devoured. It’s like being fifteen again, but this time I know what all the fuss is about.”

They were on Norris now. “We’re near the coffee shop,” William said.

“Isn’t this the turnoff for our street? Your street?”

“Sort of. It’s the back way.”

“Actually,” she said, “can we stop here for a minute? I could use some help moving something. Do you have time?”

William pretended to check his watch. “Sure,” he said. “Let me just call and shift a meeting.” He banked off Norris onto Terhune, merged into Emerick, picked up Irving. He dropped Emma off on her driveway and then backed across the street to his own. He called Karla. “I might not be able to pick up Christopher,” he said.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t expect you to do it every day. Just now and again.”

“Can’t do it now,” he said. “But I can do it again.”

He sat in the car and waited. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for, but he needed a short delay. He thought back through Southern Christmas, back to Chicago. He thought about how Emma had looked in the bed that second morning, about how he had gone out to the hallway to call Louisa, about how he had left a message saying Chicago was boring, about how he had walked into the bathroom while Emma was showering and she had invited him in and he had declined and she had asked him what, does this kind of thing happen to you all the time, and he had affected a tough tone and said yeah, all the time, there are lots of girls like you, and she had opened the shower door so that steam came out. “There are lots of girls like me, but I’m not one of them,” she had said.

William walked across the street. Emma was still outside, shoving something from the pathway to the lawn with her foot. “Look,” she said. “Some of these roof tiles fell off. That guy who sold it to us said he’d just gotten the roof redone.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” William said.

“Obviously,” she said. “But Stevie didn’t bother checking. He’s such an operator at work, but get him out of the office and there’s no one more gullible.” Inside, there was a masonry of boxes against the dining room wall; the place looked like a set under construction. “Task at hand,” she said. “It’s a husband’s job, you’d think, but he’s too busy working on his song. Did I tell you the title? ‘I Stand (For America).’ With parentheses and everything.”