The Deal

by Jon Fain

Our dads met before we did. Hers liked to take walks early morning, and so did mine, and that’s how it happened. I’d be awake and hear my father go out, but didn’t know where he went.

May is nice around here. The birds get frisky at first light. June’s nice, too, although it can be unpredictable. That’s when Earl started coming around the house; the two of them watched the baseball games together.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“She travels a lot, so he’s got nothing better to do.”

“Who does?”

“He’s just visiting, his daughter rents the place.”

My father described the house down the street, reminded me who’d lived there when I was a kid, the three families who had been there since. The last one used it as a rental.

Earl was younger than my father, taller, more hair and more weight. He didn’t like the cat, so I had to put it downstairs in the basement. He brought beer, but my father didn’t drink anymore. Two or three into Earl, it must have evened them out. Ball game blaring, they fell asleep in their chairs at about the same time.

Earl and his daughter came over one weekend. My father used to grill when we were kids, but otherwise meals were my mother’s job. Now, if I was around, I did the cooking. That Saturday afternoon, he told me they were coming for dinner, told me just do take-out, Lee Chen.

Earl and Brenda had the same dark brown eyes. She definitely worked out, or somehow managed to look good without it. As soon as I saw Brenda, I thought I had seen her before, in the local Whole Foods maybe. Complaining about old fruit to someone working there, or the one who’d caught my eye at the meat counter. Anyway, she looked familiar—or at least like someone I wouldn’t mind getting to know. 

We ate out on the deck; the bugs weren’t too bad. The two dads gabbed about baseball, so I tucked in a few things here and there. My father and I had been watching the games together until Earl showed up.

He had been a coach on my team one year, my last in Little League. Before that, he was always too busy, working his construction jobs until last light. My father had hurt his back, so he had time all of a sudden. My mother would make an early supper, and then after he and I had gone, she’d follow later, sit in the car with my little brother, smoke her cigarettes, read a book. Parked so she could see.

As a “coach,” the other kids liked my father a lot more than I did. Because of his back he couldn’t hit grounders or throw it around like the other dads. If it was a Saturday afternoon game, he’d sit on the bench, take off his shirt, and sweat, smoke a cigar, and yell at the umps.

Later, after the Chinese leftovers were put away, and we cleaned up, Brenda and I went back out to the deck. The dads had gone into the living room to watch the game.

“So what do you do?” she asked.

“Not much. Some consulting.”

She looked dubious. I figured she thought I was sponging off my old man.

“Chemical plant safety programs,” I said.

Since I didn’t add anything to that, she talked about her job. She sold computer hardware, big company to big company. They told her at the beginning of the year to focus on their new product line, but her comp plan paid her better to sell another. Were they stupid? Did they think she was? She was top earner in her region last year and going for it again.

“I’m sorry to hear about your Mom,” Brenda said. “My mother died when I was eight… What is it?”

I’d glanced into the kitchen through the window over the sink and saw her dad. I stepped closer to the window and confirmed his hand was bloody under the faucet, and when Brenda saw the red running pink, too, we hurried in from the deck.

My father arrived in the kitchen from the living room at the same time, shouting, “I told him he had a lot of barn cat in him!” Then to me, “Why didn’t you put him downstairs!”

That night, I had a dream I saw Brenda in a store. Her father Earl came down the aisle behind her, pulling stuff off the shelves, onto the floor, making a mess. There were cereal boxes spilled, and red raspberries smeared. Buzzy, the cat, booked around a corner, started chasing him. Next, I saw Brenda in the parking lot, pulling out. “I’ve got my foot on the gas!” she shouted.

A week after all the excitement at our house, Earl went back to North Carolina where he’d retired. With not much else going on that summer, I stayed around to help my father. He didn’t want anything to do with my mother’s belongings, so I did the requisite. I put aside the personal, donated the rest, and was back to watching baseball in the chair where Earl had been.

My father had bought his first smartphone and barely noticed we were sharing quality time together. He’d recently gotten into texting and become a pig for it. When he put the phone down, he kept looking at it. He was in constant touch with his friend Mary.

She’d been married to a big wheel in town named Bob Sistare. My father had built their swimming pool, and I remembered, as a kid, hearing how Bob was a “cheap shit.” He passed a year before my mother. Mary had the house with the pool, a condo down in Dunedin, Florida and a couple of kids I’d grown up with. The oldest was a cop in town, the first female officer. The son, a year younger than me, had been on the same baseball teams, pretty much a jerk. Like my little brother, he had moved to California and never looked back.  

***

In October, my father decided to go to Florida to be with his Mary. I was pretty sure by that point they’d had something going for a while. Maybe way back, maybe even pre-pool. He packed a couple of suitcases: three-quarters of the clothes from his closet, all of it from his dresser drawers. He asked me if I wanted to stay and look after the house. He’d give me “an allowance.” I didn’t have to think on it much.

After a week or so, I called Brenda and left a message. Then I texted. After enough time went by to think it was hopeless, she finally called. We talked a couple of times and then she came over for dinner. I gave her the house tour she’d missed the first time. She took over the tour at the end, took my hand after we came up from the basement. My room had my childhood crappy twin so we ended up in my parents’ old bed, the room that my father had moved on from.

Brenda stopped travelling for work as much and was around. I had some consulting possibilities, here and there, but ignored them. We drove up the coast, as far north as Southern Maine, down the Cape, into Boston for a night or two. She’d been briefly married, no kids. No kids either, I was still married, technically, five years but no longer counting—the last three in a city I grew to dislike just a bit more than my wife.

When I called my parents one Sunday to check in with them, and found out that my mother was sick—that they’d hidden it from me on the weekly Sunday calls—I left Houston to help. With a dying marriage, I had felt my life was fucked. Going home, where I hadn’t been in decades and being faced with a dying mother, took it around the bend. I kept coming to be with my parents, getting overwhelmed, and going away, back to Texas to the furnished rental where I’d ended up, half-heartedly looking for new clients, while letting the last couple of long-standing ones fade away. On the phone, I’d fight with my father about his seeming lack of urgency, and with my brother, staying away out in California, the three of us with our own ideas and fears and cowardice, while my mother wasted away.

Brenda said I was still upset because I cared. It felt good to hear, but in the telling of it I felt like an imposter, a failure at some test. I missed my mother, and I was sleeping in her old bed. With a woman I barely knew.

I did a nice Thanksgiving dinner, just the two of us, but Brenda had a trip planned with her college roommate to Australia for Christmas and New Year’s, so for a long stretch, I didn’t see her. I’d been invited down to Dunedin, where my father had become ensconced with the extended Sistare clan, but passed. Instead, I celebrated quietly with Buzzy the part-barn cat. Brenda had a sales conference in Phoenix in January, so that was another gap. But she gave me Valentine’s Day—her treat this time, fancy restaurant. We’d known each other eight months, which isn’t long, and it hadn’t been every day—plenty of unknowns— but I came to believe it was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time.

Then, she mentioned that her lease for the house up the street was ending. I thought about it for a couple of days, weighing the options, found it hard to sleep. It was complicated: my divorce not final, the house I was living in not mine.

I assumed that during the cold weather my father would be in Florida. When not down there, maybe he and Mary Sistare could bunk together on the other side of town, where (30 years before) he had built her and her cheap shit husband and asshole kids a swimming pool.

When I was growing up, my father’s only advice about girls had nothing to do with the mechanics, let alone the gory details—that was saved for my mother, who used a book, complete with illustrated fallopian tubes. He told me if I liked someone, I should ask her out. ‘You may think girls know what you’re thinking,’ he said, ‘but they don’t.’

With that, and everything else in mind, I asked Brenda to move in.

***

It had been a week. She hadn’t said yes, and she hadn’t said no.

Instead, she had conditions. I couldn’t figure out if she was playing games with me, or putting me off until she found something better. Or maybe she was having a hard time deciding. Or like a good top-earner salesperson, she was automatically trying to make the best deal.

“I have to be able to criticize you,” she said.

“Yeah?” We were in the kitchen; I was cutting greens. “More than you do now?”

“You know, once we see each other more… there’ll be more opportunities. It’s statistical.”

“Give me an example.”

“Right,” she said. “That’s fair.”

Brenda finished her beer. We were working through a bag of chips. Sea Salt, Reduced Fat. They were going down like butter.

“It’s like Noah’s Ark over here. What’s this all about?”

She was pointing at the fruit and vegetable bowl on the counter. Banana, garlic head, potato. Two of each.

“That’s your example?”

“See, this isn’t criticism, it’s an observation. You need to know the difference.” She looked at the bowl again. “So, did you do this on purpose?”

“They’re not going to mate. I’m not going to save them from a flood.”

“You hope,” she said.

We watched a movie after dinner. Some actor I didn’t recognize played a thief who believed there was a way into every security system, and the government had hired him to break into itself. We had arms linked, warm under the covers. I’d bought and set up a new TV in my parents’ old room. I’d finally bought a new mattress to mitigate ghosts.

“Or at least we talk about it,” Brenda said, about something she’d been going on about that I’d missed. “Decide together.”

The thief was belaying off a glass skyscraper. All hell was about to break loose.

“Have we reached the end of your list?”

“I don’t have a list,” she said.

***

Her next trip was in and out to Philly, no big deal. She didn’t come back for a couple of days, until the weekend.        

She was “cooking” for me that Saturday, so I’d gone over there. She had the rental house for another three weeks. It was a split level, fully furnished, but none of it hers; it was the owners’ stuff, a couple who lived full-time in Arizona. They were selling and that’s why Brenda had to move. The TV, such as it was, was on the kitchen counter. She said she’d be back in a minute, and I turned on a show. Kept clicking for something, finally left it somewhere.

I opened the refrigerator, and there was nothing in it except an open can of ginger ale and some green grapes gone bad in a white ceramic bowl. On the stove, the butternut squash was boiling over, so I turned it down, saw she had jammed a whole half chunk of it into the pot. At least she had taken off the plastic. I checked the oven and saw a store-made meat loaf, coated with too much paprika. I turned the heat down.

“What are you watching?” She’d taken a shower. You could smell the clean as she came into the room.

“Dinner,” I said.

“About what we’ve been talking about?”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe you could yell at me less.”

“Yell at you?”

“Ten percent is all I’m asking,” she told me, toweling her hair.

We’d sometimes fight, but so far, nothing serious. The last time we’d been together I’d put something the wrong way.

“What are you saying? Overweight? Isn’t that what you meant?”

“No,” I’d said. “Not really. A little for the apocalypse is all.”

“And what does that mean.”

“Ready. You could go a few days if the shit came down. If we had to scrounge.”

“You may be too weird,” she’d said.

***

Next morning, I called my father down in Florida. I decided it might be a nice touch to ask him permission. I left out the part about already asking Brenda to move in the month before.

“So you guys are serious?”

 “Pretty much,” I said.

“You could take the downstairs,” he said.

My father had brought in his old crew to help him put in a bedroom suite in the basement after my mother got sick. He’d had an office down there but gave up that and the old family room for a set-up that would accommodate a live-in nurse. My mother died before he’d found one. It was a fully furnished suite, ready to go. Since there was no reason to go down there, I didn’t, not since I’d taken Brenda on the tour after my father went to Florida. We could have easily started in down there as where we ended up, I suppose, except it was a single bed. 

“I was thinking that,” I said.

I texted her, told her I wanted to make her dinner whatever night she was coming back that week, just give me advance notice. It took a few days of messages to arrange it. I’d planned lamb kabobs, but it had hit a freakish hot stretch and the grill hadn’t been cleaned; I didn’t want to add to the heat already in the house. I made a salad, and we had that with some shrimp I bought prepared.

“So what do you think,” I said, starting to do dishes.

“About what?”

“Are you going to move in?”

By now, I decided that I’d misjudged things badly, that all the talk was her slow-walk of turning me down. She’d been headed elsewhere the whole time. I regretted that I’d talked about my mother with her, especially the last time, when I’d started crying. She said it was okay, but I knew it wasn’t. Women said they wanted to be with a man who showed his emotions, and maybe some do, but not the top sales-earner types. I ran water in the sink, grabbed the sponge.

“Okay, I will,” she said. “But is it okay if my father moves in, too?”

“You will?” I said. “Wait. That guy Earl?”

“He’s run into some problems.”

She went into a tale of a house lost because of something or other, bad finances. She hadn’t even known. Her sister was down in North Carolina, right there, but useless in a crisis, and now it was too late.

“Look, I know this is upping the deal.”  

I threw the spoon I’d been rinsing hard into the sink, and it should have cracked the drinking glass it hit, but somehow didn’t.

“Is that it? Anything else?”

 “I thought one of our agreements,” she said, “was that if I moved in, you wouldn’t yell at me so much.”

“You haven’t moved in!”

I picked up the sponge and started scrubbing. I did the glass I hadn’t broken, ran water, rinsed a plate. I opened the dishwasher and shoved silverware into the bin.

“What about the cat?” I said.

“The cat?” 

“I really don’t like your father either.”

“Really? I thought you—”

“When did you know all this?”

She came up close behind me. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Where would he stay?”

“Downstairs, you have all that room. It’s all set up. It looks like a new bed.”

She stroked my arm, nudged into me, poured some fresh dish soap on the sponge, started to take over for me in the sink.

“We have up here… right? And he’d have down there to himself.”

***

Later, a storm came through, first wind, then rain. As it blew through the house and flapped the curtains, we went around and shut the windows down.

Back in the bedroom, it was the same movie, only different. A group of geezer secret agents had reconvened to clean up government corruption from the inside-out. We had arms linked, but we didn’t need the covers. The cat came into the room and settled down on her side, and soon both of them fell asleep.

She breathed evenly, deeply. She had an important top-earner meeting in the morning. She’d be up and out by six. I watched her instead of the movie for a while.

I wanted to believe asking her had been the hardest part. The rest was merely details. It was easy to imagine the two dads watching TV together in the living room. I’m in the kitchen, doing the prep, making dinner, or cleaning up. Brenda’s back on the road, travelling. Or maybe it’s the weekend, or a stretch when she’s working out of the local headquarters—either way, she’s waiting for me downstairs, where she’s bought us a big old bed. The two dads will fall asleep in their chairs in front of the game. When he wakes up and needs a change of scenery, Earl’s got my old room with the Cowboy and Indian wallpaper that I would stare at while my mother kept dying down the hall.

I shifted, as my arm had gone numb, and as I worked it out from underneath her, it didn’t disturb Brenda, but woke the cat. He blinked, then yawned, then stared.

It looked like he was trying to decide what to do next.

*Originally published in October Hill Magazine.

BIO: Jon Fain’s recent publications include a pair of short stories in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, flash fictions in The Broadkill Review and Reservoir Road Literary Review, and micro fictions in Blink-Ink and The Woolf. He has stories in the anthologies Tales of the Apocalypse from Three Ravens Publishing and Crimeucopia: Crank It Up! from Murderous Ink Press. His chapbook of short fiction Pass the Panpharmacon! is available from Greying Ghost Press. He lives in Massachusetts. Txitter @jonsfain.