Page 2 of The River Is Waiting

But the next day, things got better. We sat on the floor and played with the kids. Danced with them to that silly “Baby Shark” song. When they went down for their afternoon naps, we went back to bed and tried again—successfully, this time, for both of us. We cooked supper together, the twins watching us as they wandered around underfoot. Things have been better since then. The usual minor ups and downs but nothing more. Marriage is all about that seesaw ride, isn’t it? We’re okay.

Now Emily cuts two slices of French toast into bite-sized squares, dotting each piece with syrup. “Yum, yum, yum,” she says, divvying up the finger food between the kids. I love watching her with them, more so when I’m feeling relaxed like this. Maisie resembles her mother: dark hair, dark eyes, Em’s dad’s Mediterranean complexion. At her twenty-four-month checkup, she was in the thirtieth percentile for both height and weight, so she’s probably going to be petite like Emily. Niko’s got my reddish hair and lighter skin tone; his height and weight are a little higher than average, the pediatrician said, but compared to his sister, he looks like a bruiser. Turning to me, Emily asks why the smoke alarm went off. I hold up the two burnt pieces I threw on the counter, dangling them like puppets. “Here you go,” I say, sliding the new stuff from the pan onto a plate. “Be rightback.” I head to the bathroom and brush my teeth so she doesn’t smell my breath. I wait half a minute or so, then flush and walk back into the kitchen. She asks me what I’m smiling about.

“What?”

“You’re smiling. What are you thinking about?”

“What am I thinking about? I don’t know. Nothing much.” I’m smiling because, thanks to the rum and Ativan, I’m pleasantly buzzed.

Maisie, the more fastidious eater, finishes without making a mess, but her brother’s bib is saturated with milk and he has somehow managed to get syrup in his left eyebrow. Half of his breakfast is on the floor. Emily looks at the clock, then starts cleaning up the mess. “You know something, kiddo?” she asks Niko. “I think Mommy and Daddy should get one of those Roomba things and program it to follow you around all day. Would you like that?” Without having any idea what she’s talking about, he nods enthusiastically. I tell Emily to leave it, that I’ll clean up. “That would be great,” she says. “I’m running a little late.” She heads back to the bathroom to brush her teeth and blow-dry her hair.

Just before she leaves for work, Emily addresses the twins. “Be good kiddos for Daddy and Grammy today. No naughty stuff, okay?” She models the correct response, a head nod, which they both mirror back to her.

“Too bad we can’t get that in writing,” I quip. The day before, Niko led his sister in a game of crayon-scribbling on the kitchen linoleum and it was a bitch to scour off those marks without scratching the surface, which I did anyway.

“Okay, I’m off,” she says. “Wish I could stay home with you guys. Love you.”

“Love you, too.” I made sure to start the breakfast dishes when I saw she was about to leave. Better a sudsy-handed wave goodbye than a boozy kiss. “Have fun on your field trip.” She’s just finished a dinosaur unit with her third graders and is taking them to the Peabody Museum to see prehistoric bones and footprints.

“Good luck with those leads, babe,” she says. “Maybe today’s the day, huh?”

I shrug. “Maybe.”

Theoretically, I’ll be job hunting today, although, truth be told, I’ve pretty much surrendered to the status quo. When I hear Emily’s car back down the driveway, then accelerate, I say, aloud to no one in particular, “There goes the family breadwinner.” Then I reach up for the lobster pot, take it down, and refresh my coffee-and-Captain cocktail. Get the twins dressed and pack the diaper bag. “Guess what?” I tell them. “Today is a Grandma day.” Maisie claps her hands, but Niko shakes his head and says, “No Gamma! No Gamma!”

“Dude, I feel your pain,” I tell him, chuckling. Emily’s father once referred to his ex-wife as “the iron butterfly.”

I lied to Betsy, telling her I’d drop them off somewhere around eight thirty so I can chase down a couple of imaginary leads, one of them in Massachusetts, north of Boston. Traffic permitting, I said, I’ll pick them up sometime between three and four. I added the “traffic permitting” caveat as a cushion in case I need an extra hour to sober up.

I’ve lied to Emily, too—told her that after I drop the kids off at her mom’s, I’ll send out another round of résumés, make some follow-up calls, and then drive over to Manchester because Hobby Lobby has advertised an opening in their framing department. In truth, having been defeated by several months’ worth of humiliation in my search for employment, and now dreading the possibility of actuallygettingthe Hobby Lobby job and having to mat and frame people’s shitty, mass-produced poster art at a big-box store, I willnotbe driving to Manchester or doing anything else on my make-believe agenda.

When I was laid off from the two-person art department of the advertising firm where I’d worked for five years, Rhonda, my manager, delivered the news at lunchtime and told me to take the afternoon off. In fairness, she didn’t realize she was shitcanning me on Maisie and Niko’s first birthday, for which we’d planned a party with the two grandmas, plus a few ofour neighbors, and some of Emily’s work friends. (The year before, it was Rhonda who had arranged for the lunchtime celebration of the twins’ birth: cake, gift cards, packs of Huggies, jokes about sleeplessness.) “I want you to know that it’s not about the quality of your work, Corby,” Rhonda assured me as she raised the ax and let it drop. “It’s about the company’s bottom line. It was a difficult decision, but I was told I couldn’t keep you both.” And, of course, she wasn’t about to lay off Brianne, the golden child who’d been hired three years after me but had been getting assigned to the bigger accounts. Like me, Brianne had been a scholarship student at the Rhode Island School of Design, but unlike me, she had graduated with honors and won awards for her work, whereas I’d quit midway through my senior year and driven across the country to secure Emily’s love.

For a while now, I’ve been nurturing this scenario whereby a bigger and more lucrative agency lures Brianne away from Creative and I get my old job back and excel, showing them what a foolish mistake they made when they let me go. What’s that called? Magical thinking? Meanwhile, my unemployment benefit has run out, and we’ve refinanced our mortgage and done three sessions of marriage counseling. Last month, we acknowledged the twins’ second birthday with presents, cake, and candles but skipped the expense of a party. Hey, it is what it is, as they say. With an assist from rum and Ativan, I’ve lately held panic at bay by embracing the Alfred E. Neuman philosophy: What? Me worry? So after I drop off the kids, I’ll be heading to the liquor store for another fifth of the Captain, then back home to consume it while watching some daytime TV: CNN,The People’s Court, The Price Is Right, and, if I can find it again, that station that carries reruns ofSaved by the Bell. Once my rum-and-benzo minivacationreallykicks in, I might watch some porn and jerk off, maybe grab a nap. I’ll pick up Maisie and Niko at Betsy’s sometime around four. Start cooking supper by the time Emily gets home or, more likely, pick up Chinese or Chipotle for dinner, plus McNuggets for the twins. There’s starting to be an embarrassing number of Happy Meal toys gathering on the windowsill in the playroom. That’s my plan. But none of this will happen.

I put the bag I packed for the twins’ day at their grandmother’s on the bottom porch step, then go back inside. Brush my teeth and gargle twice so that Betsy won’t smell anything when I drop them off. It’s a chilly morning, so I put the kids’ hats and spring jackets on. Lock the front door and walk them out to the driveway. The usual order of buckling the twins into their car seats is Niko first because he’s the more restless of the two. But the order gets turned around this morning when I see Niko on his belly, watching a swarm of ants in the driveway crawl over and around a piece of cookie that got dropped the day before. I buckle Maisie in. Then I remember the bag on the porch step and hustle back to get it. I place the bag on the passenger’s seat up front. Wave to our across-the-street neighbors, Shawn and Linda McNally, as they pull into their driveway. Linda gets out of the car shaking a paper bag. “Mr. Big Spender just took me out for breakfast,” she calls over to me. “Egg McMuffin to go. Woo-hoo!”

I laugh. Promise Shawn I’ll return the maul I’d borrowed from him. The weekend before, I finally finished splitting and stacking that half cord of wood that had been delivered a few months ago. “Yeah, good,” he says, instead of “no rush” or “not a problem.” Some guys are so possessive of their tools. Linda’s outgoing, but Shawn always seems standoffish. Suspicious, almost. Toward me, anyway. He’s a recently retired state cop. That probably explains it. I have the feeling that “Make America Great Again” sign on their lawn last year was his idea, not hers.

“How are my two little sweetie pies?” Linda asks.

“You mean double trouble? They got ahold of some crayons yesterday and scrawled all over the kitchen floor. When I busted them and asked, ‘Did you two do this?’ Maisie looked at her brother and he shook his head, so she did, too. The little monsters were still holding on to their Crayolas.”

“Gonna be artists like their daddy,” she says, laughing.

“Or politicians,” I say. “They’ve already got the fibbing thing down.”

Linda concurs. “When he was three, our Russell took a Magic Marker to our brand-new duvet. Swore up and down that he didn’t do it—that it must have been his sister, Jill, who hadn’t even started to creep yet. Healmost didn’t live to see age four.” I roll my eyes and laugh. Ask her how Russell likes living out in Colorado. “Fine,” she says. “He’s been taking classes and bartending part-time but he just got a ‘real’ job at a TV station in Fort Collins.”

I tell her to say hi from Emily and me next time she speaks to him. “Well, I better get going,” I say. “Have a good one.”

I climb into our CRV, start it up, and put it in reverse. When I feel the slight resistance at the rear right wheel, I figure a piece of the wood I stacked must have fallen off the pile; that’s what the obstruction must be. What are they yelling about over there? I pull ahead a few feet, then back up again, depressing the gas pedal just enough to make it over the obstacle. In the rearview mirror, I see them running toward us, arms waving. What the fuck, man? Why is she screaming?

And then I know.

CHAPTER TWO

Summer 2005

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