by Dan Mooney
“Does he know you call him New Dad?” he asked.
“I call him New Dad to his face. He lets me get away with it. It’s a minor form of rebellion.”
“How’s Regular Dad?” he asked.
She pursed her lips, which in the unspoken language of Rebecca that very few people could speak meant “I disapprove.” He decided not to push the matter.
“Do you think people can stay in love forever?” she asked eventually.
“I don’t know,” he told her. “It would be nice to think that most people have that capacity, but I just don’t know.”
“Do you remember when you stopped loving me?”
His eyes were stinging again. He tried to force a smile, but for some reason his mouth refused the order, and suddenly his lip felt like it was shaking.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. She looked worried. She looked upset. Perhaps she knew what the question had done to him.
Denis composed himself as best he could. He remembered her standing at the screen door by the side of his parents’ house. It was like a scene from a remembered nightmare. She stood there, her hair soaked from the rain. Her eyes were puffy and red, and she called to him through the glass. He sat there and watched her. From four feet away he had sat and watched her. For an hour she had banged on the glass. She had been calling things through to him, but he couldn’t hear, or didn’t want to. He just sat there staring at her and through her all at the same time. The cast on his arm was wet with tears. That was when he remembered how to cry. He suppressed the memory. His greatest talent in his life, the suppression and destruction of thoughts and ideas that upset him. He scrubbed the wet from his cheeks.
“Is this lamb?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said, nodding sadly.
They ate and sat in a cold, lonely silence, and when he was finished, Denis smiled his weak smile at her again and went back to work. He tapped relentlessly at his keyboard and battered his calculator and tried not to hear the sounds of her pottering in the kitchen.
Eventually, she came back to him; she offered him a look. It was a “don’t worry about it” look that suggested they move on from the afternoon’s discomfort. He smiled a stronger smile.
That afternoon they went for coffee. Roisin and Tash joined them. In less than two weeks his two friends had become five friends. Thankfully this meant symmetry when having coffee, with even numbers occupying a table being infinitely more appealing to him than odd ones. Roisin had a way of scrunching up her face when she laughed that he found charming. Tash was as bubbly as ever. When he lived in the other universe, it was common for Denis to hang around with several girls at the same time, but it had been seven years since he lived in that place, so there was a tremendous novelty to sitting down in the company of three women. He affected his best offhand charm and was pleased to see he could make them laugh. He poked fun at his own idiosyncrasies with self-deprecation that was as humorous as it was endearing. The waiter in his favorite Italian café looked shocked to see him sitting there in the company of three ladies. Thomas in the convenience store newsagent had laughed openly when he had walked in to buy his paper. He had almost insisted on a high five that day.
What none of them could see was the effort he was expending in the name of this exercise in sociability. A man walked past them at one point with the most offensive ketchup stain on his T-shirt. A small child spilled Skittles from a plastic bag all over the street in front of them. A woman at a nearby table pushed around spilled sugar from a sachet as she talked loudly on her phone. Her lipstick was uneven. A man with flyers wiped his nose with the back of his hand before placing a flyer on the table. Rebecca could see his jaw clench at the sight of it, and took immediate action with a facial wipe and his germ-killing hand sanitizer. He was grateful for her help. There was no mention or acknowledgment of the lunchtime conversation. His one departure from his new venture into socializing was that when the appointed time was up, that was that. One hundred twenty minutes had been spent in the act of engaging socially, and that was enough. He made his goodbyes and headed for home.
He had lied to his housemates the morning after she had slept in his bed. Lied right to their faces. He had no idea what the plan was, and he found this concept both terrifying and thrilling. For a man who lives in a constant stream of tasks and achievable goals, the lack of control when it came to Rebecca was very much a love-hate feeling. He knew the time would come when she would leave the house; she had to. That did not make him feel good. At times he yearned for the consistent dependable life he shared with his housemates, but too often, lately, that had been getting away from him. That feeling of control was eluding him and, with the reckless abandon of a man who just might decide not to clean his teeth before bed, part of him was embracing this new order. He couldn’t tell his housemates, obviously, but something told him that Plasterer already knew. The onetime unofficial leader of the foursome had become the führer of the group. While the other three played games of Bat the Light Bulb and What’s in this Bin, he watched over them, saying little. More often than not he sat directly at Denis’s side. He talked more than he played. He talked about their plan. He lamented their lack of order. As if the four of them had ever attempted to establish order in this house. He still had to cover for their ludicrous behavior, including running to a local shop to buy towels after all of them mysteriously vanished, only to turn up hanging from the branches of a small tree in the backyard the next day. How he had missed them when he was putting his clothes on the line the day before he’d never know.
The weekend came and went almost without incident. His mother had visited again, and he had been more or less ignored again. Plasterer threatened to cause another scene, but this time Denis had asserted himself and the pugnacious clown had backed down. He’d had dinner at Ollie’s house that week, and in a move that stunned even him, he left the house wearing a tie, only to remove it when out of sight of his housemates before unbuttoning the top two buttons. Rebecca had said nothing as they walked, but he thought he saw a faint smile playing about the edges of her lips. He watched those lips a lot.
It was early the following week before Denis suffered his first major setback. He had always felt that there were changes that came during one’s life, and such changes were often to be embraced, but from time to time, one had to step back and realize that too much change could be a terrible thing. Rebecca had, quite early in the week, expressed an interest in getting out in the evenings more. Denis could understand her desire; it had to be tough for anyone trying to live to his timetable. He’d perfected the art over years. For someone like Rebecca or Ollie, it could be tolerated only for so long.
“C’mon,” she urged in a voice near a whine. “Let’s do something. Anything.”
“You’re more than welcome to do anything you like, Becks, but I’m staying here. SVU is on in less than five minutes,” he told her cheerfully, referring to one of the grittier cop shows.
She flounced from the room in a pout. All too often she reminded him of a darker version of Penny O’Neill.
“You want to go see a movie?” she called from the kitchen, opening and closing cupboard doors as if the answer to boredom lay within.
“Oh absolutely,” he told her sarcastically. “Give me a seat that someone else has sat and sweated into any day of the week. And popcorn from a trough? It’s my favorite. And all the popcorn on the floor? It makes wonderful decoration. What about the sound of other people eating? Is there anything more melodic than that?”
“Point taken,” she shot back sourly. “Hey, where do you do your grocery shopping?”
“Online,” he called back, not seeing the trap being laid out before him.
“You’re running out of stuff. Let’s go shopping.”
“What stuff?” he asked, trying to divert her.
“Stuff,” she answered in a tone that brooked no arguments.
“What if just you go and I mind the fort?” he tried.
“What if we both go and I don’t have to kick you all the way there?” she countered playfully.
“Have you heard of the internet? It makes it so we don’t have to leave the house.”
She came to the door of the living room and looked at him sternly.
“And that’s why it’s destroying civilization, now put your shoes on and let’s go.”
She fixed him with a glare as she said it. She knew, even as he did, that he would simply be unable to refuse her. He felt his will dissolve.
“Fine.” He sighed, setting the TV to record.
“I’m just going to run to the bathroom and then we can take off,” she said cheerily. She just loved getting her own way.
He reached for his keys and wallet when a white-gloved hand grabbed him by the wrist.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Plasterer asked. Penny O’Neill stood at his shoulder, keeping watch.
“We’re just going grocery shopping,” he said, alarmed.
“Oh are we now? Are we just going grocery shopping?” There was spit forming on his lips.
“It’s not a big deal. We won’t be long.”
“This is a mistake, Denis. A huge mistake. When was the last time you were in a grocery store? Food and packages that have been handled by the thousand or so customers that come in every day. Floors dirty. Nothing symmetrical. There’ll be pudding there, Pudding.” His tone was mocking.
“You ready?” Rebecca shouted from the downstairs bathroom.
Plasterer released his hand. They looked at each other for what seemed like an age.
“You’re going to regret this,” Plasterer told him.
“I don’t need to ask your permission to live my life. I thought we were friends.”
“We were until you betrayed us,” the clown hissed back.
“Let go,” Denis commanded. They resumed their staring contest. Finally the clown backed down, shaking his head as he crept back up the stairs with Penny O’Neill in his wake.
“I’m ready,” Denis told Rebecca.
“Can I drive your car?” she asked.
For a moment he hesitated. As long as he wasn’t driving there couldn’t really be any harm done, and the car was just sitting in the driveway.
“Sure,” he said finally, tossing her the keys. “I don’t think I can remember the last time I drove it. I sometimes start it up and let it run, just so the battery doesn’t die, but actually driving it...” He really couldn’t remember.
Rebecca looked excited by the prospect. As he recalled, she drove like a lunatic, all rally corners and speeding. He tried not to be intimidated by the gleam in her eye.
And so off they went. To shop for groceries. In a grocery store. But only after he’d checked the lock three times and counted the steps to the gate.
* * *
The grocery store was a mistake. Plasterer had been right. It was huge and messy. Not messy to most people’s eyes, but Denis sought out the mess. An odd number of shopping carts in the loading bay, one of them sitting casually on its own across the line between two parking spaces. Denis should have walked home immediately, but his newfound sense of recklessness urged him forward. He carefully adjusted his tie, which, of course, needed no adjusting.
Rebecca parked incorrectly with the tires still in the turned position, one of them sitting on the line that marked the end of one space and the start of another. To Denis, that line was the very essence of order. People came to parking lots in their hundreds, and the cars parked in a neat and orderly fashion defying, or so it seemed to him, the natural inclination of people to do as they feel whenever they felt it. In a lot of hundreds of empty spaces, this simple act of bad parking would inconvenience nobody, but it was the abandonment of what should have been the epitome of structure. He tried to ignore it.
Inside the store the escalator handrail had a thick streak of what looked like rubber but actually could have been anything. Denis refused to touch it. Rebecca either didn’t spot his discomfort or was in no mood to pay attention to it. She talked and talked while Denis fought off the rising panic. Denis Murphy had no business being in a grocery store. They made their way along the aisles with a basket. Lines of boxes of tea seemed to stagger in no particular order. One brand was sitting among another brand, offensively and smugly refusing to be where it should have been.
“I don’t like this...” Denis said uneasily.
“It’s just a store, scaredy-cat.”
“To you it’s just a store, to me it’s a giant mess that other people have put their hands on.”
“Suck it up,” she replied.
Denis always felt that “suck it up” was a particularly terrible expression. He grimaced at it. Onward they plunged through rows and rows of mess, scatterings of products and labels. The evening staff was clearly in the process of restocking the shelves, and the discarded cardboard crates and boxes littered the aisles. Denis navigated each one like a man picking his way through a field of quicksand. Rebecca continued to chatter. Something about picking guitar strings, or sliding strings or something of that nature. Denis wasn’t really listening. Something in the back of his head told him that if he could make it through this minefield, he could stop thinking he was a weirdo, he could bask in his own congratulations at his ability to blend in with those around him who had no respect for control. Another voice, speaking in tones Plasterer would understand, told him that this was not his place. This was wrong.
Rebecca casually picked items at will, flinging them into the basket with no regard for what went where. Denis argued with none of her purchases, saving his energy for fighting off the anxiety that was threatening to drown him. At the checkout a runny-nosed woman served them in between sneezing. She used the same tissue every time. By now there was no hiding the feeling he was having.
“Almost there,” Rebecca said comfortingly. “I’ll get you a treat if you can survive this.”
He didn’t care that she was speaking to him as though he were a child. She bagged their items and all of a sudden it was done. He heaved a sigh of relief in spite of himself.
“We’re leaving?” he asked.
“In two minutes,” she replied in a tone that he knew was a lie. “We’re just popping into the clothes section. I promised you a reward, and a reward you shall have.” She was forcing joviality, an insincere friendliness that must have been masking her contempt for his ridiculous behavior. No one could really understand him.
They made their way into the clothes section, which was, blessedly, in better shape than the grocery department. Denis walked with her, trying to calm his ragged nerves. He had survived it, but the panic wouldn’t go away. She picked up items of clothing at random, plucking at the fabric as she walked by. Some of them she held up before him, trying to imagine how it might look. Shirts, trousers, ties, even a hat that he immediately dismissed. Hats mess hair. Mess is bad. QED. She stopped at a low shelf unit and picked up a pastel yellow T-shirt by some designer or other. It had stripes here and there in red and blue. Denis imagined that this was what “cool” people wore. He had owned one just like it in another life. That’s why she picked it up. It tugged a memory from her brain just the way it did from his. Whatever memory it stirred in her he couldn’t say, but for him it was one that he had worked almost seven years to forget. They had cut him out of a T-shirt just like that in a hospital. It had been caked in blood and shredded in parts by broken glass. There were long blond hairs attached to it.
“I think you’d look amazing in this—”
“No,” he said abruptly.
“C’mon, scaredy-cat, I know you’re only dying to get out of those shirts and ties.”
“No, Rebecca,” he insisted.
“It’ll look great with the jeans you wore to dinner the week before last,” she persisted.
“NO.” This time he shouted. A loud and forceful shout.
“Denis...don’t shout at me.” She seemed shocked and offended and scared all at once.
It was too much for Denis. He’d hurt her, he knew that, but she hurt him too, and she didn’t know or didn’t care.
“You can’t just make people wear T-shirts,” he told her. She had to understand. Except, no one ever understood, only his housemates. “You don’t just get to come into someone’s life and wreck it and make them wear T-shirts that are yellow. No one gets to do that.” He wasn’t quite shouting, but he wasn’t far from it. His tone was cold and angry, and he could do nothing about it. He could see the hurt getting worse and worse in her eyes. She would hate him now. “You don’t get to just change someone because you don’t like the way they are. You don’t know me. This is me now.” He gestured at his clothes. “You think you can just walk down a street with your thirteen beads in your hair, and everyone has to be like you want them to be. Well, they’re not. Some people are different. Some people can’t have thirteen beads in their hair. Some people like discipline. They like knowing what their day holds. They like being in charge of their lives. Some people need to know the time, and they need to know their day. They need to know that what’s waiting around the corner won’t come smashing into them and ruin their lives. I’m not who you think I am. This is me. This is me.” The last line was almost a shout. Denis turned and walked out of the store, picking his spot so that he didn’t step on any of the cracks in the plastic floor tiles. He walked home at a powerful stride, his heart hammering.
The doctors had thrown the T-shirt on the floor after they cut it off. He was screaming in agony and grief. An orderly pinned down his thrashing legs, and they injected him with something. He felt the stinging tears rolling down his cheeks. He counted the steps from the carefully closed gate all the way up to the door. Checked the lock. Turned the key. Plasterer was waiting for him at the end of the stairs.
