Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

“I didn’t run away!” she exclaimed. “And Lyle didn’t take advantage of me at all!” She tore a crust off her sandwich and tossed it to Dino, who was waiting for her by the door. It was disconcerting to be misunderstood. But how did a person tell his or her story exactly the way it was?

“When the responsibilities of your family became overwhelming, you traded them in for responsibilities of a different kind.”

“That’s not the way it was at all.”

Right from the start, Maggie had assumed Lyle needed her more than she had needed him. Even worse, she had let other people think it. Whenever Misty or True said, “I hope Lyle knows how lucky he is,” Maggie had never corrected them or said that she was lucky too. And if Lyle gave Will what she thought was bad advice, she would interrupt and contradict him, right in front of Will. Now she wondered if the proprietor was a little bit right about running away, and if what she was running away from had mostly been her fault.

9.9 Lyle

Every evening, the first thing Lyle would see when he walked into the house was the pile of bills on Maggie’s desk. He tried putting a kitchen towel over it, but that only made the pile seem to be taunting him. The Saturday after the phone service was terminated, Lyle got up early and cleared a space on the desk. After setting the checkbook and a blue felt-tip pen in the space, he poured a cup of coffee and sat in Maggie’s chair with his knees bumping up against the underside of the pencil drawer. He hadn’t worked at a desk in over twenty years, and his eyes automatically flew to the door and then to the window. A flock of crows settled on the lawn, their wings black and gleaming. Maggie’s bicycle, which he guessed now belonged to Will, rusted against the side of the shed, and the mud-spattered truck angled into its parking spot, indicating that Will had been the last to drive it. Lyle hadn’t heard him come in — where was Will going so late at night? He wished he could discuss it with Maggie, but he didn’t want to worry her. He wished he could discuss it with Jimmy Sweets without Jimmy always taking Will’s side and acting as if Lyle didn’t know his own son. When the crows flapped off, Lyle tore his eyes away from the window, half expecting Miss Proctor to slap her ruler against the side of the desk and say, Next time, Lyle, I’m slapping it against your head!

Each time Lyle wrote out a check, he sealed it in an envelope and fixed one of the self-sticking Liberty Bell stamps into the top right-hand corner. Then he printed his return address on the lines provided and dropped the envelope into a pile at his feet and carefully subtracted the amount from the balance column in the check register, just as Maggie had always done. “Look at this, Will,” he said when Will came into the room rubbing his eyes. He tapped the checkbook with the pen.

“Good job, Dad.”

Will’s big hand rested for a moment on Lyle’s shoulder, filling Lyle with something deep and joyful.

Besides bills, the pile contained credit card applications and mortgage refinance invitations and packets of coupons for things Lyle didn’t use. At the bottom of the pile were two letters on official school stationery — one inviting Will and his family to a meeting at the college counseling office, and the second saying that Will had missed two counseling sessions and also failed to turn in his scholarship application forms. A week later, a third letter arrived suggesting Will consider a trade school course if he didn’t plan to go to college. It included a final counseling date, this one printed in bold red type.

“What do you want to do?” asked Lyle.

Will seemed surprised that the counselor had taken the trouble to write so many letters. “I guess they believed their own story,” he said.

Will spent the weekend picking the letters up and putting them down again. “About becoming a doctor,” he said when they were clearing away the Sunday supper things.

“Yes?” said Lyle when his son didn’t continue.

“I mean, how do people know who they really are?”

The question unnerved Lyle, who had started to wonder the same thing. “Why don’t you call Mom in the morning?” he suggested. “She gets in early on Mondays. She’s sure to have some good ideas.”

“Mom’s a perfect example of what I mean,” said Will. “We went for years thinking she was one thing, and then, all of a sudden, she was something else.”

“People have sides to them,” said Lyle. “Your mother was just discovering a different side. Kind of like you discovering you want to be a doctor.”

“But I don’t want to be a doctor,” said Will quietly. “I don’t want to now, and I never did.”

“But I thought…” Lyle sat down at the table, stunned and silent. “Let’s call your mother,” he said. “I expect she’ll have some good advice for you.”

“What would Maggie Rayburn do — isn’t that how it goes? The thing is, I don’t want to know what Mom would do. It’s what Will Rayburn would do that counts, so don’t you go telling her anything about it.”

Lyle understood that in some way the conversation was about him, for all around him, people were changing while he sat stuck to his chair. He alone had no facets or hidden agendas. He suspected that when the doctors eventually cut him open, what they’d find would be a brown zip jacket and a red felt cap.

After that, he spent ten minutes a day at the desk and watched the dwindling pile of bills with a deep sense of satisfaction. Less satisfying was the fact that the total in the right-hand column of the check register was going down. “I guess I won’t be fixing that muffler,” he said to Will, who was sitting on the couch staring out the window at the crows.

“Did you ever notice that when one flies off, they all fly off?” asked Will.

“That seems to be in the nature of crows,” said Lyle.

“Yeah,” said Will. “Sometimes I think I must be part crow.”

One day a representative of the bank that held the mortgage on their house called to say the automatic payment had failed to go through for the second month in a row.

“My wife handles the mortgage payments,” said Lyle.

“In that case, perhaps you could put her on the phone.”

When Lyle couldn’t, the bank representative informed him that payment in full would be expected within a week. Then he told Lyle the amount of money owed, including interest and late fees. Lyle wrote the number down on a notepad and said he would send a check, but when he used his calculator to subtract the amount the bank wanted from the balance in the checkbook, the display blinked out -623.58.

Negative numbers had always seemed highly theoretical and dangerous to Lyle. They reminded him of words like “antimatter” and “implosion” because they didn’t correspond to real things, but to the opposites of real things. He tried to laugh it off — first to himself, and then to Will. “What’s the opposite of a couch?” he asked.

“There’s no such thing,” said Will.

“That’s my point,” said Lyle, walking over to show Will the bank balance. “That’s exactly what I’m getting at.”

“What about your paycheck, Dad? And didn’t Mom send you part of hers?”

“Oh gosh, of course,” said Lyle, breathing a sigh of relief. He adjusted the numbers in the check register and experienced a warm rush of competence. But there was also a car insurance bill hiding in the pile along with an unpaid speeding ticket and a charge for filling the propane tank, leaving the bank balance still veering toward negative territory even without the mortgage payments. “I guess I don’t absolutely have to pay the phone bill,” he said. “I guess I don’t absolutely have to fix the truck.”