The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  Claire had fits over it. “He’s taking advantage of you, Roy,” she told him, over and over. And to Pauline: “Why does he let himself get used like that?” Pauline looked at Claire’s hands, and at the wedding ring, given to her by her philandering dead husband, that still encircled her finger. Why indeed, Pauline thought.

  But Roy was a stayer, just like Claire. Roy had outlasted a raft of useless foremen, a boatload of shipping coordinators, a small army of inept packers. Roy could do it all, and he, like Claire, had become such an integral part of the whole ice concern that it was difficult to envision the plant without him in it. After all, there were four sets, and only four sets, of keys to Bold City Ice: one each for Pauline, Johnny, Claire, and Roy. When Pauline thought about the operations of the factory, it seemed to her that it came down to four corners, like the four legs of a table. Take any one of them away, and the table would tip. Take two, it would fall. And here they were, one down.

  “We’re coming to check on you,” Claire said to Roy now. She put down the coffee cake. “You surviving out here?”

  “Sort of,” Roy said. “For now.” He pointed through his office window to the shop floor beyond. “But going forward? This is going to be a problem.” He was referring to Johnny’s imposed hiatus. “I mean, Pauline,” Roy continued, “usually when he’s out, I have time to plan for it. Like when y’all go on vacation and such. This came on me so fast. I can do all his shit. But who’s going to do all my shit?” He gestured around his desk, picked up a shipping order, and let it flutter dramatically back down to the blotter.

  Then he raised one eyebrow the way he did when he was worried, and the movement called attention to Roy’s damaged left eye, the murky blur of the iris that should have been the same clear green as the right eye. Roy told her once that, despite his thick glasses, everything he saw out of his left eye was blurred nearly beyond recognition. He could see shapes and colors, Roy said, but no defining lines or details. So, you’re seeing only half the world? Pauline had asked him. I’m seeing all the world, Roy said, but it’s only half as good. Now he cocked his bushy eyebrow over the top of the glasses.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll get it covered out here. You want Ed from Sales?”

  “Pauline,” he said, putting his hands to his heart. “Please don’t do that to me. That boy’s so dumb he has to get naked to count to twenty-one.”

  “I disagree,” Claire said. “He’s quite sharp.”

  “Sharp as a bag of kittens,” Roy said.

  Pauline held up her hands. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll get you some more help out here, all right?”

  Roy finished chewing and looked at Claire. “There any more of that cake in there?” he said. He walked back to the admin wing with Pauline and Claire and dealt a deathblow to the dwindling coffee cake in the kitchen before retreating once again to the shop floor.

  If she had been in a decent frame of mind, the situation that unfolded at lunchtime might have struck Pauline as mildly amusing, or at least interesting: She’d sneaked out of her office just after noon with an idea to run a few errands, but just as she put the Prius in reverse to back out of the factory parking lot, Ford, the neighborhood drunk (well, one of them), appeared behind her car and promptly took a crocked header off his bicycle, no doubt because he was trying to ride with a recycling bin full of lemons propped on his handlebars.

  Ford had, for years, cornered the market on pilfering from Little Silver’s straggling but stubbornly productive fruit trees. Word was that he lived on the fruit, which Pauline always found implausible at best (how could you live on lemons?), and he certainly appeared robust enough this afternoon, thrashing around as he was behind Pauline’s car in a pile of dusty citrus, now effectively blocking her escape. She got out and went around to help him gather his spoils.

  “Don’t touch my lemons,” Ford said. He was an ungainly old man, gnarled as a cypress knee and prone to outbursts of either giddiness or fury, in equal measure and with no predictable pattern. Pauline was dismayed to see he was edging toward the latter of his two moods now. He righted his bicycle and scowled at her with the passionate indignation of the perpetually drunk.

  “I’m trying to help you, Ford,” Pauline said.

  “You’re trying to take my lemons.”

  “I’m not.” She bent over to pick up some of the fruit.

  “Don’t be stealing my lemons, baby!”

  For God’s sake! She straightened up and tossed the two lemons she was holding into his recycling bin, then glared at him. Baby! Who did he think he was? He righted the bicycle and stumbled around in a tight circle, gathering lemons and muttering. Baby. For real? A street sweeper rumbled past, and Pauline noted the irony while waiting for the noise of the mechanized brooms to subside. She couldn’t remember the last time the city had indulged Little Silver with a sweeper. It was only a shame the contraption couldn’t sweep up the sotted geezer before her, and his stupid lemons too.

  “You stealing my lemons,” he burbled. “You need to get your own lemons.”

  “I don’t want your lemons,” she snapped. “I just want to get out of here, and you’re in my way.”

  “Damn ice plant people. Damn Packy Knight,” Ford was muttering now. He was standing next to the bicycle, peering up at the factory. He seemed to have forgotten she was one of the ice plant people, and she set her jaw and didn’t answer. Did he know he was talking to Packy Knight’s daughter? Hard to tell, though Pauline certainly felt no need to clarify her identity. “This place, these people, they think they own Little Silver, you know what I’m saying?” Ford was saying. He shook his head. “I am telling you.” Pauline stooped to pick up the remaining lemons and pitched them back into the recycling bin. Sometimes, she decided, this neighborhood made her crazy; these kinds of battles were always springing up.

  She got back in her car wordlessly and waited for Ford to wobble his way out from behind it. She watched in her rearview mirror as he moved slowly down King Street. She was hot, and she was frustrated, but she felt strangely transfixed, watching the old man on his bicycle. There was something about him, something … reassuring? Yes, reassuring, she decided. Maybe it was his predictable righteousness; she found it comforting.

  She waited until he’d rounded a corner a few blocks to the south before she pulled out of the parking lot and headed for a route that would allow her to make a stop at the Publix on Baymeadows Road. Sometimes, if she was lucky, this particular Publix stocked Maynard’s Wine Gums. What made her think she should be lucky today she had no idea, because the last couple of months had proved that she was on anything but a lucky streak. Not that she was responsible for any of the recent disasters that seemed to be vying for top position lately. She could have neither caused nor prevented any of them. Still. Calling it bad luck seemed to help. Bad luck was a temporary thing. It could pass. It would pass.

  The wine gums. They had to be Maynard’s, imported from the UK—other brands, according to Johnny, were gastronomically inferior, though Pauline didn’t know how something so awful in the first place as a wine gum could have epicurean degrees of superiority. She couldn’t stand the things, ever since the first time she’d gone to Scotland with Johnny and he’d pressed her into eating one, and the darn thing was so chewy and gummy that it actually pulled a silver filling out of one of her back teeth. This actually worked to her advantage in the long run, because when she got back home and visited the dentist she was able to have the old silver filling replaced with a much more attractive white composite, which was a silly vanity, admittedly, though one she could not help appreciating. But wine gums! She renamed them “filling pullers” and never ate another one, but the same could not be said for Johnny, who, she believed, could happily exist entirely on bananas, beer, and wine gums, and probably would had he not married her and been forced to recognize common sense, at least some of the time.

  In Publix, she located the wine gums and felt through the bag to determine their consistency
. Not too hard. Good. Sometimes, probably owing to delayed shipping or lazy stocking, the candies aged to the consistency of a pink eraser, rendering them even less edible than they already were. Johnny was particular about his wine gums. They should be soft enough for teeth to sink into, tough enough to offer a satisfying fight. That’s why he loved Pauline, he often told her. She was like a wine gum. She never knew quite how to respond to this particular endearment. She brought the candies to the checkout line, and while she was waiting, she texted him. All good? She held her breath and waited. She pictured him out in the garage on Watchers Island, probably still banging at that piston situation. The reply came right away: Yep. Man of few words. She checked Scrabble on her phone; it was still Corran’s turn. She couldn’t move. She looked at the last few words they’d played: BUSY. FINE. GOOD. That’s it, Corran. One day at a time.

  The checkout lane was moving slowly. She catalogued the list of tasks still waiting for her attention at the factory today, then worried that maybe she didn’t have her priorities straight. Her husband was dealing with a brain tumor, and here she was preoccupied with shipping receipts. Maybe she should just stay home with Johnny for the two weeks prior to the surgery. What if he had another seizure and nobody was there to help him? Tosh had said the possibility of that was remote, as long as he took the medication. But still. Pauline should reassign some of the ops crew and free Roy up a little bit to help with fleet management. And maybe Claire could get Ed from Sales to take over payroll for a couple of weeks so that Claire could then deal with the distributor correspondence that was no doubt piling up in Pauline’s email in-box. And maybe Rosa would have intuited a need by now to get focused, stop flirting with the drivers, and do something useful—It’s all hands on deck now, Rosa! Four-alarm emergency, can’t you see that? And now here Pauline went with the maybes again.

  Or maybe OSHA would just shut the whole factory down. There! Problem solved.

  The Publix line finally moved. Pauline rummaged in her purse to find her wallet and saw the crumpled brown napkin with Bob Logan’s phone number. She smoothed it flat and slipped it into her billfold; she’d indeed be a dutiful daughter and talk to Packy about it the next time she went to see him, which—note to self—should probably be soon. Wait; she’d forget it for sure if it was stuffed out of sight in the wallet. She dug for it, paid for the wine gums, and got back into the Prius. She tucked the brown napkin into a clip on the passenger-side visor and headed back to the factory.

  The rest of the afternoon was a headache. Ed from Sales was having a panic attack because the roll-up booth graphics he’d ordered for the trade show on Friday had come back from the printer looking like “fried poop,” or so he said. The colors were off, he complained, and the Bold City logo was out of register. And he was right, Pauline thought, the darn thing was a mess, but there was little they could do about it now, with less than two days to correct it. Except fire the printer. Which she made a note to do. Then the Wi-Fi went down for nearly an hour and Claire had everyone on edge with the language she was using—loudly—as she battled it out with some poor help desk tech who was probably in Mumbai working the graveyard shift. By three o’clock, when the second customer service rep they’d hired this month quit abruptly, claiming a child-care issue, Pauline had had enough. She was thinking she should get back to the house, check on Johnny. Plus, the tantalizing thought of a second run began to wage a battle in her mind with the prickling of guilt she felt over the amount of work still piled on her desk.

  Ah, but why shouldn’t she? One of the few—very few—benefits that came with aging, Pauline decided, was the slightly devil-may-care attitude she found herself taking more and more in matters of propriety, responsibility, or even morality, for that matter. Do what you want! she told herself. Life’s too short! After all, she’d hit fifty, which meant that more than likely she was well past the halfway point in this particular rodeo. When she was forty-nine, she could still convince herself that it was possible, if unlikely, that she would one day be a ninety-eight-year-old woman. But a centenarian? Not so likely. She’d googled it. She had a 17 percent chance of living to a hundred. But my God. Did she even want to live to a hundred? Shriveled up and dried out and dribbling down the front of her Velcro-close duster? Of course not. Then what did she want?

  “I want to get the hell out of here and go run,” she said out loud. She texted Johnny, told him she’d be home soon. She buzzed Rosa out front and told her she’d be gone for the rest of the day. She drank a bottle of water in ten quick gulps. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Then she plugged her iPod into her computer and quickly arranged a new playlist in iTunes. Time to turn it up. Three miles, thirty-four minutes, allowing for warm-up and cool-down. Put the Kanye and Eminem up closer to the beginning, stack the middle with Beastie Boys and Green Day, round it out with AC/DC and Aerosmith. There. She was going to dream until her dreams came true.

  She stopped by Claire’s cubicle on the way out. “You good?” Pauline said. “I’m taking off early.” Claire glanced at her watch and said nothing, but Pauline saw a flicker of annoyance pass over her assistant’s face. And there it was—that old tension, palpable as twine. At Bold City Ice, Pauline was the owner; she could arrive when she wanted, leave when she wanted, do what she wanted. She’d take her Prius back over the bridge to sunny Watchers Island, complete her run, maybe hit the grocery store. She and Johnny would open a bottle of wine while cooking dinner, then they’d watch some television and she’d do a little stretching before climbing into bed with her iPad.

  Claire would be stuck at her desk until five, then would fight the worst of the traffic back home to Baymeadows, rush her kids through homework and pizza, and fall asleep in front of the television with a basket of unfolded laundry at her feet. Funny how this worked. Claire was the closest thing Pauline had ever had to a best friend, and yet there was this—this—thing they could never quite get around, this obstacle they could never surmount. Pauline was the boss. Claire was not. Well, text her tonight, Pauline told herself. It was just like everything else. Pretend it’s all fine, and it will be.

  The phone on Claire’s desk buzzed.

  “Can you catch Pauline, Mama, when she goes past you?” came Rosa’s voice.

  “She’s right here,” Claire said.

  “There’s a lawyer up here, Pauline,” Rosa said. “He wants to see you.”

  Shoot! Of course. Knowles & Frusciante, the firm they’d hired in the wake of the accident. She should have remembered this appointment. Claire raised her eyebrows.

  “I forgot about this,” Pauline said. “They said they were going to start auditing our records today. I guess somebody needs to get all the work logs out and get this guy set up in the conference room or something.” She paused, hoping that Claire might offer to meet with the lawyer in her stead. Claire kept her face expressionless. “That sounds like a big job,” Claire said; then she turned to her computer and started typing.

  Great. There went the second run. Pauline sighed, hitched up her purse, and went out to the lobby to meet the lawyer, whom she found sitting on a sofa adjacent to the reception desk, jiggling his knee. He looked like he was twenty years old.

  “Are you Mrs. MacKinnon?” he said. He stood up.

  “Yes,” Pauline said.

  He opened his wallet and pulled out a Knowles & Frusciante business card, which he handed to her. “I’m Sam Tulley. They sent me over to start a review of your work logs? For your appeal?” Pauline looked at the card, and then back up at him. He was tall, with clear green eyes and a dark boyish haircut. “For OSHA?” he added, as if she didn’t know.

  “Yep,” she said. She tried to hide the impatience in her voice. How old was this kid? What was that overpriced law firm doing, anyway, sending over the junior guy? Or was this the intern? The temp? She looked again at his card. The initials J. D. were clearly printed after Sam Tulley’s name. Well, fine. He was a lawyer, then. The youngest lawyer on the face of the earth.

  “I was just about t
o head out,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I blanked on our meeting.”

  He looked a little dejected. “They said it was important that I begin today. That it might take a while? And we want to be ready? You know?”

  Oh, Lord have mercy. “I can get you started,” she said. “There’s the conference room.” She gestured to the room just off the lobby. “We can work in there. Let me get my notes.” Sam Tulley nodded appreciatively and headed for the conference room.

  “Pauline!” Rosa whispered, as soon as he was out of earshot. “He’s hot!” She was watching the young lawyer through the conference room’s open door.

  “Mind yourself, Rosa,” Pauline said. “Don’t make me go get your mother.” She went back to her office and picked up a notebook and one of the stacks of operations logs she’d been poring over since the accident. By the time she made it back to the conference room, Tulley had a laptop booted up and had resumed his knee jiggling.

  “This is quite a building here,” he said, attempting pleasantries, it seemed. “It’s old?”

  “Nineteen twelve,” she said. She decided to follow his lead. Friendly, okay. Fine. None of this was his fault, after all. “It started as an ice factory but for a while before our company took it over, it was used as an orphanage.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. Sometimes we hear ghost babies crying.”