7
The next morning, the doctor told me they weren’t ready to take Si off the ventilator. She had to stay in the medically induced coma a little longer. They were being cautious.
So, I drove home.
The day had an unrelenting grayness, like no matter how high the sun rose, it was going to stay wrapped up like this.
The Denny’s sign dripped with snowmelt. A woman with all her possessions in a Piggly Wiggly cart was smoking on the berm outside a Dunkin’ Donuts.
In the Walmart parking lot, a man and a woman were screaming at each other, and a torn package of diapers was spilled on the ground around them. It was nine o’clock in the morning.
What the fuck was I going to do?
Maybe that was a shitty thing to worry about, but I couldn’t shake it.
Si was in the hospital. Si was in a medically induced coma.
And even if they got her off the ventilator today, even if they woke her up, and there were no complications, and she went home this afternoon, she wasn’t going to be in any condition to work.
She’d need weeks to recover. Maybe months.
She wasn’t going to be standing on a stool in my basement, shoulder squared to a joist while she mounted a brace.
I was screwed.
I was beyond screwed. I was totally, royally fucked.
Because even though I was good at what I did, and even though I knew a fair bit and could figure out a lot more, I wasn’t Si.
I didn’t have her experience. I didn’t have her skills.
Maybe I could finish the house on my own, with enough time.
But I didn’t have time. I had—what? Thirteen days? Twelve?
I couldn’t do it. Not in twelve days. Probably not in a month.
When I got home, I parked. And I sat there for a while. The thin sunlight on my face did nothing to warm me. I closed my eyes. Maybe I’d stay there forever.
One pill would be like throwing a door open. An escape hatch. Not to feel so tense all the time. Not to feel so tight. Not to feel so fucked.
I went inside.
In the pale light that made its way through the windows, the house looked even worse somehow.
All the shit we’d left piled everywhere—empty boxes, half-used buckets of mud, leftover bathroom tile that we’d decided to hang on to just in case, sample-sized cans of paint.
Dusty footprints crisscrossed the floor. Bare wires hung overhead.
There was so much fucking work to do.
Time for a spot check.
How am I feeling? Very fucking overwhelmed.
So, accept it. Accept that you can’t do all of it. You can’t control things. You can’t make Si better. The world does what it does, and you just have to do your best to go along with it.
What could I do? Well, the easy stuff. Mount the light fixtures so there weren’t bare wires sticking out all over the place.
Get rid of all this shit. Clean. I couldn’t do the fine-detail carpentry, but I could get the kitchen cabinets into place.
Maybe. What I couldn’t do right, maybe I could make look good.
After all, the house tour was just for people to walk through. They just had to see a good house.
Okay. Maybe. Maybe there was a chance.
Actually diving into any of the projects right then seemed like too much.
What I wanted to do was take a handful of ibuprofen because my neck was fucking killing me and crawl into bed.
Instead, I started doing what Si and I should have been doing from the beginning—I started straightening up.
I hauled the tile down to the basement, where we’d keep it in case we needed to replace a piece, or maybe we’d come up with another use for it.
Same thing went for any of the stuff we could still use—the bags of mortar, the buckets of mudding compound, pieces of drywall that Si and I had left leaning against the walls because we’d been too busy to take care of them.
Then the trash—there was so much fucking plastic wrap, so many empty bags, so many pieces of scrap lumber Si wouldn’t let me pitch because I might need that.
I carried it all outside. The day still only seemed half-awake, but it was a little brighter, and the cold made my eyes sting in a good way.
I was letting myself in the back when I heard the thumping at the front door—regular, insistent, and if I had to guess, annoyed.
When I opened the door, Noah stood there.
He was dressed the way he’d been the night before: another oversized hoodie, another pair of fleece-lined leggings, another pair of Uggs.
The heavy winter coat hung open, the fur-lined hood pushed back.
In its place, he wore a bunny hat. The pearl choker had been replaced by a rainbow one.
The lone earring had been swapped out for one that was even danglier.
He raised his chin. He was wearing glitter again.
“Go away,” I said and shut the door.
But nothing like that had ever worked on Noah, which was why as I turned to head deeper into the house, I heard the door open behind me.
“We need to talk,” Noah said.
“No, we don’t.” I put my hands on my hips and tried to focus. What absolutely had to be done before the tour? The lights, but I’d already decided I could do those. The cabinets in the kitchen, but I already knew about that too. Noah was still there, like a prickle at the edge of my awareness.
“What happened?” Noah asked.
The pocket doors still wouldn’t open correctly.
For that matter, they wouldn’t shut correctly either.
Hell, they were barely hanging on their tracks.
Si had looked at them, but she thought we were going to have to tear out part of the wall to get to the track, and there was no way we had time for that now.
Maybe the best thing would be to keep people from going near them.
Noah must have noticed I was looking at them because he said, “I thought these didn’t work. When we bought this place, that lady said—”
He reached out.
“No!” I barked
But I was too late. He was already grabbing one of the pocket doors, giving it a tug.
And with a crash, the door came off its hinges and hit the floor.
I do not lose my shit, I told myself. I do not act like a fucking two-year-old throwing a tantrum. I’m a grown man, and sometimes life just happens, and the only thing I can control is myself.
But it was hard, repeating all that, because life didn’t happen. Noah happened.
“Oh my God!” Noah squeaked.
I headed into the living room and crouched in front of the heater.
Footsteps came behind me. “Howie, I’m sorry.”
I checked the fuel. The smell of kerosene wafted up.
“Here, I’ll—” The thump of wood on wood. Noah’s sounds of straining. A hint of whatever scent he was wearing floated over to me—floral. Rose.
The heater clicked once, and a ring of flames sprang to life. When I got to my feet, Noah was trying to lift the door. By its side.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“I can get it.”
“Leave it alone. You can’t do it like that; I’ll take care of it later.”
He let the door settle back against the floor. The pink was high in his cheeks now, and he held his hands at his side as though afraid to bump into anything else. He wouldn’t look directly at me.
“I’ve got a lot of work to do,” I said.
At the same time, he said, “I’m sorry about last night.”
“I don’t care. It was a mistake, and I’m not doing it. Tell your parents I had a family emergency. I had to go take care of my dad.”
Which was such a strange thing to say, the way it came rolling out so easily, when I hadn’t thought about my dad in years.
“Howie, I don’t—that’s not why I came. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. You were being really sweet, and I acted so shitty toward you.”
Now he did look me in the eye, and he was on the brink of tears.
Whatever I’d been about to say melted, and I heard myself mumble, “Forget it.” More seemed to be required, so I said, “I wasn’t—it was a weird night.”
He nodded slowly. And then neither of us seemed to have anything to say.
The kerosene heater hissed. Outside, on the street, a truck rumbled past. Noah hugged himself, and the puffer coat made rustling noises.
He took a step, turned, and I had this moment of relief like my ribcage was cracking open because he was leaving.
The bottoms of his Uggs were printed with bright red hearts.
“The house is really coming along,” Noah said.
I laughed once—sharp, short.
“It is! You and Si have done such a good job.” He seemed to be trying to find something specific to say because he looked around and added, “I love the floors.”
“Probably because you hated them so much before,” I said.
He shot me a grin over his shoulder. “They looked like someone had put an inch of epoxy on top of them.”
“Pretty damn close.”
He took another turn around the front room. “The windows are new.”
I grunted.
“You did a good job matching the casing.”
“Si did that.”
For some reason, that made him roll his eyes.
And because we’d been married once—still were married, as it turned out—I said, “What?”
“You always do that.”
I wasn’t all that smart, but I was smart enough not to respond to that.
“You always minimize your accomplishments.” He bent to inspect something. The coat rode up. The leggings were molded around a ten-out-of-ten bubble butt; Noah might have lost weight, but not in his ass. “You’re so talented, Howie. You’re good at everything you do.”
“Oh sure, that’s me. Fucking Man of La Mancha.”
Noah burst out laughing. “Man of La Mancha?”
Face hot, I shrugged. “I meant to say Renaissance man.” I didn’t add, But I was checking out your ass.
He laughed some more. He had this high, energetic laugh—when we’d first started getting to know each other, I’d thought he was nervous, but it turned out that was just Noah, wired for life.
“I know you and Si are a good team,” he said, hesitating by an outlet that was still missing a wall plate. “But the house tour is next week. Are you really going to be finished in time?”
It would have been tight before Si’s heart attack. Tight, but doable.