Shelter Me

by Juliette Fay

  By the time she had ushered them out of the car, wiped their sticky hands, and disposed of the cone wrappers, the Stealing Geezers had taken the field. Carrying Carly and holding Dylan’s hand, she climbed the stands to an empty spot on the end of the third row. Dylan wanted to sit on the very end of the bench, but since there was no railing, Janie insisted she take the end.

  “But it’s not high!” whined Dylan. “If I fall off I’ll only get a bump or something!”

  “Hey, look over there,” said Janie to distract him. Dylan followed her finger out to third base. “Who’s that guy?”

  “It’s Tug. That’s Tug! He’s got a red shirt, like the other guys! HEY TUG!”

  He was only about fifty feet away, so his head turned at the sound of his name, soon focusing on the small boy waving and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Tug gave a thumbs-up to Dylan, who threw his two little thumbs into the air in return. Tug’s gaze turned to Janie—hard to be sure at that distance, but she knew, all the same—and she gave a little wave. She didn’t plan it. It just happened.

  Tug smiled back, narrowly missing a pop fly that was generously covered by the left fielder, who’d had to run his hardest toward the infield to make the catch. He gave Tug a friendly whack in the back of the head with his mitt and trotted back out to left field.

  The Trophy Husbands were not to be trifled with, and gave the Geezers a solid workout. Toward the end of the inning, Tug lunged to field a speeding grounder and fired it to first base before tumbling sideways into the grass. It was a courageous play and fans in both sets of bleachers jumped to their feet in appreciation. Janie noticed that he waited for the attention to wane before he allowed himself to give his shoulder a rub. He glanced up to see if she was watching, and a barely perceptible grin graced his face before it was replaced with the standard issue glare toward home plate.

  At the third out, the Geezers jogged toward their bench. Tug walked past the bench to the stands and greeted Dylan with a high five. Then he took off his mitt and let Dylan try it on. “Hi,” he said to Janie. “Passing by?”

  “On our way home from Dairy Queen. Thought I’d take the opportunity to talk to you about the crew you sent over.”

  “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? They seem like clowns, but they do good work. You’ll see.”

  “Okay, Shakespearean references aside, you didn’t have to send them.”

  “I know. But I have your money and I want the job finished properly. That’s only right.”

  “Malinowski!” called a member of the team. “You’re on deck!”

  “We’re not finished,” she warned him.

  “Hold onto that glove,” he told Dylan, who cradled it tightly to his narrow chest.

  Tug approached home plate swinging the bat every other step. The catcher said something to him and he grinned, but then turned his attention to the pitcher. His body was facing Janie across the plate, which seemed strange until she realized he was batting lefty. He’s left-handed, she thought, and stored the information as if she might have some occasion to retrieve it. She frowned at herself.

  He let a high pitch go by, then swung at the next, fouling it up toward the Geezer stands. Dylan jumped up with Tug’s mitt flopping on his hand, but the ball landed in the dirt well in front of them. “Darn it,” muttered Dylan. Janie had never heard him use that phrase before. Must be Keane, she thought offhandedly, and once again aimed her attention at the batter.

  The next pitch was low and outside, and Tug let it pass. Janie glanced at Dylan, the mitt still on his hand, his mouth slightly ajar, his eyes focused intently on the arc of the ball being thrown back to the pitcher. The next pitch was straight down the middle, and Tug’s whole body twisted to meet it. The ball sailed high and far, and the crowds stood to see if it would make it past the fence.

  “Home run,” whispered Dylan desperately.

  But the center fielder got his glove under it just before it passed from view, and Tug dropped the bat and walked toward the bench. “You got robbed, man,” Janie heard one of his teammates say. Tug picked up a water bottle and tipped back his head as he gulped. Then he walked back to Janie and the kids.

  “Why did that guy catch your ball?” asked Dylan.

  “Because he could,” said Tug.

  “Are you sad?”

  “I’m a little disappointed, to tell the truth. But I’ll just try harder next time. You still got my glove?” Dylan held it up like a trophy. Tug turned to Janie, but said nothing.

  “Last week,” she started, not entirely sure of where she was headed. “I was…” She glanced at Dylan. “I wasn’t very well behaved.”

  “I butted in. It was none of my business.”

  Janie nodded, then shrugged. “Still.” Tug waited for more, his eyes so dark she couldn’t see the pupils. What more should she say? “I’m sorry.”

  Tug smiled, looked away for a moment, then inhaled and turned back. “Me, too,” he said. “And I’d really prefer to finish the job myself. If it’s alright with you.”

  The relief she felt at his offer to return, despite the horrible things she’d said—and she knew they had been horrible and mostly unjustified—flooded her brain, making it hard to compose any response other than, “Fine,” and a moment later, “Thanks.”

  The Stealing Geezers were going back to the field, and Dylan reluctantly handed over the glove.

  “We’ll probably go soon, so I can get you guys to bed,” she warned Dylan.

  “No!” he whined.

  “Don’t worry, buddy,” said Tug. “I’ll see you tomorrow and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  THERE WAS A TINKLING sound, almost like wind chimes, when Janie woke. It levitated her up from a satiny black sleep into the feel of her construction pajamas and the covers pulled over her shoulders. It was cooler, a welcome relief from the tepid puffs of spongy air that she’d come to expect.

  The tinkling sound grew louder as she descended the stairs, and it organized itself into voices murmuring to each other outside. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-the-Grate, she thought. But one of the voices was too high, and when she peeked out the kitchen window she saw Tug and Dylan sitting on the mahogany floor of the front porch. Each was eating half a bagel plastered with globs of cream cheese that Tug must have brought with him. There were two sippy cups beside them, and Janie knew without a second thought that they were filled with chocolate milk.

  “…so the next guy gets up and swings at the first pitch, which isn’t always the best idea…”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because you kind of want to see what the pitcher’s going to give you, you know? You want to let him show himself first.”

  “Why?”

  “Uh…let’s see…okay, maybe you were thinking ‘This pitcher is really tough. He’s only going to throw me curve balls. That’s what he does. He’s a curve ball pitcher.’ But then, you stand there in the batter’s box and you look at him. I don’t care what anyone tells you, you never know what a pitcher is made of until you’re standing in the box, looking down the line at him, eye to eye. And then you watch a pitch. You see just exactly how he stretches back and snaps his arm. You see the look on his face, the way he recovers afterward. That way you know the real guy, not the guy you made up in your mind when you watched him from the bench.”

  “Ohhhh,” said Dylan.

  Dylan did not really understand, Janie could tell. But maybe there was some piece of it that he could take away, like don’t make snap judgments about people until you know them, or give yourself a moment to think things through before you take a swing. She could use a little remediation in those areas herself, she knew. Or maybe it was just good for Dylan to have the chance to sit with a nice guy and talk sports.

  Turn around and make the coffee now, she told herself, or in about fifteen seconds you’ll be in the bathroom with a hand towel over your face.

  JANIE WAS PUSHING CARLY in the baby swing in the backyard when Tug came looking for her. “Hey,” he said, “can
I get up under your eaves?”

  “Sure, why?”

  “I just want to check the seam where the new roof meets the old one, make sure there’s still no bowing. I might put in a little extra reinforcement just so you don’t have trouble down the line.”

  “How far down the line?”

  He chuckled and colored a little. “I don’t know, like a hundred years?” He followed her up the stairs into her bedroom, glancing quickly at the muddle of sheets and pillows.

  “Okay, so I don’t make my bed,” Janie said in defense.

  “Me either,” he said. “Why bother?” Janie leaned down to undo the latch on the three-foot-square door into the eaves, Carly clinging to her like a baby koala bear. “Hey, I can get that,” said Tug and squatted down next to her. He yanked open the door as Janie turned to let the squirming girl out of her arms and onto the floor. “What’s this?” he asked. When Janie looked back, Tug was holding the collage of pictures that Barb had made of Dylan’s birthday pictures. “Why’s it in here?”

  “Oh, I…,” she stammered. “I don’t know, I guess I just didn’t…like it.”

  “Why not? They’re great pictures. This one with the two boys and the pirate’s butt is priceless.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “You were there. It wasn’t exactly the world’s happiest party.”

  “Because your husband wasn’t there.”

  “Yes, my dead husband failed to make an appearance, which I think was pretty obvious by the way we were all sobbing.” She couldn’t seem to keep herself from saying, “Even you.”

  “So I shed a tear,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her, “it was a sad moment.”

  “One I don’t need to remember every day in dazzling color,” she said. Carly was going for the door and Janie scrambled after her, barricading the doorway with her body.

  “But what about Dylan?” He was still squatting at the entrance to the eaves. Why wouldn’t he just go into the spidery darkness with his little flashlight and leave her alone?

  “Jesus, Tug, what are you, his agent? He was sad, too, if you’ll take a second to remember. No one was crying harder than him.”

  “Yeah, but then he was bobbing for apples, and eating too much cake, and having fun. He’s okay, Janie.”

  It blistered her, the way he seemed to think he knew Dylan better than she did. But the look on his face wasn’t superior or preachy. He was smiling in that subtle way he had, where you weren’t even sure if it was a smile, except that you could feel it. Why was he smiling, for godsake? There was nothing to smile about. “Tug, I swear…” she warned. It was the only thing she could come up with to say that wouldn’t end with Ignacio and Greg, the dynamic dimwits, on her property again.

  “Show it to him,” said Tug, the soft little grin still lingering around his eyes. “Let him decide.” He turned and started into the eaves, but stopped again, then turned and came back out with the other picture in his hands, the one of Janie, Carly, and Dylan sitting in the grass together. Tug knelt on the floor of her bedroom and studied it for several seconds. “Wow.” He held it out to her. “Hang it.”

  DYLAN FOUND THE PICTURES propped against the wall in Janie’s room. She hadn’t purposely shown them to him, but she hadn’t banished them back to spider world either. It was a roll of the dice, she realized, home decor roulette.

  He loved the collage. In fact, he spent about twenty minutes trying to decide which picture he liked the best. In the end he couldn’t choose, and Janie had to reassure him several times that it was okay to have two favorites, just so he would move along to putting his pajamas on.

  “The cake picture is the best because it’s like it’s back together again, not all broken up in our stomachs.” He fingered the glass over the picture enough that Janie knew she’d be taking glass cleaner to it on a regular basis until he outgrew that sense that if he just touched it enough it would become real again. “But the apple one is good, too. Keane is laughing with his lips big like a clown, and I have water dripping all over!”

  The pictures really weren’t so bad; it had been a mostly good party, after all. She was relieved that Dylan wanted to hang it in his bedroom, however. She wouldn’t have to pass by the one with Jake in it quite so often. Dylan took a long look at the other picture of just the three of them. “Was this after we cried?” he asked.

  “Before.”

  He looked back at the collage, to the picture of Tug helping him with the screwdriver. “But this one is after,” he said.

  “Right.”

  He turned to the family photo again. “What were you whispering to me?”

  “I think I was saying you smelled like peanut butter.”

  “Because I ate my sandwich with my neck!” he remembered. “That was so silly! Look at me laughing.”

  “You thought that was pretty funny,” she nodded.

  “Where should we put it?” he asked looking around her room. “I know! In the kitchen, where that one is of the two people…” Dylan wrapped his arms around himself and puckered his lips, as if he were being forced to eat raw squid.

  The Gustav Klimt print, Janie realized. The Kiss. Robby had given it to her when they were dating. It was a message as big as skywriting to Janie: this is serious. I want you like this guy wants this girl—completely. Opening it on her thirtieth birthday it was the first time she had really allowed herself to think This Is The One. If she hung the photo in its place, where would The Kiss go?

  “That’s not such a good spot,” she said to Dylan. “We already have something there. How about if we put this picture of us in the bathroom.”

  “The bathroom!” Dylan exclaimed with horror. “I don’t want everyone looking at me when I poop, Mom!”

  She almost said “It’s just a picture, Dylan, no one’s actually looking at you.” But bedtime was long gone by now, and she knew he wasn’t going to budge on this no matter how clearly and patiently she explained it. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” she said.

  He put on his pajamas and brushed his teeth (the front of them, anyway) while Janie changed Carly’s diaper and wrestled her into a clean onesie. Dylan finally climbed into bed. “Thanks for those pictures, Mom,” he said.

  “Well, actually they’re from Cormac and Barb.”

  “Thanks, Cormac and Barb,” he giggled.

  IT HAD BEEN A week since Janie’s mother had left Pelham and flown home happily (so Janie assumed) to her Tuscan villa. Okay, it was really a small apartment in Turin, but having never seen it, Janie often imagined her mother living in a Shangri-la of ancient splendor and crusty bread. Easy for her, was the phrase that came to mind. What exactly was so easy, Janie had never fully identified.

  A letter came addressed to Janie alone. Usually Noreen’s letters and cards were addressed to Carly and Dylan, with Janie’s name added as an apparent afterthought. The text of those letters was directed toward the children, not Janie. When she saw the blue aero-mail envelope in the stack of catalogues, sale notices, and house-painting flyers, a funny feeling came over her. It was part excitement; finally her name had been culled from the others to receive a beam of motherly attention. And it was part dread.

  What could you possibly be worried about? she chided herself as she walked the mail into the house. After all, Janie wasn’t the one who’d left her daughter high and dry after the briefest possible mourning period. And she wasn’t the one who decided to spend the summer in fucking Naples, Italy, instead of boring, sad old Pelham, Massachusetts. And she CERTAINLY wasn’t the one who sent her daughter’s only true friend packing.

  Though the temperature had climbed into the high seventies, Janie braced herself with a hot steaming cup of Sumatran Java and sat down at the kitchen table with the letter. My Dearest Janie, it began. Dearest Janie rolled her eyes.

  I’m on the plane back to Europe now. We should be landing at Heathrow in about three hours. Then I’ll make my connecting flight to Rome and take a taxi to the bus station. The bus is much cheaper than a flight to
Turin.

  Janie knew what she was doing. It was her mother’s private rosary, reciting her itinerary as a kind of prayer to Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. He supposedly earned his saintly stripes by carrying people across a raging river. Noreen was just looking for a safe place to cross.

  I know you’re not happy with me for speaking to Father Jake. I want to apologize for any embarrassment or sadness that I may have caused in doing so. And I will admit that I am not entirely sure if I’ve done the right thing. I thought about it for a long time, and I came to the conclusion that, while neither one of you would intentionally “go the wrong way,” neither did you seem to understand how easily that could have happened.

  A mother does everything in her power to shelter her children from harm. I have always tried to live by that. And perhaps I spent so much time looking out for Mike, I didn’t worry much about you until now. But a mother’s worries don’t end at adulthood. You’ll see. You’re very protective. If I’ve done the wrong thing, as I’ve said, I apologize. Maybe it seems like the wrong thing now, but will have been the right thing once time passes.

  We’re over the open ocean now. There are no clouds, so even though we’re up very high, I can still look down past the wing of the plane and see the dark blue water beneath. There doesn’t seem to be anything else on this earth but water! But I know there must be, because you’re out there. You’re in my old house in Pelham, and now you’re living a life that is very much like mine was, alone with two small children.

  The pain I feel about your having to live my life is overwhelming. I’ve always prayed so fervently that you would have more opportunities, more excitement, more love. And since January it’s seemed like all those prayers were just funny jokes to God. He didn’t take me seriously. Or maybe He never even heard them in the first place.