The Best Thing for You

NO FUN

T
he landscapers wake me up. It’s five o’clock and they’re leaving for the day. They’re dragging their shovels along the gravel path under my window, back to their truck, which bristles with implements.

I pull on a robe and go downstairs in my bare feet. Outside I catch the older one coiling my garden hose. “I’ve been rethinking the patio.”

“Good morning to
you
,” he says. My hair must be sticking up.

“I work nights. What I was thinking, instead of concrete, maybe stone? With plants growing in the cracks.”

He nods. “The old wild-thyme-amongst-the-stone-flagging trick. The aged look? You step on it, it smells nice?”

I nod.

“Tuscany, am I right?”

“I’ve never been.” Although, okay, yes, this is one of my plans for a perfect future. Maybe when my son is old enough to fall in love. It would be a gift his parents could give him, taking him to a place like that to fall in love. Olives and wine and wild thyme in the flagging. Olives and bicycles, summer.

Back upstairs I’m pulling on my running gear when I overhear the older one telling his assistant about my idea.

“Tuscany?” the assistant asks.

“Not yet.”

“Funny,” I say to no one. If I keep moving, I just have time to make supper, go for my run, shower, and still make my shift at the hospital.

My husband, Liam, comes in and slumps down behind me while I’m on the floor lacing my runners. He puts his arms around me and hooks one leg over mine and starts kissing the back of my neck. “Hi,” he says.

I give us a couple of minutes of this. Then I say, “Where are the boys?” Our son, Ty, this summer, is inseparable from Jason-from-swimming. This summer they are “the boys.” We like saying this, Liam and I. We’re distantly thinking of another baby, when life settles down, the renovations and my shifts and his tenure. It’s not too late, although Ty is fourteen and it might look a little weird. But it might look cool, too.

“Look.” Liam points out the window. Down in the yard Jason is holding three white tennis balls and looking over Ty’s shoulder. Ty is reading aloud from a book. He’s wearing basketball shorts and a white vest with great loops for armholes, showing a lot of thin brown chest. He’s just started putting muscle on his back and shoulders, and he’s almost as tall as I am, but his face is still smooth. Jason is blond to my son’s dark, with a backwards baseball cap and a black T-shirt with white lettering on it, cut for someone fifty pounds heavier. His elbows flex in and out of sight in this T-shirt. He clutches the tennis balls to his chest like eggs. When he drops one we hear his thin, unbroken voice say, “Sheet.”

“They’re going to learn to juggle from a book,” Liam says.

“Ty’s idea, sounds like.”

“Who else?” Liam has told me he finds Jason a bit dull, also shifty. He’s not wrong. We go downstairs, holding hands.

“Fish for supper,” I say.

Liam lets go of me and snatches open the fridge door. He spreads his arms like an opera tenor hitting a high one, waiting to be impressed by the contents. “It’s all mocha yogurt with you people, isn’t it?”

I grind a lemon on the juicer, pinch cilantro, fork oil in a dish. One of my half-hour marinades. The door opens and Ty sticks his head through. “Can Jason stay for supper?”

“Nah,” Liam and I say together. He grins. Jason appears at his side and he starts smiling too, although he doesn’t know what at. “Is it okay?” he asks. “We’ll do the dishes.”

This is too sweet, even for them. “It’s okay if you go home and tell your mother and change your T-shirt,” I say. Liam comes over to have a look so he stands up tall and pulls it straight with his hands,
I’VE
HAD
SEX
, the T-shirt says.

Ty is smiling at the ceiling. Liam bites the inside of his cheek and turns away quickly. He starts humming, ducking to look out the window. He’s holding his breath, humming, eyes closed.

“Now,” I say.

While the fish marinates, I go for my run. My route takes me along a few quiet streets of big old houses and maples, down to the gravel beach path. At twenty minutes I turn back. When I turn the last corner I stop to walk, to cool down and admire our house – gables and dormers, an upstart thirties’ baby but trying to blend. Now it’s a character home. When we bought it, it was acid yellow and the yard was somebody’s scorched earth policy. We threw a party for all our friends. “That’s going to go,” we said, pointing at the paint. We gestured at the yard, expansive gestures. “It’s all going to go.” Now it’s the prettiest on the block: Nantucket blue, climbing yellow roses, lawn like jade, basketball hoop nailed to the garage. And we’re having the back
done, finally – sunroom, greenhouse, patio. I stand, hands on my hips, breathing hard, and admire.

Ty is sitting on the front steps, using a stick to prise pebbles from the treads of his new Nike Shox. He begged me for those shoes. I’ve seen him wash them with shampoo.

“Jason gone home?” I ask.

“He’s coming back.”

“That’s what I meant.” I ruffle his hair as I pass. Soft hair, like his father’s. He jumps up, sock-footed, and opens the door for me with a courtly bow.

I shower, bake the fish, and we eat. Liam, professor of film studies, explains to the boys why we won’t let them go see
Summer of Sam
at the second-run theatre.

“It has violence,” he says, taking salad. “Violence and sex and penises.”

“Yech,” Ty says.

Jason says, “It does not,” and looks expectant. He now has a flannel shirt buttoned over the T-shirt. He holds his fork in his fist and his knife in his other fist, like a toddler. But he says please and thanks and washes his hands before he comes to the table. I asked Ty once about his parents and he said, “They’re really nice.”

“Still, no,” Liam says.

Jason loves Liam. He watches him, waiting to laugh.

“What are you boys going to do tonight?” I ask.

“Get into trouble,” Jason says promptly.

Ty says, “Pillage.”

“Not on my watch.” Liam stacks our plates. When he gets to Jason’s, he squints at it. Jason has scraped all his cilantro to one side, a green wad. “What in hell is that?”

Jason looks at me, embarrassed. “I wasn’t sure.”

“It’s okay,” I say softly, and smile. “It’s just a herb.”

“It’s grass from the lawn,” Liam says, and Jason smiles.

“I gotta go.” I stand up. “You’ve got ten hours to do the dishes.”

Liam follows me out to the garage and presses against me in the dark. “Wake me up when you get in,” he says. He’s serious.

“Wow, no kidding.”

“This is nothing,” he says. “I’m waiting for you.”

I’m a doctor at Charity Eagle – a tiny local hospital with an even tinier Emergency that strictly ought not to exist, except that we’re a wealthy riding. I spent years pulling strings to get here, a ten-minute drive from home, which is why I’m temporarily on nights, filling in for the Emergency resident who’s on stress leave. What stress? is what I can’t help thinking. Not a stabbing, not an overdose, not a severed spinal cord in sight. I keep thinking, hit me. I can take it.

There’s no vending machine. Once an hour or so, the nurses make everybody tea.

“Dawn,” I say, greeting the nurses. “Daisy.”

“Hi, hi, hi,” they say.

It’s a quiet night. An MI, a dog bite. “What kind of dog?” I ask, as Daisy prepares the hypodermic.

The victim, who looks golf, shakes his head. Fifties, rueful. “Terrier. My own damn dog. I thought we were playing.”

“Little guy probably thought so too,” Daisy says.

It’s a ripping bite, not deep, but messy. “He hung on,” I say. I get him to bend the knee a few times.

“Sure, what do you want, he’s a terrier,” the man says.

Dawn sticks her head through the curtains. “Doctor,” is all she says.

Outside they’ve got one on the table. “Okay, yes,” I say.

The ambulance man reads from a clipboard. “Concussion, fractured rib, fractured jaw, broken nose, bruising to face, back, shoulders, shins, severe bruising to genitals.” He looks up. “A beating.”

I look at his face. Down syndrome. He’s awake.

“Hey, buddy,” I say.

“He’s not, ah, receiving you,” the man says, tapping his ear.

“Don’t be a jerk.”

“No, I mean they found his hearing aid nearby. Looked like someone stepped on it. Here’s his jacket. Wallet, Care Card, provincial
ID
. In case of emergency contact.”