A Little Ray of Sunshine (5 page)

Jess’s eyes narrowed in thought for a moment. “I don’t know. What are the other ground rules?”

“What?”

“Well, ground rule one was no talking about the wedding, which related directly to everything you said after that, so I assume there’s a two. What’s the second ground rule?”

I white-knuckled the steering wheel. “No counting my ground rules.”

She smiled and held out her hand, and we shook on it. I started the truck, figuring that if the Universe told Jess to kill me in my sleep, it’d be my own damn fault anyway.

***

In the middle of the night, in an RV park on the western edge of Ohio, I found myself staring up at the ceiling of my Airstream, unable to sleep. Jess was snoring lightly from the twin bunk at the back of the trailer, but after six years of RV park living, I was under no illusions about what I was capable of sleeping through. The snore of a deluded angel was not powerful enough to keep me up on its own.

I threw my legs over the side of my bed and stuffed my feet into my sneakers, then quietly opened the door and slipped outside. I took a moment to stare up at the clear, black sky, peppered with stars, and breathe in the smoky fragrance of a distant campfire in the warm summer air. It had been an RV park much like this one that had gotten me hooked on the things in the first place. Of course, most of the parks I’d lived in recent years had been nothing like this. Places like this were too far out in the middle of nowhere, and it was almost impossible to get any kind of viable employment within a reasonable distance, except during the occasional lucky summer when the park itself needed extra help. I glanced back at the private little nook where I’d parked the Airstream under the protective bulk of a giant willow tree, far enough away from any neighbors to provide a decent sense of privacy. I liked this park.

Maybe, someday, I’d come back.

In the distance, from the direction of the rec center, I could hear music playing, the sounds of people laughing, the erratic
conk-plinks
of two people playing Ping-Pong at the outdoor table. This was a family place, where moms and dads took their kids for long weekends and let them stay up late drinking sodas and feeding the jukebox. When I was twelve, Danny had taken Digs and Luke and me to a place like this for the summer while my mother did a TV movie-of-the-week for NBC and snared husband number three, a talent agent who, as it turned out, had no talent for agenting. But that’s another story. Anyway, Luke and I had piled our jukebox quarters together and gotten a pack of menthol cigarettes out of a vending machine, then walked down to the lake and tried to smoke them, to horrendous but predictable results. Eventually, we traded the remaining fifteen cigarettes to Digs in exchange for his silence and a pack of Bubblicious bubble gum.

I turned and walked back to my truck. I pulled open the passenger-side door and reached underneath the seat to withdraw the wooden stationery box I’d bought at a paper crafts fair not long after I left Fletcher. It was squat and wide, allowing it to double as a writing surface for people like me who had no room in their lives for a real desk. The sides were accented with dried daisies that had been glued on then shellacked within an inch of their lives. Nested inside was a shallow, flat drawer that held my pens, stationery paper and envelopes. I crawled into the seat and set it on my lap, then flipped the top off and pulled out a sheet and a pen. I set the top back on, situated the box on my lap, flicked on the cab light and started to write.

Dear Luke,

I stared up at the dim cab light, thinking carefully about what I wanted to write next. Finally hitting on just the right thing, I smiled and put pen to paper.

A duck walks into a bar and orders a beer.

“We don’t serve ducks,” the bartender says.

“Yes, but I’m special,” the duck says. “I can sing.” And the duck belts out a perfect aria.

“Oh, he’s cute,” the blonde sitting at the next stool says. “Give him the beer.”

“No,” the bartender says. “We don’t serve singing ducks.” And he throws the duck out.

The next day, the duck comes back and orders a beer.

“Forget it,” the bartender says. “We don’t serve ducks.”

“Yes, but I’m special,” the duck says. “I can dance.” And the duck waddles over to the blonde and dances with her, twirling her in her seat with his wing, then goes back to his spot at the bar when the song ends.

“Oh, how sweet!” the blonde says, laughing. “Come on, give him a beer.”

“We don’t serve dancing ducks, either,” the bartender says, and throws the duck out.

The next day, the duck comes back and orders a beer.

“I told you,” the bartender says, “we don’t serve ducks.”

“But I’m special,” the duck says, “I can—”

The bartender picks him up and throws him out.

“Fucking duck,” he mutters as he comes back to the bar.

The blonde gasps. “Who told you?”

I read it over again and laughed to myself. Luke had always had a soft spot for bad duck jokes.

I signed my name at the bottom, folded up the paper, and tucked it inside an envelope. I wrote Luke Greene on the outside, then lifted up the panel and set the envelope inside, with some fifty of its unsent brothers. I tucked the box back under the seat, flicked off the cab light and went back into the Airstream, where I continued to toss and turn until the sun rose.

***

I have been married seven times, and am so glad to be on my last one! Glenn is everything I’ve ever wanted or needed in a friend and companion. He is my light and my hope, my compass, my best friend. I am his world, and he is mine, and we need nothing else besides each other. It is such a blessing to be so fulfilled by one person that, even if everyone else on the planet were to disappear, you wouldn’t really mourn them.

—Lilly Lorraine, quoted in “The Real Lives of Forgotten Child Stars.” Author: Rebecca Wade, Women’s Day, 12 March 1997

Four

I don’t remember when Luke and I started communicating through jokes, but then I don’t remember a lot of specific moments between us. I remember our first kiss—age thirteen, broad daylight, in the middle of Danny’s pool, after which Luke dunked me under and we never spoke of it again—but most of the other stuff happened so naturally that it just seemed like it had always been that way. I can’t say when I fell in love with Luke because I can’t remember ever not being in love with Luke. It’s the same with the jokes. They started during one of the many summers I spent there, sometime between that first kiss/dunk and when I went away to college out east. I remember being upset about something—a boy, a fight with a friend, I don’t know—and Luke told me a joke that involved a penguin and a bow tie and ever since, whenever we had any kind of remotely serious talk, we told jokes. It was just something we did.

It was actually a joke that finally got us together. After college, I’d moved to an apartment in Fletcher just to be near Luke. Never did get up the nerve to tell him I was crazy in love with him, though. I was too scared he’d never see me as anything other than an old family friend. Or worse, a sister, the kiss in the pool notwithstanding. Well, about eight months of that torture was all I had in me to take, so when a friend asked me to move to New York City with her, I agreed. When I told Luke, he hugged me and wished me well and didn’t seem too sad to see me go. I cried for two days. Then, finally, the night before I was going to leave, the levee broke.

“So, two guys walk into a bar,” Luke had said as he taped up the last box of kitchen stuff. It was late and we’d been packing all day, and I was giddy from the tension of all the things I’d been unable to say, so I started giggling immediately.

“I’m not done yet,” Luke said, crawling over to sit next to me, our backs against the wall as we stared out at my empty apartment. He looked at me, smiling—Luke was never not smiling—and raised an eyebrow in mock irritation. “Can I continue?”

“Yeah,” I said quietly, my heart pounding as I stared up at him, wondering how I was ever going to survive life without that smile. “Go ahead.”

“Thank you. So, the first guy says, ‘Drinks are on me! I just asked the woman I love to marry me!’ And everyone cheers and claps him on the back.”

And there, Luke stopped talking, his eyes locking on mine, making my breath rush out as my cheeks flamed hard.

“And the second guy?” I prodded quietly.

His eyes trailed down to my lips. “Hmmm?”

“The second guy. In the bar. What did he say?”

“Oh, yeah.” Luke let out a small chuckle, then his smile faded. “He said, ‘Good for you. The woman I love is moving across the country and I’m too much of a fucking coward to ask her not to go.’”

My heart pounded painfully in my chest as I tried not to read this the wrong way, searching for the punch line that would make me feel like an idiot for even thinking Luke was trying to tell me something. Finally, I cleared my throat and said what I was thinking.

“That’s not funny.”

He reached up, took a strand of my hair in his fingers and shook his head.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

That night, we had sex for the first time on the floor of my apartment, and the next day, I called my friend to back out of New York. Later that week, we moved all my stuff into his apartment. And the rest, as they say, was history.

Until I blew everything up in a life implosion so powerful that even six years later, the sharp edges of my personal impact crater were visible to everyone around me.

My point is, if you were Jess, you’d be asking, right?
What the hell happened, EJ? Why are you a misanthropic wreck? Why do you choose to live alone in a big tin can rather than near the people who love you?

Of course you’d ask. Any sane person would be too overwhelmed with curiosity not to ask.

Jess didn’t ask a thing. Three days we’d been on the road, and the endless barrage of questions I’d been expecting about Digs and Luke and Danny and my mother never came. For three days, I stared at endless lengths of highway pavement, forming my evasion tactics for when she finally did come at me, curiosity swinging, but she never engaged in anything more than idle chitchat. Waiting for the shoe to drop wore me down and finally, in a diner somewhere between Kansas City and the fifth ring of hell, I broke.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. You win. Ask me anything.”

“Mmm?” she said, sipping her coffee.

“No games. I’m too cranky, and too tired. We’re gonna be in Colorado Springs in another day or so, and then you’ll be going off to see my family, which is like sending a lamb to the slaughter, by the way. This is your last chance to be duly informed. I’m an open book; ask me anything.”

“I don’t have any questions.” She paused. “Well, that’s not entirely true. I have questions, but I don’t like to ask direct questions unless I have to. That’s not how I work.” She poked at her pancakes, her expression dubious. “These are from a mix. What self-respecting diner owner charges five ninety-five for pancakes from a box?”

“One with a firm grasp of basic capitalism,” I said. “So, how do you work?”

“Mmm?” She dumped the fork and the pancake and smiled at me. “Oh, yeah. Well, I find that when I ask direct questions, people tend to directly lie, so mostly, I observe. I watch you and get a feel for what you’re about, and then when the opportunity comes where I can help, I do what I can. Like when I kidnapped you.”

“Ah. I see. Well, it all makes sense now, because that was very helpful.”

“But to be honest,” she went on, “I usually don’t have to do much. In the end, it’s entirely up to the person I’m assigned to. If she doesn’t want to help herself, there’s not much I can do for her.”

“Well,” I said, “
that
was thinly veiled.”

She smiled. “Subtlety’s not one of my gifts.”

“So...” I nudged sausage around on my plate casually. “What have you observed about me?”

She sighed and sat back, the red vinyl of the diner booth making unflattering sounds for which she was oddly unapologetic. “Well, you have a lot of maps.”

“So? What, are maps some kind of spiritual metaphor for being lost or something? What is that supposed to mean?”

“I think it means that you live on the road and need to know where you’re going.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Insightful.”

“Insight is one of my gifts.”

I nibbled on a sausage. She took a bite of her pancake. The tinny diner sound system played a Muzak version of Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” which was just wrong on so many levels.

I threw down my fork.

“That’s it? Three days and all you’ve noticed is that I have a lot of maps?”

“No, that’s not all. Did you want everything?”

I played with my coffee mug. Did I really want to hear everything?

No
.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” She smiled and leaned forward, pushing her plate away with one elbow. “You don’t have a computer, and you only have one notebook, which creaks when you open it, so I don’t think you’re really writing a book. Which means that for some reason you wanted me to think you were, which means you care what people think.”

“Wait a minute. I could have a great memory. I could be one of those photographic people. I could be writing a book from memory. You don’t know.”

“You didn’t abandon me at that gas station in Pennsylvania,” she went on, as though I hadn’t spoken, “which shows me you care about other people, period, despite what you’d like people to believe. You exist on as little as possible, and when you sleep, you breathe very shallowly. Either you don’t think you deserve the space and air you need, or you’re waiting to disappear into nothing, to become totally invisible.” She watched me for a minute, tapping her fingernails on the linoleum surface of the table. “I haven’t decided which.”

I huffed. “Wow, you are so far off—”

She held up her hand. “I’m not done. You don’t have any books, television, or newspapers. That speaks to invisible, you’re retreating from the world. But at the same time, you don’t shy away from the people who seek you out. The other night, with me and Digs, you were fully engaged, fully there.” She gave a curt, decisive not. “I’m going with unworthy. And, yes, I do wonder why. But I’m not going to ask, because even if I do ask, you won’t tell me the truth, which may be an unfair assumption, but based on my experience—”

“I killed a man,” I said quickly.

She froze. “Really?”

“Yep,” I said. “With a salad fork. So you see why I can’t go back to Fletcher now.”

Her shoulders relaxed. “Yeah. I can see how that would be a problem for you.”

“Well, yeah. I’m a killer. I kill people all the time, usually with some sort of kitchen utensil, although in a pinch, a tire iron will do. You might wanna sleep with one eye open.”

She kept a straight face. “Well, I’m sorry I misjudged you by assuming you’d make something up.”

I lifted my coffee mug in salute. “You’ll want to be careful about that in the future. I’m not the kind of girl you want to tick off. Especially not when there are spatulas around.”

“Thanks for the heads up.”

We shared a smile and despite myself, I found myself warming up to Jess. A little.

The waitress slid the check onto our table and Jess grabbed for it. I would have argued, but outside of that first tank of gas, I’d picked everything up so far. Jess swiveled as though she was about to get up, then turned to face me.

“I have something,” she said. “Digs gave it to me, and told me to give it to you when you sobered up, but I didn’t feel like the time was right. I think now, maybe, the time is right.”

“What is it?”

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a long, sealed letter envelope. On the front, in Luke’s chicken-scratch hand, was simply
Eejie
. Even if I hadn’t recognized Luke’s handwriting, I would have known it was him. He was the only person to ever call me Eejie.

“I’m gonna go pay this,” Jess said, sliding the check under her hand as she rose from the table. I think I mumbled something at her, but mostly, I just stared at the letter in my hands, unable to figure out if it was a nice gesture or a dirty trick. Either way, I wasn’t going to read it. I didn’t need to. I knew what was inside. On the first line
Dear Eejie
followed by some joke, probably one about a wedding, a sly way to encourage me to come and see my mother, to tell me in our own private shorthand that he was fine with my coming and that life was too short for me to not mend things with Mom, because that was the kind of guy Luke was. It didn’t matter, though. He may have survived the big train wreck intact, which I was glad for, but I was still hunched over and hobbling, and in no shape for a big reunion. I traced my fingers over the space where he’d scribbled my name, then folded the envelope in half and tucked it in my back pocket before going up to meet Jess at the register.

“So,” she said, shooting me a sideways glance as she handed the cashier a twenty. “What did it say?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just an inside joke.”

She nodded, told the cashier to give the change to our waitress, and tucked her hand in my elbow, guiding me out of the diner.

“I think we need to have some fun,” she said.

***

“This is your idea of fun?” I asked, staring down at the cardboard tray in my arms as Jess stepped in front of me, her head darting from side to side like a dousing stick looking for water. The sickly sweet smell of six bags full of sausage McGriddles wafted up from the tray, and I turned my head.

“It’s harder to find them in the small towns,” she said as she hurried down a side street toward a large park.

“You know, it’s early, but I’m sure we can find a bar or something,” I said, shuffling behind her, raising the tray over my head and inhaling the fresh air.

“Alcohol is a depressant,” she said, marching down the road. “Random acts of kindness are a natural mood elevator. Like exercise. And better than any of those damn pills they’re putting everyone on lately.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking that maybe now was not the time to argue for the pills, although I had no doubt that at least one of us, if not both, could seriously benefit from a prescription or two.

The sidewalk ended, just like that, and we found ourselves walking on the dusty shoulder of a two-way road. To our right, across the street, was a park where harried mothers yelled at their children to stop kicking dirt in the faces of the other harried mothers’ children, and to our left, an abandoned VFW hall that looked like it had seen far, far better days.

Jess clapped her hands together. “Perfect!”

My arms got tired and I was forced to lower the tray back down as I followed her around the back of the abandoned VFW.

“Jess, this is how nice girls like us get killed,” I said, but she ignored me, so I continued mumbling to myself over the crunch-crunch of our Keds on the gravel. “Oh, yes, Saint Peter. Thanks so much for sending your angel to get me hacked to pieces while committing random acts of hello-Mr.-Serial-Killer—”