Shelter Me

by Juliette Fay

  They brought kitchen chairs and an end table from the living room out onto the porch, and Tug unpacked his cooler: a turkey sandwich on rye bread with Havarti and roasted red peppers, a vegetarian wrap with alfalfa sprouts sticking out from the end, apple slices, a pint of chocolate milk, a thermos of coffee and a baggie of quartered grapes.

  Janie looked down at the spread, then up at Tug. He had brought two entire lunches, one for him, and one clearly designated for her. Coffee, which he never drank. Grapes for Carly. This was premeditated, no matter how much he tried to act as if he had just happened by spontaneously. That clenching feeling grew in her chest and she wondered what would make him do this.

  “Eating with a bunch of guys every day gets old,” he said, as if he were reading her mind.

  Lonely, she thought with relief. Bored and lonely just like me. “Which sandwich is yours?” she asked.

  “Either one,” he said. “Take your pick.”

  “So if I take the turkey, you’ll eat the veggie with sprouts.”

  “Yep.”

  “Liar.”

  “Well,” he admitted, “I’d have to pull those little hairy guys out, but I’d eat it. I’m not picky.”

  Not picky, noted Janie, and reached for the veggie wrap. Or so he claims, anyway. “So were you good and achy after that game on Friday?” she asked.

  “Yes, I was, thanks for asking,” he smiled. “My right shoulder was throbbing for most of the next day. Very satisfying.”

  “Have you always been such a big fan of pain?”

  He thought for a moment and licked a sliver of roasted red pepper from his lip. “No. It’s grown more appealing lately.”

  “Since your divorce.”

  He nodded and took several gulps of chocolate milk. “Would it be weird if I asked you how you met your husband?”

  “Would it be weird if I told you and maybe got a little choked up?”

  “Not that much,” he said, and settled back in his seat.

  Janie took a breath, exhaled. “It was on this cross-country trip I took…”

  At twenty-nine, Janie had quit her job at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, feeling a certain restlessness, a certain compulsion to do something—almost anything—that was not work-eat-sleep-hang-with-friends-work-again. And she’d developed an allergy to latex gloves that seemed like an omen. Aunt Jude checked the latex allergy website and gave her a list of alternative glove products. Janie decided to drive cross-country instead.

  She was living in Somerville, just outside of Boston, with a houseful of roommates, all of whom signed on for the adventure, and all of whom eventually came up with excuses, such as car payments, dates on the verge of becoming relationships, and the necessity of wisdom tooth removal, not to go. Janie was disappointed but undeterred. She sublet her room for the summer, packed up her Toyota Tercel, and headed west on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

  “My twin, Mike, lives in Flagstaff,” she told Tug, “so I decided to end up there, half thinking I might even stay and look for work. I felt this need for a drastic change. You ever get like that?”

  “Definitely,” said Tug. He glanced away from her, nodding slowly, and she could tell that he was thinking of something specific. Then there was a faint buzzing sound and he jumped up, wrenching a cell phone from his pants pocket. He studied the display, and let out a snort of frustration. “Sorry,” he said to her. “It’ll be quick.”

  It wasn’t though, and he stood at the other end of the porch, staring through the screen, running his hand back across his head in that way he had when he was agitated, and saying things like, “No, I told you about this last week,” and “The inspector cleared it.” While she waited, Janie found herself drifting back to her first glimmer of the drastic change she had been headed for almost a decade ago.

  Driving through Albany, New York, she had noticed a motorcycle traveling at about the same speed she was. It wasn’t one of those bullet bikes, with the rider practically prostrate in order to reach the handlebars; nor was it a souped-up “hog” with the front wheel out so far that he reclined as if sunning himself. This bike was the big clunky kind, the rider sitting upright, feet squarely below him. The gas tank was no distinct color. The rider’s helmet had no noticeable enhancements. He wore sunglasses and the stubble of a man who had recently decided to stop shaving.

  If she slowed, he passed her, but she always seemed to catch up again, sometimes passing him if she didn’t watch her speed. They leap-frogged like this across upstate New York, and Janie remembered enjoying the sense that she had some company on the road, even a stranger with whom she would never share a word. At one point, near Utica, he gave her a quick grin when he passed.

  Approaching Syracuse, her quart thermos of coffee was empty, the contents now weighing heavily on her bladder, and she decided to pull off at the next rest stop. She felt a moment of regret that she would lose her road buddy, until she saw him pull off ahead of her into the Chittenango Travel Plaza. She almost didn’t stop. It was one thing to enjoy the disconnected company of another driver while secure in your own vehicle. It was another thing altogether to breach the void by actually meeting. At a rest stop no less. It was the opening scene of your standard slasher movie.

  Then again, she was about to wet her pants, Janie remembered, approaching that point where it’s scary to stand up because it seems possible that the dam might not hold. At the last minute, she yanked the steering wheel to the right and careened into the Chittenango lot, parked in the fire lane, and made her way gingerly to the ladies’ toilets. The ensuing relief was worth the risk.

  As she pulled away from the yellow-striped curb, she noticed a picnic area in a grove of pines at the far edge of the rest stop. Time to stretch her legs and tuck into one of the pita pocket sandwiches she had made for herself back in Massachusetts. The only people there were a family with several small boys, whose noise level and proclivity for punching each other made it obvious why their parents had decided to feed them outside rather than in the cramped food court. They were polishing off a sleeve of Chips Ahoy! cookies, when Janie sat down at another table. The family left soon thereafter, a squalling fight breaking out in the backseat that blasted through their open car windows. Even now, Janie could almost hear how the sound of the brawl faded as their car made its way to the highway on-ramp.

  Moments later motorcycle guy pulled up. It took him four tries to get the bike securely situated on its kickstand, by which time Janie’s fear was tinged with embarrassment on his behalf. He pulled his helmet off and rolled his eyes in self-disgust. “It’s not my bike,” he said defensively. Janie shrugged and averted her eyes. Although by then she had noticed that he was kind of cute, despite the fact that his regular-boy haircut blew the whistle on the attempt at cool-guy stubble.

  He approached her hesitantly with his bag of takeout from the food court and told her he’d been on that godforsaken motorcycle all day without even a radio to listen to. “It would be great to sit at your table and spend the next twenty minutes lying about our identities,” he said, but he didn’t want to creep her out, so if she preferred that he leave her alone, there were no hard feelings.

  “I have a loaded gun in my bag,” she told him.

  “Of course you do,” he said with an amused grin. “This is America. Who doesn’t?” And he sat down.

  For years afterward, she interrogated him about why he had taken it as an invitation and not a threat. To her, at the time, it had been a threat, a bluff to keep him at a safe distance, if not exactly locked on the other side of her car door. “It was a lie,” he would say. “It was just your opening lie.”

  It ended up being her only lie. There were things that she declined to tell him, like where she was going, her last name, and the like. But the rest didn’t seem to hold much quarry for misuse. Wasn’t that why she had undertaken this adventure in the first place?

  He began by telling her that he was the studio keyboard player for U2, but had gotten sick of the brogues and all the fo
reign policy talk. That was his only lie. Then he admitted he had been a branch manager for BayBank during its merger with Bank of Boston, and when they offered him a transfer or a layoff, he had picked layoff. His brother, who had owned the motorcycle since high school, had recently moved to Phoenix with his wife and baby. The motorcycle was supposed to be sold, but was priced too high (“on purpose” he confided to Janie) so that his brother could eventually reclaim it. He, Robert Pierre LaMarche, was taking the opportunity of his layoff, his brother’s baffling adoration of the bike, and the disintegration of a recent relationship to make this trip.

  The lunch at the Chittenango Travel Center picnic area lasted almost two hours. By the end, he had convinced her to meet him at Niagara Falls, which hadn’t really interested her, but he was so enthusiastic, she decided it might be a waste to go right by the thing and not stop.

  After convoying to Buffalo, they ate dinner together at a roadside burgers and ice-cream stand, and later got separate rooms at a tattered motel with a flashing neon sign of a barrel going over a waterfall. Several of the light tubes had blown, however, making it seem as if the barrel was rolling down a blue road. Now, as she picked at the remnants of her veggie wrap, Janie wondered if those lights had ever been fixed or, if she were to go there now, would it look exactly the same.

  The two of them went on like this, agreeing to meet at the next attraction on Robby’s list, eating together and sleeping in separate motel rooms. Each night they stayed out later, each morning they lingered longer over breakfast, each attraction seemed more interesting or ridiculous, either case requiring a more thorough perusal. The trip took seven days, not the four that she had planned on.

  It was on the sixth day that he first kissed her—nervously, and without much in the way of follow-through. While she felt fairly certain that he would not have minded if she had joined him in his hotel room, he hadn’t pressed the point. “The trip was so much better with you along,” he explained later. “I didn’t want to mess it up.”

  Robby followed her all the way to Mike’s tiny apartment in Flagstaff, Arizona. He met Mike, stayed for dinner, slept on the couch, and stayed up half the night talking with Janie. When Mike left for the art studio the next day, they made love all morning, and Robby didn’t end up heading south to Phoenix until after lunch. He told her on the phone that night that when he arrived, his brother had hugged the motorcycle first, and then him.

  Janie was thinking of that phone call, her hand gripping the receiver only a few short hours after they had kissed good-bye over the sputtering growl of the motorcycle engine. It had felt drastic. Good and drastic.

  “Sorry about that,” Tug said, snapping his phone shut. “It’s one of the things I like and hate about construction—lots of problem solving.” He sat down again, ignoring the apples and chocolate milk. “So you were on the Pike, jobless, homeless, looking for something completely new…”

  Janie recounted the story of the cross-country trip, leaving out the more personal details. She almost felt she could tell him, had a sense that he was wondering at what point the relationship had become romantic. But it would have been inappropriate and also somehow insensitive.

  “How did you end up back here?” he asked.

  “Well, Robby already had a new job lined up that he was going back to in a month, and I spent way too much time hanging out with him all over the Southwest to actually job hunt myself. So I came back, too, and picked up a position at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. We got married two years later and ended up buying this house when my mother moved to Italy.”

  As she finished the story, Janie was pleased at her ability—finally, it seemed—to talk about Robby without getting weepy. There had been a moment or two when she’d felt emotional, but she never shed any tears. Maybe she would cry later, after Tug had packed up his cooler and left. “Why did you want to know about that?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know, just wondered. We got together a couple of times down at The Pal to go over the plans for the porch, and he seemed like a good guy. Steady, good sense of humor.”

  Robby went to The Pal? More than once? With Tug? These were small things, things her husband would have told her eventually, had he lived. And yet it was the revelation of small things, not the seemingly more important story she had recounted, that made her eyes sting and her breath short.

  As she blinked back tears, she caught sight of Tug’s watch. The crystal was so scratched she couldn’t see the face, but it reminded her about picking up Dylan at school. “What time is it?” she murmured, trying to keep her voice even.

  “Five of one.”

  “Shit!” she leaped up, almost knocking over the little table. “I’m late for pickup!” She turned to run into the house.

  “Where are you going?” he asked, standing.

  “To get Carly!”

  “Janie, don’t wake her up. Just go. I’ll stay here.”

  “What? No! You can’t…she’ll freak out if she…”

  “No, she won’t. Just go.”

  Janie grabbed her keys off the hook inside the front door and sprinted for the car. When she careened into the school parking lot, she almost forgot to turn off the motor before she got out. School’s only been open for a week, she chastised herself, and already I’m late…Bad mommy, bad mommy…

  When she got to the door of his classroom, all the kids were gone except for Dylan, who was holding Miss Sharon’s hand and chewing on the strap of his backpack.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” gushed Janie. “I am so sorry!”

  “Did you go to the doctor?” asked Dylan.

  “No, I just…lost track…” Her heart was pounding and she had to reach for the doorway to steady herself.

  Miss Sharon gave her a look of forced patience. “I know the start of school can be a bit of a transition, but we really need parents to be on time. It’s best for everyone.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m really sorry,” said Janie, taking Dylan’s hand and leading him out of the classroom. Miss Sharon’s condescending tone rankled her, but she was more concerned about Dylan. “Sorry, sweetie,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay.” He gave Miss Sharon a quick backward glance. “Wait till Keane’s father does pickup,” he said, and put a cupped hand over his mouth to cover his smile.

  Carly was sitting in her highchair when they got home, her face still crinkled with sleep lines, eating the grapes that Tug had brought her. He was leaning against the kitchen counter and saying things into his cell phone like, “They have to have it…they always have it…so call Sudbury Lumber…” He snapped the phone shut. “Gotta go,” he told them.

  “Thanks so much,” she said. “For lunch, too. Next time it’s on me, and you’re doing all the talking.”

  Without actually smiling, his face seemed to take on a faint glow of accomplishment. “Deal,” he said.

  18

  FOR SOME REASON IT was the swim lessons, not the mortgage payments or preschool tuition, that made Janie take a hard look at her finances. They were just so much more expensive than she expected. She wondered if she should postpone them until she went back to work and there was some inbound cash flow.

  It had been Shelly, with her compulsive attention to detail and divorce-honed sense of self-preservation, who’d set the course for Janie’s financial security. A week after Robby died, she had come over with Chinese takeout (which was never eaten because Janie could ingest nothing more than an occasional pistachio muffin, and it was midweek so Shelly ate only kale or some other odd green vegetable). Shelly had stayed long after the General Gao Chicken had gone cold, sprinkling Janie with gentle but persistent questions about her “safety net.” Robby, the banker, had always handled the finances, so Janie’s answers were, as she now remembered, clearly subpar. She didn’t know how much they had in savings, CDs, stocks, mutual funds, college accounts, IRAs, or 401(k)s. She wasn’t entirely sure where those accounts were, and in some cases, if they even existed.

  Shelly grabbed the lo
ose and flapping monetary reins. She discovered that, yes, there were savings, a few CDs, and two 401(k) accounts. She contacted Robby’s employer and negotiated an additional three months of health insurance coverage. She automated almost all the bills—mortgage, utilities, telephone, etc.—so that Janie would only have to move money into her checking account and pay off her credit card every month. This Shelly had handled herself until around April, when Janie began to seem somewhat less stuporous during their semiweekly online banking sessions.

  Shelly had also done all the paperwork to collect on Robby’s life insurance policy and had increased Janie’s own policy significantly, in case it were ever needed, “God forbid.” The payoff from Robby’s policy had seemed enormous—too much, in some ways: Janie had never aspired to wealth and did not have expensive taste in clothes or home furnishings, her main luxury being premium coffee beans. But no amount of money was any compensation for the loss of Robby, and in that sense it seemed a snickeringly small sum.

  The swim lessons cost more than she’d paid for anything that hadn’t been on Shelly’s budget spreadsheet, except for the porch, which had somehow never seemed optional. The lessons fell into that “discretionary purchases” column that had remained benignly blank since its creation eight months ago. Janie was now struggling with her discretionary spending skills, blunted from disuse.

  “Mom?” said Dylan, standing in the doorway, goggles swinging from an outstretched finger. “Can I wear them now?”

  It was time for Dylan to have an actual reason to don his favorite eyewear, Janie decided in that moment. Maybe if he wore them in a swimming pool, he wouldn’t need to wear them around the house quite so much. It would be worth the money just to find out.

  THE NEXT MONDAY, JANIE picked up Keane and Dylan and brought them for their first lesson. Dylan had been oddly concerned about which of his two bathing suits to wear. He liked the blue one with the sharks the best. That had been apparent all summer on the rare occasions when both bathing suits were clean (rather than one or the other of them found balled at the bottom of his backpack like some small, wet sandy animal).