14 Degrees Below Zero

by Quinton Skinner

  Anna had been attacked by pancreatic cancer, and it rotted her out from the inside. She was like waterlogged wood at the end, soft and porous. In the last couple of weeks she smelled terribly. Lewis had burned incense constantly. He had camped out on the sofa downstairs in a mess of pillows and blankets and books. He slept only a couple of hours at a time, vigilant for the sound of her coughing or moaning in a semiconscious stupor of pain and narcotics.

  “Sit, Carew,” he said to the dog, who had spotted another canine on the other side of the street. A female, Lewis thought, but his assessment was certainly clouded by the creature holding its leash—a girl of about twenty-five in those hip-hugger pants and spaghetti-strap top that was apparently handed out as a uniform these days. She didn’t seem cold, but Lewis’s hands were shaking.

  Lewis, at forty-seven, prided himself on not being the sort of man who took untoward notice of girls almost half his age—girls, he reminded himself with a wince, who were essentially the same age as his daughter.

  “I said sit,” he growled, more loudly. Carew did not comply. Carew had gotten a taste for chaos during his wild, predomestication days, and ran wild through the house and slept on the sofas. He was most definitely not getting with the program. The dog knew that Lewis was in no condition to train it.

  In a full-fledged pique, Lewis jerked on Carew’s leash—all right, granted, probably too hard, but how else was he to get his message across? The girl across the street looked up, and a flash of concerned consternation played across her admittedly pretty face. Lewis imagined himself through her eyes: an old guy, bundled up though it wasn’t really that cold, losing his shit and committing borderline animal abuse.

  Lewis smiled and gave her a what’re-you-gonna-do shrug. She would have been in his range, back when he was young. Now it was out of the question. It was unsavory to even think about it. But he thought about it.

  The girl gave Lewis a little half-smile, noncommittal, and went on her way. Her ponytail bounced on her shoulder blades as she walked.

  Now why the hell had she given him a look like that? All right, he was dressed far too warm in his hooded sweatshirt and black burglar’s cap. The girl was sleeveless, her arms fetchingly lithe and tanned. It wasn’t his fault he was bundled like an old man—the goddammed antidepressant his doctor had forced on him made him feel high and giddy in the morning, his face and fingers borderline numb, and random pains and chills flitted through his chest cavity. Maybe the girl wouldn’t have been so standoffish if she’d known that he’d just lost his wife. The pretty ones always thought they were above you—and all because of a chance genetic fluke that inspired behavior in men that was, in the end, little more than a complicated mask over extremely simple desires.

  He could have had that girl when he was younger. He was sure of it.

  He’d been married to Anna for twenty-five years when she died. He couldn’t say they were all good years, especially when he was younger, more angry. The last years, before she got sick, were also no picnic. But time had passed, they had stayed together. Sometimes he thought they shouldn’t have. But there was no point thinking about it now.

  Lewis and Carew reached the empty park. It was silent and still, too early for the children to be out.

  “Here we are, boy,” Lewis said, his voice morning-hoarse. “Your earthly paradise—Dogshit Park.”

  Lewis walked gingerly through the grass, fastidiously avoiding the plethora of turds that decorated the turf. They were like synesthetic land mines, their sight and smell permeating his oversensitized consciousness and senses in a way that had been the norm for the past year, since Anna had learned she was sick.

  Taking in a measured breath, Lewis massaged his chest. He was light-headed, and everything seemed unreal. He tried to will the world back into focus, to make everything take on the somber tones of reality. He sent out internal feelers for the catastrophic explosion of pain behind his sternum that would be the last thing he ever felt.

  It didn’t happen. He didn’t die. He came back to himself.

  There was a big sign posted: CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG. Someone had painted over some of the letters, and now it read: LEAN AFT YO DOG. Everyone apparently felt they had a special dispensation from the rules, anyway, because there was shit everywhere. Lewis counted a half-dozen mounds before he found a clear patch of grass and unclipped Carew’s leash. He wasn’t supposed to let the dog run free in the city, but fuck it. He felt a certain sympathy for Carew’s plight—it couldn’t be easy, living with Lewis.

  Carew took off and ran a big circle in the grass. He looked back with undisguised doggy affection, his big tongue hanging out.

  Yeah yeah, Lewis. OK OK yeah.

  “Yeah, OK to you, too,” Lewis called to him. “Now go play. We have to get home soon.”

  There was another sign in the neighborhood that read: BEGIN ONE WAY. Someone had obscured two letters to make it read: GIN ONE WAY. The gag rankled him every time he saw it. The better joke, obviously, was to erase the GIN and make the sign read BE ONE WAY. Wasn’t that apparent to everyone?

  Lewis took his cell phone out of his pocket and, with surprise, realized that he was smiling. He was too emotional these days; it was as though some defensive barrier inside him had been breached and couldn’t be put in place again. For the moment it was working in his favor, though, because the sight of Carew’s mottled brown pelt gave him pleasure. He thought of the animal’s not-disagreeable smell, and the satisfying clack of his claws on the hardwood floors at home, and the feeling of Carew’s body against his when they watched TV on the sofa together. And Lewis felt all right.

  After dialing a familiar number Lewis pressed the phone against his ear and, with his free hand, fished for a cigarette in the pocket of his sweatshirt. He managed to get the thing lit before Jay picked up.

  “Hello, what?” she mumbled. “Dad?”

  For the moment he had no aches, no chills, no heaviness of heart and mind. The sound of his daughter’s voice was a warm fire on a winter day—he could melt, he could die. He lived to hear her call him Dad. He loved her like music, like light. She and Ramona were all that he lived for, and he knew how much they needed him.

  “How did you know it was me?” he asked, watching Carew digging in the grass.

  “Who else would call so early?” she said.

  “Early?” he repeated, an unintentional note of mockery in his voice. “It’s almost seven-thirty. I’m out with Carew. Isn’t Ramona out of bed yet?”

  A moment of silence.

  “Dad, it’s more like ten after seven,” Jay moaned. “Ramona’s asleep. I need to rest, Dad. You’re twenty-five years ahead of me in melatonin depletion. Is there something important you want to talk about?”

  “What do you mean, you need to rest?” Lewis asked her. “What time did you get to bed last night?”

  Another pause. Lewis had miscalculated. He shouldn’t have asked her that, at least not in that tone. Jay and Anna had always been major sticklers in the matter of Lewis’s tone—he was too cutting, too acerbic, too something. He wasn’t sufficiently empathetic. He had been made to understand that sometimes he came on too strong. He lacked warmth. The criticisms of the mother had been passed on to the daughter. At least some part of her still lived.

  “Stephen was here last night, if that’s what you mean,” Jay said. She was waking up, her voice turning sharp.

  Lewis took a drag on his cigarette. He needed to be alert. He was entering a conversational wilderness.

  “Honey, you know I didn’t mean anything,” he told her. “Did Ramona at least get to sleep at a decent hour?”

  Jay let out a long breath. “Yeah, Dad, she did. She’s fine.”

  “You make it sound like I’m giving you a hard time,” Lewis said. “Truce, all right? I just called to talk to you. It’s a beautiful morning—cloudy, but the sun’s coming out like a big bald head. You remember that song?”

  “Yeah, Dad, I do.” Softer now.

  “You should get up
,” Lewis told her. “Get your day started.”

  Carew was fussily smelling trees, the grass, turds. His back twitched with the olfactory explosion of the park. Lewis winced as a plume of cigarette smoke found his eye.

  “So you’re walking the dog?” Lewis heard the sound of his daughter adjusting herself in bed.

  “I already told you that,” he said. “Hey, did I hear Ramona? Does she want to talk to Grandpa?”

  “Ramona isn’t up yet.”

  Lewis realized, all at once, that Stephen was in bed with Jay. He had spent the night there, in Jay’s little two-bedroom apartment on the far side of Hennepin Avenue, about six blocks from Lewis’s house. Lewis had suspected Stephen of sleeping over before, but it was an apprehension he’d never had confirmed.

  She wasn’t required to live like this. Jay had an open invitation to come home, to bring Ramona, to unite what was left of the family. Of course, should that happen, Lewis knew he wouldn’t approve of allowing Stephen to spend the night.

  What was this doing to Ramona’s psyche? He was no kinky Freudian, but things were hard enough for the little girl—she was growing up with a single mother, and she almost never saw her father. And now the confusion of seeing a boyfriend parading in and out of her mother’s room, the sleepy male face at the breakfast table, Stephen half-clothed and giving her mother confidential caresses to commemorate the erotic adventures of the night before.

  It had to be harmful to Ramona. It pained Lewis to think it, but the girl wasn’t being given an optimal upbringing. Of course, raising concern of any kind would only serve to cleave a yawning chasm of enmity between himself and Jay. She was stubborn, proud. She might move away. She might disappear.

  Lewis took a jagged breath and caressed his breastbone. Not yet, can’t die yet. His head swam with fear. He calculated his chances of surviving the morning at ninety-six, maybe ninety-seven percent. Very good odds, but he felt his world narrowing.

  What made it all the more unbearable was Stephen himself. Stephen was a tenure-track professor at the university, in the graduate program that Jay herself might have been starting this fall—if she hadn’t gotten pregnant at nineteen and dropped out after her second year of college. Now Jay was twenty-three. Stephen was nine years older. Stephen: Mister Perfect, Mister Intellectual. He hadn’t fooled Lewis for an instant, not from the moment—the very millisecond—they first met.

  “Dad?” Jay said. “You still there?”

  “Yes, honey,” Lewis said, trying to remember how he talked when he sounded normal. “Can I please say good morning to Ramona?”

  “She isn’t up, Dad,” Jay said again. “And there isn’t time. We’re going to have to hurry to get her to day care on time.”

  So Lewis was to believe that Ramona wasn’t awake yet, although in the same breath Jay was talking about rushing her to day care—a day care that, not insignificantly, Lewis paid for. Precisely when had his discourse with his daughter devolved into worthless half-truths and arm’s-length parrying?

  “When you were Ramona’s age, your mother and I always got you into bed by eight o’clock,” Lewis said. “That way, you were nice and rested in the morning. We didn’t have to drag you out of bed.”

  Indistinct sounds on the phone.

  “Jay, did you—”

  “What did you say, Dad? Sorry.”

  “Is someone there?” Lewis asked, the words escaping him despite his best intentions. “Did Stephen spend the night?”

  Lewis briefly considered walking home, getting into his car, and driving the short distance to Jay’s apartment. Perhaps this was a conversation best conducted in person. Maybe he needed to have a word with Stephen.

  “Dad, don’t take this the wrong way,” Jay said. “But it’s just not your business.”

  Zing. In a heartbeat, Jay had turned cold and disapproving—an elegant diversionary strategy, something else she had learned from her mother.

  “I could consider it my business, since it pertains to the general welfare of my granddaughter.”

  “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” said Jay. “I’ll call you later, Dad. I’m glad you’re enjoying the morning. I really am.”

  “Don’t get offended. Please,” Lewis rushed to say. “You know I’m always thinking about Ramona. She’s only four years old.”

  “I know how old my daughter is.”

  “Then you also know that at her age—”

  “Good-bye, Dad.”

  “Jay?”

  “What?”

  “I love you, sweetheart.”

  A big sigh, the biggest of the morning, then the longest gulf of silence.

  “I know, Dad.”

  Lewis’s daughter hung up on him.

  Carew squeezed out a magnificent shit just then, three logs’ worth. Lewis leashed up the dog and pondered the crap as though it were an abstract sculpture at the Walker museum. He took a look around.

  Fuck it. If no one else cared, why should he? Let someone else clean it up—or, better still, step in it.

  3. IT WAS KIND OF AN UGLY THING.

  Of course Jay loved her father. He was always able to overlook her transgressions, to absorb the impact of her mistakes, to point out for her where she was going wrong. He had always been unremittingly generous with her, never sparing of his time, or himself. When she was a little girl, other children had been jealous of her over her parents. The other kids in the neighborhood had shut-down materialistic disciplinarians to deal with—real white-bread Minnesota die-hard conformists, no matter what package they advertised in the form of Democratic politics and Unitarian activism. Jay’s parents were always different. Anna had been an artist once, and beautiful, with a sort of innate grace that Jay could never attain. Anna never gave a damn if Jay smoked pot or went out with boys, so long as Jay maintained her integrity. And Anna would even go so far as to give Jay a pretty coherent definition of what that integrity comprised.

  As for Lewis, well, half of Jay’s adolescent friends had serious crushes on him. They talked about it right in front of Jay. And these were real crushes, the kind where they seriously thought about her dad as a sex object. It was gross, she had been obliged to act disgusted, but secretly the whole thing filled her with a transgressive pride. She knew she should probably spend some time on the couch one of these days and unravel all of that old shit. When she could afford it. When she wasn’t waiting tables for a living.

  It was kind of an ugly thing, come to think of it, the way she had always felt jealous of her parents—the way they always seemed to have their lives together, the way they always seemed to be in love despite having been married for about a hundred years. Jay had felt small in comparison to them—not in the normal sense, but smaller as in inferior. They were hard to live up to. And Jay’s guilt had always been compounded by their unflagging support, their constant attempts to boost her up, their refusal to judge anything she did.

  Today Jay woke up and ached with the absence of her mother. In his usual fashion, Lewis had somehow sensed this and tried to make it better. He liked to take charge. He always tried to make everything all right for those he loved.

  God, he was always around.

  “I take it Lewis deduced that I stayed over,” Stephen said. “And that he wasn’t particularly happy about it.”

  “It’s none of his business,” Jay said, replacing the phone in its cradle.

  She could see Stephen’s face in the mirror over the dresser. He slipped into his default expression, the one that guardedly revealed his general haughty disapproval for the small-mindedness that he was forced to deal with on a daily basis. Of course he never expressed outright contempt, or anger—those were implicit. That was the thing about Stephen. Jay thought she might be in love with him, but he was stronger than her, and more elusive. It was really quite hard to ever pin him down on anything.

  Stephen knotted his silk tie and smoothed his wavy hair—it was a rich brown, like a nice suede coat. It curled around his ears and accentuated
his long nose and high forehead. God, he was really nice to look at. Not that Jay was a frump—in fact, she had long enjoyed a reputation as a beauty, in opposition to her own opinion. She had an unpleasant sense that she wasn’t as attractive as Stephen, on the abstract level at which a man’s appearance contrasted with a woman’s.

  But why exactly did she think that? Because Stephen did? Had he expressed that to her on some subliminal level, or was she simply being paranoid?

  Jay had no clothes on, and as she sat up in bed her blanket slipped down and she saw herself in the mirror: her belly was flat, and she had small breasts with nipples that stood up in the cool morning. She had fine black hair, and a face that looked young enough for her to get carded when she bought American Spirits at the SuperAmerica on the corner. Not bad.

  There was a noise, and Jay looked to the doorway. Ramona was standing there in her Hello Kitty pajamas, rubbing one eye with a clenched fist.

  “Good morning, Mama,” Ramona said.

  Actually, she spoke in an accent that was virtually indecipherable to anyone outside a small circle composed of her mother, grandfather, and, with sporadic success, her day care providers. Ramona’s vocabulary comprised a galaxy of words and precocious expressions, but her pronunciation lagged behind other children her age. The “G” in Ramona’s greeting was little more than a hopeful fiction, beyond the skill of her struggling tongue. Her “D” sound was a glottal choking off. Her “ing,” on the other hand, brought joy to Jay’s ear. Ramona had mastered that sound, and it was like high-pitched bird music to her mother.

  Stephen finished fussing over his tie and looked at Ramona with a self-conscious smile. Ramona’s speech troubles invariably made Jay feel protective. She hated it when people made Ramona repeat herself over and over—something that Stephen had only recently learned not to do.