Mrs. Fletcher

by Tom Perrotta

  “Oh, God.” George didn’t look surprised. “That’s not good.”

  “Some of the ladies were very upset.”

  “I bet.”

  Eve turned from the son to the father. She really hated this part of her job.

  “Mr. Rafferty, I speak for the whole staff when I say that I’ve enjoyed your company over the years. You’ve been so kind and considerate to so many people, and everybody likes you. But I’m afraid you won’t be able to come here anymore. We can’t allow it. I’m sorry.”

  “What?” George looked shocked. “You’re kicking him out?”

  “I don’t have a choice. This is a community center. Your father needs a nursing home.”

  “Can’t you give him one more chance?”

  “We already did that,” she said. “George, this isn’t going to get better. You know that, right?”

  “But he loves it here. This place is all he has left.”

  “I’m not sure you understand.” Eve’s voice was soft but firm. “Your father was touching himself and saying some very inappropriate things. One of the witnesses wanted to call the police and file charges. It was all I could do to calm everyone down and let me handle it like this.”

  George closed his eyes and nodded slowly. He must’ve known this moment was coming.

  “What am I supposed to do? I can’t watch him all day. My wife’s getting chemo. She’s in bad shape.”

  “I’m sorry.” Eve had heard about the recurrence of Lorraine Rafferty’s cancer. That was the kind of news that spread quickly at the Senior Center. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “She’s a fighter,” he said, but there wasn’t a lot of conviction in his voice. “It’s in her lungs and liver.”

  “Oh, God. It must be really hard on you.”

  “Our daughter’s taking the semester off. To watch her mother die.” He laughed at the sheer awfulness of it all. “And now I gotta deal with this shit?”

  He glanced at his father, who was sitting patiently on the couch, humming to himself, as if he were waiting for his number to be called at the DMV.

  “There are resources available for people like your dad,” Eve explained. “We have a social worker on staff who can talk you through your options.”

  No one spoke for a while. George reached out and took his father’s hand. The old man didn’t seem to notice.

  “It just sucks,” George said. “I hate to see him like this.”

  “He’s a good man.” Even as she said this, Eve realized how rude it was to refer to Roy Rafferty in the third person, so she addressed him directly. “You’re a good man, Roy. We’re going to miss you.”

  Roy Rafferty looked at Eve and nodded, as if he understood what she was saying and appreciated the kindness.

  “Okey dokey,” he said. “How about we get some lunch?”

  *

  This happened on a sleepy Friday afternoon at the tail end of summer, no meetings or activities scheduled for the rest of the day. After the Raffertys left, Eve shut her office door and turned off the light. Then she sat down at her desk and wept.

  It was hard sometimes, dealing with old people, having to cast out the unfortunate souls who could no longer control their bladders or bowels, trying to reassure the ones who couldn’t locate their cars in the parking lot, or remember their home address. It was hard to hear about their scary diagnoses and chronic ailments, to attend the funerals of so many people she’d grown fond of, or at least gotten used to. And it was hard to think about her own life, rushing by so quickly, speeding down the same road.

  It didn’t help that she was staring into the abyss of Labor Day weekend, three blank, desolate squares on her calendar. She’d been so preoccupied by the logistics of getting Brendan off to school that she hadn’t even thought about trying to make plans until yesterday. First she’d called Jane Rosen—her most reliable dinner and movie and walk-around-the-reservoir companion—only to learn that Jane and Dave had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to get out of town. They were coping with empty nest issues of their own—they’d just dropped off their twin daughters at Duke and Vanderbilt—and thought that a couple of days at an inn on Lake Champlain might rekindle the romance in their marriage.

  I’m terrified, Jane had confided. What if there’s no spark? What if we have nothing to talk about? What are we supposed to do then?

  Eve did her best to be a good listener and a supportive friend—she owed Jane at least that much, having subjected her to countless heartbroken soliloquies during the darkest days of her own separation and divorce—but it hadn’t been easy. Jane was having second thoughts about a nightgown she’d bought, pale pink and diaphanous, very pretty, but maybe not the most flattering shade for her skin tone, especially with the hot flashes coming so frequently. And sex made her so sweaty these days, though Dave insisted that he didn’t mind. I guess I’m not feeling very attractive, she confessed. Eve murmured encouragement, reminding Jane that she was still beautiful and that Dave adored her, but it took all the restraint she possessed not to burst into laughter and say, Are you kidding me? That’s your problem? You sweat when your husband fucks you?

  After Jane, she tried the rest of her usual suspects—Peggy, the mother of Brendan’s friend Wade; Liza, who’d been divorced and single even longer than Eve; and Jeanine Foley, her old college roommate—but no one was available on such short notice. Her only real alternative was to drive down to New Jersey and spend a couple of days with her widowed mother and never-married sister, who were living together in the house where Eve had spent her childhood. She was overdue for a visit, but it was always so exhausting to see them—they bickered constantly, like an old married couple—and she just didn’t have the patience right now.

  Eve didn’t cry for long. She’d never liked feeling sorry for herself, and knew there were worse fates to endure than three sunny days with nothing in particular to do. She thought of George Rafferty, with his dying wife and brain-addled father, and knew that he would have traded places with her in a heartbeat.

  Enough of this bullshit, she told herself. You have nothing to cry about.

  Unfortunately, she hadn’t quite pulled herself together when Amanda Olney, the Center’s newest employee, opened the door and poked her head into the office.

  “Quick question,” she began, and then froze, taking a moment to register the dimness of the room and her boss’s forlorn posture. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Eve sniffled, dabbing at her nose with a crumpled tissue. “Allergy season.”

  Amanda opened the door a little wider. She was short and buxom, with Cleopatra bangs and multiple lurid tattoos that she made no effort to conceal, despite the disparaging comments and disgusted head shakes they never failed to elicit from the old folks. They were particularly horrified by the cobra winding its way around her left calf and shin, its forked tongue flicking across her kneecap.

  “Can I help you with something?” Eve inquired.

  Amanda hesitated, overcome by a sudden shyness.

  “It’s not about work,” she explained. “I was just wondering if you were doing anything tonight. I thought maybe, if you were free, we could get a glass of wine or something?”

  Eve was touched, despite her irritation. She liked Amanda and could see that it had taken some courage for her to reach out like this, however awkwardly. She was fresh out of grad school, recently broken up with a longtime boyfriend, and probably a little lonely, looking for mentorship and reassurance. But the first lesson Eve needed to teach her was that she was an employee, not a friend. There was a boundary between them that needed to be respected.

  “I have other plans,” she said. “But thank you.”

  “No problem.” Amanda shrugged, as if she’d suspected as much. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Not at all,” Eve told her. “Have a nice weekend.”

  *

  Her evening at home passed pleasantly enough, rolling along the usual track. First stop, dinner (Greek salad, hummus,
pita), followed by way too much Facebook (a problem she was going to have to deal with), a couple of glasses of wine, and three episodes of Friends on Netflix (another problem, though she figured it would eventually fix itself, once she made it through all ten seasons). She kept meaning to start The Wire or Breaking Bad, but the time never seemed right to plunge into something so dark and serious. It was the same with books, always easier to pick up something breezy and upbeat than to crack open the copy of Middlemarch that had been squatting on her nightstand for the past nine months, a Christmas gift from her English professor cousin, Donna, who’d insisted that it was deceptively readable, whatever that meant.

  Aside from the shock of Brendan’s absence—still fresh and omnipresent—the only real shadow on her mood was a faint but lingering sense of regret that she hadn’t accepted Amanda’s invitation. A drink and some conversation would have been nice, a little way station between work and home. It was true that she had an unwritten policy of not socializing with her staff, but that was more a preference than a hard-and-fast rule, based as much on a lack of chemistry with her colleagues (most of whom were married, and even more of whom were dull) as it was on some nebulous sense of propriety. In any case, it was a policy she probably needed to rethink, now that she was retired from parenting and had more than enough time to herself. At this point in her life, she couldn’t afford to be ruling out potential new friends on a technicality.

  *

  The phone rang while she was brushing her teeth, and the sound made her heart leap with pleasure—It’s Brendan! But when she hurried into the bedroom, wearing only pajama bottoms—because she couldn’t find the top, and what difference did it make?—she saw that it wasn’t her son at all.

  “Ted?”

  “Hey, I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “I’m awake. Is everything okay?”

  “Just thought I’d check in. See how you’re holding up. Hard to believe our little boy’s in college, huh?”

  Whose little boy? she thought, a reflex from angrier days. But it was true. Their little boy was all grown up.

  “He seems happy there,” she said. “I think he really likes his roommate.”

  “Yeah, Zack.” Ted chuckled like he was in on the joke. “I just talked to him. Seems like a good kid.”

  “You talked to Zack?”

  “Just for a minute. Little while ago. I called Brendan, and he passed the phone to Zack.”

  That was Ted all over. Mr. Glad-to-Meet-You. Always looking for the next stranger to charm.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Zack?”

  “No, Brendan.”

  “Pretty good.” Ted paused, recalibrating his response. “Pretty wasted, actually. But I guess that’s a given your first weekend at college.”

  “I hope it’s not gonna be a problem.”

  “College kids drink a lot. I know I did.” He sounded proud of himself. “I can barely remember sophomore year.”

  “What a great role model.”

  “Don’t worry about Brendan. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

  “I hope so.” She wanted to tell him about the awful thing he’d said to Becca the other day, but she heard a child screaming on Ted’s end, and a woman’s soothing voice, and it didn’t seem like the right time to get into it. “I really miss him.”

  “He misses you, too. You know that, right?”

  “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

  “Eve,” he said. “Brendan really loves you. He just doesn’t always know how to communicate.”

  She wanted to believe this, and she was grateful to Ted for saying it out loud. His guilty conscience had made him a lot nicer than he used to be.

  “What about you?” she asked. The crying had subsided for the moment. “Everything okay?”

  “Up and down. Jon-Jon likes his new school. And the gluten-free diet seems to be helping a little.”

  Jon-Jon was Ted’s four-year-old autistic son, an adorable child with severe behavioral problems. When Eve first heard about the diagnosis, she’d reacted uncharitably, considering it a form of karmic justice for Ted and his bad-girl wife, Bethany. How ironic and gratifying it had seemed at the time to see their Casual Encounter disrupted by reality. But they hadn’t cracked under pressure the way she’d expected. Instead the ordeal had brought out the best in them. They were devoted to their son, totally immersed in the minutiae of his care. Ted had become an amateur expert on cutting-edge autism therapies. Bethany had quit her job and gone back to school for a master’s in Special Ed. All this rising to the occasion had made it hard for Eve to sustain the hatred and contempt she’d felt for them in the immediate aftermath of her divorce.

  “That’s good,” she said, glancing down at her bare chest. The room was chillier than she’d realized, and her nipples were hard, which made her remember how much Ted had appreciated her breasts. They’re perfect, he used to tell her, not that it mattered much in the end. Absolutely perfect. “Maybe we should all stop eating gluten. Everybody who gives it up goes around telling everybody else how great they feel.”

  “That’s because eating it made them sick.”

  “I guess.”

  The screaming started up again, louder than before, and Eve found herself wincing in sympathetic distress. Brendan had told her that Jon-Jon’s tantrums could be pretty terrifying.

  “All right,” he sighed. “I better go deal with this. Have a good night, okay?”

  “You too.” She almost said honey, a reflex from a different era of her past. “Thanks for calling.”

  *

  Eve was exhausted, but she stayed up well past midnight, playing Words with Friends against a random opponent, though that was just an excuse to keep her eyes open. What she was really doing was waiting for a message from Brendan. Over the summer he’d promised to keep in touch by sending her at least one text every single day. He was free to send more if he felt like it, or to call her, or even to arrange a Skype session if he was especially homesick. But one text per day was the agreed-upon minimum.

  He’d kept his word for the past three days, texting her exactly once every twenty-four hours, even if his messages all said pretty much the same thing: College is awesome!!! (Tuesday); Another AWESOME day!! (Wednesday); and Still totally awesome! (yesterday). She was happy for him—though slightly concerned by the steady decline in the number of exclamation points he used—and grateful not to have been completely forgotten in the midst of all that awesomeness.

  But no text had arrived today. It was Friday, of course, and he was drunk, as Ted had just informed her, so there was her explanation. But still—was he really going to break his promise on Day Four? Was he that irresponsible? She could have contacted him, of course, just typed out a quick miss you xxoo, and waited for him to respond, but that wasn’t the deal. The deal was that he would reach out to her, and she wanted him to do it of his own free will, without any badgering, because he loved her and wanted to include her in his life. But she already knew, long before her match with Heather0007 was over (a decisive victory for Eve), that she was kidding herself. He wasn’t going to text her tonight, and probably not tomorrow night, either. He just wasn’t that kind of kid, the kind who’d think about his mother while he was out having a good time with his friends, or flirting with a pretty girl from down the hall. From now on, she’d hear from him if and when he felt like it—probably when he needed something—and she’d be lucky if it was once a week.

  *

  She must have dozed off with the phone still in her hand, because the vibration of the arriving message shocked her awake. Thank God, she thought, lurching upright, squinting groggily at the blurred and blinding screen, blinking hard to get the words into focus.

  U r my MILF! Send me a naked pic!! I want to cum on those big floppy tits!!!

  For a second or two, she was deeply disturbed, unable to understand why Brendan would text her something so disgusting, no matter how drunk he was. It just didn’t seem possible. Big floppy tits
? But then she double-checked, and saw, to her immense relief, that the text had come from a cellphone number she didn’t recognize. It was just some anonymous jerk, a stupid prank she wouldn’t even remember in the morning.

  Orientation

  Those first few days of school, before the grind of classes started up, were pretty awesome. They had tons of activities for the freshmen, including this Welcome-to-BSU Field Day on the main quad with tug-o’-war and ring toss, water balloons and a Slip ’N Slide, all kinds of summer camp shit like that. And the weather was beautiful, which meant that lots of hot girls were wearing cutoffs and bikini tops, and more of them than I’d expected had tattoos that were good conversation starters. Some of the less hot girls stripped down too, and everybody tried to be cool about it, because body image and all that. Zack and I took our shirts off, because we’d both been working out over the summer and why wouldn’t you, if you were ripped?

  Mostly those days were about me and Zack. We did everything together, from the moment we woke up to the moment we crashed. One afternoon we hit the gym and did some lifting. We could both bench one eighty, but Zack could do five reps, and I could only make it to four. The day after that we checked out the climbing wall in the Student Center, but we’d gotten good and baked beforehand, so neither of us could manage a route higher than a 5.6.

  It was pretty scary once you made it halfway up the wall, clinging to those knobby bolted-on handholds like your life depended on it, stuck in place until your forearms started to quiver and you had no choice but to reach for something higher. One time I lost my grip about thirty feet up. I fell like Humpty Dumpty, my arms swimming through the air, until the auto belay kicked in, the harness crushing my ballsack as it yanked against gravity. I was suspended up there for a few painful seconds, dangling like a limp dick until I floated slowly back to earth. Zack thought it was hilarious.

  “You shrieked like a little bitch! I bet the whole school heard you!”

  “Fuck you,” I said. My chest felt hollow and my legs were shaky, and I guess he could hear it in my voice.