Broken Homes & Gardens

by Rebecca Kelley

  Joanna stopped eating. She froze with her fork in midair. “You know I didn’t plan to bring him over. Everyone was celebrating Halloween….” Why was she explaining this?

  “Well, if you’re going to be giggling in your room all night, just give me some fair warning next time,” he said.

  “What’s your problem?” She should be annoyed, but she wasn’t. She almost hated to admit it to herself: she was flattered. “It’s not like I was doing him in there. We were talking. Get over it.”

  “Right, well, it’s just embarrassing. I don’t need to hear it.”

  “Okay.” Joanna smiled. “I will definitely let you know the next time I have a gentleman caller stop by for a chat.”

  “Thank you,” Malcolm said primly.

  They both ate their pancakes, took sips from their coffee. “So … last night?” Joanna started. “After James left?”

  “What?” His face vacant, he looked at her across the nook table, which was so small their plates were touching. Was it possible that he had forgotten? It was the middle of the night. Maybe he had been sleepwalking, or maybe he was acting coy. She could never tell with Malcolm. She would chalk it up to temporary jealousy and forget about it. She was grateful to Allison—and her sister—for encouraging her to see other people. It put things into perspective. She didn’t need to sit around examining Malcolm’s motives anymore. It simply didn’t matter that much. They finished their pancakes, and Malcolm gathered up their plates to put them in the sink. “Hey,” he said, “what are you doing today?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We can finish the kitchen today if you help me.”

  “Really?” The place was a wreck.

  “First we have to go buy some paint. Have you thought about colors you want for the walls?” They were currently peach-colored, smudged with fingerprints and grease.

  “Not really.”

  “We’ll find something.”

  Joanna chose a bright green color called “Crisp Apple.” Malcolm had talked her down a few shades, telling her it would look much brighter on the wall than on the little swatch in the store. But first they had to move the table saw and sweep up the floors. Joanna could barely lift her side of the table saw, so they agreed to slide it into the living room until they could talk someone else into helping him move it into the garage. “Maybe Captain Hook can do it,” Malcolm said.

  “He is very strong,” Joanna said.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” Malcolm said. “You found yourself a real man.”

  Joanna just smiled. They spent the next few hours working. Malcolm reattached the cupboard doors, which he had painted white. He replaced the chipped chrome hardware with polished nickel knobs. Joanna swept the floors, stacked Malcolm’s various tools and supplies in the living room, and wiped down the counters. Then she turned to Malcolm for guidance.

  “Haven’t you painted before?” he asked.

  “We repainted my mom’s apartment once. She did the whole thing in shades of blue. It was depressing. Don’t we need to tape everything?”

  “No.” Malcolm threw two huge plastic tarps over the floors. “I’ll show you how to do the edges. Tape is for hacks.”

  “I think we established that I am a hack.”

  “See this?” He pointed to the brush in his hand. “This is an edging brush.” He dipped it in the paint, then dragged it along the edge of the entry way, making a perfect line without getting green on the white moldings. “Here you go. Give it a try.”

  Joanna dipped the brush in the paint. “Not that much!” Malcolm warned her. “Okay,” he said. “Now go.” It was easier than she had expected. “Good,” he said. “Now do all the edges.”

  “I’ve got it,” Joanna said, pushing him away.

  The two of them worked in silence for a half hour at least, listening to the rain hit the windows as they worked. Joanna was having a good time. Painting edges was fun; it reminded her of childhood hours spent filling in pictures in coloring books with crayons.

  “Is your boyfriend coming over tonight?” Malcolm asked her, bending down to inspect her work. She was almost done with the bottom edge of the wall. They had moved the stove and fridge out. Joanna had been a little disgusted at what they had found—gray clouds of dust, dried-up bits of food adhered to the linoleum. But now it was clean, and she was blotting out any remaining smudges with a nice, new coat of paint.

  “He is not my boyfriend. You seem pretty obsessed with him, though. Maybe you two should hang out. You want his number?”

  “I don’t socialize with people who wear pirate costumes. What is it with Portland and pirates?”

  “It was for Halloween, Malcolm. He’s not one of those … semi-professional pirates.”

  “Just let me know next time he comes over. I’ll be sure to stay clear.”

  Joanna concentrated on painting a nice, straight line. “Fine.”

  “It’s just—I don’t want to be around to hear it. Giggling. Moaning and groaning.”

  “Oh come on, Malcolm. I was not moaning and groaning!”

  “It’s just embarrassing. I mean, I’m embarrassed for you.”

  “Right.”

  “I just don’t want to hear it—”

  “Okay, Malcolm! I get it!” Joanna stopped painting and glared up at Malcolm, who wasn’t even working, just leaning back against the counter, his hair flopping in his face. His mouth was twisted up, his eyes narrowed. He was angry! This was ridiculous. “I’m sorry if that bothered you. It’s just—I was so into it, you know? When James is wearing that pirate wig, I just go crazy. It’s unbelievable—”

  Malcolm’s mouth softened, though he didn’t smile. “Touché,” he said.

  “Let me tell you something.” Her pulse quickened. “I didn’t exactly like it when you brought a supermodel geologist to my brother-in-law’s birthday party, but you know what? I dealt with it!” His expression had relaxed now, but Joanna kept going. “I thought we were over all this.” Her nose tingled, tears beginning to well up, threatening to spill out onto her cheeks. She blinked hard a few times and they receded.

  Malcolm leaned down, his hand extended, as if trying to coax a scared cat out of hiding. “Hey,” he said, softly. She set the brush down on the paint can, placed her hand in his, and allowed him to pull her to standing. She looked up at him, opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out. Her mind blank, an open sky. Then he was drawing her close, his lips hitting the side of her lips, his rough cheek scratching hers. He kissed her again and she closed her eyes, pressed herself into him. His hands went up, under her shirt, touching her bare skin.

  They broke apart, took in sharp breaths. “What are you doing?” she said into his chest, pushing him back. She wormed her way out of his arms, whirled around and darted into her room, her heart pounding.

  “I need to take a break!” she yelled out. “Papers to grade!” Folders of student essays, pens and textbooks—she dumped them all in a canvas shopping bag, threw on her coat, and escaped out the door.

  She darted through the rain to a nearby coffee shop she rarely visited. The espresso was always weak, burnt-tasting, the wall art bad—1980s travel posters in cheap acrylic frames. The entire place was empty except for the gray-haired barista, a woman wearing rhinestone glasses on a chain around her neck. When she finished making Joanna’s drink, she unfolded the glasses, put them on, and went back to reading the newspaper spread out on the counter.

  Joanna attempted to smooth her hair with her fingers and breathed in and out, trying not to sound like she was panting. She then took a good ten minutes organizing her papers into piles, pouring all of her concentration into this task. She was a competent, highly-organized teacher! There was simply no room left in her evenings or in her life in general for anything but her work, her students, their words. She would tackle the descriptive essay first: What specific place has the strongest associations of “home” to you? A favorite chair? A tree house? The kitchen table? Explain this place to the reader in detail,
summoning the memories and emotions associated with it. Remember that this essay still needs a point—you aren’t just describing the contents of your garage for five pages, you’re talking about what that garage means—why it is home to you.

  Pen in hand, Joanna studied each student’s paper, underlining insightful lines, putting question marks in the margins by confusing passages. She composed long, detailed comments, complimenting the students on their strengths and formulating thoughtful suggestions for revision.

  After two hours hunched over student essays in paint-splattered clothes, tattered jeans, and an old button-down shirt of Malcolm’s, she leafed through three-year-old magazines until the old woman cleared her throat and turned the Open sign around. Out on the sidewalk, Joanna looked up and down the dark street. She couldn’t go home. She pulled the hood of her raincoat over her head and took off in the opposite direction. With nothing to grab hold of her attention, her mind wandered to the place she’d been avoiding for the last few hours: his lips on hers, his hands under her shirt, her hands—

  Her face went hot; she tilted it up to the sky, letting the mist cool her cheeks. She took in deep breaths as she walked, inhaling the dark-green, earthy scent of wet leaves, grass, and moss. She loved this smell, so different from her childhood smells of sagebrush and pine—which she adored, too, but in a different way completely.

  She walked and walked and walked, trying to parse out the events of the last several months—years. Malcolm was obviously jealous and acting out accordingly. The thing was, she couldn’t stay strong forever. Eventually they’d wind up in bed; that seemed inevitable. Maybe they’d even make it work for a while. They’d sleep together, be happy for a tiny sliver of time, and then they’d break up, like every other couple in the world.

  Once she made her way back to her neighborhood, she knew what she needed to do; she simply needed Malcolm to agree to it. Her pulse thrummed at a steady rate. The meandering journey through the neighborhood had exhausted her and calmed her all at once. She wore a serene smile. It had stopped raining.

  From the street, she could see the kitchen light still glowing, the outline of Malcolm’s thin frame. Joanna entered the house, let her eyes adjust to the light. She stepped out of her wet shoes and into a pair of slippers she had by the door. Rather than fling her wet coat over the arm of the couch, she arranged it on a hanger, hung it up in the closet. She smiled to herself: a model of tidy, efficient habits. This is how she should live her life!

  In the kitchen, she leaned against the counter and watched Malcolm as he worked. He whistled while he pushed the broom back and forth over the floor, without a dustpan. A caricature of sweeping. “You were busy,” she said.

  Malcolm looked up. “Oh yeah. It’s coming along.” While Joanna had been grading papers and wandering the streets of Portland, Malcolm had pieced the kitchen back together. The cabinet doors, clean and white with a new coat of paint, rested back in their hinges. The paint cans, brushes, and drop cloths had all disappeared.

  She went over to the stove, now pushed back against the wall where it belonged, to fetch the teakettle. She could see her reflection in it—the smudges and water deposits buffed off and shined up.

  “Tea?” she asked.

  Malcolm nodded. He’d stopped working now that she’d taken over, watched as she filled the kettle. “We have some cookies or something around here?” Joanna asked, and Malcolm reached into a cupboard and handed her a package of fig bars. She arranged four on a plate, finished up the ritual of pouring water into two cups. Malcolm was watching her, his eyebrows raised slightly. “We need to talk,” she said, placing everything on the nook table and gesturing for him to sit down across from her.

  Joanna dunked her tea bag in and out of the water. Malcolm took a fig bar from the plate and bit into the corner, tasting a tiny crumb. She cleared her throat. “Okay, I’ve been doing some thinking,” she began. “This can’t keep happening.”

  “What can’t keep happening?” he asked, smiling slightly.

  She looked down, trying to avoid fixating on his mouth. “You know very well what I’m talking about,” she said into her teacup. “Grabbing me in the middle of the night. Attacking me in the kitchen. That kind of thing.”

  “‘Attacking’ wouldn’t be the way I’d put it.” Malcolm leaned forward and looked into her eyes. “And you kissed me back. Both times.”

  “That’s neither here nor there,” she said vaguely. “The point is—we can’t keep doing it. It’s not healthy.”

  “All right,” Malcolm said, raising his hands in innocence. “Trust me. It won’t happen again.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not explaining this very well—”

  “Explaining what?”

  “I mean, if we’re going to do this, we need to do it. Commit to it. You know what I mean?”

  “Uh—no.”

  “I think we should sleep together. I think that would be the most logical thing to do in this situation.” Malcolm sat back in his seat and nodded slightly. She kept talking. “I’ve really been over and over this, Malcolm. It’s obvious that—well, that there’s something left between us, something unresolved. But here’s the thing: I can’t lose you again. You know, what happened last March—we didn’t talk for months. We can’t let history repeat itself. If we just fall into that again, we won’t survive it. We just won’t. One minute you’ll be kissing me in the hallway, then we’ll fall into bed, then you’ll run off or I’ll run off or something will happen, and it will be over. You know?”

  “But it would be logical to sleep together again?”

  “Exactly. But see, the difference would be that we’d go into it consciously. We’d be doing it to preserve our friendship.”

  “That does sound logical.” Malcolm did not sound convinced.

  “Think about it. There’s this obvious—I don’t know—let’s say attraction here.” Joanna gestured between herself and Malcolm. “It seems like, if we were going to be together in any sort of traditional sense, it would have happened by now. But we’re way beyond that at this point. We’re friends. And when everyone else is breaking up and getting divorced, we’ll still have each other. You know?”

  “I’m not sure I’m following.”

  “It’s this thing between us—this attraction, for lack of a better word—that could ruin everything! It almost did, last time. So what we need to do is deal with it, with our eyes open.”

  “And sleeping together once is going to do that.”

  Joanna waved her hands with impatience. “Once, twice, however many times it takes. We’ve got to use each other up, get each other out of our systems, see? Then we’ll stop before it starts going downhill. The moment before that. And then we’ll go back to being friends. The feelings will be gone, used up, dealt with.”

  Malcolm nodded. “Sounds reasonable.” He knocked the table: meeting adjourned. His tea trembled in its cup. He eased himself out of the nook. “Thanks for the tea,” he said, heading out the kitchen and back into his room. She heard the door shut behind him.

  Joanna sat on the bench sipping her tea, which was now lukewarm.

  15

  shucked-off and abandoned like this

  Somehow, Joanna had thought the words “we should sleep together” would have a greater effect on Malcolm. An immediate effect—taking her hand, knocking teacups from the table, ravishing her in the kitchen nook. Or lifting her up, carrying her into the bedroom, and throwing her on the mattress. Or—okay, at the very least—a mischievous grin, a twinkle in his eye. But this, this non-reaction, unmoored her.

  She spent the next six days in a state of agitation. Was he going to do something? Or at least tell her, flat out, that he preferred the challenge of the somnambulant kiss to the “open” sign flashing above her head? He didn’t act as though anything had changed. He still looked happy to see her when she walked in the room. If they were both up at the same time in the morning, he made her breakfast. In the evenings he sat
on the couch reading and patted the space next to him so that she could sit by his side with her own book or a stack of papers to grade. She would plop down on the couch and sprawl out, affecting supreme casualness. These hours on the couch were torture. She couldn’t remember how she had done it before. When she leaned against the arm of the couch, her feet inching toward Malcolm at the other end, she couldn’t stop thinking about her feet. What if she became so absorbed in a book that they took on a mind of their own, finding their way into Malcolm’s lap?

  What was Malcolm trying to do to her? Did he think they could just live like this, brushing by each other in the halls, their hands accidentally touching across the table as they reached for the French press every morning?

  Malcolm had secured some independent contractor work, so he was out of the house more than usual. She observed him smiling to himself, whistling softly as he padded around the house pounding protruding nails back into the floorboards or repainting the trim on her windows. He’d moved on, she guessed. He’d forgotten their conversation or dismissed it as a joke. Or—another possibility—he was ignoring it. This was his way of letting her down easy.

  She came home to a quiet house one Friday evening after teaching all day. Malcolm was holed away in his room; she could see the light coming from under his door. She sighed with relief. No awkward conversation in the living room, no casual suggestion that they should go to the movies or out to eat that would leave Joanna exhausted from the effort of “acting natural.”

  In her own room, with the door shut firmly behind her, she snuggled under her covers with her laptop. Online, a smorgasbord of ready and willing guys awaited her. She should find someone. Not any of the guys she’d been out with over the last few weeks (James or Tim or Daniel or, or, or)—just some anonymous stranger to have sex with. She could get rid of this pesky tension taking over her life, return calm and carefree, ready to be a good friend to Malcolm again. After forty-five minutes of clicking through profile after profile, she gave up. No one matched her criteria for an anonymous sex partner: tall, dark-haired, thin, scraggly, brooding. Cold, calloused hands, smelling of wood shavings.