Джоан Силбер - Improvement

He’d called Sally, his ex-wife, from the towing garage—in this rasping, whispering voice that probably sounded like someone else—just to explain where the hell he was, and she was ominously silent at first. Then she said, “Okay, okay. I get it. You’re not hurt?”

Sally had a history of being disappointed in him, which caused him to make extra efforts to be dependable now, within their situation. He’d been sleeping with her for a year. They were having a real romance, a separate road from the rest of his life, which was his real life. It wasn’t even that complicated. He saw Sally when he was driving anywhere near her, hauling cookies to Florida or cough syrup to Baltimore, and he came home to Leah happy to see her.

He’d married Sally when they were both in their twenties and they hadn’t even stayed married that long. She’d hated his being away so much; she was always in a rage by the time he came home. When you were young it wasn’t natural to be patient.

He’d met Leah (she liked to call herself his last wife) when they were both older, glad enough to have whatever they could have. He’d helped raise April, the biggest pain in the ass on earth and the most amazing creature. She was eight when he moved in, and she was big on pranks like putting dog kibble in his cereal bowl or dropping grapes into his empty boots. He’d roar in high outrage while she giggled; he liked her tricky spirit.

When he got himself home to Leah after the accident, he must’ve looked three hundred years old. He’d left the truck outside Baltimore and gotten on a Greyhound to New York (seats not made for his height), and then waited around for another bus to take him to their upstate town, at the southern edge of the Catskills. He’d spent hours of the ride making phone calls to try to cover his ass on runs he couldn’t make now. He got a friend to do just one, and he had to explain to the broker, who was pissed off. When Leah picked him up at the stop, she said, “Well, thank God you’re in one piece.” The God part was a figure of speech; she wasn’t religious. He secretly sort of was, from so many years trying to lean on a higher power.

He had to wonder if the least he could do after the crash was to stop seeing Sally. But Sally lived near Washington, and the truck was in a repair shop a mere hour from her house. They’d take their time fixing it, earning their enormous estimate, but he’d have to go get it.

The big revival with Sally had begun when she was divorcing a more recent husband and she wanted a copy of the old divorce agreement with Teddy, which she couldn’t find, did he have it? An email came to him out of the blue with this question. He hadn’t seen her for decades, what was she up to? She said she’d worked for years as a bookkeeper and now she did something better in IT. Teddy had only started drinking at the end of their marriage, but after he got himself into AA, she was on his list of people he’d caused harm and had to make amends to. He sent her a letter, saying how sorry he was: for always telling other people how fucked-up she was, for throwing her nice cocktail dress under his truck and running it over. He thought she had a few things to be sorry for herself, but that was not the point. Not at all. She wrote back a not very respectful note, saying she hoped his new life was a shitload better than his last, there was a lot of room for improvement, and the next time he heard from her was twenty-six years later.

He still thought of her as young, though she was close to his age. He emailed a picture of himself, a selfie he took by a lake in Michigan, a graying dude who still had most of his hair, and so she sent one of herself—how could someone who’d turned into her own mother still look exactly like Sally? It was humbling to see; she was his first great love.

So when they finally met again, they were prepared. She had a house with a driveway big enough for his truck. No kids at home anymore. She served him coffee in the living room, but they both knew where they were heading. How startling it was to be in that suburban bedroom, figuring out her body all over again. “You were always fast at getting a bra off,” she said. She’d learned a lot of moves since they were first married. He knew her and he didn’t know her at all.

In the days right after the accident, when he was home all the time, Leah kept saying, “Rest, will you just rest?” as if he were convalescing, as she called it. He was still seeing blood, all the time, slick red all over the car seats, but he didn’t have to go on about it. He told Leah he could sleep when he was dead, and he started work on the back porch steps, which he’d been meaning to get to for months. The good news was that the passenger in the Taurus—the man he’d tried to lift out—had survived and was in a hospital getting his broken bones fixed. Teddy thought about going down to Maryland to pay him a visit, but the lawyer said he shouldn’t.

April, who now had a summer job in a knitting shop on Main Street, said to him, “Why did he do that, the driver who hit you? Was he stoned?”

April knew about stoned. Her high school in its countryish setting had been a hotbed of who knew what—amphetamines, heroin, synthetic marijuana, and stuff Teddy didn’t even recognize by its nicknames—and April’s adventuring attitude had led her into deep stupidity and danger from age sixteen on. She’d shift back and forth, walk around all stringy and snarling, then pop up as a perky, shiny-haired teenager; they couldn’t keep track, they had no hold on her. She laughed when Teddy offered to take her to an NA meeting. She cut school (which she’d always liked), she stole from her mother’s purse (she’d once been overattached to Leah); the usual. It was as if the drugs taught her to mock any ties as false. What held the world together was a bunch of lame assumptions.

She had a big scar slashing across her cheek now from where she’d fallen down the hill of their street when she was high. The surprise of this defacement had had an effect. Teddy had been away for that, but when he got back she was going to a rehab place in Kingston every day. She talked to Teddy now—they were buddies again—so he knew there had been one slip, but his guess was she’d be okay. In the fall she was going to a community college nearby.

Anyway, the kid who’d hit his truck had not been under the influence of anything. Teddy’s lawyer kept him more informed than he even wanted. “He must’ve just thought he could zip around as fast as he goddamned felt like,” Teddy said.

“It’s ego, isn’t it?” April said. “When people do that.”

Good group, that rehab.

“It killed him,” she said.

Teddy almost said, Gets us all, that’s always what’s the matter , but he didn’t, because he wanted April to be better than that. His girl.

“They should pay you,” she said.

Leah, who was glad to have him home so much, got him to help with the gardening. He complained that his back wasn’t made for weeding—what was she doing to him?—but he stuck with it. The sun wasn’t that hot; it was nice being out in the yard. In the end they got into a little contest pelting each other with blackberries. Her aim was really very good, but when he picked up a green tomato, to escalate, she stopped him. “You know what they cost at the farm stand? I save us a fortune by having this garden, you have no idea.”

Everyone likes a cheap tomato, but he was sorry she’d mentioned cash. It was six months since her job had cut back her hours (in the billing office of a hospital—weren’t people still getting sick?). The two of them were carrying too much debt, which made Teddy angry again at the asshole who’d careened into his truck.

“Oh, please,” Leah said. “Like you never did anything stupid at that age.”