14 Degrees Below Zero

by Quinton Skinner

  “The thing is,” Stephen added, somewhat piously, “I don’t usually patronize Starbucks.”

  Jesus. Lewis liked Starbucks. It was clean. The coffee was good, and it always tasted the same, no matter the time of day. They had standards you could count on. They were even blandly cheerful to Lewis when he stopped in most days. What was wrong with that?

  “Well, make an exception—just this one time,” Lewis said as he pushed open the door. “Patronize me, all right?”

  Stephen sighed, hitched up his briefcase, and followed Lewis through the door. They moved through the bookstore, past the racks of magazines and into the coffee shop. There was no line, and Lewis ordered his usual cup of coffee from the usual cute young girl, who dispatched Lewis quite quickly then perked up considerably at the prospect of interacting with Stephen. The girl smiled and seemed to regard Stephen’s ordering a latte as an act of admirable discernment. What the hell, Lewis thought. So it was Stephen’s turn to be relatively young.

  They sat together at a small table by the window, looking out at the pedestrian traffic on Nicollet: young men and women in business clothes mixed with that semisubterranean population for whom downtown was apparently the most interesting place to while away their idleness—those shabby, slightly crazed folk of indeterminate age, many clutching to worn and faded bags from Target or Walgreens, as though these totems of consumerism lent them a tawdry respectability that belied their appearance. Lewis stirred his coffee and turned his attention to Stephen.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” he said.

  “This won’t take long,” Stephen replied. “I wanted to talk to you about Jay.”

  “Funny, so did I,” said Lewis.

  “Really?” Stephen said, sipping his latte through its plastic lid.

  “Ramona is very young,” Lewis told him. “And she is in a confusing situation, effectively having no father. Do you think it’s appropriate for you to be spending the night at Jay’s apartment?”

  Stephen’s features froze. He lowered his coffee.

  “I assure you, Lewis—”

  “You don’t have to assure me of anything,” Lewis said. “What goes on between you and Jay is your business. But I have a responsibility to my granddaughter.”

  The words came out unencumbered by forethought. Lewis felt his resentment growing, a black sentiment that he at once embraced and abhorred. He doubted that Stephen could comprehend the vigor of Lewis’s loathing for him in that moment.

  “Well, I think that Jay—”

  “Jay is overwhelmed,” Lewis broke in. “Her mother’s death has been quite a blow. And, frankly, so has motherhood. She’s put her life on hold. Although, I have to say, she didn’t have to.”

  “Is that right?” Stephen asked. He sat back a little bit, his eyes locked onto Lewis’s, scanning, analyzing. Not for the first time Lewis felt a bit intimidated by Stephen’s self-possession—and then discarded the feeling. Lewis had fifteen years on Stephen, and he hadn’t spent all that time sleeping. He had seen things on the wide-open plain of time.

  “What, are you disagreeing with me?” Lewis asked.

  Stephen fiddled with his watch. “Look, Lewis, I didn’t come to have an argument,” he said. “We have the same interests at heart. You know I love your daughter.”

  “OK,” Lewis allowed.

  “It’s that you have this particular narrative,” Stephen added.

  “OK. Tell me,” Lewis said.

  “You have this way of creating Jay’s life for her,” Stephen said. “You’re constantly telling her what to think about herself, and everything else for that matter. You say she has been overwhelmed by motherhood, and she behaves as though that’s true. But from what I’ve been able to piece together—and, granted, I wasn’t there—you treated her pregnancy like an unrecoverable disaster.”

  “It was a setback,” Lewis said.

  “You made her feel like a failure,” Stephen said.

  Lewis bit his lip and fought off a wide variety of impulses, some of them violent. Of all the things he needed at this stage of his life, among the least desirable was the presence of this hair-splitter questioning the way he behaved with his family. Because, ultimately, wasn’t Stephen just dabbling? Didn’t he have the option of leaving without any real repercussions? Jay and Ramona were Lewis’s life. They were all he had, and now he understood that Stephen threatened the sanctity of the way he chose to care for them.

  “You had better watch yourself,” Lewis said.

  Stephen visibly blanched. “Lewis, calm down.”

  “I am calm. Right now I am calm.”

  Stephen turned away from Lewis and crossed his legs. He glanced back for a moment with an odd gleam in his eyes. Was he actually frightened? Well, good.

  “Lewis, honestly,” Stephen said. “I think that the amount of time I have spent with Jay and the commitment I’ve demonstrated to her gives me at least the right to have a frank conversation with you without things devolving into threats.”

  “I’m not threatening you,” Lewis said.

  “I think you don’t have a full understanding of your impact on Jay,” Stephen said.

  “OK. Tell me.”

  “Despite herself, she isn’t able to regard you as a fallible human being,” Stephen said slowly. “Yes, she puts up resistance, but that’s just for show, to keep her self-respect. In fact, she takes everything you tell her with extreme gravity. Each of your phone calls is a major event for her. And since Anna’s death, you’ve been calling several times a day.”

  There was an unpleasant buzzing in Lewis’s ears. He wanted to mess with them, try to rearrange them, but he knew his actions would be mistaken as a sign of mental instability.

  “I like to talk to my daughter,” Lewis said. “Surely you don’t have a problem with that.”

  “Lewis, please, drop your defenses just for a moment.” Stephen sipped at his coffee and looked outside, as though seeking support. “The point I’m making is that you have an inordinate impact on Jay. Her life has been in a state of turmoil since she got pregnant, and I assume yours has, too, to some extent. But as someone who knows your family very well, I’ve observed that your influence on Jay tends to be disruptive and disturbing a great deal of the time. I don’t doubt your love, Lewis, or your good intentions. I’d be a fool to do that, and wrong. But there are times when the weight of your judgments, and your questioning of her, is pressing down and making things far more difficult for her than they need to be. She’s brilliant, Lewis. It’s absurd for her to be spending her time waiting tables. Yet she’s convinced herself that’s all she’s capable of. And, Lewis, there are times when I worry that she’s going to start believing that it’s a permanent condition. As soon as she believes that she’s a case of lost potential, then she will have crossed a line that I’m not sure I can pull her back from. Does any of this ring true to you, Lewis?”

  Lewis sat back in his chair and dropped his chin close to his chest. He could not remember anyone ever speaking to him in this fashion. Lecturing.

  “What was it you said earlier, that I create stories out of people’s lives?” Lewis asked. “Well, if that’s not what you’re doing, tell me what the fuck it is.”

  Stephen’s mouth puckered. “Sometimes it takes Jay an hour to recover from one of your phone calls. And then, as often as not, you call again.”

  “And this is your business?” Lewis asked. “Educate me. Give me another sermon. Tell me how many times a day I should be allowed to call my own daughter.”

  “I wouldn’t presume to do that,” Stephen said. He touched the knot of his tie, and Lewis imagined grabbing that tie, pulling it up, cutting off Steven’s wind and watching him gasp for air.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Stephen said suddenly.

  “Like what?” Lewis asked.

  “I’m not going to play your games, Lewis,” Stephen replied.

  “I don’t want you to,” Lewis said. “You’re not invited.”

  “Yo
u need help.”

  “Oh, but I’m getting so much help from you,” Lewis said. “Stephen, you’ve dated my daughter for a little while. You’ve been fairly nice to her. If you hadn’t, we would have had a problem long before now. But for you to come to my place of work and—”

  “I’m worried about Jay,” Stephen said.

  And he seemed, as far as Lewis could tell, to be speaking the truth. It was tempting to let it all wash into him, to take Stephen’s hypothesis at face value and respond to it on its own terms. But, really, what the fuck did Stephen know? Stephen had never slogged through the trenches of twenty-plus years of marriage, had never lived through decades of feeling his very self erode into a clutching little core of emptiness. Stephen had never played nurse to a dying woman who, just months before, he had silently and daily judged as the criminal behind all that besieged him. Stephen had never gone to the doctor and subjected himself to the humiliation of revealing a small fraction of his loneliness, fear, and grief, and been given a small pill to take every morning in the hopes that he could pull himself together enough to care for the two fragile souls who would probably come to a bad end without him.

  Hating himself even as it happened, Lewis shivered.

  “What’s wrong?” Stephen asked.

  “Nothing, not a thing,” Lewis said. “It’s the air-conditioning in this place.”

  Curiosity passed over Stephen’s face, but he said nothing.

  “Are you done?” Lewis asked.

  “It’s not a matter of being done.” Stephen picked up his latte and looked at it as though it had disappointed him. “I just hoped we could have a civilized conversation about Jay, that’s all. I love her, you love her. You’re her father. She cares about what you think more than anything else, and I wonder whether that’s healthy.”

  “Speaking of healthy, you never answered my question.”

  “Which one?” Stephen said warily.

  “Whether it’s healthy for you to be spending the night at Jay’s apartment,” Lewis said. “Whether or not it’s good for Ramona to see you in bed with her mother.”

  “Lewis—” Stephen paused, giving the impression of a man trying very hard to check his words. “I did answer that question. I said that’s up to Jay to judge. And believe me, we have the same concerns. We try very hard to be discreet.”

  “Discreet?”

  “For crying out loud, Lewis, calm down.”

  Lewis looked around. There were about ten people in the place, including the girls behind the counter, and they were all looking at him. Had he been shouting or something? He couldn’t be sure. He took the lid off his coffee and watched the vapors of steam curl off its cooling surface.

  “I am calm,” he said quietly.

  “I don’t know how I thought this was going to go, but it’s gone badly.” Stephen picked up his briefcase off the floor. “If I’ve been presumptuous, I apologize. I don’t want to antagonize you, Lewis. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be friendly. But there are unhealthy things happening between you and Jay, and I felt a duty to try to do something about it. It’s the same thing you would do in my place.”

  “In my place,” Lewis mused. “What about my place? What would you really do if you were in my place?”

  Stephen grimaced. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I don’t really know, either,” Lewis said, and then, surprising himself, he let out a bark of a laugh.

  Stephen’s sour expression deepened. “I don’t find any of this very amusing, Lewis.”

  “Stick around,” Lewis said. “It’s going to get hilarious.”

  “Is that another threat?” Stephen asked, sitting straighter in his chair and holding his briefcase to his chest like a shield.

  “Now why would I threaten you?” Lewis asked. “We have so much in common. Hey, we’re both runners. Maybe we should go for a jog sometime.”

  “I mean it when I say you need help.” Stephen started to get up. “You’ve changed in the time I’ve known you.”

  It was shocking, to hear it put like that. Lewis got up as well and stopped short, his mounting anger defused.

  Lewis looked back at the table in the corner of the coffee shop, tucked back behind a planter. Anna was sitting there.

  She didn’t see him.

  Then she was gone. He didn’t see her get up and leave, and he didn’t witness her vanishing. It was simply that she had been there, and she no longer was.

  Lewis put out his hand and grasped the back of a chair. He realized that he had nearly fallen over.

  “Lewis, are you all right?” Stephen asked.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Lewis replied. He looked back at the table in the corner. No one was sitting there.

  “Did something just happen?” Stephen asked.

  “I’ve seen things,” Lewis said.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Stephen told him.

  “I’ve done things,” Lewis added.

  “What do you mean?” Stephen said, his forehead wrinkling.

  “Nothing.” Lewis chucked his half-finished coffee into a trash can. “Nothing at all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sell some shirts. They don’t sell themselves, apparently.”

  And, with the consolation of a dramatic exit, Lewis returned to his job. He didn’t look back to see Stephen’s reaction, and he didn’t look back to the table where he had seen his late wife sitting, staring ahead of her, looking for all the world as though she was waiting for something.

  9. THE DENUDED TREES, THE BARREN FLOWER BEDS, THE STILLNESS.

  In the morning it felt as though some irreversible shift had occurred. Jay had lived in Minneapolis her entire life, and seasonal change had been ingrained in her from her infancy—the moment when the scale tipped, when life became a matter of gradations of cold. There was no question now that the windows would remain sealed until spring, and that spring was a theoretical hope akin to the promise of life after death. She looked out the window at the denuded trees, the barren flower beds, the eerie stillness in things natural and man-made, and decided to put on a sweatshirt and take solace in the music of the Magnetic Fields.

  Ramona was in the next room dressing Barbies, luxuriating in an aimless Saturday. Jay had spent the night alone, tucking herself in with a second scotch-and-soda after playing back a couple of voice-mail messages from Stephen, who sounded tense and distant. She supposed she could have invited him over—it would have been the usual thing—but she was exhausted, and didn’t want to deal with whatever drama lay behind Stephen’s cryptic unease. She loved Stephen, and would follow that love wherever it happened to take her in the drift of time. But a quiet evening with Ramona was too good to pass up. Jay glanced through the doorway at Ramona playing, saw the way her arms had grown slender, her legs lengthening, her face shedding all its babyishness. It was no longer impossible to imagine the day when Ramona would say good-bye to her mother and hide herself in the world.

  “What?” Ramona asked, looking up from the complicated task of getting a plastic Barbie shoe to stay on an impossibly small and pointed Barbie foot.

  “Nothing,” Jay said. “I’m just watching you.”

  “Well, cut it out,” Ramona said with an enigmatic smile.

  “All right,” Jay told her daughter. “Fair enough.”

  Jay had never been alone in her entire life. She had been a child, then had a roommate in college, and then Ramona had come. The great paradox, of course, was the crushing loneliness that comprised her emotional terrain. She assiduously tried to protect Ramona from her own despair, having vowed long ago not to become one of those single mothers who treated her child like a sort of surrogate spouse. And she had done a pretty good job. So far.

  We are nothing without love, sang the baritone from the CD player. And it made Jay wonder where love had gotten her, and whether she had ever felt it, whether what she took for love was the same for those who claimed to love her.

  The door buzzer rang. Ramona screamed at the noise and ra
n out of the room (strange child) as Jay went to the electric box and pushed the button.

  “It’s me,” said Lewis.

  “Come on up,” Jay said, pressing the button that unlocked the front door of the building.

  Lewis came through the creaking door radiating warmth and relaxation. Jay enjoyed a wave of familiarity—this was weekend Lewis, the indulgent and indulged Dad whose sense of expansive fun almost compensated for his tight and sullen manner when he used to come home from work.

  “Sweetpea,” Lewis said, kissing Jay on the cheek.

  Ramona emerged from her room in a flurry of elbows and knees, running in that way of hers that was essentially a parade of off-kilter hops and lurches, giving a squeal of delight as she leapt up into her grandfather’s arms.

  “Good to see you, little girl,” Lewis said, his face half-buried in Ramona’s hair.

  “Grampa, you know what? You know what?”

  “What, sweetie?”

  “When I’m five, Mama said I can get a hamster,” Ramona exclaimed. “Or a guinea pig. One of those.”

  “Well, that’s really nice of your mama,” Lewis said.

  Ramona nestled into Lewis’s arms. “Did you bring me a present?” she asked with exaggerated coquettishness.

  Lewis laughed. Jay noticed how Lewis strained a little to hold Ramona, adjusting his grip and bunching up his shoulders. Ramona was getting bigger. Lewis was getting older.

  “I must have forgot,” Lewis said, letting Ramona slide to the floor. “But let me see. Are you still saving money?”

  Jay watched Ramona perk up, standing on tiptoe and bringing her fingers together in a cartoon enactment of guileless greed.

  “Yesss,” she said. Ramona had lately been getting an allowance of fifty cents a week for clearing her place at the table and getting her own drinking water with the assistance of a kitchen step stool. She’d saved five dollars at one point in her Hello Kitty bank and used the money to buy a stuffed animal from the Borders in Calhoun Square. Her cash reserves, as far as Jay knew, now hovered at around a buck-fifty.