Hope and Other Punch Lines(25)

I don’t say anything and neither does Abbi. I’m clearly a shitty journalist. I should ask him what that feels like: having everything change in a day. I should ask him if 9/11 is the reason he got divorced, as if that sort of thing can ever be easily traceable to a single incident. I should ask him whether he knows the other people in the photograph. Instead, I remember Poet, my old neighbor’s dog, who one Sunday afternoon got run over by some jerk driving while texting on a cell phone. I heard the crack of Poet’s neck from all the way across the street. Afterward, he lay broken in the road, and if you squinted you could almost pretend he was a squirrel.

Still, there was nothing to be done about the sound.

“Here’s what I think about when I let myself think about that day, which I don’t. Not if I can help it,” Chuck says, and it occurs to me suddenly that we are asking so much more of him by coming here than I realized. “I think about a billion tiny shards of glass showering down like a hailstorm in hell. A month after, I had to have a piece of glass removed from my leg. I didn’t notice until it got super infected. My wife liked to bring up that story, like it was indicative of everything that was wrong with me. As if I’m the type of person who walks around with a gaping wound and doesn’t realize it. Never seemed fair of her, turning that story around like that.”

Chuck stands up and leads the way to the door, his way of telling us he’s finished. I may have judged him too quickly, looked at his falling house and his chugged beer and his stupid quips and assumed I knew all about him. I wish I could think of something to say now, like Thank you or I’m sorry or I promise not to turn you into a metaphor like your ex-wife.

Also, I understand why you are done talking.

“Thanks for stopping by, Hope,” he says. “If you ever need anything, I’m here.”

“It’s Abbi,” she says in a voice so quiet I don’t think he hears her.

“You guys seem like good kids, so I’m truly sorry if I didn’t give you what you came for. I am grateful to be alive. I am.” His voice cracks, and he squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again. “Even now, it’s not easy to talk about.”

I’ve never seen a grown man hold back tears. I mean, I’ve seen it on TV, not only on the terrible network dramas my mom loves, but during live newscasts from disaster zones. Never in person, though. Never close enough that I’ve had to decide how to respond or learned that it apparently triggers my own tear ducts.

All that comes to my mind to say is There, there—a dumb word, repeated twice, as if to maximize its dumbness.

Abbi, on the other hand, seems totally in her element. She leans on her tippy-toes and throws her arms around Chuck’s neck. He hugs her back, not tight, like I would have guessed. Casual and unwound, like he’s happy for the comfort. Like she has done the exact right thing by hugging him.

Hugging him was not in the top one million ideas I had for dealing with this situation. Number two, after murmuring There, there, was to run.

“We’re going to be okay,” she says, and he nods, like those words mean something to him. A benediction. She smiles up at him, all calm and grace, and he, to my shock, smiles back. Abbi’s a natural.

“You’re right. We are,” Chuck says.

I stare at the ground, then at the takeout menus stuck in the doorframe. I think about all the questions I couldn’t bring myself to ask.





“That was decidedly not fun,” I say. We’re headed back home, and a sad pile of our cherry-scented trash sits at Noah’s feet. The radio plays a weepy ballad about getting your heart stomped on with a cowboy boot, and though like pastel hair, love seems to be the kind of thing that happens only to other people, the song echoes in my bones. That’s what happens when I play Baby Hope for an afternoon—everything feels like a performance.

“This is not going to be easy, is it?” Noah asks.

“Nope,” I say, and think about how horrible it was to sit there and watch the words tumble out of Chuck’s broken mouth. It’s so odd to be a fun-house reflection of other people’s feelings. Or maybe not even a reflection. Baby Hope is an amplifier. I’m not sure of the right way to react when you see a grown man like Chuck go wobbly from memories. My instinct is always to comfort, to overstep boundaries I’d never even consider crossing in any other context. In my non–Baby Hope life, I don’t go around hugging strange men.

Does Chuck cough too? I wonder.

“I appreciate you not saying I told you so,” Noah says.

“I told you so,” I say, and he laughs.

“So I have a theory that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they eat an Oreo,” he says after rummaging through the bag and pulling out a plastic tray of cookies.

“You have a lot of weird theories.”

“Do you carefully open them and go for the cream first? Or do you eat the cookie? Or do you defer to the Man and eat them the way they came? There are a ton of options here,” he says, and there’s something about him spewing pure nonsense that lifts the mood in the car. We are intentionally letting the hard stuff evaporate.

“That’s three options,” I say, playing along. “Not exactly a ton.”

“Perhaps you only eat them alone in your underwear. Or on your birthday, the whole box in one go. Or maybe you dip them in milk as a way to evoke nostalgia for your long-lost childhood.”