The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
After the Incident: Chapter Fourteen
A couple of years ago, I read a story in the newspaper about a lawyer boasting to some junior associates about the superior quality of their particular office tower, one of those seventy-story downtown jobs constructed to survive an earthquake registering 7.0 on the Richter scale. A litigation lawyer, no doubt, with possibly a few lunchtime chocolate martinis under his belt, he felt obliged to add some drama and body language to his presentation, taking a run at the full-length window in one of their boardrooms, fully expecting to bounce off, square his shoulders, then shoot his cuffs and bow to a rousing ovation from his audience.
Well, imagine the egg on his face when the glass panel bent, then sprung (but didn’t break, mind you, in some way supporting his statement), popping from its casing and causing him to ride the twenty-by-ten-foot tempered sheet like a not-so-magic carpet to his death on the crowded street more than seven hundred feet below.
Now, admittedly, my existence-altering action back on the job site, although almost as stupid as leaping through a skyscraper window, had neither as terrifying nor final an outcome — allowing the life flashing before my eyes to unfold on paper at a far slower clip — but I’d wondered sometimes, since reading that story, if the man had known that his death, as tragic as any, would prompt more than its share of guffaws around the world’s water coolers. Did he feel any sense of shame or embarrassment on the way down?
Probably not. But at five o’clock, as the kids and I found ourselves standing at the front door of my childhood home, I felt my own superfluous embarrassment rushing to meet me. This was my long fall from grace. I’d have questions to answer, excuses to proffer, maybe not immediately, but eventually . . . over the peach cobbler, or pinot noir, or whatever.
I rang the bell and heard chimes resonate from within.
“This house is nice,” Rachel said as she looked around the front porch.
“Yeah. Way nicer than you made it sound,” Eric said.
Times change,” I said. “For a couple of years at least, ‘Jim’s a goof’ was scrawled in chalk under this very doorbell, courtesy of Anita and Jennifer in their less mature days, and there’d always be a ratty bike or two leaning up against that railing over there. Plus, whatever else I told you, remember this: memory’s a funny thing, based loosely on fact.”
Even as I spoke, my memory bickered with my consciousness, trying to sort out what my eyes saw: the house itself, although a three-story Victorian, was nowhere near as elaborate or spacious as the ones we’d seen earlier on Clemow and Monkland — and nowhere near as big as I’d remembered it. How could I ever have felt comfortable here with a member of that sizable extended family of my youth (virtual strangers when I tried to recall them now) lurking in each corner? And what about later, during my high school years, when the crowd had thinned but adolescence called, and I heard those disembodied footsteps and/or voices manifesting themselves outside my bedroom door at the most inopportune times — freezing me in mid-motion while I flailed, hunched and sweaty, over a copy of Jugs ’n’ Buns magazine, or as I jiggled my battered old radio’s dial with the finesse of a safe cracker, trying to pick up stray airwaves (dated, late-night time killers like Boston Blackie, hailing from such exotic ports of call as Sault Saint Marie or Canton) while camped under my bedsheets at two o’clock on a school night?
Of course, those pop-up quasi-images and distorted thought bytes from another time had only peripheral relationship to the business at hand, which was the reunion with my sisters; and that began when Anita opened her front door.
“Jim,” she said, smiling.
“Anita. Hi.”
She’d aged well, and the mental picture of the bereaved but vibrant middle-aged woman that I’d carried around since our mother’s funeral was replaced instantly with that of a handsome matron. She’d left her hair natural; it was mostly grey now, pewter, really, but still thick, streaked with black, and pulled back in a loose ponytail. If she’d gained any weight, she carried it with grace under a light summer dress.
She looked good . . . but . . . but my immediate thought was, Holy shit! How old do I look?
These initial perceptions took place in a heartbeat, and before I could comprehend and compile them into some sort of compliment, she’d turned to the children and said, “Rachel, Eric. You guys are enormous! Come in, please.”
We stepped into the house, where Anita and I looked at each other for another moment before coming together in an awkward, butts-out, shoulder-bumping hug.
“I’m glad you could make it,” she said. “It’s been too long.”
Indeed it had — one decade since we’d gathered here the day after my mother’s unexpected death. A decade since, after the initial shock, we’d worked out an amicable arrangement, with Anita buying the family home rather than the three children suffering through an estate sale.
She’d renovated it since then, pulling down walls, creating views. The only landmarks I recognized on the first floor were the stairs leading to the second floor, all sixteen of them — and not just because they were at the root of Gram’s sordid ending those many years ago. No, I remembered each individual stair because of an irony that I doubt even my father had been aware of, when, the morning after my sixteenth birthday, he called me Jim the Drunk with each stair I teetered on in the aftermath of the Patterson’s Creek roast I’d been the subject of the night before; sixteen times he’d said it, while he stood on the first-floor landing with his beefy forearms crisscrossing his chest and watched me descend. I’d counted them, the equivalent of the verbal birthday bumps. In some cosmic coincidence, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’d downed sixteen Molson Exports the night before, too, but that part I don’t remember.
How the hell could Anita tolerate it here? Yet there she stood, still smiling after all these years.
“Way too long,” I replied at last. Then, “The place looks great.”
“C’mon. I’ll show you around. Maybe we can locate some of its denizens while we’re at it.” She turned to Eric and Rachel. “So? Do you guys want to grab some Cokes before or after the guided tour of where your Dad grew up?”
“We didn’t know he had yet,” Eric said. “So we’d better take the Cokes now.”
A telling pause ensued, then she laughed politely and said, “I see you have your father’s sense of humor.”
We proceeded to the basement where Anita passed out drinks — colas for the kids and cold beer for us from a well-stocked bar fridge — and we discussed the evolution of the rec room area. An ornate billiard table had taken over the duties of the four-in-one ping-pong table of yesteryear, and across its emerald surface fell a thorough but subtle glow from three stained glass light fixtures, replacing the harsh glare of the old free-swinging police-interrogation lamp. The two-hundred-gallon oil tank had been yanked even before I left home, but at that time, the cold cellar, with its rickety shelves holding Mason jars filled with antipasto and pickled beets, had still existed in all its musty glory.
It was gone now though, unless it had been drywalled over and fitted with a mahogany door. Still, something beyond all of these changes, something intangible, lurked as the basement’s biggest change. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
“Oh,” Anita said, when I asked. “You must mean the head space. We dug out an extra foot when John put an office down here.”
As if on cue, John opened the ex–cold cellar’s door and thrust his torso into the rec room, leaving a wedge of plush carpeting, computer glow, and Office Depot desk showing behind him. A tall, rectangular man, and Anita’s husband of twenty-eight years, he’d seemed to have grown more austere over the decades, not once letting down his hair in my presence; he, too, showed obvious signs of aging, now looking craggier, steel-thatched, and not so much skinnier as stringier than I’d remembered him.
“Jim,” he said, nodding. Then, “Rachel, Eric.”
“Hi, John,” I said, with Eric and Rachel echoing, “Hi, Uncle John,” simultaneously.
“I’d join you,” he said, “but I’m studying for my real estate exam on Monday morning.”
Confused, I kept my response short. “All right, then. We can catch up over dinner.”
Anita didn’t address John’s statement at all until we’d reached the stairway to the second floor, but remembering how sound carried through the ductwork in this house, I didn’t blame her.
“I guess I forgot to mention in our phone call,” she said at last. “John was retired a few months ago.”
“Was retired?” I questioned.
“It’s a long story,” Anita said, as we came to the bedroom sitting adjacent to the bathroom at the south end of the hall, and I could have sworn I’d heard a hint of resignation and/or frustration in her voice. Then, in a more upbeat mode, she added, “And I’m supposed to be giving you guys a tour.” She turned and looked at the kids as we crowded the bedroom’s doorway.
“Exactly how old are you two now?” she asked
“Twelve,” Rachel replied.
“Thirteen,” said Eric.
“Thirteen,” Anita repeated. “Well, that’s how old your father was when I moved away from home and he took this bedroom.”
We looked around without stepping in. The room was pleasant enough, holding a double bed topped with a patchwork quilt, a dresser with a Pottery Barn painting hanging over it, and an overstuffed chair. Outside its open window our old lilac tree, not presently in bloom, showed an umbrella top of greenery.
Anita sidestepped into the room. “But back when it was mine, I used to keep my school desk and all my supplies right over there by the lilac tree — just for the scent.” She pointed to the window, then turned, looked at me, and smiled slyly. “Your dad probably remembers it just as well as I do because of the lungfuls you could get when you stood there.”
“Don’t forget the vistas you’d see,” I added, as I digested the fact that for all of these years she’d known about those small, felonious withdrawals I’d made from her stash way back when.
Next up was the bathroom, which, regardless of its many upgrades, remained just that: a bathroom. Of more interest, especially to the kids, was the sun porch beyond. I don’t know how old I was when our sagging back shed was torn down to make way for it — eight perhaps — but this was where, as youths, Anita, Jennifer, and I would go to tan, oiling up in front of the bathroom’s full-length mirror before stepping through its back door and onto the deck. We did so now (stepped through the back door, that is) and looked around. A solid, waist-high fence bordered its perimeter, with a panoply of treetops and rooftops stretching into the distance.
“This,” I pronounced to Eric and Rachel, “although I doubt it would surprise you, was where your aunts and I — with them instilling the importance of superficial beauty in me when I was but a tot — would lie side by side on beach towels, like sizzling strips of bacon in a skillet, burning ourselves scarlet each spring so we could look all pretty and healthy before the summer started.”
“Didn’t you know how bad that was for you?” Rachel asked.
“What does ‘knowing’ have to do with it?” I asked. “When the sun goes supernova in however many billion of years, people will be lying on beach towels the world over, covered in SPF three thousand and hoping to catch those really big rays before they croak.”
“Well I’m not surprised, Rachel,” Eric said, ignoring my off-the-cuff analysis of human nature. “He was talking about the dark ages. I’m just wondering where they put the ashtray so everyone could reach it.”
Anita laughed. “Jim wasn’t smoking yet, I don’t think, but I used to send him to the store for mine. Fifty-seven cents a pack and he’d get the three big shiny leftover pennies for his troubles. Those were some carefree days, weren’t they, Jimmy boy?”
At that moment Jen stepped out onto the deck, her timing impeccable, relieving me of any need to contrive a jocular response. But as she approached and all three of us stood within a fifteen-foot radius, a bizarre thought, staggering in its intensity, leapt into my head for an instant: What if I were rising from my towel right now, a nine-year-old oozing Coppertone, sweat, and bile, delirious from sunstroke, with Rachel and Eric starting to fade, with Anita and Jen back in cutoffs, sporting tank tops and beehives … as if it had all been a fever-induced hallucination … everything … and I was left with nothing but a blank canvas and a total crapshoot for a future?
I blinked, swallowed my panic, and the formless image disappeared, leaving Jen in its place.
“Jim,” she said. “You’ve finally made it back.”
“The prodigal son, at your service,” I said, bowing slightly.
Like Anita, she’d aged more in life than in my mind. And like Anita, she’d still managed to stay attractive for her age, although she’d gone the accessories and dyed hair route, with jangling jewelry and a close-cropped coif now a copper hue. She held a pocketbook in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, so she’d either let herself in and poured herself a drink, or someone avoiding us had shown her those hospitalities.
We came together in another one of those hugs, and then she turned to the children and said, in mock horror, “My God. I’m now officially the shortest member of the entire Kearns clan,” although the following embraces with the kids showed her to be an inch taller than Rachel still.
We yakked for a bit then filed back into the house. Here, Chloe, Anita’s only child (and part of the new wave of twenty-somethings to not leave the paid-for nest), drifted down from her third-floor hideout to join the fray in the hallway. We’d now taken on the bloated, heel-to-toe, shoulder-to-shoulder feel of a tour group being led through a cramped museum.
Anita propagated that feeling as we stopped en masse in front of the second floor’s middle room. She guided us in to look about, and then, much like a tour guide, started to recollect a small portion of its history.
“Do you remember, Jim,” she asked, “way back when you were six or seven” — she drifted here to do some calculating — “it was the year after Kennedy was shot, so you must have been seven . . . anyway, do you remember having to spend every evening for the first two weeks of that December up here in this room playing Chinese checkers and crazy eights with Gram?”
But Jen spoke before I could answer.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “The year of her corn operations, and then they decided to do her ingrown toenails while they were at it. All she could do was lie in bed with her little feet all bundled up and sticking out from the bottom of her blankets like the ends of Q-tips.” Then she grinned. “If I remember correctly, you and I weaseled out of any responsibilities by insisting we had to lock ourselves upstairs in my room to study for first-semester exams.”
“Hey, I brought her the odd cup of tea,” Anita said, feigning indignation.
“But you never fetched the chamber pot — or carted it away.”
Both sisters burst into laughter; they’d uncovered forgotten shenanigans, the naughty but harmless hijinks of teenaged girls escaping unsavory chores.
“We must have studied ‘Louie Louie’ until it came out our ears,” Jen said at last.
“Don’t forget ‘Sugar Shack,’” Anita said, and then they were off, dredging up names of the hits they listened to and boys they talked about while they pretended to study history and math.
In truth, though, I was too young to remember much of that time with Gram; I know I’d brought up Chinese checkers in connection with her name earlier in my ramblings, but more as a generic and historic measuring device. Like Khrushchev's shoe, Hula Hoops, or pet rocks, her checkerboard was part of a certain era.
As for any memories this room could summon for me, none seemed related to anything logical: reaching under an upholstered chair on a hot summer’s day, a maelstrom of disturbed dust dancing in the sun’s rays as I rummaged for the pack of unfiltered Pall Malls that someone had stolen from somewhere and given to me for safekeeping . . . or lying here on a couch, watching Roger Ramjet while wallowing on my back and letting sweet nectar squirt into my mouth from the nail hole I’d punched into a pre pull-tab pop can.
But this room never had . . .?
“Excuse me,” I said, horning in on Anita and Jen’s ongoing reminisce. “Did this room ever have a television in it?”
“You don’t remember the spring Mom went bonkers and redid the living room and dining room?” Anita asked. “The year before Gram died, I think.”
“Vaguely,” I said. “I recall a handful of things from around then, but . . . more like snapshots than actual events.”
“Me, too. But then, that was in the midst of what you might call my ‘groovy’ years,” Jen said, laughing, then tipping her wineglass to her lips.
“They were tough times, actually,” Anita answered. “Gram was on her last legs, Dad had already had his first heart attack, Jen and I were, let’s say, finding ourselves, and you . . . well, you’d have to be the first to admit that you’ve always been a bit of trouble. I think Mom finally cracked and went through a revolution of her own — a Lady’s Home Journal revolution. This room ended up being the TV room for a month or so while she refurnished and refurbished downstairs.”
And now, the dramatic events of that time were no more that tiny footnotes appended to nothing, and this room displayed its new millennium function, a home gym that would itself be a tiny footnote in thirty-five years. Rachel had set herself on a shiny Bowflex exercise machine, and Chloe, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Anita at the age of twenty-two, helped her adjust the tension for triceps pulldowns. Across from the Bowflex, Eric pedaled madly on a high-end elliptical bike, going nowhere fast with a huge smile on his face. And behind us, facing the exercise equipment, rose an entertainment center capable of keeping a person slack-jawed and up-tempo for as long as possible without actually housing a benny dispensing machine.
Anita, Jen, and I stepped out into the hallway. And as we strolled towards the front bedroom, childfree for the first time, Anita said, “So, tell me, Jim . . ..”
She paused, and I waited. Here it came: So, tell me, Jim . . . what’s the matter with you? You’ve been given every opportunity from the very start, and what the hell have you done with your life?
“How’s Maddy doing?” she said at last.
“Huh, Maddy? She’s, uh, fine, good. She sends her best to everyone.”
“I’ve always liked that girl,” Jen said. “You got way better than you deserved.”
Of course, this sentiment had always seemed popular, but because she said it with a light laugh and a wave of the hand as we stepped into Anita and John’s bedroom, Mom and Dad’s old room, she might have been joking.
Then again, she might not have. Eight years ago, in the red-ink era of their then-budding business — an environmentally friendly cosmetics and toiletries boutique called Oh, Natural! — Jen had caught her husband sampling one of the sales girls. In his view, their “no-testing” policy applied to merchandise only. During her messy divorce and in the years to follow, as her financial situation rocketed (she was now sole proprietor of two thriving outlets, with talk of franchising), she’d applied her particular Kearns cynicism to a specific branch of mankind: in her opinion, all men were assholes, useful for only one or two functions.
“Haven’t we all got more than we’ve deserved,” I countered at last, but before we could discover if our banter was totally good-natured, a booming baseline shook the floor and rattled the windows.
“What the . . .!” The blast had startled me, leaving me partially speechless and witless. But within seconds the volume dropped and a recognizable yet unidentifiable tune emerged from the next room; a wave of laughter followed.
“Sorry,” Anita said, sounding as if she were apologizing for more than sheer volume.
“Is that Abba?” Jen asked, her brow knitted, her ear trained towards the sound.
“We saw the musical on our last vacation,” Anita said, “and John’s hooked. He’s been exercising to their ‘best of’ collection ever since. Chloe thinks it’s funny . . . and John doesn’t,” she added.
More laughter drifted in. Naturally, if Rachel and Eric were informed, they’d find that nugget of information a knee-slapper, too: Lifestyles of the old and tasteless. They might as well have been exercising to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
“Anyway,” Anita continued. “As you can see, nothing’s changed here. In fact, except for furnishings, accessories, and the bathroom, the entire second floor’s stayed pretty well the same since we were kids.”
“I have been back since, y’know,” I said.
“Yeah, a decade ago, under duress,” Jen said. “Other than that, I don’t think you’ve been here since Dad died.”
“That was what? Sixteen years ago?” Anita asked.
“Seventeen last month,” Jen said.
They stepped deeper into the bedroom and began exchanging dates and names in earnest.
Once more I was out of their loop, but to be fair, we hadn’t spent the last decade totally ignoring each other. We’d shared special occasion emails (with Maddy doing a passable Jim Kearns imitation on the keyboard), and both sisters had come to town over the years (although we’d always been part of a larger package: The Lion King, a dinner at Biff’s Bistro, a night at the Hilton . . . and, oh, yeah, a visit with Maddy and Jim). It’s true, Jen had formed some sort of bond with Maddy, but who wouldn’t; often, she’d not even bother asking for me if Maddy answered one of her rare phone calls.
For the moment, there I stood, left alone to amuse myself. I had no idea how the rest of the evening would unfold, but I’d find out soon enough.
Thank you for reading. A new short story and newsletter are on the way later this month. Keep reading!