After This

Last he saw her, just last year, he was waiting for his wife and the girls outside A amp;S when Catherine, in a beige Cadillac, pulled into the parking space beside him. It took him a moment to recognize her, and she was out of her car by the time he waved at her through his own passenger window. Then he opened his door to get out and greet her. But she was already walking away, her head down. There was another woman with her and she was the one who glanced over her shoulder when he called. But neither one of them paused.

He looked again at his reflection in the TV set. You’ll be pleased to know that she drives a Cadillac. That she’s doing quite well, her own daughter growing, Ellen tells me. A big house in Garden City. I can’t say that it didn’t cut me like a knife, Frank, standing in that parking lot. I can’t say that I didn’t see some of it in you, while you were here, with your own Cadillacs every other year, your Chivas Regal and your fancy beer, a certain fascination, when we were kids, with the society page.

He lifted the leg again. The pain, he realized, was constant, there was only the illusion of ebb and flow.

His eyes went again to the crucifix above his head, reflected in the mirror. The strained arms, the arched spine. All that effort to open the gates of heaven for us and we (he thought) probably spend our first hours among the heavenly hosts settling old scores with our relatives.

Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.

He pulled at the leg again-it was only stubborness that made him continue to believe that what he was doing was therapeutic.

At noon mary called from the city. They had met Pauline at Pe

And then, with (he would have said) much hemming and hawing, she asked him cautiously (she was building up to something) how he was feeling, if he’d gotten any sleep, if he could eat-and, finally, if his contraption was doing him any good.

He said, Yes it was, believe it or not, and he knew immediately that the lie had taken the wind out of her sails.

Still, she said, “Pauline says it’s a slipped disk.”

“Pauline’s the expert, then,” he said.

Her silence was a remarkable concoction: hurt, impatience, recrimination, blood-red anger, fear, worry-the kind of concoction only a long marriage can brew. Rising behind it was the faint clatter of dishes, the hum of restaurant conversation.

“No,” she said finally. “But a gal from the office had a brother-in-law with the same problem. Just woke up one morning with a terrible pain. Down his leg. A slipped disk.”

His wife would replace the natural laws with anecdotes. No gravity until someone’s sister’s cousin’s husband had fallen down the stairs. Night and day mere rumor until a girl she used to know in high school was stricken with insomnia, or burned to a crisp by the sun.

“Is that so?” he said placidly. “Same exact thing?”

“Yeah,” she said, with some hesitation. “More or less. You know, his leg.”

The line clicked to say their three minutes were up and instead of getting off, she said, “Hold on,” and dropped another dime into the phone.

“Right or left?” he asked when the coin had been swallowed.

“What?” she said.

And he repeated more emphatically, “Was it the right leg or the left leg? Of this fellow just like me?”

She paused and then said, “Very fu

Pauline, he thought, would be happy to learn that there is a price men pay for standing upright.

“Tomorrow I’m calling the doctor,” she went on, the very reason she had dropped the second dime into the machine. He could see her do her little “so there” nod. There, I said it.

“What are you going to call him?” he asked her.

When she hung up the phone he could hear her say “Stubborn” before the receiver hit the cradle. He could not be sure if she was speaking to herself or to Pauline, or perhaps to the two girls, who would also nod. Maybe only to a waiter, clattering dishes.

An hour later, Jacob returned, banging into the house as he tended to do, always sounding like a drunk on a stage set. He moved around the kitchen a bit, clink of glass and clatter of silverware and slam and then slam again of the refrigerator door. When he poked his head around the doorway of the bedroom, he had half a sandwich in his cheek, the other half, dripping mustard and pickle relish, cupped like a small creature in his hands.

“How are you doing, Dad?” he asked, stretching his throat to get the food swallowed as he spoke. John Keane could not help but wonder how many years would have to go by before it would occur to his son that maybe he should have come up and asked after his father before he made the sandwich.

“Better,” he said.

And then Jacob began nodding, that long, low, exaggerated nod that he and his friends so often substituted for speech. “The thing’s working, then,” he said.

His father shrugged. “Seems to be.”

“Good enough,” Jacob said, still nodding. He was not quite meeting his father’s eye. “You want me to put the TV on for you?”

Although it was within easy reach and the last thing he wanted, he said, “Sure. That’d be great.”

Jacob’s sneakers were grass stained and there were grass stains like brushstrokes on his ski

John Keane watched the boy as he carefully edged himself between the bed and the TV on its rickety stand, turned it on, fiddled with the ante

Jacob stepped back for a moment, watching the TV-two soap-opera characters, a man and a woman, arguing intently, another woman shown wide-eyed, elaborately eavesdropping from behind a closed door. Jacob watched them all with utter absorption as he finished his sandwich. His father could see the small crop of sparse beard along his son’s jawline, under the fair, sun-touched skin. He needed a haircut, but these days they all did.

When a commercial began, Jacob turned to his father as if he’d just come to. (It was the heart of the boy’s trouble, John Keane would have said; he was too easily absorbed.) “You want to see this?” he asked and his father waved a hand. “Christ, no,” he said. “Turn it off. Get your shower.”