20. Bill
CHAPTER 20
Bill
"There's no way that Derek would have been fine with this," Ed Maxwell says as he bites into a triangular section of a cheese sandwich during lunch break.
Bill, who has long since started eating with his coworkers again, shakes his head as he takes a bite of the leftover chili soup that Jo has put into a thermos for his lunch. "No," Bill agrees. "He would not have been fine with it."
Ed turns to Jay Donovan, who has just set his own lunch box on the table next to Bill. "Hey, what ever happened to your wife joining the civil rights crowd to register voters?" Ed asks out of the blue.
Jay laughs uncomfortably as he pulls out his chair and sits. "I mean, she'd love to be a part of something bigger than herself--that's just Carrie--but obviously she has two children and a husband and a home, so I think, at least for the time being, she's staying put."
"You know who isn't?" Ed lifts an eyebrow like he's holding the keys to a piece of hot gossip. "Maxine Trager. I hear she's taken up with that nutty professor who got fired from Yale for being too radical."
Bill frowns. "Who?"
"You know all those protestors who came out after the accident? He's like their guru. Their shaman."
"Are you trying to tell me that a professor from Yale turned into some kind of a cult leader and decided he had a bone to pick with NASA?"
"That is exactly what I'm saying." Ed shoves the rest of his cheese sandwich into his mouth and chews.
"And you're saying that Maxine is somehow involved with him?" Bill is dubious.
Vance, who has been flipping through the sports section of the newspaper while they talk, looks up. "Jude has been trying to talk to her for months, but it sounds like she's really getting in deep with this movement."
"So that meeting that North had with the women a few months back--they weren't able to get to her and talk sense?" Bill sets his spoon down and puts the thermos to his lips to drink the broth.
"Jude tried," Vance says. He folds the newspaper and pushes it aside. "She offered to watch the little ones if Maxine wanted to get out and spend an afternoon or two a week volunteering or something like Jo does." Vance nods at Bill. "That did good things for Jo, right, Bill?"
Bill nods and continues drinking his soup.
"So ultimately, she kind of lost her mind?" Jay asks. "It has to be rough on her, being alone and raising three kids. And Derek dying while she was pregnant..." His face blanches at the thought. "Women go through their own things, but that had to be really tough. Maybe volunteering a few days a week wouldn't have been enough to give her focus. Maybe she needs something bigger."
"So you think it's okay for her to pack up her children and follow some snake charmer around the country?" Ed is appalled. "I'm kind of thinking that NASA didn't do enough to help her."
"She got a settlement," Jay says reasonably. "That amount of money should be enough to take care of her and the kids for years, even if she packs them up and moves north to be closer to family. But she's choosing to do something else, and that is a damn shame, but I'm not sure what else NASA could have done. Or if it's even their responsibility to fix things for her."
Bill is done with his soup and he recaps the container. "I think she's a grown woman who can make her own family decisions," he says firmly. "But is this the way I'd want my own wife to live if something happened to me? Hell no." He reaches for the banana in his lunch pail and starts to peel it.
"What would you want her to do if she was in Maxine's shoes?"
Bill thinks about it as he chews the first chunk of banana. "Move back to Minnesota. Be amongst friends and family. Get her life together that way."
"But if you weren't here, then you wouldn't have any say," Ed points out.
"True. And you never know how a major tragedy affects a person." Bill squints through the window out at the blue skies of late May. It's progressively gotten hotter the closer they've gotten to Memorial Day, and he feels tired. Tired and weary. The ongoing investigation into the accident has been gnawing at him, and Arvin North has grilled him up, down, and sideways as they prepare to go into query sessions that involve panels of experts. The stress has been rough on Bill's sleep and on his digestion.
The men continue to further debate Maxine Trager and the way she's dishonoring her late husband by turning into what Ed is referring to derisively as a "hippie." This catches Bill's attention; he's not overly familiar with the term, but he knows that it's something akin to a beatnik, and that it's a lifestyle that isn't looked upon favorably by most of the people he knows.
Jay is defending her to the other guys when Jeanie Florence walks into the break room. A shaft of sunlight touches her long, brown hair, and she turns her head in the noisy room to smile at one of the other female engineers, who is pointing to an empty round table in the corner of the room. Bill's eyes follow her.
"Hey," Todd Roman says as he sits on Bill's other side. He follows Bill's gaze and then turns his attention back to the lunch that his wife, Barbie, has packed for him. As Todd quickly bites into a sandwich, he elbows Bill. "Booker," he says, pulling Bill's attention away from Jeanie. "Earth to Booker."
Bill gives him a half-hearted smile. "Sorry, were you talking to me? I was lost in thought."
Todd shoots him a look and leans in conspiratorially so that the other guys won't hear. "You know, women talk."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning Rebecca picked up on Jeanie acting differently when you were around, and she mentioned to Susan in the engineering department that she thought there was something going on between you two, and Susan went and, I don't know--I lost the trail there, man. But someone told someone who told someone else, and now here I am, just simple old Todd Roman, trying to mind my own business, and I'm overhearing that one of my teammates is kissing a female engineer in the stairwell."
Bill can feel the color drain from his face. He has no response. There is nothing in his head that he can formulate into a viable sentence, and he is quite sure that his face is giving him away entirely. To laugh would be to sound like a maniac, and so he just sits there, staring at the vending machine near their table, thinking of what a mess he’s making of his life with this one simple act.
“I’m sorry, Todd,” Bill says evenly. He packs up his lunch and latches the metal pail as he stands. “I’m really sorry that you had to hear that.”
Bill walks away. He does not turn back. He does not give himself the satisfaction of knowing how Todd responds to his apology, because he does not think he deserves to be absolved of the discomfort and guilt that he’s currently feeling.
* * *
Jo is the one who generally takes the evening walks. She and Frankie have been out together, wandering the neighborhood under the starry night sky for the past couple of years. She often comes home smelling of cigarette smoke and Bill suspects that it’s not just the scent of Frankie’s cigarette that’s clinging to Jo, but that she’s indulging in one of her own every so often. He doesn’t mind—not really. If Jo’s biggest secret is that she’s sharing a smoke with her best girlfriend, then Bill is a lucky man and he knows it.
Tonight the air is clear and warm. It’s nearly June and not quite dark yet. There are children playing in the driveways and front yards, and every few houses he passes, Bill sees a man he knows from NASA outside sitting on the front steps with a cigarette, watering his lawn in shorts and a white t-shirt, or retrieving the evening paper from where it landed when the paperboy tossed it from his canvas bag.
Without meaning to, Bill finds himself in front of the Tragers’ house. The garage door is up, and Maxine wanders out with a box in her arms. She is thin; it’s nearly impossible to tell that she was pregnant only three or four months ago.
“Mind if I help you with that?” Bill calls from the sidewalk, not wanting to startle her.
Maxine turns. She has a scarf tied around her head, and her face is free of makeup. She looks young and lovely. “Oh! Hello,” she says.
She and Bill have been introduced on a number of occasions, but they have never socialized or had dinner at one another’s houses, so she looks as though she isn’t sure what to call him.
“It’s Bill,” he says. “Bill Booker. Jo’s husband.”
“Yes, yes. Of course.” Maxine waves a hand as she smiles tentatively. “I know. I’m sorry, I was just lost in thought. How are you, Bill?”
He approaches with his hands in the pockets of his plaid shorts. “I’m well, Maxine. How are you?”
She’s standing in the midst of a garage full of boxes, many of them with things inked on this sides like “Ben’s Room,” or “Kitchen.” Maxine puts her fists on her hips and squints out at the last lingering light that hovers on the horizon.
“I’m alive, Bill. Six months ago I wasn’t sure that I would be, but here I am.”
It’s an honest, straightforward answer, and Bill wants to ask her so many different questions. It’s unusual for a man who barely knows a woman to just approach and start peppering her with personal questions, but these are unusual circumstances, so Bill goes ahead with it.
“I have to know…how did you manage, Maxine? How did you get through the first days and weeks? If you don’t mind my asking, of course.” Bill nearly blushes as he realizes that he’s just asked a widow to relive the early days of her biggest loss.
Maxine smiles at him softly. “I woke up, I got my toddler out of her crib, and I made a pot of coffee. I had friends who checked in. Some days I wasn’t sure I would make it or that I wanted to, but then the baby I was carrying would kick me and it was a hard reminder that life goes on.” She shrugs. “It just does. It has to.”
Bill nods as he takes this in. He’s still standing with his hands in his pockets when a sprinkler across the street kicks on loudly. “But what’s this I hear about you leaving Stardust Beach with some professor?”
This makes Maxine laugh. “That sounds like I’m running off with another man, which—I can assure you, Bill—I am not.” She pauses. “Professor Morse is in his sixties and he has some really big ideas. When I realized that NASA had let my husband die, I needed to do something. The protests at the Cape were something small, but then I stumbled into something bigger. This is a movement. This is an opportunity to get in on the ground floor with people who want to make this country a better place. People who want to make a difference. I need that, Bill. My kids need that. Our country needs people who are invested in its improvement, and not complicit with its demise.”
Bill feels as though her words are somehow canned; they sound to his ears like propaganda handed out by whoever is leading this charge to “fix America.” But what does he know? Maybe all these beatniks banging on about change know things that Bill Booker doesn’t.
“So you’re going to go with him, but…I’m sorry, it’s none of my business.”
“Professor Morse and his wife have been very kind to me and the children. I’m taking all my belongings up to my parents’ house in Virginia, and then I’ll join them in Alabama.”
That clears things up for Bill, though it was never his business anyway to understand whether Maxine had already found love again. He’s just worried about her, and the thought that some smooth talker might have preyed on the weakness of a lonely, broken woman has tugged at his heart. But this sounds like Maxine knows what she’s doing.
“Wait,” Bill says, backtracking. “What do you mean about NASA ‘letting’ Derek die? How do you figure?” He frowns at her, puzzled. “Again, if you don’t mind my asking.”
It’s Maxine’s turn to look puzzled. “You know the same things I know, Bill,” she says, her hazel eyes holding his gaze and burning him with intensity. “You tried to stop the mission right before launch, and they wouldn’t listen to you.”
“How do you know that?”
Maxine looks at the sprinkler across the street, and then back at Bill. A flicker of amusement passes over her pretty features. “I just do. I would venture to say that everyone in Stardust Beach knows things that other people think are secrets.”
Bill feels naked as she stares at him with her hard gaze. He wants to ask what she means—what she knows—but he doesn’t. Hearing the words cross Todd Roman’s lips that day at lunch had been startling enough. To hear that the gossip mill was turning hard and fast enough to spread details to the wives and widows of the entire neighborhood fills Bill with mortification. And worry—certainly word will get to Jo this way.
Bill pulls his shoulders straighter and sucks in a big breath. He nods. “You’re right. We all know things and hear things, but we don’t always know or hear the truth.”
“Mmmm,” Maxine says, sounding noncommittal.
“Anyhow,” Bill says. “I wanted to stop and offer to help you with anything you need as you get ready to leave.” He gestures at the stacks of boxes in her garage. “Feel free to put me to work.”
As he offers, Bill isn’t sure why he’s doing it: is he being a kindly neighbor? Is he seeking some sort of redemption for the fact that his delay in speaking up may have played a part in Derek’s death? Is he trying to do something good to balance the fact that he and Jeanie have done something bad—a sort of karmic retribution? He decides to chalk it up to doing a plain old good deed.
“Thank you, Bill,” Maxine says, taking a step back from him. Their conversation has ended, and he can tell that she needs to get back into the house where the children are no doubt waiting. “I appreciate that. And I’ll definitely let you know.”
Bill walks away slowly, turning back one last time to see Maxine closing the door to the garage for the evening. He got the distinct impression that the two of them are somehow comrades in arms; two outcasts, two wrongdoers, just attempting to put one foot in front of the other as they go about their lives and try to survive.
Everyone is judging Maxine for throwing her kids into some sort of cockamamie scheme to travel America and protest random things, but certainly anyone who knows what Bill has done is judging him as well. He’s not only the man who didn’t speak up soon enough before a tragic accident, he’s also the man who is married to one woman, but passionately kissing another in a stairwell at work while tragedy is about to occur.
But the thing that really sticks with him as he walks home in the encroaching darkness is this: if every woman on the Cape knows about him and Jeanie, and if Todd Roman has even heard about it, then how long until Jo knows?
His blood runs cold and he picks up his pace. He suddenly wants to be nowhere but home.