Mantua Bay (2)

2

Jeff woke at daybreak to find his bed had taken on another family member. Agnes the Maine coon slept sprawled out over Steven's waist and Sara's right buttock, the bronze-speckled fuzz rising and falling with her little mid-slumber wheeze. She had been boycotting their bed since the move. A reprisal, decidedly, for the displacement from her Brooklyn roots. But his old cat had apparently relented overnight, having plopped on her back in the middle of everyone, ample underbelly exposed for the world to see.

He slowly pulled himself out of the mix, slipped on a pair of sweatpants, and headed down the hall to his study. Becoming a family man pushed Jeff to choose early times like these to do the writing. The deadest of times were what made the progress happen. And progress was sorely needed at the moment, given the task at hand. 

Jeff was expected to contribute to a compendium of short stories written by an assortment of generally celebrity authors. David Sedaris, Wally Lamb, among others. His agent Keith Kassowitz had just about forced him to get involved with the project a few weeks before. The story collection was set for a winter 2018 release, and Jeff had still hardly produced a publishable thought. Kass knew it too. Jeff had come clean during their phone call the other day. (“Just what the fuck do I have to do, Jeffrey? Hit you with a club?”) Good old Kass.

But if he was being honest, he hadn't written much of anything all year. Following the move to the new house in Mantua Bay, a lot of that first half of 2017 had been spent editing his third novel. The initial draft of Deny It had weighed in at nine hundred and sixteen pages, and his publisher wanted two hundred gone. Page cuts were tedious business, but finishing the novels was when he felt most satisfied as a writer.

The short stories, by contrast, were what he killed himself over time and again. Beginning them usually felt like starting an affair you already knew was going to be met with heartbreak and disappointment. Even when he found himself on to something good, or had found the grounds for a suitable ending, Jeff often felt met with a lack of depth or dimension, some foreign ingredient that wouldn’t figure.  As a result, he considered a lot of his short fiction—maybe even some within the body of his 2013 debut Debts and Debtors—a series of eternal works in progress. So when Kass strong-armed him to make the contribution, his first impulse was to yell at his agent.

Even right then, in the placidity of an early summer morning, with his family's sleep breathing across the hall vaguely discernible, he wanted to call Kass back and tell him what a pain in the ass he thought he was. Instead, he grabbed a pack of Nicorette gum which sat next to the MacBook, withdrew a block, and resumed zoning into the Word document. 

Jeff originally had every intention of going back on his New Year’s promise to put down cigarettes for good. Yet ever since he had mentioned it to Sara, she had been faithfully supplying the house with packs of Nicorette lozenges and gums. Nicorette products were everywhere: in his study, the pantry nook, on the sink counters in the bathroom, in the kitchen next to the Mr. Coffee, in their Jeep, you name it. Sometimes she would even occasionally slip lozenges into the pockets of his jeans and shirts while folding their laundry. He hated the way they tasted, but they kept him off the “grits,” as his father liked to call them. 

He chewed, staring absently out the window that overlooked their street. Fresh skid marks outlined the reckless driving he watched take place on North Carolina Avenue hours before. Jeff wondered if the car had woken any of the neighbors, whether it had been reported.  He’d seen other kids playing on their block since they’d moved in. Another parent was pretty likely to make the complaint if they were aware of it. Jeff also wondered whether his lack of desire to report the incident himself made him a bad parent. Not only was he not going to report it, but he decided he wouldn’t tell Sara either, who would over-worry. There wasn’t much anyone could do without a license plate number. It had scared Steven, but he had been safe. He had already been awake from—

"Steven? No. Steven. Please leave that alone.” 

The rock-on-porcelain sound again.

As predicted, the rock had made the promotion from decor non grata to plaything. Steven slid it about the bathroom floor like he was practicing soccer moves, jagged edges helmed by the sole of his naked right foot. Sara sat upright in the bed, hands folded patiently. She pushed a rebellious curly lock out of her face and glanced sleepily at Jeff, who now stood in the door.

"Would you take that from him, please?"

"With great pleasure."

“It’s supposed to sit against the bathroom door."

“It used to sit against the bathroom door. Sorry, but no longer.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It rolls around all night, babe. It woke him up last night too. And now look…" He entered the bathroom, ruffling the fine layers lining the sides of Steven's blonde head as he bent down to hoist the rock up and away. "I'm over it. It’s gotta go.”

“Thirty dollars,” Sara said. “Thirty, for that thing.”

“For thirty dollars it can sit in the yard. It’ll look just as nice out there. We’ll make a rock garden or something.”

*****

Jeff gave it a swift bocce ball-style serve into the limits of the backyard, watching it make contact with a thicket of old weeds at the tool shed, where it dropped with an unsatisfactory drut of a sound.

His assumption was that it landed on a shovel or pail. He walked out towards the plastic shed, found the rock in the bed of weeds, and brought it waist-high before letting it drop again. 

drut

A solid grunt of metal.

The rock overturned a clump of dirt, revealing metal embedded in earth. Jeff tapped at it with its foot (drut) and then again (drut). 

Jeff guessed it might’ve been part of an old well system.

“What’s the matter out there, chief?” Sara asked from the porch screen.

"Just something under the ground here…" 

Sara strolled out to where Jeff knelt. She had changed into a black bikini with an embroidered denim shirt worn over and tied at the belly. Her dark curls were brushed out and spilled liberally over her built shoulders and tan collarbone like a perfect accident. While always quite attractive, motherhood for Sara had been an ascension to another level of beauty. Her skin glowed eternally since the pregnancy, had made the pretty green eyes stunning, causing her to appear closer to twenty-five than thirty-one.

“I’m going to take Steven to the beach for a while. Maybe a swim. It’s been blowing east all morning so the water should have warmed up a bit. ”

“By all means.”

"Join us?"

“Eventually. I should really get some writing done. If not for me, then to appease our friend Kass. Who apparently still thinks I’m a writer.”

“Still a writer? Were you ever?”

Jeff grabbed Sara at the shins and pretended to devour her calves, provoking a slew of hysterical laughter as she gradually pulled out of his grasp, but not before he managed to plant a kiss right above her left knee.

She offered a hand to pull him up but he didn’t take it. 

"Come down here for a second first, will you?" 

Sara obliged, squatting at the weeds next to him.

"What are we looking at?"

Jeff indicated the embedded metal winking in the sun’s reflection. “This…"

"What is it?"

“I don’t know. Touch it and tell me what you think it is."

Sara did. 

“Well, what do you think it is?"

“How should I know?”

"Tap it with your knuckle or something."

Sara did, grimacing at the drut she too created. She withdrew her hand. "Ew..."

“Strange, am I right?"

"I don't like it," she said, frowning at the ground.

Jeff dug at the dirt to expose it even more. The metal pulsated against his palm and he could make out little distorted reflections of them, as if looking into a funhouse mirror. 

"Don't, Jeff," she said. "What's the point?"

"The point is I want to know this shit is."

She pulled herself up and stood over him. "Well, have fun. I'm going to get Steven changed into his trunks." Jeff tapped out a series of druts and felt its surface again. It cooled, then heated, distracting him from noticing the young woman watching him from the other side of the neighbor’s fence.