Two Things
Mark Jacobs
Harper Hollis waited three days to move back into the house. He had stayed in the camper for seven hundred and twelve days. He knew the exact number because he marked them on a calendar. The calendar hung on the door of the mini-fridge in the mini-kitchen of his Vagabond II, and he made a checkmark with his morning coffee.
He had not planned on waiting. In the privacy of his mind, more times than he could count, he had played out his wife’s departure. Sometimes in his imagining Augusta fired one last verbal shot at him. Sometimes he shot back. Sometimes they only glared in perfect misunderstanding. But it always ended the same way as he threw open the front door and tromped in to take possession.
She was gone. He won. Didn’t he?
On the morning of the third day the snort of a horse woke him at sunrise. Annabelle had dropped her foal the week before. The coyotes that hung out in Abernathy’s woods had to be interested, the sonsabitches, although they mostly did their damage in the dark. Harper hauled himself out of bed, ignoring a familiar twinge of pain in his back. He grabbed a rifle and made his way to the pasture barefoot.
It was spring in Broadhope County. The redbuds were out, the trees wearing a blurry halo of pale purple, and the new green popping out everywhere had a satiny look. The air was mild and full of promise. The place, the moment, took hold of Harper. Nothing like country life, he thought. But that wasn’t it. The empty words did not explain the sensation that had him by the scruff of the neck. It was like seeing a thing and feeling it at the same time while not knowing what to call it.
In agreeable uncertainty he stood at the fence and whistled at Annabelle. The new mamma trotted over, her foal following on stiff legs. He gave the Appaloosa mare a carrot, rubbed her nose, said something soothing that did not quite equate to words. The other horses kept their distance as if they knew better than to expect a treat just now. No sign of Abernathy’s coyotes.
Making his way back from the pasture, Harper went into the house through the back door without giving it any thought. Strange. After two years in the camper, being home felt normal. Six months back, Augusta had demanded he come in and fix a leak in the laundry room sink. Other that that, he had stayed out. That was the agreement, not that they ever put it into words.
The same day Harper retrieved her letter from the mailbox, she began making preparations to leave. But she had left a fair amount of her stuff behind and had not bothered to clean out the pantry. He rummaged for coffee, finding it where they had always kept coffee, and brewed a pot.
Augusta’s letter. She had taken the trouble to type out her notice of intent to hire a lawyer, which gave it an official look. Why she put a stamp on the envelope and sent it through the mail was a mystery. She could have crossed thirty yards of grass and handed it to him at the trailer.
Waiting for the coffee, he turned on the radio and took a seat at the kitchen table. Rush was on, taking out after the idiots in Washington. Normally Harper got a kick out of hearing him foam at the mouth. Listening to Limbaugh was kind of like smoking used to be. You never got over that first lungful of morning smoke. But for some reason Rush got on his nerves this morning, and he turned him off.
He grasped the table top. The legs were uneven, and it wobbled. Augusta had regularly hammered him about that, but he hadn’t gotten around to fixing it before she booted him from the house. It was a small table, round. He moved his cup as though he knew what he was up to – he did not – and overturned the table. Easy as pie. He shoved it with his foot, and the table skidded across the kitchen floor, knocking against the refrigerator, where it made a dent in the door.
That was that.
Somehow being back home again left him at loose ends. A man from Roanoke was supposedly coming to look at the black gelding, which had a golden mane that gave the horse an unusual handsome look. But the guy had called twice before and failed to show, and Harper had no reason to expect the third time would have any charm to it. He wandered through his reclaimed residence room by room as though looking for something. He’d know it when he saw it. Didn’t see it.
In the bedroom, before he knew what he was doing, he was holding a pillow in his hands, inhaling the three-day-gone scent of his wife. How long was that going to last? He cursed in fury, but the object of his anger was not visible to him. He stripped the bed, tossing the sheets and pillowcases into the washer. Bending, he felt pain in the small of his back. He popped the pill he had forgotten to take when he woke. The pills did not kill the pain, but sometimes they wounded it.
Harper Hollis’ life divided neatly into halves. Before the accident and after. He had been a long-haul trucker with his own Peterbilt rig. He made money even in the bad times when overpriced gas drove a lot of the independents into the ground. The driver of the log truck who ploughed into him outside Bristol was asleep at the wheel. He died at the scene so never knew he had just ruined another man’s life.
Augusta was right all along about one thing. The insurance settlement had been Harper’s very own kiss of death. He would never climb into a cab again. Just the thought of that made the pain in his back flare. Buying fifty acres in Broadhope County and trading horses had seemed, at the time, like the smart way out. But he was not real good at the business end of the business. He was constantly being outdone, undercut, outmaneuvered by people across Southside who knew how to make money on a trade. It was a trick Harper had yet to master.
That was where Augusta’s kennel came in. Braveheart Kennel & Dog Grooming Service had brought in enough cash to keep them right side up in the water. Watching from the stoop of the camper, Harper knew she was serious about leaving when she methodically went about closing down the operation. At that point they had pretty much quit talking, apart from the occasional shouting match, which sometimes went Harper’s way but more often hers.
He had tried, off and on, to mend the break. Every time, the same three things got in the way. Augusta’s gripes. Sex. And Harper’s temper. Inside ten minutes of discussion he had no idea which one was the subject of their argument. They blurred into each other.
You’re dried up, she liked to tell him. You done quit knowing all the things a man ought to know. She was talking about tenderness, which had something to do with sex. He understood that much. It takes two, he went back at her, which she always interpreted as him complaining she no longer had any sex appeal. And that naturally made him see red. Round and round the fucking cobbler’s bench they went, monkey and weasel. He had no idea who was which.
Hearing Augusta’s voice and not wanting to, he went back to the kitchen, switched on the radio, listened to thirty seconds of fulmination, then switched it off again. What he ought to be feeling was free. The house seemed small.
Stepping out the front door, he heard tires on gravel. A little red Miata convertible was coming up the drive. Here was the odd thing: behind the wheel was a black woman with tall hair and a face out of the history books. Cleopatra, maybe. Not that Harper had ever seen a picture.
She stepped out of the car and came at him with her hand out to shake. Harper took it. Her fingers were cool. She had a flowery smell that went with the spring air.
“You must be Mr. Hollis.”
“Who are you?”
He hadn’t meant it to sound hostile, or had he?
“I’m Asya Mills. Is Augusta home?”
“What do you want with Augusta?”
If Harper was bent on offending the woman, she was bent on not being put off by him. She had a comfortable look. Good clothes, not that he had a clue about women’s clothing. Perfect nails, a trim figure. And a way of standing her ground that let you know she belonged wherever she felt like standing.
“Augusta grooms our dog. I called her a couple of times, but she didn’t call back. I was out this way so figured I’d stop by.”
“I never saw you here,” Harper said, his suspicion spiking.
“My husband – Lionel – usually brings the dog.”
“Never saw your husband, either.”
She gave him a slow, wide smile that took him in, surrounded him, made him aware how attractive she was in case he had not already noticed.
“Lionel is white,” she told him. “That’s why you didn’t notice him.”
Harper was suddenly aware of the tattoo on the bicep of his left arm, which was visible because he was wearing his Whiskey Myers T-shirt. The tattoo was a flag. Or it would have been if he hadn’t sobered up that one night in Jacksonville, way back when, in time to call a halt to Confederate ink. What he had walked out of the parlor with was modern art in blue and red. He had the idea that Asya Mills could see the parts of the design that were not there.
“Augusta’s gone,” he said.
“Would you mind asking her to call me?”
“She ain’t coming back.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I am truly sorry, Mr. Hollis. I had no idea.”
Did black people flush? They must. She turned to go.
He wanted her to stay. That was the only explanation, lame as it was, for what he said next.
“I pissed her off.”
She stopped, looking puzzled. “What did you say?”
Might as well be hung for a horse thief.
“I was mad all the time. Augusta got tired of it.”
“What were you mad about, Mr. Hollis?”
“Are you willing to call me Harper?”
“What were you angry about, Harper?”
She was curious. Had every right to be. His answer was going to disappoint her.
“I got no idea.”
She considered for a moment before telling him, “That can’t be true.”
Like a demonstration of what he meant, anger gusted in him. He did his best to hide it. The gust passed. He shrugged.
“Everything. I was mad about everything.”
“Why are you telling me?”
He had no reasonable explanation for that so changed the subject. “I trade horses.”
She nodded. “Lionel mentioned that once.”
“Went out to the pasture this morning, early. It’s a line of redbuds along the south fence. They’re in full bloom. The color don’t last, you have to look your fill now.”
“I know. They’re out everywhere. They’re stunning. Truly beautiful.”
“That’s it.”
“What’s it?”
She had a supple mind, he could see that about her. She was sophisticated. More than he was, anyway. Out of nowhere came a question he did not dare ask. Did she ever dream the same dream twice? All he cared about, just then, was keeping the conversation going.
“How can a person that stays mad all the time see what’s beautiful? Because they can, you know.”
“I’m a pediatrician.”
“A kid doctor.”
“Right.”
“Me and Augusta never had kids. That’s one thing to be mad about.”
“It is if you want children.”
“I always told her I didn’t want any, but we both knew that was bullshit.”
“At the hospital, sometimes, I’ll attend a very sick child, one I know is not going to make it.”
“Cancer.”
“Cancer, or some other wasting disease, or a heart that won’t do what hearts are meant to do. I put my hand on the child’s forehead, and it burns. I go home. Lionel and I like classical music. He puts on Beethoven. And there it is.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Are you sure?”
He wanted to spit. He didn’t. It seemed disrespectful.
“The kid dying makes you mad,” he said. “But the music is beautiful.”
She was ready to go. He would have tried to keep her talking, but it would be like begging. The thought of begging did not bother him as much as it should have, but he knew he would lose. She told him in formal words that she was sorry to have troubled him, and that was that. The greening trees in the woods on the west side of the drive performed a magic trick, making her red car disappear.
He called the guy from Roanoke, who did not pick up. Harper left him a blistering voicemail, which ended by telling the potential buyer of his handsome gelding to go fuck himself. Hanging up, he felt a moment’s satisfaction. It popped like a bubble.
Something was going on with the right foreleg of Annabelle’s foal. Some kind of growth, it looked like. He called the vet but got more voicemail. Didn’t anybody in the Commonwealth of Virginia answer the phone any more? He was about to launch his second attack of the morning but thought better of it. The vet had been known to cut him some slack when it came to paying his bill.
He wasted a couple of hours, poking around the house, trying to feel like the victim of some sort of crime, a survivor, but he had a hard time making the feeling last past thirty seconds.
On the coffee table in the living room he noticed an envelope addressed To Whom It May Concern. He opened it, having a fairly sick sense that it probably concerned him. When they were first married, Augusta had worked as a secretary at Newman Construction in downtown Briery. She was smarter than Harper – that never bothered him – and used to write a mean business letter.
He didn’t read much, any more. He worked his way through the short letter, glad nobody was there to see him laboring at it.
To Whom It May Concern:
This is why I left, and why I won’t come back. I want to say it all started with the accident, but that’s a lie. My ex-husband Harper Hollis always had a hard side to him. For the longest time I figured it was my job keeping him from getting any madder than he woke up being. I guess it wore me out, all that trying, and no success.
I don’t claim to be any saint. I gave as good as I got. All I intend to mention here is the conviction I have that I have run out of time. That’s what scares me. I would like to have that feeling, one more time, that you get when you are touched. It’s kind of a surprise to me, but I’m still alive.
Sincerely,
Augusta Snooks
Snooks was her maiden name. Hadn’t taken her long to reclaim it.
Harper tore up the letter and the envelope. Made confetti and scattered it around the room. With one pointless thing and another, his first day back home disappeared, swallowed up in nothing, nothing again, and then more nothing. He toyed with the idea of calling the hospital, seeing if they would give him the phone number of Dr. Asya Mills. It was not the prospect of more voicemail that held him back, it was the risk of having to answer the question she would surely ask if he did reach her. What is it you want from me?
His decision, that evening, was one more mystery in a day of them. As the sun was going down over the west woods, flaunting soft colors that had a sexy look to them, he went back to the camper. It had been a long time since he drank too much.
Somebody had left a bottle of Old Granddad in a cupboard. Might have been Harper himself, for all he knew. Reaching for it, he felt a prickle on his arm where the Rebel flag wasn’t. He would like to tell somebody how it had gone down in Jacksonville, some twenty five years back. Too much something in his body, that night of endless stupidity, and not enough sense in his brain. But the details had faded. Too bad the abortion of a tattoo hadn’t faded with his memory. What if he called up Dr. Mills and asked her if she knew how to go about having ink removed from human skin? No way.
He envied her, that was obvious to him. Not her money, or her success, or even her easy way of being. What he wished he had was her coolness of mind. She was a logical person.
He drank the whiskey over ice, stopping long enough to fry a couple of eggs and eat them with toast. Maturity. Experience. But there was no way to stop the alcohol onslaught, and he got drunk on the stoop with a Winchester 30.30 on his knees just in case. When the time came, he staggered to bed, remembering as he sank onto the mattress to swallow the last pain pill of the day.
Sleep was a sea. The sea was choppy. In his befuddlement, Harper lacked a boat. Waking up after midnight was like being dumped on shore by an unfriendly wave.
He went outside. The bottle of Old Granddad was still on the stoop. He sat down and poured a shot but did not drink it. Charlottesville. That was where Augusta had gone. Her brother Ben’s oldest son was away at college. Ben was willing to let her have the boy’s room while she sorted through her options.
She picked up on the third ring. Harper mumbled something that led her to accuse him of being drunk.
“I was drunk before,” he told her, aiming to be precise, “but I’m not anymore.”
“What do you want?”
“That table in the kitchen. The bad leg.”
“What about it?”
“I fixed it.”
That was not yet true but would be.
“You wake me up out of a sound sleep to tell me something I could give a shit about?”
“You’re thinking I put a matchbox under the leg, or a piece of cardboard, but I didn’t. I took the legs off and planed ‘em even.”
“And I’m supposed to care?”
The best way to answer that question was by ignoring it.
“I figured something out,” he told her. “Today.”
“I’m hanging up, Harper.”
“Hold your horses. Just listen for once, will you?”
“Be fast. I’m tired.”
His mind was racing, trying to find words that did justice to what he had figured out, with Asya Mills’ help.
“It’s two things,” he told his absent wife, but even whiskey-addled he knew that was not enough to make clear to her something he himself was struggling to understand.
“Jesus,” she said, “just let me go back to sleep.”
“Two things at once. Real different from each other, like night and day only not that obvious.”
“Don’t tell me you’re not still drunk.”
“Here’s what I mean. I’m out on the stoop, at the camper. I can see the moon through the trees. It’s a beautiful sight.”
“What are you doing in the camper?”
“Same exact moment, my back starts hurting me like a mother. See what I’m driving at?”
“No.”
“It’s two things, Augusta, that’s all I’m saying.”
“You’re not making a bit of sense.”
Normally that would be enough to make him go off on her. In his fierce desire to explain himself he let it pass.
“It was a mistake,” he told her, “not getting at that table a long time ago.”
“You’re not trying to coax me back, are you? Don’t waste your breath.”
Maybe he was trying to, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe she was coaxable, maybe she wasn’t. Right now it didn’t matter. What did matter was getting his point across in such a way that both of them understood. He dug deep.
“It’s who we are. People, I mean. We can hold two things in our head at the same time even if they fight each other.”
And two things in our heart, he thought but did not add.
“Two things,” she said. “You mean, like a man and a woman.”
“That’s part of it,” he said.
“Call me back when it’s all of it.”
She hung up. At that moment, a mostly full moon the color of clover honey lifted clear of the trees. And the coyotes in Abernathy’s woods started howling, which brought on more of the same from every dog in earshot. Two things. Harper felt his fingers curling to grasp them. Give her another five minutes to sleep, and he would call Augusta back.
Mark Jacobs
Harper Hollis waited three days to move back into the house. He had stayed in the camper for seven hundred and twelve days. He knew the exact number because he marked them on a calendar. The calendar hung on the door of the mini-fridge in the mini-kitchen of his Vagabond II, and he made a checkmark with his morning coffee.
He had not planned on waiting. In the privacy of his mind, more times than he could count, he had played out his wife’s departure. Sometimes in his imagining Augusta fired one last verbal shot at him. Sometimes he shot back. Sometimes they only glared in perfect misunderstanding. But it always ended the same way as he threw open the front door and tromped in to take possession.
She was gone. He won. Didn’t he?
On the morning of the third day the snort of a horse woke him at sunrise. Annabelle had dropped her foal the week before. The coyotes that hung out in Abernathy’s woods had to be interested, the sonsabitches, although they mostly did their damage in the dark. Harper hauled himself out of bed, ignoring a familiar twinge of pain in his back. He grabbed a rifle and made his way to the pasture barefoot.
It was spring in Broadhope County. The redbuds were out, the trees wearing a blurry halo of pale purple, and the new green popping out everywhere had a satiny look. The air was mild and full of promise. The place, the moment, took hold of Harper. Nothing like country life, he thought. But that wasn’t it. The empty words did not explain the sensation that had him by the scruff of the neck. It was like seeing a thing and feeling it at the same time while not knowing what to call it.
In agreeable uncertainty he stood at the fence and whistled at Annabelle. The new mamma trotted over, her foal following on stiff legs. He gave the Appaloosa mare a carrot, rubbed her nose, said something soothing that did not quite equate to words. The other horses kept their distance as if they knew better than to expect a treat just now. No sign of Abernathy’s coyotes.
Making his way back from the pasture, Harper went into the house through the back door without giving it any thought. Strange. After two years in the camper, being home felt normal. Six months back, Augusta had demanded he come in and fix a leak in the laundry room sink. Other that that, he had stayed out. That was the agreement, not that they ever put it into words.
The same day Harper retrieved her letter from the mailbox, she began making preparations to leave. But she had left a fair amount of her stuff behind and had not bothered to clean out the pantry. He rummaged for coffee, finding it where they had always kept coffee, and brewed a pot.
Augusta’s letter. She had taken the trouble to type out her notice of intent to hire a lawyer, which gave it an official look. Why she put a stamp on the envelope and sent it through the mail was a mystery. She could have crossed thirty yards of grass and handed it to him at the trailer.
Waiting for the coffee, he turned on the radio and took a seat at the kitchen table. Rush was on, taking out after the idiots in Washington. Normally Harper got a kick out of hearing him foam at the mouth. Listening to Limbaugh was kind of like smoking used to be. You never got over that first lungful of morning smoke. But for some reason Rush got on his nerves this morning, and he turned him off.
He grasped the table top. The legs were uneven, and it wobbled. Augusta had regularly hammered him about that, but he hadn’t gotten around to fixing it before she booted him from the house. It was a small table, round. He moved his cup as though he knew what he was up to – he did not – and overturned the table. Easy as pie. He shoved it with his foot, and the table skidded across the kitchen floor, knocking against the refrigerator, where it made a dent in the door.
That was that.
Somehow being back home again left him at loose ends. A man from Roanoke was supposedly coming to look at the black gelding, which had a golden mane that gave the horse an unusual handsome look. But the guy had called twice before and failed to show, and Harper had no reason to expect the third time would have any charm to it. He wandered through his reclaimed residence room by room as though looking for something. He’d know it when he saw it. Didn’t see it.
In the bedroom, before he knew what he was doing, he was holding a pillow in his hands, inhaling the three-day-gone scent of his wife. How long was that going to last? He cursed in fury, but the object of his anger was not visible to him. He stripped the bed, tossing the sheets and pillowcases into the washer. Bending, he felt pain in the small of his back. He popped the pill he had forgotten to take when he woke. The pills did not kill the pain, but sometimes they wounded it.
Harper Hollis’ life divided neatly into halves. Before the accident and after. He had been a long-haul trucker with his own Peterbilt rig. He made money even in the bad times when overpriced gas drove a lot of the independents into the ground. The driver of the log truck who ploughed into him outside Bristol was asleep at the wheel. He died at the scene so never knew he had just ruined another man’s life.
Augusta was right all along about one thing. The insurance settlement had been Harper’s very own kiss of death. He would never climb into a cab again. Just the thought of that made the pain in his back flare. Buying fifty acres in Broadhope County and trading horses had seemed, at the time, like the smart way out. But he was not real good at the business end of the business. He was constantly being outdone, undercut, outmaneuvered by people across Southside who knew how to make money on a trade. It was a trick Harper had yet to master.
That was where Augusta’s kennel came in. Braveheart Kennel & Dog Grooming Service had brought in enough cash to keep them right side up in the water. Watching from the stoop of the camper, Harper knew she was serious about leaving when she methodically went about closing down the operation. At that point they had pretty much quit talking, apart from the occasional shouting match, which sometimes went Harper’s way but more often hers.
He had tried, off and on, to mend the break. Every time, the same three things got in the way. Augusta’s gripes. Sex. And Harper’s temper. Inside ten minutes of discussion he had no idea which one was the subject of their argument. They blurred into each other.
You’re dried up, she liked to tell him. You done quit knowing all the things a man ought to know. She was talking about tenderness, which had something to do with sex. He understood that much. It takes two, he went back at her, which she always interpreted as him complaining she no longer had any sex appeal. And that naturally made him see red. Round and round the fucking cobbler’s bench they went, monkey and weasel. He had no idea who was which.
Hearing Augusta’s voice and not wanting to, he went back to the kitchen, switched on the radio, listened to thirty seconds of fulmination, then switched it off again. What he ought to be feeling was free. The house seemed small.
Stepping out the front door, he heard tires on gravel. A little red Miata convertible was coming up the drive. Here was the odd thing: behind the wheel was a black woman with tall hair and a face out of the history books. Cleopatra, maybe. Not that Harper had ever seen a picture.
She stepped out of the car and came at him with her hand out to shake. Harper took it. Her fingers were cool. She had a flowery smell that went with the spring air.
“You must be Mr. Hollis.”
“Who are you?”
He hadn’t meant it to sound hostile, or had he?
“I’m Asya Mills. Is Augusta home?”
“What do you want with Augusta?”
If Harper was bent on offending the woman, she was bent on not being put off by him. She had a comfortable look. Good clothes, not that he had a clue about women’s clothing. Perfect nails, a trim figure. And a way of standing her ground that let you know she belonged wherever she felt like standing.
“Augusta grooms our dog. I called her a couple of times, but she didn’t call back. I was out this way so figured I’d stop by.”
“I never saw you here,” Harper said, his suspicion spiking.
“My husband – Lionel – usually brings the dog.”
“Never saw your husband, either.”
She gave him a slow, wide smile that took him in, surrounded him, made him aware how attractive she was in case he had not already noticed.
“Lionel is white,” she told him. “That’s why you didn’t notice him.”
Harper was suddenly aware of the tattoo on the bicep of his left arm, which was visible because he was wearing his Whiskey Myers T-shirt. The tattoo was a flag. Or it would have been if he hadn’t sobered up that one night in Jacksonville, way back when, in time to call a halt to Confederate ink. What he had walked out of the parlor with was modern art in blue and red. He had the idea that Asya Mills could see the parts of the design that were not there.
“Augusta’s gone,” he said.
“Would you mind asking her to call me?”
“She ain’t coming back.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I am truly sorry, Mr. Hollis. I had no idea.”
Did black people flush? They must. She turned to go.
He wanted her to stay. That was the only explanation, lame as it was, for what he said next.
“I pissed her off.”
She stopped, looking puzzled. “What did you say?”
Might as well be hung for a horse thief.
“I was mad all the time. Augusta got tired of it.”
“What were you mad about, Mr. Hollis?”
“Are you willing to call me Harper?”
“What were you angry about, Harper?”
She was curious. Had every right to be. His answer was going to disappoint her.
“I got no idea.”
She considered for a moment before telling him, “That can’t be true.”
Like a demonstration of what he meant, anger gusted in him. He did his best to hide it. The gust passed. He shrugged.
“Everything. I was mad about everything.”
“Why are you telling me?”
He had no reasonable explanation for that so changed the subject. “I trade horses.”
She nodded. “Lionel mentioned that once.”
“Went out to the pasture this morning, early. It’s a line of redbuds along the south fence. They’re in full bloom. The color don’t last, you have to look your fill now.”
“I know. They’re out everywhere. They’re stunning. Truly beautiful.”
“That’s it.”
“What’s it?”
She had a supple mind, he could see that about her. She was sophisticated. More than he was, anyway. Out of nowhere came a question he did not dare ask. Did she ever dream the same dream twice? All he cared about, just then, was keeping the conversation going.
“How can a person that stays mad all the time see what’s beautiful? Because they can, you know.”
“I’m a pediatrician.”
“A kid doctor.”
“Right.”
“Me and Augusta never had kids. That’s one thing to be mad about.”
“It is if you want children.”
“I always told her I didn’t want any, but we both knew that was bullshit.”
“At the hospital, sometimes, I’ll attend a very sick child, one I know is not going to make it.”
“Cancer.”
“Cancer, or some other wasting disease, or a heart that won’t do what hearts are meant to do. I put my hand on the child’s forehead, and it burns. I go home. Lionel and I like classical music. He puts on Beethoven. And there it is.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Are you sure?”
He wanted to spit. He didn’t. It seemed disrespectful.
“The kid dying makes you mad,” he said. “But the music is beautiful.”
She was ready to go. He would have tried to keep her talking, but it would be like begging. The thought of begging did not bother him as much as it should have, but he knew he would lose. She told him in formal words that she was sorry to have troubled him, and that was that. The greening trees in the woods on the west side of the drive performed a magic trick, making her red car disappear.
He called the guy from Roanoke, who did not pick up. Harper left him a blistering voicemail, which ended by telling the potential buyer of his handsome gelding to go fuck himself. Hanging up, he felt a moment’s satisfaction. It popped like a bubble.
Something was going on with the right foreleg of Annabelle’s foal. Some kind of growth, it looked like. He called the vet but got more voicemail. Didn’t anybody in the Commonwealth of Virginia answer the phone any more? He was about to launch his second attack of the morning but thought better of it. The vet had been known to cut him some slack when it came to paying his bill.
He wasted a couple of hours, poking around the house, trying to feel like the victim of some sort of crime, a survivor, but he had a hard time making the feeling last past thirty seconds.
On the coffee table in the living room he noticed an envelope addressed To Whom It May Concern. He opened it, having a fairly sick sense that it probably concerned him. When they were first married, Augusta had worked as a secretary at Newman Construction in downtown Briery. She was smarter than Harper – that never bothered him – and used to write a mean business letter.
He didn’t read much, any more. He worked his way through the short letter, glad nobody was there to see him laboring at it.
To Whom It May Concern:
This is why I left, and why I won’t come back. I want to say it all started with the accident, but that’s a lie. My ex-husband Harper Hollis always had a hard side to him. For the longest time I figured it was my job keeping him from getting any madder than he woke up being. I guess it wore me out, all that trying, and no success.
I don’t claim to be any saint. I gave as good as I got. All I intend to mention here is the conviction I have that I have run out of time. That’s what scares me. I would like to have that feeling, one more time, that you get when you are touched. It’s kind of a surprise to me, but I’m still alive.
Sincerely,
Augusta Snooks
Snooks was her maiden name. Hadn’t taken her long to reclaim it.
Harper tore up the letter and the envelope. Made confetti and scattered it around the room. With one pointless thing and another, his first day back home disappeared, swallowed up in nothing, nothing again, and then more nothing. He toyed with the idea of calling the hospital, seeing if they would give him the phone number of Dr. Asya Mills. It was not the prospect of more voicemail that held him back, it was the risk of having to answer the question she would surely ask if he did reach her. What is it you want from me?
His decision, that evening, was one more mystery in a day of them. As the sun was going down over the west woods, flaunting soft colors that had a sexy look to them, he went back to the camper. It had been a long time since he drank too much.
Somebody had left a bottle of Old Granddad in a cupboard. Might have been Harper himself, for all he knew. Reaching for it, he felt a prickle on his arm where the Rebel flag wasn’t. He would like to tell somebody how it had gone down in Jacksonville, some twenty five years back. Too much something in his body, that night of endless stupidity, and not enough sense in his brain. But the details had faded. Too bad the abortion of a tattoo hadn’t faded with his memory. What if he called up Dr. Mills and asked her if she knew how to go about having ink removed from human skin? No way.
He envied her, that was obvious to him. Not her money, or her success, or even her easy way of being. What he wished he had was her coolness of mind. She was a logical person.
He drank the whiskey over ice, stopping long enough to fry a couple of eggs and eat them with toast. Maturity. Experience. But there was no way to stop the alcohol onslaught, and he got drunk on the stoop with a Winchester 30.30 on his knees just in case. When the time came, he staggered to bed, remembering as he sank onto the mattress to swallow the last pain pill of the day.
Sleep was a sea. The sea was choppy. In his befuddlement, Harper lacked a boat. Waking up after midnight was like being dumped on shore by an unfriendly wave.
He went outside. The bottle of Old Granddad was still on the stoop. He sat down and poured a shot but did not drink it. Charlottesville. That was where Augusta had gone. Her brother Ben’s oldest son was away at college. Ben was willing to let her have the boy’s room while she sorted through her options.
She picked up on the third ring. Harper mumbled something that led her to accuse him of being drunk.
“I was drunk before,” he told her, aiming to be precise, “but I’m not anymore.”
“What do you want?”
“That table in the kitchen. The bad leg.”
“What about it?”
“I fixed it.”
That was not yet true but would be.
“You wake me up out of a sound sleep to tell me something I could give a shit about?”
“You’re thinking I put a matchbox under the leg, or a piece of cardboard, but I didn’t. I took the legs off and planed ‘em even.”
“And I’m supposed to care?”
The best way to answer that question was by ignoring it.
“I figured something out,” he told her. “Today.”
“I’m hanging up, Harper.”
“Hold your horses. Just listen for once, will you?”
“Be fast. I’m tired.”
His mind was racing, trying to find words that did justice to what he had figured out, with Asya Mills’ help.
“It’s two things,” he told his absent wife, but even whiskey-addled he knew that was not enough to make clear to her something he himself was struggling to understand.
“Jesus,” she said, “just let me go back to sleep.”
“Two things at once. Real different from each other, like night and day only not that obvious.”
“Don’t tell me you’re not still drunk.”
“Here’s what I mean. I’m out on the stoop, at the camper. I can see the moon through the trees. It’s a beautiful sight.”
“What are you doing in the camper?”
“Same exact moment, my back starts hurting me like a mother. See what I’m driving at?”
“No.”
“It’s two things, Augusta, that’s all I’m saying.”
“You’re not making a bit of sense.”
Normally that would be enough to make him go off on her. In his fierce desire to explain himself he let it pass.
“It was a mistake,” he told her, “not getting at that table a long time ago.”
“You’re not trying to coax me back, are you? Don’t waste your breath.”
Maybe he was trying to, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe she was coaxable, maybe she wasn’t. Right now it didn’t matter. What did matter was getting his point across in such a way that both of them understood. He dug deep.
“It’s who we are. People, I mean. We can hold two things in our head at the same time even if they fight each other.”
And two things in our heart, he thought but did not add.
“Two things,” she said. “You mean, like a man and a woman.”
“That’s part of it,” he said.
“Call me back when it’s all of it.”
She hung up. At that moment, a mostly full moon the color of clover honey lifted clear of the trees. And the coyotes in Abernathy’s woods started howling, which brought on more of the same from every dog in earshot. Two things. Harper felt his fingers curling to grasp them. Give her another five minutes to sleep, and he would call Augusta back.
