Warren Adler 2007 Short Story Contest Finalists

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Roger and his five-year old daughter, Angie, are working in their garden. It is mid-June and everything is in blossom: tomatoes, green beans, strawberries, three kinds of squash. They are suckers for the seed catalogs that come every winder and imagine that their ten-by-ten foot roof garden is acreage enough for sorghum and wheat.  Each spring Roger hauls bales of potting soil and fertilizer from Plantworks up to the top floor of their Upper West Side brownstone, dumps out the grey desiccated soil from last year’s effort and refills their clay and redwood pots with new loam. With his actuary’s mind, he calculates that every squash and cherry tomato they harvest will cost him seventeen dollars.

"Look, Daddy."

Angie has found a caterpillar and is building it a nest of grass and wild anise. Roger marvels at her small fingers, so supple and precise, and the sweetness of her voice as she sings it a caterpillar cradle song.

"Her name is Pegsy the Pretty," Angie informs him, "and when she comes out of her cocoon she's going to live in our yard."

Roger measures Pegsy's chances.  Is it the greater act of kindness to conceal the world's cruelty from a child or to administer it in small doses? Everything has an exaggerated sense of poignancy today.  He has promised that today he will finally tell Angie that he is leaving.

"I like the name, Pegsy," Roger says.

"Do you think when she's a butterfly she'll remember being a caterpillar?" she asks.

Below them, Caroline's voice lilts up from their apartment telling Roger and Angie that she's off to the brunch and gallery opening for her high school art students.

"Hi ma, bye ma," Angie calls back.

"I think we might say a decent goodbye," Roger instructs, and the two of them troop down the three levels of brick steps to the back door.  Caroline is all in white. She is tall and slender, her hair short, her shoulders wide with the fashion. She wears a cinch belt in the shape of intertwining fingers, which enfolds her waist like the hands of a gentleman at French court. Her makeup is subtle, requiring the time and attention that used to exasperate Roger when they were made late for a film or a party.  He would pace outside the bathroom door, trying to goad her into hurrying by saying things like "Are you going to sign it?"

All of the volatility and cruelty is behind them now.  After eighteen years he finally accepts everything about her. And all it took was falling out of love.

"Look at you," Caroline laughs, as though Angie had done something incorrigibly lovable.

"What?" Angie says.

Caroline hugs Angie and tells her to have a good time on their outing. Within the broad band of her smile, she transmits a cold message to Roger on a private frequency that says: It was your idea to leave. Either you tell her today or I will.

Today is Horace's birthday. Horace is Roger's father. Horace died when he was forty-eight and Roger was twenty. Horace has been dead now for twenty years. After this year Roger will have lived longer without a father than with one.  He calculates when Angie will be able to say the same thing. The numbers are a cocoon he wishes he could crawl inside and awake when Angie was older and had lived past the devastation.

"I'm having chocolate-vanilla swirl in a cone for my sweet day," Angie proclaims.

"After breakfast,” Roger reminds her.

She rolls her eyes. "Thanks, Dad. Like I didn't know."

Saturday is Angie's sweet day. In a rare spirit of compliance, she has accepted the notion that sugar once a week is enough; and Saturday morning ice cream has become their weekly ritual.  When Roger and Tim Blankenship were just out of college and working as waiters, they found an agency that sent them out every day as fill-ins.  If they each got a lunch and a dinner job at different restaurants and coffee shops they’d have four places each day between them.  Their goal was to work in every coffee shop in the city.  Now his goal with Angie is to have a cone at every ice cream place in the city.  It’s a gorgeous day and they’re going head out to the Great Meadow in Central Park.  Roger remembers his first solo flight with her (daddy and daughter no mommy) when Angie was four months old. He stuffed his satchel full of diaper changes, costume changes, bottles of milk, juice, finger snacks, a book, a toy, his camera and a bib. As weeks went by he jettisoned more of the gear until he had become a seasoned baby wrangler, traveling subway and bus with just a spare bottle jammed into the hip pocket of his jeans.

The park is vibrant with energy of people and drums and Frisbees and lovers as it was this past Easter Sunday when the three of them were there and Roger felt like he and Caroline were a black hole in outer space, sucking in light and heat.  It was that night, in a state of near desperation that he told her if he did not leave he would die.  He wonders now for the hundredth time if there is some unexplored solution, some condition under which he can stay married to Caroline. Year-by-year they have lowered their expectations and lived down to them. They are like a cell undergoing mitosis. Caroline wakes up at five and gets ready for work while Roger makes Angie breakfast and then takes her to school. Caroline picks her up, makes dinner. They eat with the TV on. Roger reads her a story while Caroline cleans up. It is already joint custody under one roof.  Roger wishes he could sneak the news into the ice cream cone that  that she snarfles down after her breakfast, so she could swallow it without having to taste it; so that she would know without his having to tell her.

Roger's surprise treat for Angie, after she has finished her chocolate-vanilla swirl, is an outing to the house that Tim and Rae Blankenship have just bought on Charles Street It is a truly extraordinary place--seventeen rooms of three floors, a lap pool, Jacuzzi, and a guesthouse.  Tim is a writer whose last two plays have become films starring some of the big Hollywood names, and he gets to direct his next one. He is a great raconteur with amusing gossipy anecdotes of movie stars and battles with studio executives.  Angie pulls herself out of the water of their lap pool and wraps herself in a beach towel. Her long blond hair is matted back. The sun has drawn color to her face, accentuating her freckles.

"I think you got some new ones today," Roger says, and rapidly counts every freckle on her nose up to three hundred and seventy-four on while she squirms and giggles. "I knew it," he says, "twenty-six more. That's a seven percent increase!"

Rae offers Angie a soda, which she demurely declines then accepts. "You swim amazingly well," she tells Angie. "Who taught you?" Angie shrugs coquettishly and says she doesn't know.

"You know," Roger insists playfully. But he wants it on the record.

"My mom," Angie says and dashes away from Roger with a shriek. Roger wants Angie to like it here. He wants her to swim all day and bask in the sun, then barbecue under the stars. He wants this to be their secret fun place. He wants her to love it here before she hates him for moving here.  Roger was fifteen when his father had his first heart attack. It was before transplants, and you could not repair a blown valve or elasticize an artery.  Horace survived that first attack but his "condition" became a member of the family who grew larger each day. It rode the train alongside him to work. It was the third party in every conversation. It bestrode their house like a foot poised above their roof to crush it at the first unguarded moment when anyone became too angry or too happy.

Caroline is waiting when they get home. Roger allows Angie a head start, pretends to race her, and then lingers at the second steps a few steps beneath the doorway. Caroline swoops Angie up in a big, cheerful, mama-bear hug and scuttles her inside, telling her to wash up and then she can help her cut salad.

“Well?” Caroline says to Roger.  But she already knows that Roger has not told her.  "You have energy to screw your little assistants but not to tell the truth to your daughter," she says coldly.

Angie comes out of the bathroom.

"We can discuss this later," Roger says.

"She has a right to know," Caroline says.

"Not now." He cannot strain the anger out of his voice.

"Stop fighting!" Angie commands. She runs to Roger and places her cool little hand across his mouth. Then as Caroline starts to speak, Angie runs across the room and places her hand across her mouth. She will not let Caroline hold her. She shuttles between them, touching Roger's mouth, then Caroline's, then Roger's again, like a spider weaving the fine threads between two boughs blowing in a wild storm. "It's like a tornado!" she screams at them. "Why don't you just get a divorce."

There is a split-second where Roger can assure Angie that everything is alright.  In that silence Angie's life becomes written in ink.

"It's not the way I wanted to tell you," Roger says.

Tears shoot from Angie's eyes. She bolts out of the house.

"I really hate you," Roger says to Caroline.

A moment later there is a scream from the garden. Roger hurls Caroline out of the way and rushes out first. Caroline tears at his shirt to get past him.  He grabs her arm at the elbow and has an impulse to break it across his knee, but he lets go and vaults up the staircase.  Angie has stepped on the point of a length of barbed wire that Roger has used to keep the squirrels out of the berry patch. It is embedded deep into her big toe.  Roger envelops Angie's face in his hand, and there is no equivocation in his voice, no space for her to form her own opinion. 

"I'm going to get it out and it's going to be fine, but it's going to hurt like hell for another minute. Can you stand it?"

He instructs Caroline to go inside and fill a bowl with ice and water.

"Ice and water?" she says. Her brain has gone numb.

"It makes it colder. Do it."

Roger carries Angie into the house with the wire still protruding from her toe. He places her foot in the bowl of ice water. Angie cringes from the cold. He never lets her look away from his eyes.

"One two three," he says, and holds her toe and pries the talon out of her flesh. "There. There. See? There it is. It's out."

There is a hole in her toe from which blood is gushing.

"It's bleeding," he says.  “That's a good sign. I'm so proud of you.  We’re going to take you to a doctor now to be sure.”

He carries her down the steps in his arms; trying not to betray is anxiety.  She is lighter than a bale of potting soil. His fingers remember when they could span the length of her spine.  He sees her eyes close.

“Don’t go to sleep,” he warns her.

“Why?”

“Just don’t.”

An hour later, the doctor at Children’s Hospital has bandaged Angie’s foot so thickly she looks like a walking mallet.  They carry her outside and flag down a taxi.

“You can go to sleep now,” Roger says.

“Now I don’t want to.”

Ten seconds later her head falls down across her mother’s lap and she is asleep. Her body conforms to the shape of Caroline’s body like a sheet of plastic wrap. Roger looks at the pieta with envy.  A mother has her child’s love whatever she does. A father has to earn his moments by explaining and making safe for his child a world which still terrifies him and which he has never understood.

“I’d like to stay with her for a while,” Roger says, after they are home and Angie has been tucked into her bed.  The digital clock on her bookshelf says 11:42. There are eighteen minutes left of Horace’s birthday.  For his funeral he had been dressed in his blue suit. His tie was knotted in a Duke of Windsor, which he never knew how to make in life. His lids were closed softly. He resembled a piece of sculpture that you marvel at for being so nearly lifelike.

Caroline opens her eyes as Roger comes into their bedroom. He sits on the edge of the bed alongside her. She rubs his back. It is their first physical contact in months. She feels him crying.

“It’s not the way I though it would be,” she says.

“No. None of it.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks.

The numbers on the digital clock change in silence. 11:59. 12:00. 12:01. It is no longer Horace’s birthday. Roger goes up to the roof garden with clipping shears. It is chilly. Fog rolls in off the Hudson.  He cuts the tip off every strand of barbed wire. He shores up the wobbly handrail.  Angie comes outside, wearing slippers and her Big Apple Circus bathrobe.

“Hey you shouldn’t be walking on that,” Roger says. He carries her up to the garden they sit on the ground among the zucchini. He places her finger on the hard green fuzzy center of a strawberry blossom.

“I want you to promise to wait until it’s red before you pick it, ok?”

A pair of mourning doves hoots in harmony. Roger reminds Angie of all the things she will have to do to care for the garden. Water, fertilize, stake the tomatoes, watch out for snails and squirrels. There is always one more disaster than we have a plan to avert.

Horace died in a department store while Christmas shopping. Roger got the call at work. He and Tim Blakenship were working together that day in a busy restaurant on Herald Square. The excitement of Christmas was in the air. The turnover of crowds shopping at Macy’s and Gimbel’s was fast and the money was good. The secretaries and salesgirls were well dressed and carried an aura about them that came from earning and spending their own money. And you knew for absolutely certain that if you could just draw one of them into conversation, every good thing was possible.