Ryan Shoemaker
The Water Between Us
for J.
Lately when I call her at work, she’s taken to firing off questions, like she’s in the habit of keeping pace with the ringing phones and hurried conversations around her. With all those questions, she winds pretty easy. Just the realities of pregnancy, I guess. But maybe it’s more than that. Now she’s all business at work, all efficiency, nothing wasted. No idle chitchat. Just the facts.
She says, “You hear back yet on those jobs, Spencer?”
I say, “Not a word, Anne. Bad time to be out of work.”
She says, “And that employment agency on Auburn Way?”
I say, “Talked to them this morning. Truthfully, I think they’re tired of hearing from me.”
I’m calling her from home, dressed and boots on, with nowhere to go. Just me and the TV—but no news cycle. I can’t take it, all the talk about bankruptcy, bailouts, and unemployment rates. Makes me feel like a statistic. Instead, I got this infomercial on. The Ronco Rotisserie. Ron in a green apron cinched over a pressed pink shirt, hefting a roasted chicken for the audience, who can’t seem to get enough, grinning and shaking their heads in stupid disbelief. A man in an apron and a pink shirt, holding a roasted chicken—and that smile. I guess when you own the company, when it’s your show, you can smile like that, apron and all. But at least everyone seems happy.
Anne says, “And what about that place on C Street? Work Today, Paid Today, right? At least it’d get you out of the house.”
Ron slides an entire pork roast into a rotisserie oven. A dozen of his machines, loaded with hot dogs, bratwurst, racks of ribs, and stuffed chicken breast, whirl behind him. Work Today, Paid Today. I close my eyes. How do I tell Anne about it? How do I describe the dim waiting room, the scuffed floor and grimy lawn chairs, the sour smell of worry and fear? How do I explain all those sad, hungry faces? There’s no time. She’s too busy.
I say, “Anne, I’m telling you. Nothing.”
I hear her fingers tapping at a keyboard. A phone rings twice, then stops.
She says, “Something will come along.” But the words sound empty. Her mind is elsewhere, I can tell, her eyes fixed to a screen, puzzling out, just as she’ll do most nights at the kitchen table long after I’ve gone to bed, all the rows of numbers, the circles portioned into colored slices, the thin columns rising and falling—a language I can’t make sense of.
I say, “It’s in the cards, Anne,” and maybe I hear the same emptiness in my words. I touch the remote. Ron and the grinning audience and the rows of spinning rotisseries vanish, and there’s only a screen, shiny and black as a piece of obsidian. I have to stand up. I have to move. I have to get out of the house, out of this quiet that seems to press in when Anne’s not there, and lately even when she is. In this house, I’m beginning to feel as heavy and lifeless as the furniture. I tell Anne, “How about we meet up at Game Farm Park? Noon?”
The phone pressed to my ear, I can almost see Anne in her cubicle, the computer, the open calendar, the scroll of the mouse, the quick glance at her watch, her mind ticking through a half dozen small calculations, all the unavoidable adjustments to meet me. “Sure,” she says, “okay. But I have a meeting a one.” Then a quick sigh. “I have to go, Spencer. My manager wants to meet.”
#
Four years ago, when we got married, I was at Sandberg Construction in Algona, same job I worked for a year after graduating from Auburn High, same job I came back to after two years as a Mormon missionary in Lubbock, Texas. In all that time at Sandberg, I’d worked my way up from a shovel to an excavator. I’d learned enough to take pasture, nothing but field grass and blackberry thickets, and put in sewer and drainage, grade it, measure out sidewalks and streets, then lay asphalt and pour concrete.
Back then I’d say, “This is temporary, Anne, just until we save enough money for some equipment and a piece of land. I won’t have to work for anyone. My own company. My own crew.”
She’d say, “I like ambition.”
She was finishing up at Green River College and waitressing nights at Mitzel’s. Sometimes I’d stop in after work, steam rising from my damp Carhartt jacket. I’d squeeze into one of the padded booths, and then we’d pretend we didn’t know each other, like it was a game. She’d hand me a menu and fill my glass with water.
I’d say, “What do you recommend? The salmon? The steak?”
She’d say, “Sir, for you the salmon.”
I’d say, “No. The steak. Medium rare.”
I’d wink and run my hand down her thigh if she was close enough, give her breast a squeeze when she’d lean over to fill my glass.
She’d say, “Sir!”
I’d say, “Pardon me, Ma’am.”
After all day up to my knees in water and muck, digging trenches and laying pipe, I thought I deserved her attention. It seemed the proper order of things. A day’s work and a hot meal. Someday there’d be a house on a nice piece of land, a covered place for my equipment, a big workshop, a company I’d call my own, and a bunch of kids running around. I’d give Anne the life I thought she deserved.
Then last November Sandberg dies, right there in his pick-up on the 167. Heart attack. His wife sold everything, gave the crew a little bonus, cried a lot and told us how sorry she was.
That was right before the housing market bottomed out. Banks stopped loaning. No building. No hiring. The Great Recession, they’re calling it. And that’s where I’m at, not a prospect in sight.
But Anne’s moving forward. She finished her Associates and transferred all those credits into a Business Management major at UW Tacoma. Now she works in marketing for a biotech firm in north Auburn, some Singapore company unaffected by the economic dip. I should be happy for her, and I am, for the work she’s put it, and grateful for what she’s making, more than I ever did. She talks about wanting to be Director of Marketing, maybe a VP down the road.
But after ten months without work, nothing for me, just a dozen resumes in the wind. And all this time at home I’ve been thinking about when Anne worked at Mitzel’s. I don’t know why, but I can’t shake the image of me sitting there in a damp Carhartt jacket and muddy Danner boots, watching Anne weave through the tables with a pitcher of water in each hand. It’s like she’s moving toward something, real slow but moving. And then I see myself there in that booth, touching her thigh as she fills my glass, and I think, “He has no right. None at all.”
#
This is just a low moment in life’s ebb and flow, I guess, or at least my parents keep telling me that in one way or another, on the phone, when they drop by or invite us for Sunday dinner. They say life is just such that it’s hard getting a footing at first, that it’s all part of the Lord’s refining plan that will eventually reveal itself to me. They say it’s in God’s hands, on God’s time, but I wonder if they blame Anne, like her work has thrown our lives onto a different path than the one they took. Ever since she landed this job, I sense a change in how they see her, like how suddenly this girl from Buckley, the waitress and community college student they first knew, has become someone else, jumped from one world and up into another.
Now my mom’s taken to calling me every week, thinking I’m depressed, and maybe she’s right, in that way moms know things, like they’re tuned in to some deeper level. At some point, the conversation always comes to Anne and the baby, my mom saying something like how she’s sure Anne can’t wait to quit and stay home with the baby once I get a job.
What can I say? I thought having a kid would reset things to how we planned our life when we got married, back to the way we’d been taught and raised at church and at home, those primary songs we sang, that life of a man coming home each night to find his wife and kids there, all smiles and hugs. I thought having a kid would be the leap of faith God needed to open a door somewhere for me, even if it meant pulling up stakes for a while and moving the family to Colorado or North Dakota where some guys I knew from Sandberg were in the oil fields waiting out the recession. And now after all these months at home, with all that time, I can’t stop thinking in a way I never did when I had work. Anne quitting her job, giving it all up to stay home? When I think about it, this one strange thought keeps circling back, this idea of Anne and me as identical paper cutouts, same height, same shape, so no one could pick out man or woman.
“Maybe I’ll stay home with the kids,” I told my mom when she called last. The words surprised me, and I wondered in what dark, dusty corner of my mind that thought was sitting in. I had to laugh, like it was a joke, just to cut through what those words really meant. But in the silence between me and my mom, I marveled at the words, turning them over and over like I would some interesting rock pulled from a dirt pile.
My mom sucked in a mouthful of air, almost like I just spoke a profanity. Her voice ticked up a notch or two. “You stay home? Spencer, that’s just not the way things should be. What would your father say?” And in that I heard what I’d felt about how my parents have come to see Anne, like now she’s some weird kind of other. I heard suspicion, a questioning of faith. But it’s aimed square at me too, all the pep talks and reassurance over the last ten months without work, a gentle nudge about the kind of man I was raised to be, the provider and protector. Those paper cutouts of Anne and me—there’s that thought circling back again. What if one of those cutouts had a good job and the other no job at all, just a dream. Faith or no faith, you can’t feed a family dreams. They don’t pay the mortgage.
#
I pull into Game Farm Park, and there’s Anne, hair tied back, standing next to a play area with swings and plastic rock formations rising from the mulch bark. Her navy blue cardigan gapes just enough to show a round belly pushing at her white blouse. Her head’s tipped to the sky, eyes shut, the sun catching her full in the face, a picture I almost don’t want to disturb by putting myself into it. Sycamores rise around her, shedding yellow leaves as big as my hands onto the grass and empty parking lot. It’s the end of September, a warm, cloudless day before rain, a day in high school I’d have sluffed off after lunch to throw a line in the Green River for nothing more then to just watch the sun hit the water with my friends, not caring that the price of those few hours was Saturday school.
“It’s so quiet,” Anne whispers as I step from my truck. She puts a finger to her lips, then points to the sky. “The leaves. You can hear them falling through the trees.”
All I hear is the tick of the cooling engine, but I can taste the air in the back of my throat, the rot of leaves and grass in the heat, summer’s last legs, and for a moment I’m lightheaded.
Anne takes my hand. “Too much sitting at work,” she says. “Let’s walk. Doctor’s orders.” And we move slowly along the sidewalk, past empty tennis courts and soccer fields, and then onto a narrow strip of crumbling, weathered cement running along a mossy levee above the White River. We stop at a bend where deep water hits shallow rocks.
“Rushing water,” Anne says. “The sound always reminds me of something I read in an English class, something like water and meditation are forever wed. Maybe it was Melville. I don’t remember. You ever think of water like that?”
With the toe of my boot, I nudge a small chunk of the crumbling walkway over the bank. It tumbles down to the water’s edge, a jagged lump among the smooth river rocks. Water. I think of an early morning, pole in my hand, a long cast as the sun just lights the sky, the current against my legs. But I can’t hold the thought. Instead, something gloomy creeps in. All I can think about is water boiling up when I’d dig down to lay sewer pipe, seeping in where I don’t want it. I know water’s rot in a summer heat, its sting on a cold day. But I don’t tell Anne this. Her cheeks are red, her eyes fixed to a distant spot beyond the alders and sycamores on the other side of the river. Her breath comes quickly from the walk. She’s happy and content, in the grip of something I don’t want to upset.
She turns to me, a little smile bending her lips. “So, this morning my manager wanted to meet, out of the blue. I was nervous. I kept wondering if I’d messed up. But it was actually really good news. She said the company’s starting a tuition-assistance program, and if I want to develop and move up, if I’m serious about it, I should think about an MBA. She suggested a weekend program at the University of Washington. I was flattered. I told her I’d really think about it. Of course, after the baby. Maybe next year when the dust settles.”
Her words come at me with the force of rushing water. I can barely hear, barely think. I look at Anne, pale and beautiful, but I can almost picture her dissolving until she’s no longer there. But then this other thought: that maybe I’m dissolving, all that water wearing me away until I’m nothing. I breathe in, so deep my throat aches, like a breath might keep me next to Anne a little longer. “Is that what you want?” I ask.
“It’s an opportunity. It’s stability.” Anne slides her hands into the pockets of her cardigan. “I think in a couple years, with my job, we could buy a home in Lakeland Hills or Heather Highlands, a nice place our kids can grow up, not just a thousand square feet and no yard near the 18.” She takes a hand from her pocket, like she’s not even thinking about it, and touches the top of her belly.
Stability. The word loops through my mind. A little shiver in my guts rises into my belly and churns there. Then it washes up over me, across my chest and onto my shoulders, the weight of something like hopelessness. This life we’re living, Anne with her work, me at home with nothing—it suddenly seems like it’s all led up to the very spot we’re standing on. “And that life we talked about when we got married?” I ask.
Anne doesn’t say anything, and for a moment there’s just the sound of water between us. “Maybe it’s changed,” she says quietly, almost in a whisper, like a confession. “I know your parents don’t get it. My dad doesn’t, either. But my mom—maybe she does, but she wouldn’t admit it. I keep thinking that there’s the life we talked about, the life we’re expected to live, the life our parents lived, then there’s the life we have to live.”
“But that life we talked about,” I say. “We can still have it.” I want Anne to see, I want her to believe, even just for a moment. And I want to believe, too. “When the economy picks up, when people start building again, I’ll have work. And a company someday.”
“Someday can be a long time,” Anne says. “Or someday can be never. My dad always talked about someday.” She shakes her head and laughs, an easy laugh, but with a dark, raw edge to it. “He was always swinging for the fences with some business idea that never worked out. There were so many. Flipping cars. Rent-to-own cars. Detailing cars. Always cars. What he should have done is go back to school. That’s what my mom told him. Our bishop, too. Everyone at church. Instead, it was always just one more big idea.”
“That’s not me,” I say. “We won’t have that life, all the scrimping and saving.”
Anne looks out at the river. “I keep thinking about my mom, staying home all those years, all she had to do: Food on the table, clothes in our drawers, which bills to pay each month to keep the lights on. She was so tired, I remember, barely able to keep her eyes open at night, but she always helped me with my math homework. Algebra, geometry, trigonometry. She was a wiz. You know what she told me once, out of the blue, the two of us at the kitchen table working on a quadratic equation or something? How she’d wanted to study civil engineering in college. She only mentioned it once, and then never again, as if she was ashamed. And what happened? No college. Marriage and kids. And years later, with the kids gone, what does she do? She’s a receptionist in an engineering firm, answering phones, taking notes, cleaning up messes in the break room. I can’t stop thinking about that, Spencer. I wonder: every time she sees all those blue prints, the bridges and the buildings, does she think, ‘I could have designed those. Those could have been mine.’”
Anne looks down. My hand’s on her elbow, though I can’t remember reaching for her. It’s like somebody else’s hand there. I let go quickly, like I’ve been caught at something, then I stare downriver to where it turns into the trees, and only then can I look at Anne again. A watery layer pools in her eyes, reflecting the fading green of the sycamores and the silver of the river.
“But it’s not just money,” she says, a little catch in her voice. “It’s like for years I was a nobody in so many bad jobs, all to become somebody in a job I really like. But giving that up to stay home, just having that one identity. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem fair.”
How can I argue with that? It’s that word home, what it means, all the good and the bad stuffed into it. Maybe I know some of the bad now, maybe in a way I never have, home as a place where the dry tic of the clock and the churn of the dishwasher barely cut through the silence, a place where the walls can close in, but where the windows look out on a world where everyone else seems to live a better life than mine.
“And me?” I say. “What do I do? I’m stuck.”
Anne takes my hand. “No, you follow your dream. You build your company.”
“And our kids?” I ask.
“They’ll be all right,” Anne says. “We’ll make sure of it.”
The river churns below us, the water splitting around dark boulders. In the shallows, I catch a flash of black and silver, then a slick, gray fin and a tail that break the surface, a Chinook salmon pushing upriver to spawn. It holds close to the bank, suspended there before vanishing into the dark water. In two weeks, the river will be alive with them.
“I have to go,” Anne says, wiping at her eyes.
She takes my hand and we walk back along the broken walkway to the parking lot. I feel the thrill of Anne’s words, a company of my own, a crew, projects lined up, all with her blessing. I feel light on my feet, a heavy darkness gone from me. I breathe deep and take it all in, the river, the trees above, the path before us spotted with shadow and sun, and I can’t help smile as a vision of another, better life rises up in my mind: Anne in a bright, windowed corner office; me on a job site poring over a thick stack of construction plans, my crew, my equipment in motion around me; my kids, with their friends, cross-legged on a carpeted floor, pressing Legos together; and our home, a looming thing with an arched entryway, hardwood floors, and granite countertops. Our home. The words move through my mind, flick on my tongue. It’s all I can think about as I kiss Anne goodbye and drive down Auburn Way. Our home. I say it, over and over, like it’s a spell that will bring that life to us—because in that fantasy of what our lives will be, no matter how hard I try to give the windows and the porch some light, I just see a dark house.
Ryan Shoemaker’s debut story collection, Beyond the Lights, is available through No Record Press. T.C. Boyle called it a collection that “moves effortlessly from brilliant comedic pieces to stories of deep emotional resonance.” Ryan’s fiction has appeared in Gulf Stream, Santa Monica Review, Booth, Juked, and Silk Road Review, among others. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Utah University. Find him at RyanShoemaker.net.