Early Morning Riser

by Katherine Heiny

  “Absolutely,” Willard said. “A newspaper article with a picture of a pretty lady like yourself and a mention of your esteemed musical background—” He shrugged and held a hand out, palm up, as though gesturing at an invisible army of potential piano students. “You’d run old Beatrice right out of business.”

  Freida was pink with pleasure. “What a wonderful idea, Willard,” she said. She picked her knife and fork up again.

  “And I have a question for you, Aggie,” Willard said. “I have been staying at the City Motel and—”

  “The City Motel!” Aggie snorted. “That’s a terrible place! We stayed there once, and the sheets had such a low thread count that Gary broke out all over in boils and hasn’t been the same since.”

  “Really?” Jimmy looked intrigued. “What was he like before?”

  “Yes, I share your views on the City Motel,” Willard said smoothly. “I was wondering if you knew someone with a guest room, someone who would welcome a boarder for a few weeks? My job at the mountain doesn’t start until mid-November.”

  “Why, certainly, I do,” Aggie answered. “Gladys and Andy Parkins have a guest room with a private bath. I’ll speak to them immediately.”

  “They might have a guest bedroom,” Duncan said, “but they don’t have a guest bed in it. I know because it’s a four-poster that needs refinishing. It’s been down at my workshop for a few months now.”

  “Oh!” Jimmy spoke so suddenly that Jane jumped. “Gladys has been calling and asking about that, but I clean forgot to tell you, Duncan.”

  Duncan gave a small shrug. “She’ll survive.”

  “Oh, really, Duncan,” Aggie said in an aggrieved voice. “Gladys is going to need that bed soon. You know as well as I do that her brother comes up every Christmas.”

  “Not anymore,” Duncan said. “He and Gladys had a falling out over whether Call of Duty is historically accurate, and they’re no longer on speaking terms.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Aggie sounded like she didn’t believe it, either.

  “Well, it’s true. Gladys told me last April.”

  “But Gladys didn’t mention it to me,” Aggie said.

  “Look, I know it’s hard to believe that something happened in Boyne City that somebody else didn’t know about,” Duncan said, “but apparently it did.”

  “Back to my rooming situation,” Willard said, his voice respectful. “I did see an advertisement for a room to rent. A man named Roy Newton—”

  “Roy Newton!” Aggie sniffed. “That man is a complete scoundrel. Do you know that he called the police a few years ago and complained that Gary and I were having a big party and disturbing the peace? Absolutely ridiculous. Everyone knows that Gary doesn’t like loud noises or having people over. Even the police know that. They called and said—”

  “Who is Roy Newton?” Gary said, and everyone went quiet because they tended to forget for long periods that he was present.

  “He’s our neighbor, Gary,” Aggie said. “The one who lives in the yellow house. Anyway, Willard, you just leave it to me. The Schroders have a granny flat over their garage. Mark Schroder’s mother passed away recently, and it’s just sitting empty.”

  “I knew you would be the perfect person to ask,” Willard said. “Now, Duncan, perhaps you can tell me the difference between a breakfront and a hutch?”

  And so it went. Jane knew what Willard was doing—it was a version of Star of the Day. He was giving everyone a moment in the spotlight, a chance to honor their achievements, an opportunity to shine. Jane did it all the time in the classroom, but she had never thought to do it at a dinner party. But maybe that was because Taco Tuesday had never seemed like a dinner party before.

  What was most amazing of all—even more so than the fact that Willard asked Gary if he had any coworkers over at State Farm, and Gary answered in a reasonably lucid way, saying that he worked with a lady named Claire and a man named Aaron who had shorted out the toaster oven making grilled cheese sandwiches—was Jimmy during all of this. He was alert, and he watched the face of each speaker, smiling a smile that was different from his usual unselfconscious grin—it was a more confident smile somehow. When he laughed, he sounded more genuinely amused than Jane had ever heard him. (Jimmy didn’t laugh very often—Jane wondered if it was because he was afraid he was the butt of the joke.) When he spoke—“Willard and I will clean up”—the note of happy pride in his voice was tangible, a live thing, like a bluebird that had flown in and perched on a chairback, rosy-breasted and silver-songed. For the first time in all the years that she’d known him, Jimmy was animated. No, more than that: Jimmy was alive.

  * * *

  —

  Mrs. Robicheaux came to class that week, arriving in the morning with Mr. Robicheaux. She was petite and curly-haired, with purple-framed eyeglasses and a slightly formal way of speaking. She was really quite pretty in a subdued sort of way and seemed genuinely sweet. She was much better than Mr. Robicheaux deserved, in Jane’s opinion, and if her presentation lacked some dynamism, perhaps that was understandable, given the subject matter.

  Mrs. Robicheaux began by passing out blue pencils with the accounting firm’s name engraved in gold letters. Then she told the class about the differences between the 1040, the 1040-A, and the 1040-EZ, and the inadvisability of doing one’s own taxes.

  “Even if you are very, very good at math,” Mrs. Robicheaux said. “The tax system is positively filled with hidden dangers.”

  Jane sighed. She was sitting on the floor with the children for the dual purpose of gently tilting Brandon Hicks’s head toward the front of the room so it would at least look as if he was listening and also of preventing Dylan McMahon and Kyle Bradshaw from poking each other with the sharp ends of their new pencils.

  “Now, you children have no idea what a lifesaver it was when window envelopes came along,” Mrs. Robicheaux was saying. “Because at the accounting firm, we lived in fear of sending a tax return to the wrong person. That happened once, a long time ago. We accidentally sent a gentleman here in town another gentleman’s income tax return, and it so happened that the first gentleman owed the second gentleman over five hundred dollars for, I believe it was, roof repairs. And when the second gentleman saw how much the first gentleman’s income was, he called the first gentleman and said, ‘I’m holding the most enlightening piece of mail here in my hand and—’ Yes, dear, do you have a question?”

  Morgan Cruse had raised her hand. “Is it true you’re married to Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Yes, it is,” Mrs. Robicheaux said, smiling.

  Morgan frowned. “Why?”

  “I think she means, what do you love about him most?” Jane interposed hastily.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Morgan said to Jane.

  But Mrs. Robicheaux seemed not to hear. “So many, many things!” she said, misting up behind her eyeglasses. “Roland actually dated my older sister first, and one evening, she pulled me aside and said, ‘I can’t bear another night of hearing him clear his throat through a whole movie. You go on down there and tell him all nice-like that I have a headache.’ So I went downstairs, and Roland was there waiting, and I told him my sister was indisposed, and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you come to the movies with me instead?’ Now, my father was very old-fashioned, and he thought it was highly inappropriate for a twenty-year-old man to take a fourteen-year-old girl out, and he said under no circumstances could I go. But I was so woebegone, and after my sister shouted down the stairs that Roland was pretty harmless, my father decided we could sit on the porch together and have iced tea and cake. But we had to leave the front door slightly ajar because my father said he didn’t trust Roland any further than he could throw him. So Roland and I had tea and cake and the nicest, sweetest, most wonderful conversation imaginable! Then every weekend after that, Roland would show up at our house, and he and I would sit on t
he front porch and have iced tea and cake. This went on for almost two years! We had to sit out there even in the wintertime because my father refused to let Roland in the house. And finally, on my sixteenth birthday, I said, ‘Daddy, I have gained nearly ten pounds from all this cake, and besides, Roland and I are in love.’ My father said if I had my heart set on marrying a degenerate, there wasn’t much—”

  “Georgina, please!” Mr. Robicheaux was looking alarmed. “Nobody wants to hear all this.”

  Speak for yourself! Jane thought this was possibly the most interesting class discussion ever.

  “Was it applesauce cake?” Joshua Curry asked. “The cake you ate?”

  “Sometimes it was applesauce cake,” Mrs. Robicheaux said pleasantly. “Sometimes it was poppy seed, sometimes it was spice cake.”

  Jane had the impression that Mrs. Robicheaux would truthfully answer any question put to her, and it was tempting to ask some of her own. What was it like to marry a man everyone disapproved of ? Was he a better husband than he appeared? Was marriage everything Mrs. Robicheaux had hoped it would be? Did she still love Mr. Robicheaux enough to sit on a freezing-cold porch with him, or was that not the kind of love that withstood matrimony? What kind of love did withstand matrimony? Was it the kind of love Jane had? She really needed to know.

  * * *

  —

  The volunteer firefighter was supposed to come to class the next day, but he called Jane early that morning to say he was needed at a grease fire in Walloon Village.

  “I can send my brother to speak to your class, though,” he said.

  “Is your brother a firefighter?” Jane asked.

  “No, he’s an accountant.”

  “Well, thank you, but we had one of those already,” Jane said politely. “Good luck with the grease fire.”

  She decided to have Duncan and Jimmy as speakers instead, and said they could bring Willard for good measure. But Jimmy said Willard had driven over to Mio to go to the cheese shop there, so it was just Duncan and Jimmy with a whole bunch of wooden wedges, which Duncan said the children could sand and take home as doorstops.

  “Okay, everyone,” Jane said, as Duncan took a seat in the chair at the front of the room. Jimmy was setting out wood pieces and sandpaper along the back counter. “This is Mr. Ryfield, and he’s a woodworker.”

  “A woodworker is someone who works with wood to build cabinets and furniture and even boats and musical instruments,” Duncan said to the class. “It’s one of the oldest and most well-respected professions—”

  Logan Miles had been picking fluff off the carpet, but now he looked up. “I think you fixed my little sister’s crib.”

  “Please remember to raise your hand, Logan,” Jane said.

  Logan raised his hand. “I think you fixed my little sister’s crib.”

  “Is that so?” Duncan looked thoughtful. “Probably what I actually did was refinish the crib, because I—”

  “My mother says you had the crib so long my sister grew out of it,” Logan said.

  “Oh, well, now—”

  “She said my sister was two years old and had got used to sleeping in a regular bed by the time we got it back,” Logan continued. “My sister didn’t want anything to do with that crib by then.”

  “Well, no two-year-old should be sleeping in a crib anyway,” Duncan said. “So you can look at it like I did your whole family a favor, kind of. Now, who else has a question?”

  Kelsey Angula raised her hand. “Aren’t you also Ms. Wilkes’s boyfriend?”

  Jane flushed. Had she mentioned Duncan so much already, this early in the year? Yes, she supposed she had. It was so easy to do, and it felt so good. I’ll have my boyfriend come fix the playground gate this weekend, and Mr. Ryfield will know how to get that ham sandwich off the PA speaker.

  “Oh, yes,” Duncan said easily. “Couple of years now.”

  “Years?” Matthew Harvey asked, startled. “Did you get held back?”

  Duncan looked puzzled. “Held back?”

  “Like flunking,” Matthew said.

  Jane clapped her hands together. “I think Mr. Jellico is ready for everyone now.”

  Jimmy threw up his hands in a startled way. “Wait! I’m still counting out sandpaper!” But the children scrambled up and surged toward the back of the classroom.

  Jane went to look out the window, biting her lip. The playground was ugly and gray—an apocalyptic playground.

  She had always assumed that her relationship with Duncan was getting stronger and more permanent the longer it went on. But maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe Matthew was right, and they had flunked the relationship test by failing to move on to the next level. Maybe they had stopped working and just didn’t realize it yet.

  Duncan came up behind her and hooked a friendly arm around her shoulders. He rested his chin on the top of her head. “It’s nice to be here with you,” he said simply.

  She leaned back against him, his strong shoulder that was just the right height.

  Taylor Beck got a splinter underneath his thumbnail, and Duncan told the children an inappropriate joke about why squirrels swim on their backs—“To keep their nuts dry”—and Jimmy drank two of the little cartons of milk that were keeping cool in a crate at the back of the room because he thought they were free. And that was Thursday, more or less.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Haven came to school early on the day of his guest-speaker visit, arriving while Jane and Mr. Robicheaux were still in the teachers’ lounge, drinking coffee. He was a stocky, dark-haired, bearded man, and he always wore casual clothes instead of a white coat over a shirt and tie. (Almost every Halloween, some student in Jane’s class would dress as a doctor by wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt.) He was kind and understanding and wise, the very definition of a small-town doctor. Jane liked him a lot. But—had he ever heard of HIPAA? Because the very first thing he did was ask Mr. Robicheaux about the state of his bowels.

  “Now, Roland, when is the last time you ate any roughage?” Dr. Haven asked.

  Mr. Robicheaux’s face took on a fearful, hunted sort of expression. “Last night,” he said unconvincingly.

  “And what was that?” Dr. Haven challenged.

  “A, um, baked potato.”

  “That’s okay, I guess,” Dr. Haven said in a grudging tone, “but what I was really hoping you’d say was a salad. Leafy greens, cabbage, carrots, some nuts and seeds. A good crunchy salad can clean your colon just like a scrub brush. Are you producing stool every day?”

  “Oh, hey, I have never been a once-a-day man,” Mr. Robicheaux protested.

  “That’s because you don’t set yourself a schedule,” Dr. Haven said. “Every day you should make an opportunity to sit on the toilet, even if you don’t feel the need to go. The same time every day, so your body learns a routine. And I don’t mean you should just sit there smoking a cigarette or reading The Wall Street Journal—”

  “Well, I subscribe to the Free Press, anyway,” Mr. Robicheaux said.

  Dr. Haven was starting to look heated. “You listen to me, Roland! I made my peace with your smoking years ago, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let colon disease carry you off to an early grave and leave a nice lady like Georgina to fend for herself.”

  Jane, who was enjoying this conversation immensely—and thanking God that she herself was not a patient of Dr. Haven’s—finally interrupted. “We better get to class. The students will be arriving any minute.”

  Once again, Jane and Mr. Robicheaux pushed back the classroom divider, and the children sat in a semicircle around the chair at the front of the classroom.

  “This is Dr. Haven,” Jane said. “He’s here to talk to us about what it’s like to be a doctor.”

  Ryan Andre raised his hand. “Do we have to get shots?”

 
“Oh, no.” Dr. Haven looked thoughtful. “At least, not if your vaccinations are up to date.”

  “Which all of yours are,” Jane said firmly, as several students began to lick their lips nervously. “Every single one of you. No one is getting a shot today. No one. No one. Now, I think Dr. Haven has some supplies to hand out.”

  “I certainly have,” Dr. Haven said. He had brought a shopping bag with him in addition to his medical bag, and he now divided the children into pairs and had Jane and Mr. Robicheaux hand out wooden tongue depressors and surgical masks and latex gloves.

  “Examine your partners,” Dr. Haven said as he walked around the room. “Treat them as patients. Take their pulse, look into their mouths, ask them how they feel. Say ‘Now, what brings you here today? Any pain or fever?’ ”

  The children giggled, and Dr. Haven chuckled into his beard. “Say ‘How’s your heartburn?’ and ‘Are you getting enough sleep?’ ”

  He moved from pair to pair, allowing each child to use his stethoscope, otoscope, and reflex hammer. Samantha Truitt said she was pretty sure she could see something growing in Madison Lockett’s ear, and Kyle Bradshaw kicked Dylan McMahon in the jaw in what was almost certainly not a reflex reaction, but otherwise all went smoothly, and the examinations carried them right through to morning recess. Mr. Robicheaux hurried out to the playground to supervise the children with unprecedented speed and enthusiasm—obviously, he didn’t want to risk having another conversation about his intestines—but Jane lingered while Dr. Haven packed up.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” she said.

  “It was my pleasure, Jane,” Dr. Haven said. “How’s Jimmy doing on Lipitor? Is he taking it every day?”

  “Oh, yes.” Jane nodded. “Duncan gives it to him at lunchtime.”

  “Good, good.” Dr. Haven zipped his medical bag closed. “That reminds me, I saw Jimmy in Grayling earlier this week.”

  “Grayling?” Jane frowned. “Jimmy didn’t go there.”