Year After Henry (10 page)

“Good luck,” she said, giving him a quick smile. The truth was that Henry had never won more than an occasional free ticket with those lucky numbers. They had worked a lot better for the Red Sox. Chad took the ticket from her fingers and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

“Thanks,” he said. Then, “You seen my uncle?” Evie shook her head. She could see the damp strands of dark hair poking from beneath the woolen bonnet, so wet they were matted to his forehead.

“Why don't you wait until winter to wear that thing?” Evie asked him. This is when Chad cranked out the famous crooked smile.

“I didn't know bartenders cared so much about their customers,” he said, just as a loud
pop!
pop!
pop!
erupted from the poker machine. Andy called these
triple
headers.

“Goddamn it, Andy, don't do that!” Evie said, a hot flush covering her chest and neck, moving up under her hairline and across her face. Her gynecologist had warned her to get ready.
Your
estrogen
level
is
dangerously
low,
he'd said.
You're headed straight for menopause.
Well, maybe she was. So be it. But she had no intentions of taking Andy Southby with her, and it was a fact that he annoyed her so much these days that she was blaming
him
for each and every hot flash.

“Sorry,” said Andy. “Shit, maybe it's time for me to spend my money someplace where I'm wanted.” Evie looked at him. The thin, narrow face beneath a shock of brownish hair. He spent three dollars a night in the poker machine, twelve quarters, no more, no less, lining them up on the bar in three neat rows until they all disappeared. That was fifteen dollars a week since he was in every night the bar was open but Monday, and that's because he spent his three dollars that night on a rental movie that he watched with his mother. He never drank more than two beers per evening, sometimes nursing just one all night long while he nursed his quarters at the poker machine. And he never left a tip, not even one of his twelve quarters. He seemed to think that by sitting at the bar, he had outwitted any social demands to tip the bartender. Murphy's Tavern could weather the financial blow if Andy spent his money elsewhere.

“You don't need to leave,” Evie said. “Just don't crack your knuckles.” It was her job, after all, to keep the customers happy. When she looked back at the other end of the bar, Chad was gone.

Gail Ferguson arrived an hour later to relieve Evie. With her was her new boyfriend, Marshall Thompson, who grabbed a stool at the end of the bar under the television, near the spot where Gail smoked a cigarette if things were quiet. Evie liked Gail, and had from the very first day they met. Gail was tall and thin, with a long mane of thick, dark hair. There had been sadness not just in her own marriage breaking up a couple years earlier, but with a recent and devastating loss when her niece died of leukemia. This was her sister Margie's child. Evie wondered if maybe this loss had been what prompted Gail to take up with Marshall Thompson in the first place. Sometimes, all a person wants is an arm around them at the saddest hours of the night. But now, in less than a month, Gail's eyes already had that dazed, “in love at any cost” desperation about them. It was common knowledge that Marshall was a loose cannon, a man rumored to be roughing up his estranged wife. But Gail didn't see it that way. “He treats Paula like a queen,” she had told Evie the first night Marshall turned up on the stool under the television set. As Evie got her purse and sweater, she saw Gail quickly slide a scotch and water in front of Marshall, his first free drink of the night.

Out in the parking lot, Evie had just creaked open the door on her aging Mazda when she glanced up to see Chad. He was straddling his motorbike, his eyes staring up at the sky as if he were trying to find something he'd lost. She felt a rush of sadness for the boy. He had come looking for Larry since there was no longer any Henry. Larry had better turn up soon and keep an eye on his nephew. If he didn't, who knew what might happen. On her way out of the lot, Evie drove past Chad, but the boy never looked her way. His gaze was still on something only he could see, something up in the black sky over Bixley, something out among the stars.

...

On the drive home, Evie kept her window down so that the breeze would cool the sweat of the tavern that still clung to her face and neck. The air had a heaviness to it that comes of July nights, a smell of decay wafting out from under trees and up from flower beds, an odor of fertilizer mixed with rich, dark soil. She loved the honest smell of a summer night, those breezes that came down from the wooded hills around the town, and the breezes that came up from the dank and narrow river. Those were the places where things grow and root in the moist darkness, away from the lights and traffic of human lives. Those were the places that churned up that rich smell of
life,
of things breathing and eating and dying, all unseen and unnoticed. She imagined bluish crayfish and spiders that stride atop long legs, slimy snakes and crickets whose legs can sing, and the small frogs that hop onto roadways when it rains, giving their lives up to the night. Those were the midnight creatures that existed in that other, nearby universe, another world that most humans rarely see.

She turned down her own street, shifting the little car into second. It was this kind of thinking, this “a universe is burning next to us and we don't even know it” philosophy that always sent her quickly to that first joint after work. The truth was that a tension grew inside her that she hadn't been able to shake all afternoon, the tension that comes of expectancy. Each time the door at Murphy's Tavern opened, Evie had looked up, hoping to see Larry Munroe step inside the bar, longing to see him slide onto that stool he liked, the one Marshall was now sitting on, drinking free scotch-and-waters. She would lean close enough to smell Larry's cologne as she put a Bud down in front of him. He would say, “Thanks, Evie,” and wait patiently for her to find a few spare minutes to sit on her own stool behind the bar, sip at a glass of iced tea, give her swollen feet a rest as Larry told her all the news of the town.
The
mayor's in the hospital. They're building a mall out where the old drive-in used to stand. Laura Miller is pregnant. They're having a grand opening for the new nursing home wing. Len and Macy Freeman are moving to Ohio.
Evie had come to realize that mailmen have a pulse on any town, whether they like it or not, and Larry was no exception. “I can't help it,” he would say to Evie, his smile not as charming as Henry's, but so genuine that it always made her smile back when she saw it. “People want to talk to their mailman. What can I do but listen?”

But Larry hadn't turned up for the third night in a row. And now, because of it, Evie was on her way home alone, the evening just beginning. She would take a cool shower and then sit with a spinach salad on the porch swing. Afterward, she would think those heavy thoughts of nature and life in between tokes. She had a session scheduled for the next afternoon and it would be a tough one. It was with Gail's sister, Margie Jenkins, whose ten-year-old daughter had just died. Margie and her husband, Phil, used to stop by the bar every Saturday night for a game of pool and a drink, and to say hello to Gail. A year younger than her sister, Margie was also tall, and pretty, with that same long, dark hair. Evie liked Gail's sister, but she had politely refused to do a session when Margie telephoned the week before. “It's too soon, sweetheart,” Evie said. It
was
too soon. It hadn't been a month. People need to spend some time missing their loved ones in the very house where their lives used to take place. They need to miss them in the middle of the night. At the breakfast table. They need to find traces of them, still, that strand of brown hair in the hairbrush, that yellow sweater that has fallen, forgotten, behind the sofa, that cassette tape of the last birthday party, the words curled inside like a long, black tongue. “Margie just wants to talk, if that's okay,” Gail had said, pleading, and so Evie had agreed. But she knew the meeting would be difficult.

Evie had just reached her driveway and pulled in when she saw the Buick sitting at the curb on the opposite side of the street. She hit the brakes, put the car in park, and jumped out, leaving her door wide open. She managed to get close enough to lay her hand on the Buick's trunk before she heard the gears of the car shift, and then acceleration. Evie stood in the middle of the street and watched the two red taillights cut the corner. She stood there until the sound of the Buick's engine grew so faint it finally disappeared, most likely over on Market Avenue. She stood there in the street and smelled it again, that smell of decay seeping out from under trees, up from flower beds, fertilizer mixed with soil. Then, on the night breeze, came that odor of things like love and laughter, pain and despair, the things that grow under rooftops, that root in the darkness of bedrooms, those things that breathe and eat and die, as if their very existence were lived out in the highest treetops or down by the river. The wind brought with it the stench of human lives that spin like universes, without ever touching.

...

Larry cracked his bedroom door and stood there listening before he stepped out into the hallway. He tiptoed to the banister that ran along the upper side of the hallway, put there years earlier by his father to keep the unruly Munroe boys from plummeting to the first floor. He leaned over, his hands firmly on the rail so that he could hear any activity coming from the rooms below. His parents were just settling down in front of the television set. His mother's talk of what the show would be about that night drifted up to him, followed by his father's brief replies, so short they were almost grunts. It was
Dateline,
one of their favorite programs, and Larry knew it would keep them busy for a time. He made his way silently along the hallway and into the bathroom. He doubted they would hear the shower, not with Diane Sawyer blabbing away about something. He turned the hot and cold knobs, finding the perfect temperature before he climbed into the tub and closed the curtain. The water felt better than he'd imagined while he lay on his bed and waited for nine o'clock to arrive. The warm strands beat against his chest as he stood, eyes closed, and let it rain. He hadn't had a shower the whole time he'd been holed up in his bedroom. Now, he might never be able to step out of the tub. He'd be there for days, waterlogged and drowned, while everyone else was at Henry's memorial service.

Beneath the lavatory sink, Larry found a disposable razor, still sharp enough to be taken seriously, and a can of shaving foam. He had been intending to pick up some razors and shaving cream just four days earlier, the day he stood staring at the mailbox in front of the two-story Cape on Pilcher Street, the house he and Katherine had moved into shortly after their marriage, the house they had moved out of just eight months earlier, selling it and filing for divorce all on the same day. He had stuffed letters and junk into that mailbox for seven months, knowing a fellow teacher had happily taken up residence inside, knowing it was
his
kids who owned the swing set in the backyard,
their
bikes leaning against the front steps. Who knows why, but on this day Larry had done what he swore he'd never do. He had put the letters into the mailbox—a contraption he himself had refused to erect, no matter how much Katherine had pestered him—and then he had turned and looked up at the top left window of the house. He had done to himself what he promised he would never do. He had torn his own guts out, after seven months, by gazing up at that window, the room that had been Jonathan's bedroom once. Jonathan had been his son then, and he had been Jonathan's father. Once. Who knows why Larry did it? The upcoming memorial? Henry's former mistress fitting so nice and pure into his arms that Larry now felt certain he loved Evie Cooper? The pressure of living as a grown man in his parents' house again, in his old bedroom, without Henry? Maybe it was all of those things. But perhaps, just perhaps—and Larry entertained this answer more than the others—perhaps the moment in time had come when a father could no longer bear to be without his only child. Maybe that was it. Whatever it was, he had clutched the leather mailbag to his chest and walked away, had taken with him all the letters yet to be delivered in his territory beyond Pilcher Street. He had gone straight home, he had gone up the stairs, he had disappeared into his bedroom, and he had closed the fucking door on the world. It had seemed like a damn good plan four days ago. Except that Larry had forgotten to get some new razors and shaving cream.

In five minutes, he was rubbing a hand along his jaw and feeling just smooth skin beneath. He quickly rinsed the razor and put it away. With a towel, he wiped the sink until it shone, something his mother was always nagging her boys to do when they were still growing up in the house. Maybe Larry could start over. Maybe he could be the teenaged son his mother had always wanted. It would be a kind of
reprogramming,
and why not since this was the age of computers? He'd feed his brain a new software. Out in the hallway again, Larry paused, an ear pointed down the stairs. He could still hear the distant sound of the television coming from below. After
Dateline,
his parents would watch the news. Then they would go into their downstairs bedroom, where they would change into pajamas, wash their faces, brush their teeth, and pee until their bladders were empty. Larry had been back in the house long enough to know the routine. His father would then sit on the sofa and do his best to stay awake for David Letterman, as he had always been able to do for Johnny Carson. But just before midnight, Larry could depend on sounds coming up the stairs that would tell the rest of the story. First would come the soft, light snores. Then, his mother's voice from the bedroom, telling her husband to wake up and come to bed. This would be followed by a series of noises, the old man rising from the sofa, confused grunts, as if maybe he'd been dreaming that he dropped an insured package somewhere in the snow or had left letters in a wrong mailbox. He would rise and go to the kitchen for a glass of milk, the refrigerator door
sucking
open and then
sucking
shut, the glass being placed obediently in the sink, and then the last noises of the night as Bixley's most loyal postman flushed the downstairs toilet and stumbled off to bed. Only then could Larry fall asleep, knowing that the house had grown silent for the rest of the night. Knowing that one day there would be no more noises coming from the two people who had given him birth.
Noise
meant
life
.