Things Go Flying (16 page)

She was trying to look on the bright side. The drugs would surely take effect sooner or later, although she didn't know which, because she hadn't thought to ask the doctor and he hadn't offered that information. And at least the boys were doing something nice for their father. A garden bench really was an excellent idea—a place for Harold to rest when he was working in the backyard; maybe it would even encourage him to start working in the backyard again. She'd underestimated them.

She glanced at the boys in the rear-view mirror and considered whether she should tell them that their father was starting to take antidepressants, but she thought it might make John worry, and possibly spark another Nurse Ratched comment from Dylan, so she decided to keep it to herself.

She pulled into the huge parking lot and started looking for a spot. She hadn't followed up on the paternity testing yet. She hadn't had the time, as all hell had been breaking loose lately. But it was on her to-do list. She'd get to it sooner or later, because now she had to know, one way or the other. Seeing Tom on the day of his death was like being clubbed over the head. It was a sign.

Once inside, they grabbed one of the oversized orange shopping carts and went straight to the lumber area. There, the three of them looked blankly at each other until Audrey said, “Let's get some help.”

Eventually they nabbed someone. Dylan explained what they wanted. “We want to keep it really simple,” Dylan emphasized.

“Sure,” the Home Depot man said.

They got a board twelve inches wide, two inches thick, and had it cut into a five-foot length. Then two more pieces, a foot high, a foot deep, and two inches wide. One for each end.

“Put the supports in a bit,” the Home Depot man advised, “not right at the ends,” and he went away to help someone else.

Audrey looked doubtful. “That's pretty simple, all right,” she said. She was trying to picture it.

“Simple is good,” Dylan said.

“Do you think it'll hold him?” Audrey asked.

“Sure,” John said.

Dylan was already loading the lumber into the cart. Nails didn't occur to anybody.

When they got home, Audrey went in ahead to make sure the coast was clear. She needn't have worried; Harold was still in bed, curled on his side in the fetal position. She waved the boys in and went back upstairs, checked on Harold again, and then went into the bathroom and started running a bubble bath.

John and Dylan carried the boards through the kitchen and downstairs to the workroom, putting a few nicks in the walls as they went. First, they plunked the longer piece of wood down on the floor and the other two pieces beside it. This is when Dylan realized they didn't have any nails.

“Fuck,” he said. “We didn't get any nails.”

John said, “Don't sweat it. Dad's got to have nails around here someplace.”

“Yeah, well, they've got to be the right size.”

“What's the right size?”

“I don't know—big enough to go through that,” John said, directing his chin at the boards. “Three or four inches long.”

John started searching through the various jars and boxes of nails and screws on the top of the workbench while Dylan looked for a hammer. He found two. He handed one to John.

“These are the longest ones I can find,” John said, handing over a fistful of nails that were about two and a half inches long. Dylan took one and held it flush against the longer board; the nail was only about a half inch longer than the depth of the board.

“Great,” said Dylan. “These aren't going to work—they won't hold.”

“Let's just try it,” John said, anxious to get the damn thing finished, whether it was serviceable or not. “We'll just use more of them. It'll be fine.”

Dylan shrugged. He picked up one end of the board and placed it on top of the supporting board. “Hold it level, will you?” he said, putting some of the nails between his teeth. He banged in some nails, his back to John.

Meanwhile, John, whose mind was off with Nicole, slid his support underneath, lined the edge up with the end of the board, and started banging nails in too. He kind of enjoyed banging in the nails. He put in a lot of them so it would hold.

When he'd finished a whole line of nails, only smashing his thumb once, John became aware that Dylan had stopped hammering and was standing back, looking at the bench. John could feel a radiating tension. He stepped back to look too.

“Nice going,” Dylan said.

John immediately saw his mistake. The whole thing was off kilter, because Dylan had put his support about six inches in while John had put his right at the end. John now remembered what the Home Depot guy had said.

“I'll take it out and do it over,” he said defensively when Dylan didn't say anything.

Taking the nails out was much more difficult than driving them in, and not as pleasant. It was hard to get at them. After they'd been at it awhile the board didn't look so good anymore. In frustration, John took a great whack at the supporting board to get it off, which did the job, but the top of it splintered.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Dylan said, instantly pissed off. He grabbed the board and looked at it. “You moron,” he added.

John threw his hammer down. “Fuck you,” he said.

“We can't even use this now, the end's all fucked,” shouted Dylan.

“Don't yell at me, asshole,” John yelled back. They glared at each other for a minute. Then John suggested, “Turn it over and use the other end.”

Dylan tossed the board aside in disgust and said, “That's retarded. This whole thing is retarded.” Disappointed, he said, “Maybe we can buy him a bench.” He still thought a bench was a good idea.

They both heard it at the same moment—someone coming down the stairs—and turned guiltily toward the furnace room door.

It was their father, in his ratty bathrobe. “What's going on?” he asked, as his eyes took everything in.

John, desperate to salvage something from the situation, said, “We were trying to make something for your birthday.”

“I see,” said Harold. “What is it—a bench?” He bent down and took a look, trying not to show his feelings, because he really was touched by their efforts. All at once he felt quite emotional.
His boys
. “These have to be the same distance from the ends,” Harold said, indicating the supports.

“No kidding,” Dylan said. “Tell handy guy here.”

John gave him a vicious look.

Harold picked up the splintered board and looked at it. Then he looked at the one that Dylan had hammered in and tested it. “Nails are too short,” he said. He stood up. “I don't think this is going to work, kids,” Harold said, “but I appreciate the thought, I really do.”

He looked so proud of their efforts anyway, that it prompted John to say, “What would you
really
like for your birthday, Dad?”

Harold looked at them and suddenly seemed to brighten as if a light bulb had gone on behind his eyes, and he said, “What I'd really like, if you boys could manage it, is a loan.”

“You mean money?” Dylan asked.

Harold nodded. “I want to buy a new TV and right now I don't have any credit.”

“We have a TV,” John pointed out.

“Yeah,” Harold said conspiratorially, after a considering pause, “But I thought it would be nice to have one in the kitchen, so we can watch it during dinner.”

“Right on,” said Dylan.

“What'll Mom say?” John said.

“Let's just buy it first,” Harold said. He didn't want to think about what Audrey would say, or he'd never do it. He looked at his watch. It was only eight o'clock and he was pretty sure Future Shop was open till at least nine.

“How much do you need?” Dylan asked.

A half-hour later, with a son on either side of him, Harold walked into the store—no trace of a limp—and let Dylan and John show him all the latest gadgets at Future Shop they'd love to have. He hadn't known half these things existed, but the boys were surprisingly knowledgeable. How had they learned it all? Kids today, Harold thought, admiring his sons, seemed to pick up this technology stuff as if by osmosis.

Eventually they made their way over to the televisions. Harold headed straight for the model he wanted. John hoisted it up easily and carried it to the cash. They paid in twenties, because that's all that the bank machine they'd stopped at on the way had spit out. Unfortunately, the snotty girl wasn't there.

Harold was so pleased about the TV that he let John drive the car home.

• • •

A
UDREY WAS FIRST
puzzled, then alarmed, when she finally got out of her long bubble bath, turned off her music, and found that she was the only one home. She couldn't believe they'd all left and hadn't told her. She couldn't imagine where they might have gone. She looked all over the silent house, and checked the fridge for a note, but there was nothing.

When she went downstairs into the furnace room and saw the wrecked and splintered bench, the tools lying where they'd been dropped, Audrey was more mystified than ever. The logical explanation would be that Harold had taken them out to get more wood, but that didn't seem likely, because the bench was supposed to be a surprise, and she didn't think Harold would be willing to get out of bed to go to Home Depot.

It was as creepy as an alien abduction.

She looked outside and the car was gone.

They wouldn't have gone to get some milk, because they wouldn't take the car for that, and they wouldn't have all gone out together for it, and she never let them run out of milk, or anything else, anyway. She was starting to feel panicky when she heard a car and looked out the window again. She saw the car pulling into the drive, John at the wheel, and Harold sitting beside him in the front seat staring straight ahead.

Audrey immediately feared, because John was driving, that Harold had wandered off and that the boys had gone after him and brought him home again—and that this might be just the beginning.

She pulled open the front door and ran down the porch steps in her housecoat, calling, “Is everything all right?”

Her obvious concern made Harold feel briefly sorry for going out without telling her first, for not leaving a note at least. Now that he'd committed himself, he wondered at his own audacity. Was having the TV on at dinner time worth the trouble it was going to cause him with Audrey? He decided that now that he'd come this far, bravado was what was needed. He'd never tried bravado before himself, but he'd seen it work often enough for others.

“You'll never guess,” he said, with a stab at a happy smile, “what the boys got me for my birthday.” This was pure improvisation, and he was delighted that he'd thought of it.

“I have no idea,” Audrey said cautiously.

John opened the trunk and hefted up the box and carried it across the lawn and up the porch steps where the porch light fell on it on his way inside.

Audrey saw the side of the box and said, “We have a TV.”

Harold and Dylan walked past her and John put the box down on the living room floor and they all gathered around and looked down at it.

“This one's for the kitchen,” Harold said, brazening it out. “Isn't that great?”

• • •

H
AROLD COULDN'T SLEEP
. His tinnitus was bothering him—an annoying, electrical hum inside his head that often plagued him these days. When it was quiet like this, the whole house asleep, the hum in his head got very loud.

Also, he was afraid. He sensed spirits crowding in on him, imagined them creeping forward on little cat feet and he was afraid that they'd start to whisper, and laugh, and possibly start throwing things. He remembered sounds like these, and table legs thumping against hardwood floors, doors slamming, china smashing, the accelerated beating of his own heart.

Audrey was sleeping beside him, and although she was his wife of twenty years, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, she was not sharing in the electrical hum or the restlessness of the disembodied either. He wanted to shake her awake and use her as a human shield, but what would he say? Besides, she was already mad at him—she'd barely spoken to him since he'd brought the TV home tonight.

He flicked on his bedside table lamp and lay rigid against the pillows. He lay stiffly like this until he eventually fell asleep, and as he was drifting off he felt the lightest brush of a kiss against his forehead, like when he was a boy in Cabbagetown.

He slept, and dreamed about Tom.

• • •

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Audrey sipped her coffee and fretted about Harold's increasing unpredictability. One minute he was curled in the fetal position, looking like he'd never get out of bed, and the next he was all jaunty about a new TV. She didn't really believe the TV was the boys' idea, either. But what could she do? They'd obviously ganged up on her. Now, apparently, they were going to have the TV on at mealtimes. This was the last straw—the one that convinced Audrey that the whole family was going straight to hell. And she was the one in charge, she felt responsible. If she didn't take care of their moral development, who would? As concerned as she was about Harold's depressed state, as much as she wanted him to be happier, she asked herself if she should put her foot down about the TV.

She wondered how other women did it. She wondered how you could put everything you had into your family and still have anything left of yourself. She wondered if love was enough, or if something else was necessary in order for your kids to turn out. Luck, maybe. Or genetics.

What would it be like, Audrey asked herself, to put on different clothes every day and go to work, where people saw you as someone who did a particular job, rather than as a mother and a wife?

Audrey thought she might be becoming a little depressed herself. She didn't want to do the laundry, couldn't summon up the energy to even empty the dishwasher. She didn't want to think about what to make for supper. She didn't want to do anything. Instead, she sat at the kitchen table and thought about Tom.