by Tom Perrotta
Now there was a shuffle on the linoleum behind him. Trent, in the doorway, raised his skinny arms and intoned, “Thou shalt not covet.”
“Hey, bud,” said Calvin, crossing the floor and passing a hand over the boy’s fluffy brown hair.
“What’s covet, again?”
“When you want something that’s not yours.”
“And then you steal it.”
“No, I think it’s just wanting it. They’re separate commandments, aren’t they?”
The boy nodded. “What’s that smell?”
“Wastewater,” Calvin said. He knelt by his son, palmed the boy’s bony chest. Trent smelled a little too, kind of fruity, like he was due for a bath, but Calvin liked it.
“Can I sip your beer?”
“Nope.”
“Can I hold it?”
Calvin handed him the bottle and took it back when Trent’s lips fitted over the top, moving like a feeding fish.
“What did I say,” said Calvin, standing. “Honor thy father and mother.”
“Drinking’s a sin,” Trent challenged.
“Drinking’s an indulgence. It’s like sugar. It’s fine if you don’t overdo it.”
“Sugar’s a treat,” Jill called from the hallway. “Drinking’s a habit.” Now she was standing in the doorway behind Trent, hands on her hips.
“Anything can be a habit,” Calvin said.
“You’d know,” Jill said.
“I’m sure that’s supposed to mean something,” Calvin said, “but you lost me.”
Jack, their four-year-old, called Trent from the basement and the older boy backed out of the doorway and disappeared. At the counter, Jill began silently assembling her sandwich. Calvin watched the side of her face as she spread peanut butter carefully to the edges of one slice of bread, then matched up the top slice, crust to crust, as if it took great concentration.
Two nights ago, he overheard her tucking in the kids at bedtime. She told them that she loved them more than anything else in the world. “More than Daddy?” Trent said, and Calvin found himself automatically curious about how she might answer, and then abruptly not curious at all. He moved quickly on past the door.
Jill looked up from the sandwich and narrowed her eyes. “What’s that smell?”
Calvin extended his foot toward her. His pant leg was dry and stiff. “Occupational hazard.”
Jill nodded grimly. She lifted a knife from the block, carved her apple into quarters, and zipped it into a Baggie.
“Dave Lott got it worse than me,” Calvin added, lying without knowing he was going to. “Up to the waist.”
“Yeah, well, you know what I think about that,” Jill said. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
The horrible news about Dave Lott came on Saturday night, when the boys were in bed. Calvin was watching Frontline while Jill studied at the dining room table. “Listen to this stuff,” she was saying. “Nine tracks, numbered one through nine; nine dogs, A through I. Dog A must always run in track four. Dog G must always run beside Dog B, but never beside Dog C. Dog C always runs in track eight. Just to answer one question you have to make a chart, and it’s a timed test.”
The phone rang, and Calvin felt the mean satisfaction of answering it instead of responding to Jill.
“Calvin?” said a woman. For a second he couldn’t place her voice, then realized it was Robin, from work. She’d never called him at home before. “Listen,” she said.
He said, “Sure, hi, Robin, go ahead,” wanting Jill to hear how polite he was, what a good guy other people thought he was, the kind of guy people from work could call at home. And there was something about Robin’s tone that made him consider the possibility of something sexual, some signals of a crush he’d missed. He felt tentatively flattered and compassionate. He anticipated telling Jill.
But then Robin kept talking, and Calvin was writing down the name of the hospital as if he needed the note to remember, as if both the boys hadn’t been born there. Dave Lott was sick with an infection. A freak thing, one in a million. A fast-acting strain of strep invading his soft tissue, shutting down the circulation to his limbs, eating him into a coma.
Jill stood in front of the television as he told her, working her feet in and out of her slippers one at a time. “Oh, God,” she said. “From the sludge?”
Remembering his lie, Calvin had to shrug. “He had a paper cut,” he said. It could have been true, for all he knew. “He and Dora thought it was the flu, at first.” Dora was the second wife, and Jill rolled her eyes at the name.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Jill said. “It’s awful.” She stretched her mouth into a flat, frank grimace that said she was sorry Dave Lott was in bad shape but that she wasn’t going to change her opinion about him just because he was in the hospital, either.
Part of Calvin respected this—what he thought of as her bottom-line nature. But he disliked this about her too, and just now he wished he could think of something nasty to say, something to wipe the grimace right off her face. Inexplicably, he got a hard-on. He crossed his arms over his lap and leaned forward.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Jill said. “I said I was sorry.”
Calvin had always appreciated bacteria, with all their invisible processes. He liked the intricacy of their names—fecal coliform, Escherichia coli, the whole hardy Bacillus genus. Bacteria were the secret to waste management, after all, allowing humans to live virtually on top of one another. They were nature’s recyclers, breaking everything down to nutrients to be reabsorbed. It irritated Calvin the way people always acted like bacteria were the bad guys, and antibiotics were the good guys, because the antibiotics—their overuse, anyway—were what was screwing up the bacterial balance, tipping the scale toward the pathogenic. He’d shut down a few conversations with this rant. He’d refused to let the doctor prescribe antibiotics for his kids’ sinusitis, insisting that their bodies would take care of it, and he had been right. Sure there were harmful bacteria—everywhere, in fact. If wastewater treatment plants were a bacterial smorgasbord, so was your basic kitchen counter. So was the surface of your skin. Like dormant cancer cells, you carried around any number of things that could kill you if you got cut in the right place, if your immune system was sufficiently worn down. You couldn’t blame bacteria for killing Dave Lott, who was dead by Tuesday, before Calvin had even had a chance to stop by the hospital.
When the secretary sent out the mass voicemail, Calvin was the lone inspector in the office. He stood up and peered over the divider. There was Dave Lott’s dirty coffee cup. There was the picture of his daughter from a few years ago, ten or eleven, her hair pulled tightly into two ponytails. The room’s emptiness felt different suddenly, and Calvin threw on his jacket and cleared out. We weren’t really friends, he reminded himself. Even before he’d left off the occasional beer after work, that’s all it had been—an occasional beer after work.
Outside, it was wet and chilly, with a substantial wind that whistled through some invisible gaps in the dash of his car. But the heater was enthusiastic, and even with the lingering sewage smell, he spent the afternoon driving two-lane roads he’d known his whole life. He turned on talk radio and didn’t listen. It seemed stupid to Calvin, now, not to have had more beers after work with Dave Lott. It made him feel weak and pushed around by his wife, even though she’d never exactly told him not to. Now he imagined that Dave Lott had seen him this way, weak and pushed around. In his head, Calvin had an imaginary conversation with Jill, in which he told her in no uncertain terms that he would continue to have drinks with Dave Lott and any other friend—acquaintance—he saw fit. Then he imagined another conversation in which he told her something similar, but in a more reasonable voice. Perhaps Jill would have drawn it out into a lengthy battle. Perhaps she would have griped for a few days, then let it go. Perhaps she would have, eventually, admired his loyalty, even to a man she would forever dislike for leaving his wife, her friend.
He’d intended to surprise the Blue R
idge Treatment Plant with a brief inspection, but he found himself passing the facility and turning onto the back road that led to the small farm where he’d grown up. His folks still lived there, though they’d stopped farming and had sold off their acreage bit by bit, for income. Now, radiating from the scabby old clapboard farmhouse were five brick ranch homes for families who worked in town and wanted to build in the country. He didn’t stop the car. Neither of Calvin’s parents was sick, though his father had had a bout with prostate cancer. They were fine. A little shakier to get up from the table after Sunday dinner, maybe, but that was all. Now he slowed down to make sure their truck was in the driveway, and then he sped up, hoping they wouldn’t see him pass if they happened to glance out the window.
Dave Lott’s first wife, Pat, and their daughter, Jennifer, lived three hours away in Indiana. “Of course you’ll stay with us,” said Jill into the phone, and they arrived the night before the funeral.
Pat struggled to get each foot out of the car—she was a short, bulky woman—and stood up into Jill’s arms. When they separated, Calvin saw that they were both dabbing at their eyes, though they’d had nothing good, between them, to say about Dave Lott when he was alive. Pat made a sound of perseverance—something like “Whoo”—and smiled over at where Calvin stood three feet back on the grass. She reached for him, and he had no choice but to step in for a hug too. “Oh,” she said, patting his back with both hands, pressing herself hard into his stomach. After what seemed like an acceptable amount of time, he pushed back from her, but she gripped his upper arms. “This really brings everything back up for me,” she said. “This really peels the scab off the old wound.” She smiled again, bravely. She had one of those mouths where a strip of pink gum showed above her upper teeth. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t not notice, once you had. She held her smile and blinked at him, hard, until he felt compelled to smile back and nod as if he understood, as if they’d all been married to Dave Lott, as if he’d let them all down and now, on top of it all, he’d gone and died.
Through the open driver’s-side door, Calvin saw Jennifer in the passenger seat, picking at her chin in the lighted visor mirror. When she got out of the car, she let Jill hug her, but the girl looked as if she felt more captured than embraced.
Inside, Jill offered the guest bedroom and the couch.
“We’ll share the guest bedroom,” said Pat.
“I’ll take the couch,” said Jennifer.
Pat gave Jill a prim, significant pucker, which Calvin watched Jennifer ignore. The girl had ragged, dark bangs that fell into her eyes, and the rest of her hair had been drawn into a braid that went down the back of her head and then another inch or two down her neck. There was a name for this kind of braid, Calvin thought. He set the bags in the living room, for the time being.
“I told Jennifer she could watch the boys while the adults talk,” Pat said. “That would be fun for her. Take her mind off things.” She passed a hand over the girl’s forehead, brushing the long bangs out of her eyes. “Right, Jennifer?”
Jennifer’s head reared back from the hand, slightly, like a snake.
“Whatever you want to do, sweetie,” Jill said. “They’re in the basement occupied with a video. You can lie down, or read, or just hang out with us. Who wants coffee?”
“Did you hear that, Jennifer?” Pat said.
Calvin wished the woman would give her daughter a moment’s peace. She seemed unable to stop addressing the girl. And touching her too. Now Pat was squeezing Jennifer’s shoulders, repeating, “Whatever you feel like,” as the girl hunched into herself unhappily.
“Are you awake?” Jill asked Calvin that night, entering their bedroom and turning on a low light. She and Pat had stayed up late, talking in the kitchen.
Calvin kept his eyes closed. He heard the zipper of her jeans, and the shushing as she pushed them down her legs. She moved, unnecessarily, to the table on his side of the bed, and rummaged in a drawer. He could smell her. Then she moved to the dresser and he knew she was slipping into one of the short nightgowns she’d taken to wearing to bed ever since she’d gone off the pill. It took two to have a baby, she’d said, and even though she couldn’t force him, she’d informed him that she would no longer do her part to prevent anything.
“They’re having such a hard time,” Jill said. She turned off the light and got into bed. Under the covers, she pulled up the nightgown and pressed her bare breasts against his back. “Jennifer’s in such a difficult stage,” she said, moving her breasts against him. Her nipples grew hard, but just her intention, that she wanted something from him and was trying to get it her way, made her methods easier for him to ignore. “Dave wasn’t much of a father to her, but he was all she had.” She reached under the waistband of his shorts, from behind, moved her hand over his ass, and tried to work it between his legs. Calvin shifted away from her, slapping at her arm as if he were asleep.
“I know you’re awake,” said Jill as she rolled away. “You can’t fool me.”
At the funeral home, guests seemed to be dividing themselves up on either side of the aisle by who was friends with Pat, the first wife, and who was friends with Dora, the second wife. It was like a wedding, that way. Since Calvin would know everyone from work, he’d been enlisted to come early and stand toward the door at the back of the funeral parlor with the printed programs. He didn’t mind this, as it kept him far from the half-open coffin. When Jill arrived with Pat and Jennifer, they all stood near him. Dora had taken her seat already, left of the aisle in the front row.
“Will you speak to her?” Jill asked Pat.
“I don’t know,” Pat said, then, “Don’t look, honey,” as Jennifer turned to find the woman. Pat pulled Jennifer close, and the girl kept her face blank. “I guess I’ll have to say something.” Pat turned to Calvin, as if for confirmation.
Calvin said, “Umm.” What did the woman want from him?
Pat turned back to Jill. “I guess I should probably say something.”
“Wait and see,” Jill suggested, shooting Calvin a nasty look. “You shouldn’t feel like you have to.”
Visitors trickled in. Robin arrived with her husband, a thin man with an earring whom Calvin had met once before. They joined the small, stunned group of Calvin’s coworkers who’d shown up early. Calvin had worked with these people for more than five years and had never seen them dressed up before. They’d all greeted Pat, then made their way to Dora, then stood at the far side of the room, inhabiting their clothes awkwardly, unsure of where to sit. Calvin had invited them all to the house afterward, for a grim sort of reception. He imagined Dora would be receiving guests at her house too.
People who hadn’t seen Jennifer in the years since she and Pat had moved admired, quietly, how she’d grown. Calvin watched the girl answer questions in monosyllables. When she spoke, her lips parted to reveal a chipped upper-front tooth.
“You okay, honey?” Pat kept asking her between guests, keeping one square hand on the girl’s back. “She hasn’t said much since last week,” said Pat to Jill. “Have you, honey.”
“I’ve said stuff.”
“Right,” Pat said. “She’s in that phase right now. You know, where everything I say is wrong?”
“I’m not in a phase,” Jennifer said. “I just don’t have anything to say.”
“Last night you had something to say,” said Pat. “That you hated me. Remember that?” To Jill, Pat said, “That’s part of the phase too.”
Jennifer rolled her eyes.
“It’s hard to know what to say,” Jill said. Which in itself was a great thing to say, Calvin thought, and if Jill had looked his way, he might have smiled at her.
“I know,” said Pat. “I know. I just think we could give this phase a rest when something like this happens.” She pushed the tips of her fingers up against her eyebrows until her eyes bugged out. When she let go, the loose arch of skin over each eye reshaped itself slowly. Calvin realized he was staring at this and looked away.
>
The door had been propped open with a rubber wedge. Outside, the sky was heavy and gray. It had been raining off and on all morning, and he could smell worms and wet pavement. He thought he could smell the storm drains too. There was a finger of cold in the air, as though winter hadn’t given up. He watched a long blue car pull up and drop off a tiny elderly woman encased in a clear plastic rain shawl. She crept through the door with a walker and kissed Pat on the cheek.
“Oh, Miss Evelyn,” Pat said. “Jennifer, this lady used to watch you when you were little.”
“Do you remember me?” said the old woman.
Jennifer nodded and, in the first willing motion Calvin had seen her make, leaned down to hug the old woman. Over the woman’s stooped shoulder Jennifer’s face appeared suddenly nearer to Calvin’s, eyes closed, nose shiny and broad. The skin on her lower jaw looked red and bumpy, and fine brown hairs were growing at the corners of her mouth, the kind Jill tweezed away in front of the bathroom mirror. As if she felt Calvin looking, Jennifer opened her eyes. They were small and gray, like her father’s. Calvin felt for her. Her father dead, her mother hard to take at best. Before the funeral, at the house, while standing before the closet, looking for one of his ties, he had heard Jennifer’s shower through the wall. He heard the splash and patter against the stall, the rush of water hitting the tub, the squelching of plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner. He was stepping into his pants when he heard something more, almost not a sound, it was so faint. He parted the hanging row of shirts and realized that through the thin plaster, he was listening to the girl cry. There was also a subdued smacking sound, as if she were bringing her hand hard against her forehead.
“Jennifer’s a tough case,” whispered Jill as they took their seats several rows back from the first. “Pat says she said nothing the whole drive down. Five hours. Pat thinks she’s still in shock.”
