The End of the Day

by Bill Clegg

  A week after Floyd’s fiftieth birthday, he drove to Millerton to pick up a drain pipe to attach to the gutter in the back of the house, something Jackie had needled him to do for weeks because the splatter was washing out the pachysandra bed she’d planted. It was an unusually warm, rainy Saturday afternoon in December and after procrastinating most of the day, he’d asked Jackie if she minded if the errand waited until Monday. But she insisted. She’d been doing laundry and cleaning with no help from Amy, who’d been studying for a nursing school test in her old bedroom, drinking cup after cup of coffee and leaving dirty plates and bowls on the counter and in the sink. Floyd had been watching basketball on TV as Emily sat on the couch next to him unspooling an entire roll of toilet paper. At four-thirty, after Jackie reminded him that the hardware store closed at five, Floyd pleaded with his eyes one more time to be left alone, but she was unmoved. She turned the knob on the TV off, grabbed the mess of toilet paper from Emily and told her to go to her mother’s bedroom. Floyd grumbled as he put on his boots; the tires on his truck squealed as he pulled out of the driveway.

  Less than an hour later, Gus Anderson, the local cop, Dirk Morey and two other guys from the firehouse stood at her front door in the drizzling rain. They told her Floyd’s truck went off the road, down an embankment, and flipped into the side of a cement garage. He died instantly, they made sure to point out. As Dirk twisted the watch on his wrist and said they had no idea what caused him to crash through the guard rails, Jackie’s mind raced through the possibilities—a deer, an oncoming car, a distraction that took his eye off the road just long enough to keep him from turning the wheel before the road curved? Floyd is distracted easily, she blurted, the wrong tense and the blame in her voice hanging in the air between them. She did not apologize or say another word, only closed the front door to the house and stood behind it with her hand on the knob, unable to move until Amy, with Emily on her hip, came out from her bedroom to ask why there were so many cars in the driveway.

  * * *

  Standing at the bay window now, Jackie watches Amy trudge to her car and leave. Adrenaline from losing her temper has her heart racing and her fists still clenched. As Amy’s Subaru turns on to Hospital Hill Road and disappears, Jackie slumps against the window ledge. With a jolt, she remembers what Dana deposited at her doorstep—the leather briefcase and letter she’d grabbed from Amy’s hands and tossed onto the foyer floor. She scans the brown lawn outside for something to distract her, but her eye lands on nothing. The briefcase sits behind her like a bomb.

  Dana

  The rigid, leather-covered cushion beneath her is Dana’s first sign that she’s not in her bed in the city. She opens her eyes, but is unable to see in the lightless room. Her mind is blank. She has no idea where she is waking, what time of day it is. She’s experienced this temporary erasure before and knows by now to wait until a thread of something she can follow into memory presents itself. The outline of enormous bookshelves, the silhouette of lamps and rolling mahogany ladders gradually surface from the dark like cryptic symbols to be decoded, but no memory of where she is or why comes to her. She strokes the parched leather with her left hand. Lightly. Slowly.

  Marcella… At the top of the townhouse stairs. Her smug smile. The phone call yesterday, the boy, now a man, fury and helplessness in his voice. Yes, I’ll come, she remembers saying, rushing a coat over her body, Marcella calling after her as she left to find a diner that was only six blocks away but no place she’d ever seen or been to.

  * * *

  She saw the leather briefcase before she noticed the man sitting next to it. It appeared at the end of the booth like a piece from a museum exhibit of her past. Not the whole past, she qualified to herself, just the worst part that created the blueprint for the rest. And what would the plaque beneath this exhibit say, she wondered, eyeing the dulled brown leather and too-thick handle she can still remember the feel of in her hands. Good Intentions would be the kindest words, Dana decided, Guilt the more precise, and then she remembered leaving the case at Lee’s farm, telling her aunt to throw it out, give it to Christopher, she did not care.

  She imagined the exhibits depicting what came before and what followed. The first was the most obvious: Jackie’s young family standing in the front lawn of their house—Floyd looking beyond the camera, of course, Jackie seizing his shoulder with one hand, cradling an infant in the other. What would she call that one? Family? The last would be this scene, now, in the diner, meeting the man who was barely born the last time she saw him, swaddled and screaming as if on fire. All these years later he was on fire again, but this time with questions there were no good answers to. She would call this scene, Reunion.

  Dana imagined the exhibits in between—many of them depicting people and places she’d never met or seen, but had glimpses of through private detectives she’d hired over the years. They’d sent her pictures which she kept in a plain white envelope in her desk drawer. They included ten or so of a boy who’d grown from a wiry, seemingly happy adolescent into the adult fellow she now gazed at across the diner. She remembered an image of him sitting on the hood of a car, wearing a blue winter coat and thick mittens, a Middle Eastern–looking man alongside him holding a big snow shovel. There was another photo of him in his forties having dinner with a pretty woman with short blonde hair who appeared at least ten years younger than him.

  She remembered the other photos, mostly of Jackie through the years—getting into her car in the parking lot at Wells Center School, in her twenties; and later, not quite middle aged, retrieving the mail from the black metal mailbox at the end of her driveway, her mouth a tight line, an awful perm, all business; and the one where she’s in a peach-colored dress on the day of her son’s wedding, sitting next to Floyd at a table covered in a paper tablecloth, both of them looking like most of the people Dana had ever seen in that town—limited and uncurious, tired.

  She remembers another photograph of Jackie, alone, her hand resting on the metal railing outside a church entrance. It was taken the day of Floyd’s funeral. Her expression is blank, unreadable. Dana had studied the photograph more than a few times over the years, and was never able to locate what she saw there. What she didn’t see was a helpless widow. In the absence of obvious emotion, Dana believed she recognized something of Jackie’s pragmatic grit from their childhood, her particular brand of self-reliance. It didn’t go exactly as Jackie had wanted, Dana knew, but she had married the man she’d decided was the one for her, had his two children, buried him, lived and worked and mothered in the town she never intended to leave. Almost fifty, she was a widow with married children, a grandmother already, approaching life alone.

  By comparison, Dana’s twenties, thirties and even forties felt like a long summer between years in college, a protracted time to wallow outside the parameters of ordinary and ordered life. While Jackie was becoming the dependable secretary, good mother, and sturdy widow, Dana had affairs with men and women and cycled through people and money in successive locations, but after three or four years anywhere, after the possibilities had been exhausted and the place and its people were no longer novel or amusing, an affair or intrigue of some kind buoyed her away, toward some new piece of real estate that needed an overhaul and a small army at her command to do it, a fresh reservoir of oxygen to burn.

  The first place Dana went to after college was London where she stayed for seven of the fastest, most viscerally exhilarating and loneliest years of her life. When she left she packed her jewelry in a hatbox that she carried on the Concorde and left all the clothes and furniture and people behind her in a house she’d rented on Primrose Hill. She let the lease run out and trusted that all the baubles and bodies would find fine enough homes. She’d call that exhibit, Oblivion.

  One woman would appear in several of the most important exhibits, but never in the foreground, never obvious. She would be off to the side, sufficiently out of sight to avoid stirring suspicion, but present enough to ruin everything. There was only
one photograph of her in the envelope in Dana’s desk. It showed the woman as she looked sixteen years ago, aged but still exquisite. Every time Dana looks at this photograph her first vexed thought is always the same: that of all people this was the woman most likely to be the exception to her grandmother’s rule, that unlike Dana or anyone else she knew, she was able to have, without choosing, both her face and her ass. Even now, her cheekbones sliced the air around her like weapons; her severe hair, silver and thick and knotted behind her head in a bun so tight it looked like blown glass. She is seated in the driver’s seat of a parked minivan under a breezeway at a tropical resort. Her head is down, her eyes focused on something in her lap. She could be counting money or reading an email or a text on a phone. Dana has examined this photograph countless times, always looking for some hint of what she was thinking, how she might feel, what her life was like. But whatever she sees on this woman’s face is only ever what anyone saw there: what they wanted to see. Because whatever true feeling she had—elation or anger or anything in between—was something she did not show. Dana never found what she was looking for in that photo, which suggested to her that time’s only visible effect on this woman was the color of her hair and the texture of her skin, both still pleasing. There was only one word that would accurately name this exhibit: Lupita.

  The man in the booth looked up and saw Dana across the room. He put the briefcase on the table in front of him, moved to the seat’s edge, and stood up. The gesture surprised her and at first she guessed it was made out of respect: like a peasant acknowledging the presence of a royal, she thought, more amused than flattered. But something about the stiffness of his hands at his sides let her know it was only the courtesy of a younger man responding to the sight of an older woman. She signaled with her hand for him to sit down but did not cross the room. She knew when she did it would close a circle long in the making, and no doubt open several new ones.

  Finally, she approached the booth. She extended her hand to his, like an author meeting a character in a novel she’d written when she was young. Hello, he said, looking up, his face blank. He had nothing of his mother’s coloring or complexion. But this she knew from the photographs. Hello, he said again, more warmly. Something about the rise of his eyebrows, the drop of his Adam’s apple, the bunching of skin below his hairline—for a split second she had a memory of her father when she was young. He would have been in his forties, as Hap was now. It had been a long time since she’d thought of her father as anything but old and sick. She looked into Hap’s face again to see what sparked the memory but saw nothing but a stranger. One who looked lost, but kind, two words no one who knew her father would have ever used to describe him.

  Looking at Hap more closely she saw that unlike his parents who never had a chance to become much more than their adolescent impulses, he’d grown into an educated, civilized, attractive man. She allowed herself, for no longer than the time it took to let go of his hand and sit down in the booth across from him, a flash of pride. She reminded herself that she was not his mother, that she did not birth or raise him. Other women, unintentionally or because they volunteered, had been responsible for those roles. Still, she reminded herself, if not for her he would not be. This meeting was nothing she ever foresaw nor would have asked for, but seated before a consequence of her time on earth she was relieved to see that he had exceeded even her most optimistic imagining. Hello, she finally said in return. It’s good to see you again.

  Jackie

  The dip in the driveway of her parents’ old house as she turns off Undermountain Road scrapes the muffler just as it has her whole life. She steers her car to the right of the garage and slows to a stop in the space between the garbage bin and the woods, exactly where she’d parked in high school and after, when she came to visit with Amy and Rick, and thirteen years ago when she came to take away the last boxes of her parents’ belongings after they died. No one has lived here since, so she’s not worried about trespassing. Still, being back feels strange, and the dark house and moonlit lawn have the eerie wrongness of a nightmare.

  It was Dana who bought Jackie’s parents’ house from her even though the lawyer representing the buyer said it was an investment group from the city. The name of the company on the closing papers—Calliope Holdings, LLC—gave her away. Calliope was the queen of the fairies she and Dana had told stories about when they were children. Her survival, and the whole fairy world’s survival, they’d believed, depended on at least one of the jewels she’d disguised as a river stone being discovered before the end of each summer. It was visible only in the light of a setting sun and could only be seen by a girl.

  It wasn’t until Jackie sat down in the realtor’s office to sign the closing papers that she saw the name of the buyer and when she did she recoiled as if she’d seen a ghost. She asked for another day to decide and seriously considered not going through with the sale. But she still owed money on her second mortgage and looking ahead, between her social security and 401k, there was very little room for unexpected expenses. Rick and Amy were barely able to keep it together financially, so she couldn’t count on them to take care of her. The next morning she added one hundred thousand dollars to the figure they’d agreed on and drove to the real estate agent’s office in Wells and told her to call the lawyer. With the proceeds from the house, Jackie was able to pay off her debts and put enough away to stop worrying whether or not she’d be able to retire. Her only regret was that Dana had gotten what she’d wanted.

  The moon is three-quarters full and the dirt road between her old house and Edgeweather has a dull glow that she remembers from summer nights staying out late with Dana, sneaking along the tree line and pretending not to hear Ada and Maria’s calls for them to come home. Jackie was a girl who did her homework, brushed her teeth before bed, and followed the rules. But with Dana, in those years between eight and seventeen, she allowed herself, on occasion, to be defiant. The rebellions were little more than staying out past dark, but over time each little transgression helped Jackie understand that she had choices and that she could assert her will, selectively, and not only was it possible that there wouldn’t be repercussions, but that she might end up getting something she wanted. It was all a matter of deciding on what to want.

  * * *

  She remembers the night she decided she wanted Floyd. It was her Junior Prom and Floyd had come with his sister, Hannah, which was a little strange, but certainly not as strange as Jackie’s date, Dana. Since the prior fall, Dana pressured Jackie to take her. We don’t have these kinds of things at my school, she’d explained. There are formals, sort of, but they’re boring and stiff and no one, not one person, not ever, has fun. Jackie knew she was exaggerating to get her way. And a part of her liked that Dana was trying so hard. We can shop for dresses in the city and make a weekend out of it. Whatever we do we can’t let my mother talk us into letting her creepy dressmaker design something. We’ll look like old biddies from her horrible club. Jackie agreed, knowing that Dana would hound her non-stop until she finally gave in. Brilliant!, she’d screamed over the phone from the city when Jackie told her she’d talked to the teachers in charge of the prom who said it was ok to bring her. This is going to be such a gas, Jack. I promise.

  A few weeks after Dana came back from winter break in Florida, Jackie met her in the city to shop for dresses. Maria drove them to various stores in midtown while they sang “We Can Work It Out” by the Beatles over and over, deploying the lyrics in all situations—traffic jams, a broken escalator at Saks, a dropped ice cream cone on the sidewalk at Rockefeller Center. Eventually they made their way to Bonwit’s and spent the entire afternoon there. Dana even persuaded a sales assistant to go out and buy them ham and cheese sandwiches, pickles, and cupcakes for lunch. Seeing Dana in her element, where the rules and interpersonal dynamics were pre-determined—as in the lobby of her apartment building where porters and doormen and elevator attendants moved in deferential ballet around her family—incited both a smug pri
de that her friend occupied a high, rare place in the pecking order of a spectacularly intimidating city such as New York, but also provided a bracing glimpse at the vast distance between their circumstances. The difference between Dana’s family and her own was never forgotten, but in Wells, which was Jackie’s home turf, it receded enough not to be felt. In the city, though, there was talk of clubs and schools and towns in Florida and Maine and Antigua that Jackie had never heard of. Bryn Mawr or Barnard? And please don’t say Vassar, was how a friend of Dana’s mother’s greeted them in the elevator at Bergdorf’s. The presumption of one or the other, the warning of the third. It was a language Jackie didn’t understand and Dana’s response, Bryn Mawr, I’m afraid. My Aunt Lee would never forgive me otherwise, was a reminder that in less than two years their lives would change radically.

  As Jackie saw it, Dana merely had to relax into a plan, allow each door to be opened for her and simply pass through at the given time. Jackie had allowed herself to ignore real plan-making, but in New York, where every inch had been built according to a meticulous blueprint, and inhabited by people who appeared to leave nothing to chance, Jackie couldn’t ignore her future any longer. She’d given lip service to applying to the University of Connecticut but she never planned on going through with it. Her parents didn’t press, in fact displayed little interest in her plans after high school, and so collaborated in an unspoken denial of the fact that she had eighteen months until graduation and no plans after.