CHAPTER FIVE
Strenuous
Activity
Chase had been dating
Iris for a little less than a month when he told me that he was
going to be “renewing her contract.” We were sitting on the grass
on the banks of the Pine River drinking beers and wasting as much
time as possible before we got back to town. We’d actually done
surprisingly little of this that summer. Chase had Iris and a new
group of friends from this year’s lacrosse team. I had made a
couple of trips back to Boston to visit my friends there and to try
to work a spark into something warmer with a woman from the CD shop
near the school. I also got the impression that the novelty of
doing this with me had lessened from the previous summer now that
Chase looked old enough to buy his own beer.
“Should I alert the
media?” I said in response to his news.
Chase laughed and
pulled on his beer and then smiled at me in a uniquely goofy
way.
“She’s getting to you
a little, huh?” I said.
I was surprised at
the way Chase spoke about Iris. At first, I had misinterpreted the
sober tone he used as suggesting that he wasn’t that excited about
being with her. But then I realized that it was something else
entirely. That sound in his voice was respect. Chase didn’t talk
about Iris with the wildly colorful language he had used for some
of his other girlfriends because to do so would have been
disrespectful of her. When the message finally got through to me, I
felt a little taken aback by it. If Chase was going to take this
woman this seriously – so seriously that he would circumvent
certain hardwired attitudes about dating – then this had to have an
impact on other parts of his life. I wasn’t sure I was prepared for
that and I wasn’t sure I wanted it.
But by this day, as
we sat by the banks of the Pine, I had spent some more time with
Iris myself and I saw that she wasn’t bending Chase or forcing him
into a different mold. She was like the proper seasoning on a
well-prepared meal – she was bringing out his optimum flavor. And
so I approved of the news that he was planning to continue seeing
her. Chase, of course, first needed to use a string of profanity to
explain how he felt about my “approval” before clapping me on the
shoulder and telling me he was glad that I liked her. I responded
by pushing his hand off my shoulder in playful defiance, to which
he responded by knocking me over. Before long, we were rolling down
toward the river, laughing and cursing at each other the entire
time. I managed to stand up and, when Chase lunged for me, I
actually moved deftly enough to parry his approach and land on top
of him, a technique I’d learned during an intramural wrestling
program I had been in the fall before. I pinned Chase down and, for
a moment, he couldn’t pull himself free. It had probably been ten
years since I’d been able to exert that much control over
him.
“Shit, man, you
are getting soft,” I said.
And then I was
temporarily airborne before plunging into the river. The water
wasn’t particularly deep, no more than four or five feet at the
banks, but I was so disoriented that I couldn’t immediately get
myself out of it. I flailed a bit and then finally found my
footing. When my vision cleared, I saw Chase laughing and then
suddenly pulling himself up short. My instinct was to charge him,
assuming if nothing else that I could get him wet, but I wasn’t
feeling particularly steady on my feet. When I saw Chase put his
hand up to his right temple, I did the same, and that’s when I
discovered that I was bleeding. I must have hit a rock when I fell
into the water.
I’m not sure what my
expression said to him, but Chase moved very quickly to action. He
lifted me out of the water and laid me down on the shore. I knew
enough about these kinds of wounds to know that if I was conscious,
I was probably okay, but I still found the amount of blood that I
could see very upsetting. Chase pulled off his shirt and tore it
into strips to wrap my head, telling me the entire time that I was
going to be okay and that he would take care of things. It was the
second time that afternoon that his voice seemed out of character,
though, since I was shaken up myself, I might not be remembering it
accurately.
An hour later, a
doctor at the emergency room had stitched and properly bandaged me.
A stillshirtless Chase was pretending not to preen for the
nurses.
“This is great,” I
said to him when they released me. “I look like one of those
Revolutionary War musicians and you’re taking phone
numbers.”
Chase pretended not
to know what I was talking about and reminded me that he wasn’t in
the market for phone numbers any longer. I insisted on buying him a
T-shirt from the hospital gift shop before we left anyway. While we
were there, he picked up a silk rose for Iris, telling me,
laughing, that I had screwed up and made him late for his date with
her.
The night after Iris
left, I stayed with my parents until the end of visiting hours. My
father looked tired, but I was guessing that it was largely from
being immobile for so long. When my mother and I got back to the
house, she made us tea and we sat in the sunroom.
“We really appreciate
you looking after the store the last few days,” she said as she
opened a package of Oreos. “I guess you have to get back home soon,
don’t you?”
“In a couple of days,
yeah.”
“This was a lot of
time for you to be taking off from work. Will that be
okay?”
“I don’t really have
to worry about work right now, Mom. I quit a couple of weeks
ago.”
My mother looked down
at her mug and then took a slow sip. “What was wrong with this
one?”
I shrugged. “They
just wanted more from me than it made sense for me to give. This
place wasn’t meant to be a career.”
“Any
prospects?”
“Not really. I
haven’t actually been looking. I’m not sure I want to stay in
Springfield. There isn’t a lot going on there.”
She studied her tea
for several seconds. I wondered if she was looking for a message.
Something that would tell Anna Penders how to deal with her
perpetually wayward son.
“This isn’t a good
time for me to be worrying about you,” is what she
said.
“You don’t need to
worry about me. When have you ever needed to worry about me? I’ve
never once been concerned about finding a way to make money or a
place to live. You shouldn’t, either.”
“Of course you
haven’t. You’re smart, you’re talented, and you know how to talk to
people. Someone like you can always get by.” She sipped again.
“Don’t you think you might be underachieving a little,
though?”
“Mom, I’m fine. Don’t
waste any energy wondering about whether I’m
underachieving.”
We’d had this
conversation before. It was always an easy one to brush aside. This
time was no different.
“Ben Rice from the
Chamber of Commerce came to visit your father today.”
I nodded. I had never
heard Ben Rice’s name before.
“He said that a
Banana Republic was trying to lease the space that Miriam Wallace’s
boutique used to be in.”
“Did the Chamber of
Commerce call out the militia?” This had been an ongoing tug-of-war
since Amber had grown to its current size. National chains would
occasionally try to take space on Russet Avenue and the town would
vehemently oppose it, believing that one of the primary reasons why
tourists came to Amber was because of shops you couldn’t find on
any Main Street in America. In fact, only one store in the entire
downtown area had an additional location elsewhere.
“I guess they had
more trouble this time than usual. Ben said it was touch and go for
a while. Your father was getting more riled up than he should until
Ben told him that the landlord was nearly certain he was going to
lease the space to a pottery gallery instead.”
“Better that they
bring in another craft store than another stationery store,
huh?”
“Don’t even joke
about that.”
I took another Oreo
from the package and stood to go to bed.
“You’re okay for
money, right?” my mother said.
“I’m fine,
Mom.”
She nodded and turned
back to her tea. I kissed her forehead and walked up the
stairs.
Somewhere around 5:00
that morning, the phone rang. I couldn’t hear what my mother was
saying, but after she hung up, she started to rustle around in her
room. I threw on a pair of jeans and went to see her.
“What’s going on?” I
said.
My mother was
dressing and pulled a sweater up in front of her to cover her bra.
“He’s had another heart attack.”
“Is he
okay?”
“They’ve brought him
to the ICU and are monitoring him.”
I turned to head back
to my room. “Let me get dressed and I’ll drive you.”
“You don’t need to
come. He’s going to be fine.”
“I’ll drive you. Then
we’ll see that he’s fine together.”
By the time we got to
the hospital, the doctors had stabilized my father and he was
sleeping in Intensive Care. They weren’t sure yet what had caused
the second heart attack and they were going to watch him closely
over the next few hours. One doctor told my mother that my father
was out of immediate danger and suggested that we go home to get
some more sleep. This wasn’t a realistic option for my mother and
she wouldn’t even go down to the cafeteria until she was certain
that the ICU staff had her cell phone number.
“If they don’t know
what caused it, it can happen again,” she said as she picked at a
bran muffin, pulling it to little pieces.
For whatever reason,
I was very hungry, although I wouldn’t normally have had breakfast
for several hours. I took the muffin away from her and ate it. “If
you’re going to have a heart attack, this is probably the best
place to have one.”
“Yes, but no place is
the best place to have two.”
“We’ll have to wait
to see what the doctor says. You like these guys,
right?”
“I like his other
doctor. I don’t know the one we just talked to.”
“He seemed to know
what he was doing. I’m sure he’ll be very careful with
Dad.”
This didn’t reassure
her in any way. She seemed much more rattled than I had seen her at
any time since I’d been back. For a moment, her eyes seemed to mist
over and then she blinked the tears back.
“I have nothing if I
don’t have your father,” she said. I reached out and squeezed her
hand, but she didn’t seem to notice.
We went back up to
the ICU waiting room and didn’t talk much over the next few hours.
I tried a few conversation starters just to get her mind on
something else, but I was useless.
We checked in on my
father occasionally and she must have felt some sense of relief
that he was resting comfortably. She relaxed enough to ask me about
the time I spent with Iris and then she inexplicably asked if I had
retained contact with someone I dated in my senior year in high
school. She had never met any of the women I saw in college and the
one time I brought Gillian home, my mother was in bed with the flu
for most of the weekend. Therefore, this high school girl was as
real to her as anyone I’d ever spent time with.
By 10:30, my father
was awake and there had been no further incidents. At my mother’s
suggestion – “he doesn’t need both of us standing over him like
this” – I headed off to the store. Tyler was working the counter
and Tab was busying herself around the wrapping paper.
“Hey, what’s
happening?” Tyler asked when he saw me.
“My dad had another
heart attack this morning.”
Tyler’s eyes opened
wide and he was temporarily speechless. “Is he okay?”
“I think so. The
doctor seemed pretty even tempered about it, though he doesn’t know
how it happened.”
Tyler shook his head
and he had a dazed expression. I began to wonder if I should have
delivered the news to him more carefully.
“I don’t know what I
would do if I were in your shoes,” he said.
Until that moment, I
hadn’t particularly considered how this was affecting me. I was
concerned for my father and worried that my mother was borderline
unstable, but I didn’t think of myself as part of the
dilemma.
“You just go through
it and hope for the best,” I said.
“Man, if my father
was having multiple heart attacks, you’d have to peel me off the
walls.”
I shrugged. “I think
it’s different when you’re actually in the middle of
it.”
The store was
especially quiet on this morning, as though people had heard that
Richard Penders had had another heart attack and just assumed that
his stationery store wouldn’t be open for business. A Muzak version
of a song I ultimately recognized as Led Zeppelin’s “Communication
Breakdown” played ever so softly on the radio. In the first hour I
was there, we couldn’t have had more than half a dozen customers. I
gave some thought to leaving, but I really didn’t have anywhere to
go. Things picked up around lunchtime and actually got busy for a
while. When a new shipment of cards arrived, Tyler and I reassigned
Tab to the cash register so we could restock the
displays.
We had been at it for
a couple of minutes when Tyler laughed and handed me a card that
showed a couple caressing while a huge gorilla loomed behind them.
The inside of the card read, “It’s never as easy as you think.” I
chuckled and handed it back to him.
“There are a bunch in
this line that are pretty clever,” he said.
“That’s an
improvement. For years, the only humorous – and I use the term
loosely – cards my father stocked either had pictures of wrinkled
fat men or fart jokes.”
“Wow, sorry I missed
that era.”
Until that point, I
hadn’t been bothering to read the insides of the cards while I put
them up. Now I opened another that showed a post-apocalyptic
landscape and read, “Sorry about last night.” I laughed, shared it
with Tyler, and then checked the back of the card for the name of
the line.
“What kinds of cards
do you like to buy?” Tyler asked me.
“I don’t really buy a
lot of cards.”
“Really? You mean
it’s not in your blood?”
“Must skip a
generation. If I ever need a card, I tend to go with blank ones on
nice paper. Sometimes I leave them blank.”
“Yeah, well if
there’s a picture on it, you’ve got a thousand words right there
anyway, right?” He pulled the plastic wrap off another package,
glanced at the sentiment, and then put them up on the rack. “I used
to buy cards all the time when Elizabeth and I were together.
Hopefully she didn’t keep them. Some of the stuff I wrote to her
was pretty embarrassing.”
“Yeah, you only make
that mistake once, I would imagine.”
“That one anyway. I
can’t believe how convinced I was. I guess it happens to
everybody.”
“Just about
everybody, anyway.”
Tyler nodded. “I
think my parents kind of spoiled me. They started dating when they
were high school seniors and they’re still kinda sickeningly
affectionate with each other thirty-something years later. As much
as it made me feel weird sometimes to have my parents nuzzling in
front of my friends, I sorta just assumed that that was the way
things would go for me.”
“Until Elizabeth tore
your heart out.”
He snickered and
pulled the wrappers off several packages at the same
time.
“Actually, I tore her
heart out. I went on this trip during spring break and wound up
sleeping with some girl from Duke. I figured it meant that I wasn’t
as totally in love with Elizabeth as I thought I was. I couldn’t
even tell her why I was doing it, but I just started backing away
from her. It took me something like a month to break up with her.
Now that I think about it, I can be pretty sure that she didn’t
keep my cards after that.”
“Well at least
something good came out of it.” He smiled at me and we focused on
the card display. A few minutes later, I looked up to see that a
line had formed at the cash register.
“I better go help Tab
before she sprains something,” I said to him.
He gave me a little
salute and went back to work.
When I got to the
hospital that night, they’d moved my father back to a semiprivate
room. He was awake and had a bit of color in his face. He even
seemed somewhat relaxed, though my mother didn’t appear any less
uneasy than she had looked when I left her that
morning.
I leaned over to kiss
him on the forehead. This was something I had never done before
this trip. When we lived under the same roof, we rarely touched at
all, and after I moved out, I would shake his hand in greeting.
When I’d seen him lying in bed in the hospital that first day, it
hadn’t seemed right to reach out for his hand and so I simply
leaned over and kissed him. I assumed I would stop doing this when
he returned home.
“This room looks
better on you, Dad,” I said.
“Fluorescent lighting
flatters me.”
“I guess you must be
doing all right if they moved you back in here.”
My father shrugged. I
looked over at my mother, who was in the process of squeezing my
father’s hand tighter.
“I have okay news and
lousy news,” my father said. I didn’t respond in any way other than
moving to sit down next to my mother. She looked at me briefly with
a thin-lipped smile.
“The doctors say the
second heart attack came from a blockage that they’ll be able to
clear up with a procedure tomorrow morning. After that, they think
I’ll be in decent shape for a while. That’s the okay news. The
lousy news is that once I get out of the hospital, I’m going to
have to curtail strenuous activity. The bottom line is that I’m not
going to be able to work in the store any longer.”
For some reason I
took this harder than I might have taken more dire news about his
condition. If he had said, “the doctors tell me I have six months
to live,” I wouldn’t have been easily able to fix that prognosis in
my mind with the ultimate outcome. But I had literally associated
my father with the store for as long as I had known him. And as
stultifying as I found the place to be personally, I knew that he
thrived there, that in many ways he identified himself through
it.
“Wow.”
“I’m having some
trouble believing it myself.”
My mother rubbed my
father’s hand. Her expression was grim. If she had at any point
during the day tried to keep his spirits up, perhaps suggesting the
things they would be able to do together in their retirement, that
time had passed.
“What are you going
to do?” I said.
My father tried to
sit up a bit more in his bed, but even that seemed to take a lot
out of him. I stood up to help him rearrange his pillows, but he
waved me off.
“Your mother tells me
that you’re between jobs.”
“We can talk about
that some other time, Dad.”
“She also said that
you were thinking about leaving Springfield.”
“Yeah, I
am.”
Still holding my
father’s hand, my mother turned to face me. Her expression was less
grim, but not less serious.
My father continued.
“The two of us were talking and we wanted to know if you would be
interested in taking over the store for me.”
I couldn’t have been
more surprised if he’d asked me to play a round of tennis with him.
I couldn’t possibly have been equivocal in any way about my
feelings for that kind of employment and surely both of them had to
know that what I’d been doing for them in the store over the past
few days was out of a sense of responsibility and not out of any
level of interest.
“You want me to take
over the store?”
“You know your way
around; you know the way I like to do things.”
“That’s true,
Dad.”
“And coming home to
Amber would be good for you. Give you some roots.”
It didn’t seem
appropriate to tell him that I wasn’t particularly concerned with
roots and that even if I had been, the last place I would want to
be rooted was Amber. For the first time, it occurred to me that
they might have absolutely no idea what had been running through my
head for the past ten years.
But beyond that, I
couldn’t possibly imagine spending any length of time at the helm
of Amber Cards, Gifts, and Stationery. I tried to envision myself
after twenty years of such unrelenting tedium. It wasn’t difficult
with my father sitting in a hospital bed.
“I’m not sure that
would be a good idea, Dad.”
His expression
tightened. “I would be a silent partner. Give it a little
thought.”
“I really don’t need
to. I know how much the store means to you, but I don’t have the
same feelings about the place and I can’t imagine that I ever
would. I’m not cut out for that kind of work.”
He stiffened. “What
kind of work are you cut out for?”
I put my head down
and laughed humorlessly. “That’s a good question. I don’t have a
good answer for you on that. But I know what I’m not cut out for
and, if anything, the last few days in the store have proven it to
me. I’d go postal there.”
My father leaned his
head back in his pillow. For a few minutes, none of us spoke. Then
my father turned to my mother.
“You have to call
Howard Crest tomorrow. We’ve got to get the store on the
market.”
“Not tomorrow,
Richard. Your operation.”
“The next day,
then.”
“Don’t rush
anything,” I said. “I can’t do this for the long run, but I’ll take
care of the store while you sell it. I don’t want you just taking
the first offer that comes in. This is your nest egg.”
“You won’t go
postal?” my father asked. I wondered if
sarcasm qualified as strenuous activity.
“I’ll be all right
for a while,” I said, forcing myself not to react to his
disapproval. “It’s not like this is going to take six months to do,
right?”
“It could take a
couple of months.”
“I’ll be all right
for a while.” I stood up and looked at my mother. “Shouldn’t we be
letting Dad rest up for tomorrow’s procedure?”
She looked in my
direction only for a second before turning back to my
father.
“You go ahead if you
want. I’m going to stay here until visiting hours are
over.”