Crossing the Bridge (2 page)

“Anything I say would be inadequate,” I said to her. She glanced over at me, pressed her lips together in a semblance of a smile, and reached out to give my hand a momentary squeeze.

“I’m so sorry for you,” she said. “I’m so sorry for Chase.” She turned from me and leaned forward to touch my mother’s shoulder, and my mother held her head against Iris’ for the longest time, both of them sobbing. When Iris sat back again, she didn’t attempt to dab at her eyes. And she didn’t try to look in my direction.

I wanted something other than that kiss to be between us at that point. I wished she and Chase had been together for years so my role for her could have been more brotherly. I wished that the age difference between us had been greater so I could have simply put her head on my shoulder and cried with her. I
wished I could have said to her, “Give this time. We’ll work through it together.” But all I could do was sit there confused, wondering how to fit this new collection of wishes into the set of things I was already hoping had turned out differently.

“I need to go with them,” I said after a while.

She nodded without turning.

When the funeral was over, I didn’t see Iris again. As she left the gravesite, she brushed her lips on my cheek and said good-bye. Her parents had come with her and, as he walked past me, her father clapped his hand on my arm and gestured upward with his chin. My eyes moved from his to Iris’ back, only leaving there when another friend of Chase’s approached me.

For the rest of that summer, I attempted to set myself in motion. Motion of any type might have sufficed, but I found myself rooted to my room, my Discman burning dozens of batteries. I started skipping dinners when I realized that I could find no sustenance in my mother’s open-throated sorrow or my father’s empty resolve. I’ve heard that grief sometimes pulls families together. But I had no experience with that. I never felt more untethered in my life than I did in those months after the accident. It wasn’t simply that I didn’t know how to act or when any sense of pleasure or laughter or peace would return. It was that I also didn’t know where I would be or who I would be with when they did.

The summer was ending and my senior year at Emerson College was ready to begin. But as I packed during the third week of August, I knew it wasn’t for Boston. When I got in the car, I still didn’t know
where I would end up driving. But as I crossed the Pine River Bridge, I had one definite destination in mind.

Anywhere but here.

Since leaving Amber, Connecticut on that late August day, I’d never stayed anywhere for more than a year and a half and never held the same job for more than fourteen months. I still have the dress shirts and ties from the one ludicrous attempt I’d made at office work in Atlanta when I was twenty-seven. Those ten months coincided with the time I spent with Emily, and both experiments ended on the same day. Beyond that there were five months doing telephone sales in Wilmington (three of which were spent with Susan) and seven months making sandwiches in Columbus. There was a year, maybe my best, with Gillian in Richmond during which I sold real estate for ten months. I spent a couple of seasons doing data entry in Houston and a summer at a Public Radio station in Minneapolis (which turned into a sizzling fall and a very chilly winter with Kristina). In one or two of the jobs and even some of the romances, I’d given thought to what might happen if I dug deeper. But I tended to view such notions as fanciful, much in the way that some others would think about running away from it all.

I’d been in New England again, first in Concord,
New Hampshire, then in Portland, Maine, and most recently in Springfield, Massachusetts, for the past couple of years when my father got sick. I’d been home on a number of occasions since leaving, but never stayed very long. I couldn’t help but get the impression that my being in the household only served to remind my parents that Chase wouldn’t be coming for a visit.

When my mother called to tell me about my father’s heart attack, she insisted that it was nothing to worry about. I nearly believed her until she mentioned “a little angioplasty” that he’d had done the year before. For the first time since I’d been gone, the possibility that one of them might die while I was out looking for my next thing became real to me.

“I’ll come down the day after tomorrow,” I said.

“I didn’t call to alarm you.”

“It doesn’t matter why you called. And you aren’t alarming me. If Dad’s in the hospital, I should come to see him.”

“That might be a good idea.”

My father seemed devoid of color lying there in the bed. Not simply his face, but everything about him seemed washed out, diluted. My mother didn’t get up to greet me, but simply reached out a hand. I leaned over to kiss her and then him.

“What are they saying?” I said.

My mother patted my father’s hand. “He’s going to be fine.”

My father grunted. “Yeah, as long as I don’t do anything strenuous – like move.”

“Richard, don’t say things like that.”

My father cocked his eyes toward me. “I’m fine,
Hugh. The doctor is talking about certain ‘lifestyle changes,’ but hasn’t exactly told me what those might be.”

I sat down on the other chair in the room. It dawned on me that when I envisioned my parents, I always saw them as vulnerable. Still, I was surprised at how defenseless my father appeared.

“What’s going on with the store?” I said.

My father looked quickly over to my mother. “Tyler’s in charge while we sort this out.”

“Tyler?” I didn’t remember hearing the name before.

“He’s my manager.”

This meant that Tyler was no older than twenty. My father had always steadfastly refused to staff his stationery and gift store with anything other than high school and college kids, arguing, “What could I expect from an adult who was willing to work in a card store?” The logic made a certain amount of sense and it had essentially served him well. But his business model didn’t accommodate situations such as this one.

“Have you spoken to him lately?”

“He called yesterday and gave me a complete rundown. I told him I didn’t want him worrying about calling me every day. He’s fine. He’s been with me for two years. He knows the place.”

I looked over at my mother, who was studiously avoiding eye contact.

“I can take a few days if you want me to look in on the store while you recover,” I said, knowing as the words left my mouth that this was just about the last thing in the world I wanted to do.

My mother’s face lifted. “You don’t have to get back to Springfield?”

“I can take a little time.”

“Tyler’s a good kid,” my father said. “I’m sure he can handle everything.” He stopped, as though he wasn’t sure that the doctor would approve of the effort required to keep talking to me about this. “But I would appreciate it if you checked to see that everything is okay.”

I got to the store midmorning the next day. Amber Cards, Gifts, and Stationery (rumor has it that my father actually labored over the naming of his store. I could imagine him considering, “Is it Amber Gifts, Cards, and Stationery? Amber Stationery, Cards, and Gifts? If I just called it Amber Stationery, would people surmise that we also had cards and gifts?”) had been a fixture on Russet Avenue since before I was born. My father spent his first few years out of college managing a warehouse for an office supply manufacturer in Hartford. When a couple of stock investments he made shot through the roof, he took one of the few risks in his life and moved to the emerging riverside town of Amber to open the shop on its main street. Thirty-four years later, my father could never claim to have had a windfall year (or, for that matter, another investment that scored the way that pair in the ’70s did, even during the Internet boom). But he would boast that his “little enterprise” had given his family “everything they needed to get by.”

I spent enough after-school hours and summers working in the store to know that small-time retailing was not in my DNA. I didn’t have the disposition to placate customers when the supermarket inserts were missing from the local paper or when we ran out of red poster board the night before a class project was due. That required a level of patience and concern that I simply didn’t have. I never once felt shortchanged.

It had probably been five years since I’d stepped foot in the store. My father had moved the card racks, and the merchandise at the front was more focused on lower-priced items than I remembered. But the vibe was very much the same. Generic instrumental versions of popular songs peeking from the speakers, a handful of people pondering Hallmark sentiments, the guy breezing in to buy a copy of
Forbes
, the woman with the three-year-old looking at the figurines as a gift for Aunt Claire.

There was a young woman dusting shelves who continued to do so even as a customer asked her a question and there was a guy behind the counter taking notes from a textbook. I walked over to him.

“Are you Tyler?” I asked.

He glanced up from his reading. “Yeah, hi.”

“I’m Hugh Penders, Richard’s son.”

He tilted his head for a moment as though he did-n’t understand what I was saying. I imagined him thinking,
Richard’s son? But isn’t Richard’s son dead?
Then his eyes brightened.

“Oh, hey, yeah.” He reached out his hand. “I’m Tyler – which you already know. How’s it going with your dad?”

“It depends on who you ask. According to him, he’ll be in this afternoon. Seems the doctors have different ideas, though.”

“I’m sure it’s driving Richard crazy to sit in a hospital instead of being here. I’ve been meaning to get over to see him, but between the extra hours I’m putting in and studying for a bunch of tests I have coming up, it’s been tough.”

Tyler seemed to be the latest in a line of college kids my father occasionally happened upon who actually thought it was worth
doing
their part-time jobs as opposed to simply showing up for them. It was apparent in the way he talked about my father. I began to relax a little. I’d been dreading meeting Dad’s latest “manager” from the moment I first learned about him in the hospital. Some of the people Dad had entrusted with responsibility over the years had been truly unworthy of the gift.

“I’m sure he understands,” I said. “Listen, I’m in town for a few days and I told my father that I’d spend a little time giving you a hand.”

Tyler looked briefly insulted, which I also took to be a good sign. “Yeah, great,” he said. “Could always use a little help.” He leaned in to me conspiratorially and gestured toward his dusting colleague. “Leeza’s not exactly MBA material, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded and looked over to see her absently straightening cards. “Mind if I come back behind the counter?”

“No, come on in. I assume you know your way around the place.”

“I haven’t been here in a while, actually,” I said as
I surveyed the desk. “The cash register is different from when I was last here. He still has the hourly log book, I see.”

“Man, does he ever. You miss a register reading and it’s like you shot his dog.”

For the next half hour, Tyler briefed me on the operations of the store. I rang up a couple of sales and helped a customer find graph paper. It felt precisely as it had when I was seventeen – like something that stood between waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles and shoveling snow in entertainment value.

Russet Avenue is designed for foot traffic and browsers. There’s parallel parking on the street and a couple of municipal lots around back. Among other things, there’s an inn, a craft shop, a print gallery, a few restaurants, a jewelry designer, and a chocolatier for the tourists, and a bank, a drug store, and my father’s store for the locals. I’m not sure which category of consumer I fit into at this point, though I certainly hadn’t returned to Amber for its quaint New England flavor. As the morning turned into afternoon, Tyler returned to his books and I spent a lot of time watching pedestrians out the window from behind the counter. I remembered quiet afternoons such as this when I felt shackled to the store and believed that every other teenager in Amber had something more interesting going on.

It was while daydreaming that I saw Iris entering the gourmet food shop across the street. As I watched, my thoughts ranged from wondering if it was actually her, to how I would respond if she
walked in here, to considering going to the stockroom until the moment passed.

When I saw Iris come out of the shop and head down the street, I decided it was foolish to pretend (or even wish) that I hadn’t seen her. I told Tyler I’d be back in a few minutes and went out the door. I was crossing the street and she was about to walk into the bakery when I called out her name. She turned in my general direction, but didn’t make eye contact for several seconds. When she did, she seemed stupefied by the sight, as though we were standing on a street in Bali rather than in the town where we both grew up.