New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 19

It was a house, not an apartment, which was unusual in the city. More than unusual, he had never seen it before. A small house that seemed to have been forgotten about in city planning, overlooked during expansions, and more or less ignored during several decades worth of growth and rearrangement and change.

It was not a particularly nice house, nor a particularly well-maintained one, but it was just nice enough, and just maintained enough to go unnoticed.

While Robert had walked from the building where he worked to the house where Kate lived, he thought about what he would do when he got there. None of the scenarios he played out in his mind played out in a way that was anything like satisfactory. They either ended tragically, or in confusion. A few of the scenes ended happily, but it was a happiness that was wholly unbelievable — like the happy endings from half hour TV shows. He was still debating what he would say, what pretense he would use, when he knocked on the door.

Kate answered. And of course, she did not have black hair and red lips, like he had pictured her having when she was just a voice. This did not surprise him; people seldom looked as they sounded. In fact, he would have been more shocked if she had looked as he imagined; that would have changed everything, and the world itself would have reeled and seemed a different thing than he had already figured it to be.

She had brown hair, and a nose that was slightly bent at the bridge and lips that were just lips. For all that, she was pretty. She looked down at him in the doorway and said: “Robert?”

He nodded. She stood back and opened the door for him to enter. The kitchen was small and neat and lit now only by a dull light over the sink. He could see the shapes of small objects — like knick-knacks — on several shelves along one wall but what they were exactly was lost in the shadows.

She sat down at the kitchen table and he sat across the corner from her, grateful to be on more or less the same level. She was wearing a blue bathrobe and was clutching it nervously around her neck. Robert looked at her eyes, which were large and black in the darkness of her kitchen. She really did seem like she would go or do something crazy if she waited like this until morning.

“What are you going to do,” she whispered.

And Robert still did not have a plan, but he had an idea for a plan and maybe if he started talking the details might come to him as he spoke.

“I’ll go back out,” he said. “And knock again. Louder this time so he hears me. I’ll say I’m your brother. Does he know anything about your family? Do you have a brother?”

“No, he doesn’t know anything about me. I’m not even sure he remembers my name.”

“What’s his name?”

“Ian something, I think. Do you need that?”

“No. So I’ll say I’m your brother. That there’s a family emergency. Our dad has had a heart attack.”

“That’s good.”

“So we have to go to the hospital, to see Dad, who could be dying. Only family is allowed in. You can’t leave Ian or whoever in here by himself. He should understand that.”

“I hope.”

“He ought to. If not, I’ll tell him he has to leave. I’ll tell him that I’m not comfortable with leaving some cheap one-night stand of my sisters in here while w — “

“Hey.”

“I’m just thinking out loud. What to tell him to get him to leave.”

“OK.”

“So I’m going to go outside and knock real loud. You should probably be in the bedroom.”

She shivered and closed her bathrobe tighter around her neck. Robert turned to leave but she called him back with a whispered: “Hey.”

“Yes?”

“What if he wants to come with us? What if he wants to wait in the hospital while you and I are checking on our father?”

Robert thought about it for a moment, but not a very long moment. “My guess is not, Kate. My guess is he’s probably not looking for that much relationship right off the bat.”

“OK.”

“OK.” He turned toward the door again.

“What if he does? What if he is? What do we do then?”

“What if he does what?” the naked man said. The naked man was standing in the hallway that led from the bedroom. He flipped the light switch on the wall by the kitchen entrance and squinted in the new brightness at the two of them in the kitchen, her at the table in her robe, Robert standing turned slightly toward the door. They were, of course, startled to see him, and the fact of his nakedness, which the man seemed comfortable and unashamed of did nothing to diminish their reaction. It took a moment for Robert to speak.

“What if he dies,” Robert said. “What if our father dies.”

“Ian, this is my brother. Our father’s had a heart attack. We have to go to the hospital. Me and my brother. To see our father.”

The man looked at them. He had dark hair, a mustache, a tattoo of an eagle on his shoulder. He was slim but muscular. And he was extraordinarily well hung. It was hard for Robert to not look — it seemed to be the part of the man most wanting to enter the room, to say hello, to sit down at the table. A thick and ropey beast dangling from the dark and tangled forest of his crotch, just wanting to say hello.

“You’ll need to get dressed,” Kate said, looking down at the table. “So we can go.”

“Go where?”

“To the hospital, like I said. My brother and me. Our father.”

“I don’t need to go then. He’s not my father.”

Robert saw Kate’s hands turn into tight balls, with the knuckles pressing bone-white against the flesh.

“I think you do,” Robert said. “I think you need to get dressed and leave right now.”

“You must be her little brother, right?” the naked man said. Kate made a face that looked as if she had been poked by a needle, but Robert did not react. He felt something like courage growing inside him, though it was a courage based partly on the fact that his life was currently not much worth living. What could happen? He could die and be reborn? Of course, pain was still bad. He would very much like to still avoid pain.

“I’m her older brother,” Robert said. “Kate is sweet and trusting, but I am somewhat less so. I want you to get dressed and leave.”

The naked man looked from him to Kate and back again. Then he smiled and shrugged and said: “OK, little brother,” and returned to the bedroom. He emerged a few moments later dressed. He waved at them both as he walked out the door.

Kate let her head fall to the kitchen table, and Robert sat down again and sighed.

“Thank Christ,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, not knowing if she really meant to thank Christ or was just saying that because she was glad the guy was gone. He hoped it was the latter.

She lifted her head up from the table. Her hair fell at odd angles and several strands draped across her face. She puffed them away with her breath. She was laughing. He liked the look of her face laughing.

“Oh my God,” she said. “That was crazy. I am never doing anything like that ever again.”

“I think that would be good,” he said.

“And I’m sorry, but did you see the size of…”

“Yes.”

“Holy crap, that hurt! I was afraid he’d want to do something again in the morning and my God… “

“I can imagine.”

“I mean, really, that was big beyond all practicality or use.”

“It did seem a bit like overkill,” Robert said, and she snorted and laughed and put her head on the table again and thanked Christ he was gone.

“I should be getting back to work,” he said, though really, he would have liked to have stayed. He would have liked to have just sat at her kitchen table watching her all night as she laughed and snorted in relief and blew away strands of her hair from her face.

“Oh my God, thank you so much!” she said and put her hands on his hands on the table, and then rested her head on top of the pile of hands for a moment, sighing again and saying: “You are my hero.”

“We pride ourselves on our strong customer service policies at the cable company,” he said and she kissed his hand and stood up and walked with him the short distance to the door.

“You know, I don’t think he believed we were brother and sister,” she said as he was standing on her porch.

“He might not have,” Robert said — it had occurred to him as well. There had been something about the man’s smile and wave as he left, as if he were allowing them their own little secret, like two children playing beneath a table and imagining that no one could see them.

“Which is funny,” she said. “Because I was starting to.”