Mrs. Fletcher(95)

George had dressed up for the occasion—khakis, Oxford shirt, tweed jacket—and the outfit gave him a surprisingly academic aura, especially when he put on his reading glasses to study the menu.

“You don’t look like a plumber,” she said, realizing even before the words were out of her mouth that it was a stupid and condescending thing to say.

“Thanks,” he said, though he didn’t sound especially grateful.

“I’m sorry.” Eve felt like a fool. “All I meant is that normally when I see you, you’re—”

“Filthy.”

“No, not filthy. Just not quite as handsome as you are right now.”

“I clean up nice,” he said, forcing a smile. “It’s a necessity in my line of work.”

He took a sip of the Chilean Malbec he’d selected after an in-depth consultation with the waiter. He clearly knew his way around a wine list, which was another thing Eve hadn’t expected. It was humbling and illuminating, coming face-to-face with her own snobbery.

“Actually,” he told her, “I’m thinking about retiring in a couple of years, as soon as Katie graduates. Just sell the business and be done with it. I’d like to travel a little, maybe live near the ocean. I’ve been doing the same thing for thirty years. I think that’s enough.”

He said he’d never really wanted to be a plumber in the first place. He’d gone to BU for Communications, but he liked partying a lot more than he liked studying, and had only lasted three semesters. He was nineteen years old, living at home, and of course he drifted into the family business, becoming his father’s apprentice, not so much choosing a trade as accepting his fate, which turned out to be not such a terrible way to go.

“The pay was good and I liked working with my dad. I bought a nice house, had a beautiful family. The years go by and all the sudden I’m the boss.” He bit the tip of his thumb, then took a moment to inspect the toothmark. “It all made sense until Lorraine got sick.”

Her illness was a four-year ordeal—diagnosis, surgery, chemo, radiation, fingers crossed. A brief period of hope, a bad scan, and the whole cycle all over again. His older daughter, Maeve, got married right out of college, moved to Denver with her husband. She was launched. It was Katie he worried about, a moody teenager, really close to her mom. She was a wreck. On top of all that, George’s own mother died, and all the crap started up with his father.

“This past year was a nightmare. I didn’t handle it very well. I was trying to keep the business running and take care of everybody else. I wasn’t sleeping too well, so I started drinking to slow my mind down, and you know how that goes. It got to be a problem.”

“It’s hard being a caregiver,” Eve told him. “You muddle through however you can.”

He said he’d had some difficulty controlling his emotions. He was angry all the time—at God, at himself, at the doctors, all of which was okay, as far as he was concerned. But he was also angry at his wife for being sick, which was unforgivable.

“You know what I was mad about? I was mad because I didn’t have a sex life anymore. Like she was inconveniencing me. The poor woman can’t eat, she’s in terrible pain, but what about me, you know?” He released a soft, bitter chuckle. “I watched a lotta porn while she was dying. I mean, a lot. My wife was upstairs, wasting away, and I’m down in the office watching Spring Break Hotties, or whatever they call it.” He delivered the bulk of this confession to the tablecloth, but now he looked up with a slightly bewildered expression. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

Eve was wondering the same thing. It wasn’t the kind of story you expected to hear on a first date. But she was touched by his trust, and relieved to know that their experiences had overlapped in this one peculiar arena, not that she would ever tell him about that.

“You’re a good man.” She reached across the table and patted the back of his hand. “You took care of your family when they needed you. I remember that day you came to the Center. I saw how much you loved your dad.”

He managed a weak smile. “I’m sorry if I was rude to you. That was probably the worst weekend of my life. Up to that point, anyway.”

“You don’t have to apologize. It was a sad situation. We all did the best we could.”

He cheered up after that, told her about the trip to Hawaii he’d been fantasizing about, if he could work up the courage to go alone. He thought he might like to learn how to scuba dive, even though it terrified him.

“It’s a whole other world down there. You’re like an astronaut on a spacewalk.”

She told him about Brendan and the rough patch he was going through, and talked a little about her Gender and Society class at ECC. George was more interested than she’d expected, explaining that Katie was big into all that stuff, queer this and trans that. She’d had a girlfriend her freshman year, but now she was dating a guy.

“She says she’s attracted to the person, not the gender. I guess it doubles your chances of getting lucky.”

“That’s a very enlightened way of looking at it.”

“Whatever makes her happy,” he said. “That’s the only thing that matters to me.”

He drove her home and walked her to her front door. He asked if he could kiss her and she said yes. It was a nice kiss, though a little more polite than it needed to be. Brendan was away that weekend, visiting Wade at UConn, and Eve decided to seize the day.