The best he could do was try to contact her and give her my message.
There was no answer at Ray’s. And when I called home, all I got was the sound of my own voice, yapping about free estimates, satisfaction guaranteed. Five minutes later, the phone rang.
“Dominick?” Sheffer said. “How
are
you? When I found out what happened, I was like, ‘Oh, my
god
.’”
I asked her if they’d postponed the hearing.
There was a pause. “Look, you know what?” she said. “Why don’t I come see you? I think it would be better if we went over all this in person. You feeling well enough for visitors?”
“Just
tell
me,” I said. “Did they postpone it or go ahead with it?”
“They went ahead.”
“Where is he?”
“Where is he? Now? He’s at Hatch, Dominick. Look, let me just make sure my friend can watch Jesse for an hour or so, and I’ll get there as soon as I can. Okay?”
I got the phone back on the cradle, but dropped the whole damn thing trying to get it back on the nightstand. Tried unsuccessfully to grab it by the cord and pull. When I looked over at the other bed, I I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 489
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saw my roommate—lying on his side, awake, watching me. “You want me to get that for you?” he said.
Getting out of bed, he let go a long, rumbling fart. “Whoops.
’Scuse
me
,” he said. His slippers scuffed across the room. “One of the side effects of this diet they started me on. Gives me terrible gas.”
He picked up the phone. Stood there, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Nice to see you back among the living,” he said. He was about fifty or so—gray hair, beard, beer gut under his cinched bathrobe.
Go back to your bed, I felt like saying. I don’t want to socialize.
Leave me alone.
He looked down at my uncovered leg, my foot. “Ooh, baby, that’s gotta smart,” he said. “How’s it feel?”
I shrugged. “Not bad. I guess they got me pretty well doped up.”
“Yeah, well . . . How else you gonna get through it, right? . . . They were telling me about it—the nurses—when you came in a couple days ago. Took quite a tumble, huh?”
“So I hear.”
“I’m in here with a bum gut,” he said. “Bleeding ulcer.” He tapped his belly with his fist. “They think they got it under control, though. They just want to watch me through the weekend. I’m probably checking out on Monday.”
“Uh-huh. Good.” I closed my eyes. Listened to him scuff back to bed.
Why couldn’t Sheffer have just told me over the phone what had happened? Because it was
bad
news, that was why. Break it gently to the poor gimp. . . .
Bleeding Ulcer over there was getting out when? Monday? How long was
I
going to be stuck in here? And how long was I going to be out of commission once I
did
get out? I needed to talk to that surgeon. Doctor . . . ? Jesus, the guy had operated on me for five hours and I couldn’t even remember his name. Couldn’t even picture him. And I’d probably have to wait until Monday to talk to him, too; I doubted chief surgeons showed their faces on the weekend.
Be patient
,
honey,
I heard Ma say.
You need to be more patient with
people.
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And how much was this whole fiasco going to cost me? The truck, a five-hour operation, an extended stay at Club Med here. I’d crunched some numbers back in September—just before Thomas’s
“big event” down at the library—and even
then
I’d figured I was probably only going to clear twenty-two, twenty-three grand for the year, give or take a few inside jobs in November and December. Of course, those jobs were shot to hell now. And what if my climbing-up-and-down-ladders days were over altogether? There was no way in hell I’d be able to afford contracting out. . . . My insurance
had
to cover falls, right? I’d have to wait until Monday for answers on that, too. Doubted I could decipher that mumbo jumbo the policy was written in. Just the
thought
of making those insurance calls exhausted me.
If you want to file a personal claim
,
press one
.
If you
want to file a business claim
,
press two
.
If your entire life’s going down
the toilet
,
please stay on the line.
. . .
I pictured that house of horror over there on Gillette Street—framed in scaffolding, scraped and burned down to bare wood, waiting for primer and paint. Jesus Christ, that house was like a curse or something. Maybe I could talk Labanara into finishing the job for me. Or Thayer Kitchen over in Easterly. Kitchen did drywall, mostly, but he’d paint if he was between jobs. Whoever I got to finish it, I’d just have to pay him out of pocket. Screw it. It’d be worth taking the loss just for the privilege of not having to go back there again. . . .
I wondered how Ruth Rood was doing. Hell of a thing: goes up to the attic and there’s her husband’s brains all over the place. Who gets the fun job of cleaning up something like that, anyway? Not Ruth, I hoped. That son of a bitch Rood. Once she got past the shock, she’d be better off without him. Who wouldn’t drink, married to
that
guy?
Better off without him:
the exact words Dessa’s father had used when she made her big announcement to the family that she was going ahead with the divorce. Leo told me that. It was after the dealership’s annual Fourth of July picnic out at the Constantines’—after all the employees had gone home and it was just the family.
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We’d been separated for a couple of months by then. . . . Jesus, that hurt, though: hearing from Leo that the Old Man had said that.
Better off without him
. We’d always gotten along okay—Gene and me. We’d had a kind of mutual respect for each other. Plus, there’d been all that time we’d logged in together after the baby died, when Dessa had had to keep calling her mother, having her mother come over. Big Gene would always come, too. We’d just sit there, him and me, staring at the idiot box and waiting for time to pass. Waiting for Dessa to stop crying and realize that Angela’s death wasn’t, somehow,
her
fault.
Our
fault. . . . Hey, I’d wrestled with that one, too.
Still
wrestled with it sometimes: if only I’d done this, if only I’d done that. “You’re like a son to me, Dominick,” Gene had said to me one of those nights. One of us must have turned off the TV; guess he had to say
something
. “Like the son I never had.” And I’d bought it, too—believed Big Gene, who’d made his fortune selling half-truths and false promises to car buyers. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been looking for my real father my whole life. . . . But what had I expected? That he’d be loyal to
me
instead of his firstborn daughter? His pride and joy? What did I even
know
about a father’s loyalty, anyway? I’d had a great role model in that particular department, whoever the guy was who’d knocked up my mother. Left her pregnant with twins. As far as fathers went, I was unclaimed freight. Me and my brother—left on the loading dock for life. Ray Birdsey’s twin step-burdens. . . .
And as long as I was lying there, not bullshitting myself for once, I might as well admit it: Big Gene was right, wasn’t he? She
was
better off without me. Me and all my baggage—shitty childhood, crazy brother, even that vasectomy I’d gone out and gotten. That had been it for Dessa, the last straw—my vasectomy. Getting myself sterilized without even discussing it. Going behind her back and having it done while she was away so that . . . so that . . .
Your anger poisons everything
else that’s good about you
, she’d said that morning she packed her bags.
I’m going because you suck all the oxygen out of the room, Dominick. Because
I have to breathe. . . .
And she’d been right, hadn’t she? Lying here in
“time-out,” benched by my big fall off the Roods’ roof, I could finally
see
it.
See
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even the
possibility
of kids . . . you had to be one angry motherfucker to do something like that. And what about that father’s loyalty crap I was always so hung up by the balls about? What about
that
, Birdsey?
What’s so loyal about a father who goes over there and puts his feet in those stirrup things and has them sever his options. Sever, even, the
possibility
of another kid. That had been
real
loyal, hadn’t it, Dominick?
Loyal to her, to your marriage, to any kid that might have come along later. . . . That was why she’d gone away to Greece, she’d said. To decide whether or not she wanted to try again. And she’d come back knowing she
did
want to. . . . So face it, Birdsey. Own up to it.
You
did more to end your marriage than she did. She might have been the one to pack her bags because she couldn’t “breathe,” but it was you who ended it.
You
who’d sucked out all the oxygen. Killed off the possibility, the hope of anything ever . . . And all those reconciliation fantasies you’d been fooling yourself with—all those rides past that farmhouse where she and her boyfriend lived now. It was
sick
, man. . . . I was like some ghost haunting what she and I had had and lost, instead of just getting on with it. I’d gone out there the night I totaled the truck, come to think of it. I’d been pulling that shit for years now. For
years
. . . . Too bad I hadn’t totaled
myself
along with my truck. Or maybe I had.
Maybe I’d totaled myself the day I’d gone down there to that urologist’s and spread my legs and said, “Here I am. Disconnect me. Cut off my options.” Totaled. It was like . . . it was like Angela’s death had been this huge, mangled wreck in the middle of our marriage. And Dessa . . . Dessa had gotten up and gotten on with it. Had walked away from the wreck. And I hadn’t. I was road kill, man.
Road kill
.
Don’t cry. De-fense! De-fense!
Well, screw it, man. I was too
tired
to play D anymore. I didn’t give a crap whether Mr. Bleeding Ulcer over in the other bed heard me or not. I was exhausted. Used up. If I had to cry, then tough shit. . . .
Did Ruth Rood have family to lean on, I wondered. Some friend who’d go over there and sit with her? She wasn’t a bad woman. She’d been decent to me, in spite of all the hassle about their house. . . . I saw Rood up in that window again—the way he’d stood there, staring out at me. Why me, Henry? Why’d you have to go up to that I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 493
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attic and stare that way at
me
? What were you doing, you bastard—inviting me along for the ride?
God, I couldn’t stand much more of this—just lying there, thinking.
Only what was I supposed to do? Get out of bed and walk away from it?
Hop into the truck I’d totaled and
go
? Miguel had said something about being able to give me something to make me sleep, hadn’t he? That’s what I
wanted
to do, man: Rip Van Winkle my way through the rest of my sorry-ass life. Wake up after everyone I knew was dead and that baby Joy was pretending was mine had reached the age of majority. Wake me when it’s over, man.Wake me up at checkout time. Except the only catch with sleeping was dreaming. Dead monkeys, dead brothers. Jesus. . . . So let’s see, Dominick. You don’t want to sleep, you don’t want to stay awake. Guess that eliminated everything but the third option. The big
D
. . . . And if I chose that route,
how
? It scared me a little to think about it, but it jazzed me up a little, too. I knew one thing: I wouldn’t make a mess the way Rood had. No one deserved that. So she’d slept with some guy behind my back. Gotten herself pregnant. That didn’t give me the right to fuck with her head for the rest of her life.
My roommate let another one rip. “Whoops,” he said. “Excuse me again.” I tried to ignore him. Maybe I didn’t have to go to the trouble of offing myself, after all. Maybe all’s I had to do was lie here and get asphyxiated.
“Hey, you want the newspapers?” he said. “I got the
Record
and the
New York Post
. I’m through with ’em.” Before I could say no, he’d swung his legs to the floor and started over.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look at ’em later.”
“Whenever you want,” he said. “I don’t want ’em back. Hey, no kidding, I’m sorry about all this gas. It’s this diet they got me on. I can’t help it.”
“No problem,” I said. Thought: Okay, now get back in bed and shut up. I don’t
want
to be your hospital buddy. Just let me lie here and think—play with the idea of dying.
“By the way, my name’s Steve,” he said. “Steve Felice.”
He waited. Kept looking at me. “Dominick Birdsey.”
“Housepainter, right?”
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I shrugged. “
Used
to be. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. With my leg.” He just stood there, waiting. “What . . . what do you do?”
“Me? I’m a purchasing agent. Down at EB.” He told me we were both in the same boat, in a way. Hell of a thing—not knowing from month to month if the next round of layoffs was going to zap you. It got to you after a while. That was how he’d gotten his ulcer—not knowing if he was going to have a job by the end of the year or not.