The Realm of Last Chances (2 page)

After depositing the last boxes on the shoulder-high stack, he surveyed the houses on either side as well as the ones behind them over a flimsy fence. He could be seen, he knew, from any number of windows, just as he’d been able to see into any number of backyards when he looked out of his own third-story window at dusk the previous evening and observed a woman—early fifties, reddish hair, chunky build, khaki knee shorts and a blue Red Sox T-shirt—walking around the corner of the house directly behind theirs. She looked over her shoulder as if fearful somebody might be following. Apparently satisfied that no one was, she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and, while he watched, stuck one between her teeth. She withdrew a lighter, and the flame flicked on and off. Then
she squatted with her back against the wall and enjoyed the cigarette, her eyes closed the whole time. He knew he ought to quit watching—it made him feel dirty—but couldn’t tear himself away.

On a trip to Shaw’s to buy coffee and paper towels, he spotted some window units sandwiched into the seasonal section between marshmallows and charcoal. Their second evening in the house, he installed one in their bedroom.

Finally cool, she slept a full nine hours, waking shortly before seven. At some point during the night she’d heard him climb out of bed, the door then opening and closing. They were back to normal, she guessed: her asleep, him awake. That had been the routine for years. She never knew what he did after he left, but sometimes in the morning she’d find a guitar or mandolin lying on the living room couch, a couple of picks on the coffee table beside an empty whiskey bottle.

On the first trip they’d ever taken together, to a bluegrass festival in Napa Valley, she’d loved watching him move from one group of parking-lot pickers to another, joining in on whatever tune they were playing, never at a loss. He didn’t even ask what key the song was in, just slid a little clamping device up or down the guitar neck and started strumming. He told her it was called a capo. “When you’ve got one, all you need to do’s play in G or D. Put the capo at the second fret and G becomes A. D becomes E, and so on.” That night they ate dinner at a country inn and drank two bottles of wine, and though they’d reserved a pair of rooms they needed only one. Opening her eyes the next morning, she found him propped on his elbow, studying her face as if he hoped to memorize her features. His guitar was standing beside the bed. “Play something for me,” she said.

Now, however, his instruments were thousands of miles away in the home of a former colleague of hers who soon
would FedEx them, and he was beside her on his back, his mouth wide open and an arm thrown over her chest. She lay there looking at his long, thin fingers, cupped as if in supplication. Having been with him for more than fifteen years, she thought she knew how large his hand was, but for an instant it looked as garish as a flesh-colored fielder’s glove. That it could once have been the source of pleasure seemed impossible. She gently shifted his arm aside—
Unnh
, he muttered—and slid out of bed.

In the room next door, which would eventually serve as her study, she flipped on the light. Books were piled against the wall, on top of her desk, even underneath it. When she stepped into this room for the first time a few weeks ago on their home-hunting expedition, a pair of bunk beds came together in one corner, and the floor was littered with the kind of junk only boys could own: two or three baseballs, an aluminum bat, several pairs of smelly, mud-encrusted sneakers of various sizes, a surprisingly realistic replica of an AK-47, a desktop computer with a keyboard that had a huge wad of chewing gum stuck to the space bar. A milk crate was full of video games, and some of the titles made her shudder:
Resident Evil 4, World of Warcraft, Killer 7
. On the wall hung a Tom Brady poster. Somebody had used a black Magic Marker to render the famous quarterback toothless.

She’d been afraid to look at Cal that day. During the previous week they’d seen so many homes she’d lost count, and he’d detected major flaws in most of them before they even got inside. But when they entered this one he kept silent until he was standing in the opening between the living room and dining room, where he thumped the white facing. “These belly casings,” he observed, “most likely have pocket doors behind them. They were common in houses like this. They look real nice and can help preserve warmth.” He pointed at the fireplace in the corner: “That’s unusual in a dining room.” Examining it,
he said, “Looks like the original firebox. Carved brass.” In the basement he ran his hand over one of the beams. “Hemlock,” he told her. “It’s good strong timber, resistant to rot. They ran single spans in here, too.” By then, she knew that after they told the Realtor good-bye and returned to their hotel, he’d sigh and say they might as well do it. They’d make an offer on this house, and it would be accepted, and in five or six weeks she’d be standing right where she was now, trying to find the new beginning she wanted to believe must be inherent in each ending except the last one.

She drew her nightgown over her head and put on the shorts and T-shirt she’d tossed on her desk. She went downstairs and fed Suzy, then laced up her tennis shoes and hooked the leash to the dog’s collar. In California, especially in spring and summer, the days often got hot before she really got going. While “resolve” was a word she’d never had much use for—generally, people who employed it as a verb lacked it as a quality—she’d resolved to begin her mornings earlier in this new place. She’d become uncomfortably aware that fewer of them remained.

They started off, Suzy dropping her nose to sniff the ground every few feet. Newspapers lay on a couple of porches, reminding her they ought to subscribe to the
Globe
. A couple of houses down, on her side of the street, an elderly woman sat in a porch rocker sipping her coffee, and despite the reputation of New Englanders for being unfriendly she raised her hand and waved. Such a simple gesture shouldn’t have meant all that much, but right then it did. Kristin lifted her hand and smiled but kept on moving, because her throat had tightened and she wasn’t sure she could speak.

In summers when she was a child and out of school, her father would have been sitting in a porch rocker, too, drinking his coffee and reading the Harrisburg paper. But he never would’ve seen anybody out walking a dog; back then they
roamed the neighborhood at will, and nobody saw anything wrong with that. Her family lived on a narrow strip of land between Penns Creek and the Susquehanna, and dogs didn’t run away or get lost because the bridge over the creek was an open-grate construction they couldn’t cross. Sometimes you’d see the Airedale that belonged to their next-door neighbors, the Connultys, standing there looking as if he might try it, but eventually whatever reason he possessed would take over, forcing him to turn around and head for home.

Sooner or later on those mornings in the late sixties her mother would get up, go outside and join her father, and through her window she would hear them exchange pleasantries.

“How are you, dear?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Perfectly wonderful. I don’t think I ever rested better.”

“Want part of the paper?”

“No, thank you. I believe I’ll just sit for a while and listen to the morning.”

Whatever sounds the morning made, her own ear wasn’t attuned to them. Sometimes she’d fall asleep again, but more often than not she’d pad downstairs, and before long her father would come back inside and begin making breakfast.

At the time it hadn’t occurred to her that her family was living the kind of life that many people around the country were starting to question. As far as she knew, it was just normal, and if it was normal for them, she figured, it must be for everyone else. But once or twice she’d wandered into the living room, where her father was watching the evening news, and seen footage of young people lying around in the mud up in Woodstock with glazed expressions on their faces, or wielding bullhorns on the steps of some building in Berkeley or Madison, or burning a flag on the National Mall.

“Why are they doing that?” she once asked.

Her dad was having his evening drink, a double shot of Tullamore Dew. A copy of
Look
lay spread open on his knee. The sound on the Zenith was turned down so low you could barely hear it. “Doing what?”

She pointed at the screen. “Burning the flag.”

He squinted at the TV. “They’re against the war.”

“Will setting the flag on fire make the war stop?”

“No.”

“Then why do they do it?”

“It’s a symbol.”

“Of what?”

“Everything they don’t like about America. Or at least a lot of what they don’t like.”

“What else don’t they like?”

He drained his glass of whiskey, closed the magazine and laid it on the floor by his easy chair. Then, moving with the stealthy grace of a big man who’d once played football at the small college on the other side of town, he leaped out of the chair, gathered her in his arms and pretended he was rocking her in a cradle, even though she must have been seven or eight years old. “They don’t like
this
,” he said.

She was looking right up into his rosy face. When the high school where he and her mother taught held its Christmas parties, he always played Santa, so deeply had he impressed himself on everyone as a man of good cheer. “This
what
?”

“Family bliss,” he said, faint fumes on his breath. “They hate it worse than cancer.”

As if his statement were the moral equivalent of a dollar bill, she accepted it at face value, leaving aside any question she might have had as to why anybody, anywhere, at any time, could hate the sight of a happy family. She was in her father’s arms, and he was holding her so high above the Zenith that she no longer could see those people burning the flag and within seconds had forgotten they even existed.

•  •  •

She walked around for more than an hour, familiarizing herself with Cedar Park. There was an elementary school five or six blocks from their house, and a little beyond that, on the other side of the commuter rail line that she’d been told had its terminus in Haverhill, she passed Cedar Park High, deserted now except for a couple pickups she assumed must belong to the janitorial staff. Otherwise Tremont Street was lined with body shops, auto-parts stores, lube centers. She saw a car wash, too, and decided that either today or tomorrow she’d ask Cal to run her Volvo through. A thick layer of road scum covered the car, and some of it had probably attached itself before they even left the valley. It was odd to think that a speck of dirt picked up on one end of the continent could have made it to the other, but she supposed it wasn’t out of the question.

When she trudged back up the hill into Montvale, she was bone-tired. Suzy was doing even worse, panting like her heart was about to burst, her loose tongue sprinkling the sidewalk. At one point Kristin thought she was going to lie down and refuse to walk any farther. If that happened, she’d have to sit there beside her until Suzy made up her mind to get moving. She couldn’t carry an eighty-pound Lab.

But they finally reached her street, where a fair amount of activity seemed to be in progress. In one yard, two boys were tossing a baseball back and forth, their father backing out in a black pickup that said
KELLY
’
S HEATING AND PLUMBING
on the door, and in the next yard another boy was laying out balls and mallets, getting ready for a game of croquet. The old woman who’d been sitting in the rocker the last time she walked by was now down on her knees beneath a lush hydrangea, wielding a small spade.

Across the street, on the porch of a blue Queen Anne with bay windows on all three floors and badly chipped shingles, a
man leaned over to pick up his paper. He had salt-and-pepper hair, looked to be about forty and wore a beige terry-cloth bathrobe. He opened the paper, glanced at the front page, then stood up straight, and his gaze met hers before traveling downward in a manner she found vaguely insolent. “Hey,” he called, “where’d you get that T-shirt?”

Uncertain what she was wearing, she looked down to see. It was one she’d bought years ago in San Francisco, at a Clean Well Lighted Place for Books. There was a drawing of Milan Kundera on it and, beneath his image, the legend
KUNDERA ROCKS
. “I got it in California,” she said. “We just moved here.”

“I saw the plates on the car and truck.” He stepped off the porch and into the street. “I’m Matt. Welcome to the neighborhood.”

As she and Suzy moved toward him, it occurred to her that, in a manner of speaking, she might soon become his boss, that he could easily be a professor at North Shore State College, which was only a few miles away. Even in the most educated part of the country, how many nonacademics would you meet on the street who’d respond like this to Kundera? “I’m Kristin,” she said.

“Pleased to meet you.” He pointed at the dog. “And who’s that?”

“Suzy.”

He bent and patted her head. “Looks like a real sweetheart.”

“I think we walked too long. She’s not used to hills and humidity.”

“Plenty of both around here,” he said, once more glancing at her chest. “You like Kundera?”

The question wasn’t complicated, but an honest answer would be. She didn’t read nearly as much as she used to, and she hadn’t read the Czech writer’s last three or four books. She didn’t even know the titles. Once she left the faculty and moved into administration, she began spending a lot of time in meetings and even more time poring over personnel files,
checking people’s credentials and publications. When she did read a novel, it usually had short chapters and a linear plot. “I liked his early work a lot,” she said.

“Me too. What’s the cutoff for you?”

She tried to recall the name of the last one she’d read. “
Immortality
, maybe?”

“It’s even further back for me. I thought the work thinned out badly when he began writing in French. But then, you know, he lost his fictional universe, just like le Carré.”

He was making her feel stupid and, since she knew she wasn’t, she wanted to end the conversation. “Well, you may have a point,” she said.