The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  “What time does she get finished?” he asked Toole.

  “Well …” Toole seemed confused. He looked up at the ceiling as though he might find the answer there. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

  An orange cat came over and jumped into Johnny’s lap. He petted it absently. Toole turned toward them, holding three tea bags. “Do we really want tea?” he asked. “Is that what we want?”

  “I’m thinking not,” Johnny said. Toole called Sharon and told her to meet them at the pub when she got off work. “Johnny’s here,” he said into the phone. “And a friend of his.” He paused, then lowered his voice. “You did? Well, I don’t remember you telling me that.”

  Toole insisted on walking—said it was part of his therapy—so they strolled the frigid five blocks from the house to the Deoch an Doris, a stout old watering hole that had been fortifying the locals for as long as Johnny had been coming to Dunedin and two hundred or so years before that as well. It had changed in some ways—signs advertising Wi-Fi and a smoke-free establishment having taken up residence in one of the street-facing windows, for example, the former widely appreciated and the latter categorically ignored—but in other ways it was exactly the same as it had been every other time Johnny had seen it. Same ancient carpeting. Same dark pine paneling. Same cramped seating and dim lighting. Same curved wooden bar, where baskets of bagged crisps fought for space among pub mats, ashtrays, and menus. The Deoch an Doris—the “drink at the door.”

  By the time they sat down, Johnny’s hands were brittle, his eyes were watering, and he was cursing the impotence of his flimsy Carhartt jacket against the winds channeling down the Clyde and through the crooked streets of Dunedin. “So, how’s ice, then?” Toole was saying. He held up three fingers to a ponytailed young woman behind the bar, who nodded.

  “It’s okay,” Johnny said. He told Toole about the accident and the OSHA case.

  “Och, sorry, then,” Toole said.

  “Yeh.”

  The bartender approached and placed three pints on the table. “How ye, Toole?” she said. “Better now, Janie,” he replied. She rolled her eyes and walked away, and Toole nudged Chemal. “Look at that bahoochie, eh?” he said. “See, now if I was a younger man …” He let his sentence trail off and glanced at Chemal knowingly. Chemal gazed at Janie’s bahoochie as if contemplating some of the things a younger man might do with it. Then he turned back to gape at the pint frothing in front of him on the table.

  Toole sighed. “If I was a single man, I’d ask that one out,” he said.

  “Toole, a young girl like that wouldn’t go out with an old married sot like you if you were fartin’ ten-bob notes,” Johnny said.

  Toole looked injured. “You’re almost as old as I am,” he said.

  “Which is why I’m not making an ass of myself after young girls,” Johnny said. They looked across the room at Janie. She was indeed a lovely girl. With a lovely bahoochie, in fact. As if she felt them watching her, she looked up and shot them the bird.

  “Ice,” Chemal whispered. He nodded at the beer. “Seriously? I can drink this?”

  Toole waved his hand dismissively. “Drink up, lad!” he said. “You’re in Caledonia!” Chemal grinned and tipped up the glass.

  “And how’s physical therapy, then?” Johnny asked Toole.

  “Ah,” Toole said. “Pffft. I’m so sick of physical therapy. When I’m not on the receiving end myself for these bloody knees, I’m administering it to patients. And it’s a day’s work, I tell you. Have you ever had to lift a fifteen-stone woman out of a swimming pool?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Well, it’s hell on the back, I tell you. Some job.”

  We all, Johnny decided, want to be something other than what we are.

  “So, listen, then. I’ve been reading about your Disney there,” Toole said.

  Toole had a fascination with Walt Disney World, a fact Johnny could never quite reckon. A grown man, fantasizing about puppet creatures and princesses? It didn’t compute. But Toole seemed to think that the most incredible and fortunate result of Johnny’s move to Florida was that he and Pauline lived within two hours of the Magic Kingdom. “Do ye go often, then?” he asked Johnny every time he saw him. Johnny had been to Disney exactly once—when Pauline’s sister Caroline had strongarmed the entire family to go for a long weekend to entertain her girls. And once was enough. “Not very often,” he always told Toole.

  “You know what they have at Disney?” Toole said now. “Smellitzers.”

  “What?”

  “Smellitzers. They’re these patented contraptions that pump aromas into the parks. Like fresh cookie smells, or oranges, or like that. It’s a marketing thing, see. They get you in those shops to buy cookies whether you want to or no.”

  “Manipulative bastards.”

  “No, no. They’re genius, I tell you! Brilliant. They’ve extended the bounds of conventional selling.”

  “Sensory marketing,” Chemal piped up.

  “Exactly, lad.”

  “So, what’s next?” Johnny said. “Hand jobs to sell condoms?” Chemal snorted.

  “Well, now you’re being crude,” Toole said. “They don’t sell condoms at Disney.”

  “I bet they do,” Johnny said.

  “Rubbish. It’s not that kind of place.”

  “It’s the Happiest Place on Earth, Toole,” Johnny said. “How do you think it got that way? They’re all shagging in those underground tunnels, that’s how. I bet you can pay extra at the gate for a run at Snow White in her castle there.”

  “That’s Cinderella’s castle.”

  “Both of them, then. A threesome.”

  “You’re sick, Johnny,” Toole said. “You dinnae ken about Disney.”

  “Ah, you’ve never even been,” Johnny said. In fact, Toole had never been outside the UK. Johnny had long ago laid down a standing invitation to Sharon and Toole to come visit, to stay in the guest room on Watchers Island and enjoy a real Florida vacation, but so far they’d never taken him up on it.

  “I’ve read enough,” Toole said. “I bet I ken more about it than you.”

  “I won’t argue with that.” The pub was filling up now, and each time the door opened a wave of cold air shuttled in around Johnny’s legs. Chemal had reached the bottom of his pint glass with alarming speed and was now looking a little unsteady on his stool.

  “Let’s get this lad some food,” Johnny said to Janie when she passed by.

  “Cod and chips?” she said.

  “That’ll do.” She made for the kitchen.

  “Toole,” Johnny said finally.

  “Yeh?”

  “How’s Corran?”

  Toole sighed. “Well,” he said. “He’s definitely off the junk, if that’s what you’re asking. Thank God. But he’s got his hands full up there with the wee one. Katie.”

  “Katie?” Johnny said. “I thought her name was Lucy.”

  Toole stared at him vacantly, then popped himself in the forehead. “Why do I do that?” he said. “Lucy. It’s Lucy.”

  “I told you. You’re getting old, Toole.”

  “Sometimes I think I’m not getting there, Johnny. I am there.”

  Toole looked genuinely downcast, and Johnny was starting to wonder if he was needling his old friend too much, but then a familiar peal of laughter rang across the pub, and Johnny looked up to see Sharon in conversation with a couple who were evidently heading out of the pub just as she was heading in. He watched the way she gripped the man’s coat sleeve as she talked to him, the way she folded the woman into an embrace when they said goodbye. Sharon was a toucher, he remembered that. Any interaction with her was a full-body experience: rubbed shoulders, squeezed hands, patted knees.

  She took off her coat and hung it on a rack near the door. She had put on a little weight, it seemed, and the effect was quite lovely, making her face softer and her curves fuller. She looked across the pub and caught Johnny’s eye. Ah, Sharon. The awareness that he was
still half in love with his ex-wife was nothing new to Johnny. But he had come to terms with it, savored it, even. After all, it was nothing like the love he felt for Pauline, which rarely wavered, even during the bouts of ennui and the occasional prickly battles that came with the territory of a long marriage.

  Still, the past he shared with Sharon could cast a powerful spell at times, especially times like this one, as he felt the warming effects of the beer, as he watched her move across the pub toward their table, and as he was pulled off his stool into an unreserved hug that left him wobbling, a little off balance. He had a fleeting awareness of her breasts—or were they prostheses? She’d had breast cancer, he knew that. Sharon. He held her a moment longer. When they backed away from each other he noticed her eyes were brimming, but she blinked quickly and turned her head. She moved over to Chemal and gave him a hug, too. His eyes were wide over her shoulder.

  “Welcome,” she said to Chemal. “Whoever you are.” She sat down next to Toole.

  “This is Chemal,” Johnny said.

  “He helps with driving,” Toole said. He looked at Chemal proudly. Toole was getting lit.

  “What, Johnny can’t drive?” Sharon said.

  Johnny held up his hands. “Long story,” he said. “Maybe later.” Sharon looked at him quizzically but, thankfully, let it go.

  “Well, welcome back, anyway,” she said. “Finally.” She waved over to Janie at the bar and held up a finger for a pint. “You’re like the prodigal father.”

  “Not as bad as that,” he said. “It’s not like he was missing me.” Sharon didn’t disagree. She settled in then, asking for all the latest updates from Florida. Warm there? Lovely. And the factory? Och, I’m sorry. She seemed to take to Chemal right away, and Johnny watched with admiration the way she slipped into an easy banter with the kid, telling him flatly to lower his voice when it started climbing but then picking up the conversation again right where they’d left off, sparing him embarrassment and distraction. They went right through the KISS Army, which Sharon somehow knew all about, and continued on into a series of topics that left Johnny baffled: Instagram? Memes? Snapchat? He watched her. He ordered another pint. He felt himself becoming pleasantly inebriated.

  By the time they made it back to the house, they’d consumed £87 worth of beer and cod between the four of them and had decided to postpone Port Readie until the morning. It was getting late, Sharon pointed out, and there was no point driving in the dark after a load of lager, especially since Johnny’s driver, unaccustomed to the alcohol, was by now blaringly, shufflingly drunk. Chemal had to be pointed immediately to a twin bed in the extra room upstairs—Corran’s old room—which, Sharon announced, he’d be sharing with Johnny.

  “I’m in, too, then,” Toole said, once they’d gotten Chemal dispatched. “I’m knackered. See you in the morn.” He kissed Sharon and slapped Johnny on the shoulder, then went to bed.

  Sharon waited until he left the kitchen, then turned to Johnny.

  “So, what’s this about then?” Sharon said.

  “What?”

  “You not driving.”

  “My eyes are bad,” he offered lamely. “I need new glasses.”

  She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and offered him one.

  “Aren’t you a nurse?” Johnny said. He took the cigarette.

  “I’m a nurse who smokes a cigarette now and then, and you’re a man who’s lying,” she said. She put an ashtray on the table between them. “You think I can’t tell there’s something more to this story?” She arched her eyebrows and looked at him.

  “Brain tumor,” he said. “Benign. Probably. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m having surgery when I get back.”

  Sharon’s eyes were wide and bright in the dim kitchen light. “Oh,” she said. They were quiet for several moments. She reached out and took his hand.

  “You cut your hair short,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me you just noticed this now.”

  “Noticed it as soon as I saw you at the pub.”

  “But you waited until Toole went to bed to comment on it.”

  “That I did.” He reached across the table and touched one of the curls above her ear. “I like it,” he said.

  Sharon rolled her eyes. “How’s Pauline?” she said.

  “She’s running all the time now,” Johnny said. “You should see her.” One of the most unexpected circumstances of his second marriage was that Sharon and Pauline seemed to genuinely like each other. Or at least, Pauline seemed to genuinely like Sharon, and Sharon seemed to genuinely … well … tolerate Pauline. It was nothing personal, she’d once told Johnny. She’s a lovely woman, she said. We just come at the world from different angles, you know? Johnny did know. Pauline, for her part, was friendly to Sharon almost to the point of being cloying, which was altogether a shock to Johnny, as he’d never known Pauline to display such obsequiousness to anyone else. She’s the mother of your child, Pauline had once told him, almost reverently. She deserves my respect.

  “Oh, don’t tell me about Pauline’s running,” Sharon said now. “I can barely get my fat ass into my pants anymore.”

  “Your ass looks fine to me.”

  “Don’t be looking at my ass.”

  “You brought it up.” They grinned at each other like high-schoolers. She shook her head. “All right, so. We’ll drive up to Port Readie tomorrow. I’ve taken a couple of days off, but I need to be home by Wednesday.”

  Johnny nodded. “Wednesday’s good. We fly home on Thursday. Thanks for coming along.”

  She snorted. “I go every weekend. Help with Lucy. But I’m happy to jump in with you two for a change rather than have to drive myself.”

  “Why doesn’t he bring the baby down here?”

  “He doesn’t like to come to the city. Temptations, he says. Plus, he hasn’t a car.”

  “He’s really clean then?”

  “Seems to be. I’m hopeful this time. I think that’s why he liked the rigs. Kept him away from the smack, you know? But now there’s Lucy …” Her voice trailed off, and she shrugged. “He’s got a lady in the village who keeps Lucy during the week, and then I come up to help on weekends. It’s not easy.”

  Johnny sighed. “I know I haven’t been good at keeping in touch.”

  “I half thought you were dead.” She looked at him sternly. “And listen. About this brain tumor business? You can’t let it beat you.”

  “I’m trying not to.”

  “We’re survivors, Johnny. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I know you are.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette and looked at him. “Listen,” she said. “I’ve got scars from here to here.” She gestured from one armpit to the other, across her chest. “Total mastectomy. You know that, right? Both of them—gone.”

  Johnny didn’t know how to respond. Of course, he remembered when she was going through treatment some years ago, but the baldness of her statement was startling. Leave it to Sharon to present something so personally tragic with such offhand bluntness. God, she was something. Cast iron, this one. And something else occurred to him then: This was the second time today he’d discussed scars in this kitchen. Wounded people, all of us, he thought.

  “Ah, Sharon,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s a shame. They were prize, weren’t they?” She started to laugh. “So I’ve gone without for a while. But now I’m thinking about reconstruction. Is that silly? My age? I don’t know. I just sort of miss them. I’m sure Toole does, too, but he’s kind enough not to mention it.” Johnny wasn’t sure what to say to that, and the discomforting lunacy of sitting half-drunk in a dark Scottish kitchen while having a chat with his ex-wife about her lost breasts was beginning to dawn on him. She must have realized it, too. She stopped laughing. She leaned forward and looked at him carefully. “The point, Johnny,” she said, “is that you don’t take no for an answer. Cancer or no cancer. You just keep going.” She got up and hugged him hard. “Now. You’re
sharing Corran’s room with Chemal. So go to bed, you arse, before somebody wakes up and sees us two old farts flirting,” she said.

  “Is that what we’re doing?”

  “Well, I don’t know about you.” She smiled at him and left the kitchen. She went upstairs. When she opened her bedroom door he could hear Toole snoring, and then the door closed again and all was quiet in the kitchen on Boscombe Road. Johnny finished his cigarette and made his way up the stairs to the bathroom. He took his steroids and peed on the sugar strip. Then he brushed his teeth and fumbled through the dark hallway to the room at the end, where now, just like long ago, a teenage boy lay sleeping.

  Eleven

  Johnny had developed a theory that insomnia was really a form of misguided self-preservation, an innate revulsion for the deathlike trance of sleep. How else could you explain it? It made no sense. There you were, stretched out in a bed with every comfort, weariness in every limb, but unable to tip your consciousness over the edge to slumber. He could see it sometimes, the cool soft fabric of dreams, there in the distance, but so often he just couldn’t get there. He tried listening to white-noise recordings through headphones. He tried drinking less than usual. He tried drinking more than usual. He tried pestering Pauline for sex, hoping the release would bring sleepiness. He tried full darkness and nightlights, electric blankets and Benadryl, earplugs and early rising. He loathed sheep, having once hit one of the damn things outside Paisley, so he counted Chevelles instead, saw them prowling under an oak canopy on a Florida back road. One hundred Chevelles. Two hundred. Six hundred. Nothing worked.

  When he was at home, after a few hours of staring at the ceiling, he’d often tip up on one elbow to watch Pauline sleep, and though this was soothing and restful in its way, he’d usually end up getting up to watch a movie, or to noodle with some little widget in the garage, or to puzzle over one factory issue or another—investing in a new water treatment system, for example. Or automating the shrink-wrap system to save money but having to lay off three good employees in the process. Or surviving an OSHA fine. And this last would keep him up and pacing even longer.