Hair-Dryer Day

I didn’t know there could be a day too hot for planes to fly but I guess I should’ve, because lord knows it’s entirely too hot for anything else to happen. I figured I should still take the dog out but honestly as soon as I opened the door, he looked at me with these doleful eyes like, Are you kidding me? Makes sense. I was ready to crawl out of my underwear and just walk around with a creatively placed fig leaf or something, so you gotta figure it’s even worse for a furry guy. When we went back in, I dug an old t-shirt out of the laundry bin to use as a sweat rag, and the dog wedged himself underneath the couch. 

My mom used to call these “hair-dryer days.” She spent a lot of time with hair dryers, so I guess she would know. It fits, I figure - the way that there’s no wind but the heat still finds a way to wrap your face in its steamy breath, which smells unwaveringly like rotting garbage since you can’t walk two steps without bumping into another too-hot trash bin. I hear people lose their minds in the heat, killing each other and stuff, but I’ve never understood that. For me it’s like drinking slow-motion juice. Walking to and from the pharmacy during this heat wave has just been me mouth-breathing in public, stumbling between the little patches of shade on the sidewalk like a drunk dude. For the first hour after we open the customers have to ask me the same question at least twice before I can process what they said, just from those ten minutes in the sun.

So, no airplanes. Not a one. I called my sister.

“Like, nothing?” she said. I could hear my nephew shouting something about cereal in the background. And okay, if I was going to shout about something it may well also be cereal, but that little guy is always loud, and I mean always. He even has a T-shirt that says “YOU CAN HEAR ME COMING” in big black letters, and am I the only one who is baffled that people keep making these t-shirts that encourage little kids to be jerks? I’m talking those shirts for girls that say, “I’m Daddy’s little princess! Carry me!” or the ones for boys that say, “If homework is work, when do I get paid?” or the ones for whoever that just say, “MY SISTER DID IT.” You couldn’t pay me to wear a shirt that says, “I tell women how to park” or some other embarrassing garbage. 

“Like, nothing,” I confirmed. “Extreme weather warnings, apparently.”

“Well, I guess that makes sense. They’re saying it’s the hottest day of the year,” she mused, though how anyone could know that for sure was beyond me. It’s just been hot and will be hot, if you were to ask me. “Which kind of points to, y’know, not waiting till the last minute for something like this.”

Figures. Sisters will never pass up a chance to say they told you so. “Yeah, yeah.”

“So what are you going to do?”

I stared at my dog’s tail, which was sticking out in a way made it look like the couch had grown one. “Too far to drive in one day.”

“Yeah.” 

“So, I guess I’m not going to make it,” I said. Maybe I would spend the day underneath the couch, too. There had to be a reason that a ninety-pound mutt would squeeze his bulk into that little gap. 

“You have to make it. Christ, Daniel, this is not a brunch invitation! You can’t just check the “regrets” box and not come!” 

“What’s your idea, then?” 

“This is not my problem,” she snapped, and then pulled the phone away from her ear to hiss a threat to my nephew about where he might find himself the next time she had to remind him to lower his voice. “All I know is that I’m getting dressed at four and getting there at five, and you’d better be at the church by then.” 

Helpful. I hung up.

What were my options to travel across two states in four hours, if there weren’t any airplanes? Ironic that usually two states felt like not nearly enough space between my house and my family’s, but that today it was too much. My mom probably would have said the same thing as my sister, about not booking a flight for the same day you have to be somewhere. Which, fair, but my mom wouldn’t have understood the problem of not wanting to stay overnight in a house with a wannabe ESPN announcer, in miniature.

Delta announced that I could rebook my flight for tomorrow with no extra charge, and that they would even give me a meal voucher for my trouble. I wasted a while on hold with the airline just to have them tell me that no, they could not charter a plane in dangerous conditions just because my ignorant behind had failed to properly plan ahead. 

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m not trying to make it to a beach trip or something. This is – ”

But the voice on the other end of the line had a lot of other callers in similar circumstances and had to excuse itself to tell them to go screw themselves, also. 

No planes. Confirmed. Google Maps told me that if I got in my car now, and probably broke several speed limits, I might arrive around 7PM. Which was about two hours after I needed to be there. 

I lay on the floor and managed to squeeze one leg and one arm under the couch. My dog rolled one eye over to stare at me, with no discernable surprise that I had joined his weird little den. “I gotta say, pal,” I said, “I just don’t see it.” 

He blinked. 

“I mean, it might be even hotter under here. It’s like wearing the mother of all weighted blankets.” To say nothing of the unmentionable things that might be under my couch, given that I was hard-pressed to remember the last time I had moved it to vacuum. Something my mom did like clockwork every other Friday, a cleaning habit that never seemed to make the jump over to my generation, along with cleaning the baseboards. What even are baseboards. 

“The thing about it is,” I said to him, or maybe just to myself, “she’s dead whether I make it to her funeral or not.”

My mom, that is. If she were alive, she would probably be on me just like my sister about having waited this long to get over there for her funeral, the same way she used to be on me about waiting till the last minute for my science projects or taking the trash out. But after the blowouts that would result from whatever it was I had screwed up, she always insisted on coming to say goodnight. I mean every time. She would come in and sit on my bed, brushing my hair away from my face and sighing, “It’s okay, Daniel. Better tomorrow.”

Usually we did have a better tomorrow. She had Tuesdays and Thursdays off, since lots of people got their hair done on the weekends, and so sometimes she would pick me up from school early and take me to the Dairy Queen, knowing I would happily commit several crimes in exchange for a Blizzard. Something I stand by, for what it’s worth. There was this little field beyond the parking lot that looked out over the rest of town, and so we would eat our ice-cream there and she would teach me to make chains out of the little daisies that grew like weeds around our picnic blanket. Like I would be caught dead with daisy-chains in sight of the school, but just with her, I don’t know. It was kind of relaxing to twist those tiny stems into green sailor’s knots and make necklaces, crowns, whatever. 

I wrestled myself out from under the couch. No thinking my way out of this one; I wasn’t going to make it. I texted the family group chat, definitely the coward’s way out, and then put my phone on Do Not Disturb, which was probably even more cowardly. Then I Googled a picture of a baseboard and got to work. 

My dog wasn’t thrilled that I was spraying cleaning solution everywhere, and even less thrilled when I pulled out the vacuum. Neither was I, to be honest. It’s not like I’d been leaving my place a mess because I love living in a mess; it’s just harder than it might sound to keep it clean while carrying around the piano-weight of missing my mom. But I wasn’t on the plane that would take me to her funeral, so I might as well be sweating it out here, even with my A/C wheezing as hard as it could be, doing all the stuff that she would’ve done if it were her house. Windexing the mirrors, for instance. And okay, I didn’t have Windex, but it still looked surprisingly different even just to wipe off the toothpaste splatters with Clorox. 

It took me the better part of the day to get the house clean. And I’m talking clean-clean, like fridge shelves wiped down, all the trash out on the curb, floors sparkly enough to lick, etc. The dog, now the dirtiest thing in the house other than me, looked at me with some nervousness. 

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I have another plan for you.”

Which, if he’d been a fluent speaker of English, was probably the creepiest thing I could’ve said. But he seemed to react only to the “it’s okay” part, and came to put his chin on my sweaty, grease-covered knee. I appreciated the gesture. 

         I leashed him up and we started a Neanderthal-style trudge through the dusky light. You might think that the heat would be less intense by the evening, but for my money I could tell no difference. Maybe I was just extra-hot from all that cleaning. The dog looked just as irritated as he did this morning, but this time I didn’t waver. “If I’m out here, you’re out here, pal,” I muttered. 

No Dairy Queen in my town, and besides, that Blizzard would’ve been a Puddle in about thirty seconds out here. But we did have a parking lot that faced a field, and when he saw all that grass my dog seemed to remember that he was a dog and started loping towards it, tongue hanging sideways out of his mouth. I let him go and slide myself down against a tree trunk, which I swear was even hotter than the air. No wins for Daniel today. 

My sister had sent a long string of unrepeatable texts to me all day, which I was pretending not to have gotten. Out here my phone would overheat soon anyway, so no harm in checking again, I figured. There were a lot of promises of revenge and rants about my general uselessness as a brother, but at the very bottom, there was something a little less vicious. 

We’re going to say goodbye to Mom without you, so you’d better be saying goodbye to her without us. 

Well. What else had I been trying to do, every minute since she died. 

The heat hadn’t fried the little daisies growing in the shade of this tree, so I picked them. To my surprise my fingers remembered how to tie them into those micro-knots, even though my brain didn’t. My dog returned, totally winded from one meandering loop around the field, and flopped onto his belly next to me. At least the shade was growing as the sun went down, shadows pooling around my feet like water. My dog put his big head down on his paws and sighed through his nose the way dogs do, like they’ve just spent all day working the mines and they couldn’t be more tired. I put my little daisy crown on the crest of his skull, which he permitted, generously. 

“It’s okay, big guy,” I said, kind of to him but mostly to both of us, if I’m being honest.  “Better tomorrow.”