“Whenever I came home, she was usually standing right here.”
“Almost always.” He sat smoking at the kitchen table. The cartons he had brought were stacked against the wall, still folded up. He had neglected to buy packing tape. “It made it hard to sneak past if I’d been in a fight at school.”
“You used to get into a lot of fights,” his sister said. “Why was that?”
He shrugged. “Dad said to never take shit off of anybody.”
I waited for Sunday to roll over me, crash its waves into my chest and tumble me to the shore.
A hard laugh catches in my throat, comes out as a mangled rattle. I forget what was funny, what I was even thinking.
I walk to the window. The Korean neighbor pulls out of his driveway. He takes the corner too hard. The rear wheel clips a plastic garbage can and snatches it under the car, drags the can halfway down the block before it pops out, unharmed.
There’s a message there, I know. But what message?
From the other room, the football commentator’s brassy voice hammers stats and opinions into my father-in-law’s drunken face. He lives for football Sundays spent lying in his recliner drinking beer, moving only to go to the pisser or get himself another. He says he earned it. Nobody argues.
Later, I wonder why I can never remember transitions, how I move from one place to another. How I got here.
The little green man in the crosswalk turns into a blinking red hand, then a solid red hand, then back into a little green man. He does this all day, whether I am here or not.
I take a deep breath and wait for Sunday to start over from the beginning.
Last thing I remember was being angry that Janie was late. I decided to make it a double.
After that, nothing.
You probably heard the stories about me. Somebody like me. The guy who gets tossed from the bar by a pair of bouncers, the guy who is 2AM drunk at 8:30.
Hilarious, legendary.
But for me, they are just stories that happened to someone else, some mythical character with whom I happen to share a face and a name. These nights are covered in black fog. I never, never remember.
I suppose I knew about it for some weeks before I saw what I saw. At first I wasn’t sure. See something like that, you don’t want to believe it, though it’s right in front of your eyes.
Then all the pieces fall together in your head, like the tumblers in a safe when you turn that last number. Small things that never made sense all of sudden did, things I would notice and put out of my mind. The way Pastor would smile at the boys when he come in to the dining hall, the way he kept his nails trimmed like a woman’s despite the heavy work we all do here.
Once you’ve seen it, there’s no going back. Can’t be unseen. Can’t be a secret. Before I saw it, all this was on him. Now it’s on me. There are more than thirty boys out here at the ranch, most of them from families with no daddy. They look up to Pastor, admire him. Hell, I did myself. That’s why it took a minute of seeing it with my own eyes before it hit home.
I should up and quit, leave and never come back. Maybe tell the sheriff on my way out of town.
You ever stop to think that your whole life might hang on a decision you don’t actually decide? That your fate, everything that will happen to you from this point forward, hangs from a thread no thicker than a spider’s web?
Of course you don’t. Nobody does. You go through you day on automatic pilot, drive to work, drive to the store. You’re thinking about your mortgage or a dream you had or screwing the checkout girl at the grocery. You make a million decisions without knowing, each one leading to the next, each one building up to something you hope is good.
And then something happens, something real. Something bad. Time slows down and you’re all of a sudden paying close attention. When something bad happens that can’t be undone, the first thing you want to do is find out why. Blame somebody. Blame yourself, probably. And you’re right to do so, because who is this all happening to, anyway?
This is what I thought about when I got the call about Jen. This is all I ever think about, now and forever. I was going to put on the snow tires when she got home. That morning I was just too busy. I got held up. I ran out of time.
Your life is made the tiny moments and decisions you don’t notice. When you say goodbye to somebody, it might be for the last time.
“You know what Jamey said about you?”
“Your brother? He’s never even met me.”
“About all you Yanks, actually. He said you’re overpaid, oversexed and over here.”
“Not original, but true enough for now. Doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
She pushed away a wisp of hair, fire-red in the rare sunlight. “So it’s not just because you’re a soldier. A pilot, I mean.”
He held her then, pressed his lips to her cheek. “None of us knows what will happen, darling. We must make the most of it.”
They heard the drone of outbound bombers high overhead.
Her expression is wrong. And her hair. For the first time, he is glad she is dead. This would have upset her.
He goes to the bathroom to wash his hands. They smell like the funeral director’s oily aftershave– flowers and death. He washes them twice, sniffs his fingers. The smell won’t go away.
He never should have shaken the man’s hand, but there really wasn’t a choice.
He wants to change the arrangements, go closed casket. His shoes sink into the red carpet, making no noise.
Through the closed walnut door he hears the funeral director call him “the bereaved.”
The old man was as greedy with his bottle as he was lazy with his seniority. Still, he was company. And such stories!
Geoffrey took his own bottle from his pocket, raised it. “Cheers.”
“Bumpers,” said the old man. He drained his pint in a long swallow, holding the empty bottle at length to be sure of the last drop. Satisfied, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Now where was I?”
“You were telling me about Lord Olivier. About the first time he played Hamlet.”
“Right. A little shite, he was. Nervous as a summer flea. I recall him whispering to himself. Sounded like a daft old woman.”
“It must have been a great event in your life to see him there.”
The old man, savage now, cocked an eye. “How d’you mean?”
“Well, such a splendid actor. All the history of the Globe. You know. Garrick, even the Bard himself…”
Geoffrey felt his face grow hot. He was about to add something about glory, but didn’t.
The old man snorted and reached a hand for Geoffrey’s bottle.
