Men and Dogs (6 page)

“Jesus! Enough!” He inclined it one inch more and then dropped the controller.

“I’m calling the nurse,” she said, gasping. “You’re a sadist.”

“I’d like to know what the hell you were thinking.”

“I was coming to make you breakfast.”

“How nice. Well, I wasn’t there.”

“I know. You were out screwing Denise.”

Jon walked to the window, hands in his pockets. “Hell of a view you have here.”

“Or maybe you weren’t?”

“No, I was.”

“Oh.” Hannah was a bit crestfallen at this. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about her. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“The neighbors called my cell phone. They said you were breaking in, and that you were in their moop heap, whatever the hell that is. They asked if I wanted to have you arrested. These people are Ecstasy dealers, Hannah, and they thought you were out of control enough to be arrested.”

“Well, thanks for saying no. I guess.”

“I should have you arrested, you insane woman.” His voice cracked. He sat down on the vinyl visitor’s chair, running his hands through his hair. He didn’t look good. The scar on his cheek was particularly purple that day, something that happened when he wasn’t in the sun enough. His green custom-made shirt had egg on it, and he needed a haircut. “I don’t know what to do about you. You just . . .” He paused. “You are very, very bad for me. I cannot be around you anymore. But I’m so worried you’re going to drive yourself into the ground, sweetheart. Like, six feet under.”

“I won’t.”

He nodded and leaned back, crossing his legs.

“I called Daisy,” he said after a moment.

Hannah shook her head.

“I had to.”

“You didn’t have to do anything.”

“What do you—”

“You’re going home,” he said. “It’s either that or some kind of center. Daisy and I agreed.”

“Daisy,” Hannah repeated. “And you.”

Hannah pictured her mother on the porch of the DeWitt House, white wine in hand, writing the next day’s activity in her planner.
It would be a warm, soft night on the peninsula. DeWitt would be in the house somewhere, listening to pop country music. She could hear the phone ringing, the soft tones of a pleasant greeting. Jon, how are you, honey? So good to hear your—

Hannah balled the sheets up in her hands.

“One month.”

“Why did you call her?” she wailed. “Fuck you!”

“Yeah? Hell with you, too, for making me do it. You know I actually thought about having you committed?” Jon’s voice cracked again, and suddenly he was next to her, his arms draped over her legs, his head in her lap. She put her hands in his hair.
So soft, she thought. Such nice, soft hair.

“It’s OK to say ‘fuck,’ you know,” Hannah said. “It feels really good sometimes.”

He shook his head. “I love you, Han. But I can’t do this, you know? I married someone who’s not right. In the head, I mean.
You have any idea how much that sucks?”

So this was how Hannah’s husband got her to go home again. He broke down, cried, and begged. It didn’t take long for Hannah to relent. After all, she’d hit bottom. As she sat in the hospital, comforting her crying husband, this much was finally obvious. She’d fallen off her own balcony, and now no one was left to help her get back up.

Hannah gets up and dusts herself off. From far away, she can hear the door of the DeWitt House open and close.

“Hello?” someone shouts up.

She stands up, relieved. Mr. Mitchell, or Mitchell, as the DeWitt household and everyone else in town calls him, is actually one person in the DeWitt world Hannah sort of wants to see. She tightens her robe and ambles down the stairs.

“Hannah! I heard you were home.” She makes a move to hug him, but he steps back politely and puts out his hand. Hannah blushes at her misstep. A seventy-year-old black handyman hugging the thirtysomething stepdaughter of his rich white employer? Not going to happen.

He looks at her robe. “Just getting up?”

“Still on Pacific time.”

“Hmmm,” he says. Hannah smiles. Mitchell has always been an unabashedly judgmental gentleman. “I was about to eat my sandwich.
Why don’t you sit with me on the porch?”

She nods and follows him outside. The DeWitt House porch is not your average outdoor sitting area but more of a grand colonnade,
littered with black-cushioned wicker furniture and large, soft ferns. The sort of place suitable for sweeping hoopskirts.
She sits in an overstuffed chair and looks out at White Point Gardens. Passersby peer curiously up from the street.

“So you back for a while?” Mitchell asks.

“No.”

“Just a visit?”

She nods.

“Long time since you visited,” Mitchell says.

“I haven’t had a reason to come back.”

“How’s your husband? Mrs. DeWitt says you’re married.”

“He’s fine.”

“How come he’s not with you?”

Hannah pauses, considering. Would Mitchell accept the truth? Well, sir, because I screwed around on him so much that he finally wised up and began screwing someone else, too!

“He’s working.” She gets up. “Listen, I’m making coffee. You want any?”

“Sure.”

Hannah goes into the kitchen and plunges the grounds to the bottom of the press. Forty hours down, hundreds (how many hours are in a month?) to go. She hears the front door open.

“Hello?”

Her mother’s heels click on the marble. Hannah rises on her tiptoes and makes her way toward the back stairs off the kitchen.

“Hannah,” her mother calls. “Stop. I can hear you.”

Daisy appears, carrying a Goodwill shopping bag. While she now has more money than she ever dreamed of or currently acknowledges as possible, Hannah’s mother grew up poor. Her father was from a respected family, but when she was a baby, he was discovered to have gambling debts. (“Respectable” doesn’t always mean “smart,” Daisy is wont to observe.) Consequently, she suffered through the experience of being from a “good” family in an unfortunate financial situation—a story that has graced many a Hallmark movie: the home-sewn clothes, the job in a dress shop after school while her friends hung out at the soda fountain,
the soup flavored with tripe.

Happily, Daisy was—as she still is—indisputably beautiful. During her second year of college (on scholarship), Hannah’s father met her on a porch, spilled a drink on her more or less on purpose, and promptly whisked her away to the solidly middle-class life of a doctor’s wife. Still, Daisy was terrified of spending money. When Palmer and Hannah were children, she shopped for them at Sears and Kmart. They never went out to dinner. Birthday parties were homespun affairs of limp balloons and, once,
a Banana Slide purchased on sale and stretched out on the grass with a hose. Groceries were bought in bulk, sandwiches packed on road trips so the family never had to stop at a restaurant.

Hannah had no complaints about her childhood. And thrift, she will tell anyone, is an increasingly precious virtue. Anyway,
it was fun, aside from the occasional rock in the ass. Palmer and Hannah liked the Banana Slide. Esprit pants and Benetton sweaters were somehow more triumphant to wear when purchased at 70 percent off, even in sixth grade, when label-whoring was perhaps at its most rampant.

However, Daisy has been married to one of the richest people in the city for more than two decades now. In high school, alarmed by her mother’s behavior (she was borrowing the housekeeper’s S&H Green Stamps), Hannah once took Will aside and asked if he was having money troubles. Perhaps he was only land rich, she suggested, upon which his flushed face grew a frightening shade of purple and he started to laugh.

“Land rich? Sure, we’re just land rich, other than the thirty million in the bank. Why, Check-o-slavana? You in trouble?”

“Sure. I’ll buy it for you. The whole place. Now scoot.”

It seems, Hannah thinks as she appraises her mother’s out-fit, that Daisy still doesn’t have a handle on her situation. She’s always been a bargain hunter, spending weekend afternoons stalking sales like some famished lioness. But now it appears she’s graduated down to the land of secondhand. This is a bold move in Hannah’s eyes; it is her personal opinion that it’s best to wear vintage when you yourself are not. But she has to hand it to her still-gorgeous mother: Daisy pulls off the looks of yesteryear with aplomb. Today she’s fully committed to the seventies: fitted plaid polyester pants that come up high on her waist and a silky blouse with a large bow tied at the neck. She looks like a well-preserved Charlie’s Angel.

“Some good finds?” Hannah says, nodding at her bag.

“Oh. Yes. Goodwill has such wonderful surprises. I got three shirts, a dress, and a slip for four dollars. And look what I
found for you.”

“What?”

“Trousers!” her mother says triumphantly, handing her a bag. “What?”

“But—”

“That’s what I realized you needed. I got you some nice slightly used linen things. You’re still in your bathrobe?”

“I’m injured.”

“It’s been days, Hannah. Anyway, you’ve got to put some clothes on. Mitchell is here to see about the rotten sections of the roof.”

“I know. We had lunch together on the porch.”

“In your robe? Did anyone see you?”

“Yes, I flashed some boob and made out with him to give the neighbors something to gossip about.”

“Lord, Hannah,” her mother says. “When did you become so . . .”

“Troublesome?”

“‘Stunted’ was the word I was going to use.”

“Ha.”

“What are you doing today?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Well, why don’t you play tennis with me?”

“Bad at tennis.”

“Or get a massage.”

“Too sore.”

“Or walk.”

“Nah.”

“Well, Will needs some help with—”

“OK, I’ll walk.”

“And tonight?”

“Palmer asked me to dinner. Tom’s cooking.”

“Excellent.” Her mother drums her fingers together in a manner that Hannah can only call Machiavellian.

“OK, then,” Hannah says, abandoning Mitchell’s promised coffee. “I’m going out.”

“All right,” Daisy says. “I’ll be at tennis. Are you certain you don’t want to come? We have a very nice beginner’s ladder.
You probably wouldn’t lose too badly. It’s mostly the heavier people. Oh, and poor Monica, with her missing toe.”

“I’ll think about it,” Hannah says.

Nice, she thinks as she leaves the kitchen. It’s only a month. I. Can. Be. Nice.

She jogs up the stairs, cringing at the pain in her side, then strips off her robe and pulls on jeans and a frayed old shirt.
She pauses in front of the mirror. How could she have believed that she looked good just a week ago? Her eyes are bloodshot from the painkillers and lack of sleep; her forehead is marked with a slightly graying butterfly Band-Aid. She peels it off hopefully, but the puncture wound is too wince-worthy for public display, so she finds a new bandage and covers it back up again. She brushes her hair, glosses her lips, dusts her cheeks. At last, she’s ready for morning. It’s three in the afternoon.

6
The Last Time She Saw Him

T
HE MORNING BEFORE Palmer’s soccer game. Monday. Hannah opened her eyes. Her father standing at her door, wearing a tuxedo.

“On a Monday?” the police officer asked later. He sat with her on the sofa, a notepad in his hand. “A tux? Sweetie, think hard. Are you sure?”

Hannah!

Her father was wearing normal office clothes now.

Dad!

How many muscles in the body?

About six hundred.

Largest bone?

The femur.

Smallest?

The stirrup of the inner ear.

Good girl. Very good girl.

They all left at the same time that morning, flying in different directions. As if shot loose from a locked, pressured chamber.
There was something about a soccer game. Tucker scratched his bleedy ears and then leapt up to follow her father. Fast—it was all so fast.

Have a good day, Doc, he said to her at the door.

She remembers running two steps after him. Nothing was ever certain. One had to nail him down on the specifics.

See you at the game, then?

What?

Palmer’s game.

Yes. At the game.

She likes to think she said—Good-bye. I love you.

Or perhaps—I hope you have a perfect day.

It could be anything she wants, though, couldn’t it? Memory is just a story, after all. With practice, one can adjust it.
Shape the shadows to fill the empty space in your heart.

“Hannah, ‘at the game’ doesn’t mean . . .”

“He’s coming back.”

Her insides were boiling.

“Hannah, I think you need to accept—”

Her father looked back and waved. He was a handsome, happy young doctor going off to work.

I will see you again. He didn’t say it. He waved it.

A wave can be a promise.

Can’t it?

Dad?