The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  “All right, listen,” she said instead. “Come to Home Depot with me. I trashed the bathroom this morning with hair color, and now I need to buy paint. And we’ll go to lunch. Tidbits. My treat.”

  Claire dragged the trash can back into place and then turned to look at Pauline. “Well, now I feel bitchy for complaining,” she said.

  “You are bitchy,” Pauline said.

  “I know, but …”

  “Just come to lunch.”

  Claire grinned. My word, this woman’s mood could swing on a dime! “Okay,” she said. “You’re the boss.”

  In Home Depot, Claire wandered off into hardware and Pauline headed to the paint department, where she picked out a chip of the same paint color she’d been using in the bathroom for two decades, a milky white called “Diaphanous.” Then she paused, studied the paint chips for a few moments, and put the white back in favor of a bold ice blue. “Impulse,” it was called. Why not? She brought a gallon of semigloss to the mixing counter, and while she waited for the guy to mix the paint, Claire returned with a length of chain and a combination lock.

  “Seven dollars,” she said. “Fridge problem solved.”

  “You’re asking for a mutiny, Claire.”

  “They can kiss my freckled white ass.”

  They paid for the purchases and left the store. Pauline drove to the Southbank, where they stopped at Tidbits to pick up sandwiches.

  “Let’s eat outside,” Claire said. “It won’t be too hot if we can find some shade.”

  They brought the sandwiches to a bench under a cypress near Friendship Fountain and sat looking across the St. Johns. Here at the edge of the river, it was warm, but not unbearable. On the opposite bank, the restaurants and shops of the Jacksonville Landing hunched at the river’s edge. A water taxi chugged stubbornly against the current. Pauline checked her phone for a message from Johnny. Finding none, she opened her email. Nothing from Sam Tulley, either.

  “You remember when they built that place?” Claire said, nodding toward the Landing.

  “Yup,” Pauline said. “I was in college. I came back and there it was.” She squinted against the sun.

  “Mike and I used to bring the kids there when they were little,” Claire said. “There was a video arcade. Seems like a long time ago.”

  “Last time I went was when we took Roy to the Irish pub there for his birthday last year,” Pauline said. “Remember that?”

  Claire rolled her eyes. It would have been a hard night for anyone to forget, especially Claire. Roy had had too much to drink and ended up singing a sloppy set of karaoke, during which he dedicated “Saving All My Love for You” to Claire, roundly embarrassing himself, Claire, and everyone else within earshot until Johnny had wrestled him down from the karaoke stage and taken him home. Pauline smiled at the memory. Poor Roy, she thought. Poor, sweet Roy.

  “Roy’s got such a thing for you,” she said. Claire pursed her lips and nodded. “Well?” Pauline said. “Is that such a bad thing?”

  “Ain’t nobody got time for that, Pauline,” Claire said.

  “It could be fun. You guys could be good together.”

  “I got three kids standing in line for my attention. I don’t need one more.” But Claire sounded a bit wistful. Pauline was debating whether to press the point when Claire gasped and grabbed Pauline’s arm. “Oh, my God,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Look over there.” Claire pointed directly across the river toward the Landing. “It’s Rosa and that jackass Owen Vickers,” she said.

  “Where?” Pauline squinted.

  “Right there. In front of Hooters. Standing by the water.”

  Pauline shielded her eyes and looked harder. There were indeed two people standing by the railing just in front of Hooters. They were pressed close together, and it looked like they might have been kissing. But it was too far, if you asked Pauline, for a positive ID.

  “How can you tell that’s Rosa?” she said skeptically. “It’s too far away.”

  “It’s Rosa,” Claire said firmly. “I’d know that little sass anywhere. And I know she was wearing that red shirt when she left home today. Watch,” she said. She took her iPhone out of her pocket and snapped a photo of the couple across the river. Then she enlarged the photo on the phone’s screen to zoom in on the image. “You see?” she said.

  Now it did indeed look like Rosa. Rosa in a passionate clinch with Owen Vickers.

  “Oh, I tell you what!” Claire said. “I’m going to wring that girl’s neck. I told her to stay away from him. You know how old he is?”

  “At least thirty,” Pauline guessed.

  “He’s thirty-two. And she’s eighteen!” Claire stood up and walked closer to the river. She waved her arms toward the couple across the water. “Rosa!” she shouted. “Get your butt back to the factory!”

  “Claire, she can’t hear you. It’s too far.”

  Claire scowled. “Well, she can get a text message, can’t she?” She angrily thumbed at the phone, then put it back in her pocket. She and Pauline watched as the girl across the way pulled back from the man she was embracing and reached toward her back pocket. She appeared to pull out a phone, examine it, and then look straight across the water toward Claire and Pauline. Claire stood stoically, arms crossed. After a moment, the two figures across the river left the railing and disappeared around the side of the restaurant behind them.

  “I’m going to get Roy to fire him,” Claire said. “He is preying on my daughter, Pauline. This makes me sick.”

  “Well, tell Roy to come up with a better reason than dating the receptionist,” Pauline said. “The legally adult receptionist. Last I checked that wasn’t against the law. I don’t need the union crawling all over us. Although I agree with you,” she added quickly, seeing Claire’s face, “it’s not what we want. He is too old for her.”

  Claire sighed and returned to the bench. “Pauline,” she said. “This is why I have gray hair. And here I am not even forty.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s just a little flirtation,” Pauline said. “Try not to pay any attention to it.” For her part, she tried not to pay any attention to Claire’s statement about her age. As if Pauline could forget that Claire was more than ten years younger! For Pete’s sake. Claire seemed to take every opportunity to remind her.

  “What am I going to do about that girl?” Claire was saying. “She has no sense, Pauline. Do you know what she did the other day? She spent her entire paycheck on a pair of sunglasses. Her entire paycheck. Prada sunglasses! She’s an eighteen-year-old receptionist! She’s supposed to be saving for art school, and she’s out buying Prada sunglasses. Oh, I could throttle her. Meanwhile Ethan’s failing algebra and the doctor’s telling me Chase is ADHD,” she continued. “I’ve been trying to believe he’s just a little brat. But it’s worse than that. So we’re starting medication. It’s making me a nervous wreck. Do you know what it feels like to have to medicate an eight-year-old child?” She looked at Pauline sadly. “He misses his dad, he says. Oh, that gets me. Mike was such an asshole to me. But he was awfully good to the kids. Of course they miss him.”

  “You’re a good mom,” Pauline said gently. “You’re doing the best you can.” Then, before she could stop herself, she asked the question. “Claire,” she said. “Have you ever regretted having children?”

  Claire snorted. “Every day,” she said.

  “No, seriously.”

  Claire thought about it. “Well, maybe not having children,” she said. “Having these children, though.”

  “You’re terrible.”

  Claire smiled, then peered at her curiously. “Why do you ask?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I guess I was just thinking about how we make these decisions when we’re so young, you know? Whether to marry a particular man or not, whether to have kids or not. Seems like there’s a lot of room for error.”

  Claire shook her head. “Girl, first of all, you are operating under the mistaken belief that everyone
decides whether or not to do these things. I didn’t decide to have kids. I had one too many Bartles & Jaymes, went skinny-dipping at Jax Beach, and got knocked up. Not a lot of strategy going on there.” She paused. “Have you ever regretted not having children?” she said.

  “No,” Pauline said quickly. “Well, possibly. Sometimes. I don’t know.”

  “Well, maybe it’s not too late,” Claire said.

  “I’m fifty!”

  “I know. But I’ve got a couple that I can let go cheap, if you’re interested.”

  “I was thinking—okay, tell me if this is crazy—but I was thinking maybe Johnny and I should offer to keep Corran’s baby for a while. Until he gets back on his feet. I mean, after we get Johnny through the surgery, of course. Is that nuts?”

  Claire looked at her, surprised. “A baby?” she said. “That’s a huge commitment, Pauline.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I mean, huge! And what do you mean by ‘a while’?”

  “Few weeks? Months? I don’t know. Whatever Corran needs, I guess. Johnny said Sharon’s considered having her, but she just can’t.”

  “What about work? What about all the OSHA shit? And your father? Lord. You’d freak out. You’d be overwhelmed. Trust me. Or worse, you’d get attached, Pauline. You won’t want to give her back. Or what if Corran can’t take her back? What if—God forbid—the drug thing and all, well … you know. You’d be, what, raising the poor thing?” Pauline felt foolish. The doubt in Claire’s face was eroding the plausibility of the whole idea. And her skepticism was contagious. She’s right, Pauline thought. It’s insane. It’s impossible.

  Pauline shook her head. “Oh, I know. It was just a silly thought. Johnny would probably resist. And anyway, I’m not mom material,” she said. “I’m too self-centered.”

  Claire studied her for a moment. “No you’re not,” she said finally. “You’re self-involved, but that’s not the same thing as self-centered.”

  “Well, thanks a lot.”

  “You just called yourself self-centered!”

  “You were supposed to disagree with me.”

  “And I did. So you’re self-involved. So what? That’s only because there are no children in your life demanding your involvement. Anybody would be self-involved if she had the chance.”

  Self-centered. Self-involved. Pauline didn’t really see the difference.

  “The difference,” Claire said, as if reading her mind, “is that a self-involved person can choose to let someone else in. I don’t think a self-centered person can do that.”

  Oh, for God’s sake. Pauline had had enough. The sandwich was dry, her Diet Coke was empty, and she had a wicked mosquito bite rising up on her ankle. Self-involved? What the hell? Claire was on quite the philosophical high horse over there, and Pauline was abruptly hot, bothered, and ready to get back to her office, where the specter of unopened emails beckoned.

  “Come on, Socrates,” she said. “Let’s go make the ice.” They gathered the trash and walked to the car. Pauline headed for the bridge, and Claire turned the AC to full blast and leaned forward to meet the rush of air. “Come on,” she said. “Come on! Will this heat ever let up, Pauline?”

  Pauline was too hot to answer, or to speculate, or to care.

  Back at the office, Pauline checked her email. There was one from Sam Tulley: Best place to park is on the downtown side. Near the stadium.

  Lord! Completely noncommittal! Was he asking her to go running with him, or wasn’t he? Fine, Sam Tulley. Just forget it. She wasn’t going to initiate a meetup, for God’s sake. If he wanted to ask her to go for a training run with him, then ask. Go ahead, ask! Because she’d already decided, anyway, that even if he did ask, she’d say no. She was a married woman! She couldn’t go out running around in the predawn with some overgrown boy. Not to mention that the idea of attempting a training run on the Hart Bridge, of all places, was completely insane. The bridge had no sidewalks! On the day of the actual Gate River Run, the police would close the bridge to car traffic and open up the lanes for runners. But without the benefit of that safety precaution, a run on the Hart Bridge on a foggy, dark weekday morning in a traffic lane, for heaven’s sake, was out of the question. Maybe he was dumb enough to take it on. But she wasn’t.

  She was glad, then, to have the distraction of billing and payroll to keep her occupied for the rest of the afternoon, and by the time she started to think about calling it a day, it was well after five. She wondered what Johnny was up to. She texted him—Send me a pic of Lucy?—but then realized it might be too late in Scotland for him to see it. She finished up a few more emails and was about to turn off her computer when another message came in. From Sam Tulley. No subject. One line in the body: Want to run it with me tomorrow?

  Well, well, well. Bingo. Pauline sat back in her chair and looked at the email triumphantly. She turned off the computer and drove home. She took General San Jose for a walk and heated up a Smart Ones meal in the microwave. She decided against painting the bathroom. Maybe tomorrow. She sipped a glass of red wine and ate her dinner in front of the news. Dow improves. Jaguars taking it on the chin. Heat wave continues—no break for Halloween. She poured another glass of wine and took a few sips but then thought about how it might affect her running pace in the morning, so she dumped the rest of the glass down the drain. She took a shower and tried not to look at the hair color stains on the bathroom wall. In bed, she turned on her iPad and pulled up Sam Tulley’s email. How many hours since he’d sent it now? Four. That should demonstrate sufficient nonchalance, right?

  Sounds good! she wrote. What time? Then she pushed Send.

  Thirteen

  Years ago, when Sharon was in nursing school, she had an instructor who fancied herself a drill sergeant in the Scots Guards. A butchy thing she was, all clenched jawline and hammy limbs. Her name was Jackson. Presumably she had a first name as well, but all anybody ever called her was Jackson—not even “Professor” or “Miss”—just Jackson. Sharon couldn’t stand the woman, but strangely, one of the things she most remembered about her nursing training was an expression this woman would use. Whenever Jackson took her students out for clinicals to gain patient experience, she expected everyone to hustle. Time wasted due to a dawdling work pace, Jackson maintained, was the mark of shame for a nurse; she wouldn’t tolerate it. “All I want to see are arseholes and elbows!” she’d shout as her students scurried out to the floors. “Move it!”

  Arseholes and elbows! Can you imagine? Sharon thought Jackson insufferably crude at the time, but as the years of her nursing career unfolded, she found the phrase sneaking up on her at times, often when she found herself literally running from room to room to wipe the bottoms and tend to the IVs of the labor and delivery patients in the overpopulated city hospital where she worked. Later, when she moved into hospice care, the pace slowed a bit, but still, in less pleasant times, as when she found herself changing an old man’s soiled undergarment or wrestling some ancient, gangly widow into and out of a wheelchair, the old phrase popped into her head again. Arseholes and elbows, she thought. That’s all I ever deal with.

  And now, Sharon thought, God love you, little Lucy, that’s what I’m dealing with today. Inside Corran’s tiny cottage, she kicked the bathroom door closed and turned on the space heater to knock back the chill. She put Lucy down on the bath mat, cleaned up her bulging diaper, and then let the baby pull herself up to the side of the tub to watch the water filling up. The warm odor of baby poo filled the tiny room. But there were worse things.

  “Pah,” Lucy said.

  “Bath,” Sharon said. “Bath, love.”

  “Pah.”

  Improvement, perhaps. Last Sunday, when Sharon was getting the bath ready, Lucy had watched the proceedings with great interest but had insisted the correct terminology was “muh” (sometimes extended to “muh-muh”) no matter how patiently Sharon had lobbied for “bath.”

  “All right,” Sharon had finally conceded. “Muh-muh it is, then.” Bu
t this weekend they were up to “pah.” She wondered whether Lucy had been given a bath since Sharon had left Port Readie Sunday evening to head back to Dunedin last week. She sighed. No use wondering; she knew the answer.

  She left the water running and reached under the sink for a roll of paper towels and a can of bathroom cleaner, both of which were exactly where she’d left them last week. She used these to execute a two-minute spot-cleaning around the little bathroom, just enough to more or less sterilize the toilet and vanity and to wipe down the edges of the tub and cabinets. The floor could wait another week. She gave it a cursory wipe with a damp paper towel to sweep up a few scattered hairs and dust bunnies. There. Clean enough. She squirted a burst of bubble bath liquid into the bathwater and then looked around for a clean towel, quickly concluding with annoyance that there were none. Why this should surprise her, she had no idea. God, did she have to do everything herself?

  In the weeks since Anna had been arrested and Corran had found himself on his own with Lucy, Sharon had been driving up to Port Readie from Dunedin every weekend. The idea was that she’d watch the baby and help him with a few things around the house while he picked up extra hours working as a hand on the ferry at Drumscaddle. But “a few things around the house” were turning into “full service housekeeping,” and she was spending good money every weekend buying household items for her son and his baby daughter: new towels, crib sheets, clothes for Lucy, even a shower curtain, for heaven’s sake. She bought the stroller, which after only two months looked like it had been through heavy combat, and with the way Corran dragged it up and down the hill she was not surprised. She bought the activity quilt, which she noted this evening was balled up in a corner of the living room and no doubt caked in spit-up, or worse. She didn’t know how much longer this could go on.

  There was a knock on the bathroom door and she opened it. Corran stepped in with a jar of baby food and a box of Weetabix. He wrinkled his nose.

  “Close the door,” Sharon said. “I’m trying to warm it up in here.”