“You took it!”
“I did not!”
“Yes, you did!”
“Mom!” Meg yells, and comes to the top of the stairs, where she sees me. Or maybe doesn’t. She needs to wear her glasses. She stares down to where I’m standing in the shadows and she shouts, “Mom! Tell Lucas to give me back my charger!”
I hear something, and turn. And there’s Johanna. When she sees me, she does a funny thing. She jumps back. Her face goes white and she says, “Guys! Stay upstairs!”
Hey, come on, I’m thinking. It’s just me.
Johanna presses the speed dial on her phone, still backing away.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say. “Come on now, Jo-Jo.”
She gets on with 911. I take a step toward her with my hand out. I’m not going to grab the phone. I just want her to hang up and I’ll leave. But suddenly I’m holding the phone, Johanna’s screaming, and, out of nowhere, something jumps me from behind, tackling me to the ground.
It’s Bryce. My son.
He isn’t at trumpet lessons. Maybe he quit. I’m always the last to know.
Bryce has got a rope in his hand, or an extension cord, and he’s strong as a bull. He always did take after Johanna’s side.
He’s pressing his knee hard into my back, trying to hog-tie me with the extension cord.
“Got him, Mom!” he shouts.
I’m trying to talk. But my son has my face smashed down into the rug. “Hey, Bryce, lemme go,” I say. “It’s Pa. It’s Pa down here. Bryce? I’m not kidding now.”
I try an old Michigan wrestling move, scissor kick. Works like a charm. I flip Bryce off me, onto his back. He tries to scramble away but I’m too fast for him.
“Hey, now,” I say. “Who’s your daddy now, Bryce? Huh? Who’s your daddy?”
That’s when I notice Meg, higher on the stairs. She’s been frozen there the whole time. But when I look at her now she hightails it. Scared of me.
Seeing that takes all the fight out of me. Meg? Sugar pie? Daddy won’t hurt you.
But she’s gone.
“OK,” I say. “Ah’mo leave now.”
I turn and go outside. Look up at the sky. No stars. I put my hands in the air and wait.
*
After bringing me to headquarters, the officer removed my handcuffs and turned me over to the sheriff, who made me empty my pockets: wallet, cell phone, loose change, 5-Hour Energy bottle, and an Ashley Madison ad torn from some magazine. He had me put all that stuff in a ziplock and sign a form vouching for the contents.
It was too late to call my lawyer’s office, so I called Peekskill’s cell and left a message on his voice mail. I asked if that counted as a call. It did.
They took me down the hall to an interrogation room. After about a half hour, a guy I haven’t seen before, detective, comes in and sits down.
“How much you had tonight?” he asks me.
“A few.”
“Bartender at Le Grange said you came in around noon and stayed through happy hour.”
“Yessir. Not gonna lie to you.”
The detective pushes himself back in his chair.
“We get guys like you in here all the time,” he says. “Hey, I know how you feel. I’m divorced, too. Twice. You think I don’t want to stick it to my old lady sometimes? But you know what? She’s the mother of my children. That sound corny to you? Not to me it doesn’t. You have to make sure she’s happy, whether you like it or not. Because your kids are going to be living with her and they’re the ones that’ll pay the price.”
“They’re my kids, too,” I say. My voice sounds funny.
“I hear you.”
With that, he goes out. I look around the room, making sure there isn’t a two-way mirror, like on Law & Order, and when I’m satisfied I just hang my head and cry. When I was a kid, I used to imagine getting arrested and how cool I’d act. They wouldn’t get nothing out of me. A real outlaw. Well, now I am arrested, and all I am is a guy with gray stubble on my cheeks, and my nose still bleeding a little from when Bryce mashed it against the rug.
There’s a thing they’ve figured out about love. Scientifically. They’ve done studies to find out what keeps couples together. Do you know what it is? It isn’t getting along. Isn’t having money, or children, or a similar outlook on life. It’s just checking in with each other. Doing little kindnesses for each other. At breakfast, you pass the jam. Or, on a trip to New York City, you hold hands for a second in a subway elevator. You ask “How was your day?” and pretend to care. Stuff like that really works.
Sounds pretty easy, right? Except most people can’t keep it up. In addition to finding the bad guy in every argument, couples do this thing called the Protest Polka. That’s a dance where one partner seeks reassurance about the relationship and approaches the other, but because that person usually does this by complaining or being angry, the other partner wants to get the hell away, and so retreats. For most people, this complicated maneuver is easier than asking, “How are your sinuses today, dear? Still stuffed? I’m sorry. Let me get you your saline.”
While I’m thinking all this, the detective comes in again and says, “OK. Vamoose.”
He means I’m getting out. No argument from me. I follow him down the hall to the front of headquarters. I expect to see Peekskill, which I do. He’s shooting the breeze with the desk sergeant, using cheerful profanities. No one can say “you motherfucker” with more joie de vivre than Counselor Peekskill. None of this surprises me at all. What surprises me is that standing a few feet behind Peekskill is my wife.
“Johanna’s declining to press charges,” Peekskill tells me, when he comes over. “Legally, that doesn’t mean shit because the restraining order’s enforced by the state. But the police don’t want to charge you with anything if the wife’s not going to be behind it. I gotta tell you, though, this isn’t going to help you before the judge. We may not be able to get this thing revoked.”
“Never?” I say. “I’m within fifty yards of her right now.”
“True, but you’re in a police station.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“You want to talk to her? I don’t advise that right now.”
But I’m already crossing the precinct lobby.
Johanna is standing by the door, her head down.
I’m not sure when I’m going to see her again, so I look at her real hard.
I look at her but feel nothing.
I can’t even tell if she’s pretty anymore.
Probably she is. At social functions, other people, men, anyway, are always saying, “You look familiar. You didn’t used to be a Dallas cheerleader, did you?”
I look. Keep looking. Finally, Johanna meets my eye.
“I want to be a family again,” I say.
Her expression is hard to read. But the feeling I get is that Johanna’s young face is lying under her new, older face, and that the older face is like a mask. I want her younger face to come out not only because it was the face I fell in love with but because it was the face that loved me back. I remember how it crinkled up whenever I came into a room.