Early Morning Riser

by Katherine Heiny

  He didn’t know the name of his doctor. (Jane was able to figure out that it was Dr. Haven after a form of Twenty Questions: Is it a man or woman? Is he old? Does he have a beard? Does he wear glasses?) Jimmy didn’t know what kind of insurance he had, nor did he understand the concept of a co-pay. He had a vague idea of which over-the-counter medications were for pain, diarrhea, or cold and allergy symptoms, but Jane didn’t trust him to follow the directions for using them.

  He knew to call 911 in an emergency (Jane checked with him just to be sure) but had no idea how to treat cuts, burns, insect bites, or splinters. He didn’t know how to check the batteries in a smoke detector, nor was he aware of the dangers of frayed electrical cords, unattended candles, overloaded power strips, or using a knife to get bread out of a toaster.

  He knew how to shower and shave and dress himself, and to wash his hands after using the bathroom. But he didn’t know that even though you get clean in the shower, you still have to clean the shower. And the rest of the bathroom. And the kitchen. And the floors. And, well, forget about dusting, Jane had decided.

  He knew how to use the washer and dryer, but no longer did so after he shrunk all of his shirts down to the size of infant sweaters by using the hottest possible setting on the dryer, which was some very old model that dried with the heat of a thousand suns and was probably a fire hazard.

  He knew how to change a lightbulb but not what kind of lightbulbs to buy. He didn’t know how to replace a vacuum cleaner bag, or stop a toilet from running, or reset a circuit breaker, or change a fuse. He didn’t even know where the fuse box was.

  He didn’t know how to balance a checkbook or read a bank statement; he didn’t know there were fees for using ATMs, or what being overdrawn meant. He didn’t understand how credit cards worked or that not paying the electric bill meant your electricity got cut off. He didn’t know how to file a tax return (of course he didn’t—Jane was just tossing out wild ideas here) or read a pay slip or understand the difference between gross pay and net pay. Or the difference between gas and electric, or colors and whites. Or between broiling and baking, or the furnace and the hot water heater. Or between rum and whiskey, prime rib and ribeye, or Land Rover and Range Rover. Or free market and command economies, allegory and parable, India and Bangladesh, radon and radium, politics and partisanship, classical and baroque, light conversation and true communication, lust and infatuation, love and sex, and all the rest of it.

  * * *

  —

  After the movie was over, Jane left Jimmy’s house and went to Glen’s to buy groceries for both of them. Buying Jimmy’s food—Pop-Tarts, boxed macaroni and cheese, potato chips, peanut butter, saltines—was like shopping for someone who lived in a fallout shelter. Her own list was equally depressing: a packet of chicken breasts, six eggs, a half gallon of milk, one bag of salad, the smallest container of yogurt, the smallest bottle of syrup. A single person’s groceries.

  She was in the frozen foods aisle, buying a mere pint of strawberry ice cream, when a shopping cart blocked her path. She looked up in annoyance. It was Duncan.

  “You were lost in thought,” he said. “Anything interesting?”

  “Not really,” Jane said. “I haven’t seen—seen you around much.”

  She flushed. She knew she hadn’t seen him around much because he was dating a Charlevoix woman named Tabitha who worked in a bakery that, according to Freida, sold overpriced croissants. But Jane didn’t want Duncan to know she still kept track of his romantic life.

  “Tabitha and I broke up,” Duncan said, apparently not at all deceived. “She was moving downstate, and I don’t do so well with long-distance relationships.”

  “Oh,” Jane said. “That’s a shame.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.” Duncan sounded cheerful, as he always did about breakups. “Her herb garden bothered my hay fever no end.”

  Jane nodded; she’d known relationships that hinged on less.

  He was wearing a dark gold-colored shirt that matched the golden glints in his auburn hair. Jane noticed that he had new lines around his mouth. Just imagine: lines carved by experiences that Jane knew nothing about.

  They regarded each other for a moment that was really only a regular moment but that seemed as endless as a river, as open as a mountain vista. Duncan looked at her and his amber-flecked brown eyes seemed to Jane, as they always had, to fix her in a warm spotlight.

  Duncan rocked his shopping cart back and forth so it nudged hers gently. Nudge. Nudge. Finally, he said, “I see you’ve bleached the hair on your upper lip.”

  Jane sighed. “Yes, but I didn’t know it was going to make me look like Colonel Sanders.”

  “More like a very pretty Mark Twain,” Duncan said.

  And just like that, they were a couple again.

  * * *

  —

  Well, almost just like that. First, they had to pay for their groceries, and there was a little flurry of embarrassment over which checkout line to choose. The first lane was problematic because Duncan had had the cashier’s grandmother’s painted satinwood cabinet in his workshop for about a year now, and the cashier was likely to bring it up and be unpleasant about it. The cashier in the other lane was a woman Duncan had slept with a number of years ago after a car show in Manistee, and while she would (probably) not be unpleasant, Jane would just as soon not talk to someone Duncan had had sex with right before she herself was planning to have sex with him. But luckily, Mr. Fairmont came out from behind the customer service desk and opened a third lane, and he and Duncan had a small discussion about walleye fishing.

  “Walleye are just so darned smart,” Mr. Fairmont said.

  “They’re smart, but they’re lazy,” Duncan said. “I find if you can just get the worm in front of them—”

  “That’s all well and good if you’re using a worm harness,” Mr. Fairmont said, somewhat critically. “If not, just forget it.”

  Afterward, Jane loaded her groceries into her car, and Duncan loaded his groceries into his rust-spotted white van. They drove in a caravan straight to Jane’s house and made love on the old leather sofa without even unpacking the groceries, and Jane’s strawberry ice cream melted right down to a puddle.

  * * *

  —

  Jane was asleep in Duncan’s arms when the phone rang the next morning at seven thirty. She answered drowsily.

  “Hello, Jane, dear,” Aggie said. “Now that you and Duncan are back together, I feel I can ask—”

  “Wait—how did you know about that?” Jane asked. She and Duncan had been back together for about eighteen hours.

  “Well, last night I was watching the coverage of the California wildfires on CNN,” Aggie said, “and Gary got upset.”

  “Gary cares about the wildfires?” Jane asked. Up until this point, she hadn’t known Gary cared about anything but himself.

  “No, no, he disapproves of CNN,” Aggie said. “He says the news ticker makes him nervous. Often a little drive and a piece of pie calm him down, so we drove over to the pie shop in Petoskey, and on the way, we saw Duncan’s van parked down the street from your house. I said to Gary, ‘Why, I believe Duncan’s taken up with Jane again. Either that, or Mary Winslow is being unfaithful to her husband.’ ”

  “Oh,” Jane said.

  “Anyway,” Aggie continued, “we brought Jimmy a piece of coconut cream pie, and when we dropped it off at his house, I couldn’t help noticing that the porch railing is loose, and I wonder if you might ask Duncan to tighten it down.”

  Jane glanced over at Duncan. He was still asleep. His eyelashes made golden crescents on his cheeks. Look at that, Duncan asleep in her bed.

  “I’d be happy to do that, Aggie,” Jane said in a strange, upbeat voice she didn’t recognize as her own. “I’ll take Duncan over there with me today. Thank you so much for letting me know. And tha
nk you for all you do for Jimmy. You really are so very kind.”

  The world was as bright and shiny as a fishing lure.

  * * *

  —

  If Aggie knew Jane and Duncan were back together, then it was just a matter of days—perhaps hours or even minutes—before everyone else in Boyne City knew, too. So Jane called Freida and told her right away.

  “Why, that’s—wonderful,” Freida said in the uncertain tone people use when setting up Wi-Fi networks. “Do you know that he still clears my driveway every single time it snows?”

  “He does?” Jane didn’t mind that Duncan did that; she only minded that she didn’t know about it. That was how Boyne City she’d become.

  “Oh, yes,” Freida said. “And once, my car got stuck in the school parking lot, and he came over right away and pulled my car out with his van. He really is much nicer than most people think.”

  Jane even told her mother, who said, “Duncan again? I thought he was over you.”

  “Well, it turns out he wasn’t,” Jane said cheerfully. She was too happy to take offense.

  Everyone seemed baffled, even if (unlike her mother) they were too polite to say so, and Jane couldn’t blame them. They all knew she and Duncan had broken up the first time because he didn’t want to commit, and he showed no signs of having changed his mind about that. It was Jane who’d changed. She understood now that time was too valuable to deny yourself things that gave you pleasure. There had to be more to life than teaching second grade, and taking care of Jimmy, and drinking a whole bottle of red wine while you watched The Bachelor (though that last part was pretty nice). She wanted Duncan—she had never stopped wanting him—and now she was willing to take him on his terms.

  Jimmy’s reaction was much better. Jane and Duncan told him together when they went over to drop off his groceries later the next day.

  Jimmy smiled broadly—the smile that made you realize how handsome he would have been if he’d been born just a little smarter—and shook Duncan’s hand over and over, saying, “Good for you, buddy! Good for you!”

  Then he turned to Jane and said, “Now we can have Duncan and Aggie and Gary over for Taco Tuesday!”

  Taco Tuesday was a tradition Jane had started with Jimmy. It had originally been Pizza Night, but that was before Jane discovered how often Jimmy ordered pizza on his own. So they’d switched to tacos, and now on Tuesday nights, Jane brought the ingredients and made tacos and they watched a video Jimmy had chosen. Last week, they’d watched Ernest Scared Stupid, and of all the prices Jane had paid for her mother’s accident, she thought watching that movie might have been the highest.

  Now she felt insulted, too. Wasn’t her presence alone enough to make Taco Tuesday successful? Now they had to have Aggie and Gary, too? Gary?

  But this time around, Jane was determined to do everything right. She wouldn’t be jealous, not of Aggie, not of Duncan’s legion of ex-girlfriends, not of the new waitress at Robert’s with the long, dark eyelashes, not of the girl at the video store who carried her breasts in front of her as though they were a couple of large cupcakes. She would not be demanding, not of Duncan’s time, not of his attention, not of his commitment, not of his money. (He didn’t have any, so that part would be easy.) She would be all the things she had always meant to be in their relationship and somehow never managed to be: wise and cool and levelheaded and regal and hopelessly alluring, like a single ball bearing gleaming on a black velvet background, or maybe a Swedish nanny. If that meant inviting Aggie and Gary to Taco Tuesday, so be it.

  She smiled. “Of course, we can include them. We can invite Freida, too.”

  Jane called them later that night. Freida said she would be delighted, and Aggie said that Gary had some issue with tacos—apparently he’d found a stone in a street taco in 1980 and been off them ever since—but she would bring enchiladas.

  * * *

  —

  Aggie and Gary were already on the porch of Jimmy’s house on Tuesday when Jane and Duncan arrived. Jane and Duncan had made love less than an hour before, and Jane’s mind was pleasantly slowed, like her classroom’s Newton’s cradle when someone had set it going very slowly: tick…tick…tick.

  Aggie was wearing a dark purple sheath dress with an apple-green cardigan, and by all that was good and holy, Jane thought, she should have looked like Barney the dinosaur, but she didn’t. As always, Aggie’s wide-faced, rosy-lipped, flaxen-haired prettiness took Jane by surprise.

  “Oh, hello,” Aggie said, ringing the doorbell. “Now, Gary, I’m sure you remember Duncan’s girlfriend, Jane.”

  Gary peered at Jane. “You’re not the one with the fondness for Grape-Nuts, are you?”

  “No,” Jane said, sighing. “That must’ve been someone else.”

  Jimmy answered the door wearing the chinos and yellow polo shirt that Jane knew he considered his best outfit. (Honestly, Jimmy could break your heart without half trying.) The shirt was tight across Jimmy’s stomach. All that pizza, Jane supposed.

  Before they could go inside, Freida’s car pulled up to the curb, and Freida got out. “Hey, everyone!” she called.

  “Who’s that?” Gary asked.

  Aggie tsked in an annoyed way, but Jimmy said helpfully, “That’s Freida Fitzgerald.”

  Gary looked doubtful. “Is she new in town?”

  “Gary,” Duncan said patiently, “she’s taught music at the high school going on twenty years now.”

  Freida came up the porch steps, carrying her mandolin case. She was slightly out of breath and had ringlets of brown hair pressed flat against her forehead from the heat.

  “Hi, Freida!” Jimmy said. “Are you going to play the mandolin?”

  “You bet I am,” she answered cheerfully. She noticed Gary staring at her. “Hey, how are you, Gary?”

  “She knows me,” Gary said to Aggie.

  “Of course I know you!” Freida exclaimed. “We’ve known each other for years. I’ve been to your house, you’ve been to my house. You handle my homeowner’s insurance.”

  Gary frowned. “Broad form or comprehensive?”

  “Maybe we should all go inside now,” Duncan suggested.

  “Yes, please,” Aggie said. “I’ve been holding this dish of enchiladas so long my fingers are numb.”

  They all went into the kitchen to help themselves to drinks. Jane was relieved at this self-service. If they waited for Jimmy to serve drinks, they’d be here all night. Normally, Jane would stay in the kitchen to make dinner, but tonight Aggie was doing that, so Jane was free to sit in the living room with everyone else.

  Jimmy seemed very excited to have guests and told a long, confusing story about how some lady was threatening Duncan with legal action if he didn’t refinish her grandfather’s trestle table, which he’d had for at least a year and for which he’d already accepted payment.

  “People,” Duncan said, shaking his head.

  Freida settled herself on the couch next to Jane and took out her mandolin. Part of being friends with Freida meant getting used to her playing the mandolin all the time—softly if people were talking, louder if they weren’t. If the conversation got heated, she would strum faster; if they were all tired, she would play something soothing. It was like having a constant soundtrack to your life, or maybe a mandolin-playing Greek chorus, because sometimes she sang, too—little snatches of lyrics that always seemed to fit the occasion. When Aggie called to Duncan from the kitchen to please adjust the air conditioning, Freida sang, “ ‘You can fill my pipe and then go fetch my slippers,’ ” and when Gary got up to look for the bathroom, Freida sang, “ ‘I can’t help but wonder where I’m bound.’ ”

  “Dinner is ready!” Aggie called.

  Everything Aggie ever made was delicious, and the enchiladas were no exception. After dinner, Jane cleared the table and ran water in the sink for the dishe
s.

  Aggie came in to help her. “Now, if you’ll wash the dishes, I’ll clean out the fridge,” Aggie said, which was annoying because Jane was already washing the dishes. She didn’t need to be told.

  Aggie began unscrewing the lids of jars from the fridge and sniffing them. “Gah!” she said each time, and threw the jar in the recycling bin. There was no particular reason that this should make Jane feel like swatting Aggie with her own pie server, but it did. Aggie dumped the last jar and began wiping down the inside of the refrigerator. Jane moved on to washing the glasses.

  They cleaned in silence for a minute or two. Then Aggie said, “How are things with Duncan? He seems very happy.”

  Jane had noticed that Aggie often asked a question, then answered it herself. She supposed that was a real estate agent habit—How do you like this place? I love that third bedroom!—but it also might be the result of living with Gary.

  “What makes you say that?” she asked.

  “Oh, well, he and I were in the hardware store buying hinges for my kitchen cupboard yesterday, and I asked how you were, and he looked all sort of pleased. Normally, when I ask about some girl he’s seeing, he looks, I don’t know, sort of belligerent.”

  Duncan and Aggie had gone to the hardware store together? To buy hinges? Jane’s mind raced like a beagle down that alley, and then she made it stop. She didn’t do that anymore.

  “I think you’re good for Duncan,” Aggie continued. “He needs someone who isn’t so concerned with being glamorous all the time, someone who isn’t outrageously pretty—”

  Funny how this conversation was making Jane feel, well, belligerent. They finished cleaning the kitchen in that tiresome way that you clean someone else’s kitchen, when you know you won’t be there to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Jane rinsed out the sink and wandered into the living room where the others were gathered around the television.

  “I don’t understand this movie,” Gary said suddenly. “Not one bit. It’s almost like the baby is talking.”