A Job You Mostly Won't Know How to Do Read online

  ALSO BY PETE FROMM

  The Names of the Stars

  If Not for This

  As Cool as I Am

  How All This Started

  Night Swimming

  Blood Knot

  Dry Rain

  King of the Mountain

  Indian Creek Chronicles

  The Tall Uncut

  A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do

  Copyright © 2019 by Pete Fromm

  First hardcover edition: 2019

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fromm, Pete, 1958– author.

  Title: A job you mostly won’t know how to do : a novel / Pete Fromm.

  Other titles: A job you mostly will not know how to do

  Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018050852 | ISBN 9781640091771

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3556.R5942 J63 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050852

  Jacket design by Steven Attardo

  Book design by Jordan Koluch

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In memory of my father,

  Daniel Fromm, 1926–2018

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  T-Minus Two Months, and Counting

  … And Counting

  Holding

  Zero

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Day 3

  Day 4

  Day 5

  Day 6

  Day 7

  Day 8

  Day 9

  Day 30

  Day 35

  Day 40

  Day 44

  Day 47

  Day 48

  Day 60

  Day 62

  Day 70

  Day 75

  Day 85

  Day 98

  Day 100

  Day 105

  Day 112

  Day 128

  Day 129

  Day 130

  Day 135

  Day 136

  Day 137

  Day 140

  Day 144

  Day 159

  Day 161

  Day 162

  Day 175

  Day 195

  Day 196

  Day 224

  Day 226

  Day 227

  Day 255

  Day 257

  Day 263

  Day 275

  Day 305

  Day 365

  Day 366

  Day 390

  Day 400

  Day 405

  Day 416

  Day 417

  Day 424

  Day 437

  Day 438

  Day 443

  Day 452

  Day 454

  Day 455

  Day 456

  Day 461

  Day 504

  Day 505

  Day 508

  Day 509

  Day 1

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  When the groom lifts the veil from her

  delicate temples, I’m thinking someone

  should warn them: a future of funerals, car

  payments, taxes, kids throwing up in the night.

  It’s a job you mostly won’t know how to do,

  your naked arm deep in a jammed kitchen sink,

  burnt rinds of eggplant, crazily adrift.

  —JOSEPH MILLAR, “American Wedding”

  PROLOGUE

  Taz is on his knees when she tells him, his arms abuzz with the repeated hammer blows, tingling and tweaking. He looks up, ears buzzing too, the pry bar and his fingers wedged underneath another six inches of the damned kryptonite subfloor.

  Thumbs hooked into her tool belt, like now she’ll just get back after all that pesky lath, Marnie watches him, smile just waiting to bloom, and says it again.

  He blinks, lifts an eyebrow, and wriggles his fingers free, rubs away some dust. “For real?” he says.

  Fighting back the grin, she reaches into the pencil slot in her tool belt and eases up the pregnancy test, just a peek, pushes it back down. “The eaglet has landed.”

  Taz glances around the living room; the wall facing the kitchen just studs, plaster littering the floor, nail-hole freckles where the lath used to be, the whole room’s old fir trim taken down, stacked beside the shop out back, waiting for him to catch enough time to strip the gazillion coats of paint. More plaster peels away from the gaps where the trim used to be. Ancient cloth-wrapped black wiring sags between the naked studs, ringed here and there by dingy white porcelain knobs and tubes. The floor looks exploded, broken shanks of the plywood splintering up in the air, the maple underneath glue-streaked, filthy, like some pharaoh’s treasure finally touched again by light. Dust motes drift through it all, wherever the sun penetrates the gaps around the doors, the double-hung windows. He takes it all in, just a glance, but still, too long.

  Marnie’s face shifts, the bloom fading, and he says, “Oh my sweet baby Jesus,” and struggles to stand, his knees older than they were a second ago, all his joints tightened. He wraps her up, dust puffing wherever he touches. “Oh my sweet baby Jesus,” he whispers into her hair.

  “So, you found religion?” Marnie says, pulling back to study him.

  “Born again,” he says.

  “Not even born yet,” she answers. “Just heading our way.”

  Over her shoulder, he keeps studying the room this baby will land in. The dust-coated tools scattered through the carnage; the dulled and nicked inch-and-a-half chisel, the battered Sawzall, its bent blade, the indestructible crowbar. Like trying to baby-proof Baghdad. He gives Marn a kiss, a long one, wondering, and they’re in the middle of it when Rudy walks in through the kitchen, just showing up, wrecking bar in one hand, long-neck bottle in the other. “Oh,” he says. “That’s nice.”

  They break apart, in no hurry, Taz still staggered.

  “You could get a room, you know,” Rudy says.

  “We may have to,” Taz answers, but Marnie pulls him back, whispers in his ear. “Clam up,” she says. “Until it’s safe.”

  Taz nods, but safe? Seriously? He wants to say, Nothing is ever going to be safe again. But he keeps nodding, turns toward Rudy, and says, “You brought beer?”

  Rudy shoots him a wtf? Says, “From your fridge. Want one?”

  Marnie shakes her head, and just catching it, Taz does, too.

  Rudy raises an eyebrow, glances for a watch he doesn’t own. “It is Saturday, isn’t it?” he says. “I mean, I know I’m late, but not that late, right?”

  “No, it’s still Saturday,” Taz says.

  Rudy takes a swig, lifts his bar. “Well, okay then, suit yourselves. Just show me what you need wrecked.”

  “Demoed,” Taz corrects.

  “Whatever you want to call it.” He stabs the end of the bar into
the wall, breaking the plaster, pulling down the next few pieces of lath.

  “One of these days,” Taz says, “we’re going to have to, you know, start building, not just tearing down.”

  “Beyond my skill set,” Rudy answers.

  “We’re beyond just about everything,” Taz starts, and Marnie gives him a poke in the side with her hammer handle.

  She goes up beside Rudy, digs in the claw of her hammer. Taz comes up behind and starts to slip the flimsy dust mask over her head.

  Marnie lifts her hand to ward him off. “Thing’s a pain,” she says, then stops, giving herself a tiny slap upside the head, and adjusts the elastic strap, takes a few deep-sea-diver breaths, in, out. They all three of them get back to tearing the place apart.

  Hardly more than a month before, after another of Marnie’s mother’s visits, the demolition held off for it, her mother sent a note saying she’d bought a new bed for them. Mattresses, the works. All down at Wagner’s, waiting to be picked up. “You should not have to sleep on the floor,” she wrote to Marnie, but aiming straight at Taz. Out back, in the converted old garage he’d scabbed a shed-roof addition onto and declared his shop, even though the ruptured and rotted concrete floor made moving tools almost impossible, he was working the tung oil into the bedframe he’d been obsessing over for months. The best pieces of cherry he’d magpied off jobs for years, scoured the state for, every board gone over like Sherlock with his magnifier.

  But they did pick up the mattresses. And, without a second of hesitation, Marnie pocketed the return money for the bedframe, said, “She’ll never even think to miss it.” A bounty undreamed of.

  And, then, well, jesus, the new mattress and all, they had to give it a try, take it for a test drive or two. Three. More. And now, this.

  T-MINUS TWO MONTHS, AND COUNTING

  Taz tried—Marnie standing sideways before the bedroom mirror, shirt pulled up to her neck. He oohed and aahed, pushed out his own stomach, said, “Oh my god, you’re ginormous,” but really it was just Marn, a silhouette he could trace blindfolded. He came up to run his hand down her stomach, and she shoved him away, said, “It’s there, jackass. Any fool can see it.”

  A month later he told her she looked like a rope with a knot tied in the middle. He got the look.

  But, by the time they blow out of Missoula, seven months down this new trajectory, there’s no denying anything. Ditching the interstate, they follow the Blackfoot upriver, the narrow twists of the first canyon, then into the flats of Potomac, the mist still hanging low in the pasture, fingering into the spruce and lodgepole, the Angus standing like shadows. They climb the hill, swoop back down over the Clearwater, then back into the turns of the next canyon, the ponderosa crowding the road on one side, the river on the other, and Taz catches her leaning over, studying the river, looking for fishing holes, or figuring runs for the kayaks. She was nuts for all of it, from the very first day, the college kid from Ohio. All he had to do was show her this stuff he knew like breathing, from when he could take his first steps. It drove Rudy wild, the ease of the courtship. “It’s so not fair. I could show her all that. I could take her fishing and we’d actually catch fish.”

  She turns, catching him smiling, says, “What?” and he says, “Nothing. Just the first time we came up here.”

  Back out on the higher flats toward Ovando, the Scapegoat peaks rear up to the north, gray and parched with the drought, their snowpack gone since April. Smoke palls the farthest peaks, the fire season taking hold in the wilderness. Taz takes the turnoff at the gravel piles, leaves the main fork of the river and the pavement behind, dust coiling up after them on the dirt, then into the trees, hammering over the last broken bits of anything that could be called road. A swimming lesson, Marn calls it, and Taz pulls the truck in tight to the chokecherries, the lone gigantic ponderosa that marks their secret spot, no one else, as far as they could ever tell, macheteing through the thick stuff to discover the drop and pool, never even a fisherman’s tracks, though once they did find a grizzly’s in the mud, water splashed across the rocks, still wet. They opted out that day. But now, grizzly-free, they snag their rods and fly boxes from the bed of the truck and snake through the willow and scrub, keeping to rock, never leaving a trail for others to follow. As soon as they see water, Marn drops her fly rod and sheds her clothes like a skin that no longer fits. It’s what they’ve always done, from the very first time they stumbled into this place, back when Taz still couldn’t get over it, how easily she stripped down, as if they’d known each other forever and, as usual, Taz gets caught gaping, has to rush to catch up.

  The water, even in the scorching July heat, is at first breathtaking, and they gasp and giggle their way into it, then paddle deeper, pushing up to the drop and drifting back down, circling through the eddy, their breaths steadying, his arms around her belly, and they watch the clouds stream over, harmless as brushstrokes, no water coming from them in months. There’s no smoke to see here yet, just the tinge of it in the air, pleasant almost, like a campfire.

  Her belly bulges—an elbow or knee sweeping beneath Taz’s hand—and his eyes widen and Marnie laughs. “She’s going to swim like an otter, this one,” she says, her wet hair like a pelt itself, draped across his shoulder.

  “Or he?”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she says. “Solid double X.”

  “Really?”

  He feels her nod. “Sacagawea,” she says. “Lewis can follow her along. Maybe even Clark. Hogging all the glory. Men, same old, same old.”

  Back at first, wowed by the way they just knew all these places she could barely imagine, she’d called him and Rudy Lewis and Clark. They’d only been twenty. Seven years ago, but already it feels a lifetime.

  They dry raisin-style in the sun, then dress and pick their way upstream, the water so low in the drought that they crunch over whitened cobble they’d never before seen dry. When they reach the wall of the last little canyon, Marn flashes Taz a look, a question, and he glances down at her belly, raises an eyebrow. “Sacagawea carried her baby all the way to the Pacific and back,” Marnie says, and she goes first, stepping up onto the foot-wide ledge of cracked and crumbling stone. She clings to the stone, a root here and there, some wild bit of buffalo brush taking seed in the rock, cracking its way in. Below them, the river, channeled tight, races through the drop, split by boulders, and Taz follows inches behind, ready to grab, to dive in after her.

  But they make it through, dropping from rock to bunchgrass, the little meadow the canyon keeps hidden, and they stroll through the brittle stems, scattering grasshoppers all the way up to the beaver ponds. Water trickles through the bulwark of sticks and mud, the first pond glassy beyond it. They catch their breath, set up their rods, and Marnie, looking around for any kind of a hatch, runs her finger across the flies in her box, pulls out a tiny one, a midge, and names it out loud.

  Digging through his own fly box, Taz says, “Maybe, but I think a hopper can’t miss.”

  “No,” Marnie says. “Midge. That’s what we’ll call her. Her name.”

  “Midge?”

  “Yeah, just this tiny thing, but what sort of holds the whole deal together.”

  “Really?”

  She smiles. “It’s perfect.”

  “The food chain? You want her at the bottom of the food chain?” He laughs. “That is so not perfect.”

  She looks at him.

  “And you’re going to explain that to her later? ‘Yeah, jeez honey, we just wanted, you know, for you to be at the slaughter end, what the whole world preys on.’”

  Her look narrows.

  “Come on, Marn. If you want to go all native, how about, I don’t know, Cutthroat? That’d be cool, make the other kids leave her alone. Or Otter maybe.”

  She squints down toward scary and Taz says, “Or, you know, Midge is good.”

  She rolls her eyes and he says, “Midge,” like a punch line, and they cast out and he’s thinking Maddy maybe, or Carly, or Sandy, or maybe Sar
ah, or Sybil, running with the S’s, but not Sybil, you’d never know which one she was, and if it’s a boy, because, seriously, she can’t really know, maybe Bruce, for Springsteen—that’d drive Marn wild—or Eminem if she wants a compromise, or if she wants to run with the animal thing, go totally native, maybe Tatanka, but that’d go to Tank, which would make him sound like the asshole jock of some shitty comic book, and then the first fish hits and, as always, they pull in a dinner’s worth of the little brook trout.

  They gather sticks, Marnie building up the start while Taz breaks bigger branches, swinging them against the edge of a rock, and they cook the trout over their twig fire as the sun lowers, dappling through the cottonwood leaves, the willows, the long needles of the ponderosas scattered up the slopes.

  “She’s going to love this place,” Marnie says, pulling the last little slab of fish off the skeleton, her chin shiny with the oil.

  Taz leans back on his elbows, says, “Why wouldn’t she? It’s like we live in a painting.”

  Marnie says, “If he could see us now, that Van Gogh guy would cut off his other ear. Or one single person from Ohio catching a glimpse of this? They’d die weeping, if Cleveland’s air hadn’t already finished them off.”

  “Can hardly believe you survived,” Taz says.

  She gives him a little swat. “Can’t believe you never knew what you had till I showed you.”

  It’s the usual, but then she adds, “Or that your parents ever left.”

  Taz squints against a drift of smoke and it’s a bit before he comes up with, “I don’t guess New Zealand’s so hideous.”

  “Full of hobbits,” Marnie answers, but it’s a lot just mentioning his parents, these people she’s never met, and she hands him the last trout and sits cross-legged beside him, cleaning the bones with her lips.

  Taz feeds the last sticks into the fire and they go silent, watching the flames take hold, the blue leap and dance of them as mesmerizing as ever, and the sun drops behind the mountains, casting them into shade, and soon the first slightly cooler breezes start their evening fall down from the tops.

  They both know it’s time to go, but Marnie sighs, says, “This kind of night, you know. Sure isn’t making going home any easier.”