by Sara Lewis
Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
* * *
Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.
To my sisters, Maggie Lewis Thomas and Susannah Lewis-O’Dea, and my brother, Evan Lewis, with love
one
I was in my sister Ellen’s bathroom, drilling through tile. The first try, a couple of days ago, resulted in a cracked tile, which of course I had to replace. I had never put a single tile in the middle of a wall of them, so I had to hunt down a knowledgeable Home Depot employee and listen carefully to his instructions. I had to buy grout, new tile, a special drill bit and so on. A small square of plain white tile is not as easy to find as you might think. There are all kinds of variations on white, white shadow, off-white. The possibilities are endless. And the size has to be the same. So start to finish, getting the new shower curtain rod put up, which was what my sister had asked me to do for her in the first place, ended up taking three days and costing more than expected. But as I put the final screw in the wall, my sister standing in the doorway with the shower curtain in her hands, I was almost sorry to see it end. After all that work, what she had in her bathroom was what she had before the little suction cups on the old rod gave up—a functional shower curtain. It didn’t seem like enough.
“Great, Tom!” She started to snap the plastic curtain hooks over the rod. “Thanks so much for doing this. Sorry it turned out to be such a hassle.”
I took the other end of the curtain and started hooking it from the opposite direction. “Is that all you want me to do?”
“That’s it.”
“Sure you don’t want, maybe, a shelf unit there above your hamper?”
“No, thanks,” she said.
“Or, maybe—I know! What about a mirror right here?”
“Really,” Ellen said. “I have enough in here. It’s the best-equipped bathroom I’ve ever seen!” She looked at herself in one of the mirrors, fluffing up the front of her hair. I didn’t want to tell her that this didn’t make the gray strands any less noticeable. My sister was only four years older than me, but she had all the gray hair.
I surveyed the room. There were hooks I’d put up for her towel and robe. Two mirrors, a shelf unit beside the medicine cabinet. “How about another towel bar right over here?”
“Well, see, I just don’t need to hang up any more towels. I’ve already got room for four. Two here, one there, and one over here. And since I live alone, I don’t really—”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re right.” I walked into the bedroom. “Any other repairs? What about bookshelves? Want some more shelves somewhere?”
“Thanks, but I think you’ve built me more shelves than the public library down the street has.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s not a major branch.” I was still looking around the condo, checking for things that needed repairs, places where racks or shelves or hooks could be added.
“I have everything I need,” she said. “Let’s eat. I made that spaghetti sauce you like.”
“You did? All right!” I said. “I’ll wash the dishes.”
“Deal,” she said. “But, Tom, this time would you mind waiting until after we’ve finished eating the food that’s on them?”
“Ha, ha, ha,” I said.
Of course the sauce was excellent and so was the salad. While I was eating, I was looking around the place, hoping to find something broken or loose or worn that I could fix for her. Unfortunately, everything was in pretty good shape. I owe my sister a lot, and I am always on the lookout for ways to repay her.
“Hey!” I said, looking up from my spaghetti.
“What?”
“Maybe you need a spice rack!”
She pointed. Next to the stove there was a set of little wooden shelves, just right for a medium-sized spice collection.
“Oh,” I said, “Right, yeah. I guess I made you one already.”
“What about your place, Tom?”
“What about it?”
“Don’t you think you should put up some shelves there? Build yourself a spice rack?”
“No,” I said. “My place doesn’t matter. And what would I do with a spice rack? I don’t cook.”
“I’m just saying that you put so much time and energy into fixing up my place, but maybe you should focus some of that effort on your own.”
I looked at her. “What for? What would be the point of that?”
two
I was behind the bar in The Club, a music place where I had worked for a long, long time. I tried not to think about the exact number of years, but trust me, it was lots. The place was packed. All the seats were sold out as were all the standing-room tickets. People were six or seven deep at the bar, and the music was loud, so customers were screaming their drink orders into my face. An enormous biker yelled, “Whiskey sour!” and a drop of his spit landed on my upper lip.
“Did you forget my tequila sunrises?” another guy yelled. “I ordered three tequila sunrises half an hour ago!”
I nodded that I got that, and I wanted to say that it wasn’t half an hour ago; it was more like three minutes. But right then a girl squeezed her way through the crowd up to the bar. She had blond hair, and a lot of her chest was exposed in the low-cut shirt she was wearing. On the upper portion of her left breast, a tattoo of something with wings—a butterfly, an angel, the tooth fairy?—was peeking out over her shirt.
“Bartender!” she yelled in a piercing voice. She had a twenty-dollar bill in her hand, and she was waving it at me. “Margarita, extra salt!”
I had a lot of money in my left hand from other customers, and I had to put it away before I could do anything about these orders that kept coming at me. I punched the buttons on the register, but nothing happened; dead. I got down on the floor to check the plug, but it was fine. Time was passing, and the orders were piling up in my head. My right hand got wet down on the floor, and I would have to wash it before I made these drinks. I stood up. I was still holding the money, and the register wouldn’t open. Why was everybody ordering these fancy drinks tonight anyway? Didn’t anybody want a plain old beer? I was pushing buttons again, but the register must have been jammed or something.
“Bartender!” someone yelled. “I ordered two white-wine spritzers! Like, an hour ago!”
“I ordered before you!” someone said.
Just then, the biker, who was wearing a leather vest and no shirt said, “Where’s my whiskey sour?” And he lunged at me across the bar, grabbing my face with his enormous, scratchy hand. I heard something snap in my neck and everything was suddenly too bright.
“Oh, my God!” I yelled.
Then I was sitting up in bed in my own place, and my heart was pounding. The bartender dream. It was only the bartender dream, which I had at least a couple of times a month. I reached for my glasses and put them on. I looked around at my faded comforter, my yellowing lamp shade, my black-and-white TV with the coat hanger taped to where its rabbit ears should have been, a calendar on the wall from another year that had been over for a long time. “Phew. Everything’s fine,” I said out loud to no one. “Everything’s normal.”
In the bathroom, I turned on the water. While it was warming up, I took a look at my hair. A lot of guys my age had bald spots in back, like skin yamulkes. Or they had receding hairlines, ever narrowing peninsulas of hair in the middle of their oceanic foreheads. Not me. I had all my hair
. It wasn’t even thinning, and it was still dark brown. If I wanted to, I could grow it to my shoulders and make a substantial ponytail out of it, and it would be as thick and dark as it had ever been and not a bit stringy. But I didn’t want long hair, I liked it medium, not too short and not too long, no sideburns, beard, or mustache.
My name is Tom Good, but since I was ten, which was also the year I started playing guitar, everyone, except my immediate family, has called me Good, I am forty-seven years old, but if you went to high school with me, even if you hadn’t seen or thought about me since 1972, you would recognize me right away. I hadn’t changed much. I still wore T-shirts and jeans, sneakers, and, when absolutely necessary, a denim jacket.
I took off my glasses and stepped over the side of the tub and into the stream of water. It was cold, causing me to shrivel and get goose bumps. Quickly, I soaped my pits and my crotch. I put a dab of shampoo in my hand, wiped it over my hair, lathered it up. I rinsed fast and turned off the water. I pulled back the shower curtain and grabbed for my towel.
I put on my glasses. It was as I was drying my leg, one foot up on the toilet seat, when I happened to glance down and see it: a gray pubic hair. I looked again. I pulled. It was attached. Clearly, it was an anomaly, I thought, a single albino among the dark masses. But I looked around and found two more. Three, I completed my tally at five. Had they been there a long time, and I hadn’t noticed them? Or had they just sprouted suddenly? Once I’d heard a discussion on a talk radio program of people who had gone gray in a matter of moments. A sudden death in the family or a serious scare, and in a moment, their hair had all turned white. The hair on their heads, that was. But still. I guess it could be any hair. Same process, right? Maybe the dream about the biker, though not bad enough to make all the hair on my head turn white, had been just bad enough to zap the pigment from five pubic hairs. I looked again. Maybe I should see a doctor. Maybe I had a vitamin deficiency or too much stress.
I considered pulling the hairs out and tried one. The pain stopped me. And didn’t people say that if you pulled out a gray hair, two more would grow in its place? Then I’d have ten! In the end, I didn’t do anything about the hairs. Instead, I put on my clothes.
I was boiling water for coffee when there was a knock on my door.
After thinking about it a few seconds, I went to the door. I didn’t get many visitors. My place was at the back of an old stucco two-story house. The old lady who owned the house lives on the second floor; a family lived on the first in front. My apartment was just one room for living and sleeping, plus a bathroom and a kitchen. I didn’t get too many door-to-door salespeople, as they didn’t realize there was another unit back there.
I opened the door and there was Kevin, a friend I hadn’t seen in quite a while. We grew up on the same street. Later we worked together at The Club, where I was still a bartender.
“Oh!” I said, startled to see him. “Hey. What’s up?” I smiled and slugged him on the shoulder before backing up to let him in. Kevin was one of the guys I was thinking of earlier with the hair peninsulas. He was married and had two kids and another one on the way. He met his wife at one of those software mills in Sorrento Valley, where they both still worked, as far as I knew. She was a little younger than we were. He had a first marriage that didn’t work out. Whenever he wanted to remember what he had lost with the passing of his youth, he called me for comp tickets to a show. I hadn’t seen him in six months or so, since the last time Steve Poltz played at The Club.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “This is a surprise!” I didn’t think he’d ever been to my place before. But since I had been living in this house for as many years as I had worked at The Club, I was not hard to locate, if you were willing to put even a small amount of effort into it.
“I had to talk to you. Kind of important. Can I sit down? Do you have a minute?”
“Sure,” I said. “Help yourself. Do you want some coffee or something? I was just about to—”
“No, thanks,” he said. “I only drink it in the morning.”
It was 12:30. He must have been on his lunch break.
“Listen,” he said. And then he looked at me for a minute without saying anything. He exhaled and glanced at my row of guitars, my unmade bed. “Do you remember Diana?”
“Diana? Hmm. Diana?” This was a bluff. Of course I remembered her. I used to be in love with her. We were together for a few months. One minute she was asking me if I was ever going to get rid of my motorcycle and get a car so other people could ride with me without freezing and wrecking their hair, and the next minute she was gone. Untraceable.
“From The Club. You worked with her,” Kevin explained. “Waitress?” he said.
“How long ago?”
“Come on, Good. I know you remember her. About ten, eleven years ago. Blond hair. Beautiful. Smart. She was in graduate school. Education.” He clicked his fingers. “Snap out of it! You guys were together for two months! Maybe three.”
“OK, anyway, what about her?” I was bracing myself. I could almost feel that something bad was coming. She was dead, and it was my fault. Or he and Diana wanted to use my place. No one knew him in this neighborhood, and he would promise it wouldn’t be often—poor Cathy! Quickly, I made my decision: I would do the Nancy Reagan thing and Just say no, I would say. “Kevin, it’s none of my business, but why don’t you and Cathy get some counseling? You’ve got a couple of great kids, another on the way—”
“Listen, we ran into her,” Kevin said. “We saw Diana. Geneva started kindergarten this year, and Diana works at her school, Corona Vista Elementary. She’s a speech therapist there. She and Cathy started talking, and it turns out Diana’s a single mom who lives not too far from us. So anyway, Cathy invited her over for dinner.”
“Yeah?” I said, trying to urge him to get to the point.
“So she shows up with her kid. Her son.”
“OK,” I said. Single mom. I didn’t like the direction this conversation was going. I had an almost irrepressible urge to throw him out before he continued his story, to open my front door and point outside. This was a man I liked, a man I’d hung out with, a man whose wedding I’d ushered. I almost said, “Get out of here and don’t come back!” But then I sort of watched myself not do this. In a way, I waited to see what was going to happen next.
“Good, listen to me.” His voice got softer until he almost whispered. “The kid looks exactly like you.”
All the blood evacuated from my head, and my armpits started to drip. “What?” I said.
“Yeah,” Kevin went on. “Same dark hair with that cowlick right over here, same mouth. Good, he’s even got glasses.”
“What?” I said. Eloquent, I know.
“He looks exactly like you in the fifth grade! He’s in fifth grade. Same school where she works, Corona Vista. So is this just some huge, weird coincidence? Should I back off and just never mention it again? Could it be a fluke to find a kid who looks just like you in the fifth grade and happens to be the child of one of your old girlfriends—”
“Diane, you said?”
“Diana,” he said, shaking his head.
“Blond hair?” I said. I scratched my head. “Brown eyes. She wore a silver necklace with a tiny star on it?”
“I don’t remember that. Maybe I wasn’t—”
“She was trying to finish graduate school without borrowing any more money, so she had to live with her parents. It drove her nuts the way her mother would always ask her what time she was coming home and what she wanted for dinner. And her father was—”
“But you said you didn’t—”
“But I do,” I said. “I do.” I lowered my head and looked longingly at the floor. I am not proud to say that there was nothing I wanted more than to crawl under my bed.
We sat there for a long time not saying anything. I swallowed and looked out the window. Kevin looked at his hands and then at his feet. Finally, after a long time, he said, “So what are you going to d
o?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I seriously have no idea,” I was thinking, Do I have to do something? I looked at my row of guitars. I wanted to pick one up so badly, just to play a few notes, a familiar chord or two. But this was exactly the kind of moment when it would seem heartless and unfeeling to pick up a guitar. Too bad that this was also the exact kind of moment when I needed one most.
“I know what I’d do,” Kevin said. “I’d call her. I’d want to meet the kid. I’d definitely make contact. Right away. Immediately.”
I didn’t respond, I didn’t say, “Easy for you to say, Mr. Suburbia!” I just sat there willing him to leave. I liked Kevin; I really did, but he really had no idea what my life was like. Right now I just wanted him to get the hell out of my house.
“I guess I’ll go,” he said. “I should get back to work.” He stood up and moved to the door.
For once, my wish had come true. “Yeah,” I said. “OK.” I didn’t even get up as he walked out. I just sat there.
three
After you find out for the first time that you have a kid, it is hard to know what to do with the rest of your day. First, I called a somewhat new bartender, who I knew was saving for a better car, and I asked him to work for me that night.
“Sure,” he said easily, without even thinking about it.
“’Predate it,” I said.
I hung up. Now I had given myself this whole load of free time, but I knew how to fill it up. I chose a guitar and went into my music room to play it.
When I first moved here, I built a miniature music studio in my place. It was off the main room in what used to be a closet. It was a walk-in closet, almost a small room. I saw the potential the first time I looked at the apartment. It may have been the reason I decided to move here. So I soundproofed it with some dense foam. I rigged it so that there were plenty of electrical outlets in there. The cracks in the door were covered with extra strips of foam. I had never had a complaint about the noise, and I played in there every day. I didn’t think Jeanette, the old lady upstairs who owned the house, even knew I played guitar. I had all my recording equipment on shelves along one closet wall. It was old stuff that I got a long time ago, but it still worked. On a shelf above that were all the tapes I’d made.
