Callan Wink: Dog Run Moon

He played a game of H-O-R-S-E with the boys and then he fell out and sat there on the lawn with her, watching them play until it started to get dark.

“Well, I’ve got to get these hooligans to bed,” she said, nodding to the boys. “But, if you’re not in a huge hurry, you could finish spreading this mulch for me. I could probably dig up a beer for you.” She laughed as if she were mostly joking but Dale — who had very little experience with these things — could tell fairly easily that this was a woman at some sort of departure point in her life.

Dale stayed. He spread the mulch. It was pitch-dark when she had returned. He was sitting on the front step, and she sat close enough to him that their legs touched. She had beers for each of them and she told him that she was very impressed with people that devoted their lives to helping others in their most dire time of need.

“I agree,” he said. “It’s not for everyone. Very rewarding, though. Or, at least I think it will be.” He was going to say something else but she had her hand on his leg now.

“You could stay,” she said. “Here, tonight, I mean, with me. If you don’t have anything else to do.” She was talking fast now, like now that she’d started, her words were gaining momentum, coming downhill out of control. “I’m not going to sleep with you, I mean, I want to sleep with you but that’s it. I mean, I want to do more than sleep with you but tonight I just want to sleep with you. Maybe this is weird. I don’t know. Never mind.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Really? I’m forty-three years old and I’m still married, technically.”

Dale shrugged. “I just dropped out of college, and live in my dad’s basement.”

Jeannette laughed like this was the funniest thing ever. “God, that sounds perfect,” she said. “If we could all be so lucky. You want to take a shower?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, again? You’re pretty agreeable aren’t you?”

“I guess.”

“My husband, ex-husband, whatever, once called me a bossy bitch.”

“You seem nice to me.”

She stood, reaching to pull him up too. “My shower’s not real big,” she said. “But, I bet we can both still fit. It might just be a little tight.” She said this last bit right in his ear. Dale figured that sometimes when a woman wants you to sleep with her but not sleep with her she actually means it. This turned out to not be one of those cases.

Later, in bed, her hair still wet, she pulled his arms around her and sighed. “This is what I wanted most,” she said. “I wanted all that other stuff we just did too, but this is it. I miss this so bad sometimes.” Eventually her breathing slowed and Dale thought she was asleep but then she gave a little kick as if startled. “Shit,” she said. “You’ve got to leave in the morning before the boys get up. It would just confuse them.”

I’m kind of confused myself, Dale thought.

—

Five years ago, her husband had been in a motorcycle accident. He’d been left with horrible back pain and had developed an addiction to OxyContin. He was unable to work. He got caught with three different prescriptions from three different doctors. That had scared him straight for a while.

“I thought he was better,” Jeannette said. “It was a hard thing. I never blamed him. I still don’t, really. He was trying. He still seemed out of it, though, like he was when he was on the pills, but he swore he wasn’t taking them anymore and I believed him. I had gotten another job at this point. I was still working days at the nursery and then nights at the Bistro when my mom could watch the boys. Anyway, I’m not complaining, but that’s why I did it. I was fed up. I was tired all the time and I just snapped.”

“What do you mean?” Jeannette had made him dinner. They were doing the dishes when she was telling him this. Standing side by side at the sink, Dale scrubbing a pan, Jeannette drying plates.

“I had him arrested,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do. I came back from my second job and the boys were home from their grandmother’s, watching TV, and I looked all over for him and I eventually found him in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. He was — it was— heroin .” She said the word so quietly he could barely hear it over the running water. “He played baseball in college. He was a regional sales rep for outdoor gear. I still can’t really believe it. I called the cops on him. He tried to drive off and they got him before he’d made it five blocks. He did a year in Deer Lodge. He’s in a halfway house in Billings now.” With this, Jeannette finished drying the last plate. She snapped him on the rear with her towel. “Enough of that sob story.”

That night she didn’t tell him that he needed to leave, and the next morning she made him breakfast, the boys looking at him, solemn eyed, across the table.

“Our dad can throw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball,” the one with the cast said. “How fast can you throw it?”

“Football was always more my sport,” Dale said.

The boy eyed him skeptically. “How tall are you?”

“Five-ten.”

“Where did you play?”

“Right here at Park High.”

“I meant after that.”

“That was it. There was no after that.”

The boy nodded as if this had confirmed some more general suspicion he’d been harboring. “My dad played in college.”

“Okay,” Jeannette said. “Boys, go brush your teeth. Dale, would you like more coffee?”

—

Dale had never been good at taking tests. He could know the material front to back, inside and out, but as soon as he was confronted with that sheet of empty, lettered bubbles — the knowledge that the whole enterprise was timed, the feeling of all the other test-takers silently massed around him, the smell of the freshly sharpened number-two pencils — his eyes would blur over, he’d second-guess himself, he’d sweat through his shirt. The EMT exam was a brutal gauntlet of 120 questions laced with words like: hypovolemia, necrosis, eschar, maceration, and diabetic ketoacidosis.

After running every morning, Dale sat at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice and took practice tests. He put his watch on the table so he could time himself. Sometimes his dad would interrupt him, coming in to get some water, or making toast, or firing up the lawnmower right under the window, but Dale didn’t mind. He could have done his studying in his room, but he liked to do it out in the kitchen where his dad might see. So far, his dad hadn’t asked him what he was up to, but Dale knew he was curious. He’d caught him drinking his morning coffee, thumbing through one of the study manuals, his eyebrows raised.

Dale was taking a practice test, in the middle of trying to decipher a particularly dense question, when Jeannette called. He let it ring. He was fairly certain that the correct answer was C. But, it was one of those questions where there could be multiple right answers, just one was more right than the others. He was pretty sure it was C, but it might have been A as well. These things confused him. He knew it was C. But then it might be A as well in which case it would be D because answer D was both C and A. Fuck. After a moment’s silence, his phone was ringing again. He answered this time and her voice was panicky.

“The creek,” she was saying. “It’s overflowing and it’s going to come in the house and I don’t even know if I have flood insurance and everything is going to be ruined and then mold sets in and maybe the foundation is already getting undermined and then when that happens you might as well just bulldoze the house. And—”

“Okay,” Dale said. “Hang on. Don’t worry about all that. No bulldozing. I’m coming over.”