What You Need Page 9

  She said, “Awful! You are awful! Why don’t you let us be and then you can fuck that babysitter?”

  I said, “Okay, what? Wait, wait, wait. First of all, language, honey.” I put Jaxon down on the sofa then, just swung him down, and he was upset, he put his face in his arms, poor guy, all that commotion. Anna started crying back over there at the dining room table. I said, reasonably now, snapping back out of that hockey frame of mind, back to being a calm husband and dad, “Irina, get it under control. You look like a wild woman. You look terrible. Where’s pretty Irina?” I said, “Where’s the pretty girl I married? You need to be pretty.” I tried to get a pause, and a deep breath, then a smile. The smile would mean we were out of the woods. “Right?” I said. “It’s why I keep you around.”

  It was one of those things where, again, you know, these are all things I used to say, and people would love me for it. Women, girls, their mothers. It’s like Wolters and I were talking about once, about how if you’re tall and cut and have nice clothes and you follow a girl around, it’s romantic, but if you’re ugly and poor? Then you’re creepy. You’re a stalker.

  Irina was quiet for a moment. She caught her breath, but there was no smile. The dog was growling, but not barking, and I could hear his claws skittering across the ceramic tile in the kitchen, coming closer to us. Anna cried in the back of her throat, but quietly. It was sort of still for a moment. I was breathing heavy, in through my nose, out through my mouth, in through my nose, out through my mouth. Jaxon broke the quiet. He rolled over on the couch and he was looking up at us standing there.

  Then, for reasons I just can’t even, like I don’t even know, he started saying, “Shit on your head, shit on your head, shit on your head,” and I don’t even know where he learned that. Who would say that?

  I looked at Irina with this confused look on my face, and I said, “Where in the hell would he learn something like that?” and Irina went right into attack mode, screaming at me, “What does that mean? Are you saying I am bad mother that I teach him these bad things?” and just losing it. When you get somebody where it hurts most, you know, they tell you that with how they react.

  Finnegan, he came over now and he was bouncing around our legs and barking again like crazy, nipping at my pant legs. I gave him a little kick and he came right back, barking, nipping.

  “You say I am bad mother,” Irina said, “but what other woman would be mother of your kids?”

  I said, “What? Come on!”

  Irina said, “Oh, shit on your head, shit on all your heads! I did not come here for this!”

  Then I said to her and to Jaxon, to both of them, because it is another one of our rules, I said, “Bathroom words stay in the bathroom.”

  “I know rules!” she wailed. Like, I have never heard her scream like that.

  The dog, he was barking louder, I couldn’t believe it. I thought the neighbours would, you know, like maybe we could expect the cops to ring the doorbell any minute. I wanted everyone to quiet down, I thought being quiet and sitting down and taking deep breaths would be useful, would change the feeling in the room enough that we could make ourselves understood.

  “Shit on your head, shit on your head, shit on your head,” said Jaxon.

  “We need to calm down, everybody here,” I said, but the dog kept barking and Anna kept sobbing, and Irina was making fists and pushing my chest with them. She said, “I have had enough of this.” Which was worrying to me, it told me she was trying to check out of the conversation. So I went down to the front door, and Finnegan followed me like I guessed he would, because I think he saw me as the aggressor in everything that was happening, so I opened the front door and I pushed him outside with my foot and then I slammed the door and I watched out the little window. He just stood there for a minute, tilting his head, but then he saw something, like a bird or a squirrel, and he bolted. Right out across the street—I watched to make sure he didn’t get hit by a car—and then through a couple of front yards, right over the Maxwells’ flowerbed, and around the corner, gone, like he couldn’t wait to get away from us. Who could blame him, I guess. All that screaming.

  The kids freaked and ran to the front window to look for Finnegan, but Finnegan was totally gone by then. And Irina got real quiet, didn’t even try to comfort the kids, she just came over and got right into my face, and she said, “You are awful. You don’t have a heart. I hate this! And I hate you!”

  “Irina,” I said, “you be careful.” I said, “You know I could still send you back.” And I regretted that right away, if I can be honest with you. Her face just turned to stone. I guess it was hard to hear what I’d said, and I wasn’t even sure it was true. But it felt true. I felt very angry and truly powerful, and like I could do anything I wanted. There were hot tears running down her cheeks and chin and her neck. Right down into her blouse. And I took a breath and I looked at her. The redness cleared from in front of my eyes, it was like clouds blowing away and then a big blue sky, and I could see her clearly. It made me happy and sort of sad at the same time. She was so beautiful. Thin and made-up and delicate. So pretty and lacy. She had worked hard to keep herself that way for me. She was still, I could see then, the same beautiful girl I saw eight years ago, the same girl I had picked from the pages of that catalogue.

  “Asshole,” she said, and then, in another one of those moments where if I had it back, you know, but I couldn’t help myself, I went back to the front door and I opened it, and I said to Irina, “Why don’t you run away, too, like the dog? See how far you get?” But that was crazy, and I knew it. I mean, where would she go?

  “I cannot believe I came here for this,” she said, then went upstairs and shut our bedroom door.

  “Well, you did!” I called after her.

  The rest of that day I was Public Enemy Number One, and nobody said much to me. I said to them, I get it: the dog. Okay. But you can’t undo things.

  That was a rough night, too, I’ll admit. All I got was a good look at Irina’s back. But in the morning, I said okay, let’s go find Finnegan. And everybody cheered, and I felt good in the way a man does when he is happy with his decisions. We all felt the hope of a new day. My wife and my children sitting comfortably in our beautiful and roomy Santa Fe on a Sunday morning, me at the wheel, my driving gloves so snug and soft. Jaxon and Anna had so much hope in their eyes. We were united in purpose, all for one. How many times like that do you really get in this life? I’d like to know that. Everyone’s tears had dried because they finally saw me for the compassionate man that I am, and together we shared a mission: we would drive the streets as a family, back and forth, around and around, and we would search and search, and we would find that damned dog, or we would fail trying.

  THE RATE AT WHICH HE FELL

  The third company I called said they could have a guy there that afternoon. The other two would have me waiting until the end of the week, and I’ve always felt like if you want my money, in this case thousands of dollars of it, you’d better jump through hoops, like being there the day I call, no matter what you’ve got on your plate.

  “I can have my guy there this afternoon, if you’re gonna be home,” the receptionist said when I called Anderson Roofing Contractors.

  “Yes, great,” I said. “I’ll be here all day. I work shift, so.”

  “Great,” she chimed.

  Three days earlier I had been up in the attic digging around for evidence of mice, which I was sure I wouldn’t find. We’d been lying in bed reading a few nights before that when we heard a scratching-scuffling noise that Ellie said was mice in the attic. I felt no, it was squirrels in the gutters. But she said, “You’d better check that out.” Ellie doesn’t crawl into tight spaces. She doesn’t do attics. So up I went and I didn’t find any mice, which was a nice sort of vindication, but I did find dampness on the underside of the plywood up there, which had me feeling sick about the cost of a new roof. Later I climbed up on the roof to have a closer look, and sure enough, the shingles looked
like hell. Throating: that’s what they call it, I’ve since learned, when the little gaps between the shingle tabs start to wear away and get wider, and that’s where the water finds the wood. We had plenty of throating. I climbed down and told Ellie about it, and she said, “What’ll that cost?”

  I dread these adult decisions, avoid them when possible and download them onto Ellie when there’s a chance I can do so without being overly obvious. Minor adult decisions, like whether or not to tuck your shirt into your jeans, I can sort of handle. But then there are giant ones, like do I spend $7000 on a new roof, and where do I get that $7000? In our household, most of the big decisions require several rounds of negotiation. Ellie and I usually each advocate for one side, and we bring our best arguments to the kitchen table where we sit over coffee or beers, and we have at it, in a civilized fashion. Like our decision to name our son Jordan, which I sort of regret now. There are two other Jordans in his senior kindergarten class, and one of them’s a girl. But Ellie lobbied hard for Jordan, and she came to the table with notes, research, a well-considered argument. I wanted something simpler, easier on the tongue, like John or Will or Billy. But I lost that one. I should have been better prepared.

  This one about the roof I sort of won, if you can call shelling out several grand to a tradesperson a victory of any sort. What’s the word for that? Pyrrhic. But in the end she said, “I guess you’d better call someone.” That meant the roofing file was now squarely in my lap, and mine alone. I dug out the phone book.

  But it wasn’t until three days later that I finally picked up the phone. I shouldn’t have waited even those few days; it was November. Anything that was going to be done would have to be done soon. But I was walking around the house in a funk as though nothing had been decided. Ellie would ask me at dinner, “Call anybody yet?” I’d say no, I hadn’t, I was thinking. But I wasn’t thinking, I was delaying, and by not pushing the matter she was complicit. That’s us: we never finish the job. We might sort the laundry and get it in the washer and then move it to the dryer, load after load, and we might even get it folded, but it’ll sit there, folded in baskets in the middle of the living room floor for days.

  So finally I called. The first two places, the outfits with the biggest ads, wanted me to wait a few more days, but Anderson—ARC said the ad in big letters, and then underneath in smaller ones NDERSON OOFING ONTRACTORS—said they’d have their guy out that afternoon. So I waited.

  A blue truck pulled up. I was sitting at the kitchen table after lunch and I could see right through the living room and out the front window to the street. The truck was an F-350 with a cap and the letters ARC on the door. All I could see inside was the silhouette of a man in the driver’s seat hunched over something. Papers, I imagined, or maybe a Blackberry or phone. He took his time getting out. I considered putting on my boots and meeting him out front, but then I thought no, just wait for him to ring the bell. Ellie was upstairs with Jordan. I think they were building something with blocks. Jordan’s four and he likes to build roads with wooden blocks—just long strings of them laid out on the floor—but he says he needs help. Help amounts to you putting a few blocks down in the same sequence he’s established, and then him saying, “Not there!” Ellie’s got more patience for it than I do. She’ll play along, ask him for the parameters of the situation, which are always shifting, whereas I’ll usually just say, “Fine, you don’t want help, be my guest, I’ll be downstairs.” Ellie sees the parental role as something like a shepherd: protect and point the way, always with extreme patience. I’m more like a traffic cop.

  Finally the bell rang and I opened the door to find a walking handshake standing there, a bristly head and shiny dark eyes with a big, practised smile. “Mr. Mazurek?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, returning the handshake and the smile. He said, “Name’s Terry Locks,” and he put a business card in my hand. It confirmed his name. So he wasn’t lying about that.

  “Call me Nick, Terry,” I said, and then I put on my boots and moved outside to join him on the lawn. We stood beneath the bare maple and turned back to look at the house.

  “Okay,” he said, and then paused like he’d forgotten why he was there. “What do we have here…” He began looking in his folio for something, then kind of gave up and flipped it open to a blank sheet of graph paper.

  “How old is the roof, Nick?”

  “Oh, now, see, I don’t know that. Bought the house three years ago and they didn’t mention a new roof. I’d guess eight, ten, twelve years. I really don’t know, Terry.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “We’ll take a look-see. Get the ladder out and go on up.” Then Terry Locks just stood there a moment, looking at, or more likely past the roof. It was November, as I’ve said, and cold. Most of the leaves were already gone, and a mean wind was taking care of the stragglers. I thought maybe that was why Terry’s eyes were watering. Then he fixed them on me, intensely, and he sort of bit his lower lip, like he needed steeling before going on.

  “Good,” I said. “Okay.”

  “Right,” said Terry. “Right, I’ll get the ladder.” Then he brought a ladder from the back of his blue truck, a fold-up ladder that looked very light given how he was carrying it. He brought it up the driveway and began unscrewing the locking joints and straightening it out. He said nothing. Then, the ladder straight and locked, he leaned it up against the house, just above the front door, and put his right foot on the first rung.

  “Here I go,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Yep,” he grunted, and vaulted up the ladder like a squirrel climbing a tree. Suddenly he was on the roof. He walked around a bit. I walked to the middle of the front lawn so that I could see him. He moved around slowly, saying, “Right, okay, yep.” He took his tape measure off his belt, passed it from hand to hand, and clipped it back on.

  “What’s it look like up there?” I asked him, trying to spur him on. “How do those shingles look to you?”

  “Total frigging devastation,” he said, “like Hiroshima.” What I thought, but did not say, was: What about Nagasaki? The bomb dropped on Nagasaki was bigger but everyone remembers Hiroshima. I guess it’s more important to be first than to be bigger.

  He walked around some more on spongy legs, like he was testing his own weightlessness. Once or twice he just put his head back and stared up at the sky with his knees flexed, and it looked for all the world like he was going to lose his balance and fall. I saw a man fall from a roof once. I was two hundred yards away when his ladder slipped out from under him. There was a clack and a flat thud. I watched the whole thing from a park across the street, and I remember being surprised by the rate at which he fell. I don’t know what I expected; a wounded bird tumbling back to earth? But it was more like a Slushie thrown from an overpass.

  I did nothing, just stared, took a few steps toward him, then felt like I could never get there in time to be of any help. His family filed out the front door and one by one gasped in horror. It wasn’t a nice thing to see, and I didn’t want to see it again, especially not on my own lawn.

  But Terry Locks did not fall, thank goodness. He got his tape back out and he measured the roof first one way, and then the other, and then he inspected the flashing on the edge of the roof, and the chimney, and then he looked at all of the vents. He jotted things down on his pad. Over him the flat sky looked like a thing laid atop us, white and solid.

  He lowered himself down the ladder with one hand, the other clamped onto his notepad, and in a moment he was folding up his ladder again. Then he sidled up the driveway and met me on the front step.

  “I’ve got some numbers to run here,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Could take a few minutes.”

  “Sure, okay.”

  Terry the roofing guy stood before me, seemingly uncertain. “Okay,” he said, but he did not look okay. If ever a person did not look okay, it was Terry Locks as he stood on the front step of my home, swaying almost imperceptibly in
the November wind. His face looked as though something behind it, something which should be girding it, had crumbled. His eyes were empty. I thought maybe he’d been drinking. It would explain the swaying.

  “Do you want to come in,” I asked him, “maybe have a seat while you run those numbers?”

  “I think I would like to do that, Nick,” he said. So we went inside where it was warm and bright.

  Sometimes the weirdest things in the world don’t seem weird at all while they’re happening. It almost became a joke. He was sitting at the table so long, hunched over his notepad, that we sort of forgot he was there. Jordan came downstairs to show Terry some drawings he’d done.

  “This is a dragon, but he can’t fly. Are you the man who’s going to fix our roof?”

  “I might be that man,” said Terry.

  Every once in a while Ellie or I would ask Terry how the numbers were looking. The more we asked the more it became kind of a funny thing, and in time Terry was in on it. “Just a bit more figuring,” he’d say, then laugh, or “You can’t rush a man at his work, ha ha ha.”

  Soon Ellie was offering him afternoon tea. Before I knew it, Terry was sitting on the couch reading Jordan The Gruffalo, and doing a damn good job of it. His Gruffalo voice was impressive, it kept the boy in stitches.

  The truth is nobody was really in a hurry to see Terry go.

  After dinner he offered to help wash up. Once Jordan was in bed, Terry watched TV with us, laughing and making snide remarks just like we would. He was funny. He seemed a lot more at ease than he had been that afternoon. He had gone from tradesman to something more, which I suppose is what happens when you let a man put his feet up on your coffee table and watch your flatscreen for a few hours.