Early Morning Riser

by Katherine Heiny

  “This is from The New York Times,” her mother said. “It’s about adequate calcium intake for women your age.”

  “I take a multivitamin—” Jane started.

  “ ‘Intakes of five hundred milligrams of calcium per day in women with high osteoporosis rates help to reduce fracture risk, as does increased physical activity to strengthen bones and muscles,’ ” her mother read in a fulsome, newscaster sort of tone. Then she broke off and said in her regular voice, “Now, I know Luke soured you on marriage and children, dear, but you need to think of your own health.”

  “Luke did not sour me on marriage!” Jane protested. “I’m the one who called off the wedding!”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” her mother said. “Or partly true. But he has certainly seemed to give you a moment’s pause, if you don’t mind my saying so. And even if you choose to be single, you don’t want to end up a hunchback.”

  “Kyphosis has nothing to do with lack of calcium,” Jane said.

  “Well, I’m not talking about kyphosis, I’m talking about hunchbacks.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  They had arrived at the circular part of the conversation. They went back and forth over the definition of kyphosis and how that differed from scoliosis and how Jane’s mother thought they were both just excuses for poor posture and how Jane’s own posture was certainly going to have health ramifications in later life. Then Jane’s mother remembered she had some gingerbread in the oven, and they said good-bye.

  * * *

  —

  It was Saturday, and as usual, Jane drove over to Jimmy’s house to check on him. She knew Saturdays were long when you lived alone. She lived alone, too—sometimes her book club on Sunday nights was her only weekend outing. She drove absently, her mother’s comment still gnawing at her thoughts. It was true, Jane told herself, she had been the one to call off the wedding.

  Jane’s memory of the night of the accident was patchy. She remembered Luke driving her to the hospital in Petoskey to see her mother in the ER. The sight of her mother sitting on a gurney with her left arm in a sling, her large, leonine face looking so slack and old, had caused Jane to burst into tears.

  Her mother had turned to her and held out her good hand. “Don’t cry, dearheart,” she said. “I’m okay.”

  “Oh, Mom.” Jane took her mother’s hand. “I’m so glad you’re not hurt.”

  “I’ll be fine,” her mother said. Then her face had contorted, twisted with sorrow. “And, Jane, I am so, so sorry.”

  In the hospital hallway afterward, Luke had put his arms around Jane and said that of course they must postpone the wedding, and she agreed, nodding wordlessly against his chest. They had driven to Jimmy’s house, where Duncan and Darcy and Uncle Gene (who Jane had totally forgotten about) were clustered around Jimmy as he sat crying on the low plaid sofa with the broken spring.

  Luke left to take Uncle Gene back to his hotel room and to begin making all the necessary calls to Reverend Palumbo and Freida and the barn venue people and the caterer and all their guests. Darcy had made coffee in the dingy yellow kitchen while Duncan sorted through Mrs. Jellico’s papers and called the funeral home.

  And Jane? What did Jane do? She sat down next to Jimmy and put her arm around his shoulders.

  Jimmy’s eyes were red-rimmed, and the skin around them was blotchy and pink. His lips were raw-looking, and Jane noticed for the first time that there were faint lines on his forehead.

  “But what happened, Jane?” he asked. “Ma doesn’t drive. She doesn’t even know how to drive. Why was she driving?”

  “She wasn’t driving,” Jane said slowly. “My mother was driving.”

  “Your ma?” Jimmy frowned. “Why was she driving my ma home?”

  “Because I asked her to,” Jane said.

  “And what happened?” Jimmy asked. “Folks keep telling me, but I just don’t understand.”

  “Well,” Jane began hesitantly, “apparently, they were driving along East Street, and my mother—my mother was supposed to turn right onto Water Street, but she went straight instead. And then she tried to—to back up, and she backed into the intersection and another car hit them.”

  “Hit them where?”

  “Right there on the corner of East and Water.”

  “But where on the car?”

  “On the, um, the right side.” Jane did not want to say passenger side.

  “And Ma just—she just—?”

  “Yes,” Jane said as gently as she knew how. “She died.”

  “Oh.” Jimmy’s voice was almost too soft to hear. Then suddenly, “Is your ma okay?”

  Jane hesitated. “She broke her arm, but she’s going to be fine.”

  “That’s good,” Jimmy said, nodding. “That’s good.”

  Was it good, though? Was it good that right this minute her mother was sitting in a hospital bed, while Mrs. Jellico lay in the morgue? Was it good that by next week, Jane’s mother would be back in Grand Rapids, terrorizing dental patients and hitching up the waistband of her skirt, while Jimmy staggered around with an emotional hole blown in him like the cyborg in Terminator 2? Jane wasn’t sure.

  Over and over, Jimmy and Jane had this conversation, or some variant of it. His mother’s death seemed too much for Jimmy to process. It was like a game of Chutes and Ladders, and Jimmy kept hitting the longest chute and sliding back to the beginning: Why was his mother driving? Why was Jane’s mother driving? What exactly had happened? His mother was dead, actually dead? He would seem to accept this for a few days, and then he’d hit the chute again. Eventually he stopped asking, but Jane wasn’t sure that meant he’d stopped sliding down the chute.

  Three months after the accident, Luke had suggested they pick a new date for the wedding, and Jane had told him truthfully (or truthfully as far as it went) that she was too overwhelmed with straightening out Mrs. Jellico’s affairs to even think about it. And then three months later, he brought it up again.

  They had been in the kitchen at her house, with Jane measuring out spaghetti to add to the pot of boiling water on the stovetop. She was in a distinctly unreceptive mood. It was National Law Enforcement Day, and Jane had dressed the part for school: black polyester pants and a tan polyester button-down shirt with black pocket flaps, a cowboy hat with a tin star glued to the hatband, and mirrored sunglasses. Her students had loved it, but the hat was too small and squeezed her temples, and she had broken out in a rash from all that polyester and had to change into sweats and an old T-shirt borrowed from Coach Gillis during recess. She had arranged for an actual policeman to join the class for lunch, and he had squeezed a juice box too hard and sprayed lemonade all over the Peter Rabbit rug.

  “I just can’t begin to wrap my mind around planning a wedding,” she said. “Not tonight.”

  Luke stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders. “No wedding, then,” he said. “Just you and me at the courthouse.”

  “Oh, Luke.” Jane sighed. “I don’t know.”

  He stopped rubbing. “You don’t know about what?”

  “Just getting married,” Jane said. “I don’t know if I want to.”

  This didn’t seem to her, at that second, any more momentous than saying she didn’t want to grade papers or load the dishwasher. I don’t know if I want to go to a movie tonight. I don’t know if I want to have the Marshalls over. I don’t know if I want pizza again. I don’t know if I want to drive all the way to Petoskey. I don’t know if I want to go hiking today. I don’t know if I want to get married. What was the difference, really?

  Luke’s hands closed hard on her shoulders for the briefest of moments, then released. “Thanks for letting me know,” he said. “Finally.”

  Why had Jane imagined he would take this news cheerfully? Just because he was, overall, a cheerful person? He was not her personal support syst
em, not some professional caregiver she had hired. He was a man she had failed to love, or at least failed to love in the way he deserved, and now he knew that.

  Luke left that very night, even before the spaghetti was done cooking. Jane stood at the stove, swirling the spaghetti around the pot with a wooden spoon while Luke walked silently through the house, stuffing his clothes and CDs and paperbacks into a single duffel bag. She had never before realized how few possessions he had at her house.

  The worst part of it was that Jane knew she had the power to take it all back, to say she didn’t mean it, to say it was just the stress of Law Enforcement Day, that the courthouse suited her just fine. But she didn’t want to say that. What she really wanted to say—what she dared not turn around for fear that she would say—was, You aren’t really leaving me alone, are you? You aren’t leaving me alone to take care of Jimmy?

  * * *

  —

  Other people helped with Jimmy, of course. Aggie was very generous about delivering food. She brought Jimmy dishes of baked ziti and chicken cordon bleu and her special Polish meatballs, along with bossy notes about how to warm and serve them, but Jimmy never ate them. Jane knew because she was the one who scraped the pans out when the food grew hard and moldy; she was the one who washed and dried those pans, for Jimmy’s house had no dishwasher. Duncan packed a lunch for Jimmy along with his own every day now, after Jimmy had shown up for work three days in a row with no lunch. (Only then had it occurred to them: Mrs. Jellico had packed Jimmy’s lunches. Of course she had.) Mr. Estes from across the street raked and mowed Jimmy’s lawn along with his own, and another neighbor cleaned the gutters once a year. The Lymans took out Jimmy’s trash and recycling, and put the bins back afterward. The Holcombes took him to church with them on major holidays, and Mrs. Morse took him to bingo night once a month. The Deatons had him over for dinner whenever they made ham with pineapple rings.

  But almost everything else—paying bills, cleaning the house, shopping for food, making doctor appointments, the endless process of keeping Jimmy alive—fell to Jane, because the accident was her fault. Jane’s mother had been the one driving, but the accident had been Jane’s fault.

  Jane, who had been shown a million kindnesses that day and who had refused to show any in return. Jane, who had been too sullen and selfish to take five minutes and drive a nice old lady home safely. Jane, who had insisted that her mother—someone whose driving she knew to be unsafe—drive instead. Jane, who could not be bothered to give her mother directions, so that her mother missed the turn and reversed back onto Water Street just in time for a man driving a lavender Saab to hit their car broadside. Jane, who had not even taken the time to help Mrs. Jellico put her seatbelt on, which meant that when the Saab struck the car, Mrs. Jellico’s head swung forward like a thrown bowling ball and struck the windshield. It was Jane’s fault that Mrs. Jellico had sustained head injuries that would almost certainly have killed her except the crush injuries to her chest and abdomen killed her first. It was Jane’s fault that Mrs. Jellico had died on a dark street in a pool of broken glass. It was Jane’s fault that Jimmy no longer had his mother. It was all Jane’s fault—can’t you see that?

  Everyone else could.

  * * *

  —

  Jane parked her car in front of Jimmy’s house and sighed.

  She was never sure why Jimmy’s house looked so much like it was trembling on the verge of an abrupt slide into decrepitude. The lawn was no shaggier than many of the other lawns on the street. The green paint on the house was no flakier than the paint on some other houses; the roof was missing no more shingles. Other houses had off-kilter shutters, and sagging porch steps, and neglected flower beds. But no other house had all these deficits, she realized. No other house had quite so many signs of inattention, which, though small, together seemed to be a banner proclaiming an unloved single person lives here.

  She knocked on the front door, and Jimmy answered it, wearing his pajamas and carrying a plastic bowl of cereal.

  “Hi, Jane!” he said. “Come in.”

  “What are you up to, Jimmy?” Jane asked, although she knew it was a pointless question. When left to his own devices, Jimmy never did anything but eat and watch television.

  “Just watching TV,” Jimmy said, as though to prove her point.

  Jane stepped into the dim house and then closed the door on the beautiful day outside, on the trees that shook their emerald leaves like cheerleaders shaking pompoms. She and Jimmy should buy sandwiches and sit on a bench at Peninsula Beach and look at the lake and let the wind cool their faces. But the idea of getting Jimmy dressed and out the door, of figuring out what kind of sandwich he wanted, of answering his million questions about why they were doing whatever it was they were doing—it all seemed like too much effort. Way too much. Jane felt exhausted just considering it.

  “Want some Lucky Charms?” Jimmy asked.

  “No, thank you,” Jane said. “You go back to your show, and I’ll just check a few things in the kitchen.”

  “Okay,” Jimmy said agreeably, and walked back down the shadowy hallway.

  They couldn’t go to the beach, anyway, Jane told herself. So many things here needed her attention. She should change the sheets on Jimmy’s bed and run the vacuum, wipe down the bathroom and sort through the mail. She went into the kitchen, which looked like the morning-after scene of a lame frat party: empty pizza boxes, sticky soda cans, smudged glasses, crusted cereal bowls, overflowing trash can.

  Jane sighed. She washed the glasses and bowls and left them to dry in the dish drainer. She bagged up the trash and recycling and carried the bags out to the bins by the garage, making another trip for the pizza boxes. Five pizzas in a week.

  Back in the kitchen, she opened the Humpty Dumpty ceramic cookie jar—it was so ugly it almost defied description—where Jimmy insisted on keeping his money. The worn envelope inside contained three singles. Jane added four tens from her wallet. This was Jimmy’s weekly spending money.

  The road to Jimmy’s fiscal independence was a long one—possibly endless, Jane sometimes thought. Luke had been the one to sort through Mrs. Jellico’s finances after the accident, had crunched the numbers of Jimmy’s income and expenses. They were very small and extremely crunchable numbers, like pounding a bag of graham crackers to make an undersized pie crust. Mrs. Jellico had owned the house, but she had no other income besides her social security benefits and Jimmy’s long-dead father’s pension. She’d owned no other assets or investments besides a small savings account and an even smaller college fund set up for Jimmy in the distant past. (The hopefulness of that college fund had made Jane’s heart clench painfully.) Luke had consolidated these accounts into one owned jointly by Jane and Jimmy, transferred the bills into Jane’s name, set up automated payments, and outlined a budget for Jimmy that would cover property taxes, utility bills, insurance premiums, food, and clothing. The budget Luke had created was a tight one, with no room for extras. Jane had gone over it diligently with Jimmy, although she could see he paid little attention. She kept meaning to work with him, to teach him the basics of accounting, but she never seemed to get around to it. It was just easier for her to handle the money and dole out this weekly allowance.

  She went into the living room, where Jimmy was watching the Lifetime Movie Network. It was almost all he watched. This had seemed a strange choice to Jane, and she asked him about it once, and he said he liked it because the shows were all two hours long. “Sometimes, on other channels,” Jimmy said, “the shows are only half an hour, and I finish watching and look at the clock and realize there’s three more hours before I can go to bed.”

  Since then Jane had learned not to ask so many questions.

  “You want to come watch with me?” Jimmy asked.

  She didn’t, of course. The Lifetime Movie Network depressed her, as did people who watched the Lifetime Movie Netwo
rk. And she really should do some laundry. But she knew that Jimmy would rather have company watching television than all the clean clothes in the world, so she sat down next to him. On the screen, a doctor was talking about a double-blind study.

  “Double-blind means that neither the doctor nor the patient knows whether the medicine is real or fake,” Jane said automatically, knowing that Jimmy would need this explained.

  It had surprised Jane at first, the things Jimmy didn’t know. Jimmy didn’t know how to cook anything but ramen noodles, or how to tell if fruit and vegetables were fresh. He didn’t know how to read food labels for nutritional information or check expiration dates, and he was a little sketchy on which items needed to be kept in the fridge or the freezer.

  Jimmy knew his name, address, and telephone number (Jane was heartily relieved), but he didn’t know where his social security card and birth certificate were, or where his mother kept her important papers, or whether they had a mortgage.