The Lions were in overtime when Dawn kicked Josh out.
He’d been eating a sandwich on the couch when she appeared before him, fishing under the newspapers for the remote to put the game on mute. She dropped a small bag embroidered with ballet shoes into his lap and said, “Here’s your stuff. It’s time for you to split.”
Complete surprise would not have accurately described how he felt. This was Dawn, who had always only been grateful for his presence. It had been her idea for him to move in. She’d practically begged him, hadn’t she? When he didn’t get up immediately, she began to yell. It was something about the kitchen, leaving a mess there, eating a big snack after she had gone to the trouble to make a full dinner which he hadn’t even bothered to come to the table for, and then it was something about football being on too long, about leaving the newspaper all over the couch so no one else could sit down. He heard all of it and only gradually came to understand that because of all of those things and much, much more, he should leave.
“Can I take a leak first?” he asked. When he stood he felt like he always did standing next to her. She fit just right at his side when he had his arm around her, just enough shorter than he was even though he wasn’t tall. Friends told them they matched, blond hair, blue eyes. She stepped aside. Behind the closed door, he took a whiz, and stalled for time. He peeked into the waste basket to see if she was having her period. That would explain some of her rage. Quietly, he opened the medicine cabinet to see if any of the Tylenol 3s remained from when Dawn sprained her ankle during softball, last spring. A few pills were visible through the amber plastic container. He placed the vial in his pocket and closed the cabinet door. Just the tiniest squeak emerged, sending Dawn through the door. Her tirade began again, Josh still with his fly open.
“Just help yourself to the pharmaceuticals,” she said, her lips barely moving. What had happened here, Josh wondered. He held his hands up in surrender.
“Have you been going to that assertiveness training at Community Ed?” he asked. It was an honest question. She smacked him in the chest.
“Ow,” he said, grabbing her hands, hoping to gain ground that way. If he had a grasp on her, he could bring her to him and she would cry and they would hold each other and end up working it all out in the bedroom. But she wrenched herself away, shrieking now for him to get out.
He decided that would be the best thing, for now. He grabbed his jacket and the little dance bag containing all that she thought was his. CiCi, Dawn’s kid, had already taken over the couch and was immersed in a cartoon, Sponge Bob flickering and yellow. He would have liked to sit down and watch it with her, like they often did on the weekends. She didn’t look up as Josh passed through. He stopped in the doorway to the kitchen.
“I’ll bring your dance bag back when I get a place to stay,” Josh said. He picked up his ball cap and switched the bill to the side which usually made CiCi laugh and she would switch it to the back. He waited a few seconds and switched it back himself.
“It’s OK, Josh. I don’t need it anymore,” CiCi said.
Now he knew he needed a plan. CiCi and Dawn were in it together, this ousting of his shiftless ass from their house. One of them would not intercede with the other on his behalf, like they sometimes had in the past, and he was sunk. Josh left through the back porch, grabbing the garbage bag of returnable cans as he did. He negotiated the broken step, but the back yard was tangled with rotting squash vines from the garden he and CiCi had planted but not tended. He nearly tripped on his way to the garage for his bike, his only legal means of transportation since he’d lost his license a year ago. The kitchen window stamped out a square of light on the ground.
“Shitbox of a house,” he muttered. That would have hurt Dawn’s feelings, if she had heard him, which she didn’t. It was a crummy Farmer’s Home-built ranch on a slab, constructed in the ‘60s when aesthetics were at a low point, but Dawn didn’t care. She took great pride in the house, which she had scratched to buy on a subsidized plan through the city. It was painted and stenciled to the max, cluttered with little red-white-and-blue thingy-dos she found at various craft sales. When he first moved in he felt he had been wrapped in a fluffy, thick quilt. He had lived there happily, rounding out the equation between Dawn and CiCi, who had been 6 at the time, helping out with the yard work and other things. And Dawn had been so happy to have him there that she did everything for him: his wash, his meals, everything. She had been right there to bail him out the night Officer Frisch pulled him over for weaving on the blacktop and he blew a 1.8.
For sure, it had been a while since Josh had contributed much to money to the household. But after all, he wasn’t working at the present time. And he acted the part of a decent dad to CiCi. He walked her to the school bus stop, he picked her up. He checked her backpack for notes and permission slips from school and put them on the refrigerator with magnets. Better than Cici’s real dad, Dawn’s former boyfriend, who was a mean drunk and never paid any attention to the kid. He’d left Dawn with a white, spidery scar on her left elbow where her arm had gone through the back door window during a scuffle. The two men were different in that regard. Josh was not above getting shit-faced, but he had never raised a hand to a woman and couldn’t see that he ever would.
As Josh stood in the driveway, waiting a few minutes to give Dawn a chance to open the door and say, in that soft way she sometimes had, “Hey, let’s talk it over,” it began to rain. There was a click from the deadbolt inside. The light went out in the kitchen. Shit, he thought. This is not right.
Luckily, he could think on his feet. It was his saving grace. The bag of returnables, now tied to the handlebars of his bike, was a good example. If he’d had time, he would have liked to search the couch cushions for spare change, but as it was, he would probably have enough for a few drafts at Calvelli’s while he worked on Plan B. Something would happen there that would get him through the short term, certainly. Something always did. That’s why he didn’t worry about stuff or plan too far ahead, though maybe that was something he had heard Dawn complaining about recently. He hadn’t paid too much attention. He pedaled his bike down Dawn’s street, Oriole, to Nepessing, the main downtown drag. All of the houses in Dawn’s sub were the same: little bungalows with no soul. But now, from one streetlight circle to the next, mist on his face, the tiny boxy homes seemed to contain warmth and comfort that was lost to him and that he would have liked to share.
It was a small town of quiet city blocks surrounded by rural townships. The old downtown waited bitterly for any dollars not spent at suburban malls. There was some old money in town, mostly from family businesses like the hardware store and the funeral parlor, and new money from the families which had relocated from Detroit to have acreage for horses and a decent commute. Then there were most of the rest of the town chumps, who had never had much money, and sometimes didn’t have enough, whose parents had worked for years at the state hospital, tending the retarded boys and girls until the jobs vanished when the state got out of the business entirely and closed the Home down. That was Josh’s family. Both his parents and two of his grandparents had worked at the Home. It closed just a little too early for Josh’s parents to retire in comfort, so they were spending the last years of their working lives clerking at Wal-Mart and other jobs when they could find them.
The returnable cans brought just under $8 at the IGA, always less than expected. Okay, so a few drafts, maybe a game of pool, which might lead to another. On a good night he had been known to earn a little pocket change playing pool, though nothing about the recent events of his day made him confident this was one of those good nights. But it was his best bet for the moment. The neon beer sign in the window of Calvelli’s glowed warm and welcoming. The music, the voices, the laughter smoothed his feelings from a rumple to a flush of hope. He leaned the bike against the side of the building. Inside, he stashed the ballet bag under the stool.
The bar was medium full and the pool balls snapped against each other. Dominating the table was some big guy in a UAW hat and a small woman in tight jeans and poofy bangs. They might be on for hours, with the bending over the table and the blowing off of the chalk on the stick serving as foreplay on exhibit.
Josh’s buddy Gil was at the bar. “I’m up next, whenever that is,” Gil said. “You in?”
“Sure,” Josh said. He waved for a beer. “If I still have any money left by the time they’re done.”
“Hey, how about that field goal?” Gil said. “Fifty yards, man. Lions got nothin’, but sometimes they do have luck.”
“You kidding me? When?” Josh stared up at the TV over the bar in disbelief. He threw his ball hat to the floor.
“Two minutes ago,” Gil said.
“Damn,” Josh said. While he had been complying with Dawn’s inexplicable order, an afternoon’s investment in football and the hope of one exciting jump-off-the-couch play was down the drain. He watched the replay, but it wasn’t the same.
The bottle-return money went down his throat fast and by the time they were able to hit the pool table, Josh had nothing to put down. Gil said okay and he racked the balls with another guy, but he did buy Josh a beer, for which he was grateful.
Determined to drink slow, he glanced around the bar for future possibilities of any kind. Basic shelter was the issue, just between closing time and morning. Nothing was open all night in this town. Some kid’s tree fort? He couldn’t think of any. Maybe he would ride back to Dawn’s and sleep in the car in the garage. If she hadn’t locked it. She seemed to be thinking pretty clearly, so he considered that a possibility.
And that’s when he saw her, still cheerleader-pretty even though she would be in her 30s. Her blond hair was darker now but shimmered in the dim bar light, her smile warm yet shy like he’d always remembered. It was Lisa Blanchard, or whatever her married name was now, only he had heard that she recently split with her husband, a doctor who’d left her for a respiratory therapist. Lisa had been Josh’s brother’s girlfriend in high school. Miles and Lisa were once an image of things to come. If life was going to be like that, Josh couldn’t wait. Miles was good at everything to do with sports and Lisa was the greatest girlfriend he could picture. The two of them were inseparable. And passionate in that have-to-sneak teenage way, as Josh observed every move they made that he could possibly spy on. When Josh’s brother died in a car accident, just before he was supposed to graduate, he and Lisa had already broken up and she was in college. She came to the funeral anyway, and Josh was fixated as she cried without making a sound or changing expression, her tears running until her face was wet and slick.
Lisa had been ahead of him in school by about four years—one year ahead of his brother—and she came from the historic district, which was the pricier side of town. The two boys grew up in an old farmhouse just north of the city limits. Lisa’s parents tried hard to be polite about it. Josh never knew what broke them up.
For a while after his brother died, if Josh happened to run into Lisa around town on summer break or a holiday, she always greeted him with a hug that warmed his blood. She would ask how his parents were doing. The years passed and though he got a little taller, he mostly got wider, and his face changed with the weight acting like additional clay on a finished sculpture. He wasn’t fat but he was thick like any couch potato fueled by beer and pizza. The years had changed his appearance, she no longer recognized him, and walked past without noticing.
Watching her now, sitting with two girlfriends, suede jacket over the back of her chair, Josh had a vague plan. He knew where she lived. She had inherited her parents’ house on Washington Street, a few blocks north of downtown. He remembered something about the place, something his brother had told him. As Lisa’s table received a new round of drinks he downed his beer, checked the clock and headed out.
The rain came harder now, and cold. But his buzz was going pretty good, and whenever his brother came into the forefront of his mind Josh was able to obtain a detachment from the here and now. He used it when Officer Frisch handcuffed him, and during court when he felt certain he would go to jail, though he didn’t. And he used it now, happy to be able to conjure up his brother’s memory, which sometimes totally eluded him. It was a treat to picture Miles’ face and feel his presence. In reality, they had not been close. But Miles had been there in the lead, paving the way for Josh. And there was always promise that when they were both men and their childhood age difference was irrelevant, they would truly be brothers. Josh could sometimes picture how their adult life should have gone, gathering at their parents’ house for Thanksgiving, each with families of their own. They would greet each other with jabs to the shoulders, their affection out in full force, drinking beer together out on their parents’ deck while dinner cooked inside. Sometimes he could smell the turkey. When Miles died, that future fell to ruins. There was no family, just three separate people with their hearts broken, unable to come together for strength or comfort.
Josh had not considered calling his parents despite his current homeless situation. He hated speaking to his mother on the phone. She would answer “Hello?” with so much hope, like everything had been a big mistake, like it would be Miles calling, and then disintegrate into despair when she realized it was Josh. He didn’t blame her. He had been a total disappointment. But he couldn’t bear to hear it in her voice.
Heading toward Lisa’s house he was energized and hopeful as though Miles was still part of his life and he was biking over to see him after a night at the bar and they would sit on the porch and talk about the game. How ‘bout those Lions, eh? Miles had once told him about a basement window at Lisa’s house that had been broken for years, though it looked whole. The latch was still on, but not connected inside. From the outside, all you had to do was push and the window caved in. Miles said he often went over in the evening and rolled on in to the basement while Lisa’s parents thought she was in the cellar working on a school project. She and Miles would be together on the old couch down there without anyone even knowing. Of course, it could have been repaired—it had been years. But Josh was feeling maybe things were going his way. This was a gift from Miles. He rode to the house and quickly stashed his bike behind the garage.
The house was old, but freshly painted and well maintained. A built-in pool was tucked neatly beneath a tarp in the corner of the yard. The flower beds had been mulched for the season. A few piles of leaves coagulated against the fence along the edges, but for the most part the yard was spotless. Josh felt his way along the basement windows, kneeling gingerly among the remains of the lilies of the valley edging the sills, not yet killed off by frost. The first window he pushed was solid. Sweat began to bead lightly along his hairline, despite the chill. The second, too. The third window had some give. He pushed again. It gave some more. And there, as he pushed one more time, in the misty autumn night, he crossed the short, hapless bridge from being a basic ne’er-do-well into the dubious realm of a felon. The window pushed open and he rolled inside.
Dropping down to the basement floor, he pulled the little dance bag through the window and eased the window shut. The basement was dark as pitch. He stood perfectly still, listening to the house for signs of life, indications of a dog. Lisa had looked pretty well hunkered down at the bar, but who knew? Maybe she had taken a roommate since the hubby left, or was housing an aged aunt. Upstairs, he could hear the refrigerator humming gently. A clock chimed. But no footsteps. No click, click, click of clawed feet. Josh took a step and the phone rang, nearly jolting him out of his skin. Three rings and the answering machine clicked in. A woman’s voice left a muffled message. And Josh began to breathe again. No one was home.
He adjusted to the gloom. It seemed to be your basic basement: washer, dryer, piles of stuff on an old ping-pong table, exercise bike. This was Miles territory. It calmed him and made perfect sense to him at the moment, despite the wrongness of it. Miles would want him to be safe. Miles would not want him to sleep on a picnic table in the park. At the top of the stairs was a door. He turned the knob gently. It gave way and he nearly peed. If it had been locked he would have given up. He was not ready for forced entry.
The first floor was nicer than Josh had expected. New tile in the kitchen; gleaming appliances; fancy trim molding. She kept it pretty clean, too: canisters in a neat row, no crumbs on the counter. A single coffee mug polluted the sink, empty and rinsed, but with a smudge of lipstick on the rim.
He looked in the cookie jar first. Cookies. Drawers revealed only knives, forks, and measuring spoons. He found some change in a dish by the phone. He could do better than this digging into the console of Dawn’s car. By the time he got upstairs into what appeared to be Lisa’s bedroom, he was breathing hard. Finally, two purses on a dresser yielded some stray bills: some ones, a five and a twenty. Okay, he thought, maybe this would buy him a night at Dawn’s. She was so good with coupons that $30 would go a long way at the grocery store. His hand was on the jewelry box, and he stopped. Dawn would love the locket he saw within it. But it was a small town. One day the two women could be face to face in line at the IGA and his ass would be grass. He had to stick to money.
But there just didn’t seem to be much around. Who would have thought. This was a woman who had never had a car older than two years, even when she was 17. She had always had money. She apparently didn’t leave any lying around the house. Walking back downstairs, he knew his time was running out. There was a VCR which would only serve as a cop magnet if he rode through town on his bike. He had to get out. He stopped at the refrigerator. Inside was a nice pile of cold baked chicken, nestled on a plate and tucked under a sheet of plastic wrap. He took a leg.
He could have left by the front door, but he sensed something ever-so-subtle. A vibration. He hustled back to the basement where he would have more time to assess his exit plan. A headlight flashed past the window in the driveway. Lisa was home.
Josh considered scrambling out of the window he had entered through, but the dark basement was surprisingly warm and embracing. He doubted she would come down there, not tonight. Her steps above him on the hardwood floors let him know where she was. She stopped at the answering machine and played the muffled message. She dialed. He could hear her speak. “Yeah, I’m home. It was a drag, really. No. Yes. Yeah. I guess. Not really. Okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
He heard her go into the kitchen and run water. A confetti-pinging sound. The clink of claws. A dog? Then, at the top of the stair, a meow. Just a cat. Lisa’s feet echoed through hall and then went silent as she walked up the carpeted steps to her room.
Josh, until this time, had remained stock-still. Backing up a step, he encountered an old couch, superbly broken in, on which he sat for a minute. High school makeout sessions on the couch between Miles and Lisa shimmered like a ghost and his chest felt full with emotion. Realizing how wet his clothes were, he stripped most of them off. In his underwear, he felt around the piles of household sundry on the ping-pong table until he found a sleeping bag. Wrapping himself in it, comfortable as could be on the couch, he ate the chicken leg. Then, as the rain turned to sleet and pecked away at the windows, he stretched out, and with an old teddy bear for a pillow, fell fast asleep.
In the dim light of dawn he awoke, completely mystified as to where he was. There was a squeak and a slam and there was Lisa, in her slip and fuzzy slippers, pulling a blouse out of the dryer. She didn’t look over at him, and in a split-second she was back upstairs. Josh threw the sleeping bag off and grabbed for this clothes, but they had been in a soggy heap all night and were wet and cold. He heard her feet in the hall, more pronounced in pumps. The chain rattled at the door and she was gone.
Josh waited until her car backed out of the driveway and took the remainder of the load out of the dryer and put it into a basket. He put his own clothes inside. Having to piss like a racehorse, he looked round. There was a door. It concealed a small lavatory, just a toilet and sink. With great relief, he did what he had to do. A hand-towel on the rack seemed to be clean. The water in the basin was hot. Dawn had packed his razor and tooth brush into the dance bag, a few pairs of underwear, and a pair of khakis. Was this really all he owned in the world? By the time he washed up to feel sufficiently human, the dryer buzzed and he got his clothes out, dry and warm. Yesterday clean, dry clothes meant nothing. Today they were a miracle. Maybe a daylight search of the house would yield more than what he had found last night. But in the sobriety of the morning, he didn’t have the stomach for it. He packed up his bag and tried to decide what to do. Dawn would be at work and CiCi would be at school. Notably absent from his possessions was a key ring. Well, he had $30 in his pocket, more than last night. Possibilities loomed.
He would leave by the side door at the top of the basement stairs. It was broad daylight, but who was there to notice? If anyone spotted him, they would think he was some kind of repairman, judging by his Carhartt jacket. He was about to go out the door when he paused and decided a peek into the refrigerator would be okay. The kitchen was still spotless, and it gleamed in the daylight. He devoured a few more pieces of chicken. Then he spotted a wad of bills she must have taken out of her jeans pocket the night before and tossed on the counter. Another $16. That would help. Sticking a bottle of water into his jacket pocket, Josh headed out. From the way the door clicked behind him he didn’t think it had locked. It occurred to him that Lisa would be in her house that night, thinking her back door was locked because she hadn’t toyed with it for weeks, while in fact it was totally open for any schmoe to enter. A conscience like that would ruin his career as a housebreaker he thought and he laughed to himself in his head. It could be a funny story someday, though to tell it he would have to admit what he did. It would be called breaking and entering of an occupied dwelling on a court docket, not a funny thought.
His bike was glazed with sleet. After wiping the seat off with his jacket sleeve, he rode directly to Dawn’s, a distance of nearly a mile, and found the little house locked tight as a drum. The car was gone and a pink card in the mailbox said to forward his mail, only it had no address, just a check on the box that said “address unknown.” What had he done to make her so cold? He pushed his shoulder against the door, just to make sure it was locked, until the pain from that muffled what he felt inside. But more, he was frozen from his ride and the chill of the morning. He pulled a $20 bill from his pocket and tucked it in the back screen door. If he’d had any paper or a pencil he would have written her a note to tell her he was sorry he had made her so hostile and turned her warm, generous ass into an iceberg of hatred, which he may or may not deserve, but in any case, he was sorry. He thought maybe the $20 bill would communicate something to her, and he got back on his bike and headed downtown.
At Sam’s Coney, the Jaycees were bowing their heads for their pre-meeting prayer at tables near the back and Gil and his buddies from Public Works were settling in for lunch in the big booth by the front window. Josh breathed deep the food aromas: a blend of French fries, bacon, hunks of beef, egg salad and brewed coffee all combined to make one smell of something Josh would like to have served to him. But, individually, nothing tasted so good. It was always a disappointment. Gil waved him over to the band of DPW guys, all booted up for work on a water main. That should have been where his brother Miles was sitting right now, Carhartt overalls, flannel shirt, laughing at inside DPW jokes. What’s yellow and sleeps three? A DPW truck. Miles had worked summers for the city since ninth grade, and would have no doubt been hired full-time as soon as he graduated, if he had graduated. Josh sensed the ghost of him at the table, teasing the waitress, ordering a BLT.
“Hey, Josh,” Gil called. The men adjusted themselves on the booth seat for him to sit. “There’s an opening in the water department,” Gil said. “You should get down there today.”
“No shit?” Josh said. The waitress appeared at his side and he ordered eggs, fried, not runny.
“Yeah,” Gil said. “No driving. You just walk through the neighborhoods and check the meters. Part-time.”
“Even you could do it, you bonehead,” one of the guys said.
“Thanks, Gil,” Josh said. “I’ll go in today.”
He ate hastily and pretended to be interested in the stories at the table. Drinking stories. Women stories. Hunting stories. They all got a big laugh at the end, and Josh laughed along with them, though couldn’t stop thinking of getting down to the water department. He had to get that job.
“You got dough?” Gil asked when the bill came.
“Yeah,” Josh said.
“Quite a switch from yesterday.”
Josh looked at him. He could tell he didn’t mean anything by it. He handed Gil two dollars, saying “For the beer last night,” but Gil waved it away.
“Later man,” Gil said.
The guys loaded into the yellow city trucks and Josh got back on his bike, the dance bag hanging from the handlebars. At the water department building he filled out an application. He said his phone was currently being repaired so the secretary said she would ask the supervisor if he would talk to him now. Bill Cronin, weathered from years of outside work but trim and muscular all the same, appeared in the doorway a few minutes later.
“Josh,” he said, holding the application in his hand, jerking his head toward the inside of the office. Josh stood up to enter.
“What the hell took you so long,” Bill said. “I’ve been waiting for you to come by for years.”
“Yeah,” Josh said. Bill had been supervisor when Miles worked for the city. As a boy around town, after Miles was gone, Bill would stop Josh on his bike and tell him to come by in the summer for a job. Come by after graduation. Josh always said he would, but he couldn’t bear to cash in on a favor against Miles’ life. Now he was 28 and at the edge of his own life, putting in an application just like anyone else. He hadn’t expected the offer would still be open.
“How are your folks?” Bill said.
Josh tipped his palm from side to side. “They’re not really over it,” he said.
“Sure,” Bill said. “No one ever gets over it. Your brother was a hell of a fine young man.” He flicked Josh’s application onto his desk without looking at it. Josh stared at a framed cartoon on the desk, the caption reading: “Be the person your dog thinks you are.”
“You got a valid driver’s license?” Bill asked.
“No,” Josh said, resisting the temptation to lie.
Bill’s gaze didn’t change. “When are you supposed to get it back?
Josh counted in his head and bit his lip when he got it tallied. “About two more years,” he said.
Bill whistled. He raised an eyebrow. “You in recovery?”
The question had Josh stumped. He’d finished the court-ordered AA without skipping a night of beers. No one outside of the group had ever asked him that or acted like he had anything to recover from.
“Well, anyway,” Bill said when Josh didn’t answer, “you won’t need to drive. I promised myself I would hire you, no questions asked, in honor of your brother, and I’m going to. The rest is up to you.”
With horror Josh felt the tears he owed his brother brimming hot and about to flow. He swallowed hard and held his hand out to Bill, who took it and said, “Don’t fuck up.”
Josh, who had walked in a bum and a felon, walked out employed, part-time, with some benefits, at a higher wage than he could have dared hope. He would start the next day. The clock in the courthouse square said 2:30 as he rode past it on his bike in a daze. Without realizing it, he was at Lisa’s house, stashing his bike behind the garage. The back door was still unlocked and he let himself in. Keeping his eye on the time, he cruised around the house a little bit. He turned off the coffee pot. Upstairs, he could hear a toilet running. It was an easy job to lift the toilet tank top and adjust the chain so it shuddered into silence. His hand reached for the medicine cabinet. He pulled it away. He reached again. Mostly the usual: aspirin, Tylenol, Midol. Prozac. Hmm. He reached for it, then put his hand down and closed the cabinet door.
The overhead light in the hall was out, so he fished around in a closet and found a fresh bulb, standing on a chair to remove the fixture to screw it in. Downstairs, he collected what he wanted from the kitchen. He arranged some boxes to sit between the couch and the dryer so he wouldn’t be in such easy view, and then hastily, as he felt his time running out, took the basket of clothes he had removed from the dryer upstairs to the kitchen.
When he awoke from a long, deep, comfortable nap on the basement couch, Lisa was home and it was dark. He heard her walking on the wood floor above him, filling the cat dish, opening the fridge. Josh opened a Sprite carefully so it wouldn’t make a whoosh. From his spot in the basement he’d have a little something with her. She flicked on the TV. He put his feet up on an overturned laundry basket and listened to what he could catch from the news. When the sports came on she got up and rummaged around the kitchen, coming back into the den, apparently to eat in front of the TV. Josh pulled his sandwich out and ate with her. This is a peaceful way to be with a woman, he thought. Separate floors. Why hadn’t he thought of that before?
The phone rang. He could hear most of what she said.
“Yeah, I’m home tonight,” she said. “I went out last night but I’m just not ready for it. I don’t think I can do that again. Yeah. Yeah. No. I know. It’s strange, the bar scene. It’s horrid, really. Yeah, there’s that. Uh huh. I feel pretty good tonight. I don’t feel like I’m going crazy. The cat’s nutty, though. He keeps acting like he wants to go into the basement. I hope there isn’t a bat down there. No. I won’t go down there, believe me. Yeah, I’m going to quit taking them. They’re making me spacey. I found a basket of clothes in the kitchen and I couldn’t remember bringing it upstairs. Yeah, okay. I’ll talk to you later.”
A bat, Josh thought. That would keep her out of the basement. But he immediately felt bad. In order for him to retain this minimum shelter, a woman had to be terrorized with the thought of a bat sailing around her basement. Maybe someday he could ease her mind, though he didn’t know how he could do that. He got comfortable on the couch and listened to movements upstairs. After a bit, Lisa went upstairs to bed. He could hear the shower faintly on the second floor. When he felt sure she was in it, he got up and took a piss as quietly as he could. He did not flush.
After that, there was very little noise from the floors above. A faint radio from far away, then nothing. He listened as hard as he could against the basement gloom. A few beams from a streetlight provided a small amount of illumination, but he was really just there, in the dark, alone. He tried to think, to entertain himself, something he had not done much of for many years, but the embrace of the couch, the warmth beneath the sleeping bag, the exhaustion from the stress of the previous days, and the unexpected flush of health from his first sober night in many years projected him into intense sleep.
He awoke to hear Lisa hustling above him, from kitchen to den to bathroom, getting coffee, getting ready for work, and then the clink of the chain coming off the front latch and the slam of the door. At least he wouldn’t need an alarm clock. He waited a long enough time for her to not come rushing back for something forgotten, and he walked gingerly upstairs. He unplugged the electric rollers. He took a fast but thorough shower.
On his way back to the basement the phone rang and a voice came on to leave message. It was Lisa. “Rose? Rose, if you are there, would you please pick up? It’s me.”
Rose, who the hell was Rose that she was expecting to be there?
“Rose, can you hear me? I left the vacuum bags upstairs in my room. Oh, well. I’ll call you back in a bit. And be careful if you go into the basement. I think there’s a bat down there.”
The cleaning lady. Sure, that’s why the place was so spotless. Time to get out. He left by the side door, leaving it unlocked again, and rode to his new job, stopping first at the hardware store for a rubber washer to fix the drip in Lisa’s kitchen faucet.
As it turned out, the transition to working after not working for more than two years wasn’t as hard as expected. The hours worked out: 10 till 3. He could leave after Lisa and get back before she did. It was an easy gig, and walking through the neighborhoods was pleasant. The city gave him a voucher for new boots and work pants. On his route he often saw people he had known in years past, before he had become a fuck-up and was still just a nice little boy. They generally greeted him with fondness. He ate lunch each day with the DPW crew, where he learned, as he had suspected, he was way behind. Most of the guys had houses or wives or kids. Or at least a hunting trailer or acreage north of town you could put a deer stand on. Sure, some of the guys were coming off rotten divorces or bankruptcy. Not everyone was on top of the world. Yet no one, as far as he could tell, was hiding out in a basement he didn’t own and going to the city rec center for a shower.
After work he generally stopped at the library to read the paper. As the afternoon waned, he got back on his bike and rode toward Lisa’s house, always as though it was going to be the last time. He felt each day he would stay just one more night, then get his shit together and find someplace where he didn’t have to sneak in. But each day there was really no possibility of that, because he didn’t have enough money for a deposit and first month on an apartment and he didn’t feel he had anything to offer Dawn yet in the way of amends. And he still didn’t want to see his parents.
He had learned the rhythm of the house: The cleaning lady came on Mondays, and so on Monday morning after Lisa left, Josh would start the wash from the clothes chute and finish it when he got home. Then he took his stuff out and carried the rest upstairs as if the cleaning lady had done it. His goal was to eliminate any reason for Lisa to enter the basement.
And she seemed happy with the arrangement. On her nearly nightly phone calls with whoever she spoke to, she said she felt less overwhelmed about being in the house alone. The maintenance and repairs didn’t seem to be getting out of hand. The weeks went better now that the cleaning lady had apparently taken it upon herself to do the wash. But mostly, she wasn’t as lonely as she had been.
“The lights went off the other night,” she said once. “I thought I blew a fuse and I went, shit, how am I supposed to fix that again? I mean, my dad showed me how about twenty years ago. And I don’t want to go into the basement. There’s a bat down there. Then, before I could do anything, they just went back on.”
Josh was happy to hear she was happy. As for himself, he had found an old black-and-white TV in the back of an upstairs closet, which he watched occasionally with an earphone. There was more stuff of value stored away in closets in this house than some families had out in the open. He listened to sports on a small radio, earphone in. For the first time ever, he twirled the dial in search of talk radio and became engaged in some of the topics: global warming, the conflict in Iraq, gay marriage. He had a flashlight by which he occasionally read. But most often he sat in the dark, lifting weights from a pile stashed in the corner, listening to Lisa above him and trying to mend his mind of the many things which had blocked his way to a successful life.
And he learned that Lisa still loved his brother.
“Sometimes I feel like he’s still with me,” she said to her friend on the phone. “I had a dream about him and he seemed absolutely real. And then the next day, in the guest room, there was his baseball hat, lying on the floor. Like it just jumped out of the closet. It was like a sign to me. I mean it. No, I’m not still taking them.” There was a pause. “I’ll never forgive my parents for pushing me to break up with him. They thought my life would be so great if I went to college and got successful and forgot about him. But here I am, living in the same house I’ve always lived in, alone, and they’re dead, and Miles is dead too.” She began to cry. “If I’d stayed home and gone to school here he would have been with me that night and he wouldn’t have been driving drunk out on those curvy roads! Goddammit all!”
Josh felt badly about the hat. He had been looking in the closet for a sweatshirt or something cast-off to wear, and it fell off the top shelf. He hadn’t even recognized it as belonging to Miles. It was an old Tigers cap, which Josh had never seen him wear. Then he’d gotten spooked by a noise outside, thought Lisa was coming home early, and he scuttled down to the basement, leaving the hat on the floor.
He wondered what else of his brother was upstairs, hidden away in boxes and closets. Mementos from an adolescent love would no doubt linger. Letters? Poems? Josh couldn’t picture it, his brother writing anything down. He had been a live-action type of guy. But then, he had never really known him.
And now his brother’s presence in his life was everywhere. At work, they thought of him as Miles’ little brother. All the shelter he had in the world was the result of Miles guiding him to Lisa’s house. And he was bathed in the lifetime of regret suffered by Lisa over his death.
Though he would never say it to her if they ever came face-to-face, Lisa’s guilt was probably not misplaced. After she broke up with Miles, he went wild and reckless. It was during that period that the accident took place. Lisa could have been right. If she had still been in his life, Miles may have been in this very basement making out with her that night, not in the too-fast car as it met the tree.
Amazingly, Josh was awash with relief. It took him a few days to realize that a gentle glow had replaced all of his scuffed-up feelings, and even longer to come to know why. But Josh had an irrational and youthful feeling that the crash that took Miles was his fault. Maybe not his fault that Miles died, but somehow he must be to blame for living instead. Hearing Lisa shoulder the blame lifted it from himself.
For the first time, he felt trapped in the basement, listening to Lisa walk above him. This had to end, he thought. Weekends when Lisa didn’t go away somewhere were long and tedious, as he tried not to move or make a sound. For the first time ever, he recalled the Anne Frank book he’d been forced to read in seventh grade, and had not appreciated in any way. A few weekends the guys from DPW had included him in their hunting trips to their little cabins in the woods, giving him a chance to get out of the house, but it was awkward to go: he had no gun and didn’t want one, and while he was there he was tempted to drink, which seemed like the wrong direction to take.
He had started a savings account for the first time since he was a kid and he had very little overhead, but even with eating cheap lunches at Sam’s Coney, it was hard to stash much away. He had been scanning the paper for apartments, but the amounts needed seemed insurmountable, with deposits and such. He considered asking Dawn if he could rent her couch. He would gladly pay, and wouldn’t interfere with her life at all, if he could just stay there until he had enough money to get a place of his own. Some days that seemed like a good plan, but each time he made the move to call her, he couldn’t get past the hatred on her face the night she booted him out.
The first snow came before Thanksgiving. It was more than a dusting: an inch-thick coat that covered the grass and made the roads slick for morning drivers. Josh wished he could take a snow shovel to the front walk before leaving for work, but it seemed too rash. Most would be melted away by the time Lisa got home so he would not leave tracks, but he felt like that was what he should be doing for her and his hands were tied by the circumstances.
And then, that same day, for the first time since he had been rendered homeless, he ran into Dawn on the street. He was making his rounds of the meters on the downtown stores when he saw her coming out of Penney’s, a couple of brown-striped bags in her hands.
“Hey,” he said. “You have the day off?”
She stopped and looked straight into his face.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, as if she didn’t know him. She didn’t know him. After a minute it clicked.
“Josh?” she said. The look on her face scared him. It was like he had come back from the dead. “Yeah, it’s me. What’s the matter, did the uniform scare you? I’m working for the city now. In the Water Department.”
“It’s not the uniform. You look different. What have you lost there, 20 pounds?”
Josh glanced at his reflection in the storefront window and was shocked. All the walking and the limited eating and no drinking had made a change. His cheeks were hollowed where they had not been since he was a boy. His eyelids had lost a puffiness they had taken on some time in his late teens. He looked completely different.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’ve lost a little bit. Hey, do you need some money? I know I was kind of a mooch there at the end. I’m sorry. I have a little money now. I can start paying you back.”
“Forget it, Josh,” Dawn said. She shook a finger at him but it was playful. “Just forget it. I’ve already chalked it up to experience. Hey, you look good.”
And she was gone, down the street on her merry way. Was she ever over him, he thought.
“Tell CiCi I said ‘hi,’” Josh called after her, and he felt he had made his amends. There was no future with Dawn, he could see it clearly. She wasn’t mad at him in the way girls were when they still loved you. She was just glad he was gone. What did he expect? But being able to tell her he was sorry lifted a weight. He felt lighter.
Heading home, back to Lisa’s house, after work, he thought about how he was going to manage the winter. There was the matter of the walks and shoveling. Cars were unreliable in the cold weather. What if Lisa had car trouble in the morning and couldn’t leave for work? How was he supposed to get out for work himself, and worse, how was he supposed to just hang out in the basement while she was out in the driveway with a problem he could solve? Fuses he could fix. Light bulbs he could change. Garbage disposals he could un-jam. But he couldn’t go out and tell the world, “Hey, I’m here for this girl. She loved my brother and she’s lonely. I can’t fill the void in her life but I can change her oil.”
He had learned something else as he sat silently in the basement, listening to her life as she spoke on the phone: She liked having him there, too. She didn’t know she did. But she missed him when he was gone on the weekends. She said so.
“The weekend was miserable,” she told her friend, after Josh had been hunting for the weekend. “The house felt so empty, I nearly went out of my mind. Now, today, I’m okay. I can’t explain it.”
For Josh, it gave him a sense that he could contribute something and not just take. Each night as he sat below her like a refugee, he longed to see her up close. He could barely remember what she looked like. As he fell asleep to the sound of her voice, he dreamed about speaking to her face-to-face with an intensity akin to sexual longing.
So lost in his thoughts was he as he walked up the driveway to enter the side door, as he had for weeks now totally undetected, he forgot to look and listen. He did not hear her car turn into the drive until it was behind him. There was no chance for him to duck out of sight. She slammed the brakes and clutched both hands tight on the wheel, terrified. He felt she thought he was a burglar. Which, of course, he was.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay.” His city ID was on his jacket. He unclipped it and held it up. “Meter man.” What the hell was she doing home at this hour anyway?
Lisa slumped against the wheel, crying. Josh opened the car door, stooping to talk to her.
“Hey,” he said again. “It’s okay. It’s just the meter man. I can come back later.”
She rubbed her nose with her sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just thought you were someone else.”
And then Josh knew. At 20 pounds less, or whatever it was, he looked younger. He looked like Miles. Or what Miles might have looked like as an adult man. Lisa took his city ID which was still in his hand.
“Are you Josh?” she asked. She looked back at the ID and then at Josh and shook her head.
Josh nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just me.”
“You look like Miles!” she said. “I left work early. I’ve got a fever. I thought I was having a hallucination.”
“Here, let me help you get out,” Josh said. “Be careful, the driveway is slippery.”
“Can you come inside a minute?” Lisa said. “I’m shook up. You really startled me.”
“Yeah, I do that to girls,” Josh said. She laughed.
“Oh, you’re still funny,” Lisa said. Josh didn’t know he had ever been funny. On the slippery driveway she let him hold her elbow as she tip-toed unsteady in her dress pumps. She giggled as she nearly slipped but his work boots were steady on the cement and he tightened his grasp. Josh found pressure of their bodies together delicious.
“The neighbors will think I’m drunk,” she said. Her voice so clear and close like that was intoxicating in itself. He had forgotten her eyes were brown.
Josh entered the house through the front door for the first time. Lisa went straight to the couch and covered herself with an afghan. The cat leapt from hiding and nuzzled against her. It howled at Josh.
“Oh, stop that,” Lisa said. “That’s the way he’s been acting lately. Like he senses something I can’t. I think there’s a bat in the basement and he wants to go down and hunt it.”
Josh offered to make tea and she accepted. In the kitchen, with which he was acquainted, he put the kettle on. He poured honey into two mugs. When it was done and steaming, he carried it to her on tray.
“Oh, wow,” she said. “This is great. I’m really feeling awful.” She didn’t look awful. The fever had put a glow into her eyes and her face was flushed as though lit from within. The years had not taken her looks from her, but had instead enhanced them, as though her flesh had settled in onto bones, comfortable.
They drank tea and she talked, like they had been friends a long time. She told him about how she felt about his brother, though he already knew.
“You know that old song about shopping around?” she said. Josh nodded, though he didn’t know. “Well, sometimes the very first one is the right one,” she said. “I found my doctor, like my parents wanted me to, and that was a marriage made in hell. I wish I had stuck with your brother and gotten married early and had a bunch of kids and lived in a trailer and been happy ever after. No one has ever compared to him.”
Josh could barely hear what she had to say, he was so entranced by watching her mouth move. He tried to respond appropriately in the conversation and hoped he didn’t look like a starving man who had encountered a hot meal.
She said she had to go upstairs to sleep.
“I know this sounds funny, but if you’re not doing anything, would you mind staying for a while?” she said. “I don’t mean to sound crass, but I just can’t stop looking at you. You look so much like Miles. I mean, I know you’re you, and all that, but it feels good to almost see him again.”
Josh said he would be honored.
She went upstairs and Josh wandered around the first floor, not having to listen for an approaching car in the drive for the first time. He emptied the waste baskets and took the trash outside. He cleaned up the tea mugs. He tracked down the source of a mysterious beeping noise and replaced the battery in the smoke detector. At dusk he heated a can of soup and took it upstairs to Lisa. She was just starting to wake up.
She sat up in bed and blew on the soup, cheeks flushed from fever but looking happy and content. Josh sat in a chair next to the bed and watched her spoon up the soup.
“This is nice,” she said. “It feels like you’ve been here a long time.”
She asked if he would mind going down to the basement to see if he could find the bat.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. In the basement he folded the sleeping bag and put it back on the ping-pong table. He packed his stuff into the dance bag and stashed it behind the couch. Then he went back to her room, where she was under the covers and looking like she was ready to drift off again.
“Did you find the bat?” she said. “I don’t want to go down there. I haven’t been down there in a month or more.”
“It’s okay,” Josh said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and she reached her hand out to his. “I found him. I just opened the window and he flew out.”
Barbara Arno Modrack‘s short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Seventeen and elsewhere. She is a community news editor in Lansing, Michigan. A graduate of Michigan State University, she lives in Brighton, Michigan.