Early Morning Riser

by Katherine Heiny

  “Now, that was pure overreaction,” Duncan said. “We weren’t—”

  “So I have to go fetch him.” Aggie’s voice was as bitter as chicory. “Then he sleeps all the way home, except when I wake him to check the map, and then he’s so hungover he reads the map wrong! We circled Munising for nearly forty minutes!”

  Aggie didn’t believe in GPS or Google Maps. She said they were for lazy folks, for people who were not civic-minded.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Duncan said. He kissed the top of Patrice’s head, but not before Jane saw that he was smiling. She knew suddenly that he had read the map wrong on purpose. He had wanted to annoy Aggie, and it had been worth it to him—even with a monstrous hangover—to drive around pointlessly for forty minutes in order to do so. These were not two people who had taken pleasure from each other in the last forty-eight hours. Jane drank the last of her beer, feeling suddenly as though she were swinging in a soft hammock with a warm breeze blowing, although of course she was just there on the hard porch steps.

  The screen door wheezed open behind Jane, and Gary stepped out onto the porch, carrying his backpack. He looked at Aggie and said, “I haven’t had my lunch.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Aggie said. “Well, get in the car, and we’ll go home for your lunch. I want to get out of here.”

  Gary walked slowly around the passenger side of the SUV while Aggie said stiffly, “Jane, thank you for your hospitality.”

  “Bye, Aggie,” Duncan said. “And thanks for a fun weekend.”

  Aggie gave him a look so withering that it seemed possible it might leave a brown patch on the grass. She got into her SUV and slammed the door shut. She gunned the engine and backed to the end of the driveway and stayed there, waiting for traffic to clear. She kept her face turned away from them.

  “Aggie sure is mad at you, Duncan,” Jimmy said.

  “Aggie is a pain in the ass,” Duncan said, so sincerely that to Jane it sounded like I will love Jane and Jane alone for all my life.

  Patrice took her thumb of out her mouth. “Ass.”

  “How about that?” Jimmy said. “Isn’t that—”

  “Come on, madam.” Duncan shifted Patrice higher up on his hip. “We’re going to go inside and play a game called Everyone Is Real Quiet for About Two Hours.”

  Jimmy and Jane stood up. Duncan climbed the porch steps, still holding Patrice, and kissed Jane on the lips. He tasted like a beer-soaked breath mint. It was not unpleasant.

  Duncan and Jimmy went inside, but Jane lingered on the porch for a moment.

  The traffic had finally cleared, and Aggie was driving away. She had been in such a hurry that she’d slammed the car door on a corner of the full skirt of her dress, and it fluttered forlornly, like a handkerchief waved from a departing train. Their street was old and humped slightly in the middle, so that even Aggie’s perfectly maintained SUV looked a little lopsided, a little tired. Although that was ridiculous—a car was just a car. Still, Jane couldn’t shake the feeling that the SUV wanted to stay at her house, even if the people here made cocoa from Nesquik, and swore in front of toddlers, and passed out on people’s lawns. This was a house where love and desire and tenderness dwelt. Imagine having to leave that and go make Gary’s lunch. Just imagine.

  She watched until the SUV paused at the stop sign on the corner and then limped out of sight.

  2019

  It was such a surprise, Jimmy falling in love.

  Jane didn’t even hear about it until hours after it happened because it was a Monday and by the time she and the girls got home from tumbling class, it was almost seven thirty. By then Patrice was near tears, as she almost always was at the end of tumbling.

  Patrice was every bit as challenging a five-year-old as she had been a toddler. (Once, Jane had searched her emails for a notice about sales at Challenge Mountain Resale Store and as soon as she’d typed c-h-a-l-l-e-n-g into the search bar, nearly sixty emails from Patrice’s preschool had popped up: It’s been a challenge to get Patrice to follow instructions…Patrice finds it challenging to listen when others are talking…Patience is a challenge…) More often than not, the preschool teacher, Miss Meredith, would be waiting with Patrice at afternoon pickup in order to have a word with Jane or Duncan about the day’s upset. Either Patrice had refused to get off the swing after the allotted time at recess, or Patrice had let out a scream when she saw her lunch contained one cookie instead of two, or Patrice had had a tantrum when another child used the red crayons. Jane found these conversations unbearable, but Duncan seemed to take them in stride, so now he always picked up Patrice. “We’re working on that,” he would tell Miss Meredith. Or “Thanks for letting us know.” Or “Let me think about that and get back to you.” Jane supposed it was all those years of deflecting commitment; he knew how to shut a conversation down quickly. I’ll call you. I’d love to but I have to work. That sounds great—I’ll let you know if I can make it. It made Jane wonder if you could get through life with only a certain number of stock phrases.

  Next year, Patrice would start kindergarten, and God knew how that would go with Jane just down the hall, well within hearing range of Patrice’s screams. Perhaps Jane could pretend not to know Patrice. Glenn would be in second grade, and Jane was pretty sure Glenn would pretend not to know either one of them. School policy dictated that Glenn be placed in the other second-grade class. Jane would have defied this policy if Mr. Robicheaux was still teaching, but he had retired a year ago. (Jane had seen him once since then, at the dollar store, and he’d told her that his Hooters membership had been upgraded to VIP status.) The other second-grade class was now taught by an overly serious man who made Jane feel young and lighthearted by comparison.

  Now school was out for the summer, and Jane and Duncan had reversed roles: Jane was the one who took the girls to tumbling, and Duncan waited at home with cookies and alcohol and sympathy at the ready. (Jimmy went to the Summer Sounds concerts with Freida and Mr. Hutchinson on Monday nights.) Tumbling was challenging for Patrice because she couldn’t do a cartwheel. The cartwheel switch had not flipped yet. That was how Jane remembered it from her own childhood—you couldn’t and you couldn’t and then one day the switch flipped and you just could, much like turning a pancake or reading a map or putting on a condom. Patrice had a fair amount of upper-body strength and coordination, and she had mastered the forward and backward roll, the handstand, the handstand-to-bridge, and the balance beam, but the cartwheel eluded her. She lacked the timing—or maybe it was the courage—and she always clapped her legs together in the middle and fell over sideways. Glenn could do cartwheels, a dozen in a row, each perfectly timed and identical. It made Jane think of those paper dolls cut out so they were holding hands. And Patrice wanted—always—to do what Glenn did.

  Glenn seemed like the most delicate of swan girls in her pearly pink, long-sleeved leotard, her auburn hair smoothed back into a low ponytail, her skin glowing softly from exercise.

  “I know you can do it,” she said sweetly to Patrice, “when you’re older. You’re just too little now.”

  When had Glenn learned to be passive-aggressive?

  Patrice pushed out her lower lip and began to breathe heavily. She wore a dark purple bodysuit with an uneven taffeta skirt. With her round face and stocky build, she looked like a very small Russian peasant woman, and right now, like a Russian peasant woman who’d just gotten the news about the Mongol invasion.

  “Maybe when you’re seven—” Glenn began.

  Jane reached out to intercept Patrice’s striking fist, possibly before Patrice herself was even aware she intended to retaliate. “Bedtime, girls,” she said firmly.

  Duncan rumpled Patrice’s hair. “Let’s get you up for bath,” he said, “and then you can have milk and cookies.”

  As often happened on tumbling class nights, Jane and Duncan became a sort of pit crew, but instead of changing
tires and refueling a car in ten seconds, they washed and changed two children, distributed a snack, supervised tooth-brushing, read them a story, and sang the shortest lullaby they knew, “I See the Moon.” If pressed, they could do it all in twenty minutes. Patrice, worn out physically and emotionally, fell asleep with her eyes open, and Jane waited a few seconds until they fluttered shut. She and Duncan tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen.

  Duncan took two beers from the refrigerator and handed her one. She took it gratefully. “How was your day?” she asked softly.

  “I’ve been waiting to tell you,” Duncan said. “Big news: Jimmy’s in love.”

  Jane’s fatigue fell away from her like corn silk drifting to the kitchen floor. “Seriously?”

  Duncan nodded.

  “I’m so happy for him!” Jane said. “When did this happen? Can we meet her? What’s her name? What’s she like? I want to know everything.”

  “He says her first name is Raelynne,” Duncan said, “and all he knows is that she’s the new assistant manager at Kilwins.”

  “Oh,” Jane said.

  “Yes,” Duncan agreed, watching her. “It’s that kind of in love.”

  * * *

  —

  So naturally Jane called Aggie. It had turned out that the only thing worse than being friends with Aggie was not being friends with her. After Duncan and Aggie had returned from their trip to the Upper Peninsula, a cool frost had lain between the couples for months. Duncan had mowed Aggie and Gary’s lawn as usual, but he refused to apologize. (“Apologize for what?” he’d said to Jane. “Getting drunk at a party? What business is it of hers how drunk I get? No, ma’am. My days of apologizing to Aggie are over.”) He had a point. And hadn’t Jane longed all these years to be free of socializing with Aggie, let alone Gary? But still—still—there were others to consider. Aggie no longer saved empty canning jars for Glenn’s sand collection, she no longer called when she made double-butter cookies (Patrice’s absolute favorite), and she and Gary no longer took Jimmy with them when they went out for pie.

  That last part seemed particularly cruel, although Jimmy had been mystified rather than hurt, saying only, “It’s weird how we never see Aggie and Gary.”

  “Aggie, she don’t like us no more,” Glenn had said sadly.

  Jane had sighed. Were they really at a point in their lives where they could be jettisoning people, even if (as in Gary’s case) the people in question barely qualified as people? She didn’t think so.

  And Duncan was not the only one who could be charming. Jane sent Aggie a text one evening and said that she’d made beef Wellington (a lie) and that it hadn’t turned out very well. Almost immediately, Aggie had texted back to say she just bet Jane’s beef Wellington had turned out with the beef too well-done and the pastry soggy. Jane had written back and said those were exactly her problems. Aggie wrote back and said that the secret was to dust the beef with flour and fry it in oil until browned and then slow-cook it in red wine before she even started the pastry. Jane said she’d had no idea. Aggie said she felt beef Wellington was an awfully ambitious dish and really only more experienced cooks should attempt it, but that she had a recipe for Moroccan lamb meatballs that even someone as hopeless as Jane could master (Jane was paraphrasing here) and she would be happy to teach Jane how to make it.

  So Jane had invited Aggie and Gary and the recipe over for dinner the next night. She fed Glenn and Patrice early and turned on the fairy lights strung around the back deck. Jimmy agreed to keep the girls occupied playing croquet, and even the weather seemed bent on pleasing Aggie—the air was as soft and warm as cotton. Jane had made an extra-large pitcher of sangria, and they all had drinks on the back deck.

  She had found an old Jeopardy! board game in the thrift store and had stacked the question cards in a pretty cut-glass pickle dish. She shuffled them slightly and began asking Gary questions while Duncan talked to Aggie.

  “This is the world’s largest bird,” Jane said.

  “Wait,” Gary said. “What’s the category?”

  “Science.”

  “Not birds?”

  “No, it says science.”

  “Okay,” Gary said. “What is the ostrich?”

  Duncan said to Aggie, “I see you sold that house on Beardsley Street.”

  Aggie sniffed. “I could have sold that house in my sleep.”

  “This is the largest ocean in the world,” Jane said to Gary.

  “You have to tell me—”

  “The category is Science.”

  “Shouldn’t I be choosing the category?”

  “We’re not actually playing Jeopardy!” Jane said. “We’re just doing the questions.”

  “What for?”

  “For…fun, I guess.”

  “Okay. What is the Pacific Ocean?”

  It took Jane a moment to realize he was answering. “Yes, correct.”

  “Now, maybe you’ve already heard this,” Duncan said to Aggie, “but the Alfords are planning to build a swing bed.”

  Aggie frowned. “On their porch or in their bedroom?”

  “Their bedroom.”

  “They’re liable to pull the ceiling right down on top of themselves,” Aggie said indignantly. “You need to go over and help them find the ceiling studs.” Then she paused and bit her lip, perhaps realizing that she’d been drawn into two of her favorite subjects: other people’s ineptitude, and things she wanted Duncan to do.

  “Travel Hawaii,” Jane said to Gary. “This tower in downtown Honolulu was built to say welcome to tourists arriving in the nineteen twenties and thirties.”

  “What is Pearl Harbor?”

  “No, Aloha Tower.”

  Gary frowned.

  “Travel Hawaii,” Jane said. “This royal palace completed by King David Kalakaua in eighteen eighty-two had electricity installed before the White House.”

  “What is Pearl Harbor?”

  “They’re not all Pearl Harbor, Gary.”

  “Some of them will be.”

  Duncan stretched his legs out and said, “Remember when the Kerns put striped carpeting on their stairs? And then kept falling down them because they couldn’t tell where the edges were?”

  Aggie laughed, and glancing up, Jane saw her shake her head just slightly and give a nearly imperceptible shrug. Apparently, Aggie had decided—as so many women had before her—that being angry with Duncan was just not worth the effort.

  The rest of the evening was less awkward. Gary watched SpongeBob SquarePants with Jimmy and the girls. (It was a Saturday, so Jeopardy! wasn’t on.) Jane made another pitcher of sangria, and Duncan drank so much of it that she wondered if he might end up sleeping in the hammock. Aggie taught Jane to make Moroccan lamb meatballs and said bad things about people who use dried ginger and that sangria was really a lower-class sort of drink, and it was just like old times.

  Well, almost like old times. Except now, Jane was the one Aggie contacted, not Duncan. Jane was the one Aggie texted when she had surplus tomatoes or homemade jam. Jane was the one Aggie asked for help when her washing machine went berserk and shimmied its way half out of her laundry room, although in that case, all Jane did was dispatch Duncan. Jane was the one Aggie asked for advice on her bathroom tiles, and then rejected the color Jane chose. (“She does that,” Duncan said. “She asks you your opinion when she already has her mind made up. Drives me crazy.”) Jane was the one Aggie called when Gary began having dizzy spells and blurred vision and Aggie thought he might be having a stroke, although it turned out that he was just wearing the wrong eyeglasses, having accidentally picked up someone else’s at the office. Jane was the one with whom Aggie chose to share a few of her treasured recipes. (Perhaps, after Gary’s health scare, Aggie was feeling Death at her own shoulder.) She told Jane that you should never make a dish exactly the same way twice, that you should vary
it slightly each time to keep it fresh. “Now, that drove me fucking nuts,” Duncan said. “She used to tell me we were having eggs Benedict and I’d look forward to it all day, and come to find out, she’d swapped the Canadian bacon for chorizo. Or she’d up and decide to put pineapple in the coleslaw. Who puts pineapple in coleslaw? Or toffee chips in Toll House cookies? Set me on edge, and I think that was her intention. It was the opposite of comfort food—it was discomfort food. I’m glad you’re friends with her now instead of me.”

  “Aggie and I aren’t friends!” Jane protested.

  They weren’t, were they? Although Aggie was the first person Jane told about Jimmy being in love, and Aggie said, “If you know Raelynne’s last name, I can pull her rental agreement and see what she’s all about,” and it was really very comforting in an odd sort of way.

  * * *

  —

  Taco Tuesday had started up again. Jane wasn’t sure how. It wasn’t something that she’d voted on, or even had a say in, although it took place in her house. It was like some larger, vaguely official declaration. Like National Pancake Day, only not national and not about pancakes. It wasn’t even about tacos anymore—they had moved on to other foods. Jane didn’t mind Taco Tuesday. She even sort of liked it. First of all, Aggie did the cooking, and that was always a positive. Second, Jane considered these new Taco Tuesdays as a way to atone for all the Taco Tuesdays when Jimmy had lived alone. Each successful Taco Tuesday was a layer she could put over the old ones, like putting a coat of lacquer on a table until the top was glossy and smooth, the original surface obscured.

  Glenn and Patrice loved Taco Tuesday. They got to stay up late, and drink milk out of wineglasses, and sit on barstools at the table because there weren’t enough chairs. Children were the opposite of adults; adults hate novelty, especially when it comes to uncomfortable chairs. And they got to play Life. Glenn had asked for a Life game, and Jane, charmed by the old-fashioned request, had given it to her. But Jane found playing it stupefyingly boring. (She imagined it had been created by middle-aged bankers in three-piece suits, sitting around and saying, “You know what would be great? A board game about mortgages and savings!”) Luckily, Jimmy and Patrice liked to play, although Patrice needed someone to read the cards for her.