IMPATIENS, Part I
It was three years ago that Rob and Adrienne came over for dinner. Adrienne, my sister-in-law, had just graduated from hygienist school and we were celebrating. For dinner we had steak and asparagus off the grill, then moved to the front porch to watch traffic. Dessert was pudding in wine glasses, layered chocolate and butterscotch. We drank lemoncello Toschi that I picked up special. Carolyn, my wife, brought it out to us on a serving tray she’d bought that afternoon antiquing. She matched the colors on the tray with the colors of the pudding. La dolce vita.
We had just moved back home the month before, in August. It had been six years since we graduated from the University of Nebraska and we wanted to get back to the old college town. Although we made a fortune designing screen savers, we hadn’t made new friends in Chicago. It was nice to be back in the Middle West.
Much preparation had gone into this night. We liked the house because it had character, a lot of small sitting rooms and garden space to spare. I spent most of my time in the yard, planting trees that would one day have stories. A planetree that would shed its bark. An apple tree for pies. It’s not easy to pick out trees. You need foresight and imagination to create a scene that will endure for years. You have to do a lot of research on leaf and flower coloration, height at maturity, and what wildlife the fruit will attract. Not just any idiot can do it; one has to buy a few books to get it right.
My favorite choice was the burr oak, a tree that grows painfully slow and isn’t especially attractive to most eyes. Its particular charm is in how long it takes to mature. I liked it so much that I put one in the backyard and one in the front. Soon after Rob and Adrienne pulled into the driveway, the four of us posed by the one in the backyard, a Sudanese neighbor enlisted to take the photograph. In the decades hence we could look at that photo and remember what a great night it had been, the night we settled back into Lincoln. That tree will be there forever, slowly growing, the rest of us dying.
I was a strong believer in omens then and that photograph was supposed to be a sign of great things coming our way, a symbol necessary to jumpstart our spirit. In the photo, the girls didn’t smile and Rob leaned up against the tree, his arm bending the tender sapling. My head was turned, busy looking at Rob and the girls and at my tree. I didn’t even know the photo had been snapped until the neighbor was handing the camera back to me.
There had been an irregularity in my stomach all week, getting ready for the party. It was just indigestion, Carolyn said, and I would have been inclined to agree with her if the sensation didn’t have such a sense of permanence. It was like the persistent discomfort one felt as a teenager, but worse. The wonder years have nothing on the potential familial embarrassments that adulthood can bring—terminal acts of impotency, cuckoldry, fraud.
Rob and Adrienne had been dating for about a year then, the night they came over to celebrate. Rob, a muscular man with a deep brown tan, liked to talk about the indoor football league he played in, but besides that he was an okay guy to hang out with. There was something about him that made it exciting to be a man, to be manly. Like it was in junior high, cutting class, sneaking around the halls with the born trouble-maker, the kid that the administrators kept constant tabs on. Even if they were just doing meaningless stuff like tearing up attendance sheets and leaving all the bathroom faucets running, there was an excitement to it. Rob was like that. He had that same juvenile-delinquent look in his eyes, even though he was almost thirty. He engaged in a lot of deep play—he climbed rocks and used to be an EMT, he fought in Afghanistan on a jingoistic whim to flush out terrorists’ bunkers. But he couldn’t find work when he returned to the states, and wasn’t too concerned about it. He worked odd-jobs, reading meters for utility companies part-time, seasonal work with Parks and Recreation.
At first it surprised me that he ended up with Adrienne. Rob was five years older and unreliable, but he was a soldier and she’d liked soldiers then. She was tall, taller than Carolyn, and had bleach-blonde hair. Her face was slightly equine, her chin rigid, her features stretching vertically, but she had a nice figure and was good-looking. That night, at our small celebration, she wore white slacks with a peach blazer. A bit tacky, but attractive on her.
I was an only child, raised by just my mother, so I treated Adrienne like she was my own sister. She’d stayed with us a few times when we still lived in Chicago. Once, after a horse and buggy tour of Michigan Avenue, she forgot her checkbook in the carriage. She didn’t realize it was gone until we were seated at Pizzeria Due. All her cash and her credit cards were in the checkbook because she hadn’t wanted to carry a purse in the city. Luckily, whoever found the checkbook mailed it back to her with her credit cards, minus the hundred bucks in cash that was folded into it. Things like this tended to work out for Adrienne. We treated her the whole weekend, helping her until she got back home. It was no big deal. We were happy to do it, really. She just laughed it off and those around her were ecstatic that they’d made things easier on her.
“This is good lemoncello,” Rob said, sitting next to Adrienne after dinner.
It was gratifying to hear him say this. Lemoncello Toschi, an Italian liqueur made from the peels of lemon, served ice cold, had reached the height of popularity that summer in the magazines we read. After putting down my dessert, I raised my glass and proposed a toast to Adrienne’s graduation.
“I had to get this lemoncello on special order from King’s Liquor,” I said to Rob, leaning back in my chair. “They do that. I didn’t imagine that they would.”
“Is there a fee on that? I wouldn’t think that you would have to special order it at all.”
“There is a fee, but it’s worth it. You can’t normally find stuff like this around here. The shops in Chicago had it. Lemoncello Toschi. Enjoy it.”
“We had it in the service,” Rob said, scraping the rest of his pudding off the side of his wine glass with a delicately made dessert spoon that Carolyn had found when we were antiquing in New Hampshire. “My lieutenant knew the right people. Could get about anything, you know.”
“Carolyn,” I interrupted, “what was the name of that stuff we drank in Milan. We went to Milan for our honeymoon, Rob, I’m not sure if you knew that.”
“I think Adrienne might have said something about that,” Rob said. We were sitting on the front porch, in more or less a straight line facing the street. We lived on Vine Street, which was busy this time of year because the university was in session. Due to seasonal repairs being done to the road, there were construction cones bottlenecking traffic. It was a cool evening, the sun setting. The air was still.
“Do you remember what that was, Carolyn?”
“I don’t,” Carolyn said, standing up to retrieve the empty glasses we’d used for dessert. “Wasn’t it just wine?”
“I think it was special though. The waiter said a good deal about it. Talked it up to us, because it didn’t come cheap. But we don’t speak much Italian, so who knows.”
“It tasted like wine to me.”
“It was probably just wine then,” Adrienne said, giggling as she handed her pudding glass to her sister half emptied. Along the curb, in front of the house, an oversized van parked. The hazard flashers came on. On the side, its emblem read Mother of Christ Rehabilitation Center. The driver unbuckled himself and moved to the back.
“Don’t worry about it, honey,” Carolyn said to me, patting me on the shoulder. “You should show Rob your garden.” She and Adrienne went inside to wash the dishes.
When we were in high school, Carolyn had a huge crush on Rob. Not that it mattered. Just about every other girl in school did too. Rob was a few years older than us. He had always been well-built. The star wrestler. The half-back on the football team. He was witty in a way that seemed respectable until one got to college.
I’d mostly forgotten about Rob until Adrienne started dating him. Not that I was jealous of him, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me uncomfortable seeing how proud Carolyn was that her little sister was dating the Rob Jones. He was just a normal guy to me. At the time, I had the impression that he and Adrienne would marry before long.
My wife Carolyn was a plain woman, but not unattractive in any particular way. She was slender and pert. She had a small nose and a broad forehead, wore her brown hair over her ears in a way I found comforting. The only thing about Carolyn that got on my nerves, that could hurt my feelings, was that she could be flirtatious at times. She could be a tease in order to compensate for what she perceived as deficiencies. She needed to be desired. When men came on to her at bars, on occasion, she didn’t tell them that we were together. She was a casual flirt in a way that only hinted at permanent damage. It’s fair to say that I worried about her being with other men in the way all husbands must worry from time to time, but it was a latent fear. Nothing I held onto. Nothing to fight about.
The porch wrapped around the front of our house with Corinthian colonnade. It was a new part of town for us, but the property was a great value. Rob and I sat next to each other in lawn chairs, making small talk while we waited for the girls to return. We each lit a cigarette. I heard sirens coming closer from the distance, which wasn’t too strange for this neighborhood. There had been a shooting across Vine Street a few months ago. Traffic was starting to back up behind the Mother of Christ van.
“So what happened in Chicago,” Rob asked, leaning back to cross his legs. “Just ready for a change? Tired of the wind?”
“It’s complicated,” I said, laughing politely.
Rob shifted in his seat to watch me more closely, his hand under his chin. “You guys are good, right? I think you’ll be able to make it running your own company.”
“The non-compete agreement in the settlement makes it hard. We’re trying, though.”
“Well good luck,” Rob said. “It’s never easy.”
I had just applied for a job at the University, working in IT as a general problem solver. Carolyn was finding work as a consultant for a firm in Omaha. I didn’t tell Rob this.
“What is that guy doing in there?” I asked Rob, motioning to the van parked in front of the house. “There’s an ambulance coming down the street.”
“Wait a second,” Rob said, shielding his eyes from the evening glare. “The driver’s doing CPR. Look, you can see him doing compressions.”
It was true. I saw the driver through the window, his arms out in front of him, pressing down on whoever was strapped to the van stretcher. As the ambulance approached, the driver got up and opened the door of the van to flag them down. From where we were sitting, you could see into the van.
The driver went out and met the paramedics, explaining the situation to them, standing next to the front-yard burr oak. Quickly, two of the uniformed men stepped into the van and checked for vitals. They laid the man on the floor, the one who was dying. They tilted his head back and fed a tube into his mouth, pushing it down his throat. The neighbors came out to their porches to see what the commotion was.
