April & Oliver (9 page)

“It isn’t necessary,” April says. “And to be honest, I don’t want you to.”

“Too bad,” Oliver says. “Because here we are.”

April dead-bolts the front door and starts turning chairs upside down on tabletops. What the hell. Let him see her like this.
She carries a rack of dirty glasses back to the dishwasher and begins loading it. Her apron is discolored, her hairline damp
with perspiration. Oliver comes in behind her. “I’m going to clean the bathrooms next,” she says. “Want to watch that, too?”

“Nana said you fainted today.”

“I didn’t.”

“So she lied?”

“She misunderstood.” She snaps on a pair of rubber gloves, canary yellow. “I work faster alone.” She picks up a bottle of
disinfectant.

“Bernadette wants to offer you her place, if you don’t mind the smell of paint. You’ll have it to yourself for a week.”

April stops herself before asking where Bernadette will be. She wonders why they bother with separate apartments. “Thank you,
but I like my own bed.”

“If I thought you’d changed your locks today, I wouldn’t be bothering you.”

“What if I did?”

He raises a skeptical brow.

She brushes past him and heads for the men’s room. He follows her inside, motioning for Bernadette to come after. The room
is dingy, the wall behind the urinal spotted from men who missed their mark. Bernadette folds her arms across her chest, appraising
the scene.

“So you’re the janitor, too?” Oliver asks.

“The extra money buys me a tank of gas,” April says. “Did you think I’d be too proud?”

April thinks of her grandmother at Our Lady of Perpetual Hope, cleaning priests’ toilets for twenty-five years, hearing their
complaints about paint chips in the bathtub.
“What was I supposed to do?”
Nana lamented.
“Stand there and catch them as they fell?”

“I didn’t come here to argue,” Oliver says.

“Why are you here?” April asks.

“Appease me,” he says.

She sighs, wiping her forehead with her arm. “First of all, I’m not going home. And second, I don’t need an escort.”

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere if I don’t get this bathroom done. Now will you excuse me, please?”

“I’ll help you,” he says, taking a scrub brush. “You do the sink. I’ve got the john.”

“I’ll do the mirror,” Bernadette says. “I can handle that.”

“Don’t you think this makes me just a little uncomfortable?”

“We do our own every week,” Oliver says. “A toilet is a toilet.”

April shakes her head and wrings out the mop, like strangling a chicken. For a few moments, they work in silence. She pummels
the sink until the bristles of her scouring brush are bent. When Oliver is done, he comes beside her and lathers his hands
to his elbows. She notices the fine hair on his forearms, curly and wet.

“I’ve mopped us into a corner,” April says.

She watches his back as he bends over the sink, his shoulders beneath his canvas shirt, sleeves rolled up. He has changed
his clothing since leaving her apartment.

“It’s strange,” he says, prying loose a paper towel from its overstuffed bin. “My memories keep moving back; today all I can
think of is the week he was born. I had poison ivy and wasn’t allowed to touch him, remember?”

April doesn’t answer. Bernadette wipes the glass, their faces streaky in the reflection.

“I picture him flying down the hill in his Big Wheel with that guinea pig, Ratsy, on his lap,” Oliver says. “But I can hardly
remember what we said to each other the last time we spoke. I keep trying to reconstruct his face. All the photographs feel
wrong.”

April stares blankly. She knows this is hurtful, but she wants to hurt him. Oliver looks at her in the mirror. The room smells
of window cleaner, scouring powder, and, despite everything, urine. Bernadette fidgets uncomfortably.

Oliver shifts his weight, raising his arm to say something but then running his hand through his hair instead. April feels
the air move. Warmth radiates from inside his shirt, the heat he generated cleaning.

Bernadette touches April’s shoulder and she feels her skin flinch involuntarily, like a horse shooing a fly. She knows she
ought to feel comforted, but she is ready to beg them to leave. “Let’s get you home,” Bernadette says. “We don’t want you
to have another night like last night.”

April looks at Oliver, but he puts his hands in his pockets and stares at the drying floor. “Last night?” April says.

“I brought some herbal sleeping pills,” Bernadette says softly. “Nothing addictive.”

April looks at him again, but Oliver will not look back. She tosses the cleaning supplies into the bucket and pushes through
the door.

Behind the bar, the phone is ringing. April snatches it.

“Change your mind?” T.J. says.

April stops, looks at her watch, and turns her back on Oliver. “No,” she says quietly. “Just running late.”

She feels Oliver step closer.

“Did you remember what I asked you to bring?”

April glances at a bottle of Seagram’s. “I forgot to ring it up, and now the cash register is closed out.”

“So pay for it tomorrow.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Who is it?” Oliver asks.

“Is someone with you?” T.J. says.

“No. I’m leaving now.”

“Someone’s there,” he says.

“I’ll be over in ten minutes.”

“I’m coming to you.”

“No. I’ve got my coat on.” At this, Oliver catches her eye, glancing at her bare arms to acknowledge the lie. She hangs up.
“My friend Carla,” she says.

He bites his lip and nods. “Well, I guess we’ve done everything we can do here.” He picks up Bernadette’s coat.

“So you’re staying with a girlfriend?” Bernadette says hopefully.

Oliver stares at April as he slips Bernadette’s coat over her shoulders. She stares back. “That’s right,” he answers. “She’s
staying with Carla.”

April sits on her hands while she waits for the idle to settle down. In her rearview mirror she sees Oliver’s taillights swing
out of the parking lot. She can relax now, because he will not be back. He saw what a waste of time the evening had been.
He will go home and press himself upon Bernadette before they are even inside the vestibule. He will think over and over again
how lucky he is to have someone so sane and benign.

She pulls out of the lot and drives toward the rented room where T.J. is staying. She isn’t worried about getting to sleep
because they won’t, at least not until drink and exhaustion overtake them. She will climb the stairs to his windowless room
with its slanted ceiling and chipping paint and listen to the desperate cot creak beneath the weight of their forgetting.

P
ARCHEESI LIES OPEN
on nana’s kitchen table, the playing board strewn with pistachio shells, crimson as rose petals. Beside it a Rock-’n’-roll
Santa with blue suede shoes gyrates its hips, the battery so drained the jingle is more like a drone. Oliver turns it off
with a smile, but Nana is oblivious. “I see Mr. Bergfalk was here,” he says, kissing her cheek. She smells of cold cream and
Dippity-do, her hair recently set.

“Freesia again.” Nana points vaguely to a vase on the counter, not bringing herself to look at it. “He knows I’m allergic.”

“And mistletoe, I see,” says Oliver.

Nana waves her hand to suggest he is being foolish. Oliver slips Bernadette an amused glance. Nana has a string of gentleman
friends, all eager to please, none succeeding. He has no idea how she meets them. “You remember my fiancée, don’t you?”

“Imagine April working on Christmas Eve. Did you ever hear of such a thing?” Nana asks.

“Bernadette,” he reminds her. “You met at Thanksgiving.”

“Air traffic controllers, okay. Police officers. Telephone operators. But bartenders? Can’t people live without a gin and
tonic for one night?”

“Not everyone’s Christian,” Oliver says.

“Exactly. Couldn’t she have found a nice Jewish fellow to fill in?”

“Maybe she wanted to work,” Bernadette says.

Nana looks at her directly for the first time, scrutinizing. “How did you two meet, anyway?”

“Oliver came to my rescue,” Bernadette says. “He saved one of my kids from drowning.”

“She’s exaggerating. The kid wasn’t even close to the river.”

“He slipped on the rocks. He could have fallen in.”

“Excuse me,” Nana says. “You have children?”

“Not my own. I work with special-needs kids. We were doing a cleanup in the park. Oliver was jogging by when one of the kids
took a spill. I never could have picked him up myself.”

“Picked up Oliver, you mean?” Nana asks.

Bernadette blushes. “The boy,” she says.

“Believe me,” Oliver says with a smirk, “I was the one who picked up Bernadette. I’d seen her before. She’s amazing with these
kids. They light up when she’s around.”

Nana studies her. “You must have a lot of patience to do that kind of work.”

“I try.”

“Patience isn’t always what Oliver needs,” Nana says, raising a brow. “Sometimes he needs a good kick in the pants.”

“I’m good at that, too.” She grins, glancing at Oliver.

Nana appraises her. “What kind of special needs? Do you work with mongoloids?”

“Nana,” Oliver says gently. “They’re not called that anymore.”

“Mentally retarded, then? I’m sorry if I can’t keep up with the lingo.”

“Yes,” Bernadette says. “Kids with mental and physical disabilities, everything under the sun.”

“You must be a strong person, then,” says Nana.

“I love the kids,” Bernadette says. “Some days it doesn’t feel like work at all.”

“And other days?” says Nana.

“There are heartbreaks, of course. It can be hard.”

“On those days, you’ll have Oliver here to listen to all your sad stories at the end of the day. He’s good at that.”

“Yes, I know,” she says softly, looking at Oliver with affection.

“Give me your hand,” Nana says.

Bernadette extends it reluctantly. “Do you read palms, Mrs. Night?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It doesn’t take an astrologer to see that you don’t do much housework.”

“Nana!” Oliver says.

But Bernadette only smiles. “My secret is cold cream.”

“Hm,” Nana says wryly, relinquishing Bernadette’s hand. “Mine, too.” She studies her for a moment. “You realize, don’t you,
that Oliver is not your ordinary man.”

“If he were, I wouldn’t be marrying him.”

“He’s not going to give you a conventional life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Oliver says, but the women ignore him.

Bernadette smiles gently. “Well, Mrs. Night, I was under the impression that I give
myself
my life.”

“Those are pretty words,” Nana says. “But don’t underestimate the influence of marriage. After all, here you are living in
New York because of Oliver.”

“Actually, it’s the opposite, Nana. I found a law school here because Bernadette is doing her doctorate at Columbia.”

“You’d be back anyway,” Nana says. “You have unfinished business here.”

“Really?” Oliver laughs uncomfortably. “And what might that be?”

“You remind me of Oliver’s mother,” Nana says to Bernadette. “Don’t you think so, Oliver?”

“It hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Yes,” Bernadette says. “His father says so, too.”

“Not the eyes,” Nana says, “but something about the chin, and that small, triangular face. Oh, she was a lady, wasn’t she,
Oliver?” She turns to Bernadette. “Oliver was the apple of her eye. He got all her good manners and common sense. How could
he do otherwise, with his big brother keeping her up worrying all night?” She laughs. “That Al, he liked to party, didn’t
he, Oliver.”

“Still does.” He sighs.

“Oh, Al had them biting their fingernails,” she says to Bernadette. “The problem was that Al got all of his mother’s charm
and none of the logic.” She pats Oliver’s arm. “I understand what it’s like. My oldest sister in Malaga, she was a harlot.
I had no choice but to be good.”

“I hate to break it to you, Nana,” says Oliver. “But I’ve got my vices.”

“Well, I certainly hope so,” she says, giving him a wink. “A man who goes through life without burning a piece of toast will
never get what he wants.”

Bernadette grins. “If that’s the case, Oliver, I think you’ve got some catching up to do.”

He smirks.

“Now, my granddaughter, April, she’s another story,” says Nana. “Can’t put a slice in the toaster without burning down the
house.”

“Well,” Oliver says wisely. “I’ll try not to go that far.”

“Unless that’s what it takes,” Nana says.

Oliver smiles back weakly, unsure what she means.

Nana sighs, glancing out the window. “April, working on Christmas Eve.” She frowns. “Do you know that when her father was
a teenager, he used to disappear every Christmas? Just take off for God-knows-where and reappear a week later? He was mad
at
his
father, of course. He liked having the power to disappear, too. Spencer and I were sick until he came home. And it scared
Hal. When Bede meandered back, he never would say where he’d been.”