The Odds of You and Me

by Cecilia Galante

  “Violet Manning’s,” Ma says. “Over on the east side. What extra work does Jane want you to do?”

  “She’s putting together a play set for her kids. I told her I’d help her. She’s paying me extra. You okay with Violet? She’s an easy one, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Ma’s eyes scan the contents of the paper, glossing over the headlines. “All she ever wants me to do is rearrange her good china. I think she’s getting a little bit of the Alzheimer’s. Poor soul.”

  “I’M READY,” ANGUS says on our way over to preschool.

  “Ready for what?”

  “To tell you about Something Special Day.”

  I bite down hard on my bottom lip, glance at him in the rearview mirror. He looks so adorable dressed in the little white-and-blue striped polo shirt and navy pants Ma got him a few months ago. His dark hair is swept to one side, and a tiny curl like an apostrophe sits just above his eyebrows. Even the green-and-purple sneakers—which clash with everything—give him a certain level of panache. Nothing bad—nothing even remotely negative—should be allowed to come anywhere near this level of perfection.

  “Okay,” I say hopefully. “Go ahead.”

  Angus inhales, raising both shoulders as he does, and then sighs so deeply that I almost drive off the road. “It wasn’t terrible,” he says finally. “Jeremy didn’t laugh.”

  “Okay. Well, that’s good, right?”

  “But he didn’t pay attention.” Angus is wringing his hands, kneading them into the front of his blue pants like they are some kind of bread dough. “He stared out the window the whole time. And he picked his nose.”

  “Ewww . . .” I say, trying to catch his eye in the mirror: Please laugh, Angus. “He picked his nose? That’s so gross!” Angus doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even crack a smile. “How about the gum trick?” I try. “Come on. Tell me that didn’t blow his mind!”

  “He didn’t care,” Angus says softly. “At all.”

  I stare at the dirty rear window of the car ahead of me as it brakes for a red light, the digital clock on the bank building, which reads 8:56, the green-and-white street banners fluttering in the breeze. On the corner, a woman in pink sweat pants and a white T-shirt is dragging a screaming child down the street. The child is very young, two or three at the most, dressed in denim overalls, a yellow T-shirt, and miniature sneakers. Her tiny pink face, contorted into one extended howl, is a map of anguish, and even behind my window, I can hear her sobs. I look away, close my eyes, remember the rage that used to build inside me like a growing storm when Angus’s cries reached that level, and nothing I did could assuage them. More than once, I’d had to leave him screaming in his crib and shut the door while I stepped outside, my hands gripping the black railing of the fire escape outside my apartment until they stopped trembling. It was the helplessness imbued within that type of cry that unglued me, the helplessness, and the recognition, as if something very small and distant within myself remembered it and understood that until I learned to fend for myself, it would get me nowhere. Even now, the sound can create a wave of despair. I step on the gas as the light turns green and take a hard left at the corner, leaving the child and mother behind.

  “Oh, honey,” I say. “I’m sure he cared.”

  “He didn’t.” Angus is resolute. “Not even one little bit.”

  I pull over then as the green house on the corner comes into view, and edge the car along the curb until the gnomes can be seen from the backseat.

  “Well, did anybody pay attention?” I ask, putting the car in park and turning around in my seat.

  Angus’s dour expression softens slightly. “Miss Annie did,” he says. “And Raymond, too.”

  “Well, there you go! And did they think your shoes were cool?”

  “Yeah.” He sticks his legs out straight and taps the sides of his shoes together. “Especially Miss Annie. She said they were radical.”

  “Radical? Radical? Are you serious? Do you even know what radical means?”

  “It means amazing!” Angus’s face has finally split open into a grin; his tiny white teeth look like fat pieces of rice.

  “Triple amazing!” I lean over, squeeze his knee. “Like a hundred times triple amazing!”

  Angus moves over until his nose is pressed up against the window. “Can we go into the garden this morning, Mom? Just to say hi? Since we forgot yesterday?”

  “No, Angus. That’s someone’s house. They wouldn’t like it if we started walking around in their garden. But you can lean out the window. Yell superloud, too, so Dopester can hear you.”

  He gets up on his knees carefully as the window goes down, clutches the edge of the door with small pink hands. “Hi, Dopester!” he yells, waving to the plastic garden figurine. “Hope you have a good day outside!”

  I let him go on a bit—he launches into a short anecdote about Miss Annie and the Lego set at school—before tapping him on the shoulder again. “Okay, that’s enough. We have to go.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?” I buckle him back in and pull the car out into traffic again.

  “Do you think Dopester knows it’s me? I mean, when I yell? Do you think he knows my voice?”

  “I do.” I nod my head somberly. “I absolutely think he knows.”

  Angus sits back against the seat, folding his hands in his lap, and sighs contentedly.

  When we get to preschool, I lift him out of the backseat and then straddle his legs around my waist as I walk into the building. He’s way too big to be held like this, but I don’t care. I carry him all the way to his classroom.

  He lets me, too.

  IT’S WARMER TODAY than it was yesterday, although the sun has disappeared behind a sea of metallic clouds. I take my jacket off in the car, throw it in the passenger seat next to my knapsack. I still haven’t come up with an excuse yet for my planned early departure from Mr. Herron’s, and it’s making me nervous. You wouldn’t think someone like Mr. Herron could get me anxious; he’s nice enough. And hell, he can’t see anything. But he can get ornery. Mean, even, on occasion. It’s a meanness that comes out of nowhere, too, a thorn suddenly beneath a carpet of petals. Like the one morning last year when I had to leave less than an hour after arriving at his house because the preschool called to tell me Angus had a fever. I could’ve called Ma. She would have left the place she was working in a heartbeat to go pick him up. But Angus acts very particular when he gets sick. He clings to me like a little koala, nestling his head along the inside of my arm and drifting in and out of sleep until the end of the day when I finally put him down in his own bed. I couldn’t bear not to be the one to give him that.

  “You shouldn’t be workin’ at all, if you gotta run out like that,” Mr. Herron said when I explained the situation to him.

  “I have a little boy,” I said, putting my coat on, searching for my gloves. “I explained that to you when I first started. He’s sick. I have to go pick him up. I’ll be back tomorrow to make up my work.”

  “Have someone else get him,” Mr. Herron said. “His father.”

  “His father isn’t around.” I yanked on my other glove, reached for my bag.

  “Ah. You one of those loosey-gooseys.” It was a statement, not a question. I stared at him for a moment, disbelieving what he had just said, watching the torrent of profanity stream like a black ribbon through my head. Youfuckingjudgmentalasshole. I opened my mouth to say it, too. And then I closed it again and walked out the front door. We never spoke of it again. But there’s that side to him—a thin, dark side—that I know is in there. And I have to be careful.

  He’s in the kitchen today, fiddling around with that ugly plant in the corner, when I come in. “Bird?”

  “Hey, Mr. Herron.” Nothing on the stove today, thank God. But the radio is on, tuned to a talk show, the volume bracingly loud. It’s impossible not to listen: “. . . I won’t even take my children to the park!” It’s a woman’s voice, slightly frantic. “The police keep saying they’re doing eve
rything they can, but I want to know what that means exactly. Where are they looking? What’s the next step?”

  “Well, Amy, I know you’re not the only person out there who feels this way,” a male voice concurs. “We all want answers. If a scumbag like James Rittenhouse can kick his way out of the back of a police car and then somehow disappear for the next twenty-four hours with a gun, what does that say about the capabilities of our police department? Just how safe are we in New Haven?”

  I lean over, turn down the volume.

  “Hey!” Mr. Herron says. “I was listening to that.”

  “I know. I just need a second.” I pull out a chair, sit down on the other side of the table. “Listen, I have to leave a little early today.”

  He frowns, the lines on both sides of his face sliding down, as if pulled by a string. “How early?”

  “An hour.”

  “How come?” A pile of dead leaves is lying on the table next to the pot; his fingers are moving inside the plant, feeling, reaching, plucking.

  I think fast. “I have to take my mother to the doctor.”

  “She’s not feeling well?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Herron nods. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll have to tell Arthur to dock you, though.”

  I sigh, pressing my hands flat against the table and stand up. “Well, I was thinking I could come back. And work a little extra, even.”

  “Extra?” Mr. Herron repeats. The pile of leaves on the table is getting bigger. They’re dry and crinkled looking, like forgotten cocoons. “For what? You got some kind of nervous energy you need to burn off?”

  “Bills actually.” I stand up. Talking about finances is one of my least favorite things to do. Especially with a miser like Mr. Herron. “I have one that’s due on Thursday, and I’m trying to get it covered.”

  “What kind of bill?”

  “A security deposit. For a new apartment.”

  Mr. Herron’s fingers stop moving. “You moving out on your mother?” He loves Ma, mostly because she makes his bed the way he likes it, with the corners pulled extra tight, a lip of blanket folded over at the top. I forget little details like that sometimes. Ma never does.

  “Well, yeah.” I rub my finger absently along the grain of the table. “You know. I’ve been living with her for a while now. I’m twenty-five years old. It’s time.”

  Mr. Herron doesn’t say anything. He puts his hands back inside the plant and resumes plucking. “I got a few odds and ends you could help me with,” he says finally. “Out in the garden. You interested?”

  “That’s perfect.” I push my chair back in, reach over, and turn the volume back up on the radio.

  “. . . and I think they should look into bringing the National Guard in or something.” Another irate female voice from the radio. “I mean, come on, people! We’re talking about a friggin’ psychopath here! He stomped some guy nearly to death, kicked his way out of a law enforcement vehicle, and stole a gun! What the hell are we doing?”

  I bolt out of the kitchen, out of hearing range, and head upstairs to start cleaning.

  Any more talk like that, and I’ll change my mind again.

  Chapter 17

  Cleaning Mr. Herron’s bathroom can be tricky, since I have to take care not to touch any of the numerous bottles of medication lined up haphazardly along the sink countertop. I made the fatal mistake once of pushing them all to one side, aligning them neatly against the wall beneath the medicine cabinet—and heard about it for weeks afterward. “You don’t touch the meds,” he’d said on my following visit. “Don’t ever, ever touch the meds. I know exactly where they are at all times.” Now I spray around them, aiming the nozzle awkwardly in and among the tiny bottles, and wipe it down as best I can. His bedroom is next, an easy job since he moved into the spare bedroom a few months ago. He doesn’t like the big bedroom he used to share with his wife anymore, he told me once, without elaborating further. Maybe it’s too big. Maybe it makes him sad, thinking of the space she used to occupy next to him. I make the narrow twin bed, pulling the sheets tight and smoothing down the top cover, which is a soft gray color like the sky outside.

  Dusting comes next, which goes quickly, too. Aside from his bed, the only other items in Mr. Herron’s room include a rectangular bureau centered with a mirror, a small, sturdy rocking chair, and a bedside table, each of them as pristine as a monk’s. With the exception of the Happy Meal toys, lined up like a weird little army along the far edge of the bureau, the room is devoid of any personal items. No book or water glass on the bedside table, not even a pillow in the rocker. “Fuss free,” as Ma would call it. An in-and-out job. Still, I move the feather duster slowly, careful to avoid the Happy Meal toys. God only knows what he’d say if he knew I knocked two of them over yesterday. Probably dock me another hour’s pay.

  The radio is still playing as I head downstairs for the vacuum. Some lady is shrieking about the security of the prison systems. “I mean, don’t we pay enough taxes to expect that our basic safety in this town won’t be compromised?” Mr. Herron is sitting in one of the kitchen table chairs, gazing out the window.

  “You’re still in here?” In all the time I’ve been working for Mr. Herron, I’ve never known him to sit down at the kitchen table and listen to the radio. How long does this program run anyway? “I thought you’d be out in the garden.”

  The vacant look in Mr. Herron’s face eases, as if coming back from somewhere far away. “I been sittin’ here listening.”

  “I can see that.” Behind the kitchen curtains, the light is opaque, like milk.

  “Amazing how sure people think they are about things.”

  I nod, tap the wall lightly. “Yeah.”

  “And when they find that sonofabitch, they should throw him into solitary,” the woman says. “I’m serious. Teach him a lesson about following the laws in this country. Maybe then he’ll learn how to respect authority.”

  “Amazing.” Mr. Herron snorts and shakes his head. “I’d like to see her try to spend ten minutes in solitary.”

  The vacuum is all the way at the other end of the hall, and I still have the entire downstairs to tackle before I head out to Jane’s house, but something about the pensiveness in Mr. Herron’s voice makes me pause. Linger, even.

  “The Koreans had a special kind of solitary,” Mr. Herron says.

  I lean against the doorjamb, stare at the wiry strands of white interspersed throughout his gray hair, try to imagine what Mr. Herron might have looked like in an army uniform. Tall, straight, dark, neat. Clipped fingernails. Maybe a mustache. A cap fitted just over his ears.

  “We were caught in a surprise attack at the Chosin Reservoir. Winter of 1950. Damn near froze our balls off waiting for them to advance, and then the bastards came up from behind.”

  “I thought you said you were a cook.” I bite the skin along the edge of my thumb. “What were you doing fighting if you were supposed to be in charge of the meals?”

  “You think the Koreans cared if I cooked or not when they took all of us prisoner?”

  My hand drops from my mouth. “You were a prisoner?”

  “Three months. Just inside the 38th parallel. Pyoktong Camp. Don’t talk about it much. Not real pretty stuff.” He stretches out his hands, displaying them for some reason, as if he can see them. The knuckles are dry and gnarled like miniature tree trunks.

  “Holy shit, Mr. Herron.” I move out of the hallway, sit down in the empty chair across from him. “What was that like?”

  He doesn’t answer right away and I wince, thinking I’ve crossed a line. Or that he’s annoyed I’ve taken a seat when I’m supposed to be working. “I’m sorry,” I start, getting back up. “I shouldn’t—”

  “Oh, sit down,” he interrupts. “Hell, I brought it up.”

  I sit back down.

  “They were a sadistic bunch. Got their rocks off listening to us scream. Beg. Cry for our mothers. For mercy.”

  I bite my lower lip, watching him.

>   “They didn’t separate us right away. Shoved me and another guy named Randy Cutlass into a hut with a dung heap for a floor. Randy was hysterical, crying and screaming. He was convinced that we were minutes away from being executed. He was just a baby. I don’t think he’d even reached his nineteenth birthday yet. He’d joined the army right after graduating from high school. Everyone called him Randy-Kid.” Mr. Herron stops for a moment, tapping his middle finger against the tabletop.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  “I got him to calm down a little. I kept telling him that the more noise he made, the quicker he was gonna piss off the guards, and the more trouble we’d be in. He quieted down some, but he never, not once, for the entire three days we were in that shithole, stopped crying. I mean, it went on and on . . . This goddamned whimpering, these whispery sobs, like he was choking on something. It was like being trapped in a cage with a sick cat. I was starting to lose it. And one day—it was probably the third day—I just hauled off and decked him.” He pauses, gazing past my face at something only he can see. “Screamed at him to shut up. Split his lip right down the middle. There was blood all over the place.”

  “Oh, Mr. Herron.”

  “Don’t ‘oh, Mr. Herron’ me.” His face darkens. “I’m telling you this because it’s what happened. Because people don’t know and maybe they should.” He runs his hand along the surface of the table. His wedding ring makes a faint scraping sound, an echo from the past.

  “Did he stop crying after that?” I hesitate to ask the question, but I want to know.

  Mr. Herron shakes his head. “He just stared at me afterward with these big, leaky eyes. Like he couldn’t believe I’d actually hurt him, you know? I was s’posed to be on his side, not the other way around.” He takes a deep breath, exhales loudly through his nose.

  “They brought us out of the hut not too long after that, led us into a big room with white lights, a long table. A bunch of Korean officials sat on the other side of the table, waiting. Bunch of candy-ass pricks. They wanted to know our battle plans. What we would’ve done if they hadn’t captured us. Randy-Kid didn’t know how to handle it. He just started blabbing all over the place, telling them everything he knew, which wasn’t a hell of a lot, really, since he was just a private. They didn’t believe him, prolly ’cause he was crying so hard again they couldn’t understand nothing. They gave him a hard time about it, too. The crying, I mean. Kept beatin’ him around the head, poking him with a sharpened bamboo stick, to get him to stop. He just cried harder, though, said all he wanted to do was go home to his mother. I kept looking at him, trying to get him to look at me, so I could tell him to shut up again, but he was gone. I mean, the kid was in no-man’s-land. The things coming out of his mouth weren’t even making sense. Finally they dragged him out back. I could hear him sobbing and screaming and then a gun went off and everything was quiet.”