House of Glass

by Sophie Littlefield

  He’d tried to win her back. He’d tried to win, for her, to show her he still had it, that reckless luck that brought her to him in the first place. He could see now he’d gone about it all wrong. He should have listened to her, should have been beating down the bushes on the job front instead of messing around at the track, in the bars, playing the odds on the games. Once he started winning that made it so much worse. He was up a few thousand at Thanksgiving, thinking about buying her something knockout for Christmas. That string of Tahitian pearls the size of nickels they’d seen downtown—clasping those around her neck would sure as hell have said what he couldn’t seem to say himself these days.

  And then...the same old story, an idiot who believed in his own luck. He got further and further behind. Stolen hours in the long afternoons, hands sweaty on a beer he didn’t drink, watching games that didn’t go his way. They just never went his way. Until the worst, the unthinkable happened, and he had only a few days to make it right.

  He sold his most prized possession, the one beautiful thing his father had left him. He wouldn’t miss it; he wouldn’t allow himself to miss it. It was the punishment he deserved, to know the coin collection would never belong to Teddy, that they’d never pore over the rows of beautiful mint issues together the way he had with his own dad. And that was his fault.

  And even that hadn’t gone right. Five days, the dealer wanted, to collect bids before making an offer for the lot. And the bookie only gave him three. Which left a gap that Ted had to make up. Which led him right to the money market account. Only for a few days. He planned to replace the funds the minute he got the check from the dealer. There would have been some explaining to do but he would have figured out what to tell Jen.

  Except now he’d never get the chance.

  She was fading, the image of her dancing into the darkness deep in his mind. Nothing hurt, not anymore, but he had the curious feeling that his limbs were being dipped into very cold water, and he was bobbing along on its surface. He tried to move his fingers, but nothing happened. He tried his toes—same thing. There was a sound—someone was talking—but it was like Charlie Brown’s teacher in the Christmas special. Mwah, mwah, mwah.

  Ah, no matter.

  What had he been so worried about, a minute ago? He needed to stop something, some bad thing from happening, and for a moment that concerned him, and he wrinkled his brow to think better, or at least he thought he did. Jen was closer now, shimmering in and out of the darkness, her sparkling and shining hair close enough to touch. He made a mighty effort to smile at her, to let her know it was all right. His beautiful Jen. God, how he loved her. He should have tried harder to make her understand that. The thing with Sarah—it had all been stupid vanity. He probably could have had her anytime. She was like that; she had always had a thing for him. She’d even told him straight out a few years ago when they were all out after work, back when she was engaged to that douche bag, but he hadn’t taken the bait. He wasn’t all that interested, when it came down to it. A harmless flirtation, a few emails, those notes she put in the mail—it made him feel...well, not better, really, but like a man. A man who could still get a woman.

  Just not the woman he wanted.

  Another face swam into view, next to his wife’s, its features flickering and fading. It all came rushing back, killing the sweet buzz that had started to blur his mind. Dan and the terrible things he’d brought into his house. But it wasn’t all Dan’s fault. Because he was the one who had let the devil in. He was the one who had been stupid, who had been vain, who had given Dan the keys to his kingdom and the invitation to come and take it all away from him.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It had happened last weekend, when Jen and Tanya went up to Murdoch. It had seemed like such a good idea: Jen and Tanya could get some closure with their dad’s passing while handling the few practical details, and Ted could get the messy part of the demolition done without interfering with the household. Not to mention, he could use a day or two to figure out how he was going to break it to Jen about the money he’d lost.

  After Jen left with Teddy, Ted finished his coffee and got to work. He stripped away the tile above the tub, working at the old mortar with a hammer and a cold chisel. The hard work felt good at first. Ted was damn well finished with gambling, but there was something left of the restless energy, and he needed the physical labor to keep himself distracted.

  But it wasn’t an easy job, not by a long shot. By the time he’d cleared enough of the tile to take the tub out, he was sweating and filthy. And then the tub turned out to be a bear. The wise guy at the plumbing supply store told him the old stainless steel would be brittle and a few good swings of a sledgehammer would break it up. He and his coworkers probably had a good laugh about it in the back room. Ted felt the impact of the first few blows up and down his spine, the sledgehammer heavy in his hands. But the bathtub wouldn’t give, barely a chip in the porcelain. Ted stared at the damn thing, breathing hard. That fucker wasn’t going to break, at least not with him doing the swinging.

  They sure didn’t make tubs like that anymore: had to be more than three hundred pounds of porcelain over steel, seventy years old easy and not a scratch on the thing until he took the hammer to it. Ted would never admit it, but Jen might have been right. Leaving it in place and remodeling around it was sounding pretty good right now. Except for the fact that he’d removed the locknuts, the hardware, everything—it was all sitting at the bottom of the Dumpster—and cut a good six inches of plasterboard out all the way around. And he’d spent fifteen hundred bucks on a shiny new Kohler tub that was sitting in his garage.

  Ted set the sledgehammer down on the toilet lid, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the bandanna he’d pulled through his belt loop. How had it come to this? He’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, between his youth in Thief River Falls, where his old man taught him to rebuild an engine and finish an attic, to the job at a global management consulting firm where he ran the metals team until the day they gave his job to a young guy fresh out of Stanford.

  Ted wasn’t who he used to be. But the problem was that he seemed to have lost track of who he was supposed to become. He’d been following the same path for so long he’d stopped noticing that his will had become weak: he dropped a hundred fifty bucks on his daughter’s jeans and folded like wet cardboard when she asked for money to go out on a night when she was supposed to be grounded. He cried in a stall in the men’s room the day he was let go. And he’d forgotten how to take care of his family.

  The ache that had been nagging at Ted’s lower back all week twinged, a reminder that he wasn’t up to the task. There was no way he could do this on his own, not if he was going to finish before Jen and the kids returned tomorrow night. Maybe he could hire one of the Mexicans who always hung around the Home Depot parking lot looking for pickup work. Give him a couple of twenties, and have the job done by the end of the day.

  The more Ted thought about it, the more it seemed like the sensible thing to do. He hunted down his wallet, sunglasses and car keys, feeling better now that he had a plan. He’d get the rough work done this weekend, then next week he could take his time with the rest. Maybe he’d even bring Teddy up to help him, or at least watch. Put a hammer in the boy’s hand and let him feel like he was part of it. Ted wanted his son to grow up as he had, knowing his old man could fix things, could build things with his hands. That his old man took care of things. Sure, Teddy was only four, but that’s how old Ted was the first time he’d learned to turn the crank on his father’s vise, to glue a broken chair leg.

  The Home Depot lot was jammed with weekend warriors, which was both an annoyance and a relief. When he came on weekdays, Ted always felt self-conscious in the checkout line with a handful of housewives while it seemed like all the other men in the place were lined up at the contractor desk. On a Saturday it was just guys like him, clutching lists written by thei
r wives and loading up the backs of their Range Rovers and Pilots.

  Ted found a parking spot in the crowded lot and headed toward the entrance. Near the hot dog truck stood two or three men, their collars turned up and no hats despite the cold. Their hands were jammed in their pockets, and they stared at the ground, not talking. There would have been more of them earlier; these were the leftover guys, those who arrived last or maybe already finished a job and came back to make a few more bucks.

  Ted walked toward them slowly, threading between the shopping carts and cars pulling in and out of spaces. He’d done this before—he’d hired a couple of these guys last summer when he tackled the old retaining wall out back—and it wasn’t hard, but there was always that weird moment, practicing what you were going to say in your mind. English okay? Want to make a few dollars?

  Ted walked up with his smile fixed in place, already nodding.

  “Hey, how are you all doing? I’m looking for a little help with a project at home. Just an hour or two, nothing big.”

  A couple of them exchanged an appraising look. Maybe they didn’t want to go out just for an hour. Maybe he shouldn’t have said that. He’d pay for more, that wasn’t the issue—it was a dick move to give them just the ten an hour, he always slapped on an extra bill—but that wasn’t something you said up front.

  “It’s this old tub I need to get down the stairs,” he continued, getting the words out around that stiff smile. “And a little scrap hauling maybe.”

  “You doing a bathroom?”

  From the opposite side of the hot dog truck came a voice without an accent—Ted hadn’t seen him there, standing a few feet away from the other men. A red-cheeked white guy with a knit cap and a couple day’s beard, chewing on a toothpick. He wore a faded red sweatshirt hood over a beat-up leather jacket.

  “Yeah. You interested?”

  “I got some plumbing experience. And a little time.” The guy shrugged, modestly.

  Already the Mexicans had stepped back under the overhang; they weren’t about to argue.

  The guy had been polite, kicking the mud from his boots before he got into Ted’s car, whistling softly when they pulled out of the parking lot. His name was Evan. He hailed from down by Mankato. He’d been over at the Hormel plant until a month ago—“Let us all go the Monday after Thanksgiving, you believe that? I mean, who’s gonna hire before the new year, right?” That hit Ted in the gut, and he almost added his own story, that he was laid off after the firm posted their best quarter in four years, forced to walk out with the crap he’d accumulated in his desk piled in a box from the mail room, unable to meet the eyes of the people gathered to say their awkward goodbyes. But that moment passed, and for the rest of the drive back to the house, they talked about whether the Wild would ever have a shot at the play-offs. When Ted led Evan upstairs to the master suite, he was embarrassed, more than he would have been with one of the Mexicans, frankly, which wasn’t something he liked admitting even to himself. He saw the way Evan looked at the rug, the gleaming floors, the upholstered headboard, the way his lips pressed together as he walked faster.

  “So here it is,” Ted said heartily when they got to the bathroom, laying a hand on the tub. “The beast itself.”

  It had taken them nearly an hour to get the thing down the stairs, and they’d knocked a chunk out of the plaster and put a deep gouge into the floor—Jen was going to have a fit—not to mention the strain on Ted’s back, which was raging by the time they finally set the tub on the frozen winter-dead grass near the curb. But Evan had borne the worst of it: his middle fingers on the left hand had gotten mashed between the tub and the newel post somehow and were already swollen and an angry red. Ted offered Evan ice, an ACE wrap, Advil—but Evan waved it all away, rubbing the hand on his shirt and wincing.

  “At least a beer, man,” Ted found himself saying.

  He hadn’t really meant to. He’d hoped to make some headway on the floor today. He’d bought a new tile saw, a table-mount DeWalt, and he was looking forward to trying it out. And there was Jen, of course. He had promised her she’d be able to use her new bathroom by Valentine’s Day, and he wouldn’t mind seeing her face light up when she got home tomorrow, when he showed her what he’d accomplished with a few uninterrupted days to work.

  But Jesus, those smashed fingers. Ted’s hand hovered over the vegetable drawer in the fridge, where he kept the good beer, but he reached for the Sierra Nevadas lined up along the back of the bottom shelf instead, popping the tops off and grabbing a can of smokehouse almonds.

  Evan stood hesitantly in the doorway to the living room, surveying the pale green sofa, the cashmere throw folded neatly over the arm.

  “Maybe we should sit in the kitchen,” he said. “I’d hate to leave a mess for your wife.”

  And so the kitchen it was. There were only four Sierras left, and those went down pretty quick. They traded stories about growing up in rural Minnesota. Evan recounting fishing trips and summers spent baling hay and detasseling corn. Ted reciprocating with a few self-deprecating anecdotes from college, the juvenile stunts the guys from his fraternity had pulled. He even shared the embarrassing nickname he’d been given in business school, Tonto to his best friend’s Lone Ranger, since he was the quieter one, the one who always ended up being the wing man.

  By then it was getting dark outside and the talk grew more serious. Evan was divorced, but saw his middle-school-age daughter whenever he could. She had an orthopedic issue that required some sort of shoe insert that cost four hundred bucks a pop. “Not that I’m looking for sympathy,” Evan added, staring down at his chapped and swollen hands. “She’s a blessing.”

  And then Ted, who hadn’t really eaten anything since a couple of toaster waffles and a folded mound of deli ham with his coffee, found himself talking about Teddy in more detail than he could remember talking to anyone but Jen. It was easier, somehow, to tell a stranger, someone who’d never met his son or wife. How sometimes he worried that Teddy would never catch up. How you could never be sure if all the therapists and teachers knew what they were doing. How you always wondered if you were doing enough yourself.

  Evan listened with interest and the right amount of sympathy—no pity, maybe it was because he’d been through something with his own kid. Ted tossed some tacquitos and pizza rolls in the oven, grabbed a couple of the Feldschlösschens by their long frosty necks and set them down on the kitchen table with enough force to make the empty nut can skitter.

  “See what you think,” he’d said, to cover his embarrassment. “The Swiss can make a few things besides chocolate.”

  The beer honestly didn’t taste a whole lot different from the Sierra at that point. Evan lifted his bottle and knocked it against Ted’s after his first sip. Ted belched and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and they laughed like thirteen-year-olds.

  “Still, it’s cool, you guys got a nice setup here,” Evan said quietly. “Great place for the kids to grow up, with the cul-de-sac and all.”

  “Yeah...yeah, it is,” he said, matching Evan’s tone, a moment of solemnity, something they were sharing. “We’ve been blessed.”

  For a moment neither man said anything, Evan nodding slowly and Ted sipping at his beer. It was good—something he hadn’t known he’d missed so much, the company of another man. One—and he knew this was part of it—who was in the same boat as him, who’d lost something, not just a job but a part of his identity, of who he really was. A guy who understood what it was like.

  “S’cuse me a minute,” Ted said, and when he stood he realized he was drunker than he’d thought. He walked carefully to the bathroom, trailing a hand on the wall to steady himself, and while he urinated he closed his eyes and focused on the sensation, the pleasant emptying, the splashing into the porcelain bowl. A man, he was still a man, and maybe he just needed a day like today to bring it back to him, working with his hands and
sharing the fruits of his good life with someone who accepted him for what he was, hiding nothing, being himself.

  Back in the kitchen, Evan was standing in front of the fridge, looking at the photos and invitations pinned up there. “Wow, is this your wife? Beautiful lady,” Evan said. Ted was there in the photo with Jen, their arms around each other’s waists, last August at the lake with his brother’s family. Jen was wearing a pale sundress that brought out the gold in her brown eyes, and he remembered how she’d smelled that day, sunscreen and warm skin and perfume, and how after the picture had been taken Ted had chased her up the hill from the dock and into their room with its pine ceilings and fluttering curtains and they’d made love and napped all afternoon.

  And then he’d been laid off the next week. “I’m a lucky man,” Ted said automatically, but that got him thinking about the task ahead of him, confessing to Jen, telling her he’d gambled away their rainy-day fund. And the worst part would be that she wouldn’t blow up. She’d keep her anger to herself, and probably just redouble her efforts to get him to focus on the job search, ask him if he’d followed up on every lead when he hadn’t had a nibble in months. She’d wonder out loud if he should update his LinkedIn account or get his hair cut, never telling him straight out but wondering.