Chapter Fifteen #2
When Bishop walked into the break room to get a soda out of the cooler, he seemed surprised to see Felix eating alone. “Enjoying the view?” he asked, smiling and nodding toward the window that looked out onto the parking lot.
He asked Felix the same question the following Friday.
A week after that—almost two months after Felix had started working at Van Benton—Bishop came in with his lunch box and said, “Mind?”
There were four square tables in the break room but he sat down at Felix’s, across from him.
He cleaned the sawdust off his glasses with a bandanna.
Tucked the bandanna into the hammer loop of his coveralls.
They talked about work as they ate. What the best and worst parts of their stations were.
Where they’d been before this. Bishop said he’d made fancy radiator covers before the war.
He loved working with wood. He loved carving—all the finishing work.
Not the building so much, he said, but the details.
He asked if Felix had always been in metal.
Felix wagged his head a little, told him he’d been a suit at Tuck it had been two hospitals.) “I can’t say it was useless, but I think I got all I’m going to get out of it. ”
Bishop seesawed his head a little, thinking. “You could try hypnosis. A buddy of mine went, said it helps him turn off the movie in his head when he’s trying to fall asleep.” He lifted his thermos cup and blew steam off his soup. “They call it trying something new for a reason, you know?”
—
But Felix was afraid of hypnosis. It seemed to him like a surefire way to get you to talk about things you didn’t want to talk about, things you weren’t supposed to share with anyone.
It turned out there was a hypnotist who advertised in the Gazette.
He’d never noticed the ad before, though how could he have missed it, with its big eye looking out from the page.
Build Confidence! it said. Break bad habits!
Bark like a dog, Felix thought. Spill your guts.
He was grief-ridden. To the point where it no longer felt like grief, it felt like being awake, and he was all but convinced that was how things would—and maybe should—remain for the rest of his life.
He noticed another, smaller ad. Scalloped around the edges. No eye looking out at him from this one.
—
He made the appointment for mid-March, on a Saturday when he thought Margaret had no classes.
It snowed overnight—several inches added to what was still there from the last storm.
At breakfast, Margaret told him that she and Ruth and Dot Fletcher were taking Brenda out for a birthday lunch, and she had a kiddie class afterward.
The Hokey Pokey and the Bunny Hop were in her future. Tom was in his.
Felix looked up from the sports page. “You told me that?”
“I used to think you tuned me out,” Margaret said. “Now, I think you just don’t receive any signals. Yes, I told you that.”
—
Cal was shoveling the sidewalk in front of the next-door neighbors’ house when a light-blue Plymouth pulled up to the curb in front of number 17.
He watched a tall man in a fedora get out, and a boy in a trapper hat with the earflaps down.
The man noticed Cal looking over at them and gave a little wave.
Cal waved back. Then the man and the boy walked up Cal’s driveway and onto the porch, and Becky opened the front door.
There was something familiar about them to Cal, even from a distance.
Just before they went in, the boy took off his hat, and Cal felt the skin across his forehead tighten.
—
It was the first time someone had shown up with a child—but Becky wasn’t put off.
She told Mr. Salt it was probably best if the boy didn’t join them for the actual session, though, and Felix said of course; Tom could just sit somewhere, he had a puzzle book with him and wouldn’t bother anything.
He looked down at his son and said, “Don’t bother anything. ”
Tom nodded and took the softcover book and pencil stub from his pocket.
Becky said he might want to play with Skip, in the backyard.
Tom put the book and pencil away and followed her through the kitchen and outside.
They were only two years apart, but Skip was almost twice as big as Tom.
He was blond and red-cheeked, and he was busy making an igloo when Becky called him over.
The whole front of him was caked with snow, including his forehead.
She introduced him to Tom, asked him to let Tom play with him while she met with his father.
Skip sized Tom up, which for him meant looking down almost a foot. “He’s just a little kid!”
“And you’re a big one. We won’t be too long.”
—
In the parlor, at the hexagonal table, Felix provided Becky with the same bare-bones version of what had happened to the Teague that he’d given Bishop. She told him how sorry she was for what he’d gone through. She asked what sort of contact he was hoping to make.