This is Just Exactly Like You (5 page)

“OK,” says Canavan, nodding.

Jack’s known him long enough to guess that Canavan’s going through several loops of what to say. Hen rocks himself back and forth in the truck. He looks at Canavan, then at Jack, and says, “Zero percent for qualified buyers.” He says, “For a limited time only.” He says, “Chinquapin Oak.”

“Willow Oak,” Jack says.

“Water Oak.” Hen pronounces it carefully, exactly, his mouth round as a ball on the O.

A woman walks by in the street trailing a huge red dog. Jack and Canavan wave. She signals back with a stick. “OK, then,” Canavan says, and opens the passenger-side door of the truck, hauls himself up into the cab alongside Hendrick, looks at the catalog with him.

Hendrick flips a few pages. “All oaks are deciduous trees with toothed leaves and heavy, furrowed bark,” he tells Canavan. “The fruit is, of course, the acorn.”

“Of course,” Canavan says. Jack heads for the front door.
I changed my mind
, he’ll tell her.
I’m keeping him with me.
This may not go well. She will have already figured out what to do with him during her class, won’t want Jack changing her plans again. She opens the door before he can knock, and she’s tall there in the doorway, somehow, taller than normal. Maybe she’s grown. She looks good. Her eyes look clear, like she’s been getting sleep. She says, “Hello, Jack.”

“Bethany,” he says, which is not her real name. It’s just Beth. Sometimes he calls her Bethany. Can’t help himself.

She says, “Would you like to come in?”

“Not, you know, a whole lot, I have to say.”

“Don’t start in,” she says.

“Start in on you how?”

“For God’s sake,” she says, and moves out of the way. “Don’t be a jerk. I didn’t even say
on me
. Come get some coffee. You look like shit.” She squints out at the truck, at Hen and Canavan. “How’s Hendrick?” she says.

“He’s good.”

“You’re keeping him on the yogurt?”

“Yes.”

“And half a granola bar in the afternoons?”

“Jesus. Of course. Yes, OK?”

“Come in, Jackie,” she says. “Just come in.”

And he does go in. Because what else is there? He hasn’t gone to Wal-Mart to buy a rifle. No shooting sprees here, negotiations by bullhorn, Chopper 5 live on the scene. Instead: Coffee. Maybe some toast. Suddenly, he wants toast. He follows her in, but he can’t figure out how or where to stand. He leans awkwardly on a wall, watches her at the coffeemaker, pouring him a cup. “You look like you know where everything is already,” he says.

She smiles at him, a little half-sad smile, brings him the mug. She touches him on the arm.

“Don’t do that,” he says.

“OK,” she says. “You make the rules.”

“I don’t want there to be rules.”

“I don’t want you to be angry,” she says.

“I’m not here to ask you to come back home.”

“I know that.”

He sips his coffee. It’s pretty bad. “I’m taking Hen in with me. I’m not leaving him here.”

“I figured.”

“You’re not pissed off?” He shouldn’t give a damn about that, but there it is.

She sits down on a sofa, a huge blue reclining thing with actual cupholders in the arms. It’s leather, or fake leather. It’s ridiculous. Jack wonders if there’s a cooler in it. It’s new since the last time he was here. Maybe Canavan won it in a sweepstakes. “I’m not pissed off,” she says. “I’m not much of anything, I don’t think.”

“What does that mean?”

She looks up. “It means I’ve got a class at ten-thirty, and twenty papers coming in about Modernism.” She plays with a seam on the sofa. “Eight pages apiece. So, you know, other than that, I’m not much of anything. That’s all that means.”

“Fine,” he says.

“Fine?”

“How the hell do I know?” he says. “I don’t really know what’s happening here.”

She doesn’t say anything back. The ceiling feels low. There are snapshots of Canavan and Rena running along the mantel, pictures of Rena standing in front of national monuments, on hills over Mediterranean cities. One shot of the two of them with a very large bird, an emu, maybe, or an ostrich. Canavan and Rena in a restaurant. Canavan and Rena on a lake. Canavan and Rena next to a huge riverboat named, in red cursive lettering,
The General Beauregard.
This is all awfully fucked up. If it’d been him, Jack thinks, he might have put the pictures away. There’s an empty bottle of wine on the coffee table in front of Beth, two glasses. Jack says, “I still can’t believe it’s you and Canavan.”

“It’s not ‘you and Canavan.’ ”

“You know what he’s doing right now?”

“No,” she says.

“Running trees with Hen in the front seat of the dump truck.”

“What do you want him to be doing? Ignoring him? Letting him play in the road?”

Jack looks out the window. Hen’s explaining something to Canavan, and Canavan’s listening hard, asking follow-up questions. “I could use him acting like a little bit more of an asshole out there,” he says.

“It’s not his fault.”

“It’s his fault,” Jack says. “Some.”

“It’s everybody’s fault,” Beth says.

It’s been like this at lunch, too. She’ll come by to get Hen and it’s short like this, a kind of half-assed truce interrupted by these exploratory cannon rounds fired at each other. Feeling each other out. It’s all wrong. Everything’s wrong. They should be yelling at each other. He should be dragging her out of here by her hair. He should be hitting Canavan in the face. “Do you want toast?” he asks her. “I want some toast.”

“No,” she says. “Thanks.”

He goes into the kitchen, finds the bread, shoves a couple of slices into the toaster. He opens up a few of Canavan’s kitchen drawers, looks in at the knives and forks and spoons. They look like anybody else’s knives and forks and spoons. “I read in the paper that they found a stand of chestnut in Georgia that had survived the blight,” he tells her. The toaster’s not working. He bangs it on the counter a couple of times.

She comes in and leans on the counter. “It’s the switch there, on the wall,” she says, pointing. He flicks it, and the toaster comes right on. “What blight?” she asks.

“The chestnut blight,” says Jack. Why’s he telling her this? “There used to be ten million trees. Or ten billion. I can’t remember. It was in the article.”

“And then the blight.”

“And then the blight,” he says. “In the nineteen-hundreds. Early, like the thirties and forties. I think it was million. Ten million. Anyway. They found some in Georgia. This old stand of trees.”

“Wow,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. He’s got nothing more for her on the famous chestnut blight. She’s standing there, waiting for him to do something else. The shirt she’s wearing is too big for her, and he realizes it has to be Canavan’s. Perfect. He looks at the tendons in her neck, her thin collarbone, the freckles on her skin. “You look good, you know,” he says. “You look good to me.”

“You look good to me, too, Jackie,” says Beth, rubbing at her forehead. “Even if you do look like shit.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Well, it’s true. Are you sleeping?”

“Some,” he says. He stares in at his toast. His face feels hot. “I’m not asking you to come back home here,” he tells her again. “You decided to leave, you decide to come back home.”

“I know that,” she says.

“I don’t want this to be over,” he says.

“It’s not over. And I don’t either.”

“You and Canavan,” he says.

“It isn’t like that.”

“How is it not like that?”

She flicks something off the countertop. She says, “You know what? I don’t have any idea what it’s like.”

“How long are you going to stay here?” he asks her.

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, what’s your plan?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“The dog misses you. He can’t figure out what the hell’s going on.”

She says, “Did you call the vet about getting his summer shave?”

“Yes,” he says, lying, trying to make a note to himself to actually remember to do that. “Next Wednesday.”

“What about the bug guys?”

“You come home, you can worry about bugs in the house.”

“I don’t like bugs.”

“Houses have bugs,” he says.

“Not this one.”

“Ours does,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “I know.”

He’d like very much for his toast to catch on fire in the toaster, give him some minor emergency he can take care of. Anything.
Stand back, ma’am.
“So you’re fucking him, then?” He hasn’t asked her this at the lunches.

“I really don’t feel like we need to talk about that right now.”

“In front of all their pictures of all their fabulous vacations? Their whole lives right here in eight by ten? Are you fucking him in here on his big blue sofa? Or just in the bedroom?”

“I said, Jack, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Does Rena know about this? Have you told her?”

“Have I told her? When would I do that?”

“At school,” Jack says. “You’d tell her at school.”

“She’s not teaching summer classes.”

“How about when you go over there to see her? Are you going over there to see her?”

“No,” she says. “Not right now.”

“Isn’t she going to wonder where you are?”

“Probably,” Beth says. “She probably is.”

“This just gets better,” he says. “Doesn’t it?” His toast does not catch fire. It pops up, and Jack eats it dry, like always. All he can hear is his own chewing. He needs to get out of here, get away from the sofa, from Beth in Canavan’s kitchen. He’s got to go to work. He refills his mug, picks up his other piece of toast. “I have to go,” he says. “I’m taking this mug with me.”

She looks at him like she feels sorry for him, and says, “Fine.”

“And I’m not fucking asking you to come home.”

“Fine,” she says.

“You stay over here for six fucking years if you want to,” he says.

“I’m not staying six years.”

“This isn’t right,” he tells her. He wipes toast crumbs off his face. “This is not right.”

“Maybe not,” she says. “But it has to be. For now, it has to be.” She looks at the floor. “I know it’s not fair, Jackie, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”

He could do things right here. He could club her over the head with a lamp, carry her unconscious body to the truck, drive her home and chain her to a tree in the back yard. Or he could beg her for something. He could make her some promises. He could lie and tell her he’s finished the tile floor. Instead, he steals the coffee mug, goes out the door without saying anything else to Beth, walks to the truck and climbs up into the driver’s seat and waits for Canavan to get out of the cab. Doesn’t say anything to him, doesn’t look at him. Just waits. This hasn’t quite been the victory lap he had in mind. Somewhere back there he fucked this up, he’s pretty sure. Somewhere back there he may have made things worse. Canavan gets down, and Jack starts the truck, drops it in gear a little too quickly, lurches down the driveway. Canavan watches him go. Jack looks dead ahead. Hen looks dead ahead. He doesn’t open or close anything at all.

At PM&T, there is chaos. The line of cars is out to the highway, and there’s a little crowd of people standing at the office shed. Waiting to pay, probably, but it’s hard to tell. Jack parks the truck in front of the pile of crushed gravel and it’s only after he gets the brake kicked in that he sees what the problem is, why nobody’s doing much of anything: Butner and Ernesto have managed to roll one of the skid loaders over on its side. Full bucket, of course, so there’s half a yard of red-dyed pine washed out across the middle of the lot. Also, the loader looks like it’s leaking fuel. Butner and a kid who can’t be much out of high school are standing next to it, pointing at it and then back at what seems to be the kid’s truck, a Nissan pickup jacked about five feet up off the ground. Ernesto is tying lengths of chain off to the front bumper of the pickup, looping the other ends around the loader’s roof, around the bucket. Jack gets out and jogs over there.

“
Jefe,
” says Butner. He’s proud of picking up Spanish from Ernesto. Slow days on the yard, Butner will sit there with him asking what individual words are, one by one.
Ernesto, what’s “help”? What’s “dump truck”? What’s “pussy”?

“Just tell me you didn’t hit anybody on the way down,” Jack says.

“It was Ernesto, actually.”

“Damnit, Butner, he’s not even on the insurance—”

“I know. But you weren’t here yet, and things started getting crazy.”

“There’s still no way you should have let him drive.”

“It wasn’t so much ‘let,’ ” says Butner, “as me talking him into it. We were pinched. I’m sorry.” He shrugs. “Anyway, this is Randy, my buddy’s little brother. He brought over the chain.” The kid reaches out his hand, and Jack shakes it.