The instant she was gone, that old house on Arnold Street became unbearably quiet once more, and the quiet brought back all the loneliness and remorse Charlie had been suffering from since leaving Florida. He carried The Pig to Joy’s art room and sat at her desk, gazing around and thinking of the life they lived as snowbirds, migrating south each year to avoid the unpleasant weather. In the beginning, that life had seemed the greatest of ideas—the ocean! the pool! the sunshine! the lack of responsibilities and fixed schedules!—but it was those last two that became something of a problem for Charlie. While Joy took to their new situation with unbridled enthusiasm, signing up for book clubs and foreign film nights and sculpture classes and lectures, Charlie didn’t do much more than walk along the nearby golf course every morning and afternoon, collecting stray golf balls and stopping on occasion to stare up at the vast blue sky, so different than the wintery gray ones that hung over Providence that time of year.
He had never been much of a joiner, but Joy nudged until at last he met up with a group of other retired men to actually play golf on the nearby course. Those old farts in their sherbet-colored shirts, plaid pants, and enormous sunglasses talked almost exclusively of their various ailments, their kids and grandkids, and the big jobs they used to have, all of which left Charlie out of the discussion. His body was in relatively good shape, thanks to a lifetime of regular push-ups and sit-ups, and Joy diligently keeping them on a healthy diet. As for children and grandchildren, back in the days before fertility was such an exact science, he and Joy had been unable to conceive, though for no clear reason as far as the specialists could tell. And when it came to career, working as a security guard was meant to be a temporary job on his way to learning some trade or perhaps going to the police academy and becoming a real officer. But then he met Joy one morning when she needed help carrying art supplies from the trunk of her car to that peaceful classroom of hers. Once they began dating, he liked the comfort of working in a place where the person he loved most in the world was right down the hall. And so, in this way, the years had passed giving him great success and comfort in his romantic relationship, though not much to speak of in the way of a family or career. Still, because he knew it made his wife happy to see him doing something, Charlie kept riding around that course on a golf cart with those men, swinging clubs and taking mulligans and sipping their bitter-tasting cocktails a few times a week. After all, wasn’t that the snowbird life they had planned and dreamed of for years, and wasn’t it better than his former one spent patrolling those insufferable derelicts at Central High?
But as soon as he’d gotten used to his new routine it changed again. One winter’s day, a few years before, Charlie and the other retirees had just finished eighteen holes and were returning to the clubhouse when he asked why they were calling it a day when they had yet to start playing. Those men in their clown clothes and wrinkled faces had stared at him with such an odd look of concern it sent a chill right through his body. And after a few more incidents like that, Joy took him to a doctor who gave the diagnosis they both feared. That’s when the ritual of the pill container began. And that’s when Charlie went back to just walking along the golf course at the start and end of each day, collecting stray balls in so many bright happy colors. There were orange ones. There were red ones. There were blue and green and yellow and even the standard, old-fashioned white golf balls too.
*
“What are you doing here in dark?”
Charlie looked up to see Tünde standing before him in her wool coat and scarf. She must have already deposited the groceries in the kitchen, because those big hands of hers were empty. Looking at those hands, he recalled the way she had so expertly used them to bat away that metal fork and shake that mop at those crummy kids. The memory led him to think of how often he used to long for genuine authority at that school, the sort he might have been granted if only he had gotten his act together and become a police officer back in those days. God only knew how many times he’d fantasized about whipping out a Taser or handcuffs or simply grabbing them by their concert Tshirts and shoving their pathetic faces against a locker to teach them a lesson once and for all. Instead, he was left to swallow the fury he felt watching their obnoxious behavior, since his only authorization was to escort any bad seeds to the principal’s office, which he did time after time, though no meaningful punishment was ever exacted there as far as he was concerned.
“I’m just sitting here thinking,” he told Tünde, looking away from her hands and up at her unusual face, where those deep inset eyes watched him with fresh curiosity.
“Maybe you don’t need light to do thinking. But you need light to do seeing when you are done and want to walk around. Otherwise, head gets bumped all over again.”
With that, Tünde moved to the curtains and pulled them open. She was about to tug the lip of the window shade and send it flying upward too, but Charlie stopped her. “Let’s just turn on a lamp, if you don’t mind.”
“But sun is shining outside.”