The Probable Future

“I guess it would be you,” Hap said.

For a moment, Stella thought she’d misheard. Maybe her pulse had drowned out his words. But, no, she had heard him correctly. He was such a good person, so careful and thoughtful. He knelt down near the shallows to take a water sample from the lake and he didn’t spill a drop. She knew she should feel the same way, but as Hap closed the last sample of cold, green water and tadpole eggs and algae, she had only one person in mind, the most unfortunate, horrible boy in town, the one she couldn’t stop thinking about, even when she tried.

IT WAS NOT as though Jenny was about to take Will back, despite what her landlady and the other tenants in the building might think. Naturally, they would all be against a reunion of any kind, for each and every resident, from the first to the fifth floor, despised Will Avery. These neighbors did not care if Will was handsome, if his eyes were flecked with gold; they did not give a damn if he knew by heart every tune Frank Sinatra had recorded and could play Scott Joplin rags in his sleep. These were the same people who’d been forced to hear him going at the piano at all hours when he’d lived in the building before: Dylan songs in the middle of the night, “Idiot Wind” or “Tangled Up in Blue.” Louis Armstrong in the afternoon, when most hardworking people had better things to do. Repetitive practicing of four-octave scales when he really wanted to let his neighbors have it, right at dinnertime, played fiercely, without mercy.

They all knew Will was the one who was too lazy to throw the bags down the chute to the incinerator, that he picked through other people’s magazines left out in the entranceway, that he sang in the shower, that he slammed doors. Most of the other tenants were also well aware that Will had had an affair with Lauren Baker, previously of 2E, who wept for weeks after he broke up with her and then moved to Providence to start a new life. All of it, the recriminations and the crying that echoed through the air ducts to 3E and 4E, had gone on right under the nose of his wife, who now seemed to be taking him back, though she denied it. Not that anyone believed Jenny. For there Will Avery was once again, thankfully without his piano, which remained in storage, but still making a nuisance of himself all the same, leaving garbage in the hall, stealing people’s morning newspapers, blaring the TV when his wife went off to work, trying his best to flirt with Maureen Weber who lived in 2D, and who’d been warned never to invite Will Avery into her apartment, not unless she wanted trouble on her hands.

While it was true that Jenny Sparrow made dinner for Will, she was used to cooking for two. She did his laundry, but she was washing her own clothes anyway; it was no bother to throw his shirts and underwear in with hers. Here was the thing Jenny most wished to share with her nosy, disapproving neighbors: their official divorce papers had come through. Briefly, she considered nailing the document to the lobby wall. She imagined standing in the hall to shout out that Will was sleeping on the couch. This was no reunion; no forgiveness was involved, no hot, greedy kisses in the kitchen while she fixed macaroni or beef stew. Jenny had gone so far as to invite the landlady, Mrs. Ehrland, up for tea and lemon pound cake, just to show that the couch in the living room was made up with blankets and sheets. Only a few months earlier, Jenny had accompanied Mrs. Ehrland to Mass General Hospital, and she’d sat in the waiting room all morning while the landlady had her cataracts removed. But Mrs. Ehrland could not be swayed or convinced that Will’s stay was only temporary. When she saw Will’s clothing piled up on a chair, and an overflowing ashtray he’d left on the floor, she clucked her tongue disapprovingly.

“You are making a huge mistake,” the landlady told Jenny. “Now you’ll never get rid of him.”

It would have been nice if Will had thought to help out, go food shopping or vacuum, or perhaps be kind enough to pack away the dreadful model of Cake House, still set on the hall table, but Will had other things on his mind. He was in constant contact with Fred Morrison, the detective Henry Elliot had hired, even though Jenny reminded him that his brother was surely being billed for every one of those phone calls to the detective. Jenny had tried to phone Matt several times, to thank him and touch base, since they seemed to be in this mess together, but no one ever seemed to be at home.

“He’s probably sitting in the library,” Will guessed. “Hard at work on the thesis that will never be finished.”

“He’s writing a thesis?” Jenny herself had always regretted not going to college, a mistake she thought about every weekday when she was forced to revisit a job she despised. Working in a bank she had realized that money had an odor, a mix of mothballs and sweat, and it had a texture as well, somewhere between silk and flypaper. She’d become quite allergic to the stuff, so that it often left a raised rash on her hands; she tended to tell waitresses and cabdrivers to keep the change, and when she came home from the bank, she washed her hands three times.