Page 56 of Good Days Bad Days

Greg

Betty’s House

Janesville, Wisconsin

By the time Harry arranged the delivery of Betty’s piano, I regretted the little temper tantrum I threw in my bedroom after she left.

I took out all her letters, ripping off the length of silk ribbon I’d bought at B?n Thành Market to keep them together, and started rending them into pieces one at a time, destroying the physical evidence of the delusional love story I’d lived through them.

As I worked through the stack in a frenzy, the picture of Betty I’d slid into the wooden frame of a small, cloudy mirror hanging over my desk stared back at me.

Betty, looking down on me in her wedding dress with that TV show smile, flowers she probably arranged on her own, and the ring I first saw in that banquet hall, the impetus for my escape to Vietnam.

I dropped the letter I was about to tear apart and grabbed the faded photograph, which was sticky in the corners from where the Scotch tape had kept it on my headboard in the Caravelle.

It needed to go, even more than the words she’d written.

This picture of my fake “wife” needed to be shredded into pieces.

Turning the photograph over so I didn’t have to look into Betty’s eyes as I destroyed her, I held it tight, closed my eyes, and willed my fingers to do the rest, but I couldn’t.

No matter how many times I gritted my teeth and cursed, or how many tears squeezed out from my crunched eyelids, I just couldn’t shred it.

Eventually, I let her drop onto the desk, intact, and then put my head down on the pile of letters and wept.

“Knock it off with those tears,” my father used to say.

When I fell off my bike and scraped my knee so severely that the blood turned my tube socks red, he told me to suck it up and be a man.

When at six, I sniffled from grief at my beloved grandmother’s funeral, again, he told me to be a man.

And when the boys at school called me a sissy for playing piano and Pete Hachette broke my nose behind Food Queen for calling him out on shoplifting, he told me there was no use in crying about it, that next time I should punch them in the nose.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t cry at my father’s funeral—because he would’ve been ashamed of those tears.

He taught me to hide my emotions—he masked his feelings with anger, and I boxed them up and stored them away somewhere deep inside.

I didn’t even cry for my brother or my mother. I didn’t cry for the nineteen-year-old boy from Iowa who died right next to me after stepping on a mine. Yet, there I was, crying over pretty pages that’d kept me safe and hopeful and a picture of a woman I had to give up.

The tears were for more than that. They had to be.

They were for the man inside me who’d never been allowed to feel, now overwhelmed by a flood of grief.

It was like the monsoon season in Vietnam, where the rain pours endlessly, as if the sky itself is mourning the loss of life, compassion, and humanity.

It took all day to get my emotions reeled in.

I repaired Betty’s letters as best I could, then placed them in a box with her photograph.

I put the box in the corner of my room, hoping this act of containment might help dry my eyes and remove the suffocating weight of sorrow that felt like an elephant pressing down on my chest day and night.

Lost without my fantastical obsession, I immersed myself in work, researching rare items. In the past, I would’ve locked myself in my room to look through Betty’s letters.

Now, I took to walking the shore path around the lake, studying the mansions and imagining the impressive lives unfolding inside the massive edifices.

I dreamed of a day when I might find my own piece of land to settle on—a home I owned where I could watch the lake come alive with summer adventurers and then grow still with the winter frost.

Two months after Betty placed her order for the piano, Harry called me into his office and handed me a delivery form with Betty’s name on it. It’d been so long since she made the deposit that I assumed she had changed her mind.

“It’s a bit of a drive, but they paid extra for the delivery,” Harry explained. “It’s a two-man job. Take Toby.”

By this time, I’ve locked my emotions away, and though I’m wary of driving to Betty and Don’s home, I don’t let on. Toby and I load the piano, cover it in moving blankets, secure it to the wall of the truck, and head toward Janesville.

When we pull up to the two-story white house with black shutters, a one-car garage tucked up under the second story, and a red-brick path leading to a glossy ebony front door, I leave Toby with the truck.

“I’ll do a little recon. See what the plan is,” I say, swallowing the lump in my throat repeatedly.

My mouth is dry, and anxiety buzzes in my extremities as I walk up the front path.

I need to find out who is waiting inside without Toby in tow.

As much as I loathe Don Hollinger, a part of me would rather see him on the other side of the door than Betty.

But when the door swings open, it’s neither Don nor Betty but a nice-looking, dark-haired young woman in capri pants and a loose short-sleeve blouse.

“Hi, uh, we have a delivery for”—I’m about to say Betty’s name but catch myself—“Hollinger. A piano.”

“Oh, yes. Yes. Come in,” she says, waving me over the threshold. “If you want to wait a sec, I’ll go grab Mrs. Hollinger.”

The woman excuses herself as I step inside.

Alone in the entry, I spin slowly, taking in the details of Betty’s house.

It’s everything I expected: warm, earthy colors and polished parquet floors.

To the right is a teak dining table with eight orange upholstered chairs and not a spot of dust. Through the dining room, I glimpse a stylish kitchen with an avocado-green top-of-the-line refrigerator and stove, the smell of a roast filling the house with an inviting scent.

To the left is a sitting room with low-profile furniture, a drink service in the corner, a large stone fireplace, and a blank spot on the far wall where I’m guessing the piano will be placed.

Directly in front of me, a long, curved stairway covered in a dark-orange shag carpet rises to a line of doors at the top.

This is the house, the house, the one she probably dreamed of as she wrote her book, the one she promised her viewers they could have if they simply followed all the rules of etiquette and homemaking.

I feel a pang of inadequacy. This is what she’s always wanted, and it’s something I definitely couldn’t give her.

If I want the best for Betty, then I should be happy for her, I try to convince myself.

“Greg,” Betty says from the stairs, and the sound of her voice thwarts my well-laid plans.

The Betty standing on the stairs isn’t the one from the diner, or from WQRX, or even from the picture she sent me.

This is the Betty from the morning I woke up beside her in the car, the day I met her family.

She’s plain faced, dressed in jeans and a loose sweatshirt, with her hair tied up in a scarf.

To me, this is the most beautiful version of her.

“Where would you like the piano?” I ask.

I don’t greet her or act like an old friend or someone who knows what it’s like to get lost in her embrace. She jogs down the last few steps, her bare feet hitting the herringbone flooring with a slap.

“I was thinking that wall,” she says, pointing to the exact spot I’d predicted, biting her chipped nail as she watches me.

“As long as it’s an interior wall you should be fine.”

“The garage is on the other side. Is that a problem?”

“I don’t think so,” I respond, though I’m not sure of anything right now. Betty leans against the back of her fancy tangerine leather Cassina sofa, and immediately the room goes from looking like a show set to a home. She lives here with her husband, lucky bastard.

“It’ll take a few minutes to get it prepped. Do you mind leaving the door open?”

“Nope, that’s fine. Need anything else?”

“Nah, you’re all set,” I say as I step outside, taking a welcome breath of fresh air. The words I truly want to say are suffocating me, like a hand over my mouth.

Toby and I get the piano inside without a dent in the mahogany or a single scratch on her flooring.

While Toby collects the dolly and blankets to carry them back to the truck, I run my fingers across the familiar keys, playing scales from one side of the keyboard to the other.

I discover a few off-tune notes and make some adjustments, repeating the scales until the chords sound right.

I’m playing through a few simple songs when Betty speaks ups with a request.

“Play ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’” Betty says from the couch. I turn and see Betty and her friend sitting there, listening intently. The dark-haired woman cradles a bundle of soft pink blankets, a sleeping baby nestled inside.

“Gosh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Was I too loud?”

“No, no. She likes it,” Betty’s friend says, swaying slightly from side to side. “Been crying all day till now. You’re a miracle worker.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Greg likes to pretend to be humble,” Betty jokes, eyebrows raised at me, “but we know better.”

“Greg?” The friend’s eyes bulge, her head tipping toward me like she’s pointing. Betty nods and I wonder what she’s said about me. It can’t be good. I make one last tweak and then start to put the piano back together. “So you’re Greg, huh?”

“Yeah, I am.” I close the key cover.

“Sorry, I should’ve done it all proper. My head is a little all over the place since . . .” She indicates the baby that couldn’t be more than a month old. “Greg, this is my college roommate, Laura. Laura, this is Greg.”

Laura is holding a baby, and my hands are dirty from the delivery, so I just wave. She smiles at me conspiratorially, but I’m not in on the message held in her dark eyes.

“Nice to meet you, Greg.”

“You too.” I close the top lid and push in the piano bench, dropping the last of my tools into the large red box with a clank that makes the baby jump, her little face scrunching as Laura’s bouncing intensifies.

“Shoot.” She stands, pacing the room. Betty’s calm, motherly expression ripples, revealing a sheen of desperation beneath. She leaps up, putting out her arms.

“She’s probably hungry.”

“She just ate. It’s colic. Little Betty had it when she was this age,” Laura says, keeping the baby close to her chest and lowering her voice. “I’ve got this. You need some rest before he comes home.”

Betty glances at me and then back at Laura, who has shifted the now-wailing baby up to her shoulder, worry visible on her brow.

“I should let you go,” I say, hefting the toolbox, wishing instead to sit at the piano and pluck out a calming melody to give Betty some support, but it’s not my job to protect her anymore. God, it never was, as much as I wanted it to be.

“Are you sure you can’t stay for dinner?” Betty asks, and even as she says it, I know it’s a hollow offer. She knows I’ll decline, but strangely, I appreciate the invitation, though I can’t accept it.

“Thanks, but we have other deliveries.” It’s not true, but she doesn’t need to know that. “It was nice meeting you, Laura.”

“Same here,” Laura says as though we’re old friends, and she bounces her way into the kitchen with the colicky baby, leaving Betty and me alone. This time, however, I’m more centered.

“Sorry, Laura can be a little fussy,” Betty apologizes.

“Fussy?” I snicker. Laura seemed a little snarky but mostly helpful. “She looks like she knows what she’s doing.”

Betty gives me a confused look and I swing the toolbox into my other hand, my arm aching from holding it so long.

“Oh, God. No. Laura is my baby’s name.” She points to the kitchen, where things seem to have calmed down. “They’re both Laura. We promised we’d name our first girl babies after one another. She has a four-year-old named Betty, so I’d be kind of a creep if I didn’t fulfill my half of the deal.”

We laugh together at the mix-up until the humor is sucked out of the room by the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. Her face falls, and a deep dread tugs at me like a magnet, sucking me back to the safety of the truck and the haven of my new town, my new home, my new life.

“If there’s ever a problem with, you know, the piano or you need something else from the shop, you can reach me here,” I say, handing her a business card. My name is written on the back, and on the front the name of the shop along with the address and phone number.

“I’ll keep it handy,” she replies, tucking it into her palm as the sound of the automatic garage door echoes through the house, sending the baby into a fit.

I hurry across the lawn, the sharp metal corner of the toolbox scraping against my calf in a painfully welcome distraction as she closes the door behind her, the faint echo of Don’s voice chasing me back into the truck.

“I think I’ve seen that lady on TV before,” Toby says excitedly as we drive away.

“Me too,” I agree. “Me too.”