Page 26 of Caught in a Storm
This feels like a punch to the midsection. Kids do that to you. When Caleb was in third grade, he wrote a composition for school stating that his mommy makes money at an office and his daddy plays the piano all day.
“Not that many people have left me,” he says. “You, most notably, but that was before he was born, so I don’t think it counts.”
“What about that kindergarten teacher you were seeing?” she asks.
“She moved to Milwaukee,” says Billy.
“What the hell’s in Milwaukee?”
Billy wasn’t sure. A job? A guy, maybe—someone who wasn’t Billy.
“And the dogwalker?” Robyn asks. “I liked her. She was sweet.”
“She went to Pittsburgh.”
The dogwalker’s name was Amanda. The kindergarten teacher was Tricia. Both women flutter briefly through Billy’s mind now. Amanda with her cargo shorts full of biodegradable dog-poop bags and Tricia with her soft, patient voice. Yes, they’d left him, but does it count as leaving if he didn’t ask either of them to stay?
There’s a police siren somewhere nearby.
“I just don’t want him to get stuck here, Billy,” she says. “If he goes away and decides to come back on his own, like Aaron did, fine. This city, though. It…it absorbs people.”
This has been a humbling conversation, because it’s clear what Robyn is saying: Billy is among the absorbed.
“Anyway,” she says. “I haven’t seen you in a while. How are you?”
The real answer is that Billy has been down. The Margot Hammer Incident, which is what he now calls it, was ten days ago, and he’s having trouble forgetting about it. He wonders if this is what people who survive semiserious accidents experience: a mild sort of trauma. Because that’s what meeting Margot Hammer was: mild trauma. “Yeah, you know,” he says. “I’m good.”
“So, what are you gonna do?”
He isn’t sure exactly what she’s referring to.
“Billy, where are you gonna live?”
“Oh, that? No big deal. I’ll figure it out. It’s a renter’s market, or…something.”
Robyn looks out at the parking lot, which has almost entirely emptied. The van and her SUV a few rows away are among the only vehicles left. A school security guard watches them from a golf cart a hundred yards away. “Hear me out on something, okay?” she says. “I have a proposition for you.”
Billy waits, nervous suddenly.
“What would you think about staying with us for a while?”
“With you and Aaron?” He laughs. “Are you kidding?”
“Not with us,” she says. “You know the little apartment above our garage? It’s perfectly nice. We’re not using it. And there’s plenty of space for the Steinway.”
“I get that we don’t chat about money a lot, Rob, but I’m not destitute. I have a job. I can affo—”
“I know,” she says. “It’s not that. It’s…”
“What?”
“It’s Caleb’s idea.”
“Caleb wants me to move in above your garage?”
“Just until he starts college—wherever that ends up being. He didn’t say this, but I don’t know, maybe he wants us to be something like a normal family for once. For a little while. He never had that. And, well, this is the end of his childhood, right?”
“Goddammit,” says Billy to no one in particular, and he and Robyn lean on the van some more.
