The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  “Family’s family.”

  “But you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, aye?” Johnny said. “Family can do bad shite, Pauline. You can’t just march along as if nothing happened.” She’d been ready to press the point further when she realized Corran wasn’t the only member of the family Johnny was referring to. She bit her lip and swatted at a mosquito on her wrist. “Forgiving is one thing. Forgetting is something else,” Johnny said. He drained his glass of wine and got up to go inside.

  “I haven’t forgotten about what my father did, if that’s what you mean,” she said.

  “I don’t mean anything,” Johnny said. “I’m just saying.”

  “You’re avoiding the issue of your son by making this about my father.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Let’s not forget we wouldn’t even have a business if it weren’t for my father,” she said. “Not everything he did was terrible. I know he’s not a saint, Johnny. But …” she started to say “Family’s family” again, but it was hard to form the words this time. “It’s complicated,” she said. “I don’t know why you had to bring this up.”

  “You brought it up.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. She was making no sense now, and she knew it. “I’m going to bed,” she said. She stood up, too quickly, and had to steady herself on the porch railing. Johnny held the screen door open for her, and they went to bed in a strange mood, the two of them, morose and grieving and a little bit drunk.

  But that was weeks ago. This morning she was briskly sober, and Starbucks was like a song she’d heard a thousand times before:

  Grande Sumatra blend, please, half a Splenda, room for cream.

  Try a delicious blueberry scone?

  No thank you. I wish!

  Love your hair. Highlights?

  Low-lights. Salon Belleza. Ask for Pepper. And thank you.

  Pauline got her coffee, pulled out of the Starbucks lot, and then immediately had to swerve to avoid a jackass in a pickup truck drifting into her lane. She leaned on the horn and watched a tanned arm extend out of the truck’s driver’s-side window and shoot her the bird. You are a horrible person, she told him silently. My husband has a tumor and my business may be shut down, and I hope you drive your stupid ugly truck into the next ravine and stay there. Then she decided her mental indictment was hardly an adequate reproach. She rolled down her window and shot him the bird right back, but he was well ahead and it was doubtful he even saw it.

  Good Lord, what was she doing?

  Deep breath, Pauline: Focus. Control. Power. You’ve got this.

  Failure is not an option.

  At the factory, Pauline entered the building through the back door and walked past a narrow staircase leading to the second floor. Though the factory had been built as an ice plant more than a hundred years ago, at one point in its history parts of the admin wing’s second floor had been repurposed and rented out to an orphanage, of all things. Longtime ice staffers liked to scare the newbies, telling them that at certain moments, when the ice machines were quiet, you could hear the ghosts of abandoned babies crying in the rafters. Pauline didn’t admit it to anyone, but she hated that story. Awful! Why did people come up with such terrible things?

  When she passed the staircase leading to the second floor, she always quickened her step. Now she walked past the first-floor’s rows of cubicles to the lobby. Vickers, one of the ice drivers, was hanging over the reception desk talking to Rosa, but when he saw Pauline he feigned hurry and scuttled down the long hallway that connected the staff offices to the factory itself. What did Rosa see in that lout? Pauline looked at Rosa and shook her head, then felt self-conscious. Oh, what do I care who flirts with who? she thought. Who am I, the church lady? When she reached her office, she pulled out her phone and texted Johnny. You okay?

  Fine, the text came back. Not dead yet.

  Not funny, she typed. She put the phone back into her purse and hung the purse on the back of her desk chair. She’d just turned on her computer when her desk phone buzzed. “You there, Pauline?” Rosa said.

  “Yes.”

  “Roy’s looking for you. He said he wants to talk staffing, about how they’re going to make do out there without Johnny. He wants to know if you can come to his office.”

  “Tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Pauline said. She walked to the window to open the blinds, then felt a catch in her throat. Rosa’s phrasing was unsettling. Make do without Johnny? Unimaginable. Pauline didn’t even know who she was without Johnny. She tried to picture herself before she met him: so young and lonely, coming off those four foggy years of college that had been nothing but studying and tests and riding around the steaming streets of Gainesville, smoking weed with boys dumber than chimpanzees. Before Johnny, she’d never even had a boyfriend who’d lasted more than a month.

  And then, the day after graduating from UF, she came back to Jacksonville, settled in for a career in ice, and met Johnny MacKinnon. There was a lot of talk, in the beginning, about Johnny hitting pay dirt, coming over a poor young Scot and within a few years married to the boss’s daughter with his eye on a series of promotions that would bring him right up to the top of the ranks, but he’d earned it. She was proud of him.

  When they first started getting serious she’d made a bold proclamation that he could marry her if he wanted, but that she had no intention of having children. He was already a father, anyway, and for her part Pauline had seen enough of her sister Caroline’s life by then—of the jars of putrid pureed carrots, the screaming tantrums, and the frightening fatigue of those first shell-shocked years of motherhood. Caroline had her girls eighteen months apart and stayed home with them full-time while her husband Donny worked as an executive in research technology (what the heck was that?) in a huge office on the top floor of the Modis Building.

  When Pauline’s nieces were tiny, Caroline told her she was so debilitated with sleep deprivation and baby-brain that she once left the house in two different shoes, once left an entire chicken in the oven for three days. Once, exhausted, she lost her temper and slapped her shirtless, screaming older daughter on the back so hard that the blow left a splotched red handprint that lasted all day, and then she spent the afternoon weeping, applying cold packs to the girl’s skin, and considering turning herself in to Child Protective Services. Pauline was horrified, not so much at her sister’s confession, but at the pure chaos her life had fallen into. Caroline, it seemed, had very little control over anything. How could she stand it?

  No thank you, Pauline decided. Motherhood was not in the cards for her. Besides, Johnny had Corran, who was just a little thing when Pauline first met him. Five years old, and a beautiful boy, too, curly brown hair and a mouth always twisted into a smile. Pauline loved Corran. Still loved him, for heaven’s sake, missed him terribly, what with this awful falling-out he’d had with his father. When Corran was a child, they’d brought him over for Christmases and summers, took him to the beach, to the movies, to the zoo. It was lovely. And it had been just enough for Pauline—part-time mothering, just a little bit here and there and then send the darling boy back on over the pond until next time.

  She thought it was all she needed.

  “What an idiot.” She startled herself now, saying that out loud. She looked around quickly, but she was still alone in her office. A tide of self-loathing had risen. Stupid, stupid, stupid. That sweet little boy’s hand in her own, leading her across the dune to dig for mole crabs or out into the crashing waves, laughing at her as she cringed at the cold. “Pauline!” he yelled. “Come on, Pauline! Come with me!” What a lovely thing, a child. What a gift. And to think she’d contented herself all those years with being a vacation-mother to Corran and then watching cheerfully as he was packed onto an airplane to go back to Scotland to his real mother. To think she could have had a child of her own. Two. Three! And to think that she hadn’t. Wouldn’t.

  Now Johnny didn’t want her calling or emailing Corran, and she’d acquiesced to h
is wishes. But Johnny didn’t know that she and her stepson played iPhone Scrabble together. It was just a phone app, but it was wonderful—she and Corran could share coded messages whenever they got lucky enough to find the letters to do it. LOVE, she’d sent him recently. And then a two-turn combo: MISS YOU. He was clever with it, too. She’d laughed out loud at his most recent effort: YOU ROCK. It was a brilliant trick! They never discussed the wedding ring, or the rotten estrangement, and she didn’t have to lie to Johnny. I won’t text Corran, she’d promised. Or email. Or call. But she never said she wouldn’t keep up with her stepson somehow.

  “That’s just wrong.”

  Pauline turned from the window toward the voice, which belonged to Claire Kaplan, who was standing in the office doorway with a piece of coffee cake on a paper napkin.

  “What is?” Pauline said.

  “That cake in the kitchen. Somebody brought it in and I’ve had two pieces already. It’s just wrong. It’s evil, I’m telling you.” She put the napkin and the cake on Pauline’s desk and pulled a plastic fork from the back pocket of her jeans. “Pour vous.”

  Claire was like something out of Easy Rider, with a wardrobe that could have been hijacked from Dennis Hopper. She had a smoker’s voice, clear brown eyes, and long strawlike hair she wore either loose and wavy or pulled back into a hectic ponytail, depending on the occasion, the weather, and her general mood, which as Pauline well knew, could swing from bad to worse in a New York minute. Last Halloween, Claire had come in wearing a beaded vest and a floral headband and carrying a flask of Jack Daniel’s. “I’m Janis Joplin,” she told everyone who asked, and Pauline had to admit the likeness was quite believable, or at least it would have been if Janis Joplin had made it to her late forties, was single-parenting three kids, and had maneuvered a contentious divorce from a philanderer who had then unceremoniously died (heart attack, jogging) just before the split was made final, leaving Claire a resentful widow with a mountain of debt.

  Claire had been hired years ago as a receptionist and quickly moved up through accounting and human resources to her current position of Vice President of Everything, as Pauline called her. She knew more about some of the distributors’ contracts than most of the sales team, had negotiated a darn good deal on the group insurance policies, and was the only one in the factory who knew both the password for the ISP and the trick to resetting the flapper on that one toilet in the women’s room that kept running. She even kept up on truck maintenance calendars, far better than the series of surly fleet managers they’d been through over the past twenty years. She was, in short, a miracle of competence.

  Pauline looked at the coffee cake Claire had just deposited on her desk and imagined how much distance she would have to add to her run to burn off the calories in that small square of flour and sugar. She took a tiny bite, then pushed it away.

  “I told you. It’s evil,” Claire said.

  “I don’t believe in evil,” Pauline said.

  “Oh, I’m just kidding,” Claire said. “Take it. It’s just cake.” She waited a beat, and when Pauline made no move toward the cake, Claire flicked out a wiry wrist and plucked the plastic fork back. “Well, if you’re not going to eat it,” she said. Now, why was it that Claire could eat anything she wanted, and drink like a fish, for that matter, but still have the physique of a ten-year-old boy?

  “So, how’s Ice this morning?” Claire said between bites.

  “He’s all right,” Pauline said. “Hates staying home, but he’s supposed to just rest up before the surgery. I don’t know how this is going to work. He’s going to be climbing the walls if he has to sit in the house for two weeks.” She sighed. “I gotta go talk to Roy. Come with me?”

  “Sure,” Claire said. They stopped at the kitchen, and Claire cut another piece of coffee cake. (“For Roy,” she said, when Pauline looked at her.) They walked down the hallway leading to the shop floor, stopping before the heavy metal door to take two parkas from a wide rack of coats. They donned the coats and stepped through the factory entry, where the cold always took Pauline’s breath away, made her lungs actually ache with the chill. Fifty years she’d been breathing this ice. Fifty years it had never stopped hurting.

  They found Roy in his little office just inside the loading bay. He was staring at an Excel spreadsheet on his computer, scratching his head, and he looked up when they came in.

  “Oh, Lord,” he said. “I am being invaded.”

  Pauline was relieved to see that while Roy looked slightly ruffled, he was nowhere near complete panic—not yet—over the prospect of Johnny’s indefinite absence from the shop floor. Roy had been their operations engineer for more than a decade, and before that he’d been packing supervisor, and before that water feed tech, and before that—well, Pauline couldn’t even remember all the things that Roy had done at the factory. He’d been here a long time, that’s all she knew. And he did a lot.

  She regarded him—of late he’d put on a few pounds, she thought, but interestingly, he wore it well. He had a shag of dust-colored hair and a full beard a shade or two darker that he sometimes kept trimmed but often let grow to an alarming length—the beard length, Pauline knew, corresponding to the current state of his love life. A trimmed beard meant a new woman was in the picture; creeping growth meant the ship had sailed and he was back in his own lonesome port again. He wore glasses with thick black frames, and the effect of all that facial hair topped off with the concealing spectacles was one of a person trying very hard to hide from something, or perhaps hide from everything. Roy was like a yeti, Pauline thought. A furry, loyal yeti.

  As a young man, Roy had worked for the Times-Union as a typesetter, a job he dearly loved both for the technical prowess it required and for the pranking capital it offered. He took liberties with the editorials—usually the dry “in-depth” articles on state politics that you could bet a dollar nobody was reading—sometimes changing a word or two to see if anybody noticed: “public” to “pubic,” “election” to “erection,” and so on.

  He was married young; it didn’t take, but Ally, the daughter who had come from that union, was Roy’s pride and joy—”My best girl,” he often said. Ally called or texted her father at least once a day, and, under the terms of the more-or-less-amicable divorce, had come to stay with him every other weekend and every summer since she was a tiny kid. She was now in her first semester at UF, and Pauline didn’t think she’d ever seen a father who was crazier for his child than Roy. His desk was covered in photos of Ally: Ally going to her prom, Ally clutching her first driver’s license, Ally at her high school graduation. If you got him talking about Ally, you had to make sure you had some time on your hands. It was sweet, though. Pauline admired the bond he had with that kid. Envied it, really.

  But Roy had his share of troubles, too, and the biggest among them started on Christmas Eve in 1989, when a freak snowfall that had hit Jacksonville bunged up the driving conditions pretty good; nobody in town had any idea how to pilot an automobile on an icy road, and cars were sliding around the city like pucks on an air hockey table. Most of the accidents were minor, but not Roy’s. He’d been out with his buddy Nathan, driving around in Roy’s Nissan to look at the snow. They’d smoked a joint and then parked for a little while at the Treaty Oak on the south bank of the St. Johns, marveling at the ice crystals hanging like diamonds from the great tree’s limbs. They’d never seen anything like it.

  On the way home, the pot made Roy sleepy, and the unaccustomed whiteness of the snow-covered world blinded him. The next thing Roy knew, his Nissan had clipped the back of the car in front of them, spun around, hit the curb, and rolled down a sixty-foot embankment. Roy took a shard of glass in his left eye, but he walked away. Nathan survived, but he never walked again.

  Staggered with remorse, Roy had been—for almost thirty years now—carrying his accountability like a fat, rotting albatross. He devoted himself to doing everything in his power to care for Nathan, even after Blue Cross did the heavy financial lifti
ng and got Nathan set up with a power chair, a motorized car lift, and top-quality physical therapy. It wasn’t enough, as far as Roy was concerned. Nothing would ever be enough.

  In the early years after the accident, Roy visited Nathan almost every day at his parents’ home, bought him a Sega Genesis and a raft of game cartridges, even sneaked some fat doobies into Nathan’s nightstand when nobody was looking. “A little visit from Aunt Mary,” he told Nathan. “Gainesville Green. I drove down to get it.” Later, when Nathan wanted more independence, Roy helped him get settled in his own apartment, and since Nathan was by then taking classes at FCCJ and was even dating a bit (raucous girls—drinky types, adventure seekers, not the least daunted by the wheelchair), all of which left him little time for the occupational therapy he’d need to prepare for joining the workforce from a wheelchair, Roy paid half the rent.

  His own negligence behind the wheel had left his friend with half a body, he reasoned, so it was the least he could do, and never mind the fact that Roy had plenty of his own bills to pay, and child support for Ally. When the cable station started offering premium access for an additional thirty dollars a month, Roy signed Nathan up, and he paid for half. When the Internet took hold, Roy hooked Nathan up with an IBM tower and a CompuServe subscription, and he paid for half. When cell phones came out, he took Nathan to AT&T and told him to pick out his favorite. And Roy paid for half of that, too.

  It’s true that Nathan’s spinal injury had been a horrific blow—had left him maimed and limited in a way that Roy could never hope to understand, though God knew he tried. But it was also true that Nathan was a resolutely adaptable guy, stubborn and opportunistic, able to make the most acerbic but satisfying lemonade out of life’s lemons in the same way a cockroach can lose several of its legs and still drag itself quite smartly along the stovetop to raid the Fig Newtons you so foolishly left on the counter.

  So while Roy—who had lost 75 percent of the vision in his left eye from the accident, had trouble reading or studying, and had to give up his typesetting job to find work which required less close-up scrutiny—was working his way up the blue-collar ladder of Bold City Ice, Nathan transferred to UNF, earned a degree in communications, was never wanting for female companionship, and now worked in New Media Services at Citibank. And still Roy paid for half of Nathan’s rent, half of Nathan’s phone bill, and half of Nathan’s cable. It never occurred to Nathan to cut Roy loose, and it never seemed acceptable to Roy to ask for release. Had Nathan offered, Roy would have accepted. But until that day came, Roy kept paying. It was his penance, he said.