by Jon Cohen
“Atlas,” she’d say, dumping a can of glazing compound, a tube of naval jelly, two C clamps, and a spool of solder on the counter, “ring these up for me, will you please?”
Atlas would eye the stuff, while a couple of the men customers stood behind Francine shaking their heads. He’d start to say, framing his words carefully so as not to hurt her, “Um, Francine, now what sort of project is it you have in mind?”
“Various projects, Atlas. I am a widow, you know, and have to maintain my house on my own.” (Archie Koessler, who’d died thirty years into the marriage, had met his end maintaining the house, a bizarre death involving a stepladder, a bucket of paint, and 120 volts from a power drill—none of which, it should be noted, was purchased from Atlas’s store.)
“Of course, yes, Francine,” Atlas would say, knowing in fact that Francine’s house was maintained by a number of Waverly handymen, plumbers, and electricians, and that even he, as her neighbor living two houses down, had been called upon in times of household emergency. Francine, Atlas had long ago decided, needed the illusion of competence and self-reliance, a defense mechanism of widows. “Is it,” he said, searching for clues among the items before him on the counter, “some sort of plumbing problem you have?” Naval jelly, C clamps… who knew?
“Could be,” Francine said, waving her arms and handing a crumpled list to Louis, then nudging him down the aisle. Louis tried to make sense of it; it looked like a list of objects you were sent in search of in a scavenger hunt at a children’s birthday party. “Could be,” said Francine, “now that you mention it. There’s been a kind of gurgle in the pipes lately. I hear it at night, you know, Atlas, and it is not a comforting sound for a widow to have to listen to.”
“No, ma’am. But the C clamps…”
“C clamps?”
Atlas picked them up and Francine eyed them. “These aren’t for fixing gurgles,” he said gently.
She snatched them from Atlas and crooked a finger at Yank. He approached reluctantly. She handed him the C clamps. “Here,” she said. “Find me the other kind of clamps.”
“The other kind,” said Yank slowly.
“Yes,” she said evenly. “The other kind.”
Yank looked to Atlas for help, but Atlas only shrugged. Yank started off down aisle three.
“Try aisle two!” she shouted after him. “I think I see some way in the back there, against the wall.”
Yank wandered lost in aisle two, his hand hesitating before monkey wrenches, and pipe cutters, and all the other things that Francine Koessler might have thought were clamps.
Atlas tried the easy way out. “Shall I ring the rest of this up for you, Francine?”
“Yes,” she said. “No, wait.” She picked up the tube of naval jelly. “Is this good for pilot lights that sputter?”
Atlas scratched his head and tried to look as if she had asked a reasonable question. “Gee, Francine. That’s a tough one. That’s a real stumper. But really, I think naval jelly is better for—”
Francine cut in. “Well, Archie, my husband, he used to use something on the pilot lights, I remember. Something in a tube.”
Which helped explain to Atlas how Archie had met his untimely end via the stepladder, the electric drill, and the paint bucket. If they hadn’t gotten him first, surely the pilot light and the naval jelly would have.
Louis came back from his searches empty-handed. “Mrs. Koessler, are you sure this is the right list?” Atlas took it from him and read it to himself. “Belts. Supporters. Inserters. Pads.” God only knew what she meant. It seemed, though, that she might have better luck in the personal hygiene section of Berret’s Drugstore. He handed the list back to her, and she stuffed it into her pocketbook as she drew in a great indignant breath.
“Well!” she huffed. “Well, as usual, this store has been absolutely no help to me, no help whatsoever. They ought to call this place the Just Out Shop, as badly stocked as it is.” She waved her arms and popped her eyes wide. “If I die from gas leaking from my pilot light, or drown when my pipes burst, I’ll know who to blame, I can tell you that!”
The men customers pressed against the wall as she stormed by on her way to the door, which in her highly emotional state she pushed when she should have pulled. She at last made her way through it after a great struggle and more unkind words for the Just Out Shop and its treatment of widows.
And just as everyone let out a communal sigh, Yank appeared with an armful of things, any one of which, he figured, might have been the clamp Francine Koessler imagined she wanted.
Gracie looked up from her poached egg, which she’d been staring at, lost in her own thoughts of Francine. “Louis,” she began, then hesitated.
Louis fingered the side of his coffee cup.
She started again. “Louis, the thing is, you see, I don’t want to be a widow. It’s not going to be… my kind of thing, something I can settle into. I’ll never be very good at it.” She shrugged and gave him a worried smile.
“No one’s ever very good at it, do you think, Gracie?”
“Kitty is. And so is Francine, in her own way. She’s gathered her widowhood up around her, has learned how to use it for her own purposes. Her own fluttery purposes, Atlas would say. And when I was a young girl, too—the widows I knew all seemed born to it, seemed to use it as a source of power, even sustenance.” She got up and reached for his empty coffee cup. “But not me. The whole business is unnatural. It doesn’t fit me. It’s ten sizes too big.” She touched his arm. “And this sounds awful, but I don’t mean for it to. I’m tired of missing him. I’ve been tired of missing him since the day he died.”
She was at the sink now, rinsing dishes. “He came to me last night, Louis.” She turned to face him. “I hadn’t dreamed of him, not once, since the summer. Isn’t that strange? But last night he showed up, just for a moment in the corner of a dream, like he didn’t want to intrude. He was sitting in a chair, jiggling his leg slightly, in that way he had when he was nervous about having to say something he didn’t really want to say. I bit my lip and waited, I was so eager to hear his voice again. And then the words came out, left him and came to me, although I don’t think he actually spoke. He said, ‘Gracie, you’re seventy years old. Don’t waste a minute missing me.’ And then I woke up, full awake, and there was not one tear on my pillow. Just the opposite: I was smiling in the dark. I thought to myself, Imagine a man loving me so much he’d say a thing like that.”
Wasn’t it just like him, thought Louis, thinking of his own encounter with Atlas in the clouds, to make doubly sure his message would be conveyed to Gracie. He had always been like that, putting two locks on the door, having one umbrella at home and one at the hardware store. Even in death he wanted to be sure of a thing, to cover himself twice over. There was no need, Louis decided, to describe to Gracie his own encounter with Atlas. The redundancy in this case had been an unnecessary effort on Atlas’s part—he had gotten through to Gracie.
Don’t grieve for me—there’s no time. Louis looked at Gracie as she turned back to the sink to rinse her hands. Those were generous words, but what was it exactly Atlas expected her to do with her remaining time? Don’t waste it beneath the horse chestnut tree, don’t kneel at his grave plucking weeds from around his tombstone? How did she move beyond him when the chair where he always sat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner stood ready to bear the sudden weight of him; when the indentation on the other half of her mattress was so distinctly his, spoke so clearly of his thereness, was even, it seemed, still warm (for Louis had touched the spot more than once) as if he had just risen to brush his teeth and greet the day? If he, Louis, still felt Atlas’s warmth, what on earth did Gracie feel? How far did that kind of love go? he wondered, knowing that all the beds that he would ever sleep in would be warmed only by himself.
Then Gracie said, “Of course, I’m not sure what it is he wants me to do.” She was up on her toes, watering the violets and spider plants that crowded the sunny windowsill in front of th
e sink. “I mean, I’m not twenty-five years old. It’s not like I can go out and do it all over again. Or want to. I mean”—and she let out a curious laugh—“it’s not like I’m going to remarry or anything.”
Louis took the watering can from her and held it up to the hanging rabbit’s-foot fern. Atlas had always watered the fern for Gracie. Would Gracie’s next husband be tall enough to water it? That Gracie should marry again, even at seventy, did not seem impossible or absurd to Louis, who measured the question against his own possibilities. Even on her deathbed, Gracie would be much more likely to elicit a marriage proposal than he.
“It’s okay, you know. If you do get married again,” said Louis, not looking at her. “I’m thirty-two years old. I could get a place.”
Gracie touched him. “Louis. It’s just talk. I’m just saying things.”
“No, but really. If something like that should ever happen. I could…”
Get a place, get married, start a family? Hi honey, I’m home. Louis looked around the kitchen, now a kitchen in a different house, his own. Hi honey, I’m home. In he walks wearing a suit, briefcase in one hand, his other hand raised in greeting. His wife, who’d been reaching for something in the refrigerator, closes the refrigerator door, and he sees that she is holding his baby son. Both are wearing baseball hats and scarves, identical to his own. Of course they are—who else would have married him, and what other child could he have possibly sired? He goes to them, and they lean together, the three of them, the bills on their hats lightly touching, the tassels on the ends of their purple scarves interlacing.
And then he was back in the kitchen with Gracie, remembering another encounter, one that had taken place just before the fire in the hardware store. He slid his hand under his scarf and touched what remained of his lips. They were wet and coarse at the same time; he could not pucker them into a kiss now if he wanted to. Even if someone showed him how. Ariel Nesmith had shown him how. Ariel had liked him, and he had liked her, and after a high school party a week before the fire, she became the first and last person to touch his cheek in that way, to press her lips to his. Sometimes in the hospital, when the nurses laid their fingers on the gauze that wrapped his face, he mistook their touch for Ariel’s. She came to the hospital several times, and even to the house, but he refused to see her. From the edge of a curtained window, he watched her go that last time, watched as she turned when she reached the end of the sidewalk and looked back at the house, the afternoon sun lighting her perfect skin and making diamonds of the moisture on her perfect lips.
CHAPTER TWO
MOST PEOPLE his age felt the winter in their bones, but Arnie felt it in his hook. The damn thing sucked the chill right out of the air, then shot it into his stump all the way up his right arm. You couldn’t put a mitten on it, although LuLu once offered to make him one. That sure would have been a swell sight. Besides, he needed it exposed so he could grab on to things. It was hard enough as it was without a violet and orange mitten, the colors LuLu surely would have chosen, wrapped around it. Even with his frozen hook, though, sliding up and down the handle of his snow shovel, he still managed to finish his walk before old Krupmeyer across the street. Krupmeyer started to gain at the end, so Arnie really had to gun it across the finish line. He leaned against his shovel, panting, seeing spots before his eyes from the effort. When he’d caught enough of his breath to speak, he called across the street to his rival.
“Yo, Krupmeyer! Could you use a hand?” He waved his hook at him. “I sure could.”
Krupmeyer hadn’t thought it funny the first five times he’d heard it, and he didn’t think it was funny now. There was something downright indecent about a handicapped man making fun of his own handicap, especially when the handicap didn’t stop him from finishing his walk first.
“My walk’s a good thirty feet longer than yours,” Krupmeyer shouted to Arnie.
“The hell it is. Every lot on the street’s the same size.”
“So you think.”
“So I know.”
“I got five years on you,” Krupmeyer grunted.
Arnie could almost feel the heat coming off his neighbor’s fat red face. “It’s not the five years, it’s the fifty pounds you got on me,” Arnie called.
Krupmeyer didn’t say anything.
Arnie watched him happily. “You’re slowing down, Kruppie. It’s taking you a half hour longer this year. What are you using over there, a trowel?”
The two old men spoke to one another only during snow season. Both of them seemed to relish the animosity and competition. They went at it five or six times a year, which was how often it snowed in Waverly. Neither man remembered how it got started, but it had gradually evolved to the point of becoming a spectator sport, the neighbors watching the excitement from their windows. No one dared go outside while the two cantankerous old bastards went at it. The unspoken rules were simple: One man, one shovel, and you couldn’t start until the last flake hit the ground. Once that had been at three in the morning. Arnie awoke to the sound of Krupmeyer scraping away at his walk in the dark. He shot out of bed and started shoveling in his pajamas and bedroom slippers, and he might even have caught up with Krupmeyer if LuLu hadn’t latched on to his good arm and tried to drag him back inside.
Today, though, victory was his. “Hey Krupster,” called Arnie, “you’re sounding a little wheezy. You sure you can’t use an extra pair of hands? Well, don’t look at me, kid.” He laughed, waving his hook at Krupmeyer again.
Krupmeyer lifted his own hand and made a gesture at Arnie, presumably giving him the finger, but since he was wearing a mitten Arnie couldn’t quite tell. “Hey, Arnie. I let you beat me, okay? Since what I did to you last time was so pathetic. Christ, I went inside and had two cups of coffee before you even got close to finishing. It was almost goddamn spring before you got done shoveling.”
“Yeah, well, you look like you could use a cup of coffee now. And last time, as if you goddamn didn’t well know, the snowplow jumped my curb and dumped an extra two feet of snow on my walk.”
“So you say.”
“So I know, Krapski.”
Krupmeyer bent over his shovel again, redder than before, and more wheezy. Arnie tried to think of something else to say, but he couldn’t come up with anything good. Besides, his hook sucked in so much of the cold, the right side of his body was going numb. He started up the front walk to his house, after taking a last look at Krupmeyer and smiling. Iris opened the front door just as he got there, and he expected from the way she looked that she was about to rag him for being such a fool and for causing so much commotion on the public streets. Then he saw that she wasn’t looking at him but past him, and he saw, too, that up and down the block his neighbors were starting to come out of their doors, were running in fact, like Iris was suddenly doing. They’d seen from their windows where they’d been watching the snow-shoveling battle, what he had not as he walked to his front door with his back to Krupmeyer—that Krupmeyer had dropped his shovel, clutched his chest, and fallen face forward into the foot or so of snow that remained on his unfinished walk.
The ambulance came and went, an effort that was a mere formality, since in Iris’s judgment, Krupmeyer was probably dead before he hit the ground and could just as well have made the trip in one of Big Bill Rose’s two hearses, which is what she whispered to Arnie when the ambulance swerved off down the snow-slick street. The neighbors thinned out, and Iris left Arnie to go back inside, patting his good arm as she reassured him for the fifth time that Krupmeyer’s death wasn’t his fault, that Krupie would have keeled over and died no matter where he was or what he might have been doing at the fatal moment, because it was obvious to Iris, who knew a thing or two about the manner in which people go, that the Krupster had had one of those time-bomb hearts, tick tick tick, and if he had just lifted his finger to pick his nose, let alone lifting a shovel full of wet snow, he still would have gone. Any effort at all would have killed him. Hell, blinking too hard would have killed po
or old Krupso. He was due to go, tick tick tick, ka-boom.
Yeah, well, thought Arnie, after Iris left him to go back inside, maybe so, maybe not. It sure didn’t do Krupmeyer any good digging through the snow like a maniac, like he was a teenager with a thousand healthy years ahead of him. Arnie removed his knitted cap and surveyed Krupmeyer’s unfinished walk. Krupmeyer, he said to himself silently, I didn’t much care for you, but I mourn your death because you were a fellow warrior. We had us some great battles. Christ, remember two years ago, when it snowed nineteen inches and we finished our walks in a dead heat? And the ice storm—when was that?—both of us sliding all over the place, hacking at the ice with the handles of our shovels, falling on our asses. I creamed my wrist that day, and you were sure you broke your hip, but we kept going, didn’t we? Arnie tasted salt in the back of his throat and felt a thickness behind his eyes. He cleared his throat and blinked. You went down on the field of battle, Kruppie, there’s no dishonor in that. You went down with your sword in your hands. Arnie leaned over and picked up Krupmeyer’s sword, an aluminum snow shovel Krupmeyer bought ten years ago for $2.98 from Malone’s Hardware.
Shit, thought Arnie. We’re all dropping like flies. LuLu, Krupmeyer. He slowly turned his head, squinting at the bright white that surrounded him. And me, he wondered, how much longer have I got? He slid his hand inside his coat and felt the strong even beat of his heart, and was not reassured.
He shook his head and clutched Krupmeyer’s shovel with his hook, and made an adjustment with his good hand. You went the good way, Krupso, you bastard. You went down hard and fast, but you went down all in one piece. Me, I got one hand gone, my left ear’s shot, and I’m going soft in the brain. You beat me, Krupmeyer—in the big contest, the one that really counts—you left this world in one piece, not like me. They’ll tie me in a chair in some nursing home, I’ll be drooling on myself, I’ll have goddamn pee-pee stains on my pajamas, and a brain as soft as Cheez Whiz. Krupster, you won.
