Chapter Nineteen #5
He picked her up just as a rain was ending, they drove through streets shining with puddles to the new Mexican place on the west side of town, and as soon as they were done eating he said that he had something to ask her, but that he wanted her to listen all the way to the end of what he had to say before she answered.
She nodded, sinking back a little in the booth.
He went over again how—to this day—he was mortified by what he’d done.
To her. To their family. To Felix’s family.
But to her most of all, because she was the one he’d betrayed.
He wanted more than anything to convince her that he’d changed, but he didn’t know how to do that.
He was coming to the realization: the person who was stupid enough to do what he’d done wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to fix it.
He knew she didn’t want to hear him apologize anymore.
All he wanted in the whole world was to make things right.
So he was asking her to tell him, please, if she thought there was even the slightest chance for them—and if there was, could she let him know what he could do to help it along? Give him a hint or something?
Apparently, this was her birthday present: his needs.
Still, she missed him. She was tired of trying to figure out why she should forgive him, tired of weighing that against her pride.
She thought of what his father had just told her.
She said, “I’ve been trying to figure out how I can trust you, if I don’t trust your judgment. ”
He glanced at the restaurant’s dropped ceiling for an instant. Shook his head in frustration. His voice went down in volume and up in pitch. “How can you say that?”
“Because I don’t trust your judgment.”
“One thing,” he said. “I mean, it’s a big thing, but one thing.”
“It’s a thousand things, Cal. A thousand bad, selfish decisions.
And a child. And all the thinking you did to figure out how to live with yourself for those nine years.
I trust your remorse. I really do. But you’re only remorseful because I found out about it.
You’re only remorseful because you got caught. ”
It wasn’t true, he’d been remorseful before that, but he wasn’t going to argue with her. She’d somehow both dodged his question about their chances, and answered it. He drove her home, wished her happy birthday, and said with his eyes what he knew she didn’t want to hear again.
—
He planned a camping trip with Skip in June.
Two nights on the Sandusky River, north of Fremont.
Skip asked if he could bring Theo, and Cal said sure.
When Theo couldn’t go because his aunt and uncle were going to be in town, Skip asked if he could bring Tom.
Cal called the house and sailed the idea past Becky.
They both concluded the same thing: what would be the reason for saying no?
As long as it was okay with Felix. Thankfully, she made that phone call on Cal’s behalf and reported back: Felix couldn’t come up with a reason for saying no, either.
Then, the night before the trip, Roman called Cal’s apartment, having caught wind of the trip from Becky, and asked him what the ETD was.
“The what?”
“When do we leave? I’m inviting myself.”
So it was the four of them, three generations, then, who piled into the Bel Air with all the gear and drove an hour to the campground.
—
Roman gave instructions and identified plant life and sipped cognac out of a coffee mug.
When he wasn’t talking, they heard songbirds twittering, wild turkeys cackling in the distance, the sway of the basswoods overhead—but he was usually talking.
Tom stood around for a while with one arm behind him, holding his elbow.
He’d never been camping before, didn’t know how to do it.
Skip showed him. They went swimming in the river and dug for arrowheads and pottery shards along the levy.
Tom screamed his head off when he discovered a leech on his thumb; Skip pulled it off, tossed it back into the river, and ruffled his hair.
In just their bathing suits and sneakers, they went on walks through the woods.
Cal trailed along behind them, careful of his balance.
Each time they circled back to the camp, Roman was there, in a folding chair he’d brought, sipping from his mug and smoking a cigarillo, his shirt open to expose his pink, medicine ball stomach.
He was sixty-eight and still had all his teeth. “This is living,” he said.
By the first evening, Cal had banished from the camp all talk of politics, current events, the store, and lecturing of any kind for the duration of the weekend. “Banished!” he said, waving his cane in the air, making the boys laugh. Roman wasn’t amused.
On the afternoon of the last day of the trip, they went kayaking.
The boys paddled ahead until Cal could just make out the orange of their life vests and the red of their kayaks, could just hear their voices skimming across the water.
For a few minutes, Roman paddled along beside Cal, uncharacteristically silent.
Then he said, “Maritime law.”
“What about it?”
Land rules didn’t apply, Roman explained.
He could talk about whatever he wanted. Apparently that included his promise to Becky that he wouldn’t ask about what was happening with them, because he asked Cal when the hell he was going to get all this straightened out.
Cal paddled harder, but Roman kept up. “What’s the plan, Stan?
” he asked. “You bucking for a divorce?”
Cal told him no, he wasn’t, but—and he forced a smile—it was none of Roman’s business, was it?
It kind of was, Roman said. He didn’t want to point fingers, but everyone knew Cal was the one who’d stepped in it. It was time to clean off his boots. This had gone on too long.
Cal carved his paddle through the water, watching the trees along the shoreline fall away on either side. He said he didn’t think Becky liked him anymore, as a person.
“Boy, can you be a dope,” Roman said. “The whole thing wouldn’t still upset her if she didn’t like you. And you want to know a secret? I like you. You’ve grown on me. And you’re good for Becky—or you were, until you stepped in it.”
“I don’t know what else to do,” Cal said. “There’s nothing I can say that I haven’t already said to her, or tried to—and meant with all my heart. She doesn’t want to hear it.”
“What the hell did you step in? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Let me tell you from experience, you’re doing the right thing.”
“How?”
“Or, you were doing the right thing, up till a couple of months ago. She said you’ve stopped coming around as much, stopped calling.”
“She hardly ever calls me.”
“And I hardly ever call Veronica Lake. Who cares?” He pulled his paddle up, laid it across his kayak.
“The point is, with a situation like this, neither one of you can see a way out because you don’t want out.
All this time, you been sticking around.
She’s been letting you come over. Why? Because neither one of you wants out.
Sooner or later, something’s going to happen to knock that sense into your heads, and you need to be around for it.
Not only that, you need to have been around. You see what I’m saying?”
Cal stopped paddling too. They were carried by the current, beneath a clear-blue, midday sky. “Yeah,” he said.
“Good. And—son?” Roman’s silver hair was almost translucent in the bright light, the veins on his temples like a pair of tiny claws reaching for his eyes. “Don’t fuck this up.”
Which was the first and only time Cal’s father-in-law ever called him “son.”
—
Three months later, Roman was dead.
It was a Thursday afternoon. Cal had the day off and was out running errands when he saw the Back in an Hour sign on the door of the hardware store. The sign they only put out at lunchtime. He glanced at his watch. It was half past three.
He parked along the curb. Let himself in with his key. “Roman?” he called as he looked down each aisle, and “Roman?” as he descended into the basement.
He found him lying on the cement floor between two of the shelves.
A stroke, they determined later. He was on his side, stretched out, one arm bent beneath him and the other stretched out across the floor.
Cold, and firm to the touch. Lividity had settled his blood so that the lower part of his arms, hands, fingers, that side of his neck, whatever was closest to the floor was dark purple, while everything above it was pale gray.
His eyes were clenched shut, and for that Cal was grateful.
After pacing the floor for a few moments, he took a clean painter’s tarp down from one of the shelves and gently covered Roman. Then he called the operator and was put through to a deputy he’d gone to high school with. The deputy got all the necessary balls rolling.
Only after the paramedics had arrived and were carrying Roman out did Cal call Ida and Becky. Before leaving for the hospital, he threw the painter’s cloth away and mopped the floor where Roman had been.
In the morgue, Ida asked if Roman had been napping on his cot, as he often did during his lunch break, and Cal shook his head. He said Roman had been on the floor, but he’d looked peaceful, almost as if he’d chosen that spot to lie down.
—
The viewing was large. The wake at Ida’s, after the burial, was small. Twenty or so people. Boxes of cigarillos open here and there, the good stuff out at the bar, Perry Como on the stereo.