Learning to Stay (32 page)

I meet Mert’s gaze. I wonder what he knows, and if he’s insinuating that I knew more than I told him about Brad before dropping him here. But it’s hard to tell, and so I just nod. All this time, I assumed
Mert didn’t have the faintest idea of what his son was struggling with, when it sounds like maybe he knew better than I realized. But Mert is wrong, too. Brad isn’t Brad anymore. Mert might be more observant than I’ve given him credit for, sure; but he’s no North Woods oracle.

And as though he hasn’t said a word, Mert turns from the window and pats my shoulder on his way past me. “See if you can get him to bathe that dog,” he says, walking away. “She stinks.”

I look back out the window at Brad and Jones. He’s kneeling next to her, seemingly telling her she’s a good girl, though I can only make out the tone of his voice and not the words he’s saying.

Brad looks up at the kitchen window where I’m standing. He raises his hand in a tentative wave, and Jones takes the opportunity to give his cheek a lick. Brad doesn’t break my gaze and his face erupts into a toothy grin. It’s that same earnest smile I first fell in love with, back when I still felt like a young woman. Back when it seemed as though a whole world of possibility was still laid out like a feast in front of us.

I raise my own hand in a feeble return of Brad’s wave.
It’s a mirage,
I tell myself. Yet I can’t help but smile back.

I sit on the back stoop, watching Brad finish his lesson with Jones. By the time he’s done, she’s panting and there are dark areas of perspiration on his shirt. He releases Jones with a pat on the head and gestures to the yard. “Go on,” he tells her. “Good girl.”

Jones trots over to a circle of sun at the edge of the grass. She lies on her belly, her stare fixed on Brad. But when he sits next to me, she flops over onto her side, confident that her person isn’t going anywhere, and lets her eyes close.

Brad and I sit shoulder to shoulder. He picks at a weed growing defiantly through a crack in the concrete at his feet, peeling each leaf on the coarse stalk one by one. For a long time, neither of us speaks.

“Why are you here?” he asks, finally.

“Where were you yesterday?” I ask, hoping the question comes out loaded with curiosity as opposed to suspicion. It doesn’t.

We look at each other, playing a game of visual chicken.

“C’mon, E. Out with it.”

“With what?”
I’m not ready to have this conversation
. I want to sit here a little while longer. I want to pretend this isn’t happening for a few more minutes. There’s something about Brad’s carriage, the way he’s talking to me so self-assured and relaxed, that makes me want to kiss him. But I can’t. We are married and we are sitting right next to each other, but I know that I don’t have the right to indulge that impulse now. Two people sitting so close have never been so far apart.

Brad shakes his head. “I know things are a little scrambled up here,” he says, pointing to his temple, “but even I know what a packed car looks like, E., and I’m assuming you’re not here to move in with me and my old man. So what gives?”

I wonder if the surprise I feel at hearing Brad recognize that his brain isn’t working right registers in my eyes. I feel them go wide, but I try not to react. I look down at the weed between Brad’s feet and mine, stripped of its foliage and looking bare and vulnerable. I want to slap myself in the forehead. Of course he realizes it. I want to cry for him, for how frustrating it must be to have been counted as among the most accomplished and intelligent young scholars in the country only a handful of years ago, and now—

“I don’t blame you,” he says. “You should know that.”

This is classic Brad: considerate and understanding. But right now, I wouldn’t mind a little anger, a little emotion. As I sit here, it suddenly dawns on me why I’m here—why I drove all this way: I want him to fight for me, for us. I want to—need to—know that I still matter to him.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say.
Talk me out of it
is what I’m really thinking and wanting to say.

“Do any of us?” he asks. He takes my hand in his, and in doing so, notices his watch.

“Shit,” he says. “I have to be somewhere. You weren’t planning to leave, like, right now, were you?”

I shake my head no.

“Good deal. You can tell me all about it later, then. We’ll figure it out.”

He stands up and brushes his jeans clean. Then he nods in the direction of Jones, still lounging in her patch of sun. “Keep an eye on that one for me, will you?”

“Sure,” I say, though I have no idea what, exactly, he’s asking me to do.

I stand and watch in shock as Brad steers Mert’s truck down the long driveway.
He’s driving. By himself.
I hear the truck turn onto the highway; then, for lack of anything else to do, I sit back down. My normal inclination would be to reach for my BlackBerry, but I turned that in, along with my office key and security card, when I left the firm last week. As sad as it sounds, I feel as if a piece of me is missing. There is no e-mail to read, no voice mail messages to return. Nothing is being asked, or expected, of me.

Instead of liberating, it feels terrible, as if I have no purpose.

I never caught on to reading for entertainment; it always seemed a guilty pleasure—something I could never justify sitting still long enough to enjoy. Right about now, though, I wish I had a book to lose myself in, or some other way to pass a few hours, like knitting or embroidery. The image of me sitting here on Mert’s back steps doing counted cross-stitch nearly makes me chortle out loud.

Then again, who am I? I used to be able to answer that: I am an attorney. I am Brad Sabatto’s wife. I am going to be partner in a law firm someday and have children and a wonderful, wonderful life. I am blessed and lucky.

Now? I’m not sure.

Jones lifts her head and looks at me. She gets up and sidles over to where I sit. She stops a few feet from me, watching. I remember the way she looked at me, the teeth she bared the first time I saw her, and my whole body tenses. She’s an imposing dog, barrel-chested and thick all over, with jaws that look like they could reduce wood to dust. Then her tail starts wagging—slowly at first before picking up speed—and if I didn’t know any better, I would think she’s smiling. Her long tongue lolls out of her wide-open mouth. She bows down until her head and front legs are touching the ground and her rump is high in the air, tail wagging.

“Hey, million-dollar dog,” I say to her, not unkindly. “What’s going on?”

And that does it. It’s as though I’ve flipped a switch by acknowledging her. She whirls and spins, bucking like a bronco. In between bucking spurts she crouches again with her front end, looking at me with that grin of hers and wagging her tail. Then she resumes bucking.

I have no idea what I’ve done to elicit such a response. Maybe there’s some command I’ve given her inadvertently?

It’s a beautiful spring day, I have nowhere to be and nothing to do, and I have no idea when Brad will be back.

“How about we go for a walk, girl?” I ask. She looks confused until I enter the house and come out with her leash. I wonder what kind of life she’s had that she doesn’t even know the word
walk
. Isn’t that the one word that every dog in the world hangs on? When I was growing up, our neighbors would try to fool their old golden retriever by calling it, “going for a klaw”—walk, backward. Eventually, the dog caught on to that one, too.

Not only does this dog not seem to know about walks; she also has one of the ugliest, least feminine collar and leash sets I’ve ever seen. She should have a leash that’s brightly colored and girly, with polka
dots or a plaid pattern. She should have any leash other than the one Brad has purchased for her: in camouflage to match her black collar. Her name sounds like a male dog’s, and now Brad is dressing her like one, too. I make a note to tell him that she needs some new duds, more fitting for her gender.

With that ugly leash in hand, though, I have become the world’s most exciting, most wonderful human being. Jones spins around again, tongue hanging from her mouth and eyes bright and wide with anticipation. I hold the leash up, out of her way, and this must be some sort of cue, because she immediately sits square in front of me, trying to hold herself still and succeeding except for the tremors of barely contained enthusiasm that shake her body.

I tell her to stay, and run back inside to pocket some cash, my cell phone, and my car keys. When I return, the dog is still sitting where I left her. I reach a hand out and pat her tentatively on her wide, tabletop of a head. I don’t lock the door behind me, remembering what Mert said to me years ago when I asked how I’d be able to get in the house without him there, and without a key: “I haven’t locked this door since I bought the place in ’seventy-one, Princess. Don’t even have a key for it anymore.”

I open the passenger-side door to my car and Jones jumps right in, sitting up as a person would, nice and straight. Should I belt her in? I’ve never had a dog before, and it seems a good idea; dogs aren’t any less vulnerable than people in an accident. But I can’t figure out how to restrain her, so I leave her free and hope that I haven’t violated some basic tenet of dog care.

As we wind our way toward town, past the turnoff for Mead Pond and Hogsback Mountain and then the much more conspicuous Sugarloaf Mountain, I roll the windows down far enough so that the warm-tinged wind musses my hair and Jones can let her head hang out, the very portrait of a happy dog.

We follow County Road 550 until it runs into Presque Isle Avenue just short of the long beach that stretches from Presque Isle Park all the way to the other side of town, and then far beyond. Winter is always slow to leave Marquette, but when it finally does, the local students and residents celebrate with a fervor often reserved only for hockey games. Although I have many memories, my favorite Marquette sight was a group of students on a particularly hot spring day, sunbathing on the beach next to blocks of hard-packed snow and ice floes that had been left behind to melt at their own pace. The students had repurposed them as drink coolers. By the time I had returned with my camera, the kids were nowhere to be found, and now, as I drive past the parts of the beach that are popular with students, I scan for a similar scene, lest I miss capturing it twice.

But Lake Superior, or Gitche Gumee as she’s known around here, looks angry—as if she’d rather not have visitors today. Her water is ink black, crashing into the shore and running up the beach, which is completely empty. We can walk and walk and walk the shore without interruption or the worry of bothering anyone.

First, though, I am going to get myself a coffee and the two of us a treat to share. I drive up and then down Third Street and take a right on West Washington Avenue, keeping my eyes peeled for a parking spot. I end up finding one two blocks down. I leave the window partway down for Jones, and I hope she doesn’t get any crazy ideas in that little dog brain of hers in the time it’s going to take me to run into Babycakes Muffin Company and back to the car.

I wore a baseball cap for our outing because it can be windy near the lake and my hair is too short to pull into a proper ponytail, but as I approach the café’s window, I’m glad to be incognito, because sitting there, plain as day, is Brad with some woman.

She is thin, with impossibly long legs and the kind of thick, wavy, strawberry-colored mane that seems to exist only in shampoo commercials.
She flips it with her hand twice in the short time I’m standing there. Her teeth are straight and so white that she’s either scrubbed the enamel clear off them or that’s not coffee in the mug in front of her. She has on a pair of green-rimmed retro-style glasses and a nose ring, both of which suggest that she has a whole other side hidden by that coiffed façade; maybe she’s maybe a little edgier than she seems at first glance.

Brad’s back is to me. I know I’ve been seeing versions of him all over the place lately, but this man is wearing the same jeans, T-shirt, and fleece Brad was this morning. And when he stands up from the table, I catch a glimpse of his profile. It is unmistakably, undeniably him.

Jones and I do not go for our walk along the beach. I grip the steering wheel with shaking hands as I retrace our route straight back through Marquette and out County Road 550 to Mert’s house. If Jones is confused about any of this, she doesn’t seem to notice. She’s just as excited to be going back the way we came.

I think back to this morning, to how Brad acted when he confronted me about leaving. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but now, in hindsight, I realize that he seemed carefree, some new version of happy, even. And I realize why he seemed inclined to simply let me leave, why he didn’t put up any fight. Why he seemed to have so little reaction to my news.

Because he’s moving on. Or he moved on—past tense.

I park beside Mert’s house, which is still empty and quiet. Before I get out, I unclip Jones’s leash from her collar, and she follows me out the driver’s-side door instead of waiting for me to come around and get her.