A Better Man

The school nurse tried calling three times that morning, but Amanda missed it. She found the messages when she went out on break. Pharmacy techs weren’t allowed to have cell phones on the floor and there was no way she was going to let Dave list the pharmacy’s number as an emergency contact. Amanda had a few friends over the years who had gotten themselves fired for taking personal calls on their work line. She sure as hell wasn’t going to join them.

“Ms. Anderson,” the messages all began. “We’ve been trying to contact Hunter’s dad, but haven’t been able to reach him. Hunter is running a fever and we’ll need someone to come pick him up.” 

The pharmacist on duty, Michael—always Michael not Mike—grumbled, “Better do those last two orders before you go.” He paused several times to watch her while she filled the bottles. 

“What?” she said.

“The kid’s not even yours. Where’s his dad?” The overhead fluorescent lights gave Michael’s cheeks a sunken look, like maybe he needed some of his own medicine.

“He’s at work,” Amanda said. She shoved the last order into its white paper bag and stapled it shut twice.

“You’re at work.”

“I need to go.” Amanda tossed the bags into the plastic pick-up bin. The pills inside rattled like snakes. 

Hunter was huddled on the sick bench in the nurse’s office, his head down, his chubby knuckles pressed into his brows. “Where’s Dad?”

“At work,” she said, gathering his backpack and jacket from the bench.

“Then why’d she have to call so many times?” He sounded close to tears.

Instead of answering, she said, “You want a root beer float?” As a kid, this is what she craved when running a fever.

The drive-thru line at Culver’s curved out almost to Main Street—the lunch rush. “Let’s go in for a sec,” she said to Hunter. “It’ll be faster.”

“No.” His head pressed against the window, his eyes scrunched shut.

“Yes. Come on,” she said, holding open his door. “You don’t want anybody to snatch you, do you?”

“Nobody’s going to snatch me.” He was sulking but he undid his seatbelt and followed her out of the car.

She ordered him a float and large Coke for herself. She had been trying to get off soda for her New Year’s resolution, but she let herself have one now and then, when the day was stressful. 

Hunter sipped a few times before he said, “I need to use it.” He hustled off to the restroom, leaving Amanda in the blue-and-white tiled foyer holding both of their cups. She sat down in one of the hard booths to wait.

Dave hadn’t responded to any of her texts. She wavered about calling the shop, trying to reach him directly. It might get him in trouble, but he should know his kid is out of school and sick. Amanda would want to know, if she were his mother. She dialed the number. 

“Precision Cutting. This is Ed.” 

She told Ed who she was and why she was calling. “Is Dave there?” she asked.

“Well, I’m sure he is. You say it’s urgent? OK, you hold on.” She heard Ed set the heavy office phone on its side and call to someone out in the shop. There was a back and forth, loud voices over the sound of a machine winding down, and then Ed was on the line. “No, sorry, hon. I guess he went out. Dentist appointment the guys said. You want to leave a message?”

“No, but thanks.” Amanda hung up. 

Dave didn’t say anything about the dentist. It had been years since either of them had that kind of insurance, so dentists were only for emergencies and, as far as she knew, Dave’s teeth were fine. She scrolled through her phone to check her calendar just in case. She always put Dave’s and Hunter’s appointments—for Hunter’s shots, parent/teacher conferences, whatever—in her phone calendar because Dave was more likely than not to forget. But no, there was nothing about a dentist.

She put the phone in her purse and went to find Hunter. He was taking too long in the bathroom. Three or four guys had been in and out with no sign of him. She opened the heavy door just far enough so she could lean in. The bright chemical smell of the urinal cakes made her eyes water. “Hunter? Come on.” 

He called out, “I’m sick.” 

“Well, come on, then. Let’s go home.” She felt a sudden urgency to get home, to see if Dave was there. She dug her keys out of her purse and clamped her hand down on the long string of fobs to keep them from jangling. “Let’s go.” Hunter didn’t answer. “Is it just you in there?” She stepped into the room. 

Hunter’s feet were visible under the gray door of the stall. His blue jeans were around his ankles. 

“Come on, Hunter,” she said again.

Hunter stood and flushed the toilet, pulling up his pants. “You’re not supposed to be in here, you know,” he said as he emerged, red-faced and sweaty.

“Wash your hands,” she said. Hunter pounded the cold water button and gave his hands a short rinse, then wiped them on his pants. 

“Seriously?” she said, pointing him back to the sink for a real wash, with soap and hot water. Before he could use his pants as a towel again, she grabbed him by his dripping wrist and dragged him toward the door. 

A man came in, pushing the door into Amanda’s chest. Hunter sidestepped onto the heel of her work shoes. 

“Ow.” 

“Sorry,” the man said.

“Come on!” Amanda stalked out of the restaurant, not looking back until she reached the car. Hunter was only halfway across the parking lot.

She threw herself into the driver’s seat and started the car. While Hunter got in, she took a few deep breaths. 

At the town’s two stoplights, she checked her phone. No voicemail. No texts. 

She assessed Hunter in the rearview mirror. He looked queasy. “You can open the window if you want,” she said.

At the turn-off for the trailer park, Hunter asked, “Where’s Dad?” 

Amanda hit the turn signal stick hard. “He’s at work,” she said. “It’s a Tuesday, right? So he’s at work.”

Hunter was looking out the window. Some younger kids were running around the park’s rusty playground set. A woman in a puffy jacket stood smoking, watching the kids play. 

“Will you look at that sky,” Amanda said. It was a banner March day, the brilliant blue kind that makes it seem like spring might keep its promises.

“Where’s Dad?” Hunter asked again.

“I already answered that.”

She got him settled into bed with a glass of water and a comic book. He kept the book—an older one they picked up in a bundle at a yard sale last fall—on his lap, unopened. 

“You want the TV?” she asked. He shrugged, so she cleared the small table in the living room of her houseplants and dragged it into his room. She got the boxy set that she kept in the bathroom so she could check the weather while she did her hair and makeup before work. Amanda remembered the day, four years ago, when she had brought these things in, pulling up to Dave’s spartan trailer, the backseat and trunk of her car packed full of her worldly possessions. 

It was spring then, too, and everything had seemed clean and possible. She recalled the crunch of the driveway gravel under her sneakers as she leaned into the passenger seat to retrieve the first of the plants. “We’re here,” she had said to her big aloe, and Dave laughed at her from the porch. 

“They can’t actually hear you,” he said, finally moving down the stairs to help her unload.

“Actually, they can.” Amanda kissed the rough edge of his jaw. “They hear everything.”

Had they heard something Amanda had missed, she wondered now. Some sign that Dave was going to disappear? She pushed that thought away while she settled the TV on top of the table and plugged it in.

“That good?”

“Yeah,” Hunter said. 

She went closer to the bed to look at him. His red hair was sticking to the edges of his round, feverish face. He exhaled heavily and closed his eyes. Amanda reached out her hand, letting it hover just above his head, then thought the better of it. She lowered her hand to smooth the edges of the pillowcase. 

She hardly ever touched Hunter, because he wasn’t hers. It didn’t matter that Christina, his mother, was in jail. It didn’t matter that Amanda and Dave had been living together almost from the day they met—her role with Hunter remained an iffy thing. Dave sheltered the memory of Christina, with words and looks, fencing in Amanda’s overreach. Like the time she risked buying Hunter’s birthday present, when he was turning six, without consulting Dave. 

“His mother wouldn’t want him to have that,” Dave had said, pointing at the toy oven she had picked out. 

Amanda didn’t see what was wrong with it. When she was a girl, these ovens were pink, but this one was blue and black. It looked like a spaceship. “He loves to help me make muffins and cupcakes and whatnot,” she said. “He always does.” But she had taken the oven back to Wal-Mart and got Hunter a tee-ball set instead. Tee-ball turned out to require more hand-eye coordination than Hunter had at age six, so the set had been abandoned in a corner of the lean-to shed.

It wasn’t time yet for Amanda to start making dinner, not according to their regular routine, when she wouldn’t get home from the pharmacy until 4:30 and Dave not back from the shop until 5:30 or 6:00, but she was at a loss for what to do. She went to the kitchen and began to dig through the freezer for something to make. Maybe chili, she thought. That’s always better with a long, slow cook. She rifled through the cabinets for cans of beans, chiles, and tomatoes.

While she cooked, she called her mother. “Mom,” she said. A TV was on in the background, some game show, bells ringing and applause. 

“Amanda? Is that, is it Mandy? Oh, hi.” 

“Mom. I had to leave work to pick up Hunter from school because he’s sick and I can’t find Dave.” 

Her mom laughed her raspy, ex-smoker’s laugh. “Yeah.”

“Why are you laughing?”

“Oh, nothing. Just something on the TV.” 

“Can you turn it down? Mom? I need your help.”

“Alright.” She heard her shuffle things around on the coffee table, probably looking for the remote. “Damn it. Where is that thing? Aw, hold on a minute.” Her mom kept the cordless phone pressed into her cheek while, Amanda imagined, she trundled over to the TV in her big orthopedic shoes. The effort of it set off her wheezing. 

“You got your asthma medicine, Mom? Or do you need me to pick it up?”

“No, I got it. I got it.” There was a thump as her mom landed back on the couch, then the pop of a cap and the hiss of an inhaler. “Now what’s going on?” She squeezed these words out while trying to hold the medicine in.

“Mom, you’re not supposed to talk while taking the albuterol. It needs to reach the alveoli for maximum effect.” She stabbed an onion with her dull chef’s knife, breaking the yellow skin open.

“Well, I don’t know about that.”

“I think Dave’s gone.”

Her mom made a scolding tsk. “Don’t get yourself worked up. I mean, how long’s it been?”

Amanda’s breath caught in her chest. She thought through what her mother knew and didn’t know about their relationship. Finally, she said, “Oh, you mean since I heard from him! This morning, when he left for work.” She set down the knife so she could wipe her eyes on a dishtowel. The onion was making them water.

“What did you think I was asking about?” She had her mom’s full attention now. Her mom liked a puzzle.

Amanda didn’t like to talk personal stuff with her mother, but she knew she wasn’t going to let it go until she told. “OK, this is dumb, but I thought you were asking how long it’s been since Dave and I, you know, had sex.” She looked over her shoulder to the doorway to make sure Hunter wasn’t there listening.

“Oh, so that’s what’s going on.” Her mother laughed quietly, like she did whenever she guessed the big answer on Family Feud before the contestant. 

“No, it’s not.” Amanda knew the satisfied look that would be on her mom’s face. “I mean, it is. But it’s also …” She heard Hunter turn off the TV in his bedroom, so she stuck her head around the corner. He hadn’t come out of his room. “Last night, I told him I thought we should get married.” 

“Aw, well, there you go.” 

Amanda dumped the chopped onions into the pot. “There you go, what, Mom? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ll tell ya, when you were a little kid, you used to arrange all the little chairs and furniture in your doll house and if anybody moved one of them an inch, well, get ready, because little Mandy was going to go off like a firecracker on you.” 

“What are you talking about?” She got a package of ground beef from the fridge and let the dented door slam shut. “What’s that got to do with Dave?”

“You got plans,” her mom said. “You’ve always got plans. You like things orderly.” 

“So?” She waited, dropping the meat into the onions and pressing it down with a spatula. When her mom didn’t answer, she said, “So, my boyfriend should leave me because I like things orderly?” 

“Maybe. That’s what they do. Sometimes.” Her voice was steady with experience. Amanda’s dad had walked away one day when Amanda was 11, saying he was going for a stroll, and never came back. He sent a check once in a while, but never a note or a return address. 

“You were already married when Dad left, so it’s not like cause-and-effect, Mom.”

“He’s not still married to that Christina, is he?”

“No, they got divorced, back when she was getting into the drugs.”

“Seen the papers?”

Amanda’s stomach lurched. The sight of the pink meat turning gray in the pan made her gag and she flicked off the stove. 

“Of course,” Amanda said. “Mom, I think I hear Hunter. I’ll call you later.” Without waiting for her mom’s protest, she hit the off button and set the phone on the counter. 

She peeked in on Hunter who was on his back, asleep, his mouth open. Then she went to the bedroom she and Dave shared.

In the closet, she found the shoe box Dave kept his important papers in. She threw the lid on the floor and pulled the entire stack out at once. High school diploma, curved from the narrow sides of the box. A birth certificate, folded in fourths and well-creased. Photo ID from his last job. Separation papers from the National Guard. His first driver’s license. Amanda held that one a minute to stare back at the skinny, dark-eyed Dave looking slack-faced into the camera. She knew him. He would’ve been jumping for joy on the inside at getting his license, but nobody was going to get any of it, that joy.

Fishing license. Some old receipts. His vaccination record from his pediatrician’s office in Reedsburg. A high school swimming medal. No divorce papers. 

Amanda tossed the stack on the floor and sat on the bed. She thought through the past few days, trying to find any clue that Dave was going to leave. Nothing. Not even when they fought a little the night before, in bed, when she said she didn’t want to have sex and that she thought they should get married. 

“Why get married? Things are fine the way they are now,” Dave had said. “Most things anyhow,” he repeated, pressing himself into her thigh before rolling over to the far edge of the bed. 

She sat up and flattened her back against the headboard. “Things are fine,” she said, “but they would be even better if we were a family for real.” 

“Whatever. The paper doesn’t make any difference I can see.”

Amanda watched him, his shoulders shifting with barely contained anger, his face blue  from the streetlight outside their bedroom. She thought about her dad and wondered what he looked like after all these years. When Dave started snoring, she made her way to the bathroom to pee. On her way back out, she bumped into Hunter.

“Are you OK?” Hunter asked. 

Amanda pushed her hair back from her face, combining the motion with a quick swipe of her cheeks, checking for tears. “Yeah, why?”

“I don’t know. Your face looks funny,” he said, before going into the bathroom and shutting the door. 

Amanda had stood in the dim hallway, thinking about this kid and how he could read people, just like that.

The morning routine the next day went as it always did: Dave into his truck with his lunch cooler, Hunter onto the yellow bus, Amanda off to the pharmacy. Then the calls from the school and the chaos unwrapping itself before her.

Amanda picked up Dave’s papers from the floor and placed them back into the box. She put the lid on and set the box on the shelf. She closed the closet door. 

On her way back to the kitchen she looked into Hunter’s room again. He was sitting up but not reading. The TV was off. 

“You want some juice?” she asked. 

Hunter nodded. 

She poured grape juice and brought it to him in a glass with a paper napkin wrapped around it. “Don’t drip,” she said, handing the glass to him. “It stains.”

“I know.” His voice was scratchy. From the flush of his face, it didn’t seem like his fever had gone down at all. 

Amanda sat down on the bed. “How are you feeling?”

Hunter shrugged. “Hot.” 

“I’m going to get you some Tylenol and a cool washcloth, OK?” 

He nodded but he kept his eyes on the blank TV. 

When she came back, she sat on the edge of the bed and watched him swallow the pill. She spread the cloth across his face. Hunter was a sweet kid. Amanda didn’t like to see him so uncomfortable. 

What if her mom was right? What if Dave and Christina weren’t actually divorced? What if Dave was with her right now, picking her up from jail? Amanda imagined Christina leaping into Dave’s big arms, Dave kissing her on the lips. 

Hunter’s hot breath sucked the edge of the washcloth in between his teeth and out again, like a baby blowing bubbles in his sleep. 

As she sat with him, the low spring sun entered his small window, hitting the screen of the television. The day was passing. If she had to stay home with Hunter tomorrow—if Dave didn’t show—she would have to use one of her three sick days. And if Hunter was still sick after three days, what would she do? Her boss would challenge her taking time off, saying this kid wasn’t her family. Maybe she would lose her job. Amanda would just have to wait and see. 

She reached for Hunter’s wrist, rocking it gently in her cool hand. “I’ll go finish making our dinner,” she said, though she knew he was asleep.