Chapter 48
— Chapter 48 —
I told Eddie that I had to return the roofing supplies. He offered to lend me money, but I can’t let myself need him that way. I think it would ruin everything.
On the Sunday that we were supposed to start fixing the roof, I’m out on the landing cleaning up bird heads when Eddie drives up, his truck bed full of shingles.
“What did you do?” I say, running down the stairs. “I can’t afford that.”
“Doesn’t cost a thing. All scrap. Gus helped me round up leftover supplies. Tommy Tom went around to all his neighbors. I bugged some guys at the station. Everyone has a few stacks of extra shingles somewhere in their basement. We can’t get the whole roof done or do it up right, but we can get you through a few more winters. Your roof is the same as mine. I know where the weak spots are.” He’s bashful about it, hands in his pockets. Glancing at me, then looking at his boots.
“You’re amazing.”
“Yeah?” he says, like he was worried I might not be happy with his gift.
“Yeah. Thank you.”
“Good. I didn’t want to overstep. But that roof is in trouble.”
I hug him and give him a kiss on the cheek, and he gets kind of shy and flustered.
Aubrey and Shray are in the basement listening to Cat Power, making charcoal sketches of each other. The door is propped open to let in fresh air so they don’t get loopy on workable fixative. We can hear them laughing, singing along. And I think it makes Eddie even more self-conscious even though they’re completely absorbed in their own little world.
I don’t know what we are to each other. We’ve gone night swimming a few more times. But at the bar we’re friendly like usual, and I’m afraid to say anything that will push us in one direction or the other.
We start at the back of the house where the leak was. Eddie wears his work belt. I find Steena’s old neon-green fanny pack and load it with roofing nails.
“Whatever works,” Eddie says, laughing when he sees me.
He shows me how to loosen cracked shingles and pull them out from under the ones that are good enough to keep. We lay down new sheets of ice and water shield and slide the fresh shingles into place. They are all different colors. Rust, teal, beige, black. We shuffle them up and pick at random.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t round up enough matching ones,” Eddie says.
“I like it,” I tell him. “Like a patchwork quilt.”
We refill the stripped section in a couple hours. Aubrey and Shray run to the store for cold cuts, hard rolls, and Dr. Brown’s soda, and we join them on the patio for lunch.
Eddie has always been kind of low key, and I’m nervous about how he’ll get along with Shray, who is wearing orange eyeliner and has his chin-length blue hair pulled back in three French braids. But Eddie jumped right in, asking Shray what kind of dye he uses to get the blue so bright. Now they’re talking about eighties hair bands, which Shray thinks are awesome but cannot figure out.
“So, were they like a joke back then?” Shray asks. “They were so far over the top that it seems like parody. But it also feels like like people were taking them seriously? Eddie, how am I supposed to feel about Whitesnake?”
Eddie laughs. “Maybe they were a little of both? Can’t say I ever gave it much thought.”
“Twisted Sister knew they were being funny, right?” Aubrey asks.
“I think so,” Eddie says, and I can tell he’s enjoying the whole situation. “My brother was a big Motley Crüe fan, and I’m pretty sure he thought they were straight-up awesome if that helps.”
“Yeah,” Shray says, earnestly. “It does.”
Eddie grins.
Aubrey rests her chin on my shoulder, letting her hair fall in front of her face. “He’s so cute,” she whispers. “Good job.”
“Shhh.” I nudge her ribs with my elbow.
She nudges me back.
Eddie has to go home after lunch to cover a gap in his mom’s caretaker schedule.
“The nice thing about patching the roof instead of redoing the whole thing is that we can do a little at a time without leaving you exposed,” he says.
I help him pack up his tools. Aubrey and Shray went down to the pond for a swim, so we’re alone in the driveway, and when I hug him goodbye, he kisses me.
“Can I take you out on a real date?” he asks. “After my mom’s night nurse shows up?”
When I say yes, he seems shy all over again. Gets in his truck looking a little bit flustered.
Eddie calls a few minutes before he’s supposed to pick me up. “We just blew a fuse, so I have to go change it. Twenty minutes?”
I tell him I’ll meet him instead and row my boat across the pond to his house so I can work out some of my nerves. Mrs. Davis is sitting on the screened porch, and when I pull my boat onto the grass, she waves to me.
“Freya Arnalds!” she calls, her face lighting up as I climb the stairs. “I watched you rowing over. Did you get locked out of your house after school?”
“Oh, no!” I say, worrying I’ve confused her. “I just came to…”
“I’m only teasing you, silly goose,” she says, opening the door to let me in. “Get over here and give me a hug.”
Her body feels small and thin, but her arms are strong. She puts her hand on the side of my face. “Look at you all grown up. Eddie told me you came back. I’m sorry—”
My heart falls because I expect that she’ll say she’s sorry about my parents, but she says, “—that you had to leave. That must have been really rough.”
“Thank you,” I say, and it feels like I could cave in on myself.
“Oh, honey!” She hugs me again, smoothing my hair with her hand. I think it’s the first time anyone has comforted me like this since my grandfather died. “It’s okay. Cry if you need to. It’s okay, sweetheart,” she whispers into my ear.
Mrs. Davis seems fine to me, but I know she’s not, and that makes me sad too. When I finally contain myself and pull away, she wipes my cheeks with her sleeve.
The porch lights go on and the doorbell rings. Eddie tromps up from under the house. “I. Have. The. Power!” he shouts before he sees us.
Mrs. Davis startles. “You boys are so noisy!”
“Shit! Are you okay, Freya?” Eddie asks.
“I’m fine,” I say, wiping my eyes, hoping I haven’t smudged my mascara, feeling silly that I wore any makeup at all.
“Did my mom punch you?” He grins and winks at Mrs. Davis.
Mrs. Davis laughs. “John, you’re absurd,” she says, and Eddie’s face falls.
“Ma, it’s Ed.”
She stares at him, and even though she still seems confused, she says, “Oh, I know. I know. Ed. Of course I know.”
“Maureen is going to be here in ten minutes, Ma.” He looks at me. “Are you okay hanging out until she gets here?”
“I don’t mind waiting,” I say.
“I don’t! Need! A babysitter, John!” Mrs. Davis shouts.
Eddie takes a deep breath. “Ma, you love Maureen.”
“I can stay here alone. Get out of here. Go.”
I shake my head. “Mrs. Davis, I’d love to stay and catch up. Eddie, could I have some tea?” I ask. “I’d really love a cup of tea.”
“I have tea,” Mrs. Davis says. “I should have offered. I’m so sorry. Where are my manners? I’ll get it.”
“We talked about the stove, Ma. Remember?”
Mrs. Davis nods. “Okay.” She looks at me and mouths, “I’m sorry,” and points to Eddie, shaking her head.
“How about I make it and you show me how?” I ask, feeling awful for having started an argument when I was trying to help. “You always made the best tea, Mrs. Davis.”
“You’re such a sweet girl, Freya,” she says, petting my hair, giving Eddie a sharp look.
“She thinks I’m my dad a lot,” Eddie says when we get in the car after Mrs. Davis has settled in to watch Jeopardy with Maureen. “And she’s angry at him.”
“I’m so sorry.” When I left, John Davis had just had his second heart attack, and I remember Steena telling my mom she was keeping an eye on the obits because she’d love to get her hands on the Davis house and flip it if Mrs. Davis decided to sell. “When did your dad die?”
“He didn’t,” Eddie says. “He split when he found out she had dementia.”
“Are you serious?”
“After thirty-seven years of marriage. After she took care of him through three heart attacks. My brother lives in Stony Brook with his kids. He comes up to help sometimes, but it’s hard for him, you know? He’s got a lot on his plate. Meanwhile, my dad’s living in Florida in a condo on a golf course with no responsibilities. He never even fucking played golf. It’s ridiculous.”
It’s strange how the little details enrage us when the big ones are too vast to hold. I repeatedly find myself choking back anger over the sheer audacity of the trip Step was planning, because that’s easier than reckoning with the clear-cut hurt from all the ways he broke my heart.
“Honestly,” Eddie says, “she’s better off without him. I wish he’d left sooner and she could have had some fun in her life before all of this.”
“It must have been a shock.” I’m certainly shocked by it. Mr. and Mrs. Davis always seemed like a TV-sitcom couple. When I was a kid, I thought my parents were the only ones who weren’t happy—that our pain was unique and shameful—but there are so many ways for people to let each other down.
“The thing that makes me sad is how unshocking it is,” Eddie says. “I was hoping this was the moment when he’d stand up. Redeem himself at the end. But he just kept… being himself.”
Eddie packed us a little cooler with beer and pasta salad and slices of watermelon. We drive to Deans Bridge even though it’s close enough to walk. “Who wants to carry a cooler that far?” he says. Which makes sense because we are both sore from working on the roof all morning.
The summer I was six, everyone in the neighborhood stood on the side of the road one night watching a movie crew shoot a scene on this bridge. Steena got bored and went home as soon as she realized that none of the actors in the movie were actually there—just Meryl Streep’s stunt double driving a car over the bridge again and again. But I was fascinated that the same bridge we drove over all the time looked like someplace else entirely. They’d tied the tree branches down to make them sag lower and lit up the night with the brightest lights I’d ever seen. I stayed with Step to watch until I couldn’t stop yawning and he said it was past my bedtime, so we had to walk home. The next time Bee’s mom drove us to art class after school, the bridge was back to normal, like nothing special had ever happened there.
Deans Bridge has been closed for more than a decade now. There are balusters on either side to keep commuter traffic from cutting through our quiet little neighborhood. We’re not supposed to be here either, but there are no houses this far down the road, so it may as well be wilderness now. We sit on a blanket on the middle of the bridge to eat our food and drink our beer. We watch a blue heron land on the river, see fish jump from the water to feast on mosquitoes. Sunset fades into dusk while Eddie traces letters into the palm of my hand and I try to guess what he’s spelling.
We have S-E-X in his truck like a couple of high school kids, Journey playing on the radio, my knee hitting the door handle. It’s all so real and sweet and I am present for every little moment. I’m awed by the thick patch of honey-colored hair at the center of his chest, and how, with my legs wrapped around him, I can feel the strength of the muscles hidden by his comfortable belly. I want him with desperation that is delicious in its own right. Even when he’s finally inside me, the wanting courses through my body, like there could never be enough. Until all of a sudden, he feels like everything.
When we’re sticky with sweat, still breathing hard, he holds me close, runs his hands through my hair.
“I love you, Freya,” he says. His body is trembling, but his voice is steady and sure. “I know we both have… complications. And I don’t want you to feel any responsibility about it. I just want you to know.”
“I love you,” I say, and I do think I mean it. There isn’t any part of how I’ve ever felt about Eddie that couldn’t easily be described as one kind of love or another.
We stay for hours, longer than we should. We say we’re going to leave, and then we stay for more. When the night sky starts to lighten to rich royal blue, we finally concede to going home.
Eddie’s car won’t start. We drained the battery. So we get out and walk. It’s not that far.