The Best Man (8 page)

G
randpa was to be cremated. He left word about that. I didn't want to think about it, but he liked to keep things neat and tidy. When Dad and I went to collect his ashes, they were in this urn inside a fitted cardboard box. Dad carried it out to the Lincoln.

We were driving the Lincoln because it was all we had at the moment. The Rambler never was roadworthy.

“Should I hold him?” I meant the ashes. “Or put him on the backseat?”

I didn't know. Dad didn't know. He wore his mirror sunglasses, his shades. But I could see through them. His eyes were wet. I eased the box
onto the backseat. “Remember how Grandpa liked the backseat of that Hudson Hornet convertible? He'd be back there in his Cubs cap with a bottle of Gatorade while we tooled around all over. He loved that.”

Dad nodded and rubbed his stubbly chin with the back of his wrist. A thing he does. We were as quiet as we ever are, and that gave me time to think. “Do all his ashes have to go into the cemetery plot?”

We were stopped at a light. “What do you have in mind?” Dad said.

“I'm thinking, maybe you and I and Uncle Paul could take a little bit of Grandpa, maybe a handful, maybe not so much, and scatter him on Wrigley Field. He'd like being there. He always did.”

The light changed. “It's probably not legal,” Dad said.

“No,” I said, “but we could probably get away with it.”

Then we were in our driveway. Over on the swing where Cleo and Grandpa used to sit, the one-eyed cat from the corner, Sigmund Freud, was stretched out. He was making himself at home in a sunny patch, so Cleo was gone for good. Nobody ever saw her after the night Grandpa died.

Down in the garage we shook about a tablespoonful of ashes into an envelope. They were white and gritty. I don't know if they were Grandpa. How can you know? You can't. Dad sealed the flap with Scotch tape and handed the envelope to me.

“We—”

“No,” he said. “You and your uncle Paul can take it from here. Have the time together. Anyway, I may have to raise bail money for you.”

He screwed the lid back on the urn, and left a half-turn for me to do. “Are we going to tell Grandma that Grandpa's not all here?”

“
You
want to tell her?” Dad said.

“Not really,” I said.

• • •

Uncle Paul picked an away day for the Cubs for our visit. The team was down in Arizona, closing a six-game road trip with another loss to the Diamondbacks. It was one of those days with the lake breeze rattling the ivy on the Wrigley Field walls, and summer slipping away.

We came up out of the dark of the concession area, and there it was: blue sky, green infield, diamond opening like a fan. One of the perfect places of this world.

It was pretty much all ours. A groundskeeping crew was working, and there were maintenance people and security. But they all knew Uncle Paul.

So nobody especially noticed when I leaned out of the stands and poured an envelope of something onto the field.

“Play ball, Grandpa,” I said, and we strolled on.

Now we were up in the center-field bleachers, under the scoreboard. We had on sunscreen and our Cubs' caps. Uncle Paul had taken a rare weekday off work. Holly was up at her camp, being a counselor for its second session. Janie Clarkson went with her. The world was at peace. We were waiting for it to be noon enough for a burger down on Sheffield.

How cool was this? As cool as it gets.

“It's better without a game,” Uncle Paul said, half asleep with his cap pulled down.

He was wearing deck shoes and a professionally faded golf shirt and white jeans.

“You don't wear shorts even on a day like this?”

“I'm thirty-four,” he said. “That's too old to wear shorts in public.”

“Tell Dad,” I said.

“You tell him,” he said.

I was a little groggy with the sun, but I said, “Should we be sad about Grandpa?”

“No, who wouldn't want the life he had?” Uncle Paul said. “It fit him like a glove.”

That was a good thought. What else was on my mind? Oh, I know. “Dad said he might have to bail us out of jail if they caught us pouring Grandpa on the field. But I think he wanted to give us a little time to talk.”

“What about, do you suppose?” Uncle Paul said.

“Search me,” I said. “It could be like the talk Mom tried to have with me. The one about finding me under a cabbage leaf and being in labor with Holly for thirty-six hours.”

Uncle Paul's eyes opened. “I don't believe I've heard that one. She found you where?”

“Uncle Paul, it's not worth going into. I think she wanted to talk about Mr. McLeod being gay.”

“Maybe she wanted to talk about
me
being gay,” Uncle Paul said.

Whoa. The sun stopped at the top of the sky.

“You knew I was gay, right?” Uncle Paul sat up, pushed his ball cap back.

“Sure,” I said. “I guess. Not really. No.”

“Should we have talked this over before? But your
mom and dad are so not into pigeonholing people. Were we all being so liberal, we left you out?”

I shrugged. “Lynette Stanley says you really have to spell things out for me.”

“I don't mean talking down to you,” Uncle Paul said. “I mean not talking past you. Not everybody in this world's so open-minded.”

“Mr. McLeod told the sixth graders about people who'll write their fears on your face.”

“That's good,” Uncle Paul said. “You have to be ready for people like that.”

My head was still kind of whirling.

Grandpa

Dad

Uncle Paul

Mr. McLeod

Those were the four I wanted to be.

“Uncle Paul, do you think I might be gay?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Do you moisturize?”

“What—”

“Where do you stand on exfoliation?”

“What's ex—”

“And you didn't pick that shirt yourself, did you? Tell me you didn't.”

“Uncle Paul, you're kidding me, right?”

“I'm half kidding,” he said.

“One more thing then,” I said. “You love men, right?”

“I love one man,” Uncle Paul said.

T
hen here came sixth grade, and bring it on. We'd learned double last semester from Mrs. Stanley and Mr. McLeod. Probably triple. So what was left? And we were going to be the biggest, oldest class at Westside. Perry Highsmith and that bunch would be out of there. We'd even have a new teacher to break in. Mrs. Bickle had retired because she was older than the school.

These were my thoughts after Uncle Paul dropped me off at home that day. When I started upstairs, Mr. Stanley was coming down from Mom's office.
He wasn't crying, so I asked him how Lynette was liking camp.

He said she liked it now that she'd adjusted to it.

“I suppose she met a lot of kids with bigger ones than hers.”

“
What?
” Mr. Stanley stopped dead on a step.

“Vocabularies?” I said.

“Oh,” he said. Then he went on downstairs.

Mom waved me into her office. “You can be my last customer.”

I settled on the sofa.

“Good day?” she asked.

“The best,” I said. “We poured some of Grandpa out onto—”

Mom's hand slapped the desk. “Don't tell me that,” she said. “I don't want to be responsible for knowing that.”

“It's not like we're out on bail,” I said.

“Nevertheless,” Mom said. She might have been thinking about Grandma. “What else?”

“We had a burger and Diet Coke at a place on Sheffield. Uncle Paul didn't eat his bun, and I had all the fries. I think he's dieting, and now he's gone to work out. He may be turning into a gym rat.”

“Hmmm. Possibly,” Mom said. “Anything else?”

“We talked about . . . Excalibur?”

Mom pondered. “Excalibur. Isn't that a sword?”

“I think it's something you rub on your face.”

“Exfoliant? You talked about exfoliant?”

“We touched on it,” I said. “Uncle Paul likes to keep his skin in shape. Also, he's gay.”

“Ah. Well, yes,” Mom said. “We thought you'd know when you were ready to know.”

“Mom, I know when somebody tells me.”

Then Mom's old MacBook Air pinged, and an email came in that changed everything.

Mom put on her reading glasses. She went to a link and printed it out. Finally, she said, “Big news. You won't be going back to Westside Elementary for sixth grade.”

“What? Mom, what?”

“I quote,” she said. “‘Due to demographic shifts in the student population, your sixth grader will transition into the former Memorial Junior High now formatted in a grades six-through-eight configuration, to be re-branded Memorial Middle School.'”

“Mom, say it in English.”

“They're moving your class from elementary school to middle school,” Mom said. “Monday.”

I keeled over on the sofa. “Noooo.”

“Honey—”

“They can't do this.” I pounded a pillow. “We were going to be the oldest. Now we'll be the youngest. There'll be different teachers for different subjects. I won't be able to find them. Lockers, Mom. With combination locks.”

I sat up. “Mom, I'm not ready. This isn't the body I wanted to take to middle school. Look at it. I need another year. I'm pre—what?”

“Prepubescent?” Mom offered.

“Probably. You'll have to homeschool me.”

She paled. “This shouldn't come as such a shock to you,” she said. “The Board of Education's been debating it all summer. It's in the paper every day.”

“Mom, this is another case of everybody talking around me and not to me. I don't read the paper.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Maybe I would if I had my own computer with Internet ac—”

“Or you could read the one that gets thrown on our porch every morning.”

“Mom, I'm not ready,” I said again.

“Archer, honey, change doesn't care whether you're ready or not. Change happens anyway.”

• • •

Then it's the first day of school—middle school, just like that. Still August, of course. Labor Day's still down the road. They've told us sixth graders to report to the auditorium, which smells of fear. Or is it just me? I looked to see if I had the wrong shoes. I probably had the wrong shoes.

We milled around because the two homeroom teachers were up there poring over printouts. And another nightmare. It wasn't just us Westside sixth graders. It was sixth graders from Eastside Elementary and Central Elementary. A sea of strangers. I saw nobody I knew. How could that even be? A lot of friendship bracelets. A lot of headphones. A lot of hoodies. Hoodies in August?

Somebody came up to me out of the milling mob. Hoodie and shorts. Headphones and big gym shoes. Not quite my height, but his voice had changed.

“Dude, how great is it that Natalie Schuster isn't here?” he said. “She's like on the North Shore. In the New Trier district. Someplace.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard she wasn't coming back.”

“Can you believe why?” this guy said.

Probably not. “Why?”

“Because her mother got married again, and they moved.”

“I didn't know her mother wasn't married,” I said.

“I guess we weren't supposed to. But she's married now. You know who she married?”

Search me.

“It was in the paper,” this kid said. “Mr. Showalter. Remember Jackson Showalter from first grade? Didn't he pull a knife on you in the rest—”

“Right,” I said. It was going to take me a while to figure this out. Natalie Schuster's stepbrother was going to be Jackson Showalter?

The guy with all the information turned away. He seemed to be working the room. He turned back. “Archer, you don't know me, do you?”

“Ah . . .”

“I'm Josh Hunnicutt.”

What? “Get out of here,” I said. But I looked again, and it
was
Josh Hunnicutt. The same kid, but longer.

“I grew just under a foot this summer,” he said. “Eleven and three-eighths inches. Wore me out. I fainted six times. Once in the pool. They had to fish me out.”

“What about the voice?”

“That's just now happening. I'm up and down with it. But it's pretty deep this morning, which is great since it's the first day of middle school.”

Rub it in, I thought. “Great,” I said.

“And look here.” Josh pointed to his chin. “I'm about to rock some teenage acne.”

“Way to go,” I muttered, and he went.

Bells rang. Everybody was sitting. I looked for a seat over in the invisible section.

Nothing happened until a girl kind of slinked up to the next seat. Out of the corner of my eye she had more of a seventh-grade vibe. Was she going to sit down? She made a fist and popped me on the shoulder, hard. The pain was intense and knocked me half out of the chair.

Lynette.

“Lynette? Look at you!” I rubbed my shoulder in disbelief. There was less of her but more shape. I can't describe it. She was still eleven, but twelve was clearly on the way.

I wasn't familiar with her hair. “Lynette, what happened?”

“Camp happened.” She sat down, crossed a leg. “Weight-reduction no-carbs camp.”

“Wait a minute. It wasn't vocabulary camp? Because I asked your dad—”

“It was fat camp with forced marches,” Lynette said.

“I thought we weren't supposed to use the fat word.”

“You can use it now.” Lynette looked down herself. “I had to get all new clothes. I'm going for a skirt and boots look. Is it working?”

“I guess,” I said. “I mean yes. But what about your hair?”

“There was too much of it once there was less of me. I looked like a demented dandelion. After I got back to civilization, Mrs. Stanley took me for a cut and some feathering. Then we decided to tone down the color.”

“You dyed your hair?”

“Rinsed,” Lynette said, “with some lowlights. New school, new look, right? And how hilarious is it that Natalie's new stepbrother is Jackson Showalter—probably still two feet tall and heavily armed! You can't make this stuff up. Do you suppose the two of them were ring bearers at the wedding?”

“How did you even hear this where you were?”

“The paper. I read it online. We were really off
the grid up there in the Upper Peninsula. It was like
Hatchet
, so if I hadn't been reading the paper—”

“Right,” I said. “You and Josh Hunnicutt.”

Lynette pointed at the two teachers sorting us out. “You can see where that's heading,” she said. “Three sixth-grade classes into two homerooms. Do the math. It won't be just our Westside class. We'll be divided up and mixed in with these other people we don't know.”

I hadn't done the math.

“Poor us,” Lynette said. “Poor troops. In case they split us up, meet me for lunch. Not the food court. It's what they call the cafeteria, and I'm hearing the seventh graders are going to run it as a scam. They shake you down. They charge admission, like a cover charge. But we'll only have lunch together today, because I'm going to have to find some girls to hang with. I've got some peer-grouping to do.”

Now they were getting ready to divide us in half. The woman teacher was Ms. Roebuck. I never knew who the man teacher was.

“And for your information,” Lynette said, “I've dropped the
ette
.”

“The what?”

“The
ette
. From now on, I'm Lynn, not Lynette. I was never a Lynette anyway. It was never me, and it's not the me I want to be.”

“Is Mrs. Stanley going to call you Lynn?”

“Probably not. She's too old to change, but you aren't.”

Her eyebrows rose up. They were new too. Plucked or whatever. And more black than red. I squinted at her. “Who are you?” I said. “I don't know you.”

“I'm Lynn,” she said, and made another fist to help me remember.