Chapter SIX
He scanned the clues. Eighty-seven across: Rings of plumerias, e.g. One hundred twenty-three across: What barotrauma affects. Fifty-nine down: First name in comedy.
Who knew these ridiculous things?
He focused. It can be done. Just break it down. Get all the ones you know and build from there. He revisited one across: Treat for a dog, five letters. Bones? No, the clue was Treat. Singular. Bill jotted in “bones” anyway, lightly, to check it against the words going down. One down: Modern workout system. If the word started with a “B,” it would be . . . He moved to two down: Bring home? Three down: Make a delivery.
Damn! “Bones” was wrong. Bill stared at it. Five-letter word. Treat for a dog.
The squares danced before him. They called out to him, a playground taunt: Na na na na na. Can’t get even the first clue.
He threw his pen across the room and then tossed the newspaper after it. It jerked up as if pulled by a string, pages crackling, and fluttered to the floor. Next he grabbed the pipe from the ashtray on the table next to him and tamped tobacco into the bowl. “Do crossword puzzles,” Bill said aloud, mimicking his doctor. “Learn a new language. Play a musical instrument.” Mind exercises! Quack quack quack.
But after he’d lit his pipe and took a few puffs, the smoke calmed him as it rose, thinned, and disappeared. He saw the outline of a stick figure, strands of hair, and, after a while, outstretched hands with long, skinny fingers. So crosswords weren’t his thing. Big deal. Maybe he’d try a foreign language. Get some of those repeat- after-me tapes from the library. Visit Paris. Sit in one of those smoky cafes. He’d never been to Paris. He’d heard the women there were good-looking. Pretty liberal over there, too. Women didn’t care if their husbands took mistresses. In that regard, Clare was definitely not French.
“Right, Clare?” Bill called out, as if she were in the kitchen, the way he used to call out to her when he saw something funny or ridiculous on the tube. “You would have cared. Cared? Hell, you would have castrated me.”
He laughed. The newspaper he had thrown a few moments earlier made a soft rasp, still settling.
The mistress thing had never been Bill’s fantasy. Even before they were married, right before he shipped out, he promised Clare he wouldn’t do anything over there that he’d have to apologize for. They both knew what he was talking about. So while his buddies were obsessed with chasing poontang whenever they were on R&R, Bill occupied himself with the GI’s second-favorite pastime: boozing. This led to a surprising discovery one night when Sammy Lefkowitz put his hand on a local fanny and one of the local men felt bound to defend her honor. Bill had just downed his third shot of bad Korean whiskey when he saw a screaming slope charging him, waving an empty bottle over his head. That’s when Bill experienced the unique pleasure of simplicity: in this case, a simple punch in the nose. Most underrated punch of all. Hit the right spot and eyes watered, the face swelled up, and reaction time slowed enough for a knockout punch. From then on, he joined Sammy Lefkowitz on R&R whenever he could. Bill didn’t know why he liked simplicity. He didn’t know why he had so enjoyed getting in fights. But he was glad he did. Gave him something to think about as he sat in his chair staring at smoke from his pipe.
“Never touched the women, though, Clare.”
One of the few promises you kept, William Warrington.
Bill heard the words as if Clare were sitting in the room with him—or, more likely, bending over to pick up something that one of the kids had left on the floor. She had always been in motion, carrying laundry baskets, folding clothes, emptying, refilling, wiping something down, mopping up. Bill felt the heat from the bowl of his pipe.
He’d kept plenty of promises. It was just easier to bring to mind the ones he hadn’t. Like some of the jobs that didn’t pan out because he refused to kiss up to his bosses the way she wanted him to. Being civil, she’d called it. Or his assurances that he wouldn’t have one drink too many when they went out to dinner with friends, although it wasn’t his drinking that often led to a loud argument with whoever was stupid enough to bring up politics or religion. And he supposed he could have been around a little more often when the kids were small, but he usually had some sale cooking and needed to seal the deal whenever a customer was ready to move forward. Sometimes the commission checks were huge; other times he wasn’t sure how he would feed the family. Hang on, he’d tell Clare when she started worrying about the bank balances. The next check’s going to be huge. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t, but over the long run things worked out just fine. Nice home. Good schools. Family vacations.
“Made things interesting, didn’t I?” Bill said, calling out again. “Never bored you, did I?”
He’d started talking aloud to Clare about six months ago. He liked it. He figured it might be good for him, too. Exercise the vocal cords. He could go for days without saying a word to anyone—except maybe when he hurled a curse word at Dr. Phil or offered a compliment to that queen of ballbusters, Judge Judy.
He laughed as a ring of smoke encircled his head.
He saw something move on his left.
“Jesus Marie!” he yelled at the figure standing outside his window. It took a second to see it was a kid. She had a small backpack slung over one shoulder, probably filled with Girl Scout cookies or magazines to sell or some such baloney. He stood to get a better look—and glare, maybe scare the kid away.
But he saw that, no, it was not a kid, or just any kid. It was his kid’s kid. Marcy’s. Here just a few days ago.
“You always sneak up on people?” he asked when he opened the door.
“I wasn’t sneaking,” April said, taking a step back. “I was gonna knock.”
“Well, if you’re gonna to do something, do it. Worse thing in life is talking about things you were gonna do.”
Bill watched for his granddaughter’s reaction. She was holding her backpack with both hands, her right arm across her chest to keep the pack from slipping off her shoulder. Why didn’t she wear the thing the way it was supposed to be worn? For that very reason, he supposed. She was squinting up at him, and Bill was reminded of Marcy—not so much by the physical resemblance, which unfortunately the poor thing shared with her good-for-nothing father, but by the way she stood her ground, not stepping back, not breaking eye contact.
“Fine,” she said. “Life lesson number one. Do you want to close the door so I can knock, or can I just come in?”
Bill snorted and stepped aside, holding the door open for her. “Just like your mother,” he growled as she walked past him. He caught a whiff of some sickly sweet gum. Or was it a perfume? Whatever it was, it made his teeth hurt.
April sat on the couch and took a spiral notebook from her backpack. “This place is already a mess again, Grandpa. How many newspapers can you read?”
“It’s important to keep up with what’s going on in the world,” Bill said as he sat in his chair. “And I’m not talking about these knucklehead celebrities the media is obsessed with.”
“The media wouldn’t be obsessed with knucklehead celebrities if people didn’t want news about knucklehead celebrities,” April said.
Bill fiddled with his pipe, noting the tone of youthful conviction . . . and scorn.
“You in the debating club?” he asked.
“Those nerds? No way.”
“So you’re just naturally argumentative.” He looked around for matches, checking his pockets and between the cushions of his chair before finding them where he’d left them: next to the ashtray, in plain sight. What had he done with them?
April shrugged. “Least I don’t talk to myself,” she mumbled.
Bill paused just before relighting. He took a few puffs, watching April carefully. She avoided his gaze, writing something in the notebook she had just removed from her backpack.
“So that’s how it’s going to be, eh?” he said. “Okay. It’s a deal.”
April looked up at him. “What’s a deal?” she asked.
“Complete honesty. Straight from the shoulder. No baloney. You and me. That’s our deal.”
April shrugged. “Whatever.”
“So I’ll start. What’s your name?”
April looked up again. “Huh?”
“I know your mother named you after someone famous or a day of the week or some ice cream topping. I’m sorry, young lady, but I have a temporary mind freeze. I think that’s what some nitwit on TV called it. Brain freeze. So remind me.”
“April.”
“Ah, yes, April. I hated that name when your mom told me.”
April looked up, lip curled.
“Our deal, remember?” He checked to see if his pipe was still lit. “But it’s kind of grown on me, your name. I like it now.”
“I don’t,” April said. “Besides, you couldn’t even remember it. How could it have grown on you?”
“What name would you rather have?”
April shrugged.
“You shrug too much. Makes you look weak. Just speak your mind.”
“Life lesson number two,” April said, scribbling in her notebook. She finished and returned her gaze to him, meeting his eye. He knew in that moment that she wasn’t like other kids her age—not that he knew any. But he could tell she had a mind of her own. She didn’t wait for some idiotic TV talk show host to tell her how she felt. And, unlike her mother at that age, she wasn’t afraid of him. Bill shifted in his chair at the thought—there was no denying it now, no point at all in denying it—that his own daughter had once been afraid of him.
“What’s all this about life lessons?” he asked.
April rolled her eyes.
“The reason I’m here?” she said. “School paper? Life lessons from a mentor? Remember I called the other night and told you about this stupid assignment for school and then my mom talked to you and told you she’d drop me off for an hour or so while she showed a client a house and I could, you know, like, interview you?”
Sometimes, the memory of something half forgotten washed over Bill as quickly as April’s words were falling out of her mouth now. And as Bill remembered the conversation with April, the conversation with Marcy, he felt a warm wave pass from the top of his head to his stomach.
“So you consider me a mentor?”
April looked up at Bill. “No. But you’re the oldest person I know.”
Bill remained silent.
“Our deal,” April said.
Bill smiled. He couldn’t help it. “Sure. Sounds like a good assignment. Better than an essay on how to have safe sex or something, which I understand is what they’re teaching you kids these days.”
“Grandpa, please. Disgusting.”
“Sex is disgusting?”
“Old people talking about it is.”
“I see.”
Bill remembered the conversation with April on the phone. He remembered the last time she was here. He remembered the white earbuds and the way she complained and how she tied up the papers and her questions about his car and how excited she got at the thought of driving it up and down the driveway—until her mother threw a cold blanket on the idea. It was good to remember things—and not just the things from twenty or thirty years ago. Remembering these things made him want to dance.
“What class?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“What class is this life lessons essay for?”
“English, of course,” April answered, but Bill caught the hesitation.
He wanted to hug her. “Forgetting our deal already?” he asked.
April stared at him.
“You don’t really have an essay assignment, do you?”
Her face reddened.
Bill laughed. “Your mother was a lousy liar, too. But she wasn’t as creative. Not nearly.”
He dug into his pocket for his car keys and dangled them in front of him.
“Ready for life lesson number three?” he asked.
The sun streaming through the front window caught one of the keys, sending sparks to the walls, to the ceiling, to April’s widened hazel eyes.