Second Chances
- an Adam & Joan story -
by TeeJay
Chapter 2
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Joan had dropped Adam off at home. She had asked if he was going to be okay, and he had assured her he would be, but somehow Joan couldn't get that nagging feeling of worry out of her system. Yes, the relationship between her and Adam had been anything but affectionate lately. But she had always cared about Adam deep down inside.
And now she couldn't stop thinking about how life had dealt him one blow after the other. First his mother's suicide, then Judith's death, their recent break-up and now his dad on top of everything else. Sure, the break-up had been mostly his own fault, but Joan knew that Adam had had a real hard time getting over it. And she knew that she hadn't exactly made it easier for him either. She had said and done a few mean things to him because she had wanted him to feel just a bit of that pain that he had caused her. Back then, she hadn't been able to see that he had felt just the same pain, or maybe even more so because he had himself to blame on top of everything else.
Even the more important that she put her hurt feelings away now and offer support for a friend in need. She entered the Girardi home, putting her coat on the coat rack in the hall. In the kitchen, her mom was preparing dinner, Kevin was sitting at the table, cutting peppers.
"Hey," she said cheerfully, even though she didn't really feel like it.
Her mom greeted her back. "Hey, honey. How was school?"
"Oh, you know... Normal."
Her mom motioned her to sit down at the table. Kevin shoved over another cutting board and a knife. "Here, you can do the onions."
Joan protested. "No fair, my hands will smell for days!"
Kevin gave her a broad, mischievous smile. "You know what they say, the devil takes the hindmost."
Joan stuck her tongue out at him, but started peeling the onions.
They worked in silence for a while. Then Helen asked, "How was the climbing lessons?"
When Joan didn't answer, her mother called her name. "Joan?"
"What?" she asked.
"Didn't you go climbing today?"
"Oh," Joan said, as if she had almost forgotten about that. "Yeah, we did. It was fun," she said in such a tone of voice that suggested it was all she was gonna say about it.
Helen realized that something must be bothering her daughter. "Is everything all right?"
"Yeah," Joan first said. Then, after a few seconds, she added, "No. I mean, not really." She sighed. "It's Adam."
"Oh, honey, I thought you were all right with it by now," her mother said sympathetically.
"No, it's not that. I mean, part of it is, but it's just ..." She didn't know how much she should reveal to her mother and her brother as to not intrude Adam's privacy. "Adam's having some problems. I don't wanna go into detail, but he needs a job real bad."
She stopped cutting the onions. "Mom, do you think you could go to Mr. Mirren at the design studio and ask him to take Adam back? You know, tell him how many creative ideas he has and how good he is in arts class." She then looked at Kevin. "Or is there any job at the newspaper that Adam could get?"
Her mother's face bore a thoughtful expression. At first she was gonna say she shouldn't interfere, but she saw the hopeful look on Joan's face and rethought her answer. "If Adam really needs that job, maybe I can try."
Kevin also saw Joan's desperate expression and said, "I'll see if there's any opening at the newspaper, I promise."
"Thanks," Joan said and continued cutting the onions, blinking at the onion-vapor induced tears.
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The next day at school everything had been pretty much the usual. Joan had first met Adam at the lockers in the morning before first period. He had looked frayed and tired. With upcoming exams, everyone had been pretty much focused on lessons, so there hadn't been a lot of private conversation.
Everyone had noticed that Adam wasn't in a good mood, bordering on the depressed, but no one had the heart to ask him about it, especially not Grace after Adam brushing her off the day before. Nor had Adam exactly made any attempt at letting anyone in either. They had all just coexisted throughout the school day, exchanging only small talk banter.
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"Joan, what are you doing?"
"Pulling out the weeds?" Joan asked more than stated.
"No, these are field bindweed, they're supposed to actually stay in the ground," Mr. Johnsson, the volunteer supervisor told Joan, exasperated at Joan's apparent ignorance of plants and garden work.
Joan sighed. "I'll never get the hang of this."
Mr. Johnsson took Joan and guided her over to a man in his mid-forties with slightly graying hair and told her, "Here, stay with Jason, he'll teach you how to separate good from evil. At least in the plant world."
Jason smiled at Joan, extending his hand to her. "Jason Hall. You can call me Jason."
Joan took his hand and shook it. He had a firm grip and she could feel the calluses on his fingers and palms. "Joan Girardi. Joan," she replied, indicating he should call her by her first name also.
Jason gave here a quick introduction on which plants she could pluck and which should stay. Not only did he teach her that, he also told Joan a lot about the names of the plants, their Latin denominations and that some of the plants came from the same families. He explained that you could generally classify them from the shape of their flowers, leaves and stems. Joan not only found him a nice guy, he also had the uncanny ability to make what sounded endlessly boring in biology class seem interesting and worth paying attention to.
Joan had just learned that the yellow flower of the dandelion didn't actually only have only one flower but hundreds of them in one inflorescence and belonged to the composite family. She was still mulling over that when Jason asked her, "So, what brings you here?"
Joan didn't exactly know how to explain it to a total stranger. He would declare her a complete nutcase if she told him, "God walked up to me in the form of a gardener at the recreation park and told me to." So instead she vaguely said, "I thought it could be useful."
Jason pulled up one corner of his mouth in a half smile. "What, like free gardening lessons for when you have your own garden?"
"Something like that," Joan evaded. "What about you?"
Jason rubbed some dirt from his hand. "I used to live in the country, but we had to move downtown a while ago. No garden there, and I kind of missed the gardening work. I find it very relaxing, so I thought 'Why not do some gardening and do something good for the community at the same time?'"
Joan wrinkled her nose for a second. She couldn't understand how anyone could enjoy crawling in the dirt, much less find it relaxing. 'Oh well,' she thought, 'To each his own.'
When Joan and Jason had finished ridding their allocated space of weeds and things that didn't belong, they moved to another part of the cemetery. There they started clearing away some of the overgrow that had proliferated freely over some of the more unkempt headstones. When Jason pulled some twines aside, he picked up a piece of cardboard from underneath it. He brushed some of the dirt off it. "An organ donor card," he said, thinking out loud. He studied it closer to see if you could see who might have lost it, but the moisture of the ground had washed away the ink.
Jason turned the card over in his hand and said to Joan, "Funny, just the other day I was talking to my wife about getting one myself."
Joan immediately had to think about Adam and his father. She had been so absorbed in the gardening work and Jason's flora lessons that she had forgotten about Adam completely since she had come to the cemetery. She felt a little guilty about that.
"Joan?"
She was pulled from her reverie, Jason was calling her by her name and had apparently addressed her at least once before.
"Sorry," she said. "What did you say?"
"Are you okay? You look as if someone walked over your grave. No pun intended." He motioned at the headstone next to them.
"No, it's okay. It's just that I know someone who's waiting for a kidney transplant."
"Oh," Jason said. "All the more reason to get one of these. You know, I figure that if I will die anyway, at least some good might come out of that if I can help save people's lives by giving them my organs. Not that I have a death wish, but if I can save just one life by that, it will be worth it. Now I just need to go through with it."
Joan had actually done some research on the subject on the internet the day before. The whole Girardi family had gotten organ donor cards after Kevin's accident, but back then Helen had taken care of it. However, with Mr. Rove's current condition, Joan had wanted to read up on options and if his prognosis really looked as glum as Adam had said. Sadly, everything indicated that it did.
During her research, she had stumbled across a few websites that gave information about where and how you could get an organ donor card. She told Jason about it and he promised to get one right the next day. As a reminder, he pocketed the old, washed-out donor card he had found.
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Joan had gone home after working in the cemetery. She was now studying maths for their exam tomorrow. When she encountered a problem she wasn't able to figure out herself, she went over to Luke's room. She knocked and he told her to come in.
She put her notes in front of him. "Hey, can you have a look at this? I just can't wrap my head around that inflection point calculation."
Luke studied it for a minute or two and then knew where the problem lay. "Duh, you mixed up the numerator and denominator here." He pointed at one of Joan's equations in her notes.
"Of course," she said in a tone that suggested that this was anything but obvious. Then she sighed. "Man, I am so gonna suck tomorrow."
Luke shrugged. "Guess maths is not for everybody."
"Well, it's definitely not for me."
"Don't worry, sis, we'll still love you," he joked. Then he changed the subject. "Hey, look. I was gonna ask you, is there anything going on with Adam? He seemed kinda ... I don't know. Depressed. Grace also said they had kind of a row yesterday."
Joan was a little shocked. If even Luke noticed and inquired about it, it must be pretty apparent. But she wasn't gonna tell Luke any more than the other family members. If he wanted to know more, he would have to ask Adam himself. "He lost his job a while ago and he has to find another one, fast," was all Joan said.
"What, is he broke or something?" Luke said jokingly. But when he saw Joan's woeful expression, the half-smile vanished from his lips.
"I can't talk about it, but it's ... well, let's just say it's something more serious."
Luke sincerely offered, "Anything I can do to help?"
Joan shook her head. "I don't think so. If there is, I'll let you know."
"Okay." There was an uncomfortable pause. "If there's any more I can do about getting those equations sorted out for you, you know where to find me."
"Sure. Thanks," Joan said, got her notes and left her brother's room. Luke was the science nerd in the family and could be geeky at times, but he definitely had his heart in the right place. She could see how Grace would open up to him the way she had.
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It was dark outside, the street lamps were bathing Alexander Drive in a dim yellowish light. Joan approached the Rove house. She saw a light in the shed, so she went to where she would find Adam ever so often working on his sculptures and arts projects. Sometimes he would be welding metal together for a sculpture, sometimes he would be drawing or painting something. This time she could hear loud banging noises as she got closer.
She carefully opened the door. Adam was standing at the work bench, using a hammer to beat one of his sculptures to pieces. His face looked devoid of emotion, lifeless.
Joan went up to him. "Adam, what are you doing?" she asked accusingly.
Adam didn't stop hammering at the sculpture. Insistently, she addressed him again. "Adam!"
When he still didn't stop, she grabbed his arm, stopping it in mid-motion. He looked at her questioningly, as if she had just punched him in the gut and he was asking what for.
Quietly, Joan asked Adam a second time, "What the hell are you doing?"
The hammer glided from his hand and clattered onto the work bench. He sagged down onto the stool behind him. "I don't know," he said. "I just ... I needed to ... I don't know what I was doing."
Adam looked down at the scattered pieces of metal, wiring and plastic that had once been a sculpture he had built for a school project. When he realized what he had just destroyed, he said through tears that were welling up in his eyes, "It's just ... none of this is making any sense anymore."
Joan couldn't help but comfort him. "Come here," she told him and embraced him. He leaned into the embrace and clutched Joan's torso. She gently stroked his hair, soothing his sobs with shushing noises.
When he had calmed down after a few minutes, he released his grip on Joan and got up. Joan watched him going to the other side of the work bench, intertwining his hands and covering his eyes with them. With a sweeping motion down his face, he wiped the tears away. He paced the small space of the shed, looking for the words to come. Joan waited patiently.
"I was so angry," he finally admitted. He stopped in front of the door, leaned his back on it and slid down onto the floor into a sitting position. Joan went up to him and sat down next to him. Adam went on, "I really don't know why I just did that, but I needed to smash something."
Joan thought back to when she had gotten to know Adam almost two years ago. "Adam, you told me you made these things to remember your mother. Are you angry at her?"
"I don't know who I'm angry at. Mostly at myself, I guess. It's like I've been screwing up everything lately. My mom, my job, the hiking trip, the night at the concert." He turned his head to look at Joan. "The thing with Bonnie. And now my dad. My life's all just one big failure, all the consequences leading up to this point. It's like I'm losing everyone I've ever been close to."
Compassionately, Joan said, "Adam, don't say that. You can't blame yourself for what happened to your mother, and what's happening to your father. And you haven't lost me. I'm here now, aren't I?"
Adam's eyes filled with tears again. "Yeah," he whispered. "And I can't figure out why you still stick with me, after I've messed up everything."
Joan put her arm around his shoulders and Adam rested his head on her shoulder. Joan replied, "I told you before, that's what friends are for. To stick with each other, even when they have messed up. Or maybe especially then."
They stayed like that for a few minutes. Then Joan remembered why she had initially come to see Adam. She pulled her arm from around Adam's shoulders. "Oh, I almost forgot. Actually, I came here to bear good news."
Adam's face lightened up a little. Joan went on, "Kevin asked around at the Herald. They're looking for someone compiling articles and getting stuff from the archives. He said it was neither an interesting nor intellectually challenging job, mostly xeroxing things and boring stuff like that. But the pay is decent and, well, it's a start. They asked that if you want, you should come in on Monday after school."
"Cool," Adam sounded hopeful again. He looked at Joan. "Thanks."
Joan got up and held her hand out to Adam. "Come on, we both need some sleep for the maths test tomorrow."
Adam's eyes grew wide. "That's tomorrow? Damn!"
Joan almost had to laugh at his dumbstruck, shocked expression. "Hey, relax. Unlike me, you actually have an idea what Mr. Bunman tries teaching us. Well, at least most of the time. I'm sure you'll do okay. Want some advice on last-minute cramming the night before a test?"
"Shoot."
"It's useless. Never worked for me. It'll only overload your brain and you end up more confused than before."
Adam resigned. "If you say so."
Joan smiled at him. "Besides, you can always copy from Steve."
Adam chuckled. "Right." He opened the door for Joan to step out of the shed and switched off the light before he closed the door behind himself.
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