Detroit snow had grounded the flight; tiny flakes pouring like rain in the glow of the tarmac lights. Pegi watched from her window seat, annoyed by the droning breaths of the woman sleeping behind her. The noise was insistent, and she understood what it meant to tell her. She should be studying the piano sheet music for her father’s funeral.
Her phone vibrated. She had been working with a couple who were searching for a house in Bloomfield Hills. Four months of driving them around and hearing the same words at each house: “Let’s keep looking.” As soon as Pegi saw their number, she turned off her phone, slipped the sheet music inside her overnight bag and pulled out the Coastal Living magazine she’d bought at the news kiosk. A pair of subscription cards fell out and fluttered to the floor.
“This is what the airlines do,” the man told Pegi.
He was sitting in the aisle seat. She’d felt him staring across her for a few minutes, looking out the window, but she’d resisted the urge to make eye contact.
“Once they pull away from the gate, they consider this an on-time departure,” he said. “But they know we’re not going anywhere. So, they make us sit here. We’re like hostages.”
Pegi had chosen the later flight because of the available window seat. If she had taken the afternoon departure, she could have cut the fare in half with frequent flier miles that she and her husband had earned. Now she felt like she’d broken one of the great rules of real estate: never buy the most expensive house on the street.
“I’m not crazy about flying,” she said.
“I don’t blame you.” He unbuckled his seat belt and stuffed his USA Today into the gap between their seats. “Anything under eight hours by car, and I drive it. Honestly, it’s less hassle.”
The man’s face reminded Pegi of a grade-school lunchroom tray: an odd combination of features, like pizza and green beans and creamed corn. Who served green beans with pizza? She’d had this thought in the third grade. But then she sat down uneasily at a table where she hadn’t been sure if she was welcomed and ate everything on the tray. Pizza and green beans weren’t so bad together if you were hungry enough.
She thought he might be a professor of some sort. The longish hair, gray at the temples, the reading glasses hanging from a chain around his neck. The idea intimidated her a little, but then he told her that he was in the automotive business. A maker of camouflage covers for preproduction cars. His name was Andy.
“It’s counter-espionage,” he said. “But not the sexy kind of espionage. It’s just so other car makers can’t get a look at the new models when they’re being tested.”
He gestured toward her jacket, part of a navy skirt suit. She liked the way it clung to her body, just enough to ride a fine line. She enjoyed having an excuse to wear suits.
“How about you?” he asked. “You look like you just came from a meeting somewhere.”
“Even less sexy,” she said. “Real estate agent.”
She liked houses, just not the ones she usually ended up trying to sell. Her only interest in the job had been financial security as her marriage languished like a twice-mortgaged rambler surrounded by foreclosures. You couldn’t pop a Mrs. Smith’s pie in the oven and hope the smell of apples brought you a contract for that type of dwelling.
Andy wanted Pegi to know that he had some extra Klonopin with him in case of long delays or severe turbulence. He was willing to share.
“That’s okay,” she said. “If the plane goes down, I’d like to have all my faculties about me.”
He smiled. “Well, you can drag me out of the flames because I’m gonna be medicated, drunk, and possibly crapping my pants.”
The noise inside the plane had risen. People talked on cell phones. Kids babbled. A woman across the aisle changed her crying baby’s diaper. When the stewardess refused to throw it away, the woman stuffed the diaper into the pocket of the seat in front of her.
A man walked up and down the aisle with a cell phone to his ear, repeating himself. “No, I said Flagler Drive. Flagler Drive. F-L-A…Flagler. Flagler Drive.”
The pilot finally announced a break in the weather. One more round of de-icing and they would be taking off for Ft. Lauderdale.
Pegi tried to reset her thoughts, to picture whatever awaited in Pompano. When she was ten, her father had said that he wanted her to play piano at his funeral. She’d cried at the time; not so much at the thought of him dying (he wasn’t around much in the first place), but because she hated practicing the piano. It wasn’t like him to plan ahead, or to remember any plans he might have made in the first place. She’d been surprised by the call from the shelter. Not the news of death, but her father’s earlier request being relayed by the woman on the other end of the line. “He left a very specific note. He wanted you to play ‘I’ll Fly Away.’”
Andy pointed to the cover of Pegi’s magazine, a seaside cottage with pale blue shutters. “You got a place on the beach?”
She didn’t. She told him she was visitng Pompano for her father’s funeral.
“Heart failure,” she said. “But if I were going to have a place at the beach, this wouldn’t be so bad.”
He smiled. “You’d take it, huh?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That must have seemed pretty cold of me.”
Andy shrugged. “Who knows, maybe you’ll inherit enough to get that house.”
“That’s not likely,” she said.
She noticed him looking at her hands, probably checking for a wedding band. She’d lost hers sometime during the holidays, not long after her friend Renee had supplied her with a month’s worth of Xanax. “Pegi,” Renee had said, “this is going to be the best Christmas ever.” But it wasn’t. She only slept more and lost things and forgot to pay bills. Meanwhile, her husband, Jason, had fluttered downward like one of those magazine cards; an advertisement of defeat. He slept too much and missed appointments and sat on the sofa all day watching Premiere League soccer reruns while men and women, some of them crying, called the house, trying to reach him.
After the plane had lumbered down the runway and risen through the weather, Pegi pulled out one of her business cards and gave it to Andy.
“In case you’re ever in the market for a house,” she said.
Andy studied it. “I’m a renter, but I’ll keep you in mind.”
“It’s a good time for bargains. Nothing’s moving.”
Andy told her he had a friend who was buying foreclosed properties. “He sent me a listing for the house I grew up in. Seventy-five grand.”
“Where is it?”
“Hamtramck.”
“I like Hamtramck,” Pegi said.
Andy shrugged. “It needs a lot of work. And I’m no fucking carpenter.”
He stared at the seat back and smiled. “I got laid for the first time in that house. The second and fourth time, too.”
“Well, now you’ve gotta buy it,” Pegi said.
You’ve got a point. But like I said, I’m happy renting. Townhouse. No upkeep. And there’s a Cold Stone Creamery right down the street.”
Pegi flipped open her magazine. A photo of a cottage covered both pages. It was always a cottage, small and sunny as a jar, glass doors opening onto green grass, a shrubby mangrove and finally the shining ocean. No need to keep looking. Pegi wanted to lie down on the pale red sofa. Instead, she laid her seat back just a little and rubbed her temples.
“I’m going to try to get some sleep,” she said.
Andy nodded. “That’s probably a good idea. Funerals are exhausting.”
* * *
The service was supposed to start at noon. At 12:01, there were only three other people in the chapel. Pegi didn’t known any of them, and the pastor thought that she was a member of the church who’d volunteered to play at the service.
“It’s really kind of you,” he said. “I only met this man once. He came to the food pantry, but he wanted money. I could tell by his teeth that he was either smoking crack or doing meth.”
She had dreaded talking to anyone about her father, so the pastor’s stupidity was not unwelcomed. She felt like she’d just set down a heavy box and needed to catch her breath.
“I’m not very good at piano,” she said. “I don’t really know this song well.”
The pastor touched her shoulder and smiled. “Just play something you know. Play from your heart.”
Pegi’s father had been cremated, so there was no casket on display. The small chapel was outfitted with folding chairs and flourescent lights. It seemed better suited for a defensive driving course than a memorial. Evan Myers was a good man. He would have wanted you to follow one car length for every ten miles per hour of speed.
“We better get started,” the pastor said. “I’ll read the scripture and say a few words. I’ll give you a signal to play.”
Pegi took her place at the piano bench, and the pastor turned to walk to the altar. At the last instant, Pegi reached out and touched the hem of his jacket. The pastor stopped and looked back at her.
“What do you think happened to his family?” she asked.
The pastor’s face was flushed, his hair a little damp. She guessed he’d rushed from a morning workout and slipped into a suit he kept in his office.
“It’s the saddest thing I see,” he said. “Families fall apart every day. I imagine his hadn’t been together for a long time.”
Pegi felt a minor note ringing inside her chest. “My husband used to say the most important thing was for families to stay together.”
“It is,” the pastor said. “But I also understand that sometimes the cost is too much.”
“We met in high school,” she told the pastor. “We’re still together.”
When she’d first met Jason, his face reminded her of light and warmth; a beach or a scene that appeared in her mind’s eye as the doctor approached with a needle and told her to think of something happy. Jason had talked a lot in those days, and she’d wanted to believe everything he said.
He’d counseled couples for the last six years, some on the cusp of matrimony but most on the threshold of disaster; unpiloted missiles that he had as much control over as bottle rockets. One man, who had a tendency to call Jason at three in the morning, threatened to kill himself when he lost custody of his son. Jason drove to the man’s townhouse one night and found him hanging from a pair of neckties in the garage. He told Pegi that the man’s face was so pale it looked like it belonged on a marble statue.
They had always talked of having children, but lately he’d started watching her when she took her birth control pills. Even then, he would pull out to be safe. He said that most first marriages were doomed to fail. People find partners who fill in the gaps in their own personalities, but they’re too little alike. It was the second marriages that he’d begun to notice, when people found someone more like themselves. Those were the relationships that actually worked. The gaps, the weaknesses, didn’t matter.
“I’m going to write a book about this,” he said. “Someone needs to do it.”
He paced the bedroom late one night explaining all of this to her. For three months, all he’d wanted to do was sleep and watch soccer and not answer the phone. He could be exhausting. He always needed more, or less, of something.
“It’s really late,” Pegi said. “Why don’t you go in the living room and watch some TV until you settle down.”
She was already under the covers. She needed sleep, needed the white noise machine beside the bed. A couple had wasted four hours of her time that afternoon looking at houses.
Pegi closed her eyes and saw candles floating down a dark river. Then, she realized Jason was talking again. He was also bouncing a tennis ball against the bedroom wall.
She sat up, leaned back against the loose headboard and sighed. “You’re not going to write a book in one night,” she said. “Why don’t you make some notes and try to get some sleep?”
He caught the ball and turned to look at her. “I’ve already got two notebooks full of stuff.”
“Since when?”
“Yesterday,” he said.
“Jesus, Jason. You need medication. Can’t you see that? You spent six years studying this kind of thing.”
His face showed no light or recognition. “I need you to listen to me. Please don’t go to sleep.”
“So where do we fit into this theory?” she asked.
“What theory?”
“The one that you were just talking about. Gaps in personalities and second marriages and all of it.”
He dropped the tennis ball and rubbed the top of his head. The question had apparently never crossed his mind.
“We have the same values,” he said. “Isn’t that enough?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Is it?”
He didn’t say anything. He simply wore the look of a man who needed a bridge, rope, or catapult to cross a dangerous gulf. Did he honestly think that she possessed one of those things?
* * *
After she got back from Florida, Pegi agreed to play piano for a choral performance at the local middle school. Her friend, Renee, was the school’s choir director. As the two of them went over songs one evening at Renee’s home, Pegi told her friend about the guy she’d met on the airplane.
“He offered me a Klonopin.”
Renee was picking up after her two daughters, who had just gone to bed. Her husband was upstairs reading stories to them.
“A man after my own heart,” Renee said. “What was he drinking?”
“Bloody Marys,” Pegi said. “Three of them before we ever took off. But he never seemed drunk.”
Pegi looked down at the sheet music and tried to play “I’ve Got A Crush on You.”
“He had a nice face.”
Renee was aware of the problems with Jason. She dumped an armful of toys into a corner of the room, behind a chair and ottoman, and gave Pegi a concerned look.
“Did something happen?”
Pegi had known Renee since the seventh grade. Renee’s home life had been solid; her parents close, the fridge always stocked with a fresh gallon of orange juice. Pegi spent almost every weekend there. It was like a vacation. She and Renee would steal cigarettes from the elderly woman next door and smoke them in Renee’s room while they listened to Billie Holiday records and pretended their own lives were blues worthy.
Pegi stopped playing the piano and turned the pages of the music book. It was titled “Gerswhin for Girls.”
“No boys in the choir?” Pegi asked.
“There are,” Renee said, “but their voices haven’t changed.”
Renee was still staring at Pegi.
“Nothing happened,” Pegi said. “But I did give him my card.”
“Was he looking for a new house?”
Pegi pretended to study the sheet music. “No. I’m not sure why I gave him my card.”
“Has he called you?”
Pegi shook her head.
Renee pulled a chair over to the piano and sat down. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve always been a good friend to you.”
“Yes, you have.”
Renee shook her head. “No, I’ve always been a little jealous of your life. Ever since we first met, things seem to happen to you. It’s like you’ve always had this complicated life.”
“That’s probably stretching it,” Pegi said.
“To me, it’s complicated,” she said. “So, I don’t want to encourage you to meet this guy from the plane just because it excites the hell out of me. I don’t want to be part of the reason you leave your husband.”
“I’m not leaving him,” Pegi said. “Not right now, at least. He’s not well. He hasn’t been himself for a long time.”
“What about his book?” Renee asked. “I thought he was excited about that.”
Pegi told her that nothing had ever come of the book. “He sent a proposal to someone, but they never even read it. He hasn’t mentioned it since then.”
“So, he’s back on the sofa?” Renee asked.
“Mostly the bed. The cable system dropped the soccer channel.”
Pegi struggled to read the music. She tried playing some of the songs from memory, but that had always been easier when it was something she liked. She could play every song from her “Stevie Wonder Easy Piano Anthology.” At her father’s funeral, she’d played “My Cherie Amour.” She had known that “I’ll Fly Away” would be a disaster.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked Renee.
Renee had just brought glasses of wine back to the living room. She sat down in the chair beside Pegi. “Of course. What is it?”
“I think I may be sexually deviant.”
Renee laughed.
“No, I’m serious.” She pulled her hands away from the keys and let them rest on her lap. “It’s been a long time since I’ve felt anything when Jason and I were together. So, I learned to close my eyes and think of something else. Something that…”
She struggled to find the right words. It was much more difficult than faking her way through a Gershwin tune.
“Something to get you off?” Renee said.
Pegi clumsily reached for her glass, gulping more than she’d meant and feeling her cheeks burn.
“I guess so.”
“I think that’s normal,” Renee said. “Everyone has fantasized about being with somebody besides their lover.”
“Well, it’s not exactly like that,” Pegi said. “I would have felt like that was cheating. So, I think of different things. Like objects.”
Renee appeared puzzled. “I’m not following you. Objects?”
Pegi nodded. The confession made her feel very near the surface of something; fresh air and a warm, blue sky. She glanced at the steps to make sure Renee’s husband hadn’t appeared, and then she leaned closer to her friend.
“Candles,” she said.
“You think about candles?” Renee asked.
“And other things,” Pegi said. “A palm tree with Christmas lights. A cottage at the beach. Mangroves and old leather chairs and cruise liner stemware and cowboy boots and lunch room trays and little, round eyeglasses.”
Renee sat with her mouth open, struck silent.
“A full moon,” Pegi said. And then she had to stop and catch her breath.
Renee began to say something, but Pegi cut her off. “It’s no way to conceive a child, is it?”
They sat in silence for a moment, Pegi still trying to catch her breath and Renee obviously struggling to find the right words.
“It must be,” Renee said, “very difficult being married to Jason.”
“He’s a good person,” Pegi said. “Maybe I’m the problem.”
* * *
Pegi had decided long ago that there was no such thing as a bad year. If you gave in to that kind of thinking, you were bound for the bed and the covers and then you would miss opportunities. Her father had disappeared for the last time when she was seventeen. Her grandmother, who lived with Pegi and her mother, died two months later. Right after that, her mother had the big stroke. After months of rehabilitation, her mother slurred her first words: “It’s been a bad year.”
Amid all of that, Pegi had met a boy. She’d buy him a quart of beer at the 7-11 after school (she looked older than her age), and then she would let him touch her body with his cold, wet lips. “Good, or bad?” he’d ask at different spots. And she would always answer with the same word: “Good.”
She could see the boy’s face very clearly as Jason told her he was leaving. It was like a crooked picture had been straightened, his eyes calmed as he talked about how they’d both been wrong to think that they were different from other people.
“I’ve got somewhere else to go,” he said. “And so do you. We have to figure out how to get there.”
She felt nauseous, as if she was riding in a lurching car. She wanted to rush onto the apartment’s balcony to breathe the cold air, but she couldn’t quite remember how to get there.
“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about this,” he said. “I know why you got the job. It’s understandable. I see this sort of thing every day.”
“I never thought we were different,” she said.
They were sitting at the dining room table. It was the most noble thing they owned, a mahogany piece from Pegi’s grandmother’s house.
“You’re right,” he said. “I just thought I was different. I’ve been telling myself that since I was a kid.”
She reached out and touched his hand. “You need to keep things in the middle more. You get all out of sorts.”
He stared at the blank wall over her shoulder, his eyes holding steady as if he could see something beneath the most recent coat of paint.
“My father was supposed to pick me up after school,” he said. “Second grade, and I was standing out there waiting by the flag pole. All the buses were gone, and he pulls up about an hour after the last bell, driving his tow truck with this woman sitting beside him. He was drunk, she was drunk, and they were both laughing. That’s when I thought I was different. But I learned you can screw things up a million different ways.”
“You really haven’t screwed anything up,” Pegi said.
“No, you’re right,” he said. “It was mostly me. I was the one who couldn’t see things for a long time.”
“I honestly think you may need some medication,” she said.
Jason smiled. “I’ve been taking medication for the past three weeks. I think it’s helping.”
It was true. His words made more sense than they had in a long time. But they also felt like curved knives in her belly. She could think of only one thing to dispute.
“My father just died,” she said. “How could you do this to me now?”
* * *
Pegi found her wedding ring two weeks after Jason moved out, behind a bag of rubber bands on the kitchen counter. The apartment was in bad shape; dust on the furniture, crumbs in the carpet, a stack of unread newspapers piled up by the front door. Pegi left her wedding band on the counter but opened the rubber bands. An airline executive spoke on the small kitchen television about a maintenance scandal that had grounded forty airplanes and placed thousands of passengers in danger. He apologized to the flying public. Pegi fired one rubber band after another at his face. Her aim was surprisingly good.
She decided to take a week off from work. She slept a lot, ate like a bird. She had herself tested for mono, but to no avail. The doctor mentioned depression. After that, she set the alarm clock for 5 a.m. She joined a boot camp exercise class and did pushups in the mud before sunrise. She went back to work and took on new clients. She signed up to play piano at another choral concert. Renee hesitated, then told Pegi that one of the mothers had complained about her technique after the first concert.
“Technique?” Pegi asked.
“Actually,” Renee said, “she told me you missed a lot of notes.”
She promised to practice the songs, then didn’t practice and was a no-show at the concert. She threw up on a little league baseball field one morning during her bootcamp class. When the instructor tried to lead her to the dugout, she fell down in the on-deck circle and cried hysterically. The other women had miles to log and schedules to keep. Few of them even bothered to look back over their shoulders as they headed off to do their running.
A month later, Andy from the tarmac called. Pegi was randomly pulling listings off the agency’s computer for a five o’clock appointment.
“I wanted to see how the inheritance went.”
She could picture his face immediately, a banana for a smile. For the first time in a while, she felt an edge of hunger.
“Inheritance taxes.” She lied. “Nothing left after that.”
“So, no beach house?” he asked.
She sighed. “No beach house.”
There was a pause, and then Andy asked if she was okay. “You sound tired.”
“I had mono,” she said. “It takes a while.”
He told her he was looking to move back into the city. “Not the old house,” he said. “But maybe something in the neighborhood.”
She said she’d pull up some listings and get back to him. He asked if she’d like to have dinner in the meantime. “If you’re feeling up to it,” he said.
The invitation stirred a wayward concern for her husband. It took her a moment to recognize that the concern no longer belonged to her.
“Okay,” she said. “But wait until I can get some listings together. We can do business and then have dinner to talk it over.”
The suggestion was a small compromise to her marriage, to the eight years of belief in it.
Jason was at the apartment when she got home from work. The sight of her husband actually startled Pegi. He looked different standing there in his white t-shirt and new beard. His arms and chest were larger but far from firm. His eyes still looked settled, like grey stones in a cool creek bed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I let myself in.”
She paused in the doorway, her heart knocking on the grocery bag clutched to her chest. “It’s okay. Your name is on the lease, you know.”
He smiled and took the bag of groceries off her hands. She’d made a pledge to eat more, to build up some of the strength she’d lost in that stupid boot camp. She dropped her briefcase at the sofa and followed Jason into the kitchen.
He told her he was leaving for East Lansing the following week. “They have a graduate program in behavioral neuroscience.”
“Sounds like a lot of mice and electrodes.”
“Not just any mice,” he said. “Genetically altered mice.”
They both smiled.
“It’s brain physiology,” he said. “And I won’t have to do any counseling. I’m finished with family therapy. Never again.”
“I don’t blame you,” she said. “You did what you could.”
He leaned back against the sink. “It almost made me crazy.”
She laughed a little. “Yeah, you were certainly on your way.”
“I was lucky,” he said, “that you were around. You should have left me.”
“I’m not sure I could have done that.”
“I know,” he said. “You’re a good person. Better than I am, at least.”
“No, I’m just…”
He waited. “Just what?”
She shrugged. “Just a realtor from Detroit.”
He walked over and kissed her on the cheek. She closed her eyes, reached back and touched the cold edge of the stove with her hands.
She felt his hand on her face. “Open your eyes,” he said.
He was smiling when she opened them. “Tell me what you see,” he asked, “when I kiss you.”
She gazed down at the pale floor. “What do you mean?”
“You’re always somewhere else,” he said, “when we kiss or make love. It’s okay, really. It happens all the time with people. I was just wondering what you see.”
“Just now,” she said, “I was thinking about an airplane.”
“What kind?” he asked.
She looked back up at him. “A grounded one sitting inside a huge snow globe.”
He smiled. “That’s interesting. That’s one I haven’t heard before.”
“Is there something wrong with me?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Sometimes, when we were making love, I would think about that guy, Tate, who hung himself. I swear, when I found him, he had this look on his face like he was pissed off at me. I still don’t understand it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, it’s okay. I don’t think about it as much now.”
He leaned in and kissed her lips. His mouth felt wet and cold and familiar. Reflexively, her eyes closed. She couldn’t help it. But she also knew that it was okay, that he didn’t mind.
At first, she saw nothing but darkness. A clear light soon rose up from her chest as if a shutter had blown open or a plane had emerged from dangerous clouds. She held everything that came to her up to that light: candles and fruits and stemware and vintage dresses, even the notes from her Stevie Wonder songbook, which sent melodies into her brain. A man with a beard and a car in disguise, a car with a matching beard. But none of it would last. Not even the music.
Jason was kissing her neck. She heard him moan lightly. The stove was no longer cold to the touch. She opened her eyes and stared across the kitchen to the clock on the wall. She felt completely empty. It was the most frightened she’d ever been. She needed to hear a sound. And when Jason moved his lips to another spot on her neck, she said, “Good.” She repeated the word when he moved to her chest and began to unbutton her blouse. “Good.” And then again as he kissed her breasts. “Good.” Rubber bands were still scattered on the floor and the counter near the television. She counted them, stopping at thirteen, and then she repeated the word one last time. “Good.”
