Crossing the Bridge

by Michael Baron

She shrugged. “I’m not that late.” She nodded and smiled at Brian. “And Brian could probably use the extra cash, right?”

  I looked at my watch. “You were supposed to be here forty minutes ago,” I said.

  “It’s okay, Hugh,” she said. “I’m here now.” She started to walk behind the counter and I realized that I’d been harboring some form of grudge against her from nearly the moment I met her.

  “Go,” I said. Obviously, Tab thought I was talking to Brian, because she didn’t react to this.

  “Tab,” I said, “go.”

  She had been putting her purse under the counter and she looked up at me. “What?”

  “You don’t work here anymore. Go.”

  “You’re firing me because I came in a little late?”

  “I’m firing you because you think forty minutes is a little late. To name one of several hundred reasons.”

  She stood up, switching her weight to her right leg. “I don’t think you can do that. Don’t you have to talk to your father or something first?”

  “It’s done, Tab. Leave. I’ll mail you your last check.”

  She looked to Tyler and then to Brian. She seemed surprised and a little flustered, truly the most emotion I’d seen from her the entire time I’d known her. Then she simply took her purse from under the counter and walked out.

  “That was the right thing to do, right?” I asked Tyler after she left.

  “That was the right thing to do six months ago.”

  I told Brian he could leave and Tyler and I walked behind the counter.

  “Steve and Chris, too,” I said. “I’m gonna get rid of all the people who are barely conscious around here.”

  “Wow,” Tyler said. “The Terminator.”

  “Yeah, the Terminator.” I went toward the office to get Steve and Chris’ phone numbers. “Do you have any idea how to go about hiring people?”

  I was varnishing the first of the display cases that night when my mother came down to the basement. We hadn’t spoken all that much lately, though she’d begun to show a certain amount of interest in the chess matches I was having with my father.

  “Looks nice,” she said, running a hand along a dry side of the case. “This is for the store?”

  “I’m replacing the Formica display in the front. I talked to Dad about it.”

  “He told me. Are you enjoying doing this stuff again?” She looked over at the woodworking station.

  “I am, actually. It’s coming back to me.”

  She sat down on the rotating chair. “I remember when we bought this equipment from Ben Truesdale down the street when he got new things. He asked your father what kind of work he was planning to do with it. When your father told him that this was for you, Ben said, ‘these are not toys, Rich.’ I think he was seriously considering giving your father his money back and selling this equipment to someone else. Your father took great pleasure in inviting him over to look at that lamp you made for us.”

  She’d never told me that story before. “Ben was kind of a lump, wasn’t he?” I said.

  “A nice man, but definitely a lump. And it was a very beautiful lamp.”

  “Thanks.” I turned back to my work.

  “You always loved building things. Even when you were a little kid. I think your first major project was a robot – at least you said it was a robot – that you made out of Play-Doh and Popsicle sticks for your brother right after he was born. When Chase was about one, he thought that robot was the greatest thing in the world. He’d carry it all around with him. One day he was running and he dropped it and it broke into dozens of pieces. He cried for twenty minutes.”

  I had no memory of this at all. I wished in some ways that I could remember what the world felt like when Chase arrived. It’s a funny thing that the birth of a sibling is such a huge event in someone’s life, yet many of us are too young when it happens to have any recollection of the event.

  “Play-Doh and Popsicle sticks. I should have considered that medium for this display. Maybe the next one.” I concentrated on finishing a side panel while my mother sat there quietly watching.

  “Your father says you’re doing some other things to spruce up the store.”

  “A few things, yeah. It needed the sprucing.”

  “I’m sure that’s true. It would be hard for us to see that after all this time.”

  “I know; it always is. Hopefully it’ll help increase buyer interest in the store.”

  “That hasn’t gone well at all, has it?”

  “That’s a kind way of putting it.” I finished the first coat on the first side and moved toward the back. “Was there a reason why you came down here?”

  “No reason, really. I was just curious that you’d taken to doing this again and I thought I’d come down to see what you were working on. You never let me sit here like this when you were a teenager.”

  I remember thinking of her visits back then as invasions. The last thing that most teenaged boys want is their mothers peering over their shoulders while they work at a hobby. “I’m easier about that kind of stuff now,” I said.

  “I appreciate it.”

  She continued to sit there while I put the first coat of varnish on the rest of the case. I would apply another coat tomorrow night and a third the night after that. When I was finished, I cleaned the brush and went back to the workbench where she was sitting to get started on another piece. When I did, she got up from the chair and kissed me on the cheek.

  “I know you’ll be gone again soon, Hugh,” she said. “But it’s good to have you here with us now.”

  She kissed me one more time and then went back upstairs.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A Bit of Temporary Abandon

  It was the first unseasonably warm afternoon of the early spring. The kind of weather made for irrational behavior. As had become a habit in recent months, since I had no classes on Fridays, I came down from Emerson for the long weekend. I’d only realized a few weeks earlier that I was doing this to spend more time with Iris and Chase. And particularly to spend more time with Iris. I was no longer kidding myself that I was fascinated with her. That bit of self-delusion had ended on the drive back to Boston after Chase told me that their weeklong breakup had ended. I’d finally admitted to myself that, during that entire week, I had been intrigued with the notion that Iris was a free agent, even as I counseled my brother on trying to get her back. Still, I was aware of the boundaries and I never intended to cross them. I could never have done that to Chase, no matter how much Iris filled my thoughts.

  On this particular Friday, Chase came back from school, grabbed a beer with me while we caught up on the week, and then left the house again. He told me that Iris would be by soon and asked me to entertain her until he returned. He’d been doing this with increasing frequency and it didn’t feel like an imposition. I’d even begun looking forward to it. I would get Iris something to drink and sit with her on the couch exchanging clever thoughts about school, politics, and her boyfriend until he returned. When Iris and I were together like this, I could almost imagine that she had come to see me. I even began to sense that she liked having a little time with me before Chase swept her back into his world.

  On this day, though, whether it was because of the air, or my increased consciousness of my attraction to her (exacerbated by the tank top and short skirt she was wearing to celebrate the warm weather), or the fact that Chase didn’t come back for a very long time, things were different between us. I found myself nervous around her, more aware of what I was saying and what I looked like. My eyes kept traveling furtively to her knees, and even when I wasn’t looking at them, I envisioned the curve of her calves. And I thought I sensed, though I was sure I was imagining it, that she seemed a little more nervous around me, that she was aware that something was passing between us that hadn’t been there before. I had absolutely no idea what to do with these feelings and wondered if I needed to prepare better for them in the future.

  “Wh
ere did he say he was going?” Iris said after an uncertain silence.

  “Chase tells you where he’s going?”

  “I guess that was a silly question.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “The two of you are so different.”

  “You’ve noticed. Of course there is no one in the world like the singular entity known as Chase Penders.”

  “You’re right about that,” she said amusedly. She offered me another meaningful glance, though perhaps at this point, I would have considered any glance from her to be meaningful. “You do okay, though.”

  “Hey, everybody needs a straight man.”

  She leaned slightly in my direction and her expression softened. I’d seen her look at Chase this way when she was trying to convince him to take something seriously and I always thought that I would have taken anything seriously if she looked at me that way.

  “You don’t really think that’s all you are, do you?”

  “Did I say it like it was a bad thing?” We had never talked about me in this way and I wasn’t entirely sure how to handle the attention given everything else running through my mind.

  “Yes, you did,” she said, smiling. “And if you’re just doing the modest thing, that’s cool. But I sometimes think you really don’t get it.”

  “What am I missing?”

  “The caring, the sensitivity, the intelligence, the wavy brown hair. Hugh, you’re a great package.”

  “You mean like Doritos?”

  She laughed. “I mean like a really interesting guy that lots of people would want to know and some people would want to know really well.”

  Hearing this from Iris when I was feeling the way I was feeling was all too intoxicating. I stood up and walked around the room.

  “Okay, this is getting a little more intense than I can handle,” I said.

  She smiled at me and leaned forward.

  “Do you really not like to talk about yourself that much?”

  “I’m fine with talking about myself. I just think that talking about myself – like this – with you is a little tough.”

  “Why?” She tilted her head and I could swear that her eyes got a slightly deeper shade of blue.

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “No,” Iris said with a cajoling laugh. “What did you mean by that? Really.”

  At that moment, I realized I’d been waiting for this opportunity. I had fantasized situations where I told Iris how I felt about her. In every one of those fantasies, Chase was not a factor. Perhaps the only time in my life when that was the case. If I thought of him at all, I imagined that he had moved on from Iris, in fact condoned what I was doing.

  I was all nervous energy at this point. I’m not sure I even realized right away that I had moved to sit next to her or that our knees were touching.

  “Because – I can’t believe I’m telling you this – I think about you a lot. More than I should, frankly. And when you say things like you’re saying about me, it makes me think things that I really shouldn’t be thinking.”

  Her smile softened and the look of amusement left her eyes. But that other look was still there.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said quietly.

  “I really don’t think you do.”

  “Yeah, I do. Hugh. I think about you, too. It’s weird for me because I’m so in love with Chase, but I do think about you. It’s impossible for me to be around you as much as I am and not think about you.” She paused for several seconds. “Can I tell you something?”

  “I’m gonna have to reserve judgment on that.”

  “When Chase and I split up a couple of months ago – for reasons I still don’t understand – I was feeling really awful. I just completely didn’t understand what happened. But in the middle of it, I realized that one of the things I was feeling awful about was that I missed you. Not being with Chase meant that I wasn’t going to see you anymore and that shook me up. I seriously thought about calling you, but I thought you might think I was calling for a different reason.” “I almost called you,” I said, my throat a little dry.

  “I wish you had. It would have meant a lot to me. I needed you.”

  I didn’t want to wrap my mind around what she was saying. I didn’t want to consider the implications. Any of them. At that moment, all I wanted to do was kiss her. I leaned toward her and she moved toward me at the same time. Our lips met tenderly and we kissed in slow motion for a long time. It was the moment in my life when I realized that it mattered who you were kissing when you kissed like this. My hand found its way to the bare knee I’d been admiring since she walked in the door and I pulled her closer. Everything was unhurried. From my perspective, I just wanted to live in this space and I didn’t care what came next. But there’s no chance at all that we would have stopped there if we hadn’t heard Chase’s car pulling up the driveway.

  The sound jarred us, as though a stage hypnotist had snapped his fingers. As we sat back on the couch, Iris looked at me with an expression that spoke of both embarrassment and regret. She didn’t need to tell me that she didn’t know what came over her, just as she didn’t need to tell me that we couldn’t allow it to happen again. To her, she had only surrendered to a bit of temporary abandon, nothing more.

  I don’t think that I ever felt emptier than I did at that moment.

  It was cool for early July. As I got out of my car for my midtrip stop (I didn’t really need a break on the drive to Lenox, but I liked that diner I’d found in Enfield and the woman who always helped me there – it had become part of the process for me), I wondered if I should have brought a sweatshirt along. Iris and I were planning to see an outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that night and it would be considerably cooler in the Berkshires. As it turns out, it didn’t matter.

  Neither of us was pretending that we hadn’t had that middle-of-the-night phone conversation. Iris held me just a little bit longer than she usually did when I kissed her hello and as we walked and drove through the afternoon, we each mentioned numerous times how much we enjoyed this weekly foray. For my part, I wanted to make sure that Iris understood that she was important to me and that, regardless of any awkwardness from our talk on the beach, I still considered her a critical part of my life. I’m assuming that she felt somewhat the same way, because she was more openly affectionate with me than she’d been in the past, touching my arm while we spoke, at one point grabbing me around the shoulders and at another gently bumping me while we walked.

  She made dinner for me that night, keeping it simple because we had to be at the theater by 7:30. One of the rituals that had evolved between us was that we didn’t debrief each other on the events of the week until dinner on our first night, turning our first afternoons into a running set of observations about whatever we might be doing. While we ate, I told her about firing Tab and the others and about the progress I’d made on the display cases. She talked about the beginning of rehearsals for the Ensemble’s September production and about a mildly traumatic trip to the veterinarian. I’d come to appreciate these conversations because they indicated how much we had drawn ourselves into the fabric of each other’s lives. She could tell me that Tab was taking up space without ever having met her and I could anticipate her dog’s response to an unnecessarily aggressive vet.

  Toward the end of the meal, Iris became quiet and seemed more focused on her wine.

  “You know what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately?” she said. She smiled, eyes downcast, almost bashful. “That time when we kissed on the couch.”

  “You’ve been thinking about that?” I asked tentatively. We had never once talked about this.

  “I have. I mean it’s not like I haven’t thought about it before. It’s just that it’s been on my mind a lot the last few days.”

  I took a sip of my wine, thinking that not responding might be the only appropriate response.

  “That kiss had a lot in it, didn’t it?” she said. “It was illicit. It was innocent. It was wa
rm. It was intense.”

  “It was over much too soon,” I said, surprising myself that I would be this candid.

  She looked up at me. “It was?”

  “For me it was.”

  “Chase came back.”

  “I know. I was never less happy to see him.”

  She began to inscribe lines in the condensation on her wineglass. “That was a strange day,” she said. “Chase noticed that I was a little preoccupied, but I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about. I think that was the most dishonest thing I ever did to him.”

  I nodded. I wrestled with myself over telling her how much that kiss meant to me, how much it redefined kissing for me. But I wasn’t sure why she’d brought this subject up and I felt like I needed to wait to find out.

  “I’d imagined kissing you before then,” she said.

  “You had?”

  She shook her head. “A few times. It would just come into my head. I really liked you, Hugh. I always did. I liked talking to you, especially on those afternoons when you would babysit me for Chase.”

  “I loved that time.”

  “You know what I thought about after that day? And I thought about it a lot. I thought about what we were going to be like over the course of our lives together after that kiss. I really believed that Chase and I were going to get married. I imagined you and me dancing at my wedding. I imagined you coming for dinner while Chase was away on business and the two of us taking the kids for ice cream. I imagined the four of us – me and Chase and you and your wife – at some lakefront resort when we were in our fifties.

  “And in all of these cases, I imagined that we’d have a little thing that passed between us that acknowledged that kiss without ever saying a word. Didn’t quite work out that way, huh?”

  I was feeling a true loss of equilibrium. I had believed in the moments after we kissed that Iris had made every effort to erase it from her memory. And even after what we’d begun here – whatever it was that we’d begun here – I was still convinced that she would have preferred it if that kiss had never happened.