Year After Henry (20 page)

“Where's the key?” said Chad. “All I could find was geraniums.”

“Mom took it,” said Larry. How do you explain something like this to your teenaged nephew? “Go to the front door and knock. Mom and Dad are still up, watching TV.”

“No fucking way,” said Chad. “You crazy?” He staggered back a couple feet, the strain of staring upward for so long finally making him dizzy. Larry understood. Of course, he couldn't go knock on the door.

“How many beers have you had?” he asked.

“Two,” said Chad.

“That's what everyone tells the cops,” said Larry. “Come on, how many?”

“Three,” said Chad.

“No lie?”

“No lie.”

“Hang on a minute,” said Larry. “I'll be right back.” He saw Chad give him a thumbs-up from down below.

Larry quietly opened his bedroom door and stood listening for a time to the canned laughter coming from the television set. Then he padded down the hallway in his socks, stopping in front of his mother's linen closet. He found the sheets on a top shelf and pulled three from the stack. They were snow white and folded perfectly. Telling himself he would launder them on Monday, when he knew she'd be doing her grocery shopping, Larry took them back to his room and closed the door. In no time he had twisted the sheets and tied them together to make a perfect rope. He fastened one end to the heavy leg of his desk and threw the other down to Chad.

“You fall and break a leg, Spider-Man, and you're on your own,” whispered Larry.

Chad tied the plastic bag around one of the belt hooks on his jeans until it was secure. Then he grabbed the rope and began slowly to climb, one foot ahead of the other, until he crested the windowsill. Larry reached out and helped him inside.

“Man,” said Chad. “That would have been easy a year ago.” He untied the plastic bag and put it on Larry's desk.

“Wait another fifteen years and then we'll talk,” said Larry. “What you got here?” He rummaged in the plastic bag.

“Sandwiches and beer,” said Chad. “Thought you might be hungry.”

Larry knew they were Murphy sandwiches just by the way they were wrapped, the beige paper taped up like a baby's diaper. He'd seen enough of them disappear out the door as takeout. Those were the nights he sat on his bar stool and watched a game or watched Evie Cooper.

“Man, I've missed these,” said Larry. He unwrapped the one that had
Onions
scrawled in blue ink across its paper. He bit into it as Chad popped two beers.

“What would your mother say if she knew I let you drink beer?” Larry asked. Chad shrugged.

“I can drink it in the park with the other guys, or I can drink it here with you. Take your pick. Tomorrow's the old man's service and I figured you'd need company.”

This wasn't the night to make a stand, and Larry knew it. And besides, climbing up the side of a house with beer and sandwiches was so like something Henry would do that he was enjoying this visit. It was good to see the boy, to know he was all right on this very important night.

“Hey, wow,” said Chad. “Where'd you find this?” He had noticed the framed photograph of the four of them, Chad and Henry, Jonathan and Larry, standing with their fishing poles in their hands and smiling at the camera. Bixley Lake glistened in the background like a blue dream. Mr. Wilkie, who sold bait, was the one who had taken the photo, holding Jonathan's camera up to his eye as if it were some kind of Hubble Telescope and fretting over which button to push. Chad picked up the photograph and stared at it.

“It was in one of my boxes,” said Larry. He took a drink of the beer and another bite of sandwich. Liver and onions had been his and Henry's favorite since they were boys. Chad put the photo back on the dresser and turned away. Larry wished now it had stayed in the dark box. But why pretend that Henry and the good old days weren't gone forever? They were gone, at least as they were
back
then.
The problem now was to figure out how to create some
new
good old days.

“You going to the memorial service?” Chad asked. He had walked over to the bunks, the can of beer in his hand.

“Nope,” said Larry. “I prefer to remember my brother in my own way, quiet and private.”

“Me too,” said Chad. “This past couple weeks, just waiting for it to come and go, the anniversary, it's like one of them hurricane parties. Know what I mean? It's like waiting out the storm.” He tipped back the can and drank. Then, “Which bunk was my old man's?”

Larry pointed to the top bunk and Chad, balancing the beer can in one hand, climbed the little ladder and stretched out on the bed. He stared up at the ceiling, the beer resting now on his chest.

“I graduate from high school in two years,” said Chad, “and I have no idea what I'm going to do after that.” He turned on his side, a hand beneath his head to prop it up, and peered down at Larry.

Larry had heard this speech before. He was the one who had college in his sights, but Henry had moped and lamented all through high school that he had no plans for the future. So the future came and got him. The future turned him into a mailman and a husband and father. And he was fine with it. Larry, on the other hand, had planned for ages, thought it all out, revised the plan, and then revised it yet again. He had worked it out perfectly and yet the future had kicked his ass.

“When your dad's class voted on a theme for graduation,” said Larry, smiling at the memory of it, “Henry suggested
A
Hair
of
the
Dog
.” Chad smiled instantly. “It was voted on by the whole class, and Henry's motto won. But the teachers and principal didn't think it was so funny, so they chose Felicia Baker's instead.
We
Stand
on
the
Threshold
or something corny like that.”

“I know that story,” Chad said. “We had a keg party last week at Milos Baxter's and I told the guys we should choose
Two
Hairs
of
the
Dog
as our class motto. It broke everyone up.”

Larry looked at his nephew's face. Like his father, Chad had been born lucky, born with Henry's dark good looks, with the same long, lanky legs. He was Henry in high school, Henry all over again, except that the boy was more serious, having lived in his father's shadow for all of his life, until the last year. But Larry had seen it happening in his nephew, those nights Chad had stopped by Murphy's Tavern to say hello. The boy was slowly becoming the center of attention, almost addicted to the pull of power that comes with such a vocation. But the serious side of Chad seemed to take a step back, as if it recognized early that being the center of attention was a full-time job. He seemed to sense that if he accepted it, he would have to work hard in the years to come. Otherwise, like those kings Larry talked about in his European history class, Chad could be easily dethroned.

Larry took another bite of the sandwich, but this time his teeth hit something that wasn't liver or onions. He lifted the top of the bread and peered down. It was a small piece of cardboard, just big enough to get attention. In blue ink were the quickly scrawled words: I MISS YOU
.
He glanced quickly up at Chad, but the boy was looking now at the old football picture of the Fabulous Munroe Brothers, their strong arms around each other, their futures still waiting to burst wide open.

“You guys were something, weren't you?” Chad said. He lay back again and stared up at the place on the ceiling where his father had carved “HM” into the wood with his jackknife. Chad touched the letters with his fingers.

“I don't like the sound of that past tense,” said Larry. He eased the piece of cardboard out of the sandwich and let it drop into the trash can. He took another bite.

“Can I sleep here tonight?” Chad asked. “Mom already thinks I'm spending the night with Milos.”

Larry looked up at his nephew, as old as Jonathan would be in five more years, boys who quit fishing with their dads far sooner than maybe nature had planned it.

“Sure you can,” said Larry. Then, “Hey, you wanna try the trout at Bixley Lake next week? We only got a few more weeks until school starts.”

...

It was already past eleven p.m. when Jeanie turned the Buick right on Market Avenue. Beside her on the front seat was the little overnight bag she had packed in a hurry. Nightgown. Toothbrush. Facial cleansers. Hairbrush. Magazine. Nothing of importance. Just enough stuff to get her through the night. With Chad gone on this eve of the memorial service, she found herself incapable of sleeping alone in the house. There was too much memory in the air of that morning a year earlier. Jeanie thought of calling Mona to come sleep in Lisa's old room. But Mona had her own problems now. She considered sleeping on the sofa, or in Chad's bed, rather than in the marriage bed she and Henry had slept in for so many years. But she couldn't. The quiet of the house itself was talking to her, nudging her, putting her on edge. She knew that after the service she would be all right. She would find a way to cope, especially with Lisa's baby soon to arrive. By the next night, the one-year marker would have come and gone, and with it proof that the universe doesn't keep track of anniversaries the way human beings do. The universe would spin on as if nothing unique was happening at all. And nothing was, except to the handful of people who had known and loved Henry Munroe.

The reception clerk at the Days Inn looked up at Jeanie with sleepy, late-night eyes. The drone of a distant TV came from a room behind the desk, what looked like a small apartment. A cleaning woman, obviously on some late-night shift, was vacuuming in a hallway leading to the first-floor rooms.

“You got any vacancies?” Jeanie asked. The clerk punched out a few computer keys.

“First or second floor?”

“Actually,” said Jeanie, “is there any chance that number nine is vacant?”

The clerk stared with tired eyes at the computer screen before Jeanie was given a form to fill out and sign, and keys to the room. Now she was on her way down the narrow hallway toward Henry Munroe's favorite room.
Nine.
The same number Ted Williams had on his uniform before the Red Sox put the number out to pasture. And now, Ted Williams was back in the news, too, dead for just a week himself and already in a cryonic warehouse in Arizona, his son hoping to keep the baseball great suspended in time until he could be brought back. Henry would now have his hero with him on the other side, wherever that might be.

...

Evie sat on her front porch swing and smoked the joint slowly, letting loose the tension of the past week. She had checked in on Gail, who was sound asleep, just her sad face peering from beneath the fluffy bedspread. Soon, Evie would know one way or another if Larry Munroe was able to rise above the past, to take a new run at the future. Otherwise, she had decided it was time to move on. Since she was without family, maybe the best thing for her to do was to create roots for herself. Maybe she would move back to Temple City, Pennsylvania, to the place where she had been born, the place she had lived until her parents died. It was the same place where Rosemary Ann had died, too, and where Evie had first discovered she could see the faces of the dead. She would take the big portraits in their heavy walnut frames and she would put them up on a wall in some house in Temple City. If it wasn't roots as some people know it, at least it would be as close as she could get. She would build her own foundation. She would create a kind of museum for the people she had known and loved and now missed dearly.

Across town the church bells struck the hour by ringing twelve times. This was Evie's favorite time of night. The town had wound down, like the mechanism of some great clock. Now it was almost motionless. Quiet. That's when the night creatures took up the job, the crickets and bats and owls, the things that wait for the humans to give the night up to them. In the spray of light that fell from her porch and out onto the lawn, Evie could see the sign she'd driven into the earth there, just a year and a half earlier, hoping maybe like the pioneers of old she'd stake a claim.
Evie
Cooper, Spiritual Portraitist
. She'd leave Bixley if the memorial service came and went and still no sign of Larry. She'd move on, like those pioneers did when they were looking for water, or trying to escape locusts, or hoping for more fertile soil to plant their crops. Evie would find a tiny piece of land to call her own and she would settle down to plant roses, to trim roses, to water roses, and then to die with a sense of roots beneath her. But wasn't this the very dream that had brought her to Bixley, Maine? She took another long drag off the joint and drew it far down into her lungs. She needed to give the shit up. As she let the smoke spool back out in a gray stream, she kept her eyes on the sign in her yard, on that silhouette of a woman, standing beneath that silhouette of a star.

...

A few hours before dawn, the rain returned for one last barrage so that the mild Sunday predicted by local weathermen could follow. A loud crack of thunder woke Larry instantly. He lay on his bottom bunk, his eyes adjusting to the room and its items, especially the glowing numbers on the clock.
Three thirty.
Rain came at the window now in long and angry threads. Lightning broke ragged against the sky. In the dim light Larry could see an arm dangling down from the top bunk. Before his mind was fully awake, in those first confusing seconds, he was certain it belonged to Henry. How many times had he seen that arm during the years they spent together in that room? On those nights of thunder and lightning, he knew his little brother was afraid. Larry would often reach out and touch the hand, just a quick brush to let the younger boy know he wasn't alone, enough touch that a boy wouldn't have to be embarrassed the next morning about being afraid of a silly rainstorm. Then Larry remembered that it was not Henry sleeping above him, but his son. He knew this, and yet he couldn't help himself. With thunder now rumbling in the distance, moving on to the next town, Larry reached up and touched the hand at the wrist, felt the warmth of it. He heard Chad mutter in his sleep.