A Tapless Shoulder

by Mark McCann

  Katie stood back and tried to survey the damage. Ding Ding kept asking me what I was doing. “I’m just trying to fix the… window or wall or roof, maybe the house.” He didn’t understand why I had moved everything, and kept repeating that the television needed batteries. I assured him it didn’t need batteries and looked pleadingly at Katie. Any other time I would have happily agreed with him, “Yup, needs batteries,” but I needed this one tiny thing more than him, as I was in the moment mentally undressed; only the latest fashion for the trendiest of idiots.

  “Come on,” she said firmly, “give Daddy some room so he can fix it.”

  “I don’t know what to do. Is it just running from the roof and into the house all of a sudden for no reason? I think, I just…” I stuttered, “I have to see what it looks like and figure out something. I don’t know.” I shook my head, and stood staring at her for a moment. “There’s probably a ton of ice up there. Let’s get my dad over here, we’ll pour some drinks,” I said like I was serious. SLAM! One door shuts. WHOOSH! Another opens. Who could know, maybe I was serious. Boys, want to see your parents get drunk, and your mother punch a lamp out from under its shade? Even with that thought it still seemed like a reasonable possibility. While she was doing that I could start a fight with the roof. Either you or I are going down!

  Katie looked at me, unimpressed, seeing me contemplating way too much for her liking. “Um, now is not the time to be a smart ass.”

  “BLAG, BUH, SNAFFOO,” I hollered loudly with my head thrown back, “nothing smart about that,” I said snappily and tossed another piece of trim aside.

  I looked at the ceiling, then back at Katie. “Sorry, I just… I, well, you know,” I sighed and then shrugged. “You can’t go to work. You need to be here, you need to watch these guys, right? We can’t leave this, I don’t think. And my head is killing me from stupid last night.” I could feel Ding Ding staring up at me, reminding me of his presence, which was good as I would have been swearing every other word, had he not been there. I retrieved a hooded sweatshirt from the closet and put a hat on. Winter had just begun its slow fade, and the sun was again bright and warm. The snow and ice on the roof must have been melting too quickly and now that water was somehow coming into the house.

  Out on the front porch, the water was running steadily from the roof over the eaves where it was leaking inside. The ice looked to be still quite thick and I wondered if I’d returned the axe I had once borrowed from my dad. The ice had to be at least three inches thick; I would have had to bring the sun closer if I wanted to be rid of that anytime soon. I went back into the house. Katie was sitting on the couch in tears and with the phone in hand, which confused me. I assumed she’d be only a moment so I waited.

  “No, I don’t know what else to do,” she said softly, “it’s not like I want this to be happening and don’t want to come to work. It’s just, we’re having a bit of an emergency, yes, I know, but we need to deal with it now, and call whoever to do whatever needs to be done. I don’t… we don’t even know what we need to do or should be doing, I can’t just leave my husband here with two little kids to watch and a leaking roof.” Katie looked at me as though the last thing that could have gone wrong just had. My eyes widened and my mouth fell open; she was being pressured to find an alternative to missing work. This new anger of mine had been made with a deeper foundation and reinforced where the old anger fell apart. Had fate just sent me a text, pretty sure it would have read: Your house is falling apart AND I’m introducing an idiot of epic proportions. LOL.

  “Give me the phone,” I said harshly, but she stood, turned, and moved slowly and wisely away from me. I stood with my hand aimed at her back. “Let me talk to them,” I repeated, this time louder, hoping they would hear, not that it would have changed anything or been enough to drop the hell I was balling up in my head for the sole purpose of throwing at them: from my face to yours, FUCKERS. I was about to really yell and swear. The moment of truth was upon us, I thought at light speed, anger moving me quickly, as past experience reminded me the moment was now, and if they didn’t suffer now, I would suffer later. Katie, I thought, I’ll yell, ‘pull’, you toss the phone and I will punch it out of the air. Go, and as soon as it leaves your hand, yell, ‘see you tomorrow’. She wasn’t reading my mind… or even looking at me.

  I wanted to pluck the phone from her hand, let the water drip on it, and yell into the phone, “WHAT?” I wanted to then smash it with ice, yes; I’d push the entire sheet of ice from the roof down onto the phone. I had no idea why; it would not have been reasonable or professional by any means, and maybe that was just what I wanted. They weren’t being professional with her, so why should she be with them? I knew for certain I would have liked to at least have given them my fucking headache.

  “I don’t know what to do, so I really don’t know how long it’ll be,” there was a pause, and then she said again very softly, “yes, I’ll try.” She hung the phone up and wiped the tears from her face with both hands.

  “Are you fffffffflipping kidding me?” I asked as anger poured gasoline down my face and struck a match.

  It took me a little over an hour to deal with the ice on the roof. A friend who worked on roofs for a living gave me a little lesson over the phone about what he called ice damming. Basically, it’s something like the snow on the roof melting and then freezing, so while it’s in the eaves, and the water and ice get under the shingles and freeze again, the ice expands, which pulls the roof right off the effing house. I informed him us home-owners referred to it as ‘the fucking bullshit’; which was fairly unanimous with a number of things though, so one had to be specific and add something defining like ‘the fucking bullshit roof.’ He said he saw it often, and by the end of our conversation I felt rather silly for having been as alarmed by it as I had been. At his advice, my effort was to focus solely on diminishing the amount of water that was going to come into the house, which of course meant reducing the ice as well. So I had gone and hacked at the ice haphazardly with the axe, and then threw salt at it, which fell right back down into my eyes. I swore a lot before standing off to the side and trying again from there. The water coming in would stop overnight when it froze again, and then I’d see what it did tomorrow. Hopefully, the ice that had caused the gap that let in the water would melt away, letting that gap close. I also went out and bought a little heater, figuring we would try to dry what we could inside the house. A tower of sorts was erected, coffee table at the bottom and topped by a wooden chair from the dinner table, two boxes of diapers, and then several phone books. The heater oscillated on top, aimed toward the top of the wall and bottom of the ceiling.

  “Try plugging stuff in,” I suggested to Katie as my face flinched and I curled away in the opposite direction. She got my joke and giggled, and it warmed us both.

  I was glad to have her home with me, even if the reason was lousy, and even if her boss had been an idiot about it. We had been stretched thin since she’d gone back to school. Time together was scarce to say the least, which was something to which we were not accustomed. She spent her mornings at the college, came home for two hours, and then went to her afternoon job. I was so very proud of her for taking on all she had. I thought she was amazing for doing that. It was a big deal, and I knew it would mean more when we one day looked back years from now and thought, how… how, how, how, how? Two little boys, and both of us working; it seemed like quite the schedule even before adding her courses to it. Maybe it wouldn’t matter; we were learning more and more that the present was where we were and what mattered most, and the past was never going to be a place for us to look should we ever need to find ourselves.

  Katie brought a sandwich in from the kitchen. I smiled at her like she had brought it for me though she hadn’t. I would tell her I was proud of her when she had a moment or when I remembered. I was sitting at the table with Ding Ding now because it was farther from the leaking ceiling, which I couldn’t keep myself from checking every three minutes for signs
of improvement and then damning myself for doing so.

  “Here’s your sandwich, Ding Ding.”

  “It looks like a seven,” he said.

  “It does look like a seven,” she agreed, “Can you look like you’re eating a sandwich?” She smiled at him brightly. I laughed.

  Katie sat in the chair next to me. She shook her head and looked at the window, “So what do you think will go wrong next?” she asked.

  “Nothing, but great job going to school.” I winced, the moment had been spoiled. “Mm, crap, I meant to colour that better and stay in the lines,” I said glumly. “But anyway, okay, so I had a teacher in grade school that yelled, like really yelled, and when she stopped yelling at us, it was to tell us things happened in threes. She may have only yelled at us three times but took a year to do it, who knows? I’ve been thinking about our situation and how all this crap seems to keep happening to us; we must be doing three groups of three crap things. Now that really sucks for us, but at least once we’re through it; that’s a minimum of three good things coming our way, right?” My fingers were crossed before me in the air, “maybe we’re in for three groups of three good things,” I said hopefully. “Please tell me that’s what she meant. We never had any follow up questions on that or anything else. Raising your hand during yelling was like saying, ‘hey, can you focus on just me’,” I said, finalizing it with a confident nod of my head.

  “Three groups of three bad things, yeah, okay, I’ll buy that, so where in that are we exactly? You think we’re at the ninth bad thing? How did you figure that out?” she asked, looking a little more doubtful than I would have liked.

  “Oh, I am calling it number nine,” I said defiantly, “if we’re not at nine right now, our divorce will make nine. Desperate measures, my love, for our own survival; we need to get our luck back. I love you, but enough is enough. We can’t afford to live like this, financially, mentally, hell, probably physically too.”

  She was laughing, and half agreed. “But I love you, and kind of like this family,” she said as if to say, so now what?

  “Oh,” I answered, “I won’t be leaving; the divorce will be costly enough, just a straight up divorce, but no, no one’s going anywhere.”

  “Okay, so we’re not getting divorced?” she asked, a bit confused.

  “Oh, we’ll be divorced, but that’s it, nothing will change. Hell, my love, we’ve got a good thing here; the chemistry is perfect, but the world around us is falling apart. We may as well see if a divorce is all we need to get our luck back and go from there.” I paused. “Maybe it’s actually supposed to be, ‘desperation measures,’ you know, like, ‘desperation measures my love’, and what we’ll be left with will be less than what we can get by without or something. Yeah, or maybe not, I don’t know what that meant, now that I’ve said it and heard it out loud.”

  Katie looked at me like she still found me rather amusing. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about sometimes either,” she said and shook her head like she was trying to shake the smile off.

  Chapter 3 … Seriously

  My phone rang, I looked at it; there was a picture of a rock I had taken in the backyard last summer. It meant Nate was calling me. I answered with an unimpressed, “Hello.” Had I given it much thought, it would have been as I feared: he had called me yesterday. He had told me to go to the bar and of course he had not shown up to meet me there. I felt defeated and feared things would only get worse. It seemed we were both alarmed by this, but in opposite directions: his had energy, while mine was just tired. He seemed very distracted and not just because he was driving. There were cautious pauses in his speech, and I just wanted to curl up and sleep inside each one.

  I sighed like that sigh was going to be my last one ever and smoothed the phone over my head. Without listening to what he was saying I said, “No way – do you know what you did? Shut up and I’ll tell you. You had me waiting forever and for fucking nothing, nuth-thing,” I said bitterly.

  “Yeah, but, look, man, you don’t understand, I had no choice,” he said in his defense.

  “And then I was up early this morning with the boys,” I continued, “and they wanted to have a dance party just inside my eyes, right near everything that was hurting inside my head. So there was that, that kind of sucked, and my wife was quite displeased, to say the least; that really sucked. She had to load up the boys last night for a trip to pick up their drunken daddy. What? Why? Uh, because of three hours Nate, three bleeding bloody hours – I got so hammered I got in a fight with my wife and nearly punched my waiter just to surprise him. And I mean, like, yeah, I got hammered and I got in a fight and that, not together, but all separate events, you know what I mean, they were completely unrelated incidents. I’m just trying to explain how I was a victim of my environment, really, one that you put me in. That makes you a big douche bag. Because she’s standing right beside me, okay? She’s my ‘go-to’ person, that’s why I called her. Apparently I was yours, but you wrecked it. Of course I’m going to say that. Look I don’t want to talk about it. Long story short, you fucked me over. Sorry love, not you; my wife, and my kids, what is wrong with you, Nate? Did you seriously just say, ‘thank you’, when I said, ‘sorry love.’ Man, Nate, my kids are here. I’m swearing and they are looking at my face, I am sorry to them for that. That was not for you, why would I apologize to you? Why, Nate, why, what is going on? And, dude, no love, just…” I paused, it was becoming too much, I felt like I couldn’t breathe for the lack of sense in the conversation. I was being strangled by a stupid man over the phone. He was still convinced I had to meet up with him.

  “Not an effing chance, not happening,” I said, “I am not doing that again. I had a few drinks waiting for nothing last night, asshole, oh yeah, that’s right.” I was angry again, but my head still hurt so I tried to be quiet too. I moved the phone from my face, “Sorry,” I said to Katie who had raised her eyebrows and motioned toward the boys. “You are kidding. You are dumb.” I was talking to Nate again. “So just tell me now. No. No. No. When? Fine, but, listen, I’m punching you in the face if my kids start swearing anytime soon, just so you know, it’s all on you. Okay? And if they punch someone in the face, I’m throwing you out of a moving vehicle. No, it stops there; they won’t know what that means. Look, just, I’ll see you soon.”

  Katie stood staring at me, not sure if she should laugh or ask me to leave. “Nate?” she asked, her question hooked sharply with sarcasm.

  “No,” I shook my head, “your mom.” I said it with a straight face, which was easy as I was still trying to process Nate’s side of the conversation.

  “He’s picking me up,” I said casually. “Turns out it was him yesterday, of course, I should have known, all signs were indicating stupid. This morning I was thinking that it might have sounded a bit like Pete, I was way off. Anyway, something has him losing his ever loving mind, and last night he forgot to come meet me in favour of driving to his parents’, two hours away, to hide out there. He called in sick to work today. He’s just now on his way back. Don’t worry, he’s picking me up; I told him there was no way I was waiting for him anywhere ever again.” My pace changed as I became anxious, “What the hell do you think this is about? It’s NATE. It could be anything from him having seen a squirrel, to, buddy, bring a shovel, gloves and your lifting arms.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, love,” Katie said, with a bit of strain now showing on her face. “You should get him to help you with the roof this summer as payback, that’s what you should do.”

  “Yes,” I said nodding; “yeah, I think that’s a great idea.” I had nearly forgotten all about the roof, and welcomed its distracting qualities back into my mind.

  She smiled in agreement and then said, “I think I’ll try to get a run in before you leave.”

  My sulk broke upon hearing her say that, look at that gold, stuck right here in this diamond. I smiled and said, “That just won you the T.B.I.A. (pronounced te-bi-uh): Today’s Best Idea Awa
rd. You get a high five.”

  Chapter 4 … But The Bounce, Baby, The Bounce

  The Stupid Room was not to be mistaken for the room without a name.

  The room without a name was quite small, too small in fact to be turned into a washroom even though it had a sink in it, and having a washroom there would have been just so perfectly convenient. It instead was a room the size of a utility closet that one could walk into to place something on the shelf on their left or on their right. Or, depending on the item and their attachment to it, they could throw it on the floor beneath either shelf. Seeing as that, in my opinion, only made perfect housing for spiders, I tried to avoid that option and pile things carefully on whichever shelf looked like it was holding less at that moment. Needless to say; the room had become storage to many things we had run out of room and use for. There were mostly tools and items of that nature on the left shelf, including some bulbs and various plugs for various items. The second shelf held a PlayStation 2 and all its components and controllers, a scrapped Xbox 360 Nate had claimed he could “modify” to play copied games or something to that effect, an overflowing bag of dead batteries, the empty box for a George Foreman grill (though I vaguely recalled Katie saying her parents wanted to try it so she may have sent the grill their way), some champagne flutes and an electric heater I had apparently forgotten we owned.