Theodore Wheeler - Bad Faith

“I don’t want to go,” I told him.

He wouldn’t get out of the truck and make me go inside. I knew he wouldn’t.

He turned the engine over, cranked the column shifter into gear, and we left.

8

He had all the work he wanted in Urbandale and Merle Hay. Word of mouth spread across subdivision lines from woman to woman. Even with the one arm that didn’t unbend he could still hold things in that hand, in a painful, shaky grip, if he angled his body to that side, or used scrap pieces to trap boards plumb against the chopsaw back. The women always wondered how he didn’t lose a finger like that.

Sometimes he had me hold the board, even though my mom had told me to keep away from the saw. More often than not it was easier for my dad to hold the board himself.

I got him tools when asked. Hammer, shim, awl, punch, putty knife, belt sander. I carried him scraps of lumber. He yelled if I banged anything on the door molding (which is why he got full boards himself) or if I dropped something on the carpet, if it was new carpet.

He and my mom had renovated the house we lived in. It was the old house from the farm he grew up on.

I never knew my grandparents on his side. They died before I was born. The farmland partitioned off. The house had been unoccupied for some time when my parents came to fix it up. They met in Des Moines, where she went to nursing school. They tore out carpet and ripped down grease-saturated wallpaper, sanded the floors and crippled in new boards to replace the rotted ones. They scared rodents out of the attic, shot raccoons with a pellet gun. I sat to the side watching them stain the woodwork, or paste long strips of new wallpaper. I remember these things from the photos they took. It must have meant a lot to my father to keep his family in the farmhouse. To do all this even with a lame arm.

“What did grandpa die from?” I asked.

“There was a drunk driver.” He winced, saying that. “It was him, you know. My dad. He’d been drinking and rolled the car. He and mom flew out and nobody could save them.”

9

It was okay with him if I sat out of the way and banged on matchbox cars with the hammer. The carpet fiber was cool to my skin when I laid my face to it, in those houses where women ran the air conditioning all day.

These were stay-at-home women. A few divorced. They were always hanging around. Checking out the work. Complimenting my father on something technical or another they didn’t know the right word for. They made lunch so we wouldn’t have to leave for McDonald’s. Meatloaf, roast beef, chicken casserole. Not just sandwiches — food that made it hard to finish the work in an afternoon. Sometimes they baked cookies or jelly-filled kolache, and hovered behind as we ate.

10

I never thought of my father as good-looking. His arm.

My mom was good-looking. She was different from everybody. Part Cleveland Jew, part Chicago Chicana. A Brasilian diplomat mixed in somewhere along the way, the relatives all swore, who took a bullet during a Chilean coup, and that’s why he never returned from what was sworn to be a legitimate envoy to the Andes.

My father’s line was mostly Germanic. It was linear. Comfortably Midwestern. Middle American, Central Iowan. His name? Ben Schmidt. He wore overalls when he worked and jeans when company came over. Sometimes he pronounced overalls overhauls to be funny, to make my mom and me smile, mocking the way the old-timers around there talked. But I think now he liked talking that way and wasn’t always joking. It must have warmed him inside to say Missour-uh and Ioway and Neebrasskee .

11

My father was tall. He had light hair, a square jaw, a patchy beard that grew up his cheeks. The women he worked for didn’t mind his lame arm. They seemed all the more interested once they heard the story of how he’d been hurt, the car accident, the drunk friend. “Hell. We were all drunk,” he’d admit to a woman he was working for. She’d stare at his lame arm when he wasn’t looking her direction, a woman would. She’d let her fingertips glance over the unmoving surface of his skin when he was done for the day, to see if he’d notice her touching him. Sweat and sawdust collected in the fine whitish hair of his forearms. Women tried to brush the sawdust away.

These strange women of the suburbs.

12

We were three weeks in the house of Trish Schumacher that July, out in Jordan Creek, where she lived by the mall, by a golf course and the cul-de-sac of a megachurch built up like a philistine temple in stucco.

Trish and her husband were loaded. Mr. Schumacher was a lawyer, or a minister, I don’t remember. Trish was in real estate. They had a big new house. Big new cars with lots of chrome and showroom shine. Escalades.

Trish thought the finish work in the bathrooms was botched during the construction of her new house, so that’s why she called my father. “I heard about this Ben Schmidt from my girlfriends,” she said, “and I had to have him.”

13

Trish liked to check on the work. She liked to appraise and laud, to ask dumb questions, to tell about some house she sold that year and its countertops.

Trish talked to me too. I was an easy target for women. My dark complexion, my near-white blond hair. Trish thought I was adopted the first day — she didn’t know what my mom was like. I was scrawny. Like my dad, I wouldn’t start really growing until high school.

14

When we were alone Trish asked me things. How I liked school. If I liked living on a farm. “Are there any kids out where you live? Some neighbor girl?” I shook my head. “I had two brothers and two sisters. A big family, me in the middle. Not too old, not too young,” she laughed. “I think it’s sad for an only child. Don’t you think so? To not have anyone to play with.”

She was just talking. I didn’t even look at her. I sat cross-legged in the dry bathtub bottom, rolled matchbox cars until they were in a row.

She tapped her rings on the edge of the bathtub. “You don’t have to tell me. I can imagine what it’s like.”

15

“Oscar is a tough nut to crack,” my father said, back from the truck.

16

In the evening there were video calls with Mom. She was just getting up. Or just going to bed. I don’t remember what time it would have been over there. She was tired.

My father dialed in the PC that sat on the floor next to the television, but he went outside before she answered. I brought the fishbowl downstairs to brag how I was keeping my goldfish alive.

She talked about the food she ate, once the PC was dialed in, the kinds of equipment she had around her neck and in the pockets of her med kit. Her stethoscope, her thermometer. Rubber gloves. Her voice digitized, sometimes doubling over itself in echoes. She always wore her hair up, over there, wore khaki tee shirts that fit tight around her. She smiled big when she saw me. So big the video broke up in pixilation. She asked how my day went and told me about her day. She tried to tell me about the people she worked with, or the bunker she rushed to if the Sense & Warn detected incoming, she said; and the geography, the mounds of desert that blew in under the doorways; and on the airplane going over, watching the sunset and sunrise only three hours apart over the Arctic Ocean.

I didn’t hear any of that.

If she told me to shut up about asking when she was coming home, I would.

17

I told her what things my father did wrong around the house. I ratted him out for being unsafe around the saw, for letting me skip bath, for wearing the same shirt all week, for drinking too much beer, for the beard he was growing. (I didn’t tell how we ate McDonald’s for both lunch and dinner, for fear that this would mean the end of going to McDonald’s.)