2nd Place (tie)

Sick Day

by Jerry Cavanaugh

THE FIRST FEW times the phone went off, I attempted to ignore it. But it was three rings and click. Three rings and click. Jesus, you know? Like they’re avoiding the machine. The one goddamn workday I sleep in—on purpose, anyway—and someone’s messing around.

I crack an eye: It’s 7:17. Too early for telemarketers. And though I’m expecting the long-distance birthday call from my mother, she’d likely just leave her singsongy message like most years. It starts up again, and I’m out of bed and ticked because now the smart money’s on Betsy, probably just arrived at work and, knowing I’m still home, compelled to take the opportunity to immediately report her misplacement du jour: the forgotten cell phone, the lost apartment keys, something. I scoop up the receiver—here, my annoyance made manifest—and regard it in my cupped hand like a 4-H judge considering the heft of a farm kid’s blue-ribbon squash.

“Hello.” Flat as Kansas.

“Turn on the TV.” Yeah, thought so. Betsy and I fought again last night, so she gets a concentrated exhale, all sleepy warm air and nostrils.

“Why? What? You know I’m sleeping in.”

“You’ll see. Just turn it on.”

“No, no, let me guess—um, your best friend from way back in Brownies took a bus trip to New York, and Al Roker’s talking to her right now outside Studio 1A.”

“Damn it, Kevin, just turn it on. They’re attacking New York.”

BETSY AND I have been living together for three years. It was better at the beginning. Something new, a bigger apartment, easy sex: the usual. Back then she used to dismiss marriage as much as I did—two children of divorce, natch—but I know she’s changing. She teaches second grade, and the kids don’t help; it’s always Miss Decker this and Miss Decker that. Mouths of babes making a case against me every time they have to go pee.

One night toward the end of last school year, she comes home and tells me that this little shit Hunter Snodgrass (that’s my “little shit” there, actually; can you imagine a better name for a little shit than Hunter Snodgrass?) goes:

Miss Decker, are you married?

No, Hunter, that’s why I’m a Miss.

Do you have a boyfriend?

Yes, Hunter, I have a very nice boyfriend.

Miss Decker, aren’t you kind of old for just a boyfriend?

Ouch. If they didn’t sign that kid’s birth certificate with a shit pencil, they should have. So I don’t know if it’s me or her Clock or the kids or the catty looks from the marrieds in the teachers’ lounge, but it all made for a chilly summer. We fight a lot now— little things hiding the big things—and I think we’re getting close to drawing that line.

Shortly after I turned on the tube and hung up with Betsy and used the word “Holy” in front of every expletive I know, I called my cube neighbor Mikal for the state of the office. He was way into the project manager thing and I knew he’d be there already; I work for this gung-ho Internet company downtown and someone’s always there. He tells me there’s a rumor gaining ground about a bomb threat at the Northwest Mutual building just a few blocks away. When I heard that I didn’t even bother to call in sick; I just slipped into my gray lounge pants and a clean black T-shirt, pulled on some thick hiking socks, started a big pot of coffee, and hunkered down on the couch.

After a few hours of death and destruction, I go out for our morning paper. I wipe away a spider and a few dead leaves and scan what’s above the fold: a pixilated kids-in-a-park seasonal shot, another traffic story. Root vegetable recipes inside, Section E. Jesus, now this whole ink-and-pulp thing is just a remnant, a clay tablet etched by wretched, cave-blind hunchbacks. The Sumerian Picayune. What the hell could they possibly tell me tomorrow? Headline: “Oh, Just Fuck It: We’re Watching CNN, Too.”

Back upstairs the sun’s breaking through the blinds, wide, pale yellow parallels creeping across the carpet. I pad around the kitchen, open and close a few cabinets, the refrigerator. I finally decide on the chocolate ice cream, which I eat standing in front of the television spooning it absently straight from the half-gallon container.

Later I have a beer and think about Betsy. Would they let the kids watch it at school, or is it all too much? I decide they wouldn’t; you’d think they’d have learned their lesson when the Challenger explosion blew millions of impressionable minds right there in the classroom. You just can’t trust live television.

When the sun stripes start climbing the bookshelves, I go pour a big Jameson’s with ice and toast myself happy birthday. It goes without saying, of course, that the date—this date, my date—will never, ever be the same, not for the rest of my life. Self-involved, I know, but it’s true; think about your own. I get an idea to start the “BirthDay of Infamy” club, maybe make all last century’s Dec. 7s honorary members, but when the news anchor highlights the fact it spells out 9-1-1, I just forget it.

UNLIKE MOST PEOPLE, I didn’t have a big life issue when I turned 30; it hardly blipped. I guess it’s coastal or cultural or something, but for me it came earlier, when I was living back East. I had an easy, overpaying job at a big drug company outside of Philadelphia and lived in the city in a big loft just off South Street. To celebrate my 25th, a bunch of us went out drinking; mescal, beers, the whole deal. We’d taken over the whole top floor of this funky old brick-walled bar; the girls are playing darts and spilling beer on the pool table, one of the guys punches another one in the arm. I’m buzzing hard and I look around and I think: yeah. Things are good.

Ten minutes later, my friend Steve grabs my neck in the hook of his elbow, sloshing pitcher in hand, and says, “Kevin, man, listen. I want you to be the first to know. Me and Rebecca—we’re pregnant!” He goes to give me a high five and I think he’s going to cry with happiness; he’s only 24 and married six months. I scanned the room again and realized, yes, we were dwindling. Two years ago we would’ve taken over the downstairs of this place, but my crowd was signing the papers, saving up, settling down. Planning for procreation. It’s just what you did here. In a few years I’d just be the talk, the joke, the one drunk single at a July 4 backyard barbecue, tripping into the kiddie pool and nobody thinking it funny. That night I dug the road atlas from the trunk of my car, and six months later, I was living in Seattle.

The phone rings and it’s my father; I ask what he thinks about the whole New York thing, and he says we should start bombing tomorrow. Usually he calls late at night, when he’s morose and two vodkas too deep. Sometimes he just likes to remind me of the many feats of domestic derring-do he’d performed by the time he was my age. Married. Fathered four kids (and put clothes on our backs). Built the house. Buried two family dogs. Bought and cleared the land for his prized hunting cottage up in the Poconos. I used to remind him that he was also a prick, my mother kicked him out, and I was the one who actually dug the damn dog graves, but I don’t any more. He doesn’t have that much longer, and he already knows.

WHEN BETSY walked in she brought the mail and dropped a few birthday cards in my lap. We didn’t say much; she was still stinging a little, too, from our rout last night. We each made the requisite calls to the loved ones: our mothers, her brother in Phoenix, my sister in Philly. Our friend in Manhattan. (He’s in midtown, though; he was fine). During the day I’d become practiced at flipping between all the news networks so as to be constantly aware of the very latest in camcorder disaster-footage discoveries; I tried the technique on Betsy, but she just glared and asked for the remote, so I gave it to her. She settled on one channel and sank back in her chair. I made another drink.

After a silent hour and more television, she brought out two nicely wrapped boxes—as a second-grade teacher her arts-and-crafts skills were top-notch. I carefully opened a wool sweater and a hardcover biography of Miles Davis. Nice.

“I’m sorry it’s not much, but happy birthday,” she said. “I was going to get something else on the way home today, but. . . . “

Her eyes were welling; me, us, the day, everything. I swear I just can’t help it, but her tears and flushed cheeks still get me nearly every time. And I do love her.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The hardness toward her I’d been savoring melted like the last of a toffee, and I smiled, glad to have her, glad to have her here. “But you can buy me dinner instead.” She smiled back.

We walked to the fancy pub a few blocks away; it was pricey for the neighborhood, but I felt like getting drunk close to home. The place was half full but quiet; a jazz guitar trio was tuning, but with their black getups and tentative motions they could’ve been booked for a wake. The sun hadn’t yet set so we sat outside. I drank Guinness and had curried mussels; she picked at her Caesar salad. We didn’t talk much but comfortably shared our time, our space; it felt good after all the recent rancor. We swapped entr饳 halfway through like second honeymooners on a budget.

I ended up drinking too much like I planned; Betsy was not impressed but tolerant, still cool after all, and we walked home arm in waist. She went right to bed, but I poured one last whiskey and ice and turned on the television for a recap. All of the anchors looked beat, and the graphics departments had clearly been working overtime: Every channel had fully committed to its own red, white, and blue-bedecked disaster theme. America Attacked. America Under Siege. Americapocalypse. Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. They’ve all gone. To look for America.

I drifted off before finishing my drink and slumped into a murky half dream. The images still played: indelible, a visual vocabulary we already knew, learned by rote. I was in a building. I was on an elevator. I ran down a fiery hallway. Yippee ki yay, motherfucker.

An hour passed, maybe, and I surfaced just briefly, a shiver, a flickering force field of electromagnetic blue. I was cold, gut sick, trapped beneath a Dal��oft steel beam I could not budge. Doubt, promise. A watercolor wash of regret. I regretted thinking maybe we should bomb the hell out of them, all of them. I regretted not knowing what my mother eats for dinner. I regretted there were no black people in my address book. I regretted how easily I’d learned to live with the weight I’d gained, the tight-waisted khakis, the young buds of my father’s old-man breasts. I regretted watching Ricky Strauss push my kid sister to the ground, and me standing there laughing with the rest of them. I regretted having nothing to show. I regretted my horseshit job, all jargon and laptops and Emperor’s New Clothes. I regretted passing my Death sitting hungry on the sidewalk and miming sorry, no change. I regretted that the woman who loves me lies in bed nightly, hoping, hoping, waiting for me to make up my mind.

Jerry Cavanaugh studied biology at a small Eastern college and has worked as a veterinary assistant, museum exhibit developer, and copywriter. He lives in Seattle and has yet to publish in major magazines.