Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [73]
He called my office on Wednesday. I’d given him the number. There was something new in his voice, of someone wanting help. He repeated his daughter’s line about how I was a professional friend, and I said, yes, sometimes that was what I was. He asked me if I ever worked with “bad kids”—that was his phrase—and I said that sometimes I did. Then he asked me if I would help him take apart his daughter’s play structure on the following Saturday. He said there’d be plenty of beer. I could see what he was after: a bit of free counseling, but since I hadn’t prepared myself for his invitation, I didn’t have a good defense ready. I looked around my office cubicle, and I saw myself in Earl’s backyard, a screwdriver in one hand and a beer in the other. I said yes.
The day I came over, it was a fair morning, for Michigan. This state is like Holland. Cold, clammy mists mix with freezing rain in autumn, and hard rains in the spring are broken by tropical heat and tornadoes. It’s attack weather. The sky covers you with a metallic-blue, watercolor wash over tinfoil. But this day was all right. I worked out there with Earl, pulling the wood apart with our crowbars and screwdrivers, and we had an audience, Jaynee and Earl’s new woman. That was how she was introduced to me: Jody. She’s the new woman. She didn’t seem to have more than about eight or nine years on Jaynee, and she was nearsighted. She had those thick corrective lenses. But she was pretty in the details, and when she looked at Earl, the lenses enlarged those eyes, so that the love was large and naked and obvious.
I was pulling down a support bar for the north end of the structure and observing from time to time the neighboring backyards. My boys had gone off to a Scout meeting again, and my wife was busy, catching up on some office work. No one missed me. I was pulling at the wood, enjoying myself, talking to Earl and Jaynee and Jody about some of the techniques people in my profession use to resolve bad family quarrels; Jaynee and Jody were working at pulling down some of the wood, too. We already had two piles of scrap lumber.
I had heard a little of how Earl raised Jaynee. Her mother had taken off, the way they sometimes do, when Jaynee was three years old. He’d done the parental work. “You’ve been the dad, haven’t you, Earl?” Jody said, bumping her hip at him. She sat down to watch a sparrow. Her hair was in a ponytail, one of those feminine brooms. “Earl doesn’t know the first thing about being a woman, and he had to teach it all to Jaynee here.” Jody pointed her cigarette at Jaynee. “Well, she learned it from somewhere. There’s not much left she doesn’t know.”
“Where’s the mystery?” Jaynee asked. She was pounding a hammer absentmindedly into a piece of wood lying flat on the ground. “It’s easier being a woman than a girl. Men treat you better ’cause they want you.”
Earl stopped turning his wrench. “Only if you don’t go to the zoo anytime some punk asks you.”
“That was once,” she said.
Earl aimed himself at me. “I was strict with her. She knows about the laws I laid down. Fourteen laws. They’re framed in her bedroom. Nobody in this country knows what it is to be decent anymore, but I’m trying. It sure to hell isn’t easy.”
Jody smiled at me. “Earl restrained himself until I came along.” She laughed. Earl turned away so I wouldn’t see his face.
“I only spent the night in the zoo once,” Jaynee repeated, as if no one had been listening. “And besides, I was protected.”
“Protected,” Earl repeated, staring at her.
“You know.” Jaynee pointed her index finger at her father with her thumb in the air and the other fingers pulled back, and she made an explosive sound in her mouth.
“You took that?” her father said. “You took that to the zoo?”
Jaynee shrugged. At this particular moment, Earl turned to me. “Warren, did you see it?”
I assumed he meant the gun. I looked over toward him from the bolt I was