by Barry Rachin
"So why is she waiting tables?"
"Perfectly reasonable question," Fred pulled up at a stoplight. The hospital was three blocks down on the right.
"Does your daughter have some mental aberration?"
“Bite your tongue!” Fred wagged his head emphatically from side to side. "With Alison it's…" He snapped his fingers repeatedly, trying to conjure up the proper term. "Failure to launch… arrested development. I don’t know the technical jargon. Alison's been in an emotional holding pattern since completing her studies." In the hospital parking lot, the stocky man turned off the engine and sat pensively for the longest time. "There are still third world countries where parents find suitable matches for their children.”
A cardiologist Collin recognized pulled into a parking space several rows down. "You're not my father,” Collin protested, “and we don't live in a third world country.”
Fred grinned sheepishly. “My daughter’s a good girl… no bad habits or vices that a sympathetic spouse couldn’t learn to ignore.”
Collin cracked an amused expression. “Where does romance factor into the grand scheme?"
"Two perfectly nice people meet and get familiar. Where’s the harm?" Fred blustered. “In August my wife and I celebrated our silver wedding anniversary. At some point in a marriage you move beyond puppy love and goopy sentiments… become best friends, helpmates, spiritual confidants.” Fred Linden suddenly reached out and patted Collin on the shoulder. "I got a good feeling about this… a real good feeling."
Collin stared out the window at a cloudless sky. A blast of icy late October rain had stripped the last remaining leaves from the maples and oaks. Collin wrenched his beleaguered brain back to the business at hand. “What did your daughter study in college?"
“Philosophy with a minor in comparative lit.”
“Four years of Schopenhauer and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and now she waits tables in a greasy spoon?”
“Not to worry!” Fred undid the seatbelt and reached for the door. "Saturday night, Allison will bring you up to speed." "Take the laptop home over the weekend,” he said, shifting gears. “You can familiarize yourself with the PFS database program. I'll bring you up to speed on print drivers as we get closer to payroll."
* * * * *
Wednesday late morning, Alison Linden paid Collin a visit at the hospital. “My father put us both in an awkward situation the other day.”
Collin, who was updating client rosters, leaned back in the swivel chair. The woman was rather pretty with a rough-cut, unpolished appeal. The family on the mother’s side was of Dutch origin, which would explain the generous, full-lipped face, fleshy nose and watery blue eyes. “You’re not obligated to go out with me if you don’t want,” she added tersely, making no effort to mask her disdain for her father’s meddlesome antics.
Collin balked momentarily. “I already made dinner reservations... the Blue Grotto on Federal Hill. Seven o’clock.” He cleared his throat and looked her full in the face. “You’ve had a change of heart?”
“No, not at all,” Alison blustered. “It’s just my father’s got this nutty notion that we’re going directly from the desert menu to the marriage altar.”
Turning the computer off, Collin stepped out from behind the desk. “Come with me.” Poking his head in an adjoining cubicle, he informed a coworker he was taking a short break and, with Alison Linden in tow, headed for the elevator.
Three blocks down a small park snaked through a wooded grove of densely packed silver birch, willows and aromatic pines. Directly ahead an older woman was walking a brown and white shih-tzu. The dog, which was off leash, scampered erratically among the dead leaves and pine needles. When they reached the gravel footpath, Collin turned to Alison. “Your father has been forging signatures so one of our home care aides doesn’t lose her accreditation.” He told her about the incident with the continuing education workshops and counterfeited signatures. “The Department of Health doesn’t give a rat’s ass if a paraplegic teen wallows in her own body waste. All they care about are a hodgepodge of state-mandated, training regulations.”
It had been a wearisome New England fall and everyone they passed seemed buoyed by the sun and unseasonable warmth. “What would you have done?” Alison asked.
“I don’t follow you?”
“About the missing credits.”
Collin made a disgruntled face, blowing out his cheeks in exasperation. “I would have drawn the shades and locked the door to my office. Then I’d wedge the back of a sturdy chair under the doorknob as an added precaution before forging the missing signatures." The jaunty little Shih-tzu with the pushed-in face and pronounced overbite doubled back to where they were standing. Collin squatted down on his haunches and scratched the dog behind the ear. "The good news is that in the future your father won't be put in such an untenable bind."
"How that?"
"Employees who can't attend in-house training can still gain credit by viewing medical videos, if an administrator countersigns the paperwork." The shih-tzu suddenly lifted a hind leg and peed into the leaves. Standing no more than four inches off the ground, the diminutive dog with the pushed-in face scampered off again, his massive head held perfectly erect and plumed tail arched over the barrel-shaped rump. "I already put together a packet of medical videos that I'm mailing out to Gwen Santos this afternoon. I'll meet with her sometime next month to quiz her on the topics and collect signatures."
When there was no immediate response, Collin added, “Your father wants me to marry you in the worst way.”
“He’s not terribly subtle with affairs of the heart.” Alison cracked a wan smile. “What else did my father tell you about his dysfunctional, disaffected daughter?”
“He said,” Collin chose his words diplomatically, “you were still finding your way in life.”
Alison flinched and quickly glanced away. A gust of wind sent a pile of dead leaves swirling in a funnel before scattering noiselessly to the ground. Cresting a hill, just beyond a tangle of nettles and briars a small pond loomed directly ahead. A solitary mallard was feeding at the far edge of the water. “This girl my father forged the signatures for… what’s she like?”
Collin pulled up short and watched as the duck dipped precariously forward, the orangey webbed feet flailing in the air. “Gwen’s been married twice. All she’s got to show for it is a heart of pure spun gold and three minor dependents on her W-4 federal withholding.” For a second time the mallard upended its torso in search of succulent vegetation. “Gwen’s a hard worker… honest to a fault.”
They made a loop of the pond and headed back toward the entrance to the park. “Then my father did the right thing,” Allison murmured.
* * * * *
Saturday night the phone rang. “Regarding the new invoicing program...” Fred Linden was on the other end of the line.
“It’s almost midnight,” Collin groused. “I’m getting ready for bed.”
“The F-1 key opens up a series of ‘help’ boxes with step-by-step instructions.”
Collin was standing barefoot on the kitchen tiles. “You called to tell me that?”
“How did your first date go?”
“Why don’t you ask your daughter?”
“Already did and she referred me back to you.” When there was no immediate reply, Fred demanded, “Are you asking Alison out again?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In a day or so.”
Dead silence. “There’s no help menu, in the conventional sense.” Fred’s over-stimulated brain seemed to be in free fall. “When confusion arises, you’ll need to navigate to a place in the specific submenus before depressing the F-1 tab.”
“Goodnight, Fred.”
“Alison’s a sweetheart, isn’t she?”
“Goodnight.” He hung up the phone.
Collin lay down on the bed but couldn’t sleep. Sitting up in a full lotus position he arranged the laptop on his thighs and brought
up a navy blue main menu. Arrow up, arrow down, enter and F-10 to save information - that was it, the whole kit and caboodle. It was so simple the process bordered on the idiotic. But the Neanderthal, database program was infinitely more coherent than any other for organizing client data. A case in point: Gwen Santos cared for three other homemaking clients in addition to the paraplegic girl. The PFS program allowed staff to print pay slips by assigned worker, so Gwen got all her client invoices printed on continuous feed forms in one uninterrupted run before proceeding on to the next worker straight through the alphabet, A to Z. It seemed logical enough, but no other modern-day program could negotiate the multiple-client stumbling block.
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Mustard Fields
"Can I borrow your husband?" Maddie Timberland was standing on the front stoop of the neighbor’s house directly opposite her split-level ranch.
"Well, that sounds rather obscene," Kimberly Osborne tittered. Maddie had always considered the woman a latter-day Stepford wife - a gynoid designed to look the part but with few if any feminine virtues. For the third day in a row the temperature was already hovering in the high eighties, but the svelte blonde with the tepid smile seemed unaffected by the heat wave.
"My lawn mower keeps sputtering and dying out," Maddie explained.
Maddie wished Kimberly would call her husband, but she just stood there gawking at her like she was a Jehovah Witness prospecting for fresh converts. Kimberly aggravated the hell out of her, but what could she do? The woman’s husband was a regular wizard with anything mechanical, and Maddie hadn't had a spouse in the picture for the past five years. Not that Jake, had he still been around, would have known what to do. Finally, Kimberly stepped out on the front stoop. The woman was dressed in a snazzy pair of spandex shorts and Adidas sneakers. In her right hand was a mug of fresh-brewed tea with a slice of lemon bobbing up and down. "I was just going for a walk."
Going for walks - that's all Kimberly Osborne ever did. It was her all-consuming passion. Other woman raised families, held careers, nursed chronically ill relatives, volunteered at the local library or taught English as a second language. Kimberly fixed herself a cup of Bigelow's English breakfast tea with a dollop of wildflower honey, which she leisurely sipped on the short ride in her twin-turbo BMW328 with the retractable hardtop to the Brandenberg Athletic Field where she power walked around the track a dozen times or so. Sometimes she brought small weights which she pumped furiously in order to raise her metabolism and burn extra calories. After the exercise regimen, she ate a buttered croissant and swigged a second cup of tea at the Honey Dew Donut shop in the center of town. Then she went home and formally started her day, which consisted of not much of anything.
Maddie didn't know what to think. Even though Kimberly had always been decent to her in a deferential sort of way, the insipid creature freaked her out. And here Maddie was standing on the Osborne's front stairs ingratiating herself, begging for small favors.
Well, maybe Maddie was just a tad jealous.
Not that she had any reason to be.
She had a reasonably good figure, but you would never know it by the way clothes hung on her angular frame. Maddie's hair was dark and straight. If she grew it long, the wispy strands hung limply. An act of desperation, she had her stylist trim it short over the summer. The page boy was suppose to make the lanky woman who turned forty on Tuesday look mod, hip, cool—not like Tinker Bell in midlife crisis.
Over the years, the body had seen a bit of wear and tear—a handful of birthing stretch marks around the lower belly and, more recently, a smattering of crow’s feet about the eyes - the not-so-subtle indignities of aging. And, within the last year or so, her breasts had begun to sag, enough so to precipitate an anxiety attack bordering on full-blown despair. By comparison, Kimberly's perky little breasts would do what they were meant to do with or without the supportive services of a sports bra; that taken together with the high cheekbones, willowy legs and hazel eyes made the woman a complete knockout.
Trevor, who had been cleaning out the gutters in the back yard, came around the side of the house. "Maddie's lawnmower is busted," Kimberly said. "Perhaps you could take a look."
He stepped closer and the musky scent of English Leather pervaded the humid air. With his ruddy complexion and Vandyke beard, Trevor exuded a relaxed competence. The man stripped off a pair of rawhide work gloves. "Let me grab some tools."
When he was gone, Kimberly added, "He's a real nutcase when it comes to his Toro self-propelled. Every spring he does a complete tune-up… even sharpens the mulching blade by hand with a metal rasp." She giggled, a breezy, adolescent laugh. "Don't know what I'd do without him." Maddie wasn't quite sure what she would do without him either, but, as a slightly horny, unattached female, it didn't seem appropriate to share that intimacy with Kimberly.
The previous winter when a nor'easter dumped a foot and a half of snow in Maddie's driveway, Trevor slogged across the street with his Ariens two-cycle snow thrower and cleared the icy mess away inside half an hour. He had purchased the super-deluxe model. Big as a Sherman tank, the bright orange monster registered an apocalyptic roar when he fired up the engine. The sixteen-inch, serrated steel augur tossed the snow effortlessly fifty feet onto the side lawn. Maddie didn't ask Trevor to do it. He never even rang the bell, just cleared all the snow away and went home - chug, chug, chug - guiding the machine, like a docile beast, in low gear.
"Your lawnmower died?" Trevor was unscrewing a tin lid on the left side of the two-stroke engine. "Let's have a look-see." Maddie dropped down on her haunches and tried to make mental notes in the event the temperamental machine went on the fritz again.
Trevor pulled the metal cover away and gestured with a finger at a wedge of yellow, spongy material. "That's your air filter." He pulled the soft block free of the compartment and washed it clean with the garden hose. "Dirt or grass clippings can block the passageway and foul the fuel mixture." After thoroughly cleaning the filter, Trevor screwed the lid back in place. "Are you aware that a groundhog is devouring your garden?"
Maddie glanced over her shoulder. In the far corner of the yard, a burly ground hog had wriggled under the wire netting and was feasting on a row of carrot tops. "That's Burt ...a regular visitor. We've agreed to share the harvest."
Trevor's blank expression eased into a lukewarm grin. "You grow vegetables… what does the rodent contribute?"
"He's quiet, stolid… a creature of few, pithy words and very indefinite wants. We have this understanding." Maddie waved her arms up over her head - once, twice. The groundhog scurried along the perimeter of the garden, which was overgrown with crabgrass and noxious jimson weed, before disappearing into the underbrush. By the wry look on his face, her neighbor had picked up on the not-so-veiled allusion to Maddie's former spouse but opted to let it pass.
"I just finished the novel, My Antonia, by Willa Cather," Maddie noted. Trevor was an avid reader. It was the one hobby the neighbors shared in common and when, on the few rare occasions that Maddie had the man to herself, she enjoyed the intellectual tête-à-tête. "The National Organization of Women was recently advising members not to patronize her works."
Trevor tipped the mower up on its side and was checking the blade and undercarriage. "And why was that?" Setting the machine back down on its wheels, he examined the choke adjustment.
"At the end of the novel, the heroine marries and chooses to live on a farm."
"And the radical feminists viewed that as a cop-out?" Maddie nodded once. "What's your take on Ms. Cather's fall from literary grace?"
"Asking you to help me with the broken-down lawnmower puts me squarely in the enemy camp."
Trevor, who seemed reasonably sure the choke was working properly, rose to his feet and stepped around to the front of the machine. "My daughter, Melissa, was accepted to Northeastern for the fall semester." The Osborne's had two children. The oldest boy was in his last year at Boston College, studying enginee
ring.
"Congratulations!"
"I'm serving Kimberly with divorce papers."
"Excuse me?"
He fitted a silver socket onto a ratchet and, pulling the spark plug wire free of the copper tip, seated the tool over the slender, ceramic stub. "Next week. I'm moving into an efficiently apartment in Foxboro. I can't live with the woman anymore." Five flicks of the wrist and the badly corroded spark plug wobbled free of the engine block. He stood up straight, glanced at her absently and looked away. "You divorced Jake and with good reason, so you know how it is."
Maddie's husband was a thirty-five year old adolescent trapped in a man's body. He didn't need a wife as much as a nursemaid or nanny. And Trevor's wife wasn't much better. The man wiped the blackened deposits away from the tip of the sparkplug then ran a piece of bluish-black Emory cloth over the sooty mess. After a moment the abrasive cut through and the metal arm began to shine. "That should do it." He fitted the sparkplug back in the engine and snugged it hand-tight with the socket.
"She doesn't know?"
The man shrugged. "I'm planning to break the news over the weekend. In all likelihood, she'll sell the house and go live with her mother. The old lady will help her over the worst of it. Kimberly… she's not like you - resourceful and self-sufficient."
He paused to wipe a bead of sweat that was gathering on his forehead. “I’m not leaving Kimberly for another woman.” He looked Maddie full in the face and held her eyes for a solid five seconds before turning away. “I’ve never cheated on my wife. Not once.” He primed the engine then gave a tug on the starter cord. The mower fired up on the first try. "You're good for another hundred thousand miles." Trevor collected his tools and sauntered back across the street to the home with the double garage, in-ground pool and perfectly manicured lawn that he would be shortly vacating.
* * * * *
The temperature rose another five degrees, bludgeoning Maddie's brain into a state of vegetative torpor as she groomed the lawn. Dragging the weed whacker out from the shed, she trimmed around the bricks framing the front walkway, as though sprucing up the property might somehow tidy the neighborhood as a whole.
