Ordinary Hazards

by Anna Bruno

  * * *

  LUCAS AND I DECIDED we needed to add on to our kitchen. This required tearing down an exterior wall. (No bats were harmed in the process.) We planned a one-month job, which we knew meant three months, and we started in June to take advantage of the warm weather.

  In retrospect, living without a wall on the back of our house was risky. The lower floor was sealed off from the backyard only by a thin nylon tarp. We’d heard about occasional break-ins in the neighborhood but blindly believed nothing bad would happen to us. We had a dog! Also, we owned nothing worth stealing.

  Our summer project bulged into fall, finding ways to expand, like a fat body in a small wooden chair. Lucas had a football game on TV and a beer in hand. Papers strewn across the coffee table, I complained about grading—the most tedious part of my job—lopping off points for poorly structured arguments, boring first lines, weak linkages, the absence of conclusions. Beginnings, endings, and transitions! Students never learn!

  When Addie’s tail knocked what was left of Lucas’s beer over onto one of my student’s papers, it was hard to place blame: Lucas’s beer, my mess, Addie’s tail? Lucas took the green pen out of my hand, drew an arrow pointing at the beer splotch, and wrote butt fumble on the paper, referring to an incident the Jets would never live down, a real low point, when your own lineman’s ass jars the ball loose. Lucas thought it was a good metaphor for our relationship. Fortunately, my student appreciated the joke. And the beer.

  We were enjoying this peaceful Sunday, when Addie went nuts because she heard a squirrel. The creature had entered our home through the tarp, probably in search of food, and the second he saw Addie bolt toward him, he knew he’d made a mistake.

  Barking, Addie chased him up onto the counter. Lucas and I sat dumbstruck for a beat. The squirrel scurried all the way up to the top of the kitchen cabinets, which dropped about six inches below the ceiling. He paced back and forth. Addie followed him from the floor, jumping and barking, her front paws on the counter and then down again.

  The squirrel was safe as long as he held his position, but he was increasingly agitated. Lucas stood up, inched toward the kitchen, and called Addie to back down. A terrible listener, especially when excited, she continued to jump and bark. Then the squirrel made a run for it, down the side of the cabinet and toward the center of the house. That’s when Addie caught him in her mouth.

  I’d never heard a squirrel make so much noise. That little guy let out a horrible, fearful squeal: the sound of helplessness. It must have been the first time Addie ever caught anything because the look on her face was of complete bewilderment. She didn’t want to clamp down. She didn’t want to toy with the squirrel. She didn’t want to kill him. But she didn’t want to let him go. This was her house. It was her job to watch over it. And she’d done that job. She’d caught the intruder. So what now? She froze.

  Addie’s fangs reminded me of Lucas’s mind. She had this God-given feature that enabled her to rip another living thing to pieces, but she wasn’t psychologically capable of it. She could chase and bark and provoke but she didn’t know how to snap her jaw or sink her teeth in. An Australian cattle dog with the heart of a Canadian, just like her master!

  When Lucas spoke to her—How was your day, Ruffers? Rufferstiltskin Ruffers have ridges—I couldn’t help but wonder how much of her personality was her nature and how much she’d picked up from him. Certainly, the way he horsed around with her, putting his hand in her mouth, shaking her by the teeth, taught her never to bite down.

  Slowly, she opened her mouth and the poor squirrel was released into the house. Lucas lifted the tarp and exposed the back side of the kitchen to the yard, an enormous gap. Even in shock, the squirrel found his own way out.

  * * *

  TOWARD THE END OF the kitchen project, Lucas asked his father to come over to help with the drywall. For most of my life, I never thought much about walls. They were flat. They were covered in paint. Then I fell in love with a guy who hangs drywall for a living, and I began to see walls for what they really are: a thin façade covering up ducts and electrical wiring and insulation. The process of drywalling a room is patchwork, filling in gaps, taping joints, mudding over everything, layer after layer, until the surface is smooth. Now, when I see a beautiful human with a perfect child and a thriving vegetable garden and a clean car, I imagine her as drywall. I think about all the seams and joints and layers of mud. I think about everything it takes to make the surface appear smooth.

  To watch Lucas’s father hang and finish drywall was to experience virtuosity. He made it look so easy, so fluid, so precise. His pace was about one and a half times Lucas’s pace. The old man had been handsome once, like Lucas. In old age, he had wiry gray hair that stuck straight up in the humid months, and a smoker’s face, leathery and lined. When he ran into other old-timers, he’d say, “How you doin’, my brother?” He claimed to run two miles every morning and then drink two beers to start his day.

  He encouraged me to try the finishing once and only once. I ended up with a layer of mud on the wall, and also a layer on the floor and on my ripped jeans, which were, incidentally, not work pants. My pace I need not record.

  Lucas may have been aware that there would be a time when his father could not so easily lift his arms over his head for long intervals, or climb a ladder without a second thought, but the notion that a father’s physical decline is the only thing that will allow his son to surpass him is not a comforting one.

  Sometime before I’d ever seen him work, Lucas and I were in a conversation with two guys—one had just remodeled his master bathroom and the other was adding on a sunroom. One guy said, “Well, Murphy sure did a fantastic job on my drywall. Good price too,” and the other guy said, “Did you now, Lucas?” and then the first guy said, “No, no, I mean the real Murphy,” and I could see something in Lucas’s eyes but he just smiled and said, “Dad’s the best, no doubt about that.”

  I’d like to think the reason Lucas delayed joining the family business for so long was because he had other ambitions, but I wouldn’t doubt it was also because he wanted to be a real Murphy, as opposed to some less real version of his dad. It could also be the case that I’m projecting—that I’ve spent a lifetime avoiding measuring up to my own father’s success, albeit a different kind of success.

  These memories of our old home float through my mind like the ghost that comes with the house.

  7PM

  THE LOST-AND-FOUND BOX IS out on top of the bar. A guy is looking for his hoodie. He’s not a regular here but he’s a barfly. I run into him here and there around town. If I recall correctly, he works as a delivery guy, not a UPS guy—he doesn’t wear a uniform—more like a guy who moves medical equipment for some no-name company that operates in New York and New Jersey. He has bought me a drink before but I don’t remember his name.

  He digs through the box. I can see from where I’m sitting: there’s no hoodie in there. Amelia knows this. So why pull out the box at all?

  Finally, the guy announces, “My hoodie’s not in here.”

  Amelia nods, leaving the box on the bar. The guy fishes around a little more.

  Cal says, “Take something else to replace it, if you want.”

  The regulars collectively look down into their drinks, watching the guy peripherally. He pulls out a pair of cheap, black plastic sunglasses and inspects them. He puts them back. The box also holds men’s black leather gloves, a red-and-yellow polka-dot umbrella, a single hoop earring, and several other items that aren’t worth claiming.

  The guy tries on one of the gloves. He puts it back in the box and returns to his beer.

  Amelia says, “Go ahead—take it if you want it.”

  He reaches back into the box and takes both gloves this time, holding them up in front of his face. “What if someone comes for them?”

  “It’s hot as hell out there,” Cal says. “No one’s gonna come lookin’ for gloves this time of year.”

  The guy catches my eye.
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  Suddenly, I feel bad for him, maybe because he bought me that drink a while back, but more likely because I can see he’s a nice guy. It’s not a complicated analysis—I don’t know anything about him—he just has a nice-guy disposition: sunny, a little distant, the opposite of exacting. He’s one of those people who doesn’t recycle, doesn’t vote, doesn’t buy local, doesn’t care if produce is non-GMO, and he’s also not an asshole. There’s a correlation there, I’m sure.

  I shake my head: No. I try to do it subtly, but Cal sees me. The guy drops the gloves back in the box and says, “I’m good; thanks, though.”

  “Fuck, Em. Why’d you have to ruin it?”

  “That’s entrapment,” I say. “You wanna put the box out, fine, but you can’t keep telling him to take something.”

  “That’s the test—the Willy Wonka test,” Cal says. “Gotta be able to say no to temptation.”

  “If I remember correctly, Willy Wonka didn’t run around insisting the kids steal the Gobstopper. You gotta just put out the box and see what happens.”

  If you pass the test, it doesn’t make you a regular. Regulars are people who come by two or more nights a week, every week, for at least three drinks. It takes time and money to become a regular. And beyond time and money, the guys have to like you. I came in through the back door because of Lucas, but it doesn’t work that way for everyone. And if you fail the test, there are no consequences. You catch hell for about ten minutes for being a no-good thief, and maybe, if you look like you have the money, you are goaded into buying a round. Then everyone forgets the thing ever happened. The test doesn’t work, anyway. All the good items are taken before they make it to the box, like those Tom Ford aviators I left behind six months ago that I’m still bitter about.

  The guys decide they need to plant some better items in the box to raise the stakes. I agree that’s reasonable. They tell me to bring in some “female items.” I’ll never get around to it.

  * * *

  WHEN LUCAS AND I got married, my father insisted on speaking at the wedding. He was picking up the tab so it was his moral right. Against my better judgment, I allowed it. This was my only concession. I had not permitted him to bring his girlfriend—the woman with whom he had cheated on my mother. Something about saying no to the first request softened me to the second.

  Our wedding was rustic, a euphemism for paying a ton of money to recreate a down-home atmosphere with a veneer of elitism apparent in the quality of the solid wood cross-back chairs and top-shelf liquor. The soirée unironically involved a Catholic priest and a country church, a restored hundred-year-old barn and a whole hog, cake and pie, pictures of our dog even though the dog wasn’t present because she’d have eaten the pig, a hayrack ride to nowhere, a DJ in a skinny tie with a torso-length beard, mint juleps, gin and tonics, whiskey neat or on the rocks, kegs of Bud Light (townies prefer beer that tastes like piss), and a slew of family dysfunction that we choked down with the pork like a side of corn bread.

  Dad’s speech started with the smell of our town.

  “When the wind blows from the northeast, there is an unmistakable stink of manure in this country town. I smelled it immediately upon my arrival.”

  My father was a great speaker, his vocal and physical delivery: impeccable. He used no notes. He didn’t merely gaze around the audience, as a lighthouse presenter rotates systematically around the room. He made eye contact with individuals in the crowd, our guests, lingering on the important ones—my mother, my in-laws, Lucas, our best friends whom he’d met earlier in the night. His style of elocution was flawless. His voice rose and fell, volume creating suspense. He was also the best-dressed man in Upstate New York, which alone commanded a certain authority.

  Dad paused for a second, a perfected technique, and I thought maybe he’d reflect on the smells of his childhood, floating across his hilltop town—smells of olive oil production and burning wood.

  “It took me back in time in a powerful way, and I was with my little girl again. She liked to arrange my pens and pencils in my briefcase and listen to me on the phone on Saturday mornings, when I took care of odds and ends from the kitchen table.

  “She asked me, ‘Daddy, what is a manure?’ She drew out the end of the word into distinct syllables, ooo-er. I had no idea what she was talking about. I racked my brain. I repeated a manure aloud. Then I realized she had been listening intently to my conversation from earlier that morning. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself. I told her Daddy was an entrepreneur and explained that meant building something from nothing. I told her with initiative and hard work, she could be one too someday. Then she would be somebody special.”

  Why this memory? I thought. Why not talk about the only trip we ever took together, just the two of us? A father-daughter journey to the homeland to meet my grandfather. I was so young; the details were fuzzy. The TWA flight attendant gave me a little pair of wings and led me by the hand to the cockpit, where I met the pilots. The plane seemed enormous, four seats in the middle and three on either side. The trip was long—we had to fly to Rome, rent a car, and drive to the toe of the boot. I wanted to remember my grandfather; I wanted to know if his eyes were my father’s eyes, my eyes. I wanted to understand what his life was like in the old country: ancient, rural, and slow. I wanted to ask him about my grandmother, who died when my dad was just a child, not so much older than I was at the time. I was too young for these questions—these wants—but my father wasn’t. He must have remembered that trip like it was yesterday, and I couldn’t figure out why a story about manure was more important to him.

  Then he delivered his punch line: “And here we are. My little entrepreneur now lives in a town that smells like manure.”

  Dad had made a mistake, a cardinal sin. He’d forgotten the fundamental principle of communication: know your audience. Had my father forgotten where he came from? He, of all people, should have remembered small-town pride. He spent his adolescence in a town in Albany County, New York, population 792, at a time when people still put on their finest for church and took their kids to the town center to watch the parade on the Fourth of July. But then, he was the kid who left the place he came from, who never set foot in that hick town again, and, for the life of him, he couldn’t fathom why anyone with a modicum of talent would stay.

  Head tilted back, he chuckled at his own story. Then he looked at me. He must have noticed my dropped jaw, my mind fixed on the question he asked me when I told him my plan to live upstate and teach: Why?

  Of course, there was no mention of Lucas in this story. A family drywall business was far removed from my dad’s definition of entrepreneurship, from what he deemed worthy of his time. I wasn’t entirely sure whether my father knew what Lucas did for a living. I’d never spoken to him about it because he’d never asked, and he’d shown no interest in spending time with Lucas.

  He rambled on. I heard the words “She had a lot of spunk.”

  I thought, I’ll show you spunk. I wanted to interrupt with a few choice words about how I’d found a man who was nothing like my father. But neither Lucas nor I had enough money in our name at the time to even cover the bar tab.

  It made sense that he would tell a story that occurred when I was a child. He probably had the image of a third grader burned into his mind because that was the only time he knew me. Back then, we talked. I wanted a briefcase and a gold watch and a suit that smelled of cigar smoke. I wanted people to call me on Saturday morning because whatever it was couldn’t wait ’til Monday. I wanted to be important so I would be important to him.

  Eventually, he began spending Saturday mornings at his condo in Manhattan rather than at home in Wilton. I figured out I couldn’t impress him if he wasn’t there, so I stopped trying.

  When he concluded his remarks, some of our friends offered a subdued, polite applause. Others remained notably, understandably, silent. I froze in shame. Lucas’s father took the mic after him. His hair stuck straight up in the humidity. His black suit hung loose on his b
ody, the shoulders just off, the sleeves half an inch too long—a funeral suit—and his shirt had come untucked. He cursed several times as he told a story about Lucas falling off a stepladder on a drywall job. He made fun of the way I drank beer, using my tongue to regulate the flow of liquid into my mouth, joking that every time he caught me sticking my tongue in my glass he wondered how a smart person could look so retarded. When I looked around, only Samantha registered any offense at his vulgarity. Everyone else was too busy laughing, or crying because the subtext was so full of love.

  My father cornered me before he left our wedding reception, and I could see by the way he looked at me that he wanted me to thank him.

  “I’ll take my upstate manure over your city shit any day,” I said.

  And then, as if it were a serious comparison, he said, “Yes, you would.”

  Dad reached into his lapel pocket. He pulled out an envelope and a set of two keys attached to an I NY key chain.

  “Dad, I don’t have any pockets.”

  “Just open the envelope,” he said.

  It contained a slip of paper with an address in Brooklyn scribbled in his handwriting—all caps.

  “It’s yours,” he said. “Well, technically it’s the trust’s. In fifteen years, you can do whatever you want with it.” The trust was just a rich-person way to circumvent estate tax. I’d spent enough time around my father to know that.

  The gift caught me completely off guard. My dad usually went out of his way to avoid giving me anything because he worried a free lunch would thwart his only child’s ambition.