Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  Neither of us said a word until she asked, “Do you want to know why?”

  “I do.”

  She didn’t reply immediately. There was a long pause in which I heard the passersby outside.

  “I was sitting at Stephanie’s having lunch with a friend one day,” she finally began. Stephanie’s is a restaurant on Newbury Street a few blocks from my place.

  “It felt like my whole life was falling apart. My marriage was a wreck. Things weren’t going right at the clinic. Everything was just coming down on me, you know?”

  She paused, still staring down.

  “We were on the outdoor patio. It was a warm spring day, and you came walking toward us. You were on the other side of the street, and you and Harry stopped and waited for the light to change. You were standing there not really paying attention to anything, and Harry sat right beside you.”

  Another pause. She seemed more collected now, and she looked across at me with wet, red eyes.

  “And you did this thing without even really realizing it. You reached your hand down and pulled Harry’s muzzle against your leg. You just kind of rubbed him for a moment, not even thinking about it. The light turned and he gazed up at you, and then the two of you just started walking together.”

  She was gaining momentum here, more the Dr. Bendock I knew than this woman Pam who had just broken down crying in the middle of the afternoon in my house. Her gaze was fixed on me now.

  “And it just kind of hit me at that moment, randomly but not really, that, yeah, this is why I do what I do, not to argue with some know-it-all about a five-dollar hike in our grooming charge, but because of that exact scene—you and Harry and what the two of you had together.”

  By now I’ll confess that I went from annoyed to interested, which is not as long a journey as I might have thought. You think you know someone, standing with them in the confines of a small veterinary exam room over the course of ten years, across all the many seasons of a wonderful dog’s life. But all you really know is his or her silhouette, the vaguest outline. The vividness of what burns just beneath, you have no idea.

  “Then I don’t know what came over me,” Pam continued. “That afternoon, I walked down to Hermès and got the tie.”

  She pronounced it differently than the way I had, more French, accenting the second syllable, which I assumed was more correct.

  “I bought the card at the stationer on Boylston Street right afterward. You made me smile at Stephanie’s on a day I didn’t think I could smile, so that’s what I wrote. I sent it the next day, April 15, tax day. There was a long line at the post office, and I almost walked away and stopped the whole thing. I’ve never done anything like it. Never even thought about anything like it.”

  What I was quickly learning about the Pam I didn’t know, as opposed to the Dr. Bendock I did, was that if I didn’t speak, she filled the void. I kept my mouth shut.

  “You did something nice for me, so I wanted to do something nice for you,” she said. “Then, right after I did it, Harry got really sick and I’m thinking ‘Oh no.’ The timing couldn’t have been worse for anybody. I just had to put the whole thing away and not let you know.”

  Then she added, “I hope it wasn’t a big deal to you.”

  Nah, no big deal. It had barely registered. All I’d done was turn every single relationship I had with every woman I knew completely upside down in the search for a secret admirer. I’d made a total fool of myself in front of countless numbers of people. I had obsessed over it for weeks. Not a big deal at all.

  We talked for a while about the vagaries of life and the unfairness of fate. We talked about how nice it would be if differences could be bridged, but too often they only divide. We talked about where we each had been, where we were now, and where we might be headed. We talked as the light from the tall windows grew pale and the room grew cool.

  The contrasts kept flashing in my brain, vividly so, as if on a giant LED sign—my city life and her suburbia, my independence and her massive family responsibilities, my relative lack of any relationship baggage and her soon-to-be ex-husband. In the end, as she headed reluctantly for the door, I’m not exactly sure what was on her mind, but I’m positive what was on mine: alluring as she was, Pam and I would never be.

  8

  Pam and I had just wrapped up an afternoon of house hunting with dinner at a small Mexican restaurant in the far-flung suburb where we were looking. I may be the most self-involved person I’ve ever met, but even I drew the line at asking her kids to leave their school and everything familiar so we could move closer to Boston.

  It was there, in a booth in Sierra’s with a pretty damned good basket of nacho chips between us, that Pam first mentioned Abigail’s second-grade science fair project, which involved the incubating and hatching of chicken eggs. Roughly four years had passed since that afternoon in my Boston apartment when I’d learned she was the secret admirer who had mailed me the tie, four occasionally trying years, sometimes joyous years, always eventful years, each of them leading, even when they weren’t, to the immovable fact that one day we would combine our lives and see where it all went from there.

  “That sounds fun,” I said absently, not really paying attention—and believe me, I had my reasons for being distracted.

  First off, I worked for a newspaper, and this was the late winter of 2009, the doomsday period for just about every major American daily, most especially mine, the Boston Globe. Specifically, I worked as the metro editor, running the vast bulk of the news operation, managing the 120 or so reporters and editors who provided the backbone of our daily report. In my job, I knew something that most others didn’t, which is that the Globe was hemorrhaging money, that advertising had plummeted because of the miserable economy, that circulation was continuing to plunge because the technology-savvy residents of greater Boston could read us online for free. I was only too aware that the consequences for the newspaper to which I had devoted pretty much my entire adult life were going to be deep and they were going to be dire.

  There would be layoffs, severe cuts in the news hole, harsh decisions about what we continued to cover and what we left alone. In early April, the paper would publish a story that exceeded every worst fear: the New York Times, owner of the Globe since 1993, was preparing to shut us down if it couldn’t wring major givebacks from the unions and tens of millions of dollars in cuts elsewhere in the enterprise. Boston without the Globe—it would have been ludicrous if it wasn’t so frightening, and suddenly possible.

  Even a few years out from the stock market crash of autumn 2008, it’s easy to forget how bad things had become during that miserable stretch of total uncertainty. Major companies were cutting staff by the thousands. Small businesses were letting longtime workers go. Big banks were teetering on the precipice. If you hadn’t already lost your job, you worried that you were about to. Couples sat at kitchen tables slashing through the small luxuries before taking the ax to basic necessities. 401(k) accounts had shriveled in half. Foreclosures soared. Pension plans were going under. Even big, beefy stalwarts such as General Motors were heading into bankruptcy. One late night, I sat in side-by-side leather chairs in the hunter green study of a wealthy Beacon Hill resident whom I was trying to convince to buy the Globe. He told me he had literally cashed money out of the stock market at desperate lows because he thought it possible his family could end up sleeping on Boston Common. You knew the economy was in free fall when an absurdly successful guy who lived in a six-story mansion is scared.

  And in that environment of loss, Pam and I were trying to build something new, which was a future together. It hadn’t been a particularly smooth ride from my living room in Boston on that day of the discovery to this late-night dinner in her suburban town west of the city, but it was by every measure an eventful one. We hesitated for a good year or more at first. Pam was going through a divorce, feeling every bump, every pull, every moment of strain along the way. I was wandering from steak house to steak house, living life
one day, one night, one meal at a time, with no grand plan.

  Pam and I made a good solid run at things, and they were great until the day they weren’t, which is when we gave it a rest, perhaps for good. Pam was feeling guilty about her failed marriage and its impact on her two daughters. I was scared out of my mind about pretty much everything that Pam represented: the responsibility, the house in a distant suburban town, the two young girls who were smart, expressive, and lacking even the slightest sign of interest in me.

  Actually, the girls, they terrified me. On a child familiarity scale of 1 to 10, one being, say, Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, 10 being Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins, I was hovering in the 1s and 2s. It probably didn’t help that the girls weren’t exactly demure. They were outspoken on just about everything. They were emotional. They liked nothing about baseball or golf or basketball, meaning the things I liked. They didn’t ever want to go to Friendly’s for ice cream. (I’d thought that part would be easy.) They couldn’t be bribed with pasta twirling in the North End or the popcorn guy at Fenway Park. They were avid horse riders, American Girl doll fanatics, and basically fussed over names for hundreds, even thousands of animals, real and imagined. They loved little more in life than their mother’s home cooking. When they paid attention to me, it was mostly to repeat that their mother was, in their stern words, “Ours, not yours.” I had a lot to learn.

  Still, Pam and I kept finding our way back to each other. For me, clarity arrived in the midst of a classic September pennant race. I was sitting in my regular box seats at Fenway when a casual friend, a reasonably well-known guy-about-town, stopped by to say hello. I knew him enough to enthusiastically talk over golf plans but not so well that we’d ever consummate them. Anyway, on that night, I asked the whereabouts of his fiancée, a woman, in truth, with much more to offer than him. The guy was in his early fifties, never married, and had been engaged to this extremely nice teacher for the past four or five years.

  “Yeah, that didn’t work out,” he said, grimacing.

  And finally I saw it. Of course it didn’t, and the next one wouldn’t either, nor would the one after that. He was that type—the guy who couldn’t commit—and that type was everywhere. There was an editor at the Globe just like him, a few squash players at my gym, and another guy with whom I actually did regularly golf. In your thirties, it’s something to be admired, the guy in no rush, confidently waiting for someone special. In your forties, there are suddenly suspicious character traits—narcissism, chronic indecision, or harmful perfectionism. In your fifties, if there’s still even lip service to wanting family, partner, commitment, you’re bordering on the pathetic and well on your way to being the eighty-five-year-old in the nursing home just hoping that someone else’s visitors give you a few minutes of their time to break up the loneliness of your day.

  As I sat in judgment of this acquaintance, shaking my head that he couldn’t pull the trigger, something very familiar nagged at my core: me. Pam and I had been doing this absurd shuffle for too many years, but we had excuses. Melding two mature lives, I told her (and myself), was never an easy undertaking. She didn’t have the freedom to move towns. I didn’t have what it took to live amid lawns and laundry rooms that were forty minutes from the nearest bistro.

  But my commute to see her and her kids on a virtually nightly basis was getting old, as were her attempts to shoot into Boston whenever she dropped off the kids at their father’s. The whole thing was exhausting and in too many ways lacking. Something had to change, and that something, it ended up, had to be me.

  So there we were at Sierra’s, having just toured several more uninspiring houses.

  “Yeah, evidently, their father got them this prepackaged hatching set,” Pam said. “It comes with an incubator that slowly heats and turns the eggs, as if there was a mother hen sitting on top of them.” She always sounded enthusiastic when she talked about any kind of animal, even more when the topic turned to the unusual things they do in the name of their young, in this case rotate the eggs at least three times a day.

  The nice waitress dropped sizzling chicken fajitas on our table for me and a burrito for Pam, and I signaled for another glass of wine that wasn’t half bad. Actually, it was pretty bad, but it was also really cheap.

  “That’ll be fun for them,” I said, offering it little thought. And that was it for the egg-hatching talk for the night. Looking back, I can summon up no good excuse for how it slipped through my defenses, how red flags weren’t furiously flapping in the breeze of fear that guides so much of my life with the opposite sex. There are member nations of the NATO alliance that lack the sophistication I have in sensing mounting threats, or at least overt changes, from miles and weeks away. I once noticed Pam in the condiments aisle of a supermarket in Maine briefly touch a small Heinz ketchup bottle before putting it back and casually picking up the larger one, even though it was April. I knew then and there that she planned to have her kids up to my house for a two-week vacation later that summer. Sure enough, come August, I would be sitting on the deck with the girls eating hot dogs and pasta watching Caroline, the younger, liberally squirt the ketchup from that same large bottle in the midst of a long visit.

  I once knew the moment a former girlfriend asked me my favorite month—October, by the way—that within weeks, she would begin talking about how nice it would be to get married in the fall. And she did, remarking one night after a couple of glasses of wine, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a wedding in a field in the middle of the autumn with every single tree burning bright red and orange?” It would have been, just not with her.

  I could go on about this talent that I’m not necessarily proud of but that’s served me well over many years. But in the case of Pam and her kids and the chicken eggs, it’s a talent that completely failed me, making me reassess whether I actually had that kind of talent at all. I mean, it should have been obvious. Pam’s a veterinarian, an excellent and compassionate one. Her daughters seemed to inherit every bit of her love of animals. Neither she nor they have ever in their lives given an animal of any sort away. This thing should have played out with the obviousness of a fast-moving PowerPoint presentation, the slides flipping from an incubator to an egg with a crack to a little chick to a big chicken to a big ornery chicken chasing an innocent Brian across the dewy grass of their front yard.

  But I don’t care how sophisticated my radar for trouble may or may not be. I don’t care how prescient I am or I’m not about the twists and turns of the future. There was precisely no way that I could have predicted the hell that was going to come out of Abigail’s science fair project at the General John Nixon Elementary School. No way whatsoever.

  Typically I didn’t spend the night at Pam’s place on weekdays, under the guise of it not sending a good message to the kids but more secretly because the thought of starting my weekday in the chaotic environs of a house filled with three females furiously and simultaneously getting ready for school and work, all of it unfolding more than thirty minutes from Boston, made me nauseous with fear.

  I would do it on weekends, happily, when my only morning obligation was to take the dog portion of the group to a pretty field for their morning run, then stop at a nice Dunkin’ Donuts to pick up Munchkins for the girls. But otherwise I needed my weekday tranquillity and work proximity, so shortly after the kids went to bed each night at 8:30 or 9, I’d get back into my car, drive to my condo, and spend a pleasant stretch of time on my couch catching the end of the Red Sox game or a few more pages of a book, spooning Brigham’s chocolate chip ice cream into my big mouth, savoring every second and bite, knowing that that part of my life was very much on the block.

  On Saint Patrick’s Day morning, though, I was in their house for reasons I can’t remember. Let’s assume it was fate. The phone rang, and I heard Pam shout out, “Abigail, it’s your dad! Pick up and talk to him.” I heard silence and then a shriek of joy and then her little voice shouting, “Mom, it cracked! The egg cracked! The brown one, it crack
ed!”

  From downstairs I heard her frantically running around her bedroom one floor above, undoubtedly getting dressed in a rush. I heard water running, which was Abigail brushing her teeth. I heard feet pounding down the narrow front stairs. Then she was there, right in front of me, this little Mini-Me version of Pam with long blond hair and big knowing eyes and a brain that worked as fast and as hard as a turbocharged sports car.

  “The chick is coming today,” she said, trying to play it down a bit. I was leaning against the kitchen sink, reading the morning paper, trying to stay clear of the mayhem of their morning routine.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Our dad called. He said there’s a crack in the egg and he can almost see the chick getting ready to come through.”

  She paused and added, “Mom’s going to take us by to see it for a minute on the way to school.”

  Even that didn’t give me a moment of pause. But in defense of my lack of defenses, what sane person would ever look into the future and see a chicken—actually, a large snow-white rooster with the darkest of hearts—as his household pet? How, from my sheltered vantage of a brownstone condominium with a job that allowed me to call virtually all of my own shots, could I ever have fully anticipated the sense of powerlessness that was to come?

  That said, I have to concede that there were plenty of signs that my life was changing all around me. Take the night that my cell phone rang on my drive from the Globe to Pam’s house in suburbia.

  “Hey, I hate to ask you this,” Pam said, “but Caroline is begging me for these things called Silly Bandz. Abigail’s got homework to do. I don’t want to leave her home alone. Would you mind stopping on the way out and picking some up?”

  “Sure,” I said, already a little wary of all that could go wrong—the wrong store, the wrong bag, the wrong size, any or all of which would leave little Caroline in tears and Brian the clueless antagonist.