The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

Note: This is a draft of the first chapter of my novel Lithium which I am currently in the process of rewriting. This page is part of my ongoing experiment with deadlines. You can read more of my fiction here.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

“No. I don’t know.”

We were sitting on a blanket in the park listening to a free concert sponsored by a local alternative rock station. Mac and Wendy had gone on a beer run and Maggie had taken the opportunity to ask me the question that had been on her mind since Wednesday when the news of my mother’s death had arrived. It was now Friday evening and my father and I were booked on an early morning flight to Boston for the funeral the next day. That made it three days that I’d been avoiding this conversation, and now I saw Mac and Wendy coming with a pitcher and four plastic cups to save me from having it now.

I had been worried that my reaction to the news about Marianne was not severe enough. I had insisted on going back to work on Thursday. Mac and I had gone to the pub Thursday night. He had understood my unspoken desire to pretend nothing had happened, and we’d traded stories about work, talked about our respective girlfriend troubles. I’d kicked off work early to go to the concert, but other than that it was business as usual.

My mother and I had not been close. She and my father divorced when I was three, and he’d won sole custody when I was twelve after she’d left me alone in her Wilmington, Delaware, apartment for two days. She’d had a manic episode and disappeared for a week before they found her after a traffic stop in New Jersey. I was the one who called the police to report her missing. I didn’t see her for ten years after that. I thought for a long time she was punishing my father, refusing to come to Seattle to see me, but it could just as easily have been her disease that kept her away, the alternating mania and depression.

But I had a hard time understanding that. She was a prolific writer, a literary renaissance woman, publishing novels and short stories and essays and poetry. If she could do that, why couldn’t she swallow her pride and cross the Mississippi and the Rockies for a visit every year or two?

Marianne was never famous outside literary circles, never had an Oprah appearance, but she had one New York Times bestseller and had several stories anthologized in various fiction collections. She even wrote about me, once, in a personal essay in which she revealed, rather bluntly, that she hadn’t seen me, at the time, in over seven years. She didn’t justify it, didn’t blame anyone other than herself. It’s just the way it was, she wrote. This was in Harper’s. There was some minor blowback in the letters section.

I reminded myself of all of this to try to make myself feel better about not feeling worse, but it didn’t help.

Mac and Wendy sat down and passed cups around and poured beer for everyone, a summertime ale we looked forward to every spring. It was early this year, appearing at the end of April instead of May.

“If we drink this with enough gratitude and enthusiasm, I think we can ward off the rain,” Mac was saying. So far, we had been blessed with clear skies for the concert, but in the west, rain threatened. In Seattle, rain always threatened. We ignored it. Even if a shower started, we would stoically enjoy the concert, and the band, which was local, would stoically play on.

Wendy wore her dark hair in a pixie cut. Her eyes were full of concern, had been since I told her about Marianne. She was dressed optimistically in jeans and a white linen spaghetti-strapped top, and I realized, belatedly, that she must be cold and that I should have offered her my fleece an hour ago. Mac, my best friend since we roomed together at UW, wore a pair of brown work pants and a long-sleeve t-shirt. He had already given his own fleece to Wendy. He wore a full, reddish beard. His eyes narrowed in my direction, trying to read what was going on in my head. Wendy’s long light brown hair blew across her face in a sudden breeze. Her ample body swam in Mac’s jacket. She wore no makeup.

The cloud line advanced steadily toward us as the sun set.

“Is this normal?” I said. They all just looked at me. I looked back.

“I mean am I handling this right?” I took a sip of my beer and barely tasted it.

“What’s normal, dude?” Mac asked.

“Everybody reacts differently,” said Wendy. There is no ‘normal.’ You can’t choose how you feel.”

“If it’s any consolation, bro, you haven’t exactly been your usual self. I’m guessing wine sales in the state of Washington are probably off fifty percent the last two days.”

We all smiled at that. Maggie didn’t say anything. She just looked worried. But I felt strangely relieved.

I finally started to really pay attention to the show. The band was called The Maytrees, and, though I’d never heard their music before, I became engrossed in it. They weren’t just playing straight through their songs the way they’d be heard on their album, that much I could tell. There were embellishments and some freeform jamming. The singer was a woman with pink-streaked spiked hair, and, corny as it sounds, her voice sounded to me like how an angel’s would sound, not church choir-like or inspirational or whatever, but sometimes sweet and melodic and sometimes big and full of rage. It was the voice of a being who could call down fire and brimstone.

The clouds finally reached us and a light rain started. As predicted, much of the crowd stayed put, and the band continued playing (“We’re not leaving,” said the band’s front woman. “Unless we get electrocuted.”) We stayed for the whole set and then went to the bar.

*

I’d come downstairs Wednesday morning to make coffee. I set about with the preparations—boiling water in the kettle, emptying the spent grounds from the press, hitting the button on the mill—and I smelled cigarette smoke. Through the mullioned glass of our patio door I saw a blond woman in a black sweat suit sitting on the brick step. She was wearing headphones and staring at the ivy-covered fence that divided our flagstone patio from the neighbor’s yard—or, rather, she was staring in the direction of the fence, hugging her knees to her chest. The apparently forgotten cigarette had an inch of ash sagging from the lit end that would drop off at the slightest movement. The water kettle dinged and I went to pour the hot water into the press.

When I opened the back door, my aunt Laura jumped and put her left hand to her chest and looked up at me with a relieved expression on her face. She closed her eyes and plucked the buds from her ears and said, “Hi Nate.” Then she looked at the stub of her cigarette apologetically and knocked the ember off the end before standing and coming inside.

Read the rest of Chapter 1 here. You’ll need Adobe Reader.