The Little Flashes

I didn’t think of myself as lonely before I met Thom, which may be the same as saying I wasn’t, not quite, until he came along—that he made me unhappy. Papers had been placed before me; I’d been told to sign and sign. Keys had been deposited into my hand while my fingers still echoed my name. A white clapboard bungalow on Hemphill Street in Ypsilanti, Michigan, three bedrooms, one bath, detached garage, aluminum awnings lidding every window. Starter home, investment: my realtor said it could be worth half again more in five years. In the meantime, she said, I should make some updates. I wanted white oak cabinets for the kitchen. Thom was the carpenter I happened to call.

 

“I was a lonely child,” I told him, and as soon as I said it the word drew a line, an arrow through the years, between the child I was describing and the woman I was—ear to his sternum, listening to his heart the way a child, as I recalled, could listen at a locked door for the sounds of the ones who were leaving, the ones who had left her alone.

 

Thom once saw a man’s finger partially degloved when his wedding band caught the spinning chuck of a sander. Like many carpenters, then, he never wore his ring while he worked: “You only need to see a thing like that once.” He told me this before anything actually happened between us: it’s not as though I was tricked. Large, callused hands, salt in his close-cropped curls. Handsome not in spite of the crooked nose, the knurled ear, but because of them, the strong particularity they imparted.

 

In law school I’d been married, too, something my husband and I had soon agreed was a mistake. Instead of seeking the clerkship that might otherwise have been mine after graduating, I’d returned home, to Ypsilanti, where’d I’d grown up—though my mother was long dead and my father was living in Surprise, Arizona—to pass the Michigan bar and join the practice of an old friend of my mock trial advisor at a small firm specializing in estate law, a position promised around the time of my divorce, a net in case I needed one. I would not have said I needed one. Yet here I was.

 

Sometimes I saw people I recognized. In the Kroger parking lot, I helped my eighth-grade English teacher heft a forty-pound bag of Ol’ Roy into the back of her Subaru. I shepherded an estate through probate, and the grandson of the deceased turned out to have been on my high-school debate team. Sometimes I was recognized. “Didn’t know you were still around,” the grandson said. He told me about his family, his job down in Dayton with a company that manufactured plastic blanks for credit cards. My old teacher adjusted her glasses when, approaching, I greeted her by name—as though waiting for me to come into focus, as though I were only a blur, perhaps not so different from how I’d appeared in the eighth grade: an unfocused, unfriendly, unloved blur of a girl. She said, “Have we met?”

 

Drinks sometime, I suggested, around the time Thom finished hanging the cabinets. This was before I learned about the ring—immediately before. And then came one of those pauses, the hush of impending mortification. He wasn’t sure, he finally said, what his wife would make of that. “Well, of course,” I replied, “but why would you tell her?” At the time, I didn’t think I meant it. It’s just that I had to say something, and I come from the school of comedy that believes the best way out is through.

 

The cauliflower ear was from wrestling, he told me. Third-team all-Michigan in high school, a scholarship to Grand Valley State, but it hadn’t worked out: “Partied.” He was happier, anyhow, working with his hands. By now things had happened we couldn’t take back, and in the same easy tone he told me how he and his wife had separated for six months when their daughter was small, how she’d actually been speaking to a lawyer—he grinned: “Maybe someone like you”— both of them reasoning that if it were going to end between them, it should end before their girl was old enough to remember, and when I asked what the trouble had been, he told me, neither apologetic nor proud but faithful to all the mistakes that had led him this far, that he’d cheated.

 

Eventually the phone rang: Thom’s number. “I was just thinking of you,” I said, but it was a woman’s voice, asking who I was.

 

What did I think, she wanted to know next—did I think I was somebody special? I admired her resolve in that moment, her steadiness of voice as she maneuvered into striking distance, waiting to land like a blow news of that past affair, the one she’d outlasted, the one that meant nothing to anyone anymore. Anne was her name. Annie, Thom sometimes referred to her as, though I’d come to believe—already, even then—that his sudden fondness in such moments had to do with the guilt that followed his pleasure at how I made him feel, which meant it was fondness for me, too, that I was hearing, or fondness for me, actually. With a feeling familiar to me from mock trial—something like a wrestler’s proprioceptive sureness, I imagine, of balance shifting in a grapple—I asked her what she meant. “To the universe,” I asked, “or to Thom?”

 

To read this story in its entirety, please purchase a copy of Issue #19, or to never miss an issue of Story, subscribe to the magazine