Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

Bette was looking at the same design as was on the key ring. NA was in a baseball diamond, with the words Self, God, Society, Service in the open spaces.

“They give them out to celebrate ‘sobriety,’” Dale said. “That means for not doing drugs. For thirty days on up.”

“But this one says twenty.” What was Paul Legaris doing with a poker chip from Narcotics Anonymous?

“I think that means twenty years,” Dale said. “Where did you find these keys?”

Bette hesitated. If Paul Legaris had anything to do with drugs or Narcotics Anonymous, she didn’t want Dale to know until she knew more herself.

“Found it someplace,” Bette said.

“I need to google anything else? Potato chips or the rules for poker?”

“No.” Bette went back to loading the dishwasher. When she was finished she called Maggie.

“Sure, Narcotics Anonymous,” Maggie told her. “AA for drunks. CA for cokeheads. They have an Anonymous for everything.”

“NA is for junkies?”

“Not narcoleptics.” Maggie was curious. “You sure they are his keys?”

“No. But they were in his driveway, so let’s assume—which will make an ass out of you and me…”

“Guys in twelve-step programs always sleep with someone else in the twelve-step program. Sarah Jallis had a niece who married a guy from her AA group, but I think they divorced later.”

“If Paul Legaris is in NA, has been in NA for twenty years, I wonder what for.”

“Well.” Maggie paused. “I’d guess narcotics had something to do with it.”

Eddie and Sharri came in an hour later, wet from the Patels’ garden hose. An hour after that, all three kids were bathed and in front of the PlayStation watching a movie in HD. Bette was in the kitchen on her iPad, looking up Narcotics Anonymous on website after website. She did not hear the knock on the front door.

“Professor Legaris is here.” Eddie had come into the kitchen. Bette looked at her son with no reaction. “He’s at the front door.”

And there he was, on the porch, just on the other side of the doorway, dressed in jeans and a white shirt with leather deck shoes on his feet. Bette closed the door slightly behind her to block the sound from the movie.

“Hi,” she said.

“Sorry to bother you. I wonder if I can use your backyard to access my backyard.”

“Why?”

“Because I am a knucklehead. Locked myself out of my house. I think my sliding door is unlocked. I’d go over my own fence but I’d land in my garbage cans.”

Bette looked at Paul, at the same face that had brought her a HoneyBaked ham a month before, at the same guy who washed his car on Friday and thought her kids were a hoot, the neighbor who made his own telescopes and fixed old typewriters. Pop! Paul Legaris is sitting in a circle of men and women, all on folding chairs. He is listening to Daniel, the skinny redhead, talking about his days scoring heroin. Paul nods his head, recognizing his own behavior of twenty years prior.

“Wait right here,” Bette says.

She returned seconds later with the key chain in her hand.

“My keys,” Paul murmured. “You swiped my keys? That’s a joke.”

“They were in your driveway. I thought it was a big bug, but nope.”

“My car remote must have fallen off without me noticing, one more event to which I am oblivious. I had no clue where I’d lost them, so thanks.”

“Credit Greene Street and its good neighbor policy,” Bette said. Now would have been the time for her to close the door on any more interaction with the guy who lived next door, the guy who wore flip-flops, the guy whom she had been avoiding since she had moved in. But she surprised herself with a question. “What happened to that Daniel fellow with the red hair and the lofty vocabulary?” she asked.

Paul had turned to go but stopped, facing Bette in the doorway. “Ah, Danny.” Paul paused. “He’s in Kentucky.”

“Kentucky? He from there?” Bette was now leaning in the doorway, casually, comfortably. She found herself relaxed with Paul in her doorway, something she had never felt, not since that first Are you doing anything tonight?

“He’s from Detroit. A spot opened up at a place in Kentucky, so he took it for ninety days, if all goes well. I hope there was no problem during his stay with me.”

“No. I did want to give the guy a sandwich to fatten him up.”

“Yeah. Danny needs to eat better.” Paul stepped away again, leaving.

“You know,” Bette said, “in olden times redheads like him were considered demons. Because of the devil-colored hair.”

Paul laughed. “He’s got his demons, but no more than any of us.”

Bette looked down at the keys in Paul’s hand, at the poker chip that celebrated twenty years of sobriety, two decades narcotics-free. She did some math in her head. Chick Legaris was at least twenty-one years old, which would have made him a baby when his father hit his own rock bottom, when Paul began his journey from wherever that was to this night in August.

In that wink of an eye, Bette was even more assured she and the kids belonged here, on Greene Street.

“Thanks for saving me a ton of hassle,” Paul said, waving his keys.

“De nada,” Bette said, watching him step away toward his house next door.

She was just turning back into her house when— pop —she saw herself in her kitchen, early in the morning, with dawn still hours away and kids all still asleep in their beds.

“Hello, big boy,” she is saying to her espresso machine, steaming her morning latte and, in another mug, a double cappuccino with just a frothing of foam.

Then she is carrying both wake ’em ups out her front door, down her porch steps, across her lawn, and under the low hanging limbs of her sycamore.

Paul Legaris has set up his telescope on his driveway. The instrument is pointing at the deep, dark blue of the eastern sky over Greene Street.

Saturn is just rising. Through the eyepiece, the ringed planet is a glory, bang solid fat as a goose and cool as hell.

Traveling to the moon was way less complicated this year than it was back in 1969, as the four of us proved, not that anyone gives a whoop. You see, over cold beers in my backyard, with the crescent moon a delicate princess fingernail low in the west, I told Steve Wong that if he threw, say, a hammer with enough muscle, said tool would make a 500,000-mile figure eight, sail around that very moon, and return to Earth like a boomerang, and wasn’t that fascinating?

Steve Wong works at Home Depot, so has access to many hammers. He offered to chuck a few. His co-worker MDash, who’d shortened his given name to rap-star length, wondered how one would catch a red-hot hammer falling at a thousand miles an hour. Anna, who runs her own graphic design biz, said that there’d be nothing to catch, as the hammer would burn up like a meteor, and she was right. Plus, she didn’t buy the simplicity of my cosmic throw-wait-return. She is ever doubtful of my space program bona fides. She says I’m always “Apollo missions this” and “Lunokhod moon landing that,” and have begun to falsify details in order to sound like an expert, and she is right about that, too.

I keep all my nonfiction on a pocket-size Kobo digital reader, so I whipped out a chapter from No Way, Ivan: Why the CCCP Lost the Race to the Moon, written by an émigré professor with an ax to grind. According to him, in the mid-sixties the Soviets hoped to trump the Apollo program with just such a figure-eight mission: no orbit, no landing, just photos and crowing rights. The Reds sent off an unmanned Soyuz with, supposedly, a mannequin in a spacesuit, but so many things went south that they didn’t dare try again, not even with a dog. Kaputnik.