This is Just Exactly Like You

by Drew Perry

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE - Patriot Mulch & Tree

  TWO - Olives in the Street

  THREE - Backyard Sidewalk Tricycle Racetrack

  Acknowledgements

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Drew Perry, 2010 All rights reserved

  Excerpt from “How to Like It” from Cemetery Nights by Stephen Dobyns. Copyright © Stephen Dobyns, 1987. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Perry, Drew

  This is just exactly like you : a novel / Drew Perry

  p.cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19004-3

  1. Marital conflict—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction. 3. Parents of autistic children—Fiction.

  4. Parenthood—Fiction. 5. Autistic children—Fiction. 6. Parent and child—Fiction.

  7. Suburban life—Fiction. 8. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.E7929T47 2010

  813’.6—dc22 2009042562

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For Tita

  But the dog says, Let’s go make a sandwich.

  Let’s make the tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.

  And that’s what they do and that’s where the man’s

  wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator

  as if into the place where the answers are kept—

  the ones telling why you get up in the morning

  and how it is possible to sleep at night,

  answers to what comes next and how to like it.

  —Stephen Dobyns, from “How to Like It”

  Oh help me, please doctor, I’m damaged—

  —The Rolling Stones, from “Dear Doctor”

  ONE

  Patriot Mulch & Tree

  From the half-insulated attic—a space he’s been wanting to carve out as an office if he can ever even get some goddamned drywall up at least, Jack, please—he calls over there. Lets it ring. His big plan: Run bookcases down the sides, replace the windows in the two gable ends, put a desk under each window. Maybe set a couple of upholstered chairs out in the middle, and a rug, and it’d be nice up here, a place they could sit in the evenings, have a drink. She’d like that. Ice in glasses, sprigs of mint. Coasters on little low tables. How was your day, dear? That’d be just grand as hell. It rings. Six times. Eight. He’s calling to tell Beth that he needs to come by to drop Hen off. It’s Canavan who finally picks up.

  “Hey, Jack,” Canavan says. He sounds sleepy.

  “I wake you guys up?” Jack says.

  “You’re calling for Beth,” says Canavan.

  He doesn’t feel any real need to answer that. “No jobs this morning?” he asks. Canavan cuts trees down. Likes to call himself a tree surgeon, like there’s a medical degree that goes with it.

  “Not till later on,” says Canavan. “Slow Friday.”

  Jack can hear sheets and blankets, and then also what sounds like dishes, like plates. “You two eating breakfast in bed?”

  “No,” Canavan says. “It’s dinner.”

  Jack checks his watch. “It’s eight in the morning.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s from last night. Beth made us soup and bread. Campeloni.”

  Somewhere in the background, Beth says, “Cannellini.”

  “Cannellini,” Canavan says. “Apparently.”

  “Beth made you soup and bread,” says Jack. Beth is not a huge cook.

  “Cannellini,” he says again, as if it’s some kind of explanation. “Tomatoes in it. It was pretty good.”

  Jack holds the phone out in front of him, like he’ll somehow be able to look in there through the little array of holes and see them in bed, his wife and his excellent friend Terry Canavan and all the plates and bowls from soup and bread. At least she doesn’t have a suitcase with her yet. Every time he’s come back home this week he’s checked the closets first thing. All the suitcases are still right there. And her clothes, too, he’s pretty sure, or most of them. Which only means she’s probably over there wearing some old sweatshirt Canavan’s found her, or his Carhartt fucking jacket he’s so proud of, the one with the zip-off arms. Zippers everywhere. That’s how Jack pictures her, then, little panties and the unsleeved vest of Canavan’s jacket. Hair all in knots. “Gimme Beth,” he says.

  “Yeah. Hang on.” Canavan puts the phone down and Jack hears them talking, but can’t make out the words. Then Beth picks up.

  “Hey, Jackie,” she says.

  “Hey,” he says back, and just stands there. In their attic. He doesn’t know why he came up here to make the call. Sometimes he does things like this. Now he feels a little like zipping his own arms off.

  “You called me,” says Beth.

  “Yeah,” he says, recovering some. “I need to drop Hendrick by. I’m going in to the yard.”

  “I have a class,” she says. “Summer session started yesterday. You know this.”

  The way she says it, like he’s a kid. You know this. “You couldn’t take him with you?” he asks her.

  “What, to my class? I don’t think so, Jack. And anyway, why can’t he go with you? He went with you yesterday. And Wednesday.”

  “Fridays are crazy,” he says. “Plus with the weather like this, the line’ll be out off the lot. We probably won’t even get to break for lunch.” He picks at the windowsill, can’t really believe he’s having this conversation. “It’s not like I’m dying to come over there and, what, help you two clean up your dishe
s from last night, maybe straighten the covers for you, put a mint on your pillow—”

  “Stop it, OK?” she says, her voice gone all brittle. Just like that. “I’ll figure something out. I’ll take him. Let’s not do this right now.”

  “Hey, I know: Let’s not do it at all.”

  “Jack,” she says, and then quits.

  He waits for her to start talking again. A piece of someone else’s conversation breaks in on the line, then disappears. On her end, there’s something like the sound of Canavan rearranging the dressers in the bedroom. Or bowling. “I’ll be by, then,” Jack says finally, to fill up the space. He checks his watch again. “In half an hour.” And instead of waiting for more quiet, he hangs up on her, stabbing at the button on the handset a few times, which just makes him feel a whole lot better. Bitch, he thinks, and right away feels sorry for that, or stupid about it, or both. One more thing done wrong. He puts the phone in his pocket and goes downstairs to find Hendrick. Whatever else there is, there’s this: She will have been gone one week tomorrow.

  The weather’s been perfect, actually, like it’s spiting him somehow, the end of May into June and cool weather hanging on after a weird warm winter, the seasons all out of whack. He’s got windows open all over the house still, breeze blowing in from everywhere. It’s been fiercely sunny, daylilies coming in, everything greening over, everything in bloom. It’s not even supposed to make it much past 80 degrees today, a kind of Chamber-of-Commerce forecast, which means by ten o’clock the line will be out to the highway, pickups and trailers and minivans bumper-to-bumper back behind the Shell station next door, past the Dumpsters and down the gravel side lane the county put in for them on 61. Everybody taking Friday off to buy flowers and soil and mulch. Hardwood, pine, dyed pine, pine bark, pine needles. Everybody in a fight against weeds, against the hot and the dry that’s got to be coming. He’ll have been doing this four years this fall—hard to take in that it’s been that long—and they’ve got it to where the thing will almost run itself. A day like this, and Butner and Ernesto could have moved sixty yards of mulch and soil by the time he gets in, maybe more. Butner: His right-hand man, his heavy lifting, his lot manager. He’s been with him nearly the whole time. Ernesto’s been on a year and a half, conduit to the Spanish-speaking landscape crews, a genius with the plants. He can bring anything back to life. Last summer he grew peppers in a plot next to the greenhouse—hard little orange things the size of golf balls, wrinkled green witch hats, ten or fifteen other kinds. Jack had no idea there were that many varieties of pepper. Butner grows heirloom tomatoes, has every year. The two of them sold produce out of the office all last season. One more way to bring in money.

  Patriot Mulch & Tree. Butner named it. The first week after he hired him, Jack deep in the red and already paying bills out of their savings account, Butner took him out there, stood him in front of the old sign that said HIGHWAY 70 MULCH SUPPLY, said Here’s your problem right here. Go get you fifteen American flags and run ’em across the front of the property. Rename it something patriotic and people’ll buy whatever you sell. Business doubled in six months. Butner and the flags and the location. It’s on the same lot as the Shell station, in Whitsett, on the only real road that’s not the interstate anywhere nearby. Twenty minutes east from where they live in Greensboro, ten minutes west from where Beth teaches, Kinnett College. PM&T sits just up from the Holy Redeemer International Church of Whitsett and the First Whitsett Church of Jesus Christ Our Only Lord, both prefab metal buildings, built right next to each other. International flags on poles around the Holy Redeemer, competing semi-apocalyptic sign marquees out front of each: IF YOU THINK IT’S HOT HERE, JUST KEEP ON GOING. GODANSWERSKNEEMAIL. PREVENT TRUTH DECAY—BRUSH UP ON JESUS. Bible verses, threats, prayers for the living and the dead, for storm survivors, for soldiers. Ride a few hundred yards past the churches, and there are Jack’s fifteen American flags, Jack’s two yellow loaders, his red dump truck, his low gray office shed, his small mountains of pine bark and gravel and leaf compost. The little world he’s made for himself.

  He finds Hendrick downstairs right where he left him, sitting in the kitchen on the half-finished tile floor, fully into his morning routine. He’s in front of the one cabinet they’ve left the guards off of, opening and closing it, rocking back and forth, humming the tune to the WXII NewsChannel 12 evening news. He knocks his forehead against the cabinet door every second time he gets it open. He’s got a good rhythm going. Jack watches him do that a while, stands there and looks at their kitchen, tries to see what Beth sees. This is something she asks him to do. So he looks. He ran out of tile at the hole where the dishwasher is supposed to go eventually, and when he went back to the flooring place the next week, they were out. Evening Mist had been discontinued, they said. But why wouldn’t you have bought it all the first time? Beth wanted to know. No good answer, like most other things. He goes ahead with projects without planning them all the way through first. It makes her crazy. He knows this, does it anyway. Gets excited. Which is why there’s plywood running one entire wall of the kitchen: Jack knocked a hole through the back of the house in February, planning a little 8x8 breakfast nook with a bay window. Something Beth might enjoy. She was out of town, at a conference in Chicago. He had dreams of getting it roughed in over the course of the weekend—ambitious, he thought, but possible—except he hit the water line trying to dig out trenches for the footings and foundation. When the city came out to turn it off, a good-sized geyser Hendrick got a kick out of watching, they shut him down. No building permit, nothing to code. Now he’s supposed to get actual licensed plumbers and electricians. Plus an architect. He’s got to get drawings approved downtown. He’s done none of that. How was Chicago? he asked her at the airport. How’s the house? she said, knowing already, somehow. Expecting. She took it well at first, or pretty well, but it was what he’d have to call a mitigating factor in her leaving. Last week, during her meltdown: And I’ve had a goddamned plywood kitchen for six months! Jack wanted to point out that really it was just the one wall, and that it had only been four months, but she’d already moved well past that and on to his most recent sin, his most grievous, the one they’ll surely send him up the river for: That he’d bought, Jack, for chrissakes, the house across the street.

  Which was an accident. He’d never have done that on purpose. Nobody would have. They woke up one morning at the end of April to an auctioneer working his way through a series of end tables and sofas and riding lawn mowers all set up in the yard over there. The old man, somebody they’d known well enough to wave to, had died, and his kids, in from out of town, were auctioning everything they weren’t keeping. The auctioneer had a microphone and a podium. Jack took Hen over to watch, to stand in the crowd of old men wearing camouflage ball caps and listen to the guy work his way through ten, ten, gimme ten, can I get ten? Ten! How ’bout fifteen? Gimme fifteen, gimme fifteen. He had a high, thin voice that rode out over the top of the crowd. Up for sale: Boxes of old Field and Stream magazines. Shovel handles. Mini-blinds. Light fixtures. Shot-guns. Trash cans full of shotgun shells, bags and bags of shot. The old man must have been preparing for an invasion. When the auctioneer got around to the house itself, the bidding stopped thirty thousand dollars below what Jack had bought his own house for last year, and there it was: The exact same house, same floor plan, same everything, one more house in a neighborhood full of postwar ranch houses built all the same by the same builder, and it was too simple. He could not help it. Didn’t even really think about trying to. He raised his hand.

  Beth couldn’t believe it, kept saying that over and over. I cannot believe you did this to us. It was easy money, he tried to tell her: Open up a couple of walls like they’d done, pull up the carpets and redo the hardwoods like they’d done, replace the stove and fridge like they’d done. Coat of white paint top to bottom. Sell the place in two months. Easy money. Beth wanted to know how in hell he thought he could do all that across the street when you can’t even finish a tile
floor in your own kitchen. Wanted to know what on earth, Jack, could have gotten jammed inside your skull that would make you do a thing like this. Last week, after they’d railed through their own house at each other for a while, Jack went across the street while she stuffed her toothbrush and whatever else she could find into a plastic grocery sack. He sat on the steps, identical to his own steps. Concrete. Iron railing. He watched her come out their front door, watched her get into the car and back down the driveway, watched her drive down the road. To Terry fucking Canavan’s house, of all places. If he’d known that—if he’d known where she was going—he might have thrown himself under the back bumper while she was leaving. Or stood in the street and lit himself on fire. Or something else that might have gotten her attention, or his.

  Open, closed, open, forehead, closed—Hendrick bangs his head on the cabinet, hums a little louder. Jack refills his coffee and runs his toe along the place where the tile ends. At least Hen’s dressed today. This is a minor triumph. He hates textures right now, hates his sheets and clothes, likes to be naked a lot. Two weeks ago at the post office Jack looked up from checking whichever square it is that allows delivery without signatures, and there was Hen, walking the row of PO boxes, naked but for his socks and shoes. He had one hand out to the side, for balance, and he was hanging onto his little pink dick with the other. He kissed each keyhole as he passed. What Jack couldn’t figure out was how he’d managed to get his pants off over his sneakers, how he’d done it so fast. A logistical miracle, hugely impressive. People in line whispered to each other, staring, not sure what the protocol was for a situation like this, not sure if this was the sort of thing allowed in government buildings post-9/11. Nakedness, shouting, repetitions, astonishments: These are the things Jack’s all but used to, finds a little funny sometimes, even. They are the sorts of things that freak Beth right the hell out. Sign after sign after sign that Hen’s not getting any better. The difference is that Jack doesn’t really expect him to—not any time soon, anyway. At the post office, he picked him up and put him over his shoulder and headed for the door, Hen going fully limp in his arms. Jack stared right back at the people in line. Made eye contact. He left the pile of clothes and the mail and everything there on the counter, drove back home.