The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (21 page)

“I’m not saying I won’t. But—”

“What?”

“I’ve been married.”

“So have I.”

“It’s only been two years since I lost him. He was supposed to be here forever, and he’s not, and I get that, and I’ve moved on. It’s just—”

“Tell me.”

She sniffled and drew up her hand, the one that held mine, to wipe her nose. She didn’t let go.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“Of what?”

“I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“I know.”

I let go of her, and she grabbed me back. “Hold on,” she said.

The night before I married Marlene, Joe Oldegaard, my best man and best friend since elementary school, walked me away from the party with my groomsmen at the 17 Club and suggested that we have a cigarette. The outside air that evening, heart of spring, still had a bite. We had to give each other hand cover to get blazed up.

“People will understand,” he said.

“Understand what?”

“If you call it off. Yeah, it’ll be inconvenient and embarrassing, but they’ll get it.”

I was dumbfounded. “Get the fuck out of here.”

He shrugged. We finished our cigarettes in silence and went back inside.

Twenty-four hours later, I was married and holed up in the Stardust with Marlene, a long weekend in Vegas awaiting us before work and the drudgeries of marriage called us back home. I told her what Joe had said.

“Cass said the same thing to me,” she said.

“Last night?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think they planned it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They looked pretty chummy at the rehearsal dinner.”

I stared into the ceiling. Marlene went rigid beside me.

“Why would they do that?” I said.

I left Lainie’s and went home, to my bed. I pounded my pillow, as if some bedside violence would stop the motion inside my head and let me find sleep.

Lainie had asked me to stay. Begged me, really. I couldn’t do it. By the time I left, I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even hurt—at least not too much. Her reasons for caution, when she finally expressed them, made sense. Distance from her life with Delmar. Not wanting to one-up Tony and his fiancée, who were in the full flurry of planning their own nuptials. Time. Just more time.

I got it. I got it, but I couldn’t stay. The downside of my elaborate proposal theater is
I’d
left no room for any answer other than yes. No would have been devastation. Let-me-think-about-it might well have turned me into a huckster, babbling anything to close the deal. She didn’t say either of those things. She said, “I love you, and I’ll always love you, and I’ll always want you,” and I kissed her forehead, her cheek, her lips. I had to go home, where I didn’t want to be, and try to figure out why it wasn’t yes.

After Dad was gone and before Mom slipped into the depths of the dementia that took her, I would sit at the little kitchen table in the house where I grew up, and
I’d
spend a few hours with her every Tuesday morning. Those hours made a slow reveal of the crevasses opening in my marriage. I told Mom one time that I didn’t see how she and Dad had done it, how the
y’d
managed to stay in tune all those years, and she laughed and said, “Mark, there were years at a time when we could barely stand each other.” That surprised me. It shouldn’t have.
I’d
come to know such years with Marlene. In any case, I don’t think that dose of perspective helped me, because it gave rise to my most mulish impulses. It made me view my marriage as something to be conquered.

I got out of bed and paced the floor, wore a groove into the carpet between my room and the den. Each time I passed Von’s door, I ran my finger along it.

I’d
spent a lot of time with this subject, before Marlene found the gumption to go and long after, and all that thought had made a few things clear. I no longer hated Joe or Cass for what the
y’d
done. The friendships hadn’t survived their last-ditch efforts to save us from ourselves, but the
y’d
made those decisions knowing the risks. They had accurately diagnosed our underlying trouble, and you can’t hate someone for being right.
I’d
also come to be well in tune with the hesitations I felt before we said “I do,” the many times
I’d
wanted to run and hadn’t, and I could tell myself, categorically, that I felt none of that where Lainie was concerned. My delivery of the question had left me open to feelings of foolishness, but
I’d
get over that. I had to. My desire to ask again—and again, if I needed to—remained.

I returned to bed and crawled into the sheets. I lay my head down and sleep came for me, at last, in measures too heavy to resist. The blackness came on in full and I was gone, and it wasn’t until after Lainie had let herself in with the key
I’d
given her and found me in my room and slid into the bed next to me and kissed my ear that I awoke again. Not with a start, but as if she had been there all along.

“Yes,” she said.

Excerpt from
Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

On the whole, I will never feel anything but gratitude for Frank Feeney and what he’s done for me.

As for what he’s done
to
me, that’s a harder account to square.

I never knew my actual father, and so I’m not altogether certain how that relationship looks from the son’s end of things. I also wasn’t much of a father to Raj when he was young, so I’m deficient there, too. Frank was my father figure in the absence of anyone else willing to do the job, and I have considered whether that was expecting too much of him. Maybe it was. But that’s where we are, and that’s why his distancing himself from me hurts so much. I’m not saying he doesn’t have a right to cut me out. I’m saying that I would hope a father, a real father, would never take that step. Frank did, and here we are, living in the same town, talking to the same people, but never seeing each other. It’s hard. Damn right it’s hard.

This is another area where my daily affirmations at my support group really help. I parse through the things I can control and the things I can’t. Frank made his decision where I’m concerned. I can’t change it for him. That duty lies with him.

39

I’d
barely breached the door at Feeney’s before I said, “I come in peace.” Frank’s plump face, wound up into a ready bark, did a slow unraveling.

“Have a seat,” he said. The midday lunch crowd had come and gone and it was just the two of us. I tended to have impeccable timing when I wanted to see him alone.

I settled onto the stool in front of him. “How’ve you been?”

Frank shrugged. The smell of chili wafted across the bar, and my face must have betrayed my interest. “You hungry?” Frank said, pointing at the slow cooker.

“Yeah, I’ll have some.”

He dished it up—ground beef chili, no beans, the way God intended. I could have stood my spoon up in it.

“Did I do that?” Frank said. He pointed at the mark under my eye that, by now, was on its final, slow fade, a process that was taking its good sweet time.

“You have a good eye for your own handiwork,” I said.

He laughed, quick and curt. “Well, I’m sorry. You might remember that you took a poke at me first. I was pretty much operating on instinct.”

I socked away a couple of bites of chili before I responded.

“Well, you know, Frank, I’m trying to forget it happened. But you’re right. Just the same, you disrespected my wife, so—”

“Your wife?”

I rummaged through my pocket and scared up the simple tungsten ring Lainie had slipped on my finger not forty-eight hours earlier, precisely two weeks after sh
e’d
said yes. I held it out to him, and he took it in for closer examination.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Frank said. “Why aren’t you wearing it?”

“We’re kind of keeping it quiet. Her kid has a wedding coming up, and we didn’t want to steal his thunder.”

I held out my hand, and he dropped the ring into my palm.

“Well, Mark, I’m happy for you. Congratulations.”

The night Lainie came to me in my bed, she and I talked about the implications of the yes sh
e’d
first avoided and then accepted. “I know I love you, and you want this,” sh
e’d
said. “I want it, too.” We didn’t want a big wedding. W
e’d
both done that. We wanted to keep things as intimate as possible, to the point where even the justice of the peace was a regrettable, though necessary, intrusion. And we dealt with the immediate baggage that comes with yes. We wanted it done as soon as possible. Before we could give a chance to no or maybe. Before we had to spend a minute longer with how things were now.

That had taken a bit longer than
I’d
have preferred, a couple of smoke breaks with Trimear to talk him into giving me three consecutive days off—one to get to Deadwood, a reasonable one-day drive from Billings; one for Lainie and me to approximate a honeymoon; one to get home.

Trimear can be such an intractable fuckhead. For a day he held me off, whinnying about the inherent unfairness of my request with football season upon us and our resources so thin. I held my tongue about his poor-mouthing and said, simply, “I really need this, Gene.”

That first day, he turned me down flat. I said, “Fine. I’ll quit.”
I’d
threatened to quit any number of times over the years in various temper tantrums. What was one more?

“Don’t be a sorehead,” he said. “What do you need it for?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might.”

The rat bastard. “OK, Gene, look. I’m getting married. I’m hoping to keep it quiet, you know, so don’t blab about it, OK?”

“What’s the problem? She got two heads or something?”

“Shut up.”

He laughed. It was that irritating horse-wheeze, the one where the implication is that what amuses Gene Trimear should also amuse the target of his nonsense.

“Are you gonna do this for me?” I asked.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

A day after that, Trimear posted a fresh round of schedules. Two weeks out, there it was: a Friday-Saturday-Sunday stretch where my name didn’t appear.
I’d
hoped for something sooner, but hope isn’t something that often gets redeemed by the likes of Trimear. I thanked him, and the inchoate peckerwood actually approximated grace. “Good luck,” he said.

At the bar, I filled Frank in on Hugo, or tried to. As it turned out, old forms retained their function. There wasn’t anything I knew about Hugo’s retreat to the oil patch that was news to Frank, nor did I bring new information about his stated intentions toward Frank’s niece.

“He says he loves her,” I said.

“I’ve heard.”

“Don’t believe him?”

Frank punched open the cash register and counted off some twenties, putting them in an envelope and dropping them into the floor safe. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. We’re at showtime, you know? What he says doesn’t really matter, either.”

I drained the last of my beer. “Yeah. I believe him. I want to believe him.”

“That’s what you do.”

“What’s that?”

“You want the happy story,” Frank said. “I get it. You know? Everybody wants a happy ending. It doesn’t always work out like that.”

I started to speak, but he cut me off.

“Now, he’s working. Great. But for how long? He says he loves Amber, but he’s not here. This is a woman with a little boy. She needs somebody reliable, somebody here. He had a chance, and he blew it by being unreliable like he always is, and now he’s not here. What’s she supposed to think about that?”

“Yeah, but—”

“No ‘yeah, but.’ Seriously. What’s she supposed to think?”

“Maybe she thinks he’s trying.”

Frank went to refill my glass, but I waved him off. He dropped it into the washtub. “She doesn’t think that. You know why? Because he’s always trying. So what?”

“I guess I just hope he’s getting it right,” I said.

Frank smiled—it was weary and a little sad, but a smile nonetheless.

“Of course,” he said. “You want the happy ending.”