The One Who Sang So Well
When Cathy left him, Jack began singing everywhere, he was in the car by himself, the house and then that shit apartment. It wasn’t because he was happy to be alone all of a sudden, he didn’t know why. He was always annoyed when people on the phone thought he was a woman,
but it made sense when he heard himself singing, when he felt his head lift and the skin of his face stretch as he widened his eyes and opened his mouth, and out came a high, soft voice, almost like his mother’s.
It wasn’t even songs he particularly liked, and sometimes it was songs he didn’t know he’d memorized after years of hearing them so often, sometimes he turned a commercial jingle into a duet. He felt so dumb, sliding into the living room with a microwave meal and singing along with the TV.
It was the guy at the restaurant Cathy used to work at. She’d started as a waitress and ended up running the kitchen, she loved the work and the people—she loved to talk—and the whole place made a show whenever Jack and Gwendolyn came by. Gwendolyn would have been six or seven
then, and when the manager named Litz gave her free reign at the treasure chest by the cash register she relished the envy of all the other little kids in the place, she pranced out the door with a new ring or a tiny dinosaur or a pair of dice, since she always got extra.
Cathy told him about Litz on their usual night for the babysitter, and Jack knew
something was up when all she wanted to do was go to a place down the street for coffee and apple pie. “Me and Litz,” Cathy said finally, “we just kept in touch after the place closed down.” She wasn’t trying to hold his hand, which was good. “We’d been through a lot, you know—”
“The trenches,” Jack said.
“What?”
“You always said you and the girls and the cooks—and Litz—you said you’d been in the trenches together.”
She smiled. “Sundays after church—”
“I know, Cathy.” Now that she’d started to open up she was glowing. She’d been miserable for weeks and he was tired of trying to pick that lock, he was tired of playing the game where she waited for him to ask what was wrong just to show he was paying attention. But he never stopped paying attention, he stopped caring.
“—and well, then we talked a few times on the phone, I don’t know. And I realized”—now he took her hand—“I don’t know, that I missed seeing him. Because when it wasn’t busy at the old place, we did talk a lot.”
“We had him over for dinner,” he said quietly.
“That wasn’t anything, that was before—”
“If you say so.”
“The restaurant was still open then.”
“I know.” He waited. He didn’t know how he felt, but whatever it was he didn’t want to show it to her. “So what are you saying, what are we going to do about it?” She looked hurt and he said, “Cathy, please, save the details for your friends. If you say you’ve fallen in love with this guy, that’s all I want to hear, I don’t need to hear the rest.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Well I am hurt, but so what. You’re hurt too. Christ. The last ten years have hurt us both. But if you’re waiting for me to convince you to stay, we’re not nineteen anymore.”
“I’m not saying I want to marry him, I don’t even want to live with him yet—”
“But you don’t want to live with me?” He saw her hesitation and rapped the table. He toyed with the pie crust on his plate, he took out the notepad and pen he always carried and started making a table, a list, the cost of everything. “There’s number one. I’ll find a place.”
“You mean tonight?”
“No, not tonight, Cathy. But come on, isn’t that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“Well it’s going to be confusing as hell for Gwendolyn, so we don’t tell her until we have to. I can still be over at night when she goes to bed. And then I’ll … go wherever.” Gwendolyn was the surprise neither of them ever wanted, and it felt sometimes that they’d given her such an ornate name to make up for this, to convince themselves she was worth their attention, though it never worked. Now, she was the only reason he and Cathy would ever talk again.
Gwendolyn was five head-strong girls all rolled into one. She and Jack and Cathy lived in a house on Spenser Lane, a small road of five or six houses that dipped down off of Thompson Run, and one of the happiest moments of Jack’s day was watching her climb that hill and wait for the school bus. Thompson Run was a busy road in the morning but Gwendolyn loved to take
her time getting into the bus, she loved making traffic on both sides wait, and wait.
Sometimes she pretended to tie her shoes again just for effect, she noticed everything. And she noticed something was off with him and Cathy, right away. “Why do you leave right after I go to bed?” she asked one morning, when they were all driving to the mall.
Jack hesitated. “I don’t always.”
“Now you do.”
“Honey,” Cathy said, “what are you talking about?”
Jack said, “I don’t want your mom to be cooking every night, is all.” He shrugged at the rearview mirror and his daughter’s skepticism. “I guess I have been getting us a lot of McDonald’s lately.”
“But you don’t come back home.”
“What are you talking about, of course I do. You’re probably asleep by then.”
She sighed at her parents with huge seriousness, as if she’d given them a million chances to straighten up but that they kept on lying. She said, “I don’t think so.”
Neither of them knew what to do with her. They’d expected that by the time she got into grade school they would all be able to sit down and watch TV together, or read a book, but she hated whatever they gave her, whatever they wanted to do. They’d heard of kids being contrary, but with Gwendolyn there was no letup, no downtime of just being sweet, or lazy, or happy. When Cathy had gone out of town for a few days to see her father, Gwendolyn had skipped feeling distraught about missing her mom, and moved straight into anger.
When they got back from the mall that night, and after Gwendolyn went to bed, Jack asked if he could sleep on the couch, or maybe leave closer to midnight. He was making coffee for the two of them, but Cathy had already started rearranging the cabinets and he didn’t know where
anything was. “I hope What’s-His-Face is ready to deal with her. If you two are serious yet.”
“You know his name, Jack.”
“I might be going along with this, but it doesn’t mean I want to say his name.”
“Gwendolyn always liked him.”
Jack was sitting down at the kitchen table, he had no idea where the sugar was and didn’t want to ask. “Of course she did, every time she sees him he gives her a little toy from the treasure chest.” He winced at the black coffee. “Just wait till he shows up and wants to be alone with you, because you know she’ll pick up on that right away.”
“If it comes to that, we’ll figure it out.”
“I should have a room at my place fixed up for her by then. It won’t be too big, maybe we can go in on some art supplies or something, I don’t want her to think that coming over to dad’s is where all the crappy toys are, the old bed.”
Cathy laughed. “She might try to walk back here.”
“You know she would.” He pointed out the window. “You know I’m pretty sure she’s
been back to the Dempsey House.” After they’d all gone to bed one night, Jack heard something and looked out the window. Gwendolyn had hidden a brown paper bag with sandwiches and Jack’s good camera behind the dog house the previous owner had left, and they’d watched her from the window to see where she was going before they ran to get her. She’d entered an overgrown field at whose end, a few hundred yards away and overlooking McKnight Road, was the house where the girls reformatory had been, back in the forties. They used to joke that it would only take a phone call to get Gwendolyn sent there.
She’d told Cathy she was trying to run away, but Jack didn’t think so. If she really wanted to run away she could have been in Erie before morning. He was sure she’d wanted them to hear her, she’d made just enough noise so they’d have to see her go over the bridge by the stream, and cross the main road. She’d done it to scare them, he knew, because they scared her all the time.
He and Cathy had been together since right after high school, when their classmates heading for college were suddenly gone in August, probably forever. The year before, Jack had gotten a job
where his mother used to work, cleaning office buildings downtown, and when that same August came around, he took on more hours: it wasn’t a summer job anymore, and he was able to move out on his own pretty quickly. That’s when Cathy got her first waitressing job, too, and they’d met when she was working overnight once, when he’d come in for a four a.m. steak and eggs.
When Cathy’s mom died in a car accident around New Year’s, she suddenly knew she had feelings for Jack because all she wished was to be at work so she could tell him, could talk to him and see him. Jack knew something was up when he’d said yes to her asking him to come to the funeral, and then to meet her grieving father. The last time he’d been to a funeral was when
he was five and he’d broken out laughing for no reason and gotten the worst beating of his life when they got home at night. But when Cathy asked, there was no question: he found the money for a sports coat and slacks and held Cathy’s hand at the wake, praying he didn’t do something inappropriate. When he realized his father would have beaten him no matter what anyway, he calmed and was able to focus on this girl that he realized he was falling in love with. Before their old friends started sophomore year, they were married.
Cathy called him on a Monday afternoon and asked to see him before Gwendolyn got home from school. When he got to the house she was on the porch, and he knew from how she looked that she and Litz were done. She’d even put Jack’s old chair next to hers, and she was wearing one of her all-denim numbers she knew he loved to joke with her about. This was her way of inviting him back, and his heart leapt at the thought. He waited for her to start.
“Litz was over last night,” she said. She wouldn’t look at him, she was past being sad and so she hadn’t been crying, but she looked trapped in her chair, rocking it with her big toe each time it fell towards the porch.
“What happened?”
She gave him a look that told him the story: she wasn’t choosing him, she was resigned to him. “Just at bedtime, you know, Gwendolyn does one of her things, it almost doesn’t even matter what.” She gestured with her hands. “And it just went up and up and up… and she’s wondering who this guy is—even though you and I have talked to her about him—and she sees that I’m trying something, that I’m being careful”—she shakes her head—“no, she sees that I want something, something that will make me happy, and she just steps right in front of it—”
“What the hell’d she do?”
Cathy stopped rocking. “It’s what I did.”
He laughed. “What the hell’d you do?”
She gestured with her hands, made a web between the two of them. “What we always do.”
He took a step forward. “You mean, in front of Litz—”
“He was going to see it anyway, it’s the only way to get her to just stop—”
“So you—”
“I smacked her right across the face, I fucking… and I… I yanked her back to me and
threw her over my lap and spanked her I don’t know how hard, I don’t know how many times, and I’m screaming the whole time—you know how she gets—and she won’t shut up and so you just have to scream louder”—she stopped. “And by the time I come out of it, it’s her sobbing, and Litz isn’t even there, he left and I didn’t even notice. I was running around the house looking for him when Gwendolyn said his car was gone. I finally got him on the phone this morning, he
doesn’t want anything to do with me, I told him he didn’t understand, I told him it’s actually gotten better—”
“Cathy—”
“And then he tries to say he can’t judge anybody, but it was me singing that did it, he said I was singing while I was hitting her, like you said your mother did while your dad was beating you, trying to drown it out—”
Jack put his hand up and she stopped, and she held up the newspaper.
Right after they got married, the two of them had almost started a cleaning business: Cathy would be the personable and bubbly side of it while Jack would be the muscle, at least to start. Eventually they’d hire a bunch of girls and have regular customers, and Cathy would teach them
how to pay attention to the family pictures people put up, and how old their kids were, and where they went on vacation. That’s how you got referrals most of the time, becoming part of the woodwork, knowing just the right details. But before they could get started, Cathy got pregnant with Gwendolyn.
On the porch that afternoon, Cathy said it was time for them to try again. The newspaper had a listing for a restaurant and gas station for sale, it was out on Babcock and right on the corner at the bottom of Cemetery Lane. Cathy said she’d driven by it earlier in the day, and while
it needed a bit of work, they could keep the color scheme it had to minimize the renovations. There was a lot of candy-apple red, red booths and countertops, red and white stripes. It had an old-fashioned diner feel, and the gas station looked big enough to sell merchandise, they could get fresh bread and pastries delivered every morning, something a little more than the newspaper
and stale coffee. She even had a name for it: The Rose.
Jack knew where she was going, and eventually she asked about the money he’d put away after his mother had died, the one who sang so well. The only reason he’d been able to find an apartment and buy furniture for it so quickly was because, if they’d done anything for him, his parents taught him how to save money. When his mother died—this wasn’t long after Gwendolyn was born—she left him a good chunk and they’d never touched it, in part because she asked that it be used for her only grandchild’s education. But Jack didn’t hesitate when he saw what Cathy was saying. If The Rose became successful, they could replace all the money they used by the time Gwendolyn was eighteen.
But until then, the money and this new place would save their marriage. If their interest in each other had changed, they still loved a good project, they still worked well together. It was ideal: Jack could run the gas station and Cathy the restaurant, and their differences and discomforts would be consumed in running around and supervising unreliable teenagers or adults who would call off, quit, or always arrive late. And the ones who were stable and dependable enough, they would become friends with them both, so there would be no chance of another Litz developing during downtime.
They would be in the trenches together, and Gwendolyn would have nothing to do with it. It would give them something to do that wasn’t her, something that didn’t terrify them with what they had already done, Jack sitting alone in the dark afterwards and hating himself, or Cathy sobbing outside by the stream behind the house. Or the three of them becoming used to it, the escalation and the screaming, how easy it got each time to put an end to it by hitting her. The more time they spent outside the house, the less likely it was to happen.
Gwendolyn was almost old enough to be at home by herself anyway, and by then they could both work at The Rose all day. That new family, the Trasks, had moved in on Spenser Lane, too, and they had a girl Gwendolyn’s age. If Jack reminisced about childhood at all, it was coming home from school and going to a his friend’s house, where a mother who was actually kind made everybody grilled cheese sandwiches. Maybe that’s what Gwendolyn needed, too, more time with a family that wasn’t her own.
Jack and Cathy got in the car to drive over to the address, and neither of them noticed the school bus approaching from the other direction, and they pulled onto Thompson Run before it stopped at their street. As Gwendolyn stepped off the bus, she didn’t notice her parents’ car in the
distance, and when she got home she didn’t think it was strange that neither of them was there. Only after dumping her backpack in her room did she think to look around to be sure, to look in the backyard and the basement, even the attic.
She finally allowed her entire body to lift at the thought of all the emptiness and quiet that was all hers, though she’d no idea for how long. She made herself a sandwich and watched TV and brought a glass of milk up to her room, and she lay on her bed reading until it got dark. She didn’t know where her parents were, and it was one of the best days.
Tim Miller’s most recent book is the essay collection Notes from the Grid. His other books include the poetry collection Bone Antler Stone, and the long narrative poem, To the House of the Sun. He is online at wordandsilence.com, and he talks poetry, mythology, and creativity on the podcast Human Voices Wake Us.
