So Much Love Page 10

  He stops making sounds. She can’t be sure if he’s breathing, but she won’t go closer to check. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to tell. She’s shaking so violently and the cuts on her hands are throbbing and the bright bright light in her eyes. The light tube is barely more than the metal cap at the end now, and she lets it fall from her hand. Catherine starts climbing the stairs toward the door, which maybe he left locked and maybe he didn’t. Dex never mattered, and he matters even less now.

  Her hand is slick with sweat and blood, and it hurts when she grasps the doorknob, but she does not look down. It is hard to look anywhere, the room is so bright. The sun will be a far greater challenge.

  The House That Modern Art Built

  All the houses in the subdivision were enormous and sitting on little tiny lots, so they looked like fat people pressed up against each other in bus seats. But I was doing the kitchen, which was decent, and once you’re inside you don’t see the outside. I guess that’s what the morons buying these three-car-garage monsters thought too.

  We had a list of custom specs from the particular moron who had bought this place, including crown moulding, which I thought was basically assfuckery in a mid-1990s nothing-scape like this one, but Edwin could say, Sean, the customer is always right a thousand times and still not get tired of the words. I liked working for Edwin because he gave me a ride out from town in his van, and because of the gorgeous miter saw he had. I’d been using it for the windows and now for the mouldings. I didn’t love my job, but to aim the laser line and then slide the blade arm through the pine like air—it was satisfying.

  The actual house was never going to be beautiful, but that wasn’t the point—I was hired to do a job and I was going to make sure my work was amazing even if it was going to get swallowed up by the larger shittiness. Like you can see this ugly-ass woman and be revolted when you first look at her, but maybe she’s got really good teeth or gorgeous tits or something, so you can get through talking to her by just focusing on that.

  That’s what I was thinking as I got out of Edwin’s van at 7:57. We were only going to get a few hours of work in before the sun was so hot the hammer would skid out of your hand. That’s the way August is here: disgusting. But the subdivision was half-built with people already living in it, and they had some rule that we couldn’t be loud before 8 a.m., so we mainly lost working in the cool in the morning. Just carrying the toolbox and some wood into the kitchen, I was sweating. I couldn’t be drinking much water when I was working indoors because we were getting to that stage in the build where if you left something messed up or wet or whatever, you might get called out by Edwin, or even by the owners if they showed up for a surprise look-see. Sometimes it was worse than being at home with Julianna because if she bitched too much about stuff on the floor, I could usually make her shut up, but at a job, I couldn’t talk back—not if I wanted to stay. I hated owners, hated worrying about spilling a bit of water like a little kid, sometimes hated goddamn Edwin, but I loved those saws.

  The thing was, assfuckery or not, the work of damn crown mouldings was nice, even in a stupid room. The house had forty-seven neighbours just like it, slick white suburban boxes with no need for crown anything—but I liked cutting the simple angled lines, fitting the joins, smoothing the edges. Julianna was a poet, all staring out windows and imagining shit, but I liked real things, like the wood that framed the window. Things you could touch and feel proud of, instead of scribbles on a page. She told me someone in the city wanted to publish a bunch of her stuff as a book, which kind of blew my mind. Usually it seemed like me and her were in agreement that writing was just her way of wasting time, the way watching TV was for me. She did work at it, reading a bunch of poetry books from the library and writing the same things over and over, even though there wasn’t any point. When she heard about getting to publish her own book, Juli got so excited I didn’t say nothing to bring her down, but in my mind, I was wondering who was going to buy a bunch of pages about our stupid cat, Archie, and the time I was plastered and drove my brother’s truck over her garden. I read her poems of course, but afterwards I didn’t know anything more than I did before, didn’t feel any better or smarter, which I think is supposed to be the point of poetry. When I finished my day, all the windows in the house would be framed in—you’d think she would have seen the difference.

  When Edwin came in from helping the other guys pouring concrete in the garage, he was not as happy with my work as I was expecting.

  “Speed it along, please,” he said. Edwin didn’t smoke, but he always talked like he had a cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth. “This guy, he wants crown moulding so he can say he got crown moulding. It don’t need to be fit for a king. Quit with the perfectionism.”

  Now that pissed me right off. “You want me to stop and let Caleb or Joey do it?”

  “Those losers? Fuck no. Just make up time in the dining room, and wherever else. This ain’t fucking modern art, all right?”

  I kept my mouth shut and hustled it through the dining room without barely looking at what I was doing—I couldn’t stand to look. The day got hotter.

  —

  “This house job is going straight to shit. The owner is coming by every day, sometimes twice. He thinks we’re too slow, lollygagging on all these fancy extras he wanted. He walks around with his hands in his pockets inspecting stuff he doesn’t understand. I’m not even sure he knew what crown moulding was when he asked for it, maybe he just thought anything with the word crown in it had to be good. He sure did stare at it for a long time, sort of squinting, like he was trying to make it out.”

  “Oh, yeah? That’s crappy.” Julianna was getting dressed to go to work when I came in, which was sort of the problem with her job. She was a waitress at a fake-Italian restaurant because she never got paid anything much for her poems—not so far, anyway. Waitressing meant she was always out in the evening without me. She kept saying that she wasn’t “out” if she was at work. But the fact remained, she was at the restaurant with all these douchey pasta-eating guys, who would pat her ass if they got the chance, of course, because she had a sweet little curve back there, and she wore these fucking shorts that I could not believe were part of a uniform at a family restaurant—a saintly white blouse and these tiny black shorts like a Hooters whore. One time she’d been leaving for work when Edwin dropped me off, and he was practically hanging out the driver’s window watching her walk down the sidewalk. I’m sure it was the same with whatever guys were passing her all the way to the restaurant.

  “Today, hottest day of the summer, the owner just stood at the other end of the living room, fiddling with a tape measure like a little kid—pulling it out to watch it snap back. So fucking annoying. I was sanding up the ends before I started the window frames. I didn’t like to work when he was there, but you gotta get something done sometime, especially when he’s pushing for faster work. Of course he came over and looked at what I was doing and asked what I was sanding the end bits for. ‘It need that?’ He asked me that!”

  “Oh, jeez, I’m sorry, Sean.” She was doing up her shorts; she had to tug a bit to get the button done. I always told her to just scrape off the sauce and eat that, not the noodles, because carbs were bad for her ass. I don’t know if she listened to me—I bet she didn’t—but she still looked damn good, and had the tips to prove it. It was a blessing and a curse, that ass. “What did you say?”

  “Well, I’d’ve loved to not answer. But it was pretty clear I heard. So I just explained to him how yeah, you need to sand if you want a tight join. And he just fucked off—left, and took the tape measure too. What a loser!”

  I chucked my shirt into the corner—Edwin don’t allow the guys to be shirtless on site because he says it’s unprofessional, but in the van we all strip off fast—and was heading to the can when Julianna said, “Hey?” She was twisting her blouse over her stomach. “Sean?” Then she just stood there blocking the bathroom door while I was just sweating and dying to take a leak,
like she didn’t know she had said anything.

  “What, Julianna? What?”

  “I think Archie’s feeling sick today. Could you keep an eye on him?”

  “Archie?” She was watching me with her big dumb eyes, making me feel like I was the dumb one. “The cat? Oh, he’s fine. Cats are rodents; they take care of themselves.”

  “He’s not a rodent.” I only got a step forward before she grabbed my arm. Her hands were like ice, and I remembered why I liked her again. “I’ve just been so busy, with the extra shifts at work and trying to get the book ready and all. And then today I realized he might be sick—”

  I shook her hand off and took another step away. “Well, that is your own damn fault, Julianna. You have responsibilities here, you have a job that you need to keep, but instead you’re wasting time, writing shit no one wants to read—”

  “They’re going to publish it, Sean, I told you! A real publishing house sent me a contract.”

  “Yeah, yeah, for how much again?”

  “I told you, $500. That’s not nothing—and I put a lot of myself into that book. It’s important to me to get things right.”

  “And for $500 you’re going to kill the cat you supposedly love and lose the only job you can get.”

  “I won’t—I just wanted—”

  “Go to work, Juli, or it’ll be you and that cat both feeling sick.”

  —

  “They want to eat gravy but pay dry,” said Edwin—some fucking metaphor. After he kept talking a minute more, I realized Edwin was actually going on about the owner refusing to pay proper labour costs. It would’ve been nice to understand that earlier in the conversation.

  This was the next night: he ranted all the way to my place and then he wanted to come in. I knew he was hoping Julianna would be there. But what can you say when your boss drives you home and goes, “Got any beer?”

  At least she wasn’t there, though actually that pissed me off too—she should’ve scheduled her shifts so we were both home at the same time occasionally. And the cat was there, running ape-shit circles around our ankles. Edwin was eyeing the bottle of 50 I handed him as if I’d fished it out of the sea. He was reading the label for a full minute, even though there were about four words on there. I oughta’ve shown him one of Julianna’s endless poems—it would’ve taken him out of commission for a week.

  Finally he took a swig, swallowed, and looked down at the orange mess swirling around his feet. “Your cat?”

  “It’s Julianna’s.”

  “Seriously?” He bent down and gave it a testing pat, as if you could tell by the fur who it belonged to.

  “Seriously. You know a guy with a cat?”

  Edwin sat his fat ass in a chair. “I’ve known just about every thing in my time.”

  “I bet.” We drank in silence.

  Edwin leaned over the cat again and tugged at the silver tag on his collar. “ ‘Remember us with no familiar name’? What the fuck is that?”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s a poem. Julianna had some fucking idea about…I don’t know. The cat’s name is Archie, and the guy who wrote that poem is Archibald something, so it’s like—she loves that poet guy. I tried to read his book, but I guess I’m not a fucking poetry genius because it was all just trees and sadness to me.”

  Edwin nodded and shrugged and took another sip of beer. Really, he wasn’t a bad boss. He got the job done, and he didn’t put up with shit unless it was his own. I could’ve almost liked the guy if he didn’t have a hard-on for my girlfriend.

  “What’s she up to these days, Julianna?”

  “She’s workin’. Italian place by the arena.”

  He leaned back and narrowed his eyes like he was going to say something filthy and I clenched up. “Oh man, I love them garlic sticks. You eat free there?”

  “Naw, I gotta pay unless she brings leftovers home.”

  “How long till the end of her shift?”

  “Long. Hours.” I did not check the clock on the VCR.

  “Yeah. I bet if you go in there, though, she’ll set you up, right? Extra sauce, the good wine instead of the shitty house stuff?”

  God, he was so hot for her, even the food she served was sexy to him. “Dunno. I never tried that.”

  “You never know till you try.” He set the bottle on the table and stood, hitching his belt. “You tell Juli I might be stopping in some suppertime.”

  I thought about clocking him one but I needed the job. I was so hot and tired, and I’d drunk that beer so fast, I didn’t know if I’d heard what I thought I’d heard. So I just walked up the stairs with him, even though I didn’t want to climb those steep basement steps behind his swaggering ass, but I knew the door stuck and if you weren’t used to it you couldn’t get it open. It felt good to watch him fumble for a moment, though. When I closed the door behind him, the goddamn spooky-eyed cat was staring at me. I can’t take that shit. I knocked him with my foot just a bit and he flipped down a couple stairs—just to remind him to show a little respect. Cats land on their feet, my ass.

  —

  When I got home Friday night, I was pissed off because Edwin kept us waiting in the hot van for ten minutes while he shot the shit with the guy who installed the window glass. Then he kept a tenner off my pay because he said I’d busted a blade off the jigsaw and what he thought I would’ve been doing with a jigsaw out there I just don’t fucking know.

  There was nothing to eat. The only thing in the kitchen was a bunch of old notebooks on the counter, for some reason. I opened one at random and read a poem about ice on an ice-cream cone. It wasn’t bad, and I would’ve told Julianna so if she’d been there to hear it. I went out and picked up shrimp pad thai, came back, ate it while watching a movie where a dog plays basketball. Then I went back and read the poem again. I wondered if the ice cream she was writing about was from the shop down by the lake we used to go to back home—she thought it was romantic to walk and eat ice cream and look out at the water. Or maybe it was about the time we tried to make our own and it was a mess.

  The cat went up on the table while I was in the can and he stole a shrimp. I locked him in the pantry, tossed the cat-contaminated food, opened a beer, watched the rest of the movie, then Letterman. Nearly midnight and Julianna still wasn’t home. I shotgunned another beer in the kitchen. In bed I felt like I’d stay awake, but then it was morning and Julianna was curled beside me in a white linen ball, so I must’ve fallen asleep.

  Work continued to be bullshit all the next week—still hot, still dull, still the fucking owner begging us to make it fancy but then cut corners and Edwin agreeing. After all the time I spent on them cupboards, they put on ugly plastic door pulls. Like zits on a perfect round ass.

  “You can’t be telling the client what he needs. It’s the client who tells us.” Edwin was unloading boards from the truck—I didn’t even know what they were for. There was something else now?

  I tried to stay on topic. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but generally, doesn’t the client tell us at the beginning what he wants, and then leave things be? Correct me if I’m wrong, but the client is not usually in the house while we’re doing the work.”

  “It is what it fucking is, Sean. I pay you the same per hour whether the work makes sense or it don’t. This ain’t modern art, I told you. So earn your money and quit bugging me, okay?” He shoved the ends of some of the twelve-foot two-by-fours at me.

  I grabbed the wood and breathed deep. I needed all the oxygen I could get. “Fine.”

  We plonked the boards on the lawn. As I started to go, he said, “I was right—your Juli does help a guy out with a few extra breadsticks and the good wine.”

  I stopped with my back to him; I needed to work out what he was saying, if it was another of his fucking metaphors: Did he just go eat in Julianna’s restaurant, or did he actually lay her?

  “What’d you eat?” I said it like it was a code, which is all metaphor is. “If you’d told me you were going, I would’ve said get the
chicken parm. That’s the best.” I finally faced him; he was just smiling like an idiot, squinting into the sun.

  “Them lasagna rolls, man—those are the bomb.”

  “What time did you go? To the restaurant?”

  “Late…lateish. I figured if it was the dinner rush they wouldn’t like her chatting with a friend—” Edwin was not Julianna’s friend “—so I went just before close, like.”

  “Like.”

  “You’re a lucky man, Sean, and don’t forget it. She let me stay while they was closing up and we had a little chat. Sweetheart, that one. A real sweetheart.”

  “Chat?”

  “Well, I just asked her what was new. Imagine my surprise when she told me she has her own book of poetry coming out in a few months. How come you never told me that?”