Crossing the Bridge (11 page)

The idyll didn’t last very long.

Tuesdays in the store were always quiet. Even during the height of the summer and fall, when the inns were full most of the time and it took ten minutes to find a parking space anywhere near Russet Avenue, Tuesdays and Wednesdays remained relatively still. During the first hour I was in the store, as Tyler took notes for his accounting final and Carl put up a new shipment of Father’s Day mugs, it came to mind that I could easily take these two days off for as long as it took to sell the store.

It was about this time when Carl came running up from the stockroom.

“We have a problem,” he said, looking at Tyler.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The back room is getting flooded.”

The three of us moved quickly to the stockroom, where water was gushing out of a burst pipe at an absurd rate. There was already an inch of water on the floor and the wall that butted up against the back display of the store was getting soaked.

“How the hell did this happen?” I said.

Carl shook his head. “I’m not sure how it started. I came back here to get a box and there was water all over the place. I tried to close the valve over there with a wrench and the valve broke.”

I threw my head back and cursed. The vision of an
enormous flood in the back of the store doing untold damage – damage that would take months to repair, thereby extending my stay in Amber – loomed in front of me as the water continued to stream out. My cursing seemed to intimidate Carl, who started muttering apologies. I wasn’t interested in an apology. What I wanted was for the flood never to have happened in the first place.

While I was seething, Tyler was actually doing something. He went first to a valve that he thought controlled the water in the store, but nothing happened. As he continued to search, I continued to rant. Several minutes went by while Tyler tried to figure out how to turn off the water. During this time, the flood got worse. Nearly the entire back wall of the store was soaked now.

“Of course, it’s outside,” Tyler said and headed out the back door. Shortly thereafter, the water stopped streaming and Tyler returned.

“I’ve probably seen that valve five hundred times coming into the store,” he said. “I just never paid any attention to it.”

“This is a disaster,” I said, looking around the room. Most of our backup stock had been drenched. Since this was essentially cards and stationery items, that meant that all of it was ruined. I walked out of the stockroom to look at the back of the store. As I suspected, the plasterboard was soaked. What I stupidly hadn’t anticipated was that the carpet was spongy. Rivulets of water formed around my shoes.

“Can someone help me up here?” came a voice from the front of the store. I turned to see a man holding a magazine, looking exasperated. I turned
my back to him and cursed again.

“I’ll get him,” Tyler said, walking to the cash register. I went back to examining the display and Tyler returned after making the transaction.

“This whole wall is going to have to be replaced,” I said. “Is this a load-bearing wall? Is the entire back of the store going to collapse?”

“What do you want me to do with these boxes,” Carl said from the stockroom. I stood up, opened the back door, and pointed outside.

“See that dumpster?” I said. “That’s the only thing you can do with those boxes now.”

Tyler put his arm around my shoulder. “You might want to wait until we talk to the insurance company.”

“I don’t even know who the insurance company is.”

Tyler took a deep breath. I think he was doing it to try to convince me to do the same. I didn’t take his suggestion.

“I’ll find out,” he said. He led me toward the door of the stockroom. “Listen, why don’t you take the register for a while? I’ll call the landlord and cordon off the back of the store and then I’ll get the number of the insurance company from the files.”

“This is a total disaster,” I said.

“It’s actually only a partial disaster. Let me take care of some stuff back here. You handle the front.”

While Tyler worked, I stood behind the counter, helping the occasional customer and stealing regular glances toward the back. I knew I’d been overreacting, but this complication was one of the few distressing scenarios I hadn’t considered before. We weren’t likely to find a buyer for the store while it was under repair. I castigated myself for having
cavalierly offered to stay until my father sold the store. If I’d thought about it at all ahead of time, I would have put an outside date on my commitment. A date that would be rapidly approaching instead of receding increasingly into the distance.

I allowed myself to be furious about this for a while longer. Eventually, the simple act of needing to be pleasant to customers calmed me down. By the time Tyler returned to the front, I’d begun to feel somewhat chastened by the way he had taken charge while I ranted. Certainly if Tyler hadn’t been there, I would have eventually done all of the things that he did instead, but I wouldn’t have done them with his composure.

“Thanks,” I said to him when he got behind the counter.

“It’s fine. It’s a mess back there, but at least the customers won’t get wet. The landlord’s going to be here in a half hour or so. The insurance agent is Philip Watson. I’ll call him if you want.”

“No, I’ll call him.” He handed me a piece of paper that listed the broker’s contact information and the policy number. “You’ve done way more than your share already.”

By the time the afternoon came along, the landlord and Watson himself (an old friend of my father’s) had been by to examine the damage and I’d spoken to a contractor about getting to work on the repairs as quickly as possible. The activity made me feel like something was happening, even though it was really only conversation about something happening. Feeling guilty, I even sent Tyler home early once I was sure that things were under control. I kept Carl
around, though there was very little for him to do.

As I stayed in the store, my sense of frustration returned. I walked to the back to examine everything again. I wondered if I had missed some sign that would have told me that this was coming, and I wondered if I could have done something to prevent it. I wondered what my father would have done differently. And then I wondered what Chase would have done differently. That I knew that both of them would have acted more efficiently and might have even minimized the damage did nothing to salve my mood.

That weekend, my mother went out of town with her sister for a couple of days. They’d been planning the trip for quite some time, some kind of annual spring retreat, and my mother intended to cancel it to tend to my father until I told her that I would do that job instead. It seemed that she could use the break and, sadly, taking care of my father didn’t require much.

On my mother’s recommendation, I hadn’t told him about the water damage in the store because I didn’t want to depress him more than he already was. This had the effect of making the weekend feel even more stilted than it was already going to be. Not only was he largely uncommunicative, but I couldn’t even come up with a conversation starter without thinking about the mess in the store. On Friday night, he sat staring at the television, picking at the roasted chicken I’d brought home, and only talking to me
when I asked him a question. Between my stint at the store and the duty I was pulling here, I felt like a full-time babysitter.

I knew I couldn’t leave my father alone (a neighbor was staying with him while I was in the store), but I certainly didn’t need to be in the same room with him. Still, for some reason, I felt obligated to sit with him, even though he was at best tangentially aware of my presence. And so I lay on the couch, gazing at the trophies and photographs and shop projects, while he sat in his chair watching a sitcom (two kids frolicking and causing their parents to roll their eyes a lot), a mawkish drama (a dysfunctional family that still manages to love one another), and then a cop show (some kind of mystery emerging from deep in the past). At some point, I fell asleep. The first time in my adult life that I did that in front of a television. When I awoke, it was a little after eleven and Dad was giving the news the same hypnotic attention he’d given the other shows.

“Dad, it’s late,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”

“I just want to finish watching this.”

“All right, but we’re going to bed after the news is over. I’m getting tired and I want to help you upstairs before I go to sleep.”

He didn’t say anything until a segment on a parade in Hartford finished.

“I’m not going upstairs tonight. I’ll sleep here.”

For the past three nights, he’d slept on the sofa bed in the den, unwilling to climb the steps to his bedroom. The doctors had told us that there was no reason to believe that the stress of going up a flight of stairs would do any damage to his heart, but he
didn’t want to hear this. If he was going to sleep downstairs a fourth night in a row, there was a good chance he was simply going to continue to do it. In his mid-fifties, my father was acting like an elderly man.

“The bed upstairs is much more comfortable, Dad. We always put the guests we didn’t like very much on the sofa bed.”

“This is fine. I’m not up for climbing the stairs. If you could just pull the bed out for me, I’ll be okay.”

I wondered what would happen if I refused to pull the bed out for him. Would this force him to come upstairs with me? I guessed that he would probably just sleep in the chair. I set things up and then tried one more time to convince him to go up to his room.

“I’m fine here, Hugh. Go to bed if you’re tired.”

“Do you want me to help you to the bathroom?”

He scowled at me. “I can make it to the bathroom myself,” he said. At least I had some sense of the parameters now.

When I came back from the store on Saturday, we repeated the ritual. By 8:45, I was burning up with cabin fever. He was watching a rerun of a Super Bowl game on ESPN Classic. He didn’t even like football. He’d always said that the only games he could watch were the games Chase participated in when he was in middle school. I tried to pass the time reading
The Witches of Eastwick
, but the play-by-play on the television was too distracting. Finally, I decided to leave the den. I’m not even sure Dad noticed I was gone.

As I approached the stairs to my room, I passed the study and noticed the computer’s screen saver, a
time-lapse video image of a lily blossoming. My mother was a dedicated e-mail correspondent with dozens of friends and relatives. In fact, this was the primary way I had communicated with her over the past several years.

Rather than reading, I decided to spend a little time online. I went to Google and typed “New Mexico.” Of course, there were nearly three million items returned, but I managed to find some truly informative sites on the first several screens. One site even allowed me to match my temperament with my ideal New Mexico location. While I would have expected to be directed to Albuquerque or Santa Fe (admittedly among the only places I knew in New Mexico), the program directed me toward Tucumcari, a tiny frontier town out on the old Route 66. The only previous reference I’d had to Tucumcari was in Lowell George’s song, “Willin’” and George had hardly provided much information. I followed a link to the town’s Chamber of Commerce site and spent a good half hour surfing the place’s history, attractions, and community development plans. I even found a restaurant that I would surely visit once I got out there. Before leaving the site, I requested a booklet about the town and several brochures.

When I got off, I felt better than I’d felt in a few days. Spending the time exploring New Mexico reminded me that my stasis in Connecticut was only temporary, that the store would eventually sell, and that I would be free to make my way West. To get my kicks out on Route 66.

I picked up my Updike book where I’d left it on the stairs and decided to check in on my father before
going to my room. A Denver Broncos drive against the Green Bay Packers had my father’s absolute attention. I wondered if he would notice if I changed the channel.

“Dad, do you need anything before I head upstairs?” The sofa bed was already open, since I hadn’t bothered to fold it in in the morning. He didn’t say a word as John Elway completed another pass to Ed McCaffrey. It dawned on me that it was entirely possible that he didn’t know who won this game – if he was even actually paying attention.

“You sure you don’t need anything, Dad?”

As the Broncos huddled up, he turned to me. “Yeah, a new body,” he said.

“I’ll see if I can order you one online in the morning. I’m going to read in my room. If you need me, give me a call.”

He turned back toward the game. I watched him for another minute, stupefied at the way he’d decided to kill the clock.

On Sunday, the store was busier than I expected it to be and I stayed behind to give the late shift a hand. When I got back to my parents’ house in the late afternoon, my mother had returned from her trip. I hadn’t been expecting her until after dinner, but was relieved to see her there. We talked for a couple of minutes about her weekend and then I told her I was going out again.