Buddy Page 16

  I learned that a shower isn’t worth talking about unless it has more than one head—and most actually did. I learned that acreage was apparently important, though for reasons I don’t exactly understand; I mean, the more you have, the more work it requires. I learned that you no longer open or close garage doors by pulling them up or down, though Pam had sort of already taught me that.

  I also learned that every showing agent believes that every house he or she is showing is about to sell within the next half hour, and that if we don’t jump on it fast, we’re going to lose out on the greatest deal we may ever know. The house could have been on the market for three years. The siding could be falling off. There could be rabid raccoons waving their little paws from the broken second-story windows. Doesn’t matter, it’s the perfect fixer-upper in an improving economy, and this isn’t just the right week for it, it’s the exact day.

  I also learned that I didn’t like most houses out there. Their turrets and gables, pillars and columns depressed me in a small d kind of way. They looked as though they should be sitting on the edge of the Black Forest or the side of the Alps, not in another nondescript development twenty miles west of Boston. I kept asking Pam, to her considerable frustration, whatever happened to the center-entrance Colonial? Is that not good enough for anyone anymore? Maybe I just couldn’t get my head around being so far from the nearest four-star restaurant or subway stop. But there was something else that was troubling me almost every time we walked inside an available house: as I wandered through the empty rooms, I realized I was becoming my father, without actually becoming a father. Put another way, I realized I was giving up the dreams of my youth for the far more standard dream of American success: love, kids, suburbia, cookouts. Maybe, probably, almost certainly, there was nothing wrong with that. It’s the natural order of things. But it was jarring for me because I had skipped—or just missed—so many of the seemingly requisite steps. I’d never had a wife inform me she was pregnant. I’d never seen a child born. I’d never felt cramped in an apartment with an infant and a toddler and longed for suburbia’s promise of more space. I’d never needed to move to a town with a good school system. I’d never felt the need to be close to the kids’ elementary school.

  No, I’d simply fallen in love with the right woman who happened to live in what to me felt like a foreign place. As I walked around each prospective house, it brought home to me all that it required and all that it meant.

  “You don’t like this one,” Pam said to me time and time again as we stood amid family rooms with cathedral ceilings, peered at stone counter finishes, gauged how many years the washer and dryer had left in their lives.

  “Not quite right,” I’d reply. They never were, and she didn’t push.

  It happened so many times that I was starting to feel self-conscious about it. So to weed out what I didn’t think I’d like, I proposed one clarifying rule meant to propel the process along. My only stipulation in this move to suburbia was that we needed to buy a house on a road that went somewhere. I’m sorry, but this was brilliant. It ruled out the highly coveted cul-de-sacs. It placed a big red X through subdivisions with gauzy names drilled into large ornamental rocks at the entrances—“Willow Estates” or “Brookside Farms.” I lived in mortal fear of those places, neighbors knowing every ounce of our business, gazing judgmentally at our weed-saturated lawn, boring the bejesus out of me with constant talk of young Tyler’s exploits on the soccer field or in tai kwon do. I wasn’t proud of any of my fears and frustrations, but I needed to address them, and Pam was patient as I moved through my ten stages of grief at leaving the urban life behind.

  Finally we found it. It was a brand-new house built in the likeness of an old red farmhouse with covered porches and many windows and a family room with a stone fireplace. It was unique. It had never been lived in. It had no media room, no two-story living room, no upstairs catwalk, no palladium window. It was on a main road but a quiet one. It all seemed very Pam, and if it was Pam, then it would and could also be me.

  That being 2009, nothing happened easily. The same bankers who had been sending out preapproved credit cards and home equity lines by the bushel in 2007 basically wanted a gallon of our blood to get a mortgage we could afford in 2009. We lived in that great maw between rich and poor—enough money to put half down on the house but not so much that we could buy it outright. Still, dolphins at SeaWorld don’t jump through as many hoops as we did to get our loan.

  There was the matter of selling my condominium in Boston. I would get irrationally angry at every person who looked at it and didn’t immediately place an offer. I mean, how could they not see what I saw? How could they not know it was the greatest place they could ever possibly imagine? How could they not realize the warmth of this marble fireplace on a January night, the access to the Charles River on a July morning, the ease of walking to Fenway for the October playoffs? Did they not feel the vibe?

  Eventually, as things generally do, everything worked itself out—the sale, the loan, the new house. I had come nearly to terms with it all. I was even excited about having a home office with a fireplace and not having to flee Pam’s place on weeknights to drive thirty-five minutes into the city to go to bed. I was also ready for the commitment that accompanied the whole deal, and I don’t mean just the new mortgage.

  My phone rang in the newsroom one mid-March afternoon. Pam was on the other end of the line. “Will you make it out here for the birthday celebration?” she asked.

  Birthday celebration.

  It is nearly impossible to imagine the raw fear, the potential for failure, that I was forced to confront in those two upbeat words, mostly because I had precisely no idea whose birthday we would be celebrating that night and it’s not a question that can be easily asked. It used to be so different: I needed to know basically one birthday, my own. I’d learn and memorize that of my then wife or an important girlfriend. My two sisters would be sure to remind me of my mother’s, and my mother would typically call me about my two sisters’. I always knew Harry’s, though we didn’t necessarily celebrate it because I never felt good about his getting old. But now there were kids and a fiancée and her extended family, and the whole thing was ripe for the exact kind of oversight that I was apparently immersed in at that moment.

  My heart sank like a cold stone through hot soup. Birthday. I pictured a crying kid when I arrived absent a gift, even though there was nothing in this wide world either one of the kids could possibly need that they didn’t already have. I pictured an angry adult, the shocked nanny, Marsha, who had been with the family forever, a whispered phone call to my future mother-in-law, weeks of darkness followed by a pallid attempt at redemption, possibly with the purchase of a new pony that I couldn’t actually afford. And to think that twenty minutes earlier, I had been blissfully tossing back a bag of Peanut M&Ms while contemplating whether I had the time to get to the gym.

  I focused on Caroline, Pam’s youngest. Think, Brian, think. Yes, I remembered. There had been a sleepover party about two weeks after Christmas, another one of those affairs when a team of manicurists had set up shop in the living room of Pam’s house and a dozen or so seven-year-olds had waited impatiently to get their toes and nails done. That was her birthday. Then Abigail, Pam’s oldest. It had been a while, to be sure. Think. For chrissakes, think. Yes, I remembered picking up her cake. I remembered that the Red Sox had been playing that night. It was April. The baseball season had already started. This was still March, so it couldn’t be her birthday.

  Pam, I knew that one. It was October, among my favorite months.

  Who the hell else?

  “Of course I’m going to be there,” I told Pam, doing my level best to conceal the panic gurgling within. “Don’t cut the cake without me.”

  Walking into her house that night, I carried no gift but a sense of dread. As soon as I opened the heavy front door, I heard Caroline squeal, “Brian’s here. We can start!” That was a good greeting, a warm greeting, something tha
t wasn’t always guaranteed. Those kinds of greetings made it all worthwhile, offsetting the nights I’d walk through the door and see two kids who wouldn’t even look up from the TV to say hello and I’d end up eating cheese ravioli alone while standing at the kitchen sink.

  I went into the kitchen, where Abigail was sitting at the table doing homework, Pam was putting away the dinner dishes, and a covered box, from the upscale bakery Icing on the Cake, sat on the counter, not far from a bouquet of red and white balloons. Nobody was messing around here.

  “You want to get the birthday boy?” Pam called out to Caroline.

  Okay, we had a gender. Pam made a move toward the cake box. She began cutting the taped edges. A door opened and shut in the background. Abigail pushed her homework out of the way and excitedly stood up. I thought my head was going to explode from curiosity.

  And in unintentionally simultaneous motions, Caroline walked into the kitchen carrying none other than the clucking Buddy the Rooster in her arms as Pam held up a cake with Buddy’s exact likeness in thick white and red buttercream frosting.

  “Look, Boo-Boo, it’s you!” Abigail announced. Caroline thrust his face right up to the cake, and I’ll be damned if Buddy didn’t silently stare at it for a moment, as if saying “It better be chocolate inside.” One lone candle was lit. The lights went out. The trio of women broke out into a rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.”

  I was at once relieved and incredibly stunned. I knew they liked this bird, but Icing on the Cake? That thing had probably set Pam back about a hundred bucks. Pam cut a sliver of the cake and put it on a festive birthday plate, which she then placed on the floor. The lights came back on. Caroline let go of Buddy, who let out a loud bark that, if I didn’t know any better, could have actually been of appreciation. He poked his beak into the cake and emerged with frosting smeared down both sides of his face, staring at Pam and the girls with a look of unabashed joy. Before they could wipe him clean, he was pecking hungrily at the cake all over again, at the frosting, at the cake part, at the little crumbs on the plate. The girls were giggling loudly, squealing his name. Pam was as light as I’d seen her in a long while. I couldn’t help but laugh as well—about the bird, about the kids, about the weirdness of it all.

  “One year old, Buddy,” Caroline said to a chicken that wasn’t really listening anymore. “There’ll be plenty of more cakes where this one came from.”

  It was just a couple of months later, on a warm Sunday afternoon in May, that we got our first, scary hint of how easily that could all come apart.

  We were showing my sister Colleen and her husband, Mark, our new house, Pam and I. We were due to close in a couple of weeks, and the builder had been kind enough to give us keys, and we were unveiling it to our families for the first time. Just as we were about to walk inside, Pam’s phone rang and her face turned virtually white.

  “Okay,” she said sharply into the phone. “Okay. Yes. Where is he now? Is he moving? Would you mind staying with him? I’ll be right there.”

  Pam hung up the phone, looked at me with a mix of bewilderment and unabashed fear, and said, “Buddy just got attacked by a dog. I’ve got to go.” Before I could respond, she was in her car, gunning out of the driveway, headed to her house about five minutes across town.

  I continued giving Colleen and Mark a tour of the new house, as if I had invented the very concept of suburban living, but something was going on inside of me, something I didn’t expect. I had been waiting for more than a year now for this damned bird to meet his demise. I had accepted that he would never wander off on his own because even he knew there was nowhere better to go. That had gotten me praying for hawks and coyotes, to one day finding a carcass on the side lawn, followed by the requisite consolations that he had lived a great life, the kind of life any rooster would have loved to have led.

  And now, faced with the distinct possibility of his death, I was unsettled, deeply so. Maybe it was just how hard it would hit Pam and her kids if Buddy no longer was. Actually, I’m sure that was a part of it, but it was something more. As I was showing Colleen how the kitchen faucet had both spray and flow settings (can you believe it?), my mind was on this damn fowl, the little barking noises he made when anyone came out the front door, the way he perched on the front stoop, his impeccable timing at always finding his way into the safety of the garage just before dark, the completely silly, unapologetically joyful look he got on his face when Abigail or Caroline picked him up.

  Why was I thinking like that?

  Twenty minutes or so later, my phone rang with Pam’s name on the caller ID.

  “He’s okay,” she said. “There are feathers all over the yard and a little bit of blood, but I think the blood is from the dog because I couldn’t find anything wrong with Buddy—no cuts, no wounds, no signs of trauma. He’s just acting a little anxious.”

  Why did I feel so relieved?

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I’m heading back to the house. I’ve shut him in the garage so he can regroup. I’ll tell you when I get there.”

  I bided time while we waited for Pam. It was one of those beautiful May afternoons, a hint of the summer ahead. Mark was poking around the landscaping, basically recommending things to me that I would soon learn I couldn’t afford. Colleen, bored out of her brain, was just waiting to head to dinner. “Well, you almost got your wish,” she said.

  In fact, I did get my wish. I was just embarrassed to explain why. Pam pulled into the gravel driveway with the crunching sound that would become very familiar. When she got out of the car, I could see that she had been crying but was happy at the same time—her tears, undoubtedly, of fear and then relief and, ultimately, joy.

  She pressed her face against my shoulder as I greeted her by her car, shut her eyes, and simply said, “I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “What happened?”

  My sister and brother-in-law approached and did a very credible job of acting concerned about Buddy’s well-being. Months later, Buddy would actually chase Colleen down the length of the yard at Abigail’s birthday party, pretty much providing the unexpected entertainment for sixteen ten-year-old girls, but she couldn’t see that coming yet.

  “Somebody was visiting a house down the street with a dog. They took the dog out for a walk, and they’re going past my place, and the dog sees Buddy and freaks out.”

  She paused to collect herself, then continued, “The stupid dog charges Buddy. My neighbor is right next door and sees it all happening. Buddy starts flapping his wings. The dog is trying to bite him, but Buddy’s not backing off. He’s jumping in the air and pecking at the dog. Feathers are flying, the dog is getting pecked at, Buddy’s screaming. I guess it was quite a scene. Finally the guy gets his dog on a leash, and that’s when they called me.”

  “So Buddy basically beat up a dog?” I asked. I have no idea why I felt pangs of pride.

  Pam thought about that a moment, smiled, and said, “Yeah, kind of.”

  She was getting color back into her face and strength into her voice. We agreed to shake it off and go to dinner. On the way to the car, Pam put her head against my shoulder again and said, “I know it’s weird, but I love that damned bird.”

  I wasn’t in love, but I was starting to get what she meant.

  They say you can’t put a price tag on any kind of love, let alone true love, but it seemed as if Pam was giving it a shot. It was a week before we were to move into our new house, a week before the moving trucks would pull up to my place and take all my possessions, and my largely solitary life would slip into that tender world of the past tense.

  Pam and I met with the builder of our new house, Adam, for some last-minute tweaks. It’s important to understand that Adam basically regarded me as if I had just shuttled in from another planet. I worked not with my hands (unless you count typing) but with my mind, and some people would even dispute that. I didn’t own a toolbox. I couldn’t pick a wrench out of a lineup of hammers. When I took
the kids fishing in Maine, I needed Abigail, aged nine, to tie my lines and teach me to cast. Seriously, picture the scene with a forty-something-year-old guy holding a bright pink Disney Princess fishing rod, a towheaded girl beside him demonstrating when to hold the stupid little button and when to let go. “You can do it, Brian,” she’d say. All along, some guy in waterproof Orvis overalls is standing about twenty yards away, every kind of bait imaginable in a veritable steamer trunk of a tackle box on the beach, looking on in shame that I, too, am a man.

  Pam, on the other hand, had an innate understanding of how things fit together in the material world. She had a surgeon’s hands and an engineer’s outlook. She could talk to Adam in a way that I couldn’t about cabinetry and flooring and fixtures. Adam tried to be as respectful as humanly possible to me, but in the end it was an obvious struggle, and he inevitably directed most of his attention toward Pam.

  On that day, Pam decided that we needed a fence. The only thing I knew about fences was that they cost money—undoubtedly a lot of money.

  “What about one of those nice invisible fences?” I suggested. “That way we’re not breaking up all the clean lines around the house. The lawn flows to the street. Everything’s on an even keel.”

  They both looked at me as if I were nuts.

  “I don’t trust those fences,” Pam said. “The dogs could still run right through them. We live on a main road. There’s no margin for error. We don’t want to be taking that risk.”

  Adam did a lot of pacing around the perimeter and counting in his mind. He scribbled on a scrap of paper. We settled on split rail. Pam asked for wire or mesh between the rails. “It’ll keep the dogs in,” she assured me. “Peace of mind. Priceless.”