Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [146]
Then Marilyn approached. “The hospital just called,” she said. “A boy broke his leg. They want you to come down and have a look.”
In the x-ray room, Sheppard examined the break the boy had sustained, a clean fracture taken off a brother’s shoulder to his thigh playing in a friendly scrimmage that with a cast, gravity, and musculature would set and finally seal as strong as it was before. Eight weeks and the boy would be fine, he figured, and when he sat at Hunter’s bedside while the attending made the cast, he said something it seemed he repeated all the time at his job: “You’ll be like new.” It was another one of those automatic expressions whose overuse hid its built-in, deep-seated hope, along with the human questions it always begged. Was there progress? Did we actually become better people? His wife had accused him of thinking in straight lines, when in fact nothing was further from the truth. For so many years he’d thought of their lives as a toiling of cycles, and that had been his own self-serving justification, his rationale for license. There was no improvement, only reprieve, and neither of them could really change, so he must gorge himself on every opportunity life presented him. But did he still believe that, even now? If so, did that mean he was destined to slip again? Would this moment of joy be eclipsed by the next phase of sadness? Or could you finally grow beyond certain forms of evil and sin? This place where he and Marilyn now found themselves, wasn’t it somehow possible to make it endure? So he someday could tell his unborn son or the daughter Marilyn thought they were having: I changed. We changed. We became happy, and from that point on, child, everything was different. If only, he thought. Please let me be able to say that and then pass along genuine hope, instead of the hopeless advice to simply wait, to just hang on.
I want to arrive, he decided, pulling out of the hospital. I want to be finished. I want to be done with the person I was.
Back at home, Marilyn and Nancy were frantic and he could hear the kids screaming in the background. Don, exasperated, told them to keep it down. “I’m trying to listen to the game!”
Marilyn came out of the kitchen. “We’re really running behind with dinner,” she said.
Sheppard checked his watch: quarter to nine. “What can I do?” he said.
Nancy touched her fingers to her chest in amazement. “Is he offering his assistance?”
“I think so,” Marilyn said.
“Are you feverish, Sam?” Nancy rubbed her hands in her apron, then felt his forehead. “Is something wrong?”
“I’m fine.”
“All right,” she said, and nodded. “You can take the kids off my husband’s hardworking hands before he kills them.”
“I can do that.”
Seizing this chance to be with his boy, Sheppard hustled them all to the basement and turned on the light in the back, where he’d set up the heavy bag. “How about we learn how to throw a punch?” he said. Todd, the Aherns’ oldest, was crazy for the idea, but Jennifer and Chip seemed a little scared.
“Don’t you want to do this, son?”
“I don’t know if I’ll like it,” he said, twining his arms together shyly and stretching the tangle toward the bag.
“Well, let’s give it a try.”
He felt it was important to first set down some rules: never to punch each other once they learned how, and never to punch other children unless, of course, they’d been hit first. Then he threw a couple jabs and right crosses, then some solid body shots, emphasizing the proper form, the importance of always keeping your hands up, your feet planted—“The ground’s where you get your strength,” he said—the kids agog at how far the bag moved when he hit it, the three of them blinking with each blow as if the force of impact blew puffs of air into their eyes. His exertion seemed to get them all riled up, even more than they were before upstairs, and sooner than he’d expected, Chip was whaling away on the bag while Todd held it steady, laughing when he stopped to shake out his hands. When Sheppard bent toward him to tell him how well he was doing, Chip ran up and