From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt

PART I

James

I’m stepping to the black gate at the head of the path to the house.  It’s heavier than I remember.  I let Eve pass through ahead of me.  Her dress feels like silk as I touch the small of her back.  I don’t think its silk but the bottom by her legs blows like curtains, the white curtains that were in our first apartment.  The ones that mom gave to me.  But now she’s dead and I’m walking along the path holding Eve’s hand.  I can see the black door.  It still looks as bold as ever.  Like it did when I used to slam it on Tom and pretend to lock him out.  To the left all of the trees are lush and I can make out some honeysuckles.  Eve doesn’t know how I gave Jane honeysuckles in eighth grade.  My first girlfriend.  There beyond the side of the house I know the blackberries will be sitting there or beginning to form.  Some still a premature greenish maroon, while the rest will be the deep black-purple of a terrible bruise.  Each small round circle of the berry sheen and ready to burst out the juice.  We approach the front stoop.  The well done stone work.  I slept off a hangover while they did it.  A sunny summer Saturday, but I kept the shades drawn in my room.  I looked out the window and saw smoke and heard the sound of the buzzing saw.  Tom was watching the Mexican workers and throwing the football to himself.  He saw me in the window and I drew the shade, jumped into my bed and covered myself with the big white quilt I had.  I didn’t want him or Liza to know.  Mom would’ve frowned on it too, but by then, she knew I was different than Dad.  Above the door there is still that dried wood decoration with the red berries at the center.  I ring the bell and Eve smiles at me.  She squeezes my hand.  I love her and the warm clamminess of our palms together.  I knock on the black.  We wait and now Eve looks worried.  There are slight lines on her forehead and her brown hair is blowing across her face.  She always cared for Dad.  He treats her like a third daughter the way he will kiss her forehead sometimes and always listen to her problems.  I even know that she’s talked to him about me before, especially right before we got married and she was nervous.  She talked to Dad about it before she spoke to her own father.  I know she loves me and we’ve never had any real problems or any real fights, which some would say makes us a weak couple because we haven’t been battle tested, we bear no emotional scars from each other.  I think it’s the opposite.  Our lack of scars shows our strength. Which is why I feel terrible about what I know and about what she doesn’t know.

    I knock again.  Dad doesn’t answer as we wait.  So I grab the gold handle and push down on the lever that Liza always called the doorpetal.  I open the door and smell Mom’s perfume.  Then I see Dad sitting on the steps.  He holds a bottle of Cutty Sark.  He passes a hand through his still thick grey and white hair.

    “What do I owe?”

    Eve laughs and I look at her.  I know what she doesn’t know. She and Dad know that Mom is dead.  I know that Mom is dead.  But they both don’t know that Eve is pregnant.  Only I do and I smile at Dad who’s scotch drunk again it looks like for the first time since before I was born.




Tom

    James hasn’t been home since Easter.  The pavement looks like my skin as I move away from the thick yellow line and the heat of the train and the sun make my skin feel uncomfortable.  It feels red even though it isn’t.  I throw my beer in its paper bag out.  The bottom is sopping and the brown paper has come apart down there revealing the silver aluminum and red and white coloring of the can.  Another Saturday in the city but when I get home James will be there with Eve and most likely Maggie will have arrived.  It’s funny that I call it home.  It’s not really my home anymore, it certainly isn’t James’, not Maggie’s, and Liza is just learning what home means.  But we’ll all be leaving it soon.  Everything has to go – even Dad.  The house will be hollowed out like some harvest-time fruit until there is only a shell or rind of what once was a life and a family left. There’s no changing Dad’s mind.  He doesn’t want a wake and he doesn’t want to stay in the house alone.  The cars pass along the road, glinting in the sun.  The stained white, orange and green of the 7-11 sign even has a shine to it.

    I walk across the track crossing and run my sneaker on the iron of the rails.  A shock of electricity could jump up and take you out.  In an instant you’re gone just like the universe was created in an instant out of a bang and a ball of light.  It’s the same thing.  The universe and an individual life.  That is a profound thought; mom would’ve liked that.  She was stubborn in her religion but she gave philosophy its own fair share.  The religious philosophers of course like Aquinas.  I remember when she tried to institute a policy of reading it aloud after dinner.  Dad wouldn’t have it.  He’d push his plate aside, usually clean or maybe with a scrap or two of meat, some remaining juice or blood pooled on the grey ceramic.

    “Taking the children to church is one thing, but bringing the church and this religion home is another.  I won’t let God and Jesus Christ upset my digestion.”

    Mom would nod quietly and press the book closed.  Then they’d look at each other from across the table.  There was some kind of recognition between them.  They always had their secrets.  The magic in their relationship.  Mom’s Catholic piety and Dad’s unrelenting wit.  You’d think they would’ve clashed more often but instead they wove together in a way.  A tightly woven band of years.  Four children full of tightly woven strands of DNA.

    I left my car at the house.  Liza got in last night.  I picked her up from the train.  I’m walking underneath the shade of the maple trees but it’s impossible to avoid the trickling sunlight.  Light and dark swaying with the wind. Cicadas are buzzing and a woman is riding her bike up the main drive of the Clark School.  The woman’s daughter rides beside her on a pink bike with training wheels.  I can see them across one of the fields.  The cicadas buzz and buzz while the woman and child ride, their wheels slowly pushing up on the black concrete moving away from me.  The white house on my right has a pile of dirt on its front lawn and I can hear someone hammering in the backyard.

    Why are cicadas so ugly?  Why do they bide the time of the longest days, the season my mother died in?  Electricity didn’t overtake her body.  It simply left her body to move elsewhere.  To move away from me and leave an empty shell of my mother.

    I hope Dad isn’t too drunk.



Liza

    I hear James and Eve downstairs talking to Dad.  I heard them ring and I heard all of their knocks.  I like the sound of Eve’s voice.  I always have.  It’s so womanly, not girlish like mine.  Hers is a voice that wraps around you; I can picture her calling kids in for dinner, or on the phone giving permission for a sleep over.  Even going out to a store, a young wife calmly putting down some loser that tries to hit on her.  A loyal woman with a warm voice.  Sort of like mom.  But Eve is so much more sleek and stylish. She’s young, alive, and beautiful whereas Mom is…

Never seen Dad like this before, though.  No one has except Maggie but she was so young – barely three – and she probably has no memory of it anyway.  He’s been drinking since I got here.  He still has his normal look.  The playfulness he always had that frightened Mom so much.  That’s what Maggie told me at least.  Why Mom got him off alcohol.  There is something different about him, though.  His hair looks whiter.  You couldn’t tell if you just passed him in the street or if he was doing a checkup on you in his office.  But I’m one of his daughters so I know.  The circles under his eyes are bolder too.  His skin is tan but his face looks purple.  He looks like a haunted movie star – a failed celebrity.  Pouring that scotch down his throat.  Do all guys have that inclination in them, especially as they grow older?  Even the ones that don’t drink have the inclination in them I bet; they just use it for something else.  That’s why all men need a woman in one way or another.  They need someone to control them, to trim the edges.  Pull the bottle away from their mouths like Mom did from Dad.  I look out the window.  The beginning of September is always so beautiful here.  The trees are overhanging the streets, canopies of the still full summer leaves, the colors only slightly showing.  I see Tom walking up the street.  Just got back from his Saturday train ride.  He’s a little like an old man that way with his routines.  Look at his walk.  His strides are full of purpose; he leans forward but holds his shoulders slightly back letting his chest stick out.  The collar of his shirt is a little crooked as he walks through the black gate.  I can see everything from this room and always could.  James and I got the rooms with the best views out into the slope of the front lawn.  I turn away from the window and look at the emptiness of the pink walls of my room.  I’ll have less stuff to move out since I already had to pack it all up to bring to school.  Already I’m back.  Some part of me knew that this would happen.  That the empty nest would bring Mom to her death even though she was already sick. She could’ve held on longer had I stayed.  I walk over to the small light colored-wood shelf along the wall next to my closet.  There is a dark wooden dolphin resting on two small dark wood planks of wood.  The planks are curved upward so that when you push the dolphin a little it begins to roll and arch as if it were plunging and rising out in the distance of the sea mimicking the waves.  But this dolphin is dark wood and swims through the air and all I want to do is cry looking at it, because on the base of this contraption my name is inscribed with the year 1991 alongside it.  Below the year is a heart and below that Mom is written.  My eyes are becoming moist now and I have to walk over to my bed and lay down on my old purple comforter.  But it doesn’t comfort me.  I hear Dad laughing downstairs.
There are steps coming slowly upwards.  I know their speed.  Tom is walking up to his old room too.


Maggie

It always comes at the worst time doesn’t it?  Just when things seem like they are going to get the most frustrating and I know I’m going to become fussy the cramps hit me and then the rest follows.  I’m passing the 7-11 and I make a right on Shaker Drive across from the train station.  I haven’t been home in a long time.  I couldn’t make it to Easter and of course Mom was upset about that.

On the phone. “You’re the oldest.  You know how important that is to set the examples for your brothers and sisters.  The piety begins with you.”

“Oh, come on, Mom.  We’re not kids anymore.”

“It doesn’t end there, Margaret.”

“Mom, you know I’d make it if I could, but work…”

“Yes, work.”

“I have to stay.”

“You were always the oldest.”

I laughed. “That’s a bit obvious.”

“The most adventurous and I always loved that about you.  But your brothers and sisters they…”

“I’m not James, Mom.”

“Yes, James.”

I didn’t know how badly off she was then.  I spoke to her after of course but that would’ve been one of the last chances to see her.  I could’ve come in the summer.  Taken a train down to New York and then hop on Tom’s beloved LIRR and come home.  Take a swim in those Long Island waters.  But I didn’t.  And now I’m back to Shaker Hill at the four way stop where it intersects with Meadow Street.  On the right is the angular white corner house where Zach Roper used to live.  The green shutters still look the same and so do the pink phlox flowers growing right by the stop sign.  Something in me always had to get away from here.  I felt a certain suffocation at all times growing up.  I don’t have the poise of James, his patience in letting things come to him.  Now he’s married and three and a half years younger than me.  I always expected one of us to have part of Dad’s curse.  Him more than me since he was the first boy.  But sometimes I think it’s me who inherited Dad’s freewheeling nature.  The way he didn’t want to be pinned down.  I can remember vaguely from childhood when he was drinking and coming in late.  That was before he started the practice with Uncle Connor.  He thought he could be a comic or an actor.  Maybe that was why Mom fell in love with him in the first place.  She was the complete opposite, patient and levelheaded.  That’s where James must have gotten it.  I guess he’s the perfect mixture of the two. “A born leader,” Dad used to say. “A bleader.”

And me?  The oldest maybe I’ve been the disappointment.  Never ready to receive responsibility but always ready to move on. I think I’ve done alright, though.  I’ve got an apartment in Boston.  I’ve got a good job at the magazine.  I get to travel.  Yet, I pass those old ivy-lined brick buildings of the Clark School and I begin to get goose bumps.  I’m afraid to be recognized by anyone from these sand-lined streets.  James could always accept that, but I can’t.  And, even though Tom has remained close to home, I know that he shares the same feelings as I do.  The repulsion of this little island of ignorance and self-importance.  Hugging to Manhattan for dear life or a reason to exist.  I roll my window down and turn onto Tallmadge St.  I smell honeysuckles and the always-indirect scent of hot wet grass.  I know somewhere above and beyond the trees the sound is sitting there lapping and lapping.  My car rolls down the little hill of Tallmadge and begins to climb up the big one.  As the engine works its way to the top, I can make out the black gate.  I see Tom’s car and I see James’ car.  Green and Blue.  Mine is white.  Dad’s is black and probably in the garage next to Mom’s, which is silver.

I park the car and feel the urge to eat the blackberries along the side of the house underneath my old window.  Now, I’m out of the car into the September sunlight and I can really smell the honeysuckles.  They will probably die soon.  Mom beat them to it.

Maybe when this house is empty I’ll finally understand what I’m missing.

   


Ben

I’m sitting at our long wooden kitchen table with James and Eve.  I’d have to say that Eve looks stunning and she is the kind of girl I would’ve married when I was young.  However, I did marry the kind of girl that I would marry.  My bottle of Cutty Sark is standing in front of me.  I love the taste of it, the look of the old sailboat.  I once saw a terrific photo of a cutty sark burning up at sea.  The horror of the flames rising and rising against the black clouds and the dark-green hellish waves.  It really did look like a medieval painting of Dante’s Inferno.  But this bottle is a fine light green and Hart Crane jumped off a cruise ship and not a cutty sark.  Does anyone read him anymore?  He was my favorite when I was young and still is though I haven’t picked up a book of his work in a long time.  There was something to the language, the way it sounded old and yet fast and new at the same time.  If there was ever a language that fit the word fleeting then it came from his mouth or brain or soul.
James isn’t trying to take the bottle from me.  He and Eve are drinking tea.  They have the kettle in front of them resting on an iron trivet.  The steam lifts up and my eyes are following it to the navy blue painted ceiling and the strong beam of sunlight that is cutting through the skylight and along the wall.  I take a drink from the bottle.  James is talking to me.

“Dad do you think that is the best solution?”

“I was never good at math.”

“But you’re a doctor.”

“We didn’t invent calculus or calculators.”

Eve’s hand touches my arm.  I feel her nails slightly through the thin green striped sleeve of my white shirt.  Her hand is very tan.

“Are you alright, Ben?”

Her hair is still slightly damp and it’s pulled back in a bun that all girls seem to wear their hair.  A few strands are falling on her forehead.  Her hair is dark brown and her eyes are a lighter shade.  You would call them mocha.  Everything about her is brown – bronze is the better word.  There is something ancient about her, a crafted sculpture.  When your son is a child, you hope that he will grow up to marry a girl this beautiful.  Even the most humble man at one point or another while looking at his son move and fumble about in the world trying to figure things out, hopes he will marry a girl of outstanding beauty because in some way it makes that deep masculine part of all men proud.  However, what you never expect is that it will actually happen or that if it does that the girl will be Eve rousing something in you that is more than sex or more than love for a daughter or daughter in law. I think it might just simply be Love and maybe that is because she reminds me of Rose so damn much even if she doesn’t look a damn thing like her.

My head nods at Eve. “Thank you, Eve.”

She looks a little confused but humors me with a laugh.

I hear the front door open and close.

“Hello?” It’s Mags.  My oldest daughter is back.  So many women in my life the most important ones are swirling around me now.  Liza upstairs, Eve next to me and Mags walking down the hall.  But not Rose and because of that I can feel the stitching in me coming undone.  She was the surgeon of my life.

Tom walks in from the back door.  Mags’ hand is on my shoulder now.

I take a drink from the bottle and feel the burn in my stomach like a ship bursting into flames on the open water.



James

Eve is sitting next to me; she has the bottom of her dress pulled up a little bit so that the sun illuminates her already tan legs.  Maggie is sitting out with us.  This complicates things a little bit because I wanted time alone with Eve so that I could approach the situation in her womb that is taking shape with every passing second.  But, I’m home now and when I’m home, I feel the need to be available for everyone in my family, to talk when they need to talk and push aside my business.  And this time home is especially different since Mom isn’t here and it seems like the life has been taken out of everyone in one way or another.  Everyone seems slightly deflated.  I can’t tell what Dad is feeling, though.  He seems sad, but I can see in his eyes the enjoyment he is getting from tasting liquor again – his dangerous vice.  Although it wasn’t dangerous, he never destroyed anything, he never hit Mom as far as I’ve heard the stories relayed to me from Maggie, Mom and Uncle Connor.  It was more of what could happen, he’d get carried away with his jokes and his charm and maybe he’d make a mistake.
 “Everyone loved him,” Uncle Connor said. “He was young, handsome, funny and starting to meet people.  He certainly didn’t neglect Maggie, but I think your mother saw that something was lacking.”
The pool is still open and because the lining is a dark blue stone, the water is very dark like a lagoon.  The stones that surround the pool and line the patio are hot.  Sweat rolls from the back of my knee down my calf.  The sun is becoming more of a red and the afternoon is slowly giving way.  Is this an Indian summer?

“So, Maggie,” Eve says. “Going anywhere exciting soon on assignment?”

Maggie drinks what looks like a coke but I think it is mixed with either rum or whiskey. “Yes,” she says. “Morocco.  On the northern coast near the Strait of Gibraltar.”

“Wow, Maggie,” I say. “That sounds terrific.”

“How soon?”

“Oh, when this ordeal is over.” She drinks again.

“It is an ordeal isn’t it?” I say.

“Yes,” she says.

“Well we’re going to have to go through with it.  We’re going to have to go to Mom’s funeral and empty the house in the next week.”

She’s looking at me and I know the look.  The look of her green eyes that says to me you’re my younger brother and somehow everyone always looked to you for support, they looked to you as the leader of the family when I’m the oldest and I’m a capable woman who’s made a God damned success of herself and who’s seen a lot more of this big rock of a world than you have.  And I know all of this is true.  But it wasn’t my fault.  I didn’t ask for any of it.

“Is there any convincing your dad to hold off on moving? I mean, at least until he sells the house?”

“No,” Maggie shakes her head. “He wants out.  He’s got the money.  He’s always been willing to take a hit in his wallet as long as he can keep moving forward.  And by the looks of him and the way he’s holding that bottle, there’ll be no convincing him.”

“We’re just going to let him do it?” I say.

“What do you want to do? Mom’s dead.  This is what he’s doing.”

“Exactly what she kept him from doing for thirty years!”

Maggie takes a drink and looks at me again.  Flashing me the green while the sun adds a gleam to her auburn hair.

Eve is touching my arm. “Maybe it’ll be healthy for him.”

Maggie holds up her drink towards Eve.  But she keeps looking at me scolding me silently.  I look at Eve.  She’s going to know soon enough.  She’ll have to feel all of that energy of creation coming together in her body and then she’ll begin to have morning sickness.  If only Maggie knew that too, knew what I was doing.  Then she wouldn’t throw me that look because she’d know that I’m no leader.  I’m afraid to face being a father while my father is inside holding onto a bottle of Cutty Sark.
I see some of the blackberry bushes past the far corner of the house.




Liza

“Should we get Chinese food?”

I’m sitting with Dad at the kitchen table now.  I see James, Eve, and Maggie outside.  I’m not sure where Tom is.  He was down here before but he must have gone out for a walk or something.  Dad smiles at me.

“Never heard of it.”

He plays up his New York accent so that heard sounds more like hoid.  I take this answer to mean yes so I walk over to Mom’s old desk, which looks out onto the backyard.  There are still cluttered papers on the desk, notes of things to do.  She had the date of Parents’ Weekend at my school written down on a blue post-it.  The note is in my hand and I make a fist crumpling it.  I feel the adhesive in my palm and I drop the ball of paper.  It hits the light colored wood of the desk and bounces once.  I see her old address book, beaten and colored by time and dust.  The cloth flower print binding is frayed in so many places and there are all kinds of odd pieces of paper sticking out of it in different colors.  I open it up and begin leafing through.

Anderson, Joan                        101 Shaker Drive           631-689-4277

Christian, Terri        43 Colonial Way        751-0123

Hulse, Lindsay        2 Bay Street             689-8819
                corner near Main

O’Donnell, Connor        22 Old Grey Road        631-941-9491

I’m past the S section when I see a small scrap of white paper pressed down in the nook where the pages meet the binding.  The writing is in red ink and it looks like the writing of a child. “Mom- went to Shore Deli with James and Paul.  Love, James” I put the paper back down in its nook and press the book with its worn out binding closed.  Then I reach underneath the desk lamp to the ceramic envelope where Mom kept all of our takeout menus.  I pull out the Eastern Pavilion one and begin to cry.  I’m crying and crying and I can’t stop.  I turn around back to the table and I slide the menu along the surface.  Dad is looking at me.  I feel the heat of my tears and the blood rising and filling my cheeks and the snot that is filling my nose, running a little bit down towards my lips.  I pull a napkin out of the holder, which is a wooden house painted blue with a red roof and even one little puff of grey smoke coming out of a black chimney.  Dad is looking at me.

    “I don’t remember the food being that bad.”

    I laugh and the laughter rises through my tears and I’m shrugging and holding the napkin upwards in my right hand.  Dad is drinking.  I don’t know what to do.  But I hate this house with its brick chimney and because it’s so big and not small and wooden and sitting on a table. It sits on a small hill and is full to the brim of objects and memories.

    I’m crying.  Dad is drinking.  And I killed mom because I went to college.





Tom


I forgot how much I liked spareribs.  I chomp into the grey-colored meat with its reddish brown crust or marinade on the outside.  I’m ripping flesh and meat off the bone.  Tissue too.  Leaving it bare and grey with a few white marks that may or may not be from my teeth.  The bone rattles on the old light-grey ceramic plates we’ve always used.  There is a pile of four bones.  Two are licked clean and two have pieces of chewed pale meat sticking to them.  I’m a pale piece of meat.

    James is talking.

    “I think what we first should do is box up all of our old bedrooms.  We can start that tomorrow.  Then we work our way around the house.  The moving truck gets here on Wednesday and they’re going to pack it that day and the next.”

    “The funeral is on Monday?” Maggie asks.

    James is eating his food and he nods.

    “We’ll pack up the kitchen last right?” Liza asks.

    “Absolutely.  That way we can cook if we need to and have an area that’s not a complete disaster.  Can you hand me the rice, honey?”

    Eve passes the rice.  But with her, there is something more.  I want to say that she is swanlike in the way her arm raises, falls, rises again and slides the box of steaming rice.  I think I’m in love with her and always have been since James first brought her home for Christmas.  There was nothing like the way she looked on the wedding, though.  She wore a white dress of course, but it was everything.  The way her skin looked even more glowing in that way it has.  Like honey in the sun or a bright penny but, no, lighter than that.  And her hair was done in a certain way with strands threaded in a design I don’t even know the first thing about.  I hate that he gets to live with her down in D.C.  I still haven’t been to their house yet.  I ride the train every Saturday and hope that a girl like her will come and sit down next to me and if she did, I know I’d have the courage to make her fall in love with me.

    James again:

    “Dad, did you really have to buy a new place so quickly? I hate to think that you just wasted some money by being brash.”

    Dad is licking a sparerib bone. He turns to the Cutty Sark, which has about a third or so of its orangey liquid left.  I look around the table.  Eve looks concerned and so does James.  Maggie tosses back her hair; she still has so much of it.  Liza is quiet sitting next to Dad; she’s looking at her food.

    “Jimmy,” Dad says.  He rarely ever called him Jimmy.  None of us did. “That’s the way I’ve always been.  But didn’t you know?”

    “Know what?” James says.

    “Know that he was brash,” Maggie adds.

    “No,” Dad is shaking his head.  He lazily pokes his fork at a dark dripping piece of beef.  “Didn’t you know that your mother was a magician?”

    James looks at Eve.

    “A magician, Ben?”

    Dad nods and chews.  Nods and chews.

    “How do you mean, Dad?” Liza has piped up at the mention of Mom.

    Dad looks over at her and smiles.  He grabs the top of the Cutty Sark and begins to rotate the bottle.  It makes that hollow sliding sound that glass makes on wood.

    “She played a trick on you all, on anyone that has known us, and even on me.”

    I’m confused.  It seems like he’s going to drop a bombshell.  But what kind of bombshell? What kind of secret is he toying around with?  Or is he just playing, patting some dead rat around like a tomcat. That’s what his legend was.  The big joker, the wit, the famous drunk.  He has to be playing.  My stomach feels bloated and it flips for a moment.  Maybe Mom tricked him?  An affair?

    James is talking.

    “What are you talking about, Dad?”

    “The greatest trick of all that only your mother could pull off.” Dad is looking at Eve as he talks. “Making me seem like a respectable and successful man.”

    I feel relieved.  Everyone is rolling their eyes.

    “C’mon, Dad,” Maggie says.

    “No, Mags, it’s true.  Now that she’s gone I can feel my old ways coming back to me.  I’m becoming undone.  All the stitching she did to fix me up over the years is loosening.  She turned me into a doctor, but not a surgeon.  That was her job.” Dad is standing with his plate in his right hand and the bottle tucked into his armpit.  “I hope you will all come visit me at my new home.  Feel free to bring any grandkids.  You know how I always loved children. That’s what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

    “Oh, come on, Dad,” Maggie says. “Don’t be like that.”

    The faucet comes on and then there is thud of the dishwasher door opening.  After that, it’s the clank of the dish and then the muffled close of the dishwasher.  I hear Dad unscrew the bottle.

    “I’ll be in the study,” he says.

    We’re all quiet at the table.  The Chinese food has consolidated into a lump in my stomach.  I feel my skin bulge out and I’m tired.

    Maggie is looking at James.

    “What?” James says.

    “Let him go through this.”

    James plays with the food on his plate. He sighs. “I can’t just let him act like a fool.  He’s got to take care of his money and himself now that Mom is dead.”

    “This is how he’s grieving.”

    “By reliving some sort of fantasy of himself from thirty years ago?”

    “She’s gone.”

    “I know.”

    Maggie wants to speak but she remains quiet.  James is home now and all of the feelings are starting to come back to me.  The way he was always in control, trying to help everyone, taking responsibility.  I’m looking at the grey bones on my plate.  I love him and I’m glad he’s back.  But I hate him for leaving and I hate that he’s going to go away again with his wife who I’m in love with.  And I’ll still be here, riding the train, taking walks, stuck on this jut of land, which I’m tied to for some reason that I don’t understand.

    I’m standing with my plate.

    “I’m going to go for another walk.”





Maggie

    “Hey, Dad,” I say as I walk into the study.  This was my favorite room of the house.  It has the nice big skylight above the desk and I love the slanted wood walls, which are the color of caramel.  I love it so much because it will always remind me more than anything else of being a kid.  The mystery of the room, with bookshelves on three of the walls and Dad would come in here for privacy and you always wanted to know what he was doing in there.

    “Daddy’s working,” Mom would say.  But of course I didn’t believe her.  Dad is sitting on his favorite chair with his feet kicked up on the ottoman and of course there is the bottle sitting on his lap, tilting forward onto his chest.

    “Hello, Margaret,” Dad says.

    “Oh, we’re being formal tonight,” I quip back and I’m very pleased by it.  Dad is too because he gives one of his high-pitched laughs that he gives when he is caught off guard.

    “You’ve gotten funny in your young age.”

    “I’ve been trying to, Dad.”

    We’re both quiet and looking around the room.  Dad’s breathing is steady and as his chest rises and falls, I can hear the sloshing of his scotch in the bottle.

    “How’re you doing?” I ask.

    “I’m almost drunk,” he says and smiles. “Thirty years on and it’s the same as it was.”

    “Except mom’s…”

    “I’m talking liquor, Mags.”

    I nod at him.  I feel a little embarrassed about trying to point that out to him.  I get up and walk over to the parchment colored globe that stands right in front of one of the bookshelves.  I begin spinning the Earth on a completely impossible axis at an impossibly slow rate.  But it’s my axis and it’s my rate.

    “I bet you’ve been to almost half of the places on that globe.” Dad winks. “Imagine where you’ll be when you’re my age.”

    “Hopefully at a little over fifty percent and living in a suburb.”

    “Are you that smart?”

    “I always thought I was.”

    Dad laughs. “Well, then you’re not my daughter.”

    I stop the globe with my hand.  The tips of my fingers are touching China and Korea.  I begin to cry.  I don’t know why I’m crying and I can’t remember the last time I did.  My face feels too hot.  I didn’t even cry when Jake left the note for me in our apartment and then I noticed how big it was and that it really was meant for two and not as small as I thought.

    Dad takes a drink. “I was only joking. You are my daughter.”

    His arms are spread out.  I walk over and he props himself up.  I sit on his knee and he hugs me.  I didn’t notice his stubble before, but now I can feel it.  His hands stroke my hair.

    “I haven’t seen hair this beautiful since your mother was twenty-two years old.”
    “You like it?”

    “How can I not? There’s so much to.”

    “Yeah,” I say. “You’re right.” And now I’m speaking to so many things in the world that I’ve seen that I can’t even concentrate on crying.  So I realize I’ve stopped and that I’m on my father’s knee.  And for the first time in what seems like forever, I feel like a girl and not like a woman.





Ben

    I’m alone now.  I’m outside by the pool.  The world is dark and the moon is waxing.  I’m cradling the bottle in my right arm as I lay on the lounge.  Nearly waxed this bottle off over the whole day.  A bottle a day keeps the doctor in me at bay.

    But there is so much to heal.  Both of my daughters and both of my sons.  I can see myself in James so much.  The way he tries to heal people, to mend wounds.  The difference is, is that he’s more like his mother.  He’s noble, he looks noble; he sounds noble, and is noble to the point that it can be irritating.  Except to the person who loves you.  Me for Rose.  Eve for him. I’ve healed.  I can heal.  I do it and did it in my own way.  Quietly because it was a duty and duties are done in silence.

    There is a coolness touching everything.  I can feel it caressing my skin and my hair.  If I walked on the perimeter I would feel it hovering over the leaves.  It’s the autumn.  What was that one good thing Kerouac said?  Everyone goes home in October. Well it’s not October and everyone is home.

    But no one cleans the pool anymore.  I did it twice this summer, but we always leave it up to that robot now.  It’s not the same, though.  When we first got the pool James and I would both clean it.  He’d listen to his music and do it during the day and on the weekends.  I’d come home from work and clean it at night during the week.  Look at it, glowing greenish and dark denim.  It’s always looked this way in the dark.  Those deep blue stones.  Santos charged a high price but the work was worth it and who am I counting pennies?  I was never a penny counter.  This bottle feels good on my gut.  It’s not quite a gut, but when I slouch like this, it’s unavoidable.

    Yes, it’s definitely a cool night.  When I was growing up, every year I looked forward to nights like this in September.  During the day, the sun will beat down on the flowers and the trees, but at night, the wind picks up a little.  The way I thought of it was that the cold hid in the ground until winter and that in the fall it made its first reemergence only at night.  It made logical sense to me then.  But tonight everything is touched by dampness and coolness.  On all the leaves and petals there will be little marks of moisture.

    I’m an old man now.  My wife is dead.  The songs of my youth don’t ring in my ears like they used to.  I never thought I’d be old.  Look at Cutty Sark.  The bottle never ages, it keeps being produced looking the same and never changing.  Orange label and orange liquid.  If only humans could be as simple and adaptable as that.  The model of my body has been outlived.  I have four children that prove that.  I have four children.  Each one probably detests seeing me like this.  I’m sure they all know about my past, the mistakes and jokes I made.  I don’t regret it and I never did.  Rose may have saved me.  I’m sure she did because I couldn’t have helped the kids the way I did if I was getting like this all the time.  I could’ve loved them.  I always would’ve.  But I couldn’t have helped them.  I couldn’tve been a father.  Although I never quite figured out what that meant.  I heard the phrase “be a father” at soccer games, dance recitals, music concerts, and lacrosse camps, but I never really understood it.  I had a part in creating them and I was always there to help.  But I never knew when I crossed in the holy territory of being a father.

    I suppose it all means as much as you want it to or as little.  There are plenty of fathers out there who simply planted the seed for their children and didn’t do a thing after.  Yet, other fathers destroyed their children’s lives by taking their title of “Dad” as a license to kill their child’s independence.  Being a parent is terrible, but it’s a business I’m glad I got into.

    I’m getting more sentimental.  It’s not just because my wife – my guide – is gone, because it was happening before that. I’m seventy in January.  That’s not so old, but old enough that the memories and sentiments pile up enough so that you can be sentimental.  I don’t cry about things.  I’ve heard about men near death who were easily brought to tears.  They cried over Christ, talk of sex, love, American presidents, war and music.  It’s funny, the only thing that seems to be missing from that list is death itself, but no one really talks about that as one of the elements of life.  Because it’s always seen as the opposite.  I don’t think it is.  It’s as much a part in life as love or anything else.  I’m going to die soon.  Rose already did.  The clouds are moving in over the stars.  I need to finish this bottle and start the next one.  Each day has its own agenda.  What is tomorrow anyway?





James

I’m lying in my old bed.  Eve lies next to me. The walls are bare and blue.  All of my trophies are gone.  They’ve been gone for quite some time.  Ever since I graduated from college and started at the firm.  Who would’ve thought that I’d be an accountant when I was running on grass past the white lines on the lacrosse field?  But I suppose I was always good at numbers I was never that great at lacrosse.  I could run, somewhat, so they made me a midfielder.  But all that is past now.  All those faces are off somewhere.  Maybe still around here.  Cicero and Gertz.  I know they’re still living close – Huntington I heard.  I didn’t even invite them to my wedding.  I knew what would happen if I did.  I knew how they would act.  I’m better off for it.

    But Eve is still curled on the tan sheets, dreaming whatever dreams she’s dreaming.  Can she feel the baby in her stomach?  How long is that supposed to take before they know?  I always thought it was instantaneous.  A mother would know immediately when that little ball of life and electricity forms inside her.  She didn’t, though.  At least she hasn’t said anything to me.  What if she does know?  What if she has been waiting for me to tell her I lied, that I hid the positive test?  Those things aren’t accurate anyway.  She knows that too.  Who was she telling me about?  It was an actress I remember that.  It was Halle Berry! Halle Berry took the test almost thirty times before they realized she was pregnant.  It could happen to anyone and so that means I can delay too.

    I don’t know why I did it or why I’m continuing.  There she is, her chest rising and falling underneath my white comforter.  The white makes the tan of her skin and the black of her hair stand out even more.  It compliments them so well – it makes them realer than real to me and I’ve known her for so many years now.

    I can still see the image of the first time I saw her.  How many husbands can say that to their wives?  She was wearing a blue t-shirt and the sleeves were short.  I remember because I thought there was something strange about the way the color looked with her skin and her hair, and because the sleeves were short, I could make out the slight definition of her shoulder muscle.  I’ve never been one to notice a detail like that either but I did, and that’s what meant everything.  She talked to me first.  The image of her head and neck leaning back to look up at me.  But that was the first image, not the lasting one.  The lasting one was from our first date.  After we finished dinner – it was sushi, yes it was – we walked up the street together in the streetlight.  She had a thin white scarf on.  In the orange light, her coat looked maroon because I wasn’t paying attention and it was actually navy corduroy.  Her hair was longer then and pulled up, the little strands stuck out around her neck.  I was so nervous I’d barely eaten anything.  I awkwardly put my arm around her and I realized I was in love.  Who could make a movie about a moment like that or try to explain the feeling?  For me it happened with a movement of my arm and nausea in my stomach.  That’s what true love felt like then and now.  That same woman is lying next to me. My wife is carrying my child in her stomach.  What is it I am afraid of?  Is it the baby itself or Eve with the baby inside her and what this will all mean for us?  I’m not afraid.  I shouldn’t be scared.  Not me, not the one who holds the family together.  But Eve is pregnant and something inside of me is screaming in fear.



Liza

    I liked being the last one home with mom.  We’d sit at the kitchen table like I’m doing now and have coffee together.  I’d make it.  We’d talk, both with our white and blue ceramic mugs in our hands.  Tom bought them for her for mother’s day one year.  It was my single after school cup of coffee and it was a time for mom and me to just chat.  In the summer we missed that time to share.  I was too busy going to see my friends.  She’d stop me sometimes and try to get me to stay.  But I had to go, even though I could hear and I guess even feel the sadness in her voice.  It’s funny that you can realize and even feel those things and not act on them.  It doesn’t make sense.  I don’t know why I did it.  I just wanted to spend time with my friends before college.  I knew mom was sick, but you never think that your mother is going to die.

    It’s not sunny like it was yesterday.  The clouds have moved in and I can see specks of rain on the skylight above me.  The coffee is a little strong, not enough water.  I always did that.  The coffee at school is fine, although a little hot in those thin paper cups.  The inside of the mug is grayish clay, which looks nice with the black of my coffee.  James always asked me if I was a fisherman drinking my coffee black.  I just like the flavor, the bitterness, and the strength.  But he liked to tease me.

    I don’t think that mom ever talked with Maggie the way she talks with me.  No, its talked isn’t it?  The way she talked with me.  I was too young to really observe how they acted towards each other when Maggie was my age.  And she was out of the house for so much of my time growing up that I could only really see on the holidays.  I think mom was always hard on her.  Maybe it was because they were so different but looked the same with their terrific red hair.  And me with my strange blondish hair that no one in the family has.

    “Maggie did you and mom ever just chat like girls?”


    “Like girls?”


    “I don’t know.  I mean you know about celebrities and hair and I don’t know share with her your problems.”


    “No, I don’t really share my problems with anyone.  And I never did with mom.  Celebrities?”


    I look down embarrassed.  She’s my big sister and sometimes I don’t know where to start with her.


    “Yeah, like gossip.”


    She laughs.


    “You mean you never even shared your problems with Jake?”


    She stops laughing and looks at me closely for a moment.  Then she smiles and turns away.

    If only I could talk to her that way.  What happened between her and Jake?  I thought they were going to get married.  I was happy when James got married, but it’s different when you’re older sister is going to get married.  Because even though James and I have always been closer, it was Maggie I looked up to.  A sister who is successful and has an interesting job and gets to travel and sends you pictures of exotic places. “My older sister is on assignment in Siberia.”  Then your friends come over and see pictures of this beautiful girl with lots of red hair and you hope you can be like that too.  Well without the red hair of course.

    The drizzle is falling a little bit more.  It’s like a mist.  Tom went out earlier for a walk.  I hope he isn’t getting caught in the rain.  Where did he go anyway?  I see him the most but know him the least.  He should’ve asked me to go with him.  He’s always sneaking around going on his train rides, going for his walks with his funny and forceful stride.  It’s strange to grow up and not really know one of your brothers.

    I sip the coffee.  It’s nice and bitter and hot.  My tongue burns a little.

    I’ve put the dishes in the washer after dinner.  The kitchen smells like strong brewed coffee.

    “Why don’t you sit with me and have a cup, Liza?”

    “I’m sorry, mom.  I’ve got to go meet Lauren.”

    “Just a cup?  Soon you’ll be gone.  And it’ll be such an empty house.”

    “Tom will come by.  You know that.”

    “I know but it’s not the same as talking with you.”

    “Come on, mom.”

    “Alright.”

    She looked so disappointed in me.  She just gave me a vacant nod.  And I was so angry.  Why did she have to put that on me?  Why did she have to look so pathetic?  And why couldn’t I see she was getting weaker?  Wasn’t dad supposed to fix her? It wasn’t cancer, that’s what he said.  I still don’t understand it all.  You’re not supposed to feel guilty for spending time with your friends.  Your parents are supposed to cope with having an empty nest, not die suddenly when they seem fine.

    I didn’t kill my mother.

    “Liza, is it true you killed your mother?”


    “I heard that too.  That she died of a broken heart because you moved out and went to school.”


    “I wouldn’t have done that.”


    “You all don’t understand.  I didn’t do it.”


    “Liar.”

    I didn’t do it.



Tom

    It’s cloudy this morning but it’s still warm.  I could’ve drove, but here I am walking to church.  I didn’t ask anyone else because I know they wouldn’t want to go. Well maybe I should have asked Liza to go; she and I were the only two who would go with mom before…

    Dad would come every other week or two weeks, he’d use excuses about the new receptionist or the people in billing so he had to lower himself to clerical matters on a Sunday.  I knew he wasn’t working but relaxing.  Not like the old days when we’d all go all six of us and stand there proudly in our khakis and polos and button downs and skirts and dresses.

    I can see Saint James’ white tower as I walk up the hill.  I check my watch. 10:10. I’ll be there just in time for mass.  I’ll walk in and smell that initial blast of perfume and incense and then the wet of the water on my forehead, the cross, and then kneeling and sign again.  Then I will sit on the wood of the pew and feel the heaviness of church.  What will I pray for?  Mom of course. What else could I possibly pray for?  I’ll pray for her and for dad.  He was bound to take this the hardest and he has.  I don’t like to see him this way, lolling and drunk, zoning out and then laughing and cracking jokes like an imbecile.  He is almost speaking his own language, though in a way I guess he always did that.

    The tractors are moving over the dirt on the farm.  What do they grow there anymore?  It was always pumpkins in the fall.  When we were kids, we’d take field trips and pick out the best pumpkin.  It didn’t always have to be the biggest, you could get one with the best shape or one that would curve easily although that was tough to figure out and I don’t know if you could ever really direct that to a science.  But we would carve them and have a school wide contest.  In fourth grade I won for the grade with my carving of Mona Lisa.  Maggie and James both helped me.  Maggie did the vague outline with me using that small metal carver.  She was always a great lover of paintings, especially Cezanne. And then James would help me carve out the rough and thick sin.  It was tough work.  We messed up twice and had to go back to get new pumpkins.  No one noticed, though.

    I hear a plane fly overhead and on my right a door slams and I can hear the echoing of a basketball bouncing.  A young kid comes out wearing shorts and a t-shirt.  He’s yelling, “Mark! Mark! Mark!”  Mark is probably his brother or his cousin.  It could be Deluca’s little brother or cousin.  I don’t remember him having a little brother just a sister, and I don’t think he lived in this part of town anyway.

    It’s nice to have siblings.  I was always glad to have an older brother and sister and also a younger one.  It makes you more well rounded I think to juggle all of those different interactions.  I’d never give any of the fights and awful car rides back.  In a way, I’m glad Mom died.  Now we’re all back under the same roof.  My brother is back and maybe I can tell him how much I hate him for moving away.  I’m not really glad that Mom’s dead.

    I turn onto the church drive below the overhanging trees and I can see into a sideyard with a little wooden swing set.  On my other side is the second half of the church’s cemetery.  We won’t bury mom here.  Grandpa had a plot all set up out east.  We will bury her there.  I wish she were alive so much.  Just so I knew that she would be around to help me with my problems, to help me explain how I feel when I’m stifled, frustrated and trapped on this Island.  I know I’ll get away someday.  The way Mom never wanted me to.  She was a simple God-fearing woman at heart.  But she was good with words in a way that I’m not.  I bet she could’ve been a writer or maybe even a psychologist with the way that she explains things.  Explained things.

    The parking lot is nearly full.  Families pull up in mini-vans, dads in leather jackets holding the hands of their kids.  There are some frumpy mothers and also sleek well-kept rich mothers with nice neat tan coats and slim black and brown sunglasses.  There are old people too; there are always old people at mass.  Walking or caning their way up to the altar to receive communion in ivory white sneakers.  Or the old dames like grandma when she lived with us with her big hats with bows and feathers and large pearl necklaces.  The perfume of church is a mix of mothballs and incense.

    I open the heavy white door and enter in.  An old woman hands me the weekly flyer, which is written in maroon ink.  I push open the lightweight light wood door and hear the large echo of coughs and whispered talk.  The organ is playing low.  I reach my hand over and touch my fingertips to the water in the iron bowl.  I always forget the real name of the holy water holder.  I cross myself and a little drop of water remains on my forehead.  I can feel it.  At first glance I don’t recognize anyone.  I slide into a pew closer to the back.  I look up at the wood ceiling that always reminded me of a ship.  It’s wooden, curved, and highly polished.  The wood just looks strong like a ship.  Then my eyes fall on the cross.  I pull out the kneeler and it squeaks and is made of blue padding like always.  I feel the heaviness of church, but it has a different twist because I’m alone at mass for the first time in my life.



Maggie

    I’m sitting with Eve in the living room.  She’s watching me play the piano.   I haven’t played in a long time.  I would’ve played at Easter if I’d been home.  Something sounds off with it.  No one has kept it in tune I’m sure.  I used to spend hours here playing and playing in the afternoon.  Mom would sit with me.  She’d fold laundry or read the Times or whatever book she was reading.  The philosophy she dabbled in too.  But now it’s Eve and I and I’m playing a Bach etude that I learned to long ago. I forget if it even has a name. I like seeing my fingers move along the white and black keys.  My fingers still look young even though I’m not.  Thirty-two, dear God!  I always dreaded when I would be able to say, “When I was thirty.”  The past tense of being thirty, which is everyone’s cut off age for kids and marriage and all of that.  I stop playing.  Eve looks at me.

    “Does it upset you to see Ben this way?”  She asks.  Her legs are crossed in jeans and she’s bouncing the right one, which is crossed on top.

    “Why? Does it bother you?”

    “You were the only one who was alive when he last had a drink.  James treats that like its folk-lore or some sort of holy myth.”

    “He does?” I ask.

    She smiles and her eyes widen. “Yes, I think that you all do.”

    I laugh. I can’t help it. “You’re right,” I say.

    “It’s because of how legendary Ben was, isn’t it? How he was going to be famous?”

    I know she knows this, but it’s the first time she has asked me directly about it.

    “That’s what they say.  He was famous in a way I suppose.”

    “As a doctor in the town.”

    “Well I guess that makes it more than one way.”

    She smiles at me.  I always liked her.  I’m glad James married her.  I hate that they’re married, though.  What does it take to do that?  What do they both have that I don’t?  Or is the key word both?

    I play around in the key of A.  Linking subdominant chords, minor chords.  Eve’s knee and draped thigh are bouncing.

    “Did James tell you we’re trying to have a baby?”

    No one had told me that.  I didn’t know.

    “No, was he supposed to?”

    Eve shrugs and rests her chin in her palm.  She looks French.  I don’t think she is, though.  What is she?  Now she’s shaking her head.  The light from outside is falling in.  It’s grey and not so light but it gives the room that atmosphere.  The atmosphere that something is heavy and that somehow that light is in your stomach and weighing you down like a big brick of dough.

    “He wasn’t supposed to,” she says. “I just thought he might’ve shared.”

    “Well we were never the closest, you know that.”

    “That’s true.”

    “He was closest to Liza I think.  For some reason.”

    Eve laughs. “I always wanted to be from a big family.”

    “We’re not big,” I say.

    “To me it seems like it.  It was only my older sister and I.  I just love the way it works between all of you.”

    “How do you mean?”

    “Well, who is closer to who and how everyone has to vie for attention.”

    I’ve never had anyone talk to me in admiration about my family.  And I never gave it a thought.  You never do, or maybe there is a point growing up when you’re supposed to see your family as a whole unit.  A whole and complete entity as its own that you are within and without.  I must have missed that stage.  I was too busy being without - chasing images, photos in my lens. Stories.  Maybe if I called Jake he’d come to the funeral, though if I were him I wouldn’t.

    “I’ve never really thought about it in that way.”

    Eve stretches out on the couch. “I guess if it was my family I wouldn’t either.  But then again, maybe I would.”

    This is the longest conversation I’ve ever had with her.  She is my sister-in-law now.  She has been for two years.  That’s another thing you don’t think of - in-laws and who they are going to be.  Eve and I are very different.  I think a man would get the sense if he just happened to walk in the room and see the two of us, the two of us sitting relaxed in a grey heavy morning.

    Eve sighs. “I’m going to miss this house.”

    I nod my head and play an old progression that sounds familiar. F, A minor, G. “I don’t think any of us have any idea.”



Ben

    I’m in my bathrobe and the shower is running.  I’m wasting the water and I know that.  But I’ve always loved the sound of the shower, the sound of repetitive falling water as natural in its way as rain.  I remember when I used to take a shower in the morning and when I’d step out James would be curled up on the bathroom rug with a towel over him sleeping.  I’d laugh every time.  There’s something natural about it.  The warmth, the moisture and the sound.  It’s like the womb.  That stuff was always surprising about being a father.  How your kids could do strange little things like that.  Be so attached to you.  You never imagine that.  Another person being so attached to you that they’d wake up to come and lay and listen to you shower.  But that’s what it is to be a parent.  You can never project that, you can’t project a child sleeping on the bathroom floor or waking you up before dawn on Christmas.  Those are the images you have, but you can’t fully project that.  You can’t fully project the feeling of being in that bed in the dark on Christmas Morning and you are still a college student in some way wanting to sleep as late as possible when you can, but here they come.  Here are these little people that can’t wait to wake you up and be alive and can’t wait for you to be up and be alive so that you can watch them open presents.  And you want sleep so bad, but there is a joy in you – an unknown glowing organ that flourishes at moments like that.  When the little legs and arms jump on the comforter in the dark and these kids are you and they need and love you.

    But those are all memories and old feelings.  I’m still here in my bathrobe and drunk.  The bathroom still looks the same with the jacuzzi empty and the baskets with the different colored soaps and gels that I never used.  I should just dump them all in the jacuzzi and lie there instead of taking a shower.  Maybe I will.  On the sink a glass of water is resting on the flat part next to the faucet.  It’s one of the glasses with the red flowers on it.  In the sink is my second Cutty Sark bottle.  I took a few sips before.

    I open the stall.  Water sprinkles my forearm.  I turn off the knobs.  Steam has started to fill the bathroom and everything feels damp and comfortable.  I step to the jacuzzi and turn on the water.  I stop the drain and watch it fill.

    When we first moved in, Rose and I would use the jacuzzi all the time.  It was a luxury to have.  That was the beginning of the prosperous time.  We had Maggie and James.  So much room and so many bathrooms.  We still had a healthy sex life then too.  Three times a week it was I think.  We’d put the kids to sleep and the house was so big that it didn’t matter.  But she’s dead now.  Thinking about the sex you had with your dead wife. And how can I possibly get all of that back?  I can’t and I know that but it would be nice.

    The water is filling and I pour in some soap.  It’s a round smooth plastic bottle with blue liquid.  Then there’s a red one, its raspberry scented.  I pour that into the mix too.  A green one is next: kiwi. A purple one: passion fruit and plum.  These are all scents I’ve smelt before but never known.  Although it looks like the bottles have hardly been used.  The soap and bubbles are rising and frothing beneath the flow of the faucet.  The water is just about higher than the jets. I turn the jets on; some of the water shoots out of the tub and hits my robe thigh.  It’s warm and leaves a soapy mark.  The water has risen above the jets and now everything is bubbly and the room is steamy and smells like a strange rotten and overripe fruit vendor.  I remove my robe.  My skin is wrinkled.  There are some liver spots on my thigh.  I could’ve had more if I drank all those years.

    I step to the sink and take the bottle of Cutty Sark with me.  I look at my naked self in the mirror.  Just another day of vanity.  Remember when I was 20?  Looking in the mirror all the time then.  I’m walking over to the tub and now I’m sinking into the bubbles and the steam and watching the suds wrap around the bottle.



James

The rain is falling outside and I don’t feel like doing anything.  Dad’s leather study chair isn’t comfortable but it reclines back with my weight so I can trick my posture into being comfortable.  It’s been a long time since I’ve sat and admired the rain.  I was never melancholy enough to do it so often.  I always got the sense that Tom was that way although he never really told me so or shared so much.  I’d catch him reading poems and gazing out the window when I’d come home from school or on the holidays.  I think he had an artistic bent to him.  Turning and turning in the widening gyre.  He had to recite that for English class.  Mr. Marsh.  I had to do that also.  I forget what I picked.  I think it was one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  There were so many of those to go around.  I couldn’t really enjoy it.  You don’t enjoy poetry or get caught up in a school assignment if you are on the lacrosse team.  That would make you look like a fag.  I always hated that word.

Drops are falling on bushes, the leaves are still full on trees and they move slightly in the wind.  Things are green and wet and the light is still a summer light even though it is grey, it’s not dark and depressing like the rain or grey of November or December.  How considerate of mom to die in a month when the weather is still nice and we don’t have to shovel snow to get to a grave.  That’s what I’m looking at.  The paperwork for the funeral.  She and dad had enough morbid sense to make their payments already and plan everything out in advance.  Who thinks of that?  I guess we all have to think of that.  We all have to set up our gardens to plant ourselves in, make our advance payments for it too so that everything is neat and clean trimmed mounds of dirt next to the green of the grass and maybe a flower or two.  I spoke to Aunt Diane before.

“I ordered a flower arrangement.”

“Thank you but my mom had already picked out her arrangements.”

“A sister can add her own too.  That’s the way it is at funerals.”

“I guess I never noticed before.”

“Best that you didn’t.  What does a young man need to notice flowers at a funeral for?”

“I don’t know.”

“You had a good mother.”

“I know.”

“We could all use extra flowers.”

Everyone sounds so sad and seems so sad.  We weren’t all this messed up all the time were we?  I don’t think so.  I had a happy childhood.  I’d like to think that people were envious of our family.  I was a good brother.  Maybe I was too anxious to grow up.  To handle paperwork and be a man, be relied upon by a wife like Eve.  I could’ve been a better brother to Tom.  I tried to teach him things, to stay away from losers, the guys I hung out with on the team.  I wanted him to escape too.  But what is he doing now?  Why does he still live on the Island?  Why does he come home?  Why is he at mass now?  I could’ve been a better brother.

The chair rocks back and forth and I hear it squeak underneath my weight.  I grip the wood of the table with my right hand and shift the paperwork around with my left.  Bryant and Sons Funeral Home.  Old Town Road.  The name is written in script with a slight flourish of graphic underneath it.  Piles of paperwork make up this world; it’s the world that I work in.  Numbers, files, papers.  I don’t want Tom or Liza to be in a world like that, but I don’t know if you can escape it.

“You’ll be a good husband, James.”

“Do you think so, mom?”

“It doesn’t really matter if I think it.”

“Of course it does.”

“You had your father to look at.”

“But he had his problems didn’t he?”

“And so did I.”

“You did?”

“We’re all faulted.”

“That’s only the Bible talking.”

“Well, if you think that then we all have compromises to make.  We face ourselves and sometimes we have to give things up.  Luckily, your father was able to do that.  He gives me too much credit.  I might’ve been too much of a bitch when I was younger, but he seemed to understand something in it.”

“That all seems too nice.  How can it all make sense like that?”

“I don’t know if it all does make sense like that.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll be a good husband, James.”

“Mom.”

Her red cheeks.  The reddishness of her hair like Maggie.  The youth that remained in her face, especially in the corners by her eyes so that they still looked twenty-four.  Why couldn’t dad catch the illness?

The desk lamp makes the room look gold.  My life and childhood have been something out of a movie.  I spin the chair and as it slows, I face the window and the rain again.  Life isn’t so sad.  Life is made up of rainy days and I should learn to enjoy rainy days more.  I should let water drip off the end of leaves and fall to the grass to enter into the rest of the earth.  I can remember taking naps in October on cloudy days in college and listening to music.  I’m still young.  When did I become the leader?  When did I become responsible?

"Come in here, James.  There’s a little boy who wants to meet you."


I’m a father?



Liza

The piano has stopped playing and I hear two pairs of footsteps.  One goes up the stairs and the other continues walking down the hall and enters the den where I’m sitting reading Frankenstein for my fiction class.  All freshmen have to take it.  Eve emerges and doesn’t seem to notice me.

“Hi, Eve.”

She jumps up and puts her hand to her chest.

“You scared the shit out of me.”

“Sorry,” I say.

Eve begins laughing hysterically.  Her laugh is somewhat musical.  It rises and falls nicely.

“What?” I ask.

“Oh, nothing.  I just can’t believe that scared me so much.”

She sits down next to me on the couch.

“What’re you reading?”

I hold up the book to show her.

“Ah,” she says. “I always thought that was such a boring book. I hate those epistolary novels.”

“You were an English major right?”

She nods. “Your brother and I were complete opposites.  I’ve managed to get him to become a bigger reader.  How do you like school so far anyway?”

I feel tears forming behind my eyes but I don’t want to start crying in front of her. Besides, I’m stronger than that.  Even if it is my fault, I can’t let anyone know or see that it affects me.  I’m not the little girl.

“I love it.  It’s terrific.”

“Yeah? You don’t miss home?  Or, well I guess there wasn’t so much time to.”

We’re both quiet.  I know she’s thinking about mom too.  Mom would never say too much about Eve.  I’d try to get it out of her.  But she’d always keep it simple. “She’s a lovely girl.”  Something generic like that from a woman who was capable of turning eloquent phrases and who could really get to the heart of something.  “She’s a lovely girl.”  It sounded like something from a Hallmark card.

“How are the guys?” Eve asks laughing her little music again.  I can’t help but laugh too.  There is something infectious about it.  When did James first fall in love with her?  After her first laugh?  What is it even like to fall in love and to know you want to get married?

“There are some cute ones.  Not so many on my floor but definitely in some of my classes.  In this fiction class actually.”

I put the book down.  I like talking to her.  Something about it reminds me of talking to mom over coffee.  She lightly hits my arm.

“What about your roommate?”

“I don’t know.  We’re feeling each other out still.  We had our first sort of heart to heart the other night.”

“Ah, one of those late night talks when you both can’t sleep.”

“Yeah, its tough when you hear people outside talking.  There’s something about it.”

Eve smiles. “That feeling that something is always happening.”

That’s exactly it.  That’s been the best part about it so far.  The feeling of things constantly going on.  People constantly talking or staying up late.  There could be a party going on in every room.  There probably isn’t but there could be.  Lights are never off at college.

“Yeah,” I say. “Something always happening.”

We’re quiet again.  I can see that Eve is staring at the white bookcase that the TV sits in.  All of the books are still up on the shelves.  The photo albums too.  No one’s started packing this area.
“I can’t believe we’ve got to pack all of this up,” she says.

“I know.”

“Ben’s always been like this?”

“I never saw it so much, but that’s what I’ve heard.  He’s always been funny and had his own way about him.  You know.  My mom kept him from doing a lot of spur of the moment things like this.”

“After his accident right?”

“Accident?”

“The motorcycle accident when he was drunk. Isn’t that what it was?”

I close the book.  I never knew about an accident.  All this time my family, all of them have been keeping this from me.  James never told me.  Tom never told me.  Dad never told me.  Not even Maggie who would’ve been the one to let it slip.  But worst of all…. Not even after school.  Not even when we were drinking coffee together.

The rain falls down.  Everyone is holding black umbrellas and wearing black clothes.  Maggie is wearing sunglasses.  Eve and James are standing next to me squeezing each other’s hands.  I watch the coffin lowering into the wet and almost black mud.  My dress shoes squish on the grass and green blades stick to the shining patent leather.


I see mom’s picture.  They have it standing above the hole.  She’s young in it.  She looks exactly like Maggie.  She’s wearing a pearl necklace and smiling.  You can see little lines by her eyes.  Her red hair looks beautiful.


And there is dad behind the picture.  He’s soaking wet. He has no umbrella.  The jacket of his suit slopes down and looks too big for him.  But he’s sitting on a motorcycle holding a glass with liquor in it.  He looks at no one but me.  He raises it up and the rain falls and runs down his face. He and I must share something.

Why couldn’t I know?




Tom

    I’m in the darkness of my eyes.  In the beginning there was the word.  Repent your sins and welcome the love of the lord. Taake aaand eeat. Taake aaand eeat.  Let me escape from this past from what is holding me back.  Forgive me for hating my brother and for not knowing my family well enough and for being glad that my mother is dead in some way because it sets me free somehow and I think she knew that overall.  She knew that by dying she would be able to bring us together again even though we’ve always been together something needed to change and she being the woman she was knew that in some way too.  I move my knee on the blue and smell perfume and mothballs. There are stars and rings of color in the darkness, in front of me I hear the shuffling of feet on the stone floor, and I know that hanging up there is the crucifix and Christ.  Forgive me for not taking advantage of the opportunities given to me.  Why am I afraid to move on with my life?  Why didn’t I go away to college? Why am I content to work two jobs I don’t care about? I come to church for answers because it is the only thing I know.  It is what my mother knew and so stubbornly stuck to.  We’re all not believers.

Next to me one of the two old women is coughing.  I think it’s the one wearing a fur coat and she must be hot in it.  One of the women – I think it is the same one – is blowing her nose. They’ve stopped singing the communion hymn and now the organ just plays its chords and notes.  The organ has such a resonant sound; there is something about it.  I wonder if Maggie could play the organ if she tried. Her auburn hair.  James’ short and clean cut brown hair, his still athletic build and broadish chest.  Liza’s light brown almost blonde hair that seems so out of place with the rest of us.  Dad is grayer and grayer.  We all have to move away and grow up sometime.  Why is that? Why do we have to keep moving and growing up? What does it all add up to? Why can’t we just be young forever?  We have to die don’t we? Our parents will die the ones we came from and so must we.  These things are too morbid I have to open my eyes but I can’t.  I’m deluding myself of something and I think that
something might be death but its what we all have to face and understand isn’t it? I don’t know. Open!

    I look up at the wooden sailboat ceiling of the church.  Everything looks the same as it did before I closed my eyes and stepped into the dark.  I wish I hadn’t come to church and just stayed at home and slept in my bed or sat with Liza or James or Eve.  I look at the two old women next to me.  The one in the fur coat smiles.  She has white hair and she reminds me of a substitute teacher I used to have in high school.  The other one is still closed within herself praying to God.  Her brow is furrowed.  I can only imagine what things she is facing inside of herself after being alive for so many years.  I remember to smile back at the woman and then I turn away and gaze up at the cross. Christ is thin in his frozen middle age.

    In two days we’ll watch mom go beneath the ground.  Then we’ll have to leave this house behind unless James manages to change Dad’s mind.  Something has to give within me.

    Christ is sad and bleeding.  He knew he couldn’t escape.  None of us can.  I haven’t truly even tried.  But I can’t, James can’t, Eve can’t.  Maggie can’t either.

    I’ll get a beer from 7-11 on the way home.






Maggie

    “Jake, its good to see you again.”


    “Seeing you is like a shadow.”


    “A shadow?”


    “A mystery you mysterious woman of the lens.”


    “I think you would’ve liked my mom.”


    “Did you ever tell her about the ring?”


    “No.”


    “I suppose that makes sense.”


    He’s growing a beard I think.  He has on a trench coat, or is it a pea coat?  It’s dark anyway and it has a nice collar and big buttons on it.  It makes him look like a man, which he is and always was.  The one who gave me my first real orgasm anyway so that has to mean something.  At least it does to most girls.


    “Are you growing a beard?”


    “Am I?”


    “I don’t know if you are.”


    “What do you want by bringing me here?”


    “I don’t know.  I think just you and your shadow beard.”


    “Well you have it it looks like.”


    He turns away from me and walks up along the grass past the other graves and stones.  He walks past flapping flags stuck in the dirt and among the green blades.  There are flowers too.  Red, pink, purple, blue, yellow.  The yellows are vivid.  I’m not sure if it’s sunny or gray.  He’s walking, his coat flapping and hitting his thighs.  He looks back at me.


    I walk towards him in the sun.  Or is it gray?

    The rain is falling against my bedroom window.  How many days did I look out at the rain?  It’s somewhat pathetic to look out at it and wish for things that could’ve been or should’ve been or maybe might be.  But you do it when you’re younger.  You can’t avoid it because that’s what adolescence is all about – dreams, dreaming and angst.  Well, usually that and headphones, Led Zeppelin and pot.  How I sat here in high school thinking about whoever my crush was at the time.  I even kept a journal too, a running high school social commentary.  I can picture my teenage self.  I see her with her hair cut short in some sort of feminine rebellion.  I can see her little stash of weed in the bottom desk drawer hidden behind old magazines and a small knitting set that was supposed to be a school project.  I want to taunt her and her love of boys’ names. Mike, Johnny, Jordan, Blake.  Which one do you love the most?  Which one do you think you love the most?  What are you looking for?  And I can see her shrugging at me from my vantage point with my questions.  She’s slipping on the headphones with the ripped pad on the right one.  I can’t hear what she’s listening to, it’s muffled and she’s picking up a camera from the floor and looking out the window.

    I’ve spent most of my life taking pictures and watching people.  The moment of capture, motion and identity frozen in time.  With photos you can stop blood, you can stop time, it is the static art and when observed closely it can reveal countless things to us about humanity and instantaneous occurrences that occur everyday.  The little girl in the purple dress poking a flower in the white marble walls in Dubrovnik.  The monk and the crab picture I took in Thailand.  Or Even more simply the one of Jake when he spilt the wine and he stood over it with an umbrella as a walking stick.

    “Oh, miss! Would you please take a picture of my wife and me?”

    A flick of his wrist and the umbrella was lifted; he wrapped his arm around it.

    “Don’t you feed her?”

    “Please, she’s had a bit of an accident and she’s upset.”

    “What seems to be the problem?”

    “She was crying over spilt milk and well…”

    “Ah, the wine.”

    His laughter, hard and loud.  Him poking the umbrella in my direction pretending as if it were a sword parrying me.  I jumped back and snapped pictures in my socks.  He moved closer and closer to me.

    “No more business.  You’re a dedicated professional woman.”

    “It’s not business its art.”

    “Shuah shuah.”

    “I don’t have that accent.”

    He was good at teasing me.  He wrapped my waist and persuaded the camera out of my hand and in the same movement gently placed it on the table with the right hand while leaning me back with his left against the back of the couch.  We fell over onto the cushions.  He slid down to the floor his legs on my stomach and on the couch while his back rested on the rug and his face looked up at me.

    “I love you, you know.”

    I nodded.

    “I’ll clean up the wine.”

    I’m fondling my camera in my hand.  Don’t look out the window at the rain coming down in the afternoon.  Tom walked to church.  He’s caught in the rain.  Should I have gone with him?  He seems strange.  I know there is something similar in us.  It’s a restlessness in our nature, even though he hasn’t gone anywhere and I’ve been so many places.  We both got it from him.  I think Tom might be taking all of this the hardest despite the fact that he hasn’t really showed it.  He hasn’t shown much of anything since I’ve been here.  I’ll talk to him tonight.  The funeral is tomorrow.

    There are boxes piled in my room, some of them empty some of them with filled with things.  There are a few with leftover and old books.  It’s mainly the closet that needs to be cleaned out.  I haven’t lived here in so long but there are still things in the closet that you think you’ve thrown out but are still there.  Old bins full of school papers, old clothes too.  I even found a few stuffed animals. My old Winnie the Pooh and the cow that I sewed in home ec in eighth grade.  I’ll take pictures of the boxes.  There is something absolutely picturesque about them.  It might be the cleanness of their shape, how simple and defined they are in their squaredom.  This is a messy world and the objects in our boxes are messy too.  But the boxes themselves can be beautiful.

    There is the grass again.  The mound of dirt and the flags sticking up here and there.  Dad’s in a suit holding his bottle in his left jacket sleeve.  He wears a red rose on his left lapel. There’s a wooden box above the hole and the wind moves the leaves.  Someone touches my shoulder.  It’s Jake again.  He doesn’t have a beard.  I think I’ll take a picture of him and the box.

    I’ll bring my camera to the funeral.

    Will I call him?

    “You look beautiful.”

    I can feel the singleness of my half full apartment in my slowly emptying room that isn’t even mine.




Ben

    Who first invented the shape of a bottle?  It’s really an ingenious design.  It must have been the Egyptians when they were fooling around with the mason jars.  I’dve liked to have that as a gift: a collection of mason jars with Egyptian godheads on them.  It would’ve been fun to scare the kids by putting fake organs in them.  I could’ve made up plenty of lies about them.  Haunted hearts, livers that were still living.  Tom would’ve been the most scared.  My jokes and pranks always worked him up.

    But I think there is just something terrific about the shape of it.  It’s romantic in a way whether full or empty, though I suppose the empty bottle has been romanticized more in movies and in books as a symbol.  Everybody loves a hapless drunk, a haunted loner who lives in the shadows.  We want our heroes to fall almost as much as we want them to succeed.  I’m not sure I’d know what a hero looked like on the street if I met him.  Or her.

    I should turn the lights on in here to read but the windows in here and the skylights always give enough real light to see.  it doesn’t matter to me whether I carve up a Christian or the first fowl that comes my way.  That was always one of my favorite quotes.  You could use it as armor when dealing with patients.  I’m not that cruel, but it’s nice to pretend it’s possible.  I never bothered to read Bovary before.  She was the one that told me to read it.  It had to be a little bit after James was born.  We’d sit here after we put him and Mags to sleep and both read underneath those overhead track lights, which were too bright then so I had the dimmer put in right over there by the back door.  We’d sit like two kids back in the college library, except instead of being awkward or passionately fighting off the urge to have sex in public we were married and reading together, tired and I can always remember wanting a drink.  I didn’t want to drink; I just wanted a drink to relax with the pages in front of me and nothing but sleep then and patients the next day.  She wouldn’t let me.  She kept me to that promise and made sure I stuck it out.  We are both stubborn people.  Well, she was and I still am stubborn.

    The island.  So many times she’d lean against the marble when I’d get home.  I’d see James’ cleats by the back door, dirt on them, maybe a little round mold of mud clay lying on that back door rug.  Someone’s notebooks on the table.  My mind draws up the era when Mags was out of the house.  What imprints that on my memory?  Marble countertops and Rose standing there, gray on the edges of her auburn.  Her and Mags with the shining auburn.  Rose was auburn always. Always auburn.  I’m pushing the bottle along the wood table.  My bottle of Cutty Sark.  Sark the sequel revenge of the sark.

    The left leg of my khakis is missing.  The most comfortable pair of pants I ever had.  My skin all bashed up and black and blue.  My ribs wrapped up and my arm draped around Connor. His long hair over the collar of his brown leather jacket.  I’d always thought I was more handsome, but that night he seemed the older and more confident brother.  Maybe because he saved my life.  And Rose rushed over to me; her hair long and auburn and she just leaned into me a bit.  Just that little lean made the ends of her hair touch my leg.  Something that soft should’ve never touched that injury.  Although I was proud of it afterwards - gave my thigh and knee a nice definition even if I had a strange crick and limp when it was too humid.  She looked at me.  Her face young.  I was young too.

    “You’re drunk.” She smelled.

    “Yes, I am.”

    “I’ll step in the other room,” Connor said.

    “Thank you.”

    “A scholar and a gentlehand.”

    Connor smiled at me and flicked my ear, his leather arms squeaking.  The leather later cracked but worn and comfortable.  I wore it.

    “This is a long time coming.”

    I nodded.

    “The motorcycle?”

    “Destroyed.”

    “Who was it? Billy?”

    “No, not that piano playing drunk.”

    “Who then?”

    “It was this guy.  His name was Nicky Schwartz.  He was going to introduce me to this comic who’s supposed to be on Saturday Night Live next month.”

    “Ben.”

    Her hands were always so cold.

    “This is going to stop.”

    “C’mon, mom.”

    She narrowed her eyes. Oh, when her eyes were narrow and gray.  What could I have possibly done but to listen?  But then she grabbed my right hand, which was wrapped up too and put it on her stomach.  The white wrap of my bandagehand on the purple the soft purple of her dress.  There were darker purple flowers on it too.

    “You almost died.”

    “Yes.”

    “It has to stop.”

    “But I don’t want it too.”

    She gripped my hand.  I could feel the pressure and I saw her nails digging into the bandage.  Her eyes grey and round storms.  The old house with the round wood table that had marks from hot plates I put on it without trivets because I didn’t know any better.  I could feel her stomach round and my hand looked round.

    “Will you?”

    Round the cycle spun and round I fell onto the pavement and I’d put a lot of money into that bike and I loved taking care of it but it turned into mangled metal.  All of your dreams turn into mangled metal I’d thought then.  It’s not true now.  I thought of the first time Connor and I got drunk in the field by the barn.  I’d stolen the gin and we didn’t know what was what.  We drank it without thinking and of course we threw up side by side in the weeds next to the red painted wood.

    “Will you?” She asked again.

    “Yes,” I said. And that was the beginning of the end.  I slept that night in pain and spent the next thirty and more years in pain without a drink.  I could’ve made people laugh and I did resent her for that for so long even when I saw the fluid and the blood and James in the artificial light of this world for the first time.  I resented her in the off-white porcelain of the jacuzzi and her auburn hair and I resented the fruit smell of so many of her clothes because I couldn’t and I could’ve…

    In comes Tom from the back door and he’s wet and his coat is wilted.  He pulls off his boots and they thump on that back door carpet.  He’s got a beer in his hand.  There’s a scrap of brown paper bag clinging to it.  His hair is soaked and black.

    “Hey, dad.”

    “What’s the weather like?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “Do I need a coat?”

    “No, it’s warm.”

    I think you might find a lot of answers from the drooping and full flowers and bushes of September in the rain.  The square divisions of the window make leaves and branches look like pictures.  I hold my hands up and pretend to take a picture of Tom, my second son.  He looks at me and sips his beer.  He wipes rainwater off his chin.  Or maybe its beer.

    “A little early to be drinking,” I say.

    “What about you?”

    “I’ve earned it.”

    “Me too.”

    I laugh because I like when my kids are quick.  It makes me see myself in all of them.  It’s a humane mental insurance policy.

    “What are you always riding the train for?”

    He sits across from me at the table.  He stretches his right hand out and touches the golden and curved knob of the right back door.  His left arm sweeps back and touches one of Rose’s plants on the sill.

    “I like the rhythm of the train.  I like looking out the windows.”

    “You always liked this one too.  Didn’t you?” I point outside at the rain and the leaves and the rocks and the water in the pool and then the fence and beyond that the woods and beyond that the Smith’s house through the woods.

    “One of the better ones I’ve looked through.”

    “You were at church?”

    “Yes.” He sips.

    I sip. “They mention your mother?”

    “Not that I heard.”

    “The bastards.”

    I’m quiet thinking of that damn church and how Rose wanted to go every Sunday.  My mother wanted me to marry a good woman well I married a good woman a god-fearing woman just like my mother.

    “Dad?” Tom says.

    “Yeah?”

    “Are you going to be alright tomorrow?”

    “I’ll be fine.”

    “Sober?”

    “Don’t tell James or Maggie.” I wink.

    Tom laughs and takes another sip of his beer.  I look him in the eye and nod my head.  He slides his beer across the wood and I slide my bottle.  The can is cool, wet, and slick.  I lift it. Cold beer and carbonation.  We make eye contact and laugh together.

    “Dad?” He says.

    “Yes.”

    “Why don’t you keep the house?”

    I lean my neck back, look up at the skylight, and see the drops forming a momentary perfect circle and then splash and slide down the glass.  There are streaks running in every direction from perfect symmetrical natural liquid circles.
 
    “Because if I couldn’t save her, why would I save the house?  It wasn’t ours anyway.  It was hers.”
    I feel hot and angry but that’s not the way I mean it and that’s not the way I want it to sound.  Tom slides the Cutty Sark across the table at me.

    “I don’t believe that.”

    “Now you’re getting the hang of it.”

    He moves to get up.  His hands are poised on the table, his forearm muscles are contracted and a vein runs up from along the joint of his thumb’s distal phalange.  But he sits back down again, wet with strands of dark grass hair hanging low on his forehead.

    “You’re alright, dad.”

    “You too?”

    “I think so.”

    “At least you’re that far.”

    Tom and I drink together.  I’m not quite sure what time it is but it has to be after noon. Although, I’m not quite sure what the difference is.



James

    “Everything look in order for tomorrow?” Eve asks me.

    “Yeah, I think so.  She did a good job getting everything set up beforehand.”

    “She was a very organized woman wasn’t she?

    We’re sitting on the floor in my room, on the black carpet.  The lamp in the corner is on.  I can hear Tom and dad laughing downstairs.  Sounds travel in this house; they always have.   The rain on my window: pit, pit, pit, slowly.  Are Liza and Maggie packing up their rooms too?  This house needs to be empty by Wednesday.

“Yes, she liked everything to be in place.”

    “Did she like me, James?”

    I look at Eve in my dark room.  Even with the top light of the lamp illuminating the blue walls and the white ceiling, it’s dark.  Yes, of course mom liked her.  She would’ve loved to be a grandmother to Eve’s child.

    “Marry that girl, James.  You’ll both make such handsome children.”

    She always said things like that in an old-fashioned way.  Handsome children.  I think she might’ve been jealous of Eve in a way for taking me away.  But maybe I’m being to full of myself thinking that way.  I should say something instead of just packing these books.

    “Of course she did.”

    “Are you sure?”

    “You knew that didn’t you.”

    “It was tough to tell.”

    This confuses me because I thought that mom was always warm and welcoming of her into the family.  She never said a bad thing about Eve to me not once.  But as honest and eloquent as mom could be, you always got a sense that there was a certain silence she kept.  She could’ve had reservations about it, I’m sure that a lot of women do when their children get married, sons or daughters.  But with the way that dad welcomed her into the family I figured mom must’ve felt the same.  Maybe he knows something about it.

    “She could be quiet at times, but I’m positive she loved you as much as my dad does.”

    She nods at me and places a few more books in the box.  The one on top is an old child’s book of mine with quick retellings of the Greek myths.  The cover is brown and the print is old looking.  It’s been old since I was young.  There is a picture of what is supposed to be an ancient Greek looking depiction of Zeus’ face.  Eve’s pushes the books down in the box and the cardboard rubs: eek, sccrrp. She’s quiet and her thin eyebrows are drawn down.  I know she’s working something out.   I know something is coming.  Is it what I think it is?  I should’ve been honest from the start.  She exhales, closes her mouth, her lips part again.

    “I sort of wish we could’ve had a baby before she died.”

    I feel somewhat relieved and at the same time, I feel even guiltier.  I’ll tell her after the funeral.  I’m too wound up and concerned about what will happen tomorrow.  What kind of behavior dad will be on.  What kind of behavior we’ll all be on.  Uncle Connor will no doubt be there and they haven’t spoken I don’t think in twenty years at least.

    “We couldn’t have known how things turned.”

    “I know,” she says. “It would’ve been nice.  I know she wanted to be a grandmother.”

    “Yeah, I think Maggie knew that enough.”

    Eve laughs and then sighs again.  She has so many different sighs.  I can’t decide which one I like the best, but part of me says it’s the sexual sigh.  And I know that’s right even if I don’t want to admit it.

    “I feel bad for your sister,” she says.

    “Why is that?”

    “It seems like your mom put a lot of pressure on her as far as that’s concerned.”

    It’s true.  There was a lot of pressure put on Maggie, but more pressure put on me.  She was the oldest, but she made it clear a long time ago where her priorities were.  They belonged in Morocco or New Zealand or Iceland or the far side of Siberia.  Whatever was on the other side of the lens.

    “No more pressure than the rest of us.”

    “I don’t know.  I just think being the oldest and a girl maybe your mom expected more out of her.  Expected her to be more of a traditional woman maybe?”

    It’s amazing how intuitive she can be sometimes.  I don’t know if what she just said is true.  But it’s not because it isn’t.  I never paid attention to that part of the relationship between mom and Maggie.  I figured mom accepted who Maggie was after so long and especially after she broke up with Jake.  We’d all figured he would be the one to settle her down a little.  I liked him a hell of a lot.  What is he doing now anyway?

    “That could be.  I never really thought about it.”

    “I don’t know.  I just kind of got that feeling.  Your mom was intimidating in a way.”

    “I never heard anyone say that. You think that?”

    “Yeah. I do.”

    I’m quiet thinking about it.  Thinking about my mom cooking a pork roast on a Wednesday night when I’d come home sweaty and wet from some late March practice.  The afternoons still cold and dark.  There would be grass stuck to the elastic bands at the bottom of my green sweatpants.  I’d put the stick down by the back door and my cleats outside and mom was by the oven. Everything smelled warm and roasting potatoes.  I’ll never forget that sensation.  That’s one of the things you can’t get back.  Is it wrong to associate mom with cooking meat?

    “I’m sorry if she was.”

    Eve laughs. “It’s nothing to be sorry about…I just…”

    She holds off.

    “What?” I say.

    “I don’t just wish we would’ve had a baby for your mother.  I wish we weren’t having such trouble.  I mean I really thought the last time…”

    I put my arm around her back and pull her close to me.  She’s starting to cry.  She’s crying into my armpit.  With my right hand I rub her back, with my left hand I rub her thigh.  Her jeans are soft and worn in.  She looks up at me, her face red and moist.

    “Don’t you wish it were easier?”

    “Of course I do,” I say. “I want kids as much as you do.”

    She breathes in her nose, sucking up the loosened snot and making that gurgling stuffy nose sound.  She nuzzles against my arm and armpit and I love the way it feels.  But what is wrong with me?  If I love even the sound of her snot and her puffy crying face then why am I afraid of her child?  Our child.  What don’t I want to give up?  I’m already married; I didn’t have cold feet about that.  I don’t miss any bachelor life.  I’ve never been afraid to make the next step in my life, but something is holding me back right now.  What would mom say?

    “You hid my child from me?  How could you do that?  What is wrong with you?” Eve says.


    I’m in court and handcuffed.  There is a judge looming in front of me.  He wears a wig like an old British aristocrat.


    “We find the defendant guilty of cowardice.  One of the high treasons of American society.”


    He slams the gavel and the guards carry me away by the armpits.

    Eve nuzzles me some more and puts her arms around me.  She squeezes me tight.  I wrap her up too and pull her close.  I take in the shampoo of her hair.  It still brings me back to our first date when she only kissed me and then gave me a hug.  That long hug when all I could smell was her shampoo.  That soapy smell like flowers.  I knew it was artificial but so artificial that it was realer than real.  More natural than natural.  Each time I smell it that first love and nausea comes back to me.  Even here and now on my floor where I used to pass out drunk or lay with caked sweat from practice when I didn’t even have a clue about her or that she would be pregnant and I’d be hiding from my wife.

    I’ll tell her after the funeral.



Liza

    The rain has let up and I’m standing outside wearing my raincoat hood over my head.  The afternoon is cool and it still smells like summer.  The water in the pool has risen high, almost to the top of the rock ledges.  I had to come outside to think.  I suppose I could’ve just gone to my room and not given myself away by walking past Tom and dad like I did.  But I did keep my calm in front of Eve when she told me about the secret I didn’t know.  Why did it have to come from her?  I love her but she’s not in my family.  She is, but she really isn’t.  She isn’t the same as all of us.

    How is that your vision of your family changes?  So many things are always supposed to change, friends, seasons, opinions, favorite ice cream, and even sex.  The way you see your family isn’t.  It does, though.  First you know your mother and father because you need them.  Then you know the number of people in your family because you know your brothers and sister.  That stays for a while through car rides and fights and sharing bathrooms and dinner and getting rides places.  Then everyone gets older – the secrets start coming out.  You find out that your father is a good man but he has a past that is deeply flawed, and that’s OK because you find out that everyone does.  And being the youngest you get to hear it all, hear all of the problems and the stories of your brothers and sister, the problems and bad things they’ve done.  There is nothing of the original picture of family left.  What keeps all of that together in a shape?  How are you supposed to see it all when you get older?

    “Liza, what are you doing in the rain?” Tom’s voice says.

    I turn around and see him walking out the door.

    “Oh, it isn’t raining anymore,” he says.

    “Yep.”

    He shuffles out and stretches his arms.  I think he always liked weather like this.  It would make sense because it sort of fits his demeanor.  He is all kinds of rain and grey but he is also warm.  He walks up to me by the pool with his hands in his pockets.  His hair is wet and a bit blackish rather than reddish brown.  Is he drunk?

    “Well what are you doing out here anyway?”

    “Just thinking.”

    Tom spreads his legs apart and looks down at his shoes.  They’re a nice pair of brown loafers; they seem comfortable.  He was the neatest of us for sure.  He and James were both neat, although James was always bounding around to a practice or running out with his friends could leave messes and things on the floor.  Mom never came down so hard on him.  Maybe it was because he took on so much.  Tom’s shoes look comfortable but he looks messier than usual.

    “There’s a lot to think about, huh?”  He puts his hand on my jacket shoulder.

    I pull my hood off my head and shake my hair.  I look up at his face.  He is looking forward, but he senses me and so his eyes drift down to me.

    “Tom,” I ask. “What are you doing always riding the trains?”

    He takes his hand off my shoulder and puts it back in his right pocket.  He scuffs his shoes on the wet stones.

    “There’s something about it.  Something about that moment of travel, even though I’ll always bounce back from the city out here, when the train is moving I feel good.  Having a beer and riding a train.  Its very simple in a way.”

    I nod my head.  He’s very stern now thinking about it.  I decide to put my hand up on his shoulder. “You could’ve asked me to come to mass.”

    He turns down at me. “Don’t you ever think about anything simple?”

    I don’t know what he means by that. He seems really curious, though.  He wants to know. There are a lot of simple things in the world I guess.  I mean don’t they say that you can break down the whole earth and the universe into different math formulas?  Those formulas might be tough to understand but numbers are a lot simpler than stars and atmospheres and endless space.  I don’t think I’m supposed to find joy in riding a train and drinking a beer.  That doesn’t make sense to me.  I want to jump into the excitement of the night at school.  But then isn’t simple staying with mom, not leaving her alone.  Not killing her.

    “Are you drunk, Tom?”

    He raises an eyebrow. “No.”

    “You’re not like dad are you?”

    “Don’t you love dad despite this? Don’t you understand?”

    “Yeah I do.”

    “No, I’m not like dad.”

    He hugs me and I can smell beer.  His clothes are wet too but he smells like church and faint cologne.  The type that most boys smell like. Musk is what it’s called. Maybe this is what happens to family. We fall apart and bring it back together again.  But we aren’t so bad.  This is just what we’re changing into.

    “I love you,” I say to Tom.

    “Thank you.”

    I open my eyes and over his shoulder, I can see dad standing in the doorway looking out at us and cradling his bottle to his stomach.

    In the rain, I walk over to dad and his motorcycle.  He put his glass down on the sopping sod and mud. 


    “Want to ride?”


    “Why didn’t you tell me?”


    He regards the motorcycle for a moment.  The rainwater is streaming down his nose and over his lips.


    “You were so close with your mother.  You know she’d never let you ride.”


    “But why didn’t anyone tell me?”


He looks past me.  I turn around and look at the open hole in the ground where the mourners are standing stiff like cardboard.  I don’t even recognize any of them.  The hole is filling with water.  I hope mom won’t drown.  She’s not a fish.


    “It wasn’t up to us.”


   

Tom

    I feel a little drunk but I’ve been drunker. Taaake and eaat.  I wonder if Liza can smell the church on me.  She asked me if I was like dad and I said no.  I think that is the right answer.  No, it definitely is.  I’m nothing like dad.  If she was asking me if I was a drunk then the answer is, “No, I’m not a drunk.”  But then again, dad wasn’t a drunk either.  He was and then he wasn’t.  Now he was again.  Rather he is again.  What does that make him?  What would he be?  I think that is a question we’ve all tried to get at.

    “Have you been packing?” Liza asks me as we release our embrace.  She smells like lavender, or what I imagine lavender to be.  Flowery, soft, like rainwater maybe because she’s been soaking and marinating in the scent standing outside so strangely.  I feel good in this warm wet afternoon.  I stretch my arms out again and Liza looks at me strangely.  My pants are damp.

    “No, not really.  I guess I should before James yells at me.”

    Liza smiles at me.

    “Sorry, Jimmy-boy,” I try to say like a gangster but I feel a little foolish.  I don’t make the jokes.  Dad does or James will sometimes or Maggie skewers us with her sarcasm and wit.  That is the formula, that’s how it works very simply.

    “Do you think it’s a good idea to let dad go ahead with leaving the house behind?”

    Its not a good idea and I know that. I mean you can’t just give up a place like this.  It’s more of an investment than a house.  The finely done stonework here around the pool, the little waterfall that falls from the hot tub into the main pool itself.  Also the landscaping around the front walk and the stone patio in the front.  I watched those Mexicans do it.  They weren’t really Mexican.  I talked to them and gave them beers.  Dad told me to do that.  They were from Guatemala some of them, others from Ecuador.  No one is really a Mexican; you have to find out the truth, the real story about where someone is from.  I think that’s something dad always cared about.  Maybe he cared about it too much when he was younger.

    You look around this backyard and at the big white shape of the house itself with the black shutters.  They’re really navy, though, I think.  It is an investment.  That’s what people do when they get older, they make nests, nest eggs, they put their money in something.  Mom believed in that, putting your money into real estate, your real estate, something extremely personal and I bet they did make a lot of money from when they first moved in here years ago.  Things only get more expensive as time goes on.  I think its because people forget about how things originated and keep guessing at what everything costs until they become lost in values.  That’s not true.  Its all based on markets, demands, supplies, loans, mortgage rates and freezes.  I’m just thinking the way mom would.  I look over at Liza and mess my hair up at bit with my hand.

    “No, it’s not a good idea.  But I think its what dad wants.”

    “I know that, but I mean if he’s going to lose money on it or mess up the plans mom had then maybe we should stop him.”

    I look past the pool to the corner of the house where the blackberry bushes are.  I could go for a handful.

    “Let’s pick some blackberries.”

    “What?”

    “Blackberries.” I nod my head in their direction and slide my hands into my khaki pockets feeling debonair.  Feeling like George Clooney feels.

    In the darkness of my eyes I see the flashing of the train in the sun.  I see Christ on the cross and the priest in white and black with his purple Lent sash.  The train is silver and it streaks blue.  The wire and antennae above strike for a moment and sparks leap out and rain down around me.  Just a chance encounter or are things planned like that like tracks everyday? The train is moving down the line and its night I watch the red lights on behind.  The gap between the platforms is a gaping hole that wants me to step down into it one way or another.  Where am I?  Who will save me?

    “No, I want you to tell me what you think.”

    Fine.

    “I think that even though it’s wrong, its what dad wants and he’s entitled to it after all of this time.  After spending most of mom’s life with her, loving her and doing exactly what she wanted of him.”

    I realize that I’m breathing sort of heavy.  Liza seems satisfied with that answer.  She looks over to the blackberries too and nods.  Rain drips off the gutter and a breeze picks up a strand of her hair on the side of her head, lifts it, drops it.

    “You are a little drunk aren’t you?” She asks me.

    I laugh.  I can’t help it. “Maybe.”

    “Let’s pick some.”

    We walk alongside the pool.  There are leaves and silver reflections of the trees and the grey sky on the surface.  We pass the back windows and I can the light of the den on and dad’s shape seated in the recliner.  It’s so hard to read him.  I think we connected sitting at the table.  I can’t know what he’s feeling.  Is trying to wrong?

    We step down the little hill by the deep end of the pool and walk to the gate.  Liza lifts the latch, we pass through, and it clanks.  So many times that little piece of metal hit the other pole of metal and made a noise.  Time passes and it becomes memory, routine and music.  But it’s just a sound.  Is it special because I have pictures in my mind to go along with it?  Because I see a slideshow of us growing up?  I see Liza tiny in a neon pink one-piece bathing suit her hair whitish blonde like it used to be.  Now she slides along the wet grass next to me.

    “What are you doing here?” I ask her.

    “You’re so strange, Tom.”

    “You should be at school, you don’t need this.”

    “I do need this.  I have to be home for this.  What are you talking about?”

    I shake my head.  She shouldn’t go through with this.  She should be away, be having fun.  It’s the beginning of school.  Things never get more beautiful or more optimistic than at the beginning of a school year of any school year.  You dread going back, but once you are there the first month is like no other feeling, no mixture of emotion anytime else.  At least that’s how I always felt.  But then, I never went to college.

    We walk up to the berry bushes.  There are many dead and rotten ones on the dirt below the bushes.  There are some confused one’s that still aren’t ripe and others that look just ripe.  I reach out and pick a few.  I look at them in the palm of my hand – five.  All of their little circular pockets of juice.  It’s my favorite fruit.  Liza pushes her palm up to her mouth and chews the berries.  She shows her hand, its purple black like a scab or more like that sweater mom got me for Christmas when I was thirteen.

    “Still taste good.  A little sour.”

    I look down at the berries.

    “It’s something simple.”

    Liza nods and reaches her hand to pick more.  She grabs one that is full.  It looks ripe, delicious and perfect.  It even shines a little bit like cartoon fruit.  She holds it between her forefinger and her thumb regarding its shape, twisting it, trying to see it from all possible angles.  She extends her hand to me and I look at it.

    “I’d eat it in a second.”

    She looks down at and spreads her fingers out.  She flicks her palm and the berry pops up. She catches it in her mouth like a child.  Like we all used to do.  Chewing, she spits a bit of purple on the ground.

    “A little sour.”

    “Ah.”

    She swallows the rest.

    “Why didn’t anyone tell me about dad’s accident, Tom?”

    “Because mom wanted to spare you the knowledge.”

    I have a tendency to spit back immediately when I'm offguard.  I couldn’t help it.  She wanted to know.







Maggie


    I saw them outside eating blackberries.  They weren’t close like that the last time I was home.  They never were.  Liza and Tom are complete opposites.  Tom so strange he never wants to let anyone know about anything, riding the trains the way he does.  The only one of us who really hung onto going to church.  I’ve often wondered if he was going to become a priest.  I think he’d be good at it because he could be eloquent if he wanted to.  I don’t see him sermonizing but just giving sermons.  God, he is strange but that’s what I love about him.  He’s got dark and he’s hurt like me.

    Eve is moving around the kitchen wearing an old yellow apron.  The apron doesn’t say anything, it just has a picture of a loaf of  bread, a carrot and some other vegetables, an apple.  I think it’s supposed to represent the food groups.  Yes, I forgot that there are eggs on there – dairy.  Mom used to put it on us.  James even wore it.  But he’s leaning on the island where mom always leaned and talked to us. He’s leaning and watching her cook.  She’s been over the stove for a while now and she even has something in the oven.  It’s a kind of steak she’s making.  The kitchen smells like cooking tomatoes and garlic.  She’s trying to feed us all.

    I look across the table.  Dad has his glasses on and he’s doing a crossword.  He takes a drink from the bottle but keeps his stare down at the puzzle.  He’s almost three quarters done with it.  I feel like I should be worried.  I haven’t seen a binge like this.  Jake tried to once.  He couldn’t handle it.  He needed me.  Something strange about that.

    “What puzzle is that, dad?”

    He looks up and frowns, his glasses coming forward on his nose bridge.

    “Sunday Times.  Your mother started it and,” he looks back down at it, then up. “Well I guess I thought I could finish it.”

    He sounds like an actor.  I feel like I should be watching him on a screen curled up in a ball on my couch or back at college in my dorm room with my comforter over me feeling warm and wanting to be touched by a boy that only lives in my head and who’d never really touch me.  How is it that my father is a movie?  I want to cry listening to the way he pauses after “well.”  I want him to slide the Cutty Sark across the table to me and take a long slug too.  James is turned round, though.  He heard it too.
    “Dad,” he says. “Maybe you should lay off the scotch a little?”

    “What? Are you afraid I’ll have the shits all night?”

    “No.”

    Dad looks down at the crossword. “That’s the worst that it can do to me at this point.”

    “But, dad…” James tries again.

    Dad turns up, glasses leaning forward. “Trust me, Jimmy.  I know this stuff.”  He stops and looks over to me. “I’m entertaining enough, right? I’m not being a sad bastard.”

    “You’re doing well,” I say.  I can’t think of anything more clever.

    “How does it smell, Ben?” Ah, there she is to chime in.

    Dad ruffles the puzzle, sits back, and lifts the bottle and glugs.  He puts it back down on the table and it hollowly bangs. “Great.  Like a Saturday Night off Mulberry.”

    Eve laughs and James is still just leaning.  I hear the padding of feet and Liza enters from the den.

    “Jesus, it smells good in here.”

    “Don’t take your mother’s favorite name in vain,” dad says.

    I have to keep myself from laughing.  James turns from the island again but he doesn’t say anything.  Liza is dead in her tracks.

    “Damn, dad,” she says. “I don’t know if that’s funny.”

    Dad looks up from the puzzle.  I can tell he is or has entered an area of rare territory even for him.  The glasses are up front and he is looking above their frames at her standing in the opening.  She’s framed with her terrific blonde hair out and long.  I wish my hair were light and easy like hers sometimes.

    Dad sighs. “Maybe you’re right, dear.  I’ve lost my timing.” Stop. “I’m sorry.”

    “Thanks.”  She moves into the kitchen and sits closer to my head of the table.

    “Did you and Tom have a lovely time picking berries?” I ask her.  I can’t resist.

    Liza seems put off by this.  Her skin is a little thin. She knows that this is the way that dad and I can always be.  Her eyes are wide and it’s amazing how blue they are.  I can see my reflection in them and is there even a bit of pride or indignation in those pupils?  I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in my little sister before.

    “So you saw us?”

    “Yes.  I never knew you and Tom were so buddy buddy.”

    “He’s acting a little strange.”

    “That’s Tom,” James says, his back still turned.

    Liza shakes her head still looking at me. “It’s different.”

    “He seems fine to me.”  It looks like Eve is stirring.  I can see her right elbow.  So much motion going on in this kitchen right now.  I feel like I’m seventeen again.  Liza was only what, three then?  What is she making?  It smells delcious and my stomach is rumbling.

    “Well first we have a lovely filet mignon with a béarnaise sauce.”

    “Jake…”

    “If that is not to your liking then perhaps the bronzini?  Full body, head on.  We do all the cutting tableside.  My personal perk of the job.”

    I couldn’t stop laughing. “Stop it.”

“Is it wrong for a handsome young waiter to be enthusiastic about his work?”

    “Well with vanity like that you must not get a lot of tips.”

    “You’d be surprised.”

He stood close to me playing his role.  I looked up at him and held his hand.  I pet his knuckles and those bones that stretch down to our wrists, which make us all living skeletons.  But I was tired and our apartment and the streets always smelled of thick frying garlic.

“We can really just go out somewhere.  Let’s just walk down the street.  Or let’s just go downstairs to Cibo.”

“No, I want to cook for you.  You’re home now.  That’s the whole point.”

I sighed. 

“Aren’t you happy to be home?”

He nuzzled up to me.  I never would have imagined the way he turned out to be.  This man with the build and the look of a boxer.  On Sunday’s when he wore that old worn charcoal sweatshirt with the frayed neckband he was a boxer.  He was a boxer who was in love with me and would do anything for me, the most romantic fighter I’d never seen fight.  I saw his clean shaven face, his five o’clock shadow gone.  Why did he do those things for me? All of his gestures.  Because he loved me, because that apartment was home.  But is my apartment among Italian restaurants home? Was it ever?  Are the windows?  Those blue and yellow plaid couches, the round table, the wicker chairs?  He was my imaginary boxer and he couldn’t fight what’s inside of me.

“Yes, of course I am.”

He kissed my thighs through the hole in my light thin jeans I’ve had since college.  I ran my hands through his hair trying to push and spike it up.  His arms wrapped beneath my knees.  He looked up at me.

“Then let me cook for you.”

“OK, Jake.”

That was the week before I found the ring.  Two weeks before he proposed.  Now it’s over a year later and everything still stinks of garlic.

“Tom has always just been a quiet, I don’t know, thoughtful guy.  That’s just the way it seemed to me anyway.  He’s deep.”

I like Eve and everything but sometimes she goes too far with her analysis of our family.  It was cute before to hear that she admires our dynamic but I’m not in the mood for this right now especially her cooking and wearing that apron.  It always happens, though, doesn’t it.  That time of the month sneaks up when you have to come home for your mother’s funeral.  My body knew somehow.  No, its on a cycle.

“He’s definitely deep, your brother,” Dad mumbles, his face set on the puzzle.

“You think so, dad?” Liza asks.

How did this all come up anyway?  Are we doing a report on Tom?

“I know so.”

“What do you mean, dad?  Has Tom opened up to you?” James is suddenly curious.  He’s the oldest son so he should be the deepest one.

Dad takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes.  He crinkles the magazine’s pages and flips the puzzle over.  Then he leans back in his chair and puts his hands behind his head.  He is a satisfied farmer at the end of the day, a relaxed slacker in the back of class.

“You know your children, James.  A father doesn’t need to have his son open up to him to understand.  He can read him, he made him.  A good father knows anyway.  That’s what I’ve come to believe.”
James is looking at dad and he seems confused, he doesn’t know what to say.  Now he looks at the floor.

“Its one of the mysteries of being a parent,” Dad says.
 
We’re all quiet.  Eve comes up from behind James and places her chin on his shoulder.  He kisses her cheek.  I never did that to Jake.  Maybe he wanted me to.

Dad puts back on his glasses. “In any case, I hear the pitter patter of not so little feet upstairs so why don’t we all just lay off your brother.”

    “Right.” James takes a big breath. “How is everyone doing on packing?
”
I groan.  It’s a natural reaction to him.

“What, Maggie?  I just want to make sure we’re making progress.”

“Yeah, yeah I’m making progress.”

I’m not making progress and I don’t know what that even means.

James frowns and turns to Liza.

“I’m almost done,” she says. “A little bit more tomorrow and I think I should be good.”

Liar.

James appears to be satisfied by this and Eve pokes him in the side.

“Alright, dad, that’s enough.”

Dad looks up at hearing this.  He cocks his head and realizes no one is talking to him.  He goes back to the  puzzle but then turns up again and takes a drink of scotch before returning to the black and white boxes.

Tom thuds in from the den with wet slick hair.

“Smells good in here.” He’s smiling.

“Good,” Eve says. “Because its done.  We can all eat.”

James motions to Liza to help him set the table.  She gets up and they begin clattering around with silverware and drawers.  Tom sits by the window.  He pushes his wet hair back and leans against the table.  Liza places a trivet down in the middle.  Eve comes over with oven mits and a glass pan, she lays it down.  It smells delicious and looks delicious.  I can see the steak beneath the tomato sauce and peppers and onions that are covering it.

“Steak pizzaola,” she says.

“Good job,” I say.

“I think we should all go to the Checkmate tonight,” Tom says.

I see the bar on Mill Road.  It’s an old house in the middle of a neighborhood of other old colonial homes.  The only difference are the red neon lights that flash beer brands.

“I can’t think of a better idea,” I say.






Ben

They’re all gone now.  I feel bloated sitting in this damn comfortable chair.  I’m passing my hand over my round food belly.  I’m sticking it out a little, I never really grew a gut.  That has to be one of my greatest achievements, staving off the onset of middle age old age fat.  It’s bound to happen to so many people.  You lose metabolism, you work longer hours, harder hours for the wife the kids, you don’t eat meals when you’re supposed to – I even did it sometimes too.  Sometimes when I’d be stuck in our office looking over patient files or doing the god damn books when we had some fuck-up of a bookkeeper the greatest thing was to think about coming home and devouring whatever roast or dinner that Rose would’ve had still waiting for me.  So it’d be cold but you just warm it and it didn’t matter because she’dve been waiting for me there anyway.  I can feel the acid in my stomach eating away at all that steak in there.  That girl can cook cant’t she, Jimmy?  I toast his little league lacrosse picture that sits on the shelf.  I bet that steak pizzaola would taste great late at night.

I listen to the drum sound of my stomach.  I try to play it like bongos.  There is no resonance.  Only a good fleshy smack.  Thock.   Connor and I both never grew bellies.  Our father never had one either.  We weren’t a lanky family, all just sort of lean, gaunt maybe.  My father’s hands and arms sinewy strong.  His palm disproportionately large looking and feeling to the rest of his body.  It wasn’t fleshy or soft and you wouldn’t call it a bear paw either with an encompassing vice-grip.  No, it was slightly rough, it was weathered, it had lived and touched.  I think Connor and I both aspired to something like that in our whole appearance, genetic or otherwise.   I don’t know what he eats or how Erin feeds him, but when we worked together we both tried to keep a diet, stick to the words and promises that came out of our mouths during the day to those people sitting on blue paper waiting for us.

I didn’t want to go to the Checkmate with them all.  It’s not my place anymore and it hasn’t been in such a long time.  Checkmate, oh checkmate, my home away from home! Just the sound of my own singing voice coming back to me in this room.  It’s funny to think of all the songs and all the times wasted in that ramshackle house of a bar.  Were they really wasted times?  Well in the one hand they look wasted and they absolutely were.  Aye stood meself quite a few droonks standing aside  the barnacle.  However, on the other hand they weren’t wasted at all, there was a remarkable clarity that usually comes with the passing of time, or the strange once in a blue moon occurance of recognizing the significance of a moment as it occurs.  But our president hires the poets, writers and playwrights to do that and they still haven’t taught me so I guess that government laureate spending is going to waste.  Who started that? Clinton?

I can’t help but laugh out loud, though.  The nights Connor and I would have there when we were young.  He was so much more reluctant to take a drink than I ever was, but when he did it was a different side you’d see to him nothing like the quiet and thoughtful appearance  he’d always give though I suppose the reason he took that on was probably due to me and the way I acted when I was younger, in middle age and I guess even now with me entering old age or already well into it.
That one night when he and I were playing darts – cricket – and we met those girls.  The sassy ones who’d just moved here from Minnesota. It must’ve been some time before my accident.  Yes, it was because I had been hanging out with Billy and his whole gang or I guess entourage is what it was really.  The practice was doing alright but I still felt I could get somewhere going to the City all the time or out east, doing my best to rub my elbows and make people laugh – to know me as a character because its always been my belief that the secret to life lies in how you can read someone’s character.  And the trick to success was to know that about other people and then to do your best to emit a sense of character a sense of wholeness within yourself that another person could make out amid all the other bullshit and clutter of life and truly grab onto and lose themselves in whether over a few drinks or if you were really good at it, over two hours on a movie screen.

That night, though, we’d been going at pints of Budweiser.  I can’t remember who was winning the game – I never really cared for darts.

“It’s not like how we’d imagined it, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

One of them was blonde with long hair.  She was tall but I couldn’t tell how tall she was when I saw her in the corner of my eye as she sat.

“People make such a big deal about the glamour.  All this Hamptons bull and the Great Gatsby.”
“I know.” The other laughed. “The Great Gatsby.”

I couldn’t help myself.  I was drunk and feeling funny.  So I staggered over to their table by the long front window that looks out to the street.  I placed the darts between their glasses.  At first they were startled, but I smiled.  They seemed amused then.

“And what is wrong with The Great Gatsby?”

“Excuse me,” the blonde said.

“Gatsby.  What’s wrong with him?”

She paused and the other sized me up.  They weren’t sure what to make of me?  Was I oppressive or playful.  The blonde touched the tip of the dart.

“Well I just think he’s not all that he’s cracked up to be.”

“Sure he is.  I think he’s a great guy and a great character too.  That is one beautiful book.”
The other laughed, short and halting.

The blonde held her finger to her lips, then she looked up at me blinking.

“I don’t know.  I’ve been living here for almost a year and I haven’t seen anything like him or the world he was supposed to live in.  Seems kind of seedy around here.  Things have fallen off haven’t they?”

“Scathing reviews!”

“I just don’t see what the big deal in romantizing him is.  He’s just a guy from Long Island.  Billy Joel is too and I hate that “Piano Man” song.”

I turned around to check on Connor, but he’d left the dart area.  I saw him hovering by the jukebox and the bar.  I went back to the blonde.

“Well, Billy happens to be a friend of mine but I think you are getting a bit off the topic and missing the point of the book.”

“This guy sure thinks a lot of himself,” the other said.

“Where are you girls from?”

“Minnesota.”

“Ah, give it some time.  You’ve both got cold charms and you need to have them warmed by a few glorious Long Island summers.”

“Cold charms?” The blonde pushed the darts toward my waist. “What does that mean?”

I shrugged.  I was about to speak, but from the speakers I heard the beginning of “Piano Man.”  I pointed up in the air as if it were some divine coincidence.  Then I felt Connor’s hand on my back.  He stood beside me cradling his pint glass.

“ ‘Piano Man’,” he said.  “Great song.”  He winked at me and I broke up.  The girls groaned but they warmed up to us.  He could’ve made the blonde one when the night was all said and done but he didn’t.  He and Erin were off and on and not so serious at that point, but I think he saw a future in her and didn’t want to mess that up.  She ended up picking us up that night anyway.  A sweet brunette who was originally from New Hampshire but ended up at the university and she stuck around.

“What are you doing going out like this, Ben?  You’ve got a baby daughter at home.  You should be helping out your wife.  Why she stays with you I have no idea.”

“She’s got a good sense of humor.”

“You’ve got to control your big brother, Connor.”

“He’s not such a bad sense of humor.”

I started giggling in the back of the car.

“What? I don’t get you two.”

No one did and we were terrific together.

There’s that picture of the two of us at my bachelor party.  It’s on the shelf above James’ lacrosse picture.  We’ve both got our ties loosened and dishevelled around our necks, our hair still thick and brown, arms hooked.  You can’t put a price on a good sibling.  I hope all of the kids know that.  I think they do otherwise they wouldn’t all be going out together tonight.  I’m surprised it was Tom that had the idea.  He is my strange son and I don’t think I’ll ever know everything about him and I’m not supposed to.  But it was good to have a drink with him watching the rain today.  What’s he going to do with himself?  I don’t know the what but I know that he is going to because he will.  He’ll solve his mysteries without my help.  Without James’ help and certainly now without Rose’s help.

He reminds me of Connor a lot.  They both were reserved and Connor was quirky though not as introspective or strange.  I reach next to me and take a drink from the bottle.  It’s almost done, so I ride the burn and the bloat and take another glug to finish it off.  It’s time to start on the next one.  I stand myself up and drag myself over to the desk.  I slide my hands along the top listening to the squeak of my palm on wood.  That’s all I’ll have for now on – it’s what I’ve been used to for many years now.  But what is wrong with me to be thinking like that.  I’m drunk and I slouch in the rolling chair.  It’s leather too.  My eyes are closed.  My arm drops to the bottom drawer and my fingers pull at the handle which is cooler – metal.

She’s there against the blackness.  It’s all auburn now – auburnette more accurately.  It’s her white sundress that makes her shine more than the hair.  But where is this?  No its not heaven.  This isn’t the afterlife – it couldn’t be because even though I’m Catholic I never thought about it: she thought about it.  But she must be thinking about me because of that dress, she knew I loved that dress more than anything more than her naked.


It has to mean more than that.  She walks along the black.  It gives way to the rocks down at the jetties.  I took her there on our second date - an afternoon walk.   The sun is shining just the same.  Is this it? Is this eternity?  An endless day remembered in my eyelids?  She’s pointing out to the sound.  I see a sailboat, someone is actually  sailing the way they used to by the beach.


And its gone its all gone and I can see Connor.  It’s nothing but Connor his hair like mine blowing in the breeze. We’re down by the docks.  He stands behind me sitting on the planks looking into the water.  I’m holding an O’Doul’s between my thighs.  It’s his reflection I see.  That’s what brothers are for.


“You let her die,” he says.


“Which one.”


“Maybe it’s both.  You’d have to decide about Rose.”


“You’re right, Connor.  Are you tired?”

Then it’s my desk.  It’s the wood everywhere – the brown shades, the shines.  Me and the bottle in between my thighs at the desk.  I look to the shelves.

They’re all gone or going.




James

    I’m kissing Eve and everything smells like stale beer but tastes like wintergreen gum.  It’s her lip balm.  I open my eyes and see hers.  We’re up against the little banister and counter by the door.  Her small eyes.  Chinese eyes I called them when we first met.  If the thing in her stomach is a girl will she…

    This place is cramped – the people by the door moving in and out with smoke and the smell of moist night – and I can hear the sounds of the hunting game behind me: the virtual deer and antelope noises.  One of the new digital online jukeboxes is playing “Don’t Stop Believing” in the corner – an old terrible fan favorite.  The overproduced piano, the high vocals, but I don’t really know anything about music.  All I know is that this Brooklyn beer is heavy in my stomach and would leave my mouth tasting completely hoppy if it weren’t for the wintergreen residue on my lips.

    “I still love this place,” Eve says. “I loved it when I first came home with you.”

    “A town cornerstone.”

    “Was this Ben’s favorite?”

    “I’m not so sure.  He and Uncle Connor did come here a lot.”

    I see Liza and Maggie playing darts in front of us.  They are both really bad.  Maggie lines up on the one floorboard that moves perpendicular to the rest in order to mark the dart line.  She aims and her right leg lifts up as she tosses.  The dart hits the wall beneath the board and falls to the floor.  She throws again.  This dart sticks in the cork behind the boards.  Third time is a charm and she hits the outer level of eighteen.  She strides up to the dry erase board and makes a slash next to her side of the number.  On top of her column her name has a frowny face above it while Liza’s has a smiley face.

    “Nice shooting,” I say.

    She grins back.

    “Are you drunk?”

    “It would take a few more than that.”  She pulls the darts out of the board and hands them to Liza.  Liza puts down her Budweiser on the ledge next to Eve.  Maggie walks past her and as they pass each other something about the flash of the two different hues of their hair makes my stomach turn.  I don’t know what the feeling is: nervousness, earnestness, what?  I can only think of dad and Uncle Connor and how they must’ve looked years ago with their long wavy hair sitting at one of those window tables drunk.  Now will Uncle Connor even show up tomorrow?  What about dad?  I can see him stumbling over the casket in the church and spilling whiskey on mom’s body. This is no folktale – she’s not coming back.  Will Uncle Connor, though?  Brothers.  I see auburn and blonde.  Sisters.

    Maggie elbows my side.  The way I used to sneak up on her and  prod her sides with my hands, the younger brother picking on the older sister – she hated that.

    “You see Jane over there?”

    “No, I didn’t. She’s here?”  I saw her on the way in.  I can see her now.  She has the same sort of round face that she always did.  Still has the same curves too, bigger breasts than Eve.  Eve doesn’t know.

    “Who’s Jane?”

    “Ah, just this girl we used to go to school with.”

    “I think I saw Dan Christian over there too.  Those Christian Brothers.  You and Danny were always so close.”

    It was behind the junior high where Gertz and Cicero beat him up.  Tom was riding on his bike.  I chased him away, pushed him onto the cement. It must’ve been hot because that day was scorching and I could feel it in the old white Chucks I was wearing then.  Dan had fucked Gertz’s girl.  I didn’t want to push Tom, but he was there at the wrong time.  I take a long drink of my Brooklyn.  Thick, heavy and cold. Does the dirt feel that way?

    “Didn’t see him either.”

    “Well he’s over by the bar too.”

    “I should go over and say hello.  I actually just saw Arielle Gregors slip in the back door.  I’ll be right back, Eve.”

    “Shouldn’t I come?”

    “Nah, you’ll be bored,” I say. “I need to do it to be polite.”  I pause.  The timing feels awkward to me.  There’s an Elton John song on the jukebox - he’s wailing about something. “My mom knows their moms, you know?”

    “Get me another drink?” She rubs my elbow.  Gin and tonic with lime.

    “You got it.”

    I start walking and can hear Maggie behind me.

    “Our James was the popular sibling in high school.  You knew that right Eve?”

    “Well, I think so,” I hear Eve.  And she says it in that sweet way she has of honestly trying to answer a stupid or sarcastic question like Maggie’s.  She just wants to defend me.

    I walk over to the bar.  There’s a Mets game on one TV and a Yankees game on the other.  The Mets are losing 2-1 to the Marlins in the sixth, while the Yanks are tied at two with the Twins in the third.  There are Christmas lights up, draped in and around the liquor bottles on the shelf and the behind bar mirror.  I can see myself, my face looks thin, my cheek bones sticking out.  I fix my hair and hold up my bottle.  Mike knows us.  He gets me a beer.

    “Buy back,” he mouths.  The buy is a little elongated and the back is short.  The way any good Long Islander would say it. I grab the beer by the neck and lean into the bar.  He’s a nice guy – he’s been working behind the counter for awhile; he and his brother Tony.  Their dad owned the bar.  Mike’s got a stubbly beard - wearing a grey sweatshirt - and he’s slightly heavy.  I lean and expect to be seen and before I know it, I feel a light hand on my shoulder.  I turn my head back and it’s Arielle.

She’s still pretty as hell with shiny black hair and those eyes that are big and brownish – hazel.  Her eyes are big but not too big.

“Well, its one of the famous Gregors girls.”

She laughs. “You sound like an ass.”

“You know I was always good at that.”

She gives me a hug and all of a sudden I feel the warmth of a good drunk.  The kind I used to get in college when I knew a good night was coming. When the feeling hits and the voices around you swell and seem important maybe more important than they really are and the lighting seems like it is already part of your halycon memories yet still painfully alive and present.  That’s dangerous the way I can recognize it.  It’s probably the way dad…

“So, did you see Jane and Danny over there?”

“No, I hadn’t seen them.”

“You should come over and say hi.” Her voice lowers. “Jane told me about your mom.  James, I’m really really sorry.  She was the sweetest woman.  You know how we all liked coming over to your house.”

She’s touching my shoulder and her finger grazes my neck.  I felt a quick small rush of goosebumps. It has to be hormone impulse.

“Yeah,” I sigh. “Its tough.  I’m going to miss her.”

“It was sudden, huh?”

“Well my dad saw it coming.  He tried to diagnose it.  He thought it was a form of cancer and that she’d have longer.  But I don’t know.”

Dad did see it coming.  He tried to heal her.  I don’t know the depths of the work he did, what they went through in the house during the past four months.  I didn’t know it would happen  like this.  Liza must have some kind of idea.  Dad on the phone in the summer.  He knew that Uncle Connor could help him if he could only bother to call him up.  They were brothers and it was a shame that that one disagreement could break them apart.  But disagreeing over a death, especially in their profession will lead to life long silences and feuds – drinking problems.  Lucky for dad he had his already in young age.

“That’s rough.” She hugs me again.

“Thanks.”

“She always did make the best brownies.  It seemed like she’d always happen to be baking when we’d be over.”

“She liked to make it seem that way.  That’s something she was good at.”

“Huh?”

“Appearances.”

“Oh.” She’s quiet.  I know she’s uneasy at the situation.  Does she have any delicacy or tact or is she just simply beautiful? Do I have tact?

Mom is in the kitchen except that the kitchen is separated from the rest of the house.  It’s all black beyond the borders.  There is no den and there is no side hallway to the garage.  It seems like we are on a TV set somewhere in space.  The kitchen smells sweet and like chocolate.  I don’t smell any of the savory roasting meats that make my stomach growl.  She’s in front of the oven wearing a long yellow dress.  She turns around and the oven is open and red.  She’s holding a metal cooking sheet.
“James,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting you.”


“It’s OK, mom.  I didn’t know I would be late.”


“I made brownies.”


I laugh. “Mom you didn’t have to.”


She bows her head and I notice that she’s wearing the apron with the food groups on it.  The one I used to wear when she helped me make those Chinese dinners I tried to make for everyone or on Christmas when I’d try to make the pork loin.


“Yes, I did.”


“What do you mean?”


“Did your wife like my apron.”


“I think so, mom.”


She pulls out a cake knife and cuts into the pan.  Steam rises up from the cuts she makes in the hot brownies.  It smells like I’m ten.


“Everything goes on, James.”


“What do you mean?”


“Light, colors, sound.  It comes from all different places.”


“I don’t understand.”


“Have a brownie”


And I take a bite.  The kitchen fills with yellows and whites.  The taste in my mouth is rich and it is hard work chewing through the brownies and their entire flavor.  Now there are thick whisps of steam and swirling around my mother the kitchen is filling and moving away from me.

“Only The Good Die Young” is on the jukebox now.  Who would’ve thought?  I take a drink and look over at Eve talking to Maggie.  She’s looking at me, she must’ve been for a little bit.  I hold my finger up and roll my eyes to pretend like I’m bored.  But I’m not bored, it feels good to be recognized and remembered.  I can remember my old excitements.  Now I’m looking at Dan Christian.  I never hit him, but  I never really apologized anyway.

“I’m sorry about what happened between you and Gertz, Dan,” I say to him.

He frowns and takes a drink of his pint. “I never held it against you, O’Donnell.  Just that dumb polock.”

I take a drink too.  It’ll be like a silent agreement, even though I don’t agree.  But everything else seems about right – the voices, the accents, the music, and the taste.





Liza

The bartender knew I was underage but he gave me a beer anyway. “It’s for Ben,” he said.  Dad’s legacy  is all over this town.  How many people has he healed?  How many people know about his accident when I didn’t know until just before?  I should just enjoy it all.  Tomorrow we are going to bury mom and right now it looks like everyone is doing alright.  Maggie is playful playing darts with me and talking to Eve, though Eve looks worried about what James is doing.  He wouldn’t do anything.  That girl Jane was such an old girlfriend.  But that oldest Gregors sister is so pretty, they all were.  Anne was the closest one to me.  Tom knew her somewhat. Where is he?

I always loved this Billy Joel song.  He’s one of my favorites. “Still Rock N’ Roll To Me” and “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.” They all sound like New York.  Long Island.  Home.  I never could believe that dad was friends with him.  He must’ve been close to getting famous.  The accident stopped him.  That would make sense.  Then again what do I know about it all anyway?

  I’m standing holding my bottle.  The wrapper is damp and peeling off.  I can see the Bud of the Budweiser logo.  This place is how I pictured it – wooden, messy, a dive.  I didn’t expect the sawdust on the floor.  It must be for atmosphere.  James said he’d been sneaking in here since he was sixteen.  He did look older, started growing facial hair when he was pretty young, well I was really young.  I slide my right hand into the snug right pocket of my jeans and look around.  Kids from my grade said they’d snuck in here too.  I don’t really want to be seen.  That would be sort of embarassing being home this soon after I went away and down here drinking.  It would seem a little strange of all of us coming down here together the day before our mother’s funeral.  But I think we all need this.  I’ve been depressed since I heard the news and this has seemed like the longest day of moping.  I need a little positive energy to go into tomorrow.  I don’t know if I’ll even stop crying.  Just thinking about the look of the coffin and the whole ceremony is making me tear up a little bit.  I wipe my eye with my sleeve and feel a little water in my nose.  My mother is dead so its OK for me to be home.  People will understand.  But its so hard in this town because once word gets out it soon gets distorted and then you’re pregnant or depressed or an alcoholic and in shame when you’re seen or your name is mentioned between mothers in the Stop N’ Shop.

“Ok, sorry sorry, Liza.  My turn right?” Maggie taps my arm.

“Yep, no problem.”

“This is a marathon, huh?”

“It’s kind of a boring game.”

Maggie laughs and her hair flies back.  My sister is beautiful in her own way. “I don’t know why guys like it.  Jake used to…”

She still has her smile but it fades and she starts to frown a little.  She holds a grin that is barely above straightlip.

“Anyway, let’s just finish.  You need to be exposed to this kind of boredom. It consumes your college years and your twenties.”

“She’s right,” Eve adds.

“See,” Maggie says. “We have the wisdom of a married woman too.”

She winks and Eve laughs.  I feel like I should laugh too but I’m not sure if Maggie was being mean or nice.  I just take a litle sip and my beer is getting warm.  I’m not good at drinking.

I see Eve looking back at James and I look back too.  But I see the back door open and Tom is walking in with some girl. 




Tom

“Tom! Hey look its my little brother.  Where’ve you been?  And who is this?”

James is talking and he’s excited.  He must be drunk.  It’s good for him take his sober serious sombre leadership edge off.  I guess I’m more of the sombre one.  Well we all are now.

“This is Natalie.  We went to school together.”

“Hi,” Natalie says.  She holds out one of her lean athletic arms.  They were always like that.  Even in English class back in tenth grade I’d look at her exposed shoulder and notice the gentle tone of the muscle.  That was something extremely feminine.

“I don’t remember you coming over to the house at all,” James says.

“I was at one of your parties.”

Is this song Bruce Springsteen?  The pretty girl next to James is talking.
“Hey you knew my sister didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I say.
“Anne Gregors.”

“Oh, you’re Arielle.” I pause.  I pretend to reflect. “I see the resemblance.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Where did you go to school?”

“I didn’t.” I can see her eyes sort of glaze. “I was a year behind Anne anyway.  She and I just had a few classes together.”

“Oh.”

Thankfully, Natalie is touching my elbow. “Let’s go get a table in front or outside.”

“Alright.”  We start to move past them.  James grabs my shoulder.

“What is this?” He whispers.

I shrug and keep following Natalie.  We get through the crowd who are hovering around the bar with shots and necks tilted up at the games on TV.  Natalie leads along the main passage past the old Pac-Man machine and the hunting game.  She walks balancing her drink up high in her left hand. She carries it like it were a grail.  Maybe not that holy but something delicate and precious.  Does she treat all meaningless things that way? Maggie and Liza are still playing darts with Eve standing there looking a bit forlorn.  Why has James left her standing there?

“Tom.  What have you got there?”  Maggie says.  Everyone is in pretty good spirits.  I’m surprised they all wanted to come down too.  Our mother is dead and we are all out drinking together.  Is dad secretly mad at us?  No, he wouldn’t hold this against us.  He understands our grief – we all feel it.  This is a release.

“Just an old friend.”

Natalie waves like a passing sports icon through the stadium’s tunnel.  I see Liza and she smiles at me.
“Let’s just go out front,” I say to Natalie.

She continues to the door.

“Are you leaving, Tom?” Liza asks me.

“No. Going out front?”

“Oh.  Weren’t you just outside?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

Liza sips her beer and turns back to Maggie and the darts.  I pass by a big guy in a black sweater that is too tight for him standing by the door and move back outside into the night.  There are torches burning along the porch.  Across the way is one of the historic colonial homes with its wood fence.  It has a nice open field or lawn that I used to go and lay in some nights when I’d take walks.  There’s an empty table in the front corner of the deck by the bushes.  Natalie keeps going and we sit down.

“Perfect spot,” she says upbeat.

“Better out here.  More space.” I feel shy.

“You know,” she smiles. “It makes sense that I’d catch you peeing out back.”

I  bow down into my beer a little bit.

“It’s a good thing.” She says.

“Thanks.” I pause look down look up at Natalie. “You know.  You’re one person I didn’t think I’d ever see again.”

“What? Me?”

I laugh. “Who else.”

“C’mon, Tom,” she says. “We were buds.”

“Were we?”

“I thought we were.”

We both take a drink.  I think we’re respecting the awkwardness or maybe the tension.  Is this sexual tension?  It must be close to it.

“I’m going to be bold,” I say.

“I’ll be myself.”

“Your choice.”

“Well, then, bold.”

“I still think you are absolutely beautiful.  You have a terrific nose. I’ve always thought so.”
She rubs both of her hands along the sides of her glass.  The ice makes a perfect tinkling sound as it sloshes and becomes water with her alcohol.

“Quite a compliment.”

And I mean it more than I’ve meant something in awhile.




Maggie

Its hot in this god forsaken hole in the wall and my cramps are bad.  This is all fun, though.  Tom outside having a chat with that girl.  I can’t see him from here.  It’s all fun for us depressives to come out and get a drink.  Poor dad sitting alone up at the house.  We shouldn’t have left him like that.  Is he crying about her? About tomorrow?  Has he cried yet? Ever?  All men have to come to tears sometime don’t they?  That guide in Siberia.  He cried when one of his dogs died on the trip with us.  His knee bent in snow pants quietly scruffing and scraping the snow the breath rising and his staccato sobs.  I never saw Jake.  Not even…

I throw the dart.

It lands in the first level of nineteen.  That closes that one out.  The others did nothing for me.  I walk up to the board to circle my X.

“Now all I need are the bullseyes,” I say to Liza.

“Let’s hope you can get those quick.”

“That’s the competitive spirit I like to see.”

We’re  both bored but what else are we going to do in this shitty place?  I have been in worse - bars with dirt floors in Central and South America. Its only that this place is in our backyard and I get to be reminded of watching old friends puke in the back when I’d come home from college.  Guys a year older than trying to make out with me because I’d “gotten hotter and really become a women since you went away to college.”

Liza steps up and throws her first dart. It hits the outside section of ten.  I don’t know why I agreed with Tom’s idea to come down here, but then again I do know why because it is better to get out of the house and it even looks like James is loosening up over there in the corner.  I remember hearing about him being involved with beating up Danny Christian.  His friend Paul and the other James almost got sued for it.  They were good friends in the end because they admitted that James never through a punch – never touched the kid.

And look at Eve just watching him.  Shame on him.  Shame on her too for not going over there and just listening to him about saying a quick  hello.  She should’ve known he was drunk.  I could tell. Ah it’s uncomfortable in here.

“Eve you should go over and drag him back.”

She puts on a smile and pretends like its not bothering her.  But it would bother me.  I wouldn’t let him talk to a slut like Arielle Gregors.

“Oh, no,” she says. “I’ll let him catch up. He needs to lighten up a little.  He’s taken this all so hard.”
We’ve all taken it hard.  Maybe we should be taking it harder.  Maybe I should get out of here before I see someone I know and go sit with dad.

“Yeah, he has a way of doing that.”

“That’s what attracted me to him.”

I take a drink of my pint and set it down. “What that he was so serious?”

“No that he welcomed responsibility.  That he was willing to. You know it feels different when you date a guy who you could recognize as a husband or a good father.  I don’t know maybe I’m crazy.”
She’s not crazy.  She’s right.

“Jake, I’m home.”

I walked down the hall, the lights were dim and there he was to take my coat.  His tie was draped around his neck.  I looked down at the coffee table.  Two glasses of wine.  One red and one white.
His hands on my waist.

“I’m not sure I know,” I say.

Eve looks down at her drink.  Liza taps me on the shoulder and hands me the darts.  I touch one sharp tip and feel it try to pierce my skin.  Over Liza’s shoulder I see a girl with blonde hair sneaking up on her.  I raise my eyebrows and motion with my head for her to turn around.  She does.

“Liza! What are you doing home?”

“Oh, hey Lindsey,” she says.  She’s tentative.  She doesn’t want to be there or be seen just as much as me.  My baby sister.  The other girl hugs her.  I’m sure she’s a bitch.








Ben

They put the drape over her body.  I could see the last glimpse of the red along her ribcage. Then it was all blue.

“We’ll take it from here, Dr. O’Donnell.”

I nodded and watched as they wheeled her corpse down the hall.  I looked over at the nurse’s desk.  They looked down at their paperwork.

My shoes clacked against the floor.  It was freshly waxed.  I was wearing dress shoes.  I got to my office and realized I still had my gloves on.  The blood was turning dark and dry on them.  It already looked old.

I opened the door peeling my left glove off.  Connor was sitting in one of the chairs that faced my desk.  He was still wearing his scrubs too.  He didn’t turn around.

I pulled off my left glove and the band smacked rubber.

“What is it, Connor?”

Silence.

“What the fuck do you want to say to me?”

He turned around.  That one strand stretching across his forehead.

“It’s over, Ben.”

I take another drink of the Cutty and place the bottle down next to my record player.  I kneel down and open up the cabinet below.  I run my hand along the musty smelling carboard of the vinyl covers.  I know just where I want to go. Let it Bleed.  I slide it out and pull the sleeve off, holding the record gently on the edges.  I place it on the turntable.  I pick up the needle and line it up on the track line.  The black wax is spinning and now the old crackles come from the speakers – strumming guitars.

        Well we all need someone we can lean on
        And if you want it, you can lean on me.
        Well we all need somone we can lean on
        And if you want it, you can lean on me.

    Jagger is singing like he always wanted to be a cowboy.  When I  hear a Stones song like this I remember all of the smokey bars and clubs I’ve been in. The times when people crowded around and the talk itself was pure energy and no matter how bad I felt the next day if I could get some of that feeling in me again I knew I would be alright – the invisible vision of a good time and of tinkling glasses.  How much of that is just the elusiveness of youth?  Because I can remember how important everything felt just because I was young and could talk to people and people knew me and knew about my legendary nights and bouts with the bottle.  Now who knows me?  I’m sitting alone in a study that is made up of years, pictures, books and dust like anything else.  What is that thing that is always on the tip of your tongue when you’re young?  Is it a word?  The answer would mean a whole lot.

Yeah, we all need someone we can dream on
And if you want it, well you can dream on me.
Yeah, we all need someone we can cream on
And if you want to, well you can cream on me.

    When you think about it, though, life can be very simple. Like our engagement party.  Rose’s father – old Gerald with his stately moustache drinking Tokaj in a teacup – had it in the VFW Hall basement.   He’d done well as a lawyer but he liked the basic things.  He was just an average guy.  All of our friends were behind the little concession counter they had giving out cups and cups of  beer while above them the the menu was missing letters.  Ham urger.  F ench Fri.  Pe s – Cola.  My dad dancing with Rose and her mother.  I watched them twisting their legs and feet when Gerald clasped his hand on my shoulder.

    “You’re a smart kid, Ben.”

    “You saw that article too?”

    He had a hearty laugh that sounded as though everything funny surprised him, or as if it were the first joke that had ever been invented.

    “No, but I mean it.  I’ve never met a quicker young man than you.”

    “Thanks, Gerald.”

    “I’m very happy for the two of you.”

    “That means a lot.”

    “You’re going to do right by her? Aren’t you?”

    “What do you mean?”

    He pulled up the waist of his pants, they were already a little high.

    “I mean a smart young man like you – things come easy.  I know you’ve got a lot of ambition.  I just hope it doesn’t tempt you too far.  So far that my daughter might suffer because of it.  You know I can always put in a word at the firm for you.  I know you haven’t studied for that but you should consider…”

We all need someone we can feed on
And if you want it, well you can feed on me.
Take my arm, take my leg
Oh, baby, dont you take my head.

    “No,” I said firmly.  Maybe I was too firm. “You don’t need to help me out with your firm.  We’re going to be alright.  I love Rose.  I know that.”

    “That’s what I thought and I’m happy.  That’s also what I’m afraid of.”

    He turned, grabbing my shoulders, and hugged me.

    “I have some Tokaj behind the counter.”

    And I always hated him for that.  I hated him for being afraid of how devoted I was to his daughter and always doubting my dreams and disguising it as some sort of respect or awe for my intelligence.
Maybe even that night wasn’t as simple as I thought.

We all need someone we can bleed on
And if you want it, baby, well you can bleed on me
We all need someone we can bleed on
And if you want it, why dont you bleed on me

    But as time passes with songs like this one and the other musics of life, I still see everyone linking arms over shoulders - Connor and I there with all of the neighborhood guys.  It was simple because it was a night all about me and Rose.  That’s all it was ever really about for me.  Even when I slept past noon or woke up in the bathtub wet after one of those city nights.

    I wasn’t close to being famous.  I don’t think anyone knew me just like no one knows me now and I’m alone in my study.

    “Come on, Benny, open your eyes.”


    “I don’t want to.”


    “You’ve finally made it and now you don’t want to look in the lights?”


    “Maybe I don’t want to know.”


    “Come on, open.  You promised me in our vows.”


    “Did I?”


    “Yeah, in sickness and death.”


    I open my eyes.  It looks and smells like the VFW hall.


    “What is this?”


    “Something simple.  Dad would’ve liked it.”


    “Yeah.”


    “I wish the kids could’ve seen it.”


    “Yeah, me too.”







James

    It’s great to see all these familiar faces.  When you first come back from school you’re a little tentative about it, but now that I’ve gotten older I welcome it.  We have a good social life in D.C. – sure – but this is something different.  I mean this is coming home.  I have a reputation here, a reputation that isn’t based off my work status and my office career.  That’s the thing about getting older isn’t it?  You start to lose the romance that you once had about yourself.  There is nothing sexy about working with numbers or about doing taxes, paying insurance, wanting to get a good night’s sleep.  When I used to see a girl like Arielle, I’d think of nothing but the possibilities.  I’d think about how I could be the best man for her, how I could cook her dinner or make her laugh.  I’d try to invent scenes in my head – about as creative as I got.

    She lays across my lap.  Her dark hair draped down my thighs to the faded denim of the couch.  I’ve never been in this house before.  There are white french doors that open up to a dripping deck and back yard.


    “I could cook ya big Chinese dinners,” I say.


    We touch fingertips.


    “I bet you could.”


    “When are your parents coming home?”


    “I don’t have parents.”

    The girls in my dreams always had small eyes so its strange that I would eventually fall in love with Eve.  Can something inside of you see it coming?  There’s something to that.  And that’s the thing about being young too.  You’re looking for answers to questions like that and you can fathom being a philosopher.  I could ask myself questions about love for a living.  That seems feasible then and you’re all the more romantic for it.  Because you’re full of potential then and can wonder about those things, time doesn’t pass and bring on routines and threats of gingivitis from forgetting to brush at night and drinking too much coffee.  Then again, the real girls I romanticized turned out to be sluts for older guys - like Arielle out there.

    I flush the toliet.  The handle is slimy. There is a flyer for Reckoning who are playing an acoustic set the next Friday – Grateful Dead covers are perfect for the nook of liberals curled away in this fair town.  I look at myself in the mirror.  I widen my eyes and the pores on my nose look dirty.  The faucet handle is slimy too and the hot water handle only gives off cold.  I should’ve remembered that.  The nights I’d have here.  The Thanksgiving breaks. Faces on faces who I’d known, forgotten and some who I was still slightly in love with.  But all of that was before Eve.  I splash my face with water and run my hands through my hair, wetting and pushing it back a little.  She’s out there and she needs her gin and tonic!  I never got it for her!  I rub my forehead feeling my hand’s clam.

    “What does yours say?”

    “It looks like a pink line. Yes, one pink line.  What does that mean?”

    Eve sat on the sink counter in the bathroom.  She pushed open boxes out of the way.  All of those brand names.  Answer, First Response, Rite Aid Brand, E.P.T and E.P.T Ordinary.  The pictures of women on the pink laminated cardboard, always looking so gentle and soft like a photographed Virgin Mary.  Some were already holding babies – greedy bitches. And there were the women peeking over the pharmacy counter at me while I looked at them, unshaven.  I wrapped my arm around a handful of those clean, neat boxes and smiled at them.  That was something that felt good.

She picked up the white thin paper instructions and spread them out.

“Not pregnant,” Eve grunted.  She groaned.  She never made noises like that until we started testing.  Her hair was pulled up and a few strands hung down in bangs.  I should tell her to wear them like that more often, I always like it when she does that – when she’s being messy.

    “Are you sure you missed it?”

    “Yes. I’m sure.  I’m very familiar with it by now.”

    Strange to hear her voice snippy.  But I should’ve known, it always came towards the end of the month.  Her usually even keel rocked a little by the waves within her, the waves I’d never undersand.  It felt good to know her that well, it made me feel like a man.  The last thing I’d ever think would make me feel like a man was knowing a girl’s cycle.

    “OK, well here’s this one.  It’s supposed to make a smiley face if you’re pregnant.”

    She picked up the box and held it gingerly, only on her fingertips.  A slight glare came off the blue box.  She dropped it and it bounced off the tile and fell on the peach bath rug.  Eve sat on the toilet, pregnancy tests littered the floor – pick up sticks in shades of white and tan.  I looked down for a moment.  One of them simply read, “Not Pregnant.”

    “I don’t want to make you sit outside while I pee and only have a frowny face to show for it.”
    She leaned forward - head towards thighs, bangs floating out – and covered her face.  I knelt down on the rug and slid over to her, letting the peach fur bunch and roll.  I put my hand on her neck and stroked it.  When she first spent the night, I rubbed her neck and in a moment of glee, pure silliness, she screamed, “I’m not a cat, I’m a woman!”

    “I won’t care if it’s a frowny face.”

    She looked up puffy.

    “You know what I mean.”

    I pulled her close against my chest and held her head tight with one hand.  With my other I grazed against the sticks.  One caught my eye.  It had a blue plus sign and something about that seemed wrong to me. I coughed.  She looked again, puffed.

    “We can see a doctor if you want.”

    “I’ll think about it.  Maybe. Yes.”

    Then, later.  I was in the downstairs bathroom. It was a Rite Aid One Step. I read the box.  Blue + | means pregnant.  I looked back at the stick.  Blue + | . She missed it.  Was she too impatient?  It had to be right.  How did she miss it?

    I looked at the box.  It was one of the women smiling with a baby next to her cheek.  How could she be so uncaring? I watched my pale face in the mirror.  Then I washed it.  The phone rang.  I heard Eve get up and thump.  She was crying.

    “What’s wrong?”

    “Your mother’s dead.”

    My crotch itches me and I turn the water on again just to feel the heat from the tap.  I look once more in the mirror. I can hear “Ruben and Cherise” on the jukebox.  I’ll step back out now.  People know me here and I’m not ready.









Liza

    “So is it true?” Lindsey aks.

    “Is what true?”  She can only mean about mom.  At least that is what I think she can mean.

    “That you’re coming home because of…well…”

    Yes and no.

    “No, where did you hear that?”

    “Mikayla sent me a message on Facebook.”

    “She did?”

    “So is it true?”

    Lindsey is leaning in close to me like she always had a bad habit of doing. I can smell her Chanel.  And Mikayla made up a lie to tell her, all the way from College Park, Maryland.  This is exactly what I was dreading.

    “Yes and no.”

    “Oh.”

    “Only for the funeral.”

    “Oh,” she says. “Yeah, because it really would suck to be stuck back around here.  I mean there is nothing to do.  Where can you go from here?”

    I have no answers for her.  There isn’t anywhere you can go from here.  The only place you can go is somewhere else and it is extremely important that you do that.

    “How is your brother by the way?”

    “James?”

    “No. Tom.  I saw him outside before with that girl, Natalie, you remember her.  She was in his grade.  Real pretty, real nice.  She played clarinet.  Karen wanted to be like her. Karen’s home too by the way.”

    That’s who it was! I knew I recognized her face.  She’s striking in the same way Eve is.  Statuesque, glowing, a girl that should be on a magazine cover but would never let herself get photographed for it.  That’s how I see Eve at least.  I never knew Natalie. How does Tom?  What’s gotten into him tonight?  Gotten into us all?  We should be going home shouldn’t we?  I see James still by the bar.  He looks drunk.

    “Maggie.” I look over Lindsey’s shoulder to my sister who is talking to Eve. “Shouldn’t we go?”

    “Are you alright?” Lindsey asks. She fondles her cell phone in one hand and pushes her hair behind her ear with the other.  I don’t know what to say to her.  She is my friend, I guess.  I haven’t talked to her and Mikayla since I left, which wasn’t so long ago, and now that I’m back and everything is the way it is I don’t feel like talking anyway.

    “My mom’s dead.”

    “I know, honey.  I’m so sorry.” The cradling of her cell phone from hand to hand.

    Maggie is next to me now  and she throws her hair over her head and ruffles it with her hands like she’s trying to add volume to it.  My father is a dying movie star and my sister is just in her prime.

    “What did you say, Liza?”  She’s sizing Lindsey up.  I know she’s been doing it since Lindsey came up to me.

    “Shouldn’t we go?”

    “No more darts or Led Zeppelin?” She acts surprised.  Lindsey peeks at her phone for a second.  And over her shoulder  James comes up to Eve.  Eve looks a little coy and James seems big and is trying to nuzzle her. “I’ll get my coat”

    “Everyone seems to be taking this well,” Lindsey says now that Maggie is gone. “I mean you’re all out drinking together.”

    This hits me and pisses me off.  I know it is strange and is probably wrong that we’re out doing this together.  But Maggie didn’t make a joke about it and Eve didn’t question James about it on the walk down so Lindsey doesn’t have a right to say it like that to me.

    “What are you doing home, Lindsey?  I didn’t ask.”

    She peeks down at the phone. “Just some things I forgot.”

    “Oh.”

    “I’ve got to go meet someone outside.”  She leans in close with her sticky sweet smelling Chanel and gives me a hug that feels like I’m in seventh grade and Billy is trying feel my nonexistant boobs by his blue locker right before we go to the buses. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

    “Thank you.”

    She moves past me and out the front door.  Maggie comes back over.

    “Where’d Chanel go?”

     I laugh.

    “C’mon,” Maggie says. “Those two are staying.  James said he’d bring Tom back.” She stops, looks towards the window. “I think Tom will bring himself back.”

    We walk together and quickly wave to Eve and James.  James doesn’t see, he’s leaning into Eve’s neck.  But Eve gives us a small wave and sips her fizzing drink.  Maggie and I move past the bar.  She pulls up the collar on her coat.  And as we pass the flapping wood door of the flushing bathroom,  “Good Times, Bad Times” comes on.

    “Right on cue,” Maggie turns back as she opens the door into the moist night.  But stepping out she bumps into a guy.  He’s wearing a thin grey sweater that fits him tightly.  He looks down at her.
    “Is this the elusive Maggie O’Donnell?”

    “Big word for you, Mike,” Maggie growls.  My skin tingles.  My sister is a growling movie star.
    “That’s a drink I’ll buy.”  The guy smiles and touches Maggie’s shoulder.  She looks disgusted.

    We’re not safe home yet.  Dad’ll have to wait.






Tom

    Drum kick punch and the cymbols tip. I can hear the music from the speakers, they are wired along the edge of the roof.  It’s a good song but it sounds stale from overplay.  With space and time will come the love remembered; like any classic, like any old thing.

    I move my attention from my ears to my eyes.  My heart is on edge watching Natalie as she fingers the bridge of her nose.  She must be self-conscious of it now that I’ve professed my love for its shape – its Grecian curve, although an art  historian would have a field day with that and with me in general.  How can I speak when there is flesh like that in the world? Taaaakeee and ssseeeee.  When objects move and perform and have a past that is well known but never fleshed out.  I’m not simple, but her nose is and I must take action in the silence among the torches.  Speak!

    “Is this the first time you’ve been here since you’ve been home?”
    “Yes.”

    “Afraid to be seen out?”

    “No.  Well maybe yes.  I like to go to the Corner sometimes.”

    I didn’t think she had it in her to go to a place like the Corner.  I’m always surprised that there are ever girls in there at all.  The bathroom is disgusting and seems like it hasn’t been cleaned in a decade.  The urinal doesn’t flush and runs a somehow never rising pool in its small ceramic basin.  The plastic soap dispenser is forever empty.  I’m not sure there is a girl’s bathroom.  But she goes and now that I look at her finger on the very tip of her nose - her glass oozing a slug’s trail on the flicker lit table – maybe it does make sense.

    “I like the Corner,” is what I can say.

    “What about you?”

    “Me?”

    Now she’s leaning over her drink. Her finger extends down from her nose where everything seems to emnate from – at least now – and falls over her pouting lips.  Not big and cartoonish and not thin – they simply are lips.  And that’s what makes my heart sharp.  The torches show themselves in the small puddles of condensation and melted ice on the table.  I can’t help but think of my friend Jeff.  He drank nothing but water until we were sixteen years old.  He was slim and nothing ever seemed to stick to him.  It was only until recently I connected that to his always drinking water.  Now he’s gone and I’m here.  He’s made of water -75 percent, maybe 80 – and I’m made of something I can’t figure out.  But I’m here and the torches burn and she’s leaning with a nose.

    “Yes, you.”

    “And?”

    “Aren’t you afraid to be seen out?”

    “Well its not like I went away anywhere.”

    She is about to say something.  She decides to touch her hair instead and I’m fine with that.
    “Why was that?”

    I’m not weak and I can’t really say why it was that it was that I did or didn’t.  But there is something about her that makes me want to tell her everything.  Even in this thick night that belongs to Georgia or Alabama, where the air smells faintly of fertile dirt, when she speaks I smell the mothballs of a church basement.  Which is to say that I want to confess everything to her as if I were seven and truly believed in reconciliation.  When I was seven and first understood death through the story of a cat being hit by a car in my CCD book and then later that night when I read – in bed with dad - the story of Martin Luther King.  And now mom is dead like the cat and the Doctor Martin Luther.  But she is here in torch light and wants to know me like we once knew each other.

    “I can’t really say.”

    “You can’t or you won’t”

    She turns away.  All of sudden this seems much more intimate.  Her nose in profile, the dancing light, the moistness and earthy fragrence  of the night air.  It seems like we are a reconciling couple.  We were friends – very close friends at one time – sure, but the way she is acting would sound and look like something more.  If we were a painting on display, or merely caught by a nosy churchwoman walking her dog to burn calories.

    “This is strange.”

    She’s turned back. “Why?”

    “Its been so long since we’ve spoken and now.  This feels like some kind of familiar rhythm.  Our postures.”

    She looks at me.  She’s looking long and hard.  Studying my face to see if I’ll move or flinch or look away.  Maybe I’m too stupid to look away.  Maybe I’m too strange like everyone has always said.  But either I can’t or I won’t and she knows it now.

    “Yeah,” she looks down. “I think there is something.  It makes me think that there might’ve always been.  There might’ve always been and…”

    “I can’t really say why because I don’t really know,” I find myself saying.  She on the edge of a secret, revealing her sentiment, and I find myself talking.  Not wanting her to show everything, not wanting her to bear that.  Because I’m not sure if I am ready to hear what she has to say.  I just want to watch the glow around her nose and cheeks and feel my blood. I want to feel the dabs of drinks I’ve had over the course of this day.  I’m not ready to have anything bared.

    “Oh,” she says.

    Or am I?

    “Let me buy you another drink.”

    “No,” she says.  I’d be nervous, but I’m not.  I see her pause.  She looks back up, squinting a little.  She’s trying to see me better. “Do you want to come to my house?”

    I look at her.  I know I’m simply looking.

    “Er…my parents’ house?”
 
    I smile at her.  I know I’m simply  smiling.

    “Yes.”

    I don’t know if I want her to bare anything to me.  I might just want to walk with her and breathe in the soil richness of the air.  Or maybe its that I want to run.  To find a place that’s quiet like snow.  I’m kidding myself of course.  I just want to kiss her.







Maggie

    Once a dick always a dick.  I can’t believe I’m caught.  I don’t think the term “red-handed” applies here, but we’re at the door – the portal of escape! – and of course I bump right into this guy and his gelled up pieces of jet black hair.  I know  Mike, I know what he likes and he’d like it if I got sassy; if I got high and mighty and pretentious.  He has to know what I’ve been doing because even if you get away you can’t stop the local paper from sucking your parents for information so that they can print your name and recent accomplishments up in the Thursday Herald, next to pictures of the most recent wedding of high school sweethearts.

    And with all of this, Liza and I are now holding dripping Bud Lights in our hands.

    “Gee, thanks, Mike.”

    “You never told me you had such a good looking younger sister, Maggie.”

    Once a dick always a dick.  I punch him on the arm.  If I’m not careful he’ll think I’m flirting.  Maybe I should do it once more; a little harder; just for the hell of it.  No, I should try to keep some of my womanly manners.  I think I’ve grown into some of those.

    “That’s because she was like…” I look at Liza.  She’s not blushing. She’s standing her ground, awkward as it might be. “How hold were you when we were in high school?”

    “Two, I think? Three?”

    “Yeah, that’s why,” I say and take a slug from the bottle.

    Mike looks me up and down again.  He has no shame.  He can’t be real, he’s like a walking charicature.  I’d give him more credit for his portrayal if he knew he were doing it, but I never was sure if he was.  He’s still in shape, though – have to give him that.  And he’s gotten a nice stubble.  It sort of reminds me of…

    “So,” he pauses deliberately.  A bit of self-awareness. “I heard you just got back from Siberia.”

    “That was almost two years ago actually.”

    “Well, well.  Who would’ve thought a stoner like you would become a world class jet setter.”
    I give him an ironic smile.  He enjoys this game.  I know he likes to get a rise out of me and he always has.  I should be able to help it.  But something about its oldness – not its not familiarity, because I’ve become so foreign – the fact that it is stale and tired and grey makes me fall into it.  Nevertheless I’m taking a big long gulp.  I’ve finished.  Time changes when you’re drinking with people you don’t want to.

    “We should be going.”

    “So soon, O’Donnell?”

    “Yes, I’m not here to be out getting drunk.  I’m here on family business.”

    He stops for a second and eyes down the neck of his bottle.  It’s like he tasted something wrong or felt a tingling in his throat and he’s looking for the insect, the tiny life mishap, that caused him discomfort.

    “I know,” he says.  He catches a glimpse of himself in the bar mirror. “That’s why I bought you the drink.”

    Then I feel complete guilt.  My pettyness after all this time to keep his character the same.  To use the same lens, the same color and light to outline him.  He’s not so bad and he’s probably just like me, looking for an answer to the youth that we don’t necessarily have anymore.  Is he alone like me?

    “Anyway,” he goes on. “I figured you’d be drinking this one down.  Knowing your family and all.”

    And it’s a dick thing to say, but it’s the truth in the same way that this town is the truth.  He finishes his too.

    I laugh and smile and I’ve got to give him one more punch right in the sweater. “Always a pleasure, Mikey.  I mean it.”

    He nods. “Nice to meet you…”

    “Liza,” Liza says.

    “Liza.”

    He takes her hand and holds it a little longer than I’d like.  Finally – it seems like that – he releases and Liza and I begin back towards the door.

    “Hey, Maggie,” Mike says.

    I turn. “Yeah?”

    “Didn’t you get married?”

    I give him the finger and turn back.  I hook Liza’s arm and we hit the door striding.  And this time we make it out clear, we’re free to the street and the long sloping hill home.
   
   
   



   
Ben

    I’m on the floor.  I’m laying on my stomach on this soft carpet.  It’s green and tan and brown.  It has all sorts of patterns on it.  I think they’re Indian – Native American.  Or maybe they’re Spanish, or Indian – Far East – or African.  Who knows, but to me it says ancient, some old world where people worshipped the sun and the air and made patterns to try and fill in the space of the unknowable.

    I  like lying on the floor.  I feel like that’s where I always belong.  I’m most comfortable there, its my cradle and my womb.  And this carpet just makes me want to sleep.  She picked it out of course.  I think I’ll take it with me to the new house.  Maybe I’ll get a dog who’ll roll around on it.  A dog with white hair that will fall in tufts and collect on the edges.  We never had time for a dog did we?

    I prop myself up on my forearms and feel the strain, the lactic acid beginning to collect.  I reach over and pick Cutty Sark up.  I turn the top off and drink.  Galup – the liquor drops down and makes waves upon the Hart Crane Sea , the East River.  I put the bottle back down.  I see it it on its side with the orange at an equilibrium.  So I spin the wheel.  The friction of the carpet keeps it slow and it slows to stop, pointing capwards toward the desk.  I drop to the floor on my stomach and exhale.  I kiss a stairway looking Aztec pattern and feel soft fabric on my lips.  I close my eyes.

    “Ben, it’s Erin.”

    “Hello, Erin,” I said.

    “I just want to say how sorry I am.  How sorry we are for you.”

    “Thank you.  And tell my brother that too.”

    “Of course,” she got quiet.  Like she was thinking about Connor and I. “Is there anything we can do?”

    The idea to sell the house came to me once I said outloud to myself, “My wife is dead.”  And I’m stubborn and I’ll stick to an idea.  So I said, “Yes.  Any listings for a small place good for a bachelor.”

    “Ben?”

    “Still.”

    “You…you want to buy a place?”

    “I want to get out.”

    “I don’t think that’s something to think about now.  I mean the kids and you.  Rose is…”

    “This would be best for all of us I think.”

    “What about the…”

    “You could sell it for me.”

    “That would take time.”

    “That’s all I’ve got now.”

    “I’ll see what I can do.”

    And she did.  God bless her.  Sark bless her, she found me a place and I put the money down.  My brother and I both married good women and if he comes tomorrow it will be because of her and not because of me or Rose.  That makes me sad in a way but much happier, much much happier for him because I knew what that felt like.

    I’ll go there on Monday.  I’ll step around and sit by the water.

    I open my eyes and can almost see myself on the floor.







James

    I come down the stairs and walk into the den.  I see mom standing there with a baby on her shoulder.


    “Hi, mom,” I say.


    She looks over at me. I know she’s looking in my direction but it seems like she is staring past me.  In any case the room is elongated.


    “He’s sleeping.”


    “Oh.  I’ll get a bottle.”


    Mom smiles. “I have one.”


    “Thanks, mom.”


    “Eve’s sleeping?”


    “Yes, she’s tired.”


    “This is a beautiful boy.” She rocks back and forth.  Her hips are swaying and so is her hair which seems much more vibrant than I ever remember.  I walk closer to her.  She sings into the baby’s ear.


    “Who’s a little whosits? Whats a little whatsits?”


    “That same little song,” I say.


    She nods and looks down at the baby.


    “You hold her, James.”


    “Me?”


    “You’re the father.  Sing to your daughter.”


    “What if I break her?”


    “Don’t worry.  He’ll  be strong like the rest of us.  Even Tom.”


    My mother still exists even though she is dead.


    “James? James?”  A girlish lilt says.

    I’m staring ahead at the contrast of the worn wood and the brightly flashing electronic jukebox.  A picture of Toby Keith flashes up on the screen.  It fades into one of the Rolling Stone album covers.  They are young with unkempt Beatles haircuts, they look pockmarked and British. My eyes focus and unfocus.

    “James.”

    I focus.  I’m back from wherever I was.  I need to get home.  Eve is next to me, shoulder to shoulder.  It’s Ariel talking .
 
    “You there?”

    “Oh, yeah,” I say.

    “I was wondering the same thing myself,” Eve says.

    Ariel looks at Eve.  She laughs and it’s a forced laugh.  One that I’ve known so well at bars, at work, at work bars, at work functions and luncheons.  I don’t remember my mother doing it and I wonder if anyone else stops to think if their mother forced a laugh in her life or not.

    “We’re going down Port,” she says. Now she’s just looking at me playing with her tanned leather bag on her shoulder.  Her eyelashes playing too.  “Do you want to come?” I’m drunk or fairly close to it,  and if those small hairs would ever speak a music to me it would be now and yet I don’t care what they have to say.  My lids are tired and my wife’s shoulder is touching my shoulder.  My wife.

    “No.  I need to get home.  We need to get home.  Tomorrow is…”

    Ariel nods. “I understand.”  She hesitates.  She takes a step toward me and then back, still with a hand on her bag.  She wants to kiss me. “It was good to see you again, James.  And it was nice to meet you Eve.”

    She doesn’t.

    Then I watch her as she leaves.  Her hips – her ass – moving from side to side.  Slim and round and not ready to give birth like Eve – my wife – will be doing in nine months.  I look at Eve.  I let my eyes  wander down to her small breasts and then to her wider – not wide – waist.  Above it her womb covered in a stylish dark dress that is soft and somehow casual.  When I’m drunk I notice things more.

    The people I know and who know me are leaving out the front door.  I lock my fingers with Eve.  She’s been quiet.  I know I’ve been wrong.  I’m an ass.

    “Ben’s probably wiped out,” she says.  She says it quietly. “Let’s go.”

    “You’re right, honey.”

    I take her whole form in again.  Her body outline I know so well against the wood and the jukebox and the beer and toilet stink of this institution.  Her against my home, her against the world.

    “Lemme just finish my beer.”

    I grab it and its slightly warm.  Then her hand is on my wrist.  It’s more than slightly warm.

    “Better leave it.”

    I move my mouth to begin a smile, but I see her eyes and I know she means it.  She wants to go and  I’m in trouble.  I’ve been acting like an ass, yes I have.  This whole being home has made me slip.  I must smell like wet grass and the stale sweat of a lacrosse jersey.  I’m melting backward into town.  Melting backward into time.  I leave the beer where its perched.  I take her hand and she accepts it.  My first move is a step towards the front door where I know Tom is sitting outside with that cute girl he was with – and good for him for that – but I hesitate crossing feet, then I pull my right back across with as much grace as I can and head for the back door.  Eve is attached to me by the hand, a weight that is not burden but merely extension.  And I feel this now with the light blurred and my mind moving fast as my father must have felt, and perhaps still feels, about a tall slowly glinting bottle.

    Merely is not how I feel.

    We pass the bar.  Melky catches a pop up and the Yanks win 6-3.  The news is already on the other TV so I don’t know if the Mets won or lost.  Now out  the back door the smell of exposed bark overtakes any lingering cigarette smoke.  We – my handmeld with Eve – move through the wet grass, step over the slanted and falling wood fence that separates the bar from the neighbors, quickly hop through mulch and make it to the glowing street.

    And Ridgeway is glowing, it isn’t slick, there are patches of grey, the drying.  Her hands are slick.  Not slick, but warm and moist – the clamminess I’ve always loved.  If someone saw the two of us together, attached, maybe we’d still look like newlyweds, which I suppose we are. But the people who saw us in the bar knew.  I tried my best to put Eve in the conversation, but I failed.  It was never like that before, not with people from my past around and not with…not with the secrets and the growing form.

    “I’m sorry about all that back there,” I say.

    “It’s fine,” she says. “I know you’re grieving.”

    I know she knows I’m grieving.  I know its not fine and I know she knows that I know its not fine.  But what am I going to do?  I have to do something about it.  That’s what I’ve been good at.  Not that  I ever had to stand up against such odds.  My life has been free of tragedy.  I just had to carve the turkey one Thanksgiving when Aunt Diane was too overbearing in her navy pant suit and dangling gold bracelets and Dad wouldn’t have any of it.  He’d snuck a drink I think, but we’ll never be sure because he’d never say.  The turkey was left there, a little gravy gelatin gathering on the skin.  I cut it, releasing the heat into the kitchen.  So much heat on a cold night that the sky lights were fogged – only blurred reflections of our family, pots, dishes of mashed potatoes.

    “I’m a little drunk,” I say.

    She stops and takes a good look at me.  Her mouth is a little pursed, but still beautiful.  She’d make faces like that with her small lips pinched together when we joked under the covers, or when I wore a pillow as a crown.  What guy thinks he will come to that silliness?  But now its different.  This is real.  Its all real.

    “Now you sound like Ben.”

    I’m looking at her stomach, still flat.

    “You sound like the rest,” she continues.

    “What do you mean?”

    “Always writing things off to fate or heredity.  That’s what I loved about you.  That you were not just different from them, but from everyone.  There was an accountability for things.  Sure maybe a fate brought me to you, or you to me, but I knew at heart you always felt an accountability in love.  Not just in love but in life.”

    Now I’m the quiet one.  The dynamics in this walk have shifted.  We’re still holding hands but her fingers are higher up on my wrist, inching along the forearm.  I don’t know what to say.  I look through the trees, where front porch lanterns are shining and making the small shapes of leaves.  The sand along the slightly raised side pavement is dark brown.  I see a white house.  One I have passed so many times walking, driving, running - a typical colonial of the town.  Old and tested, regal, inviting on cold days, open and romantic during the summer.  When I was younger and I looked at it, I felt those things.  I thought who lived nearby.  Did Chis Curtis live around here? That cute girl Elyse from my gym class?  But now these cases have no meanings.  Is there someway that the names can still grip me?  If they can than these houses still can and I don’t want them to.  I don’t want any of it to.  All I want is the sweatiness from her palm. What does that mean?

    We continue up Ridgeway’s long hill and turn onto our street.  We walk, still quiet, listening to our footsteps.  I kiss her neck.  I kiss her cheek.

    “I love the sound of echoing footsteps in a neighborbood,” she says. “It is joy.”

    “It is?”

    She smiles briefly. “For me I guess it’s the definition.”

    The curve bends showing us long lawns.  One of the street lights is out and there is a stretch of darkness.  It seems long, but it isn’t so bad.  We make it to the gate, still holding our hands.  The cars are parked along the curb as we left them, as we’ve been used to.  Whoever had to make the getaway was never blocking the others.

    We enter through the black gate, I let Eve pass before me.  In darkness we approach the shining light of the front porch.  As we climb the finely done Latin American stone work -  it looks like its from Montana - Eve stops me.

    “Why did you act that way in the bar?”

    “I’m feeling a bit…”

    “No, I know its not that,” she takes my other hand. “Something is wrong.”

    I can hear crickets.  I hadn’t heard them earlier.  Why can’t I stop looking at her womb? I know why of course.

    “It’s my mom,” I say. “Its my dad.  It’s everyone.  They tear me up.  They need me and they don’t need me – I need them.”

    She pulls me closer. “I know.”

    “I love you.”

    “But its something else,” she says.

    I look down at her.  Its our first date filtered through a strange new light.  Its off and maybe we’re not the same two fools.

    “What?”

    “Do you want,” she pauses. “What do you want from me?”

    I take her cheeks with my hand.  I see her hair, shorter, longer, vibrant from the hairdresser, a mess after sex or after a Sunday when we slept until two just to sleep next to each other. Things pass but its all her.  Where does this all come from?  How is she my wife?  How is she this to me?

    “Nothing.  Just you.  The ways its always been.”

    She purses again.  I think she might want to say something, but instead she kisses me.

    “You acted like a high school jerk tonight.”

    “I’m sorry.” I kiss her.

    We stand embracing in this strange September night.  Husband and wife at the edge of a new decade. What do young married couples do to shirk responsibility?  Young people act reckless, get drunk, travel, treat each other poorly.  But not two people as normal in love as us.  I’ve never acted reckless.  And why do I want to now?

    “I’m sorry too,” she says. “I’m asking and testing you on the night before your mother’s funeral.”
    I pull her in closer.  I’m standing with my wife, stooped under the overhead light that sits over the black door.  The doorpetal is shining.  Maybe I get a pass and maybe I deserve a pass.  But I want to pass the tests.  I really do.  I want to be the best for everyone.  I’m just.

    “I’m afraid.”

    “I know,” she says, “And I still can’t.”

    A slight  breeze picks up.  I notice we are holding both of our hands together, pressed up near our chins. Its like we’re on the altar again.  But its my front porch and this time the ceremony is something completely different.

    “Yes,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

    She grips my left hand firmly, but not my right.

    “So where does this leave us?”

    I see her in my apartment on our first date.  She’s on the couch and I’m sitting on the floor.  That small couch – more of a loveseat – and I couldn’t squish her on it, not on our first date.  I held a glass of wine, a white that looked orange and pissy in the bad lighting of my place.  I tried to explain the flavors, the bits I’d picked up from the guy in the store.  She laughed.  Turning her face up and not meaning to.  Posing and not meaning to.

    “You know nothing about wine, huh?”

    I smiled, looking down at my shoes. “You don’t hold back on a guy on a first date.”

    “Just play me some George Harrison and it’ll be alright.”
    “What if the best I have is Pet Sounds?”

    She rolled her eyes and smiled. “Pretentious.  But it wouldn’t be the first time.”
    “But I want to be.”

    And then quiet.  Bad lights.  The wine suddenly smelling fragrant. Fruity, crisp, and strongly alcoholic.  She and I looking – like the night we conceived.

    “It leaves us in the same place.”

    “Yes,” she says.

    “Right on the doorstep.”






Liza

    “I’m sorry about that guy,” Maggie says to me.

    “Mike,” I say.

    She laughs, tilting her head back so that it brushes the top of the fence rail.

    “Yes, Mike.”

    We’re sitting on the wood fence opposite the Checkmate.  The wood is sturdy.  What kind are these fences made of?  Always thick and pointed at the ends to fit into the the slits of the posts.  I look over to the historical building behind us. It’s painted green.  I think it was some kind of school house during the colonies.  What wood is it made of?  It’s all slanted and I hated having to draw it in fourth grade.

    “Why’d you want to sit out here Maggie?” I ask.

    “I thought you said you didn’t mind.”

    “No, I don’t.”

    “I just wanted to take it in, take in the night.” She turns away.  Her hair flipping almost violently.  I follow her face.  It’s dark and she looks angry. Ultimately, there is something appealing about my sister.

    “Let’s just walk home,” I say. “Check on dad.”

    “He doesn’t need any checking on.”

    She’s terse and I’m hurt.  She’s acting like a bitch and we’ve never even spent enough time in the same place together for her to treat me like that.  We’re sisters, but who knew?

    “You said…”

    “No, you’re right.” She’s still looking back.  Her hair has taken over her face so that it looks like I’m talking to this impossibly full mass.

    “Alright, so let’s go.”

    “I always loved this field..  It’s not big, but its got a few noticeable slumps, there are the thin woods and then the farm beyond.  Have you seen it in the full moon?”

    I shrugged. “I think so.”

    “The way the light seems to come up from the grass, light given off by the earth and what that looks like.”

    She’s bonding with me.  Or she’s trying to.  I think she’s going though something like I’m going through something.  Our mother is dead.  And I don’t know how it could get any more profound than that, but maybe mom being dead is only the beginning.  I don’t know.  I just started college.
    “I think I know what you mean.”

    “What about the fog? Have you seen it in the fog?”

    “I’m sure.”

    “You can see and hear George Washington’s ghost,” she says, turning back.  She’s excited now, her hair illustrates her emotions. “I walked home from my friend Jen’s house one night.  I think it was midnight and I was only fourteen.  I had one cigarette.”

    “You got away with that?”

    She nods but she’s continuing. “I was a little nervous being alone.  But when I saw the fog I felt this great comfort.  You’d think I’d be scared, but it made my heart throb in a way I hadn’t known.  I mean, you know how boys make you feel then.”

    I laugh and look down at my sneakers. “Nervous and on fire.”

    She grabs my elbow so strongly that it hurts a little. “Right, and this was different.  Seeing the grass, the fog swirling past that old house, and feeling slightly cool but warm – it was like tonight – my heart became something new to me.”

    She turns towards me, her greenish eyes drawn.  She’s not frowning I see now.  She’s just concentrated.  I think she’s expecting an answer as she’s looking.  I don’t know if I have one.  So I stay quiet.

    “Have you learned to enjoy moments like that yet?”

    That pisses me off because its like she’s speaking to a child and I’m not a  child.  I’m eighteen and I’m not a virgin.  I let Shane fuck me in his TrailBlazer.  I wanted to call it making love, but it wasn’t.  I liked his short and thick black hair. I liked the little freckles on his nose, his body.  And that we could laugh sometimes – him more than me.  But I didn’t love him.  It was something I did.  That was a moment.  There were colors, grey, blue, orange numbers from the radio, a smell of some kind of cologne.  Even words. “I’m nervous.”  “Don’t be. I won’t fuck you over.”

    “I think I’m learning.”

    “Good.”

    We both sit silent.  Maggie has moved forward and she now stands leaning back.  Crickets are chirping and a bit of mist hovers on the grass.  Drunken stumbles and talk still come from the Checkmate.  Headlights turn on from the street and people drive away on these dark streets drunk.

    Now I want to piss my sister off.  Its not just pissing her off, I want to know something.

    “What happened to Jake?”

    She keeps her face forward and starts walking.

“Come on,” she says. “Lets go see Dad.”







Tom

I saw the snow.  The trees could’ve been birches, but they were white with snow so who would’ve known.  I walked watching the tracks glow with small blue flame because a train had just passed by with its electricity.  Tracks that run with fire.  I stepped around them as I saw the train moving away to the station.  My feet left marks, showing pebbles, gravel.  I stepped over fire and down the slope. I almost slipped, seeing an odd root sticking above the white.  The day was quiet, white and grey except for a crow.  Where the hill dipped, when I looked straight – when you look straight – the sixteenth green rose up –rises up -, revealed wealth, revealed the summer golf and martini, the winter sled and promise of a kiss.  Where the hill dipped – where it dips – there was the creek.  I sloshed stepped in boots to the creek.  Leaves below, leaves with snow.  My soul was –is – a soul swooning in snow.  My soul was a flake.  The creak was frozen with black holes of water.  I heard the train whistle.  I thought of my boots on the blue and grey upholstery.

“Feet off the seat.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ticket?”

“Thanks.”

“Switch at Huntington.”

    The creek had black holes of water in it.  The snow had leaves.  White snow.  White golf  balls.  Clear martinis.  What color was a kiss? What color is a kiss?

    “I’ll be right back,” Natalie says and slips back into her house.  Correction, her parents house.

    I sit and look out through the screen of the screened in porch.  I put my boots up on one of the white curved legs of the table.  I bet they bring this table in during the winter.  I bet they store it up in the shed that is over there in the corner, where behind it there are bushes, shrubs, a small wood separating the homes.  And maybe within that wood there is a fence separating yards.  A dog barks – barked – and Natalie tries to catch the bus to school.  I didn’t know this neighborhood so well.  But I didn’t know other neighborhoods when I was a kid.  I just knew mine, that corner with the cracked curb, where for one year I watched as James drove to school with his friends and laughed passing me by.  I didn’t really care.  That’s the way it worked.  All younger brothers wanted to ride in cars like their older brothers.  But I looked up at that tree across the street.  The tree with the perfect piney branches to climb and I climbed it.  And I was on top while the other kids tried to make fun of  me. “What the fuck are you doing up there, retard?” And the two stoners smoked, crouching by the bushes.  I was still on top when the bus came and I could see those two emergency escape hatches.  Seeing them from the top of that tree was one of the best feelings I’ve ever known.  When I climbed down I could still smell the exhaust, but it was mixed with the fresh pine stink of my shirt.  I started walking towards Ridgeway when dad slowed by.  I knew I’d get caught.

    “How’s that English class, stranger?” He tipped an imaginary cowboy hat.

    “Just mindin’ my A’s and B’s and C’s” I played along.

    He tapped the wheel. “Get in, Thomas.”

    Then we were off.  I know I learned something when we got there.

    I hear the gentle touch and swish of the rubber on the end of the door.  Natalie is back.  She carries out two thin cylinder glasses on a tray like she’s a waitress.  I’m glad to see they’re filled with club soda.

    “I hope you don’t mind,” she says.

    “I don’t.”

    “I figured this would be best.”

    “It is.”

    She sits down across from me.  Then she nudges the chair so that it scrapes at the floor and she is closer to me.  She crosses her legs with the sex and easiness that all girls seem to be able to do.  If she were riding on a train with me I’d try to talk to her. I’d drop my Times, or maybe she’d drop hers.
    “Are we old now?” she asks.

    “No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”

    “Then we’re acting like rather sophisticated sad bastards aren’t we?"

    I laugh.  It hits me right in my chin and my cheeks respond.

    “I guess we are.”

    “But your mom just died so..”

    She feels closer to me.  And I think she is closer to me.  I can smell her hair.  It smells like shampoo, but not fruity or just clean.  There is something else to it.  Its feminine but not like perfume.  It’s more natural and feminine than perfume would ever dream.

    “Let me ask you something, Natalie?”

    “Proceed, senator.”

    “Why weren’t we always like this?”

    “What do you mean this?”  She seems taken aback.

    “I don’t know,” I look at the fizzing bubbles in my glass.  The taste of opening air so refreshing.  What did my escaping breaths look like from the black of the creek among the ice and the snow?  That kid – Sirch was his last name – never told me.  He’d just wave and smile at me whenever he saw me after that.  Big as he was. So different from me.  Strong, and me? Strange in loafers.  Strange with messy hair.  Strange like a saint or an old photograph from the 1920’s.  If only a bubble could pop open and tell me an answer.  Show me a picture of myself sitting here with this girl – a woman now maybe and I’m sure in many ways – two noses, one upturned, and let me know the truth.  Let me know the inner light that two postures - making one together, one scene – have, let me know what they can reveal.  Patron and paritioner summoning saint and saviour.  The bubbles are rising, my drink is breathing.  I am too.

    “I mean how we are so cozy right now,” I say.

    “Cozy?"

    “Yes.”

    “I don’t know.  But I do know what you mean.  There is something strange going on between us right now.  And I’ve never come out and said it when I’ve felt it before.  I don’t know if I’ve felt something like this.  I’ve usually just been kissed or tried to kiss.  I’ve never sat with club soda in September.”

    “You speak beautifully.”

    “It is cozy, isn’t it?”

    “Yes.”

    Our drinks explode at their surface in between us.  The crickets are out there in the dark beyond the screen, they’re chirping.  Everything – every creature, even me – is releasing a dew into the air.  Did you plan this, mother?  Are you breathing onto the world?  Is this your soul revealed?  Is this what they feel like and smell like and taste like?  A soul: a club soda and a girl?

    “Can I ask you something?” she says.

    “I was hoping you would.”

    “Can I come to the funeral tomorrow?”

    I take a drink.  There are no answers in the carbonation.

    “Yes, I was hoping you would.”

    “Thanks.”

    She turns out towards the screens and the crickets.  Her elbow is on the honeycombed glass.  Her hand lays across her face, one finger draping the bridge of that nose.

    “She was a sweet woman.”

    “Thank you.”

    She looks back to me. She wants to speak.  She takes a drink first, admires it, or at least pretends to.  Maybe she is regarding it.  Maybe she wants this glass, this liquid to speak to her and show her something as much as I want it to, want anything to.  Crucifix, club soda, cricket, lacrosse ball, Cutty Sark.

    “How come you aren’t sadder?” she asks above her drink.

    “I am,” I say. “I loved my mother.  But there is a lot of life still out there.  There’s my father, whose probably passed out on the floor.  There’s me, the general mystery of myself.  There’s you.  There’s crickets out there- a general strangeness of people.”

    She raises her eyebrows and laughs.  I feel my face getting red.

    “What?”

    “You speak beautifully,” she says.

    I’m going to kiss you now, I don’t say.  I kiss her.  I kiss her and I smell grass.  I smell the freshness of the soda water.  I can see James and myself as I feel her nose on my nose.  I can see James wearing a red lacrosse jersey.  He’s young, we’re both young.  We’re wrestling on the grass.  I was on top for a moment. I looked down at him.  He was laughing.  My brother was laughing hysterically.  I stopped.  The match was over.  But he turned me on my back quick and then was on top.  He was laughing and he wouldn’t stop until I started.  The grass on his arms. I feel it on my cheek now as I feel her cheek.  Then space.  The night dewy like a soul.  The crickets.

    “What is this?” I ask.

    “Cozy.”







Maggie

    My sister is a pretty girl.  She really is.  Prettier than I ever was, then I ever hoped to be when I tried to make a statement by chopping my hair short in high school.  She has this blondish hair that seems like it appeared out of nowhere.  But there was a grandma or an aunt in there who had it.  She wasn’t as beautiful as Liza.  She steps alongside me. Her hands rise and fall in rhythm with her feet.  Is that grace?  Is grace in a motion or is it in her moving with this light?  With the reflection that a still wet – drying – road can have.  If I had my camera, is that picture graceful or is it grace?  Where did Mary get off anyway?

    That’s right, she didn’t. That was the whole thing.  Is that where grace comes from?  That little garden that’s supposed to grow between my legs?

    “Are you still a virgin?” I ask.  I ‘m tempted.

    Liza turns towards me, a few strands of her hair streak across her face.  She has to brush them.

    “What?”

    “You know the question?”

    “I know it, but since when – you’ve never asked me something like that before.”

    I saw her born.  I saw them wipe the blood off her. The afterbirth is the word for the nasty stuff, but for a poetic and meaningful word it still sounds pretty disgusting.  I remember being embarassed of her.  “Your parents still have sex?”  But that look I saw in mom. I was old enough to see the change of face that a woman can have when she has a child.  I was changing then too.  I was starting to feel wombish, like we used to call it in college – like I feel now. But I was also changing in the fact that when  I saw mom I wanted to do something that I couldn’t describe.  I wanted to rage at the beauty of her look, of the beauty of the fact that my mother, who was mine, who I’d known so well, could look like that over another little girl.  That want, that feeling turned into me and my lens.

    Mom was full of grace and she spat out four kids.

    “I think it’s overdue,” I say to her.

“Come on, Maggie.”

“Ah, that’s disgusting!”

She laughs as she says it.  So I know she doesn’t care.

“We’re both adults here,” I say.  I take a poke at her.  She dodges.

“Fine.” We stop.  We’re right at the corner of Ridgeway and our slope.  I can feel the curve beginning under my feet.

“I’m not,” she says.

I smile. “Good for you.”

“I don’t regret it.”

“Neither do I.”

She nods, taking my abstract meaning.  I only realize after the fact that its not pointed in the exact direction I want it to go, but who cares.  I’ve never explained myself before.  I let my pictures say what they had to say.  I hope they will speak for themselves.

“No,” a beard was starting to grow in. He was unbuttoning his white shirt for work. “I really love them.  I mean they are so humanistic.”

“Humanistic? Gross.”

He laughed barechested.  I liked the way his spare chest hair shaped his muscles. “There’s a pity in them.  Look at the lines on the hands in that one.  What I like is that these aren’t from some third world country, that they’re from a city that people hear about in the south of France being so glamorous, but at heart its really an ancient and medieval fishing city and these are our eternal signifiers of time never changing.”

I’m sprawled behind my photos on the bed.  I had one hand propping me up.

“You know, some say pictures evoking pity are weak.  That a good photo shouldn’t make the viewer feel a simple emotion like that, a base emotion.”

“Is pity base?”

“It’s pretty base.”

He laughed.

“Will you shave before we fuck?” I asked him.

He kept laughing as he pulled on his sweatshirt.  He was becoming the boxer.

“Must you call it fucking, lover?”

    I fell into the pillow.  We’d just gotten over colds so the pillows were in two different cases.  We had to change our germs.  I fell into a faded purple flower pattern.

    “You know I hate that.”

    “Why, though?”

    I looked up, my face feeling pillow flattened.

    “You know why.”

    He shook his head and leant over the photos.  One hand touched my leg, petting it, the other fingers stretched out, their tips kissing the gloss.  That was a picture, zoom and focus.

    “No, I know about the lovers. Why about the pity?”

    “Because it attaches you to the subject instead of removing you, instead of taking in the entire shape, the form, the light.  High emotion comes from distance.”

    He shook his head again.  His hand stopped petting.

    “I like pity.  I like attachment.  I like dirty hands.”

    “Me too.’

    He looked up from the photos. He gave me his look of intent: lines above his nose between his eyebrows, his mouth straight, maybe upturned a bit but not as much as Mona Lisa’s.  His cheekbones strong, standing on the sides of his face like satellites in space.  They did mark out his face.

    “I’ll shave.”

    “There’s a light on,” Liza says as we come up to the house.

    “I think James and Eve are feeling frisky.”

    “Gross,” she says.

    “What? I’ve heard them fuck.”

    “Do you have to say it like that.”

    “Yes.”

    We walk quietly through the gate.  I enjoy the darkness of the lawn.  Part of me wishes that we could sit out in this darkness forever. My sister and I.  So far apart but made of the same stuff really.  But just opening that door means that tomorrow will begin.  How is that?

    Liza leads the way up the front stones.  She opens it.  I can’t see her hand but I hear the doorpetal – that’s right! That’s what she used to call it! – click and light shed onto the dark of us.  Eve happens to pass by.

    “Ben’s dead drunk.”

    “One of my old favorites,” I say. “Right up there with ‘Captain Jack.’”

    Eve doesn’t react.  She’s mad maybe at James.  Good for her, she should be.  I know she’s deep.  I almost smile thinking of her anger. Dead drunk.  Considering the circumstances, that’s pretty funny.

    “What’s he doing?”  Liza asks.

    Eve steps back and starts touching the bannister. She hooks her model arms around one of the thin and sculpted posts.

    “James found him asleep on the floor in his office.  He tried to bring him upstairs, but he won’t budge. He keeps mumbling, ‘Let  me stay and roll.’”

    I shake my head.

    “Where’s James?” Liza sounds concerned.

    “He’s upstairs.  He’s taking a break from trying to pull him up.”

    “Is he drunk?” I say.

    “Yes.”

    She bows a little – almost curtsies – and cuts in front of both of us.  She goes up the stairs.  Right before the ceiling I see her stoop down a little and use her hands to walk up.

    “Come on, lover.” I walked on all fours up the stairs.

    “I thought you hated that.”

    “Not now when I’m in love with my lover.”

    Jake laughed and followed me up.  I sat on the top step.  The bathroom door behind me was open and a wet breeze blew through.  It was warm and not cool on my neck.  One thing is not the other. Jake leaned over me.  He was wearing a long sleeve shirt but I sould sense his muscles tighten as he held himself up in front of my face, just slightly above my nose.

    “How come we came when everyone was away?”

    “Just kiss me.”

    Eve disappears.  I look at Liza.

    “Well, non-virgin sister.  Let’s give the old man a pick-me-up.  We’ve got a big terrible day tomorrow.”

    Liza touches my hand.  With her other she strokes the ends of her hair a little bit.  Her whisps of hair that curl up and around her ear.  Mine doesn’t do that.

  “I love you," she says.  "But there’s nothing funny about all this.”

   “It’s not sad either.”

   “It isn’t?”

   “No.”

    She pauses and takes her hand off of mine.  Now she’s cross armed. I put my arm around her and start her walking down the hall.

     “C'mon," I say. "He’s still alive.”





Ben

Yes, I’m on the floor.  I feel the drool coming out of my mouth onto the floor.  It’s moist there already.

“You been kissin’ girls, Connor?  God knows Benny’s kissed a few.”

He was a strong and funny old man.  A little too hard on Connor, though.  He used to slap his back and you could hear that slap.  Thock. Hulpth.  A smack is supposed to be fleshy, but this was hollow.

Here are the girls now.  My blondie on the left and Rose reincarnated on the right.  Is it too soon for reincarnation?  She couldn’t be reincarnated anyway, because she already was.  She is.  So then maybe I’ll look forward to a flower coming off of a tree, or an especially beautiful shepard dog, or perhaps a girl who is too young and sweet for me – like her - will pass me on the street one day from now.  That’ll be ten years or maybe even one hundred years from now and it’ll be her, hair riding behind her, a small wave and that slow creeping smile, like the fade-in of a piano on mono speakers.
“Dad, are you alright,” I hear Liza say.  She kneels down right above me.  I can feel her.  It’s funny how you can feel your own children, its like that organ inside of you is a radar, that glowing recognition of yourself out in the world – a full entity beyond you and inside of you forever.
I smell a freshness, something like dirt.  It smells like a moist night by the harbor.  It’s Mags.

“Mags,” I hear myself mumble. “Dance Maquokeeta! Play piano man play!”

“What, dad?” I hear her. “Looks like the damage has been done old timer.”

“Shh, Maggie. I ain’t that old.”

“Not that old, did you say? Maybe not.  But I can think of maybe one of your organs that is.”
I hear the touch of fabric.  It was like a slap.

“Just grab his other arm-pit,” it’s Liza little sing-song.

When dad used to slap Connor on the back it was because he saw something womanish in him.  It was because he was so close to mom.  He must’ve had a few and walked in on Connor confessing his soul’s purpose to mom one of those nights they used to sit at the table after dinner picking at scraps of chicken, or dipping bread in the vinegar at the bottom of the salad bowl.  He was going to be a poet-doctor, like William Carlos Williams.  He was just sensitive and found himself around girls like mom, whether it was at school or at the altar with Erin.

“You looked like sunshine up there,” I said.

“That was weak for such a cunning wordsmith,” Erin said.

“And you,” I turned to him.  He looked handsome.  A little too thin for his tuxedo, but looking suave, pushed back and relaxed like he always did.

“Thank you, Ben.”

He put his hand on my shoulder.  The younger one got married first.  I feel pressure underneath my pits.  My wings are lifting. Praise be to⎯

“Just pull him up, Liza.”

“I am.  Maybe we’re not that strong?”

“What the hell is that clicking noise?”

“It’s the record player I think.”

“Oh yeah.”

I feel my arms hit the rug.

“Oops.”

“I think I’ll get James.”

“Damnit.  We can do this without him.  The two of us.  Get his legs. I’ll get the armpits.”

I want to laugh but my mouth doesn’t want to.  I was always ticklish down at my ankle.  When Rose found out she was unmerciful!

 “Is that his tickly little ankle?” She talked to me like I was baby.

“No no no! What’s the ransom?”

“Tell me how much you love me.”

“I thought a girl like you didn’t need to be remindahahoo.”  I rolled back on the bed.  She leaned over me.  Her hair covered her face and she moved it.  Her breasts dangled.

“All girls need to.” She ran her fingers gentler.  Five feathers along my bones.

“OK OK.  But what if I have no words?”

She stopped and looked down at me. She kissed me.  She kissed me hard.  Then she pulled away.  Our lips and eyes only so far apart.  Silence, sheets, the smells of our bodies, her breath beginning to turn before bed but I loved it.  I loved it!

“I’ll invent something new.”

I feel myself lifted.

“We got it, Liza. We got it.”  Mags again.  Ah, its always about the girls.  Now its these two.  First my mother who feared God and I feared her and stuck to the shadows where you could curse and didn’t have to be controlled, didn’t have to keep your foot above the break.  Then it was the faces and tinkling music of girls at school, passing passing always passing skirts and jackets.  Then Rose.  She was nothing but – what?  She was everything.  I  saw her from all angles.  I saw her bleed, I saw these girls come out of her.  What was Rose but all colors and all girls and all lights and all clothings and every album and song that I ever loved?  She was that touch on a piano key that makes you think you could live forever.  Do I still have it?  Do I still have it in me to live forever?  Or is that gone with my stitching?  Is all my fabric bleeding out all over this house?  My blood, piss, and half-oxidized alcohol.
The girls at school:

    Connor and Benjamin O’Donnell,
    They were born with their heads in the bottle.

“Just down the hall.  We’ll take a break at the stairs.”

“I’m losing grip on his ankle.”
“Right here, c’mon.”

Now it’s these two.  My blondie and my – my Mags.  I can see Liza ahead of me a litle blurred holding two logs. My legs.  I lean my head back.  Mags’ blurred face, a little point in there on her chin.  Like Rose of course.  I lay my head on my chest and keep my eyes closed.  I’m riding out to sea.  I’ll let myself explode like a Cutty Sark.  I’ll try to live forever.

“Ok, here.”

Thud. Ow!  Right by the fucking ass!

“Oops.”

“What the hell was that?” I hear James.

“Well big – little brother.  Here’s your everloving father.  I think we may need your help hoisting him the rest of the way.”

All my children are here.  My wife is dead.  But where is Tom?  And what is tomorrow anyway?






James

There’s dad in bed.  I’ve got the lamp on.  The lamp that was on mom’s side.  They both look the same, the dark green shades.  Her magazines are still laying next to her clock.  Harpers, New Living, Better Homes & Gardens.  A book is draped over the clock, marking the page.  It’s Sons and Lovers.  D.H. Lawrence.  One of those pastoral looking paintings is on the cover, like all the old  books they gave us in high school.  I look up to the lamp and follow its light over to dads’ shape beneath the covers.  He licks his lips.  I watch him as I put the glass to his lips.  The water tilts and he drinks and there are drips falling to the sheets.  I put the water back.

“You’re in a bad way, huh, dad?”

“Ah, Jimmy, I’ll be alright.”

I laugh hearing it.

“You’ve been calling me Jimmy a lot since I’ve been home.”

“Ah, Jimmy, James, what’s the difference? There’s nothing in a name.”

I turn down to my knee.  I scratch the denim.

    “I think there is.”

    His lips smack.

    “A rose by any other name a Rose.”

    I look up.  His eyes are still closed.  His body is stretched out beneath the blanket.  It looks like he just fell from the top of a building, spread eagle, right on his back.  The light shapes the curves of his body.  It makes him look bigger than he ever was.  I’ve been bigger than him for years, but he had that thin toughness, that look to him .  Everyone used to call it old-man strength, the power that came from within your manhood when you got married and gave birth to a kid, the power of protection. It was supposed to be the same stuff that lions and bears were made of – all males.  At least Cicero and Gertz used to say that about coach at practice.  About dad too.

    “Are you going to be alright tomorrow, dad?’

    Licking again.  Now his eyes are open.

    “Me?”

    I laugh. “Yeah, you.”

    “I’ll be alriight.” He stops. “I was there one night.  It was at a club in Manhattan.  I forget the name now, but it was downtown.  I think it was ’71.  Billy was playing there.  I got so drunk with him before the set that he was playing with his feet.”

    “Piano Man with his feet?”

    “This was before that.  He was still a kid, he was  younger than me and I looked up to him. Anyway - Billy tried to get me to come up and play with him, or at least sit at the piano.  The owner didn’t like that and he got a little physical.  Billy was gone to the world and he tried to hit him with his glass –scotch I think.  He missed and smashed the glass over my head.  The next day,” he stops, smacks. “Aieee woke up with noo hangover and noo headache.  I took my MCAT.  The score that got me into school.  That’s what a train ride will do for you.”

    “Jesus, dad.”

    “He couldn't have done it better.”

    I laugh and I feel something over my shoulder.  I feel Eve.  I turn and there she is.  Leaning in the light from the small hall into their room.  I feel her?

    “I looked up to younger people my whole life.”

    “Who else?”

    “Your damn uncle.”

    I can’t think of something to say.  I look back at Eve.  One hand is under her chin.  She loves dad.
    “Will he come tomorrow?”

    “If he does, it won’t be because of me.”

    He closes his eyes.  In the dim greenish light it looks like a tear is on his lid.

    “I don’t mean to upset you, dad.  I’ll let you sleep.”

    He opens again.  His eyes are red.  He pulls the blanket down again.  I see his legs move a little closer together.

    “Are you going to be OK, James?”

    “What?”

    “Tomorrow? Are you going to be OK?  Because I can tell somethings not right.  After watching you for almost thirty years and seeing people look up to you, and seeing how your siblings can’t seem to understand or break your courage or poise.  I see something new that I haven’t.”

    “I⎯”

    “People loved me cause I was a drunk and could make ‘em laugh. People love you for something else and I can’t see it so clearly right now.”

    I look down again.  I reach for the carpet.  My vision is watery.  The green light makes me feel heavy and clumsy.  Now Eve is on my shoulder – her hand.

    “Go with your wife,” he says. “Tomorrow is the beginning of the end.  And I mean that in a way.  Its good and bad. I’ll stitch myself back up on my own.”

    “Ben,” Eve says.

    He just closes his eyes.  I turn up and her sight is off in space.  I look to dad’s lit shape, his dim frame.

    “What if I call Uncle Connor?”

    “Don’t call my brother.”  His lids stay shut. “We wear suits and dresses tomorrow.  What is tomorrow anyway?”

    “What do you mean, dad?”

    “Let your wife take you to bed.  She’s a beautiful girl.”

    I push myself up with my knee like I was in a huddle on the wet grass of the field in the morning.  I wish I could hear the birds chirp like they did on a Saturday or Sunday.  I take Eve’s hand and look at her.  I look at her and I know that I love her as we walk around the bed. I keep my grasp on her soft and clammy skin as I turn the lamp on mom’s side off.  We’re in the darkness, a few slants coming from the hall.  I feel sobriety.  I feel the light in Eve’s stomach.  I just don’t know what it all means to me as my father sleeps spread eagle in his bed, drunk, dreaming of his wife.

    A rose by any other name a Rose


    What is tomorrow anyway?

    It’s a funeral for my mom and his wife.  I’ve got a wife who’s about to be a mom.  What does that make me?

PART II

    Bryant and Sons Funeral Home stood white, bright and proud along Old Town Road.  The black lettering of the name was no different than any other funeral home in a ten mile radius of town.  The curves of each character were set with a bolder font, which made the name seem bigger.  The name Bryant – in bold – was regal, classical and, most important of all for the said family in propriety, memorable.

    Douglas Bryant paced the cement front steps impatiently.  In his pocket he thumbed at a piece of loose, callused skin that was on the edge of his middle finger.  He checked the watch on his other wrist.  “Damnit,” he thought. “That bastard O’Donnell is running late.”  He’d heard from Susan, his wife,  that Ben had gone on one of his famous benders again.  Susan had heard this from Ben’s sister-in-law, Erin.  Connor was always the more respectable brother, never carrying on like Ben had.  Funeral Director Bryant wondered if there had been any public displays as there had been years ago, the kind everyone talked about.  The most famous was when that widow who lived on West Meadow found Ben sleeping in a bathtub on the piece of beach behind her house.

    Douglas reminded himself to stop picking at his skin.  His hand rested in his pocket, slowly sweating onto the fabric.  A light breeze pushed his white hair back.  He looked across the street at the brick high school which stood equally as proud.  A small faint smile moved over his lips.  Cars moved in and out of the school parking lot and he felt as though he could hear the uncaring shouts of the students in and outside of the hallways; hear the stick and pull of cleats on the wet September fields.  There was a chance the football team might be good this year.  His son, Frank, was a nose tackle.

    Douglas listened to the traffic pass and continued to think of his son.  Frank was born with the same unfortunate husky build that he had carried his whole life.  However, Frank had used althletics to turn that shape into something positive, something admirable in terms of sacks and tackles.  Mr. Bryant sighed and realized he was picking at the skin on his finger again.  They weren’t getting along – he and his son – and Douglas blamed it on himself.  He was tough on Frank, wanted him to have a standout season and get a chance to go to a big university.  That would give him the possibility to get away.  Douglas looked up at the proud black lettered name on the building.  It would give Frank a chance to avoid entering this business, a business that he – Douglas – was supposed to love and cherish as much as his father Abraham.  God rest his soul.

    The loose skin fell off Funeral Director Bryant’s finger and dropped in a corner of his pocket, lost to him.  From the white noise of traffic two cars veered into the parking lot.  Douglas checked his watch and then peered into the window of one of the cars.  Ben O’Donnell was riding in the passenger seat.  The car stopped and one of Ben’s son’s stood up from the driver’s side.  It was Tom O’Donnell.  He was the strange son, the one with all that potential, who’d been at the head of the class but who’d never gone away.  The one who’d tried to kill himself three years ago.

    “How late are we?” Tom O’Donnell asked, his sharp face squinting in the sunlight.

    Funeral Director Bryant didn’t want to be stern, he didn’t want to seem like a hard ass. “Fairly late I would say,” he began.  Realizing that his tone sounded gruff, he tried to change it, but found his voice cracking. “Your family has been waiting for about twenty minutes.”

    The passenger window rolled down.  Ben O’Donnell, wearing sunglasses – surely not out of grief, thought Funeral Director Bryant – stuck his head out.

    “They can stand to wait.  All of them, Douglas.”

    Douglas Bryant was taken back by this blatant rudeness.  But before he could say anything, Tom O’Donnell spoke up.

    “I’m sorry, Mr. Bryant,” he said. “We’ve been getting calls all morning.  My father’s been having a tough time –"

    “Don’t apologize for me,” Ben O’Donnell said.  He opened the car door and got out.  Douglas Bryant noticed Ben stepping with a certain looseness in his step, almost a wobble, but it was held together. Yes, he still had to be drunk.

     “Dougie can take a little joke. Can’t you, Doug?”

    “It’s up to you how you want to honor your wife, Ben.  I’m not one to make judgments.”
    “Sure you are.”

    The second car honked and Tom O’Donnell gave a small wave. “We’ll meet you inside, dad.”  Then he stooped in, his dark face vanishing, and both cars continued around the corner of the building.

    “Let’s go, Ben,” Funeral Director Bryant said, walking briskly up to the heavy white front doors of the home.

    Ben followed him.  His limbs felt light and alive as he watched Doug Bryant’s round frame move in front of him.  Doug pulled open the door.  Ben stopped.  His head felt remarkably clear, there was no ache or bluriness.  Everything was bright and seemed to sit exactly right,  even Doug in his greenish black suit and his slightly damp parted white hair.  Ben took off his sunglasses.  He looked Doug up and down, then hugged him.

    “You’re a saint, Doug.”

    “Thank you, Ben.  I appreciate that.  But anything we can do, you know –"

     Ben passed by him and stepped onto the red carpet.  It was thick and gave with his shoes.  The carpet could carry him along on its spring, it would be able to carry him through this entire ceremony.  He didn’t need carrying, though.  This was where her wake was.  Connor over there by the door looking in at the crowd as I entered, like I am now.  He’s not here. Can I make out his ghost?
    “This way, Ben,” Doug said from his side.

    Above a purple flower arrangement there was a brooding portrait of Mr. Abraham Bryant.  The background was Dutch Black and Doug’s father looked pale and forboding wearing a small smile.  Ben remembered Abraham.  He remembered how he and Connor used to use Doug for rides at school.  Abraham Bryant would drive them home in the family hearse.  Ben had always found it amusing – as he’d tell in stories when he was grown – when they’d pull into the driveway to shout, “Back from the dad, ma!”

    Ben felt the flask in the inside pocket of his black suit jacket.  It weighed down the breast slightly, but in the mirror it wasn’t noticable. The last time he’d come to a wake at Bryant and Sons, it was for Lucy. It had been good to see her made up and smiling, some color in her.  It was much better seeing her in peach than in the red he’d left her in after the surgery. I did that stone sober.  No, not this time.  But maybe then I wasn’t sober either.  There is nothing sober about guilt and anger.

 Doug held out a meaty red hand towards the sliding handle of one of the home’s doors.

    “Wait,” Ben said. “I want the kids to bring me in.”

    “But,” Doug answered. “You have guests and well wishers waiting.  I don’t condone this in my home, Ben.  I’ve let it go on enough.”

    “God damnit, Doug.  Just give me this.”  Ben squeezed his sunglasses in his right hand.  He looked Doug directly in the face, every moment or so glancing at his developing jowels. “I’m sorry.”

    Doug looked down at the carpet.  He wiped his recently shined loafer in a windshield wiper semi-circle on the floor.  It left a whitish streak behind. “I’ll go in and tell them you’ll only be a moment.”  Doug went to open the door, but stopped and looked up at Ben. “I never liked a drunk.”

    “Neither did I,” Ben said.  He felt half-surprised at and half-prepared for the remark.

    Doug considered the exchange – felt nothing - and slid open the door a crack.  He managed to slide his husky frame in with an appearing ease.  Ben could make out Erin through the door’s opening before Doug closed it.  Maybe he’s here. The white of the door merged with the white of the wall making the room seem hidden.  Ben walked over to the purple flower arrangement and put the sunglasses back on his face.  He looked up at the darkly tinted face of Abraham Bryant.  He glanced quickly from side to side and took a long pull from his flask. Burn Sark! Burn upon my sea! If Crane wasn’t gay would he have jumped ship and drowned?

Abraham Bryant, right before he died, was the one who told Ben that he would’ve done the services for Tom had he died in the creek that day.  A family of bastards – the father and his sons.  I don’t remember George that well, though.  He’s probably around here shilling for more bodies.  Ben concealed the flask and stooped down to smell the flower arrangement. Despite the taste of scotch on his tongue, he smelt the perfume of the plants.  There were gladiolas, pansies, darker purple roses, which gave the whole arrangement its morbidity.  His wife, Rose, had never smelled like these flowers, the stale air in this building.  She’d smelt like moist skin, like mint toothpaste, like dish soap, broth, and, when they went out, like vanilla extract.  He wondered if they rubbed their smells on her body when she was dead and naked and lying before them.  Will her body smell the way the Bryants wanted it to smell when they lower her into the ground?

Ben rose from the flowers, he wouldn’t admit it, but he felt faint.  His feeling of faintness was not due to his drinking, but from the overwhelming sadness and loneliness that had suddenly overcome him.  It was as if the bittersweet – or even too sweet – smell of those grotesque purple flowers had given a scent or brief form to the life that waited for him without Rose.  The bright red carpet appeared to recede from him, but at the same time it was elongating and stretching out for an eternity.  What am I?  Will I have to live forever without her? Do I have a hundred more left in me?  Left for me?  He steadied himself on the wood table.

No, I’ll just have to hang on for a few years and die warm in my bed.  Maybe I’ll put a glass of milk on the nightstand too, for the cookies as my last supper.  If its going to be a last supper then I’ll have to put the milk on her nightstand.  I’ll have to clear it off first.

“Dad,” Maggie said from behind.  She touched Ben’s side.

He turned slowly and put his hand on top of her hand. “Ah, thank God its you, Mags. I was afraid it might be a ghost.”  As he faced her he saw his other three children standing behind and beside her.  He saw Eve standing back, her hand low holding James’.  His oldest son James who seemed to have lost some of his confidence or poise in the few days since he’d come home.  Ben knew this observation could’ve only been all of the drinking, but he also knew that it could’ve been because of all the drinking.

“Oh, Dad,” Liza stepped up next to Maggie.

“Well,” James said. “Shouldn’t we go in?”

“Man’s eternal dilemma,” Ben answered.

Tom laughed without looking at his father.  He kept his eyes on the picture of Abraham Bryant.  What was up his ass?  That could’ve been man’s eternal question too.  At least that’s what it seems like everyone is always wondering about each other.  No, but we should go in, we should take the plunge.  Will I feel sanctity like in church, will there be a meaning in there?  Maybe she’ll come too. Now that’s a plunge.

“What are we waiting for?” James asked.

“Is Uncle Connor here?” Maggie asked.

“Ah,” Ben began.

“The other⎯”

Ben nodded.  He pointed toward the door. “Lead the way, kids.”

Maggie turned toward the door.  It was hard to discern from the wall.  She went to take a step forward, but before she did she looked at James.  He didn’t make a move.  Maggie stepped –there is something off about him.  What is he trying to prove by this?  How is he playing this into his favor?  Get rid of this imposter and give me my brother! – toward the door.  She took one step after the other, watching her feet on the red carpet.  As she reached the door, she went to touch the gold square that served as the handle.  The tips of her fingers touched the gold and she turned back to the front entrance of the home.  There was only a slant of light coming in.  It’ll be a beautiful funeral.

Maggie faced the door and slid it open.  A strong blast of mixed perfumes hit her and she was overwhelmed. Death smells so much like life.  A garden, I guess.  She couldn’t focus on the people, the family that were there.  All she could see was the coffin standing up above the seated figures.  There were flowers – of course – but she only saw the form of the coffin, its smooth looking edges, the shining wood finish.  The gold that lined the sides.  Maggie felt like crying as she sniffed in the overbearing scent of wellwishers.  Is Liza going to cry?  Is James?  An image came into her mind of standing next to him at church on Easter.  She’d kept stomping his boot with her heel.  But he didn’t do anything.  He’d just looked at her, no emotion at all.  How did he do it?

She looked back and James was right behind her, still holding Eve’s hand.  He wasn’t looking at the coffin.  He had his eyes set on a man, tall and gaunt, standing at the far corner of the room.  His face was well defined by sharp cheekbones and, although it was reddish with a few lines by the eyes, held a vitality and ease in its skin.  Uncle Connor’s hair was full, whisping by his ears – a little longer than Dad’s – where the brown seamlessly became grey – a little greyer than Dad’s.

Maggie followed James’ glance.  She looked at Uncle Connor standing upright, very straight as he always had.  He looked like Thomas Jefferson – or at least what Thomas Jefferson’s portrait appeared as.

“Do you see?” Maggie whispered to James.

“Of course I do.”

“Does he?”

Maggie craned her head past James and saw her father staring at Uncle Connor. Uncle Connor remained unmoved by their presence.  He kept his head bowed.  Maggie had been so taken in by his presence that she hadn’t noticed Aunt Erin sitting in the chair right in front of him.  The man stands and the woman sits.  It’s like that in so many ways. Not only in the bathroom – though I did sit and pee while he stood and shaved before we had sex – but in the many other poses of life.  Now where’s my camera?

She felt an arm on her shoulder.  It was James’.  He nodded in the direction of Douglas Bryant who was puffing his cheeks and breath impatiently.

“Let’s go.  We have to sit up front.”

“Oh, right.”  Maggie thought briefly of the dog funeral she’d kneeled for in the snow.  That ceremony appealed more to her than what she was now engaged in.  To her, this seemed already like a pagent after a few moments, while that burial had never seemed forced, only natural.

Maggie led the way to the front.  She kept from looking at faces as she passed.  All she saw where the curved archs of the chair backs.  She didn’t even notice that they were poorly gilded with imitation gold.

James watched his sister hurry in front of him with her red hair bent.  He felt inclined to do the same, but kept himself erect.  There was something in him that couldn’t help but scan the crowd.  It was tied to the same feeling he’d felt at the Checkmate the night before.  It was a longing to see someone he knew, to be reminded of his youth, that he hadn’t felt in so many years.  And as his eyes settled on the shape of  James Cicero and Paul Gertz sitting next to each other, he felt a dread in the pit of his stomach at knowing what tied those feelings together and made them one.

Cicero was still thin, but Gertz had gotten much rounder – especially in  the face.  I knew that would keep happening to him without the sports.  He was a good drinker.  Actually, he was more of a big drinker.  Of course all that sloshing and slugging and chugging caught up to him.  James nodded towards the two of them.  Cicero and Gertz nodded back.  But I’m judging what has happened to them? Why is that my defense against what’s sitting up there?  And all of this around me - the flowers, the home, the funeral arrangement, what happens from here to the last mound of dirt – I didn’t plan.  None of this is me.  But at the same time it is. He looked away from his old friends; the friends who’d fed him liquor; helped him learn how to get girls.  He looked away from them and down to Eve at his side.  James took her hand and pulled it close to his thigh.  He wrapped his free hand around it also and squeezed.

As he walked embracing her hand, adding once more to the already innumerable times he’d held it, kissed it, outlined it, and simply looked at it, a wash of ease came over him and gave him goose bumps.  He thought of Eve.  He thought of her delicate nature, the nature that always instinctively told him to swoop her off her feet right now and hold her high into the air.  Twirl her in some way.  Would it be wrong if I did that in front of the family and friends gathered here? Would it be wrong for the baby? James pictured Eve huddling over a swaddled child.  The baby looked generic, a movie baby.  His mind couldn’t wrap around it.  He’d had images of getting a dog, but could never pull the trigger on that.  What was more important than being young, recently married and completely in love with your wife?  He looked back out at the crowd.  Someone out there would tell him “Nothing was wrong with it,” he was sure of that.  In the fourth row from the front, he thought he saw his senior English teacher, Mr. Roland.

Maggie reached the front row of seats set up on the left side of the room.  All of the places were empty.  James was struck by the large amount of flowers that were set up along the left corner, directly across from the front chairs.  There were small potted red flowers and then there were also huge arrangments, pink, white and yellow flowers.  He didn’t know the names, but there were anemones, peruvian lilies, bunches of baby’s breath, daffodils, hyacinths, roses, and carnations.  In front of these startling arrangements were two boards that were set on easels.  In the center of each was a picture of Rose.  The one closer to the coffin and her body had a picture of her when she was young.  James couldn’t remember seeing it before.  Her head was turned slightly away from the camera or whomever was taking the picture.  She looked off, past the limits of the frame, and out.  There were out of focus trees behind her and, even though the picture was black and white, her hair seemed vibrant – redder than if it were in color.  It’s amazing that a color can stand out even when its taken away.  I can’t believe I never saw that picture before.  Mom looks fantastic.  I look at Maggie and then I look at the picture of young mom.  I can feel my heart about to burst comparing them.  I always knew they looked similar but this is unbelievable! Who took that picture?  On the board furthest from her body was a more recent photo.  It was in color.  She was in the backyard wearing loose sweatpants.  There was a straw hat on her head and she knelt close to the dirt of the flowerbed by the den windows, clutching weeds in one hand, while her other was frozen in a wave.  My heart won’t slow down.  Mom looks so old in that picture!  I need to breath.  I squeeze Eve’s hand again.  I hope it isn’t bothering her.  It probably isn’t.  She can understand all of this.  I can’t understand who did all of this.  I know dad didn’t arrange for it to all be done.  Was it Aunt Erin?  Uncle Connor? James let Eve sit first next to Maggie.  Then he sat next to her, he let his eyes focus on his mother’s dead body for the first time.

That’s my favorite picture of mom.  I sit next to James and keep my eye on it.  I just think she looks so young in it, so glamorous.  A lot of that has to do with the fact that it’s in black and white.  It’s romantic, its like one of those old snapshots they show of Bob Dylan from when he was in New York.  Liza sighed and looked down at her black skirt.  Then, like a swan, she pulled it up and leant forward.  Her hands became limp and fell between her thighs.  She considered the casket.  It was raised on a small platform, which was the same hideous color as the red carpet in the rest of the home.  She couldn’t say that the casket was ugly, because in some way it was beautiful.  The wood looked like a finely finished wood floor in Better Homes and Gardens, it was a brown that didn’t have a good name to describe its brownness.  It reflected the light nicely – Liza could see the reflections of her family sitting in a row.  Tom, Ben, Her, James, Eve, Maggie.  Their forms were shadowy and smushed in the coffin’s smooth corner reflection.  I heard they call it a wake because originally the family and townspeople who gathered to mourn hoped that the body would wake up and come back to life. I can see the profile of mom’s face peeking up above the edge.  It rests on a satiny pillow.  She never slept like that.  Liza continued to regard her mother’s still form.  Then she turned over to the more recent picture of Rose.  She’d taken that picture.  It was to be for a school project, but she never decided to use it – she never thought it was any good.  But as she looked at it now, it seemed that it might be a good picture after all.  For some reason, feeling stuffy in a black blouse and skirt, and unable to look anyone in the eye, the picture now seemed to sum up her mother perfectly.  Liza focused back on her still mother.  She wondered if maybe Rose was thinking of her at that moment.  It was never like her to think of the soul and of afterlife – she certainly didn’t care much about heaven or hell – but maybe part of her mother could still think, and if she could still think maybe she was thinking that Liza had let her down.  However, Liza hadn’t let her down, she’d only lived her life.  That knowledge, that piece of truth and acceptance, didn’t make the understanding any better, it didn’t ease the loss.

Liza recognized a few of the people who were kneeling on the pew in front of her mother’s body.

“Who’s that again?” She asked her father.

“Er,” Ben squinted. “They’re your second cousins.  Aunt Erin’s side.”

“When’s the last time we saw them?”

Ben smiled. “Oh, probably awhile.” He stopped for a minute, but held his smile.  He took a long and caring look at his daughter. “Its funny having extended family.  I always preferred the smallness of my own family.  Just me, my brother – your Uncle Ben – and our parents – grandma and grandpa.”

Liza looked at the family paying their respects.  It was a simple family:  mother, father, a sister and a brother who both looked about fifteen or sixteen.

“I think I do too.”

She felt her father squeeze her arm tenderly.  I look at dad.  He doesn’t seem sad, he’s loose, he’s just looking up there at mom.  Did he even see Uncle Connor?  I wonder if I will ever have the same thoughts he’s having right now, whatever they may be.  I look back down at my skirt.  I try not to wear black too much, but I forgot how comfortable this skirt was.  I was supposed to be planning outfits for the weekend nights out – but now here we are.  Dad’s reaching into his coat. Is he? No, he can’t.

Ben took a good pull of his flask.  His lips felt puckered, but only because he couldn’t bear to bring them to a smile or a frown.

“Dad,” Liza said to him. “You can’t drink in here.”

“I just want this to move on.  These things used to be shorter.”

“Dad.”

“What?”

“Shhh. If James sees.”

“Ah, he knows as well as I do that if I spilt whiskey on your mother she’d wake right up.  That’s the secret of these things you know.”

“Dad,” Tom said from the other said.

“Yes, Thomas.”

“Let it wait.”

Ben looked at his son.  Tom’s face appeared tight, his cheekbones stuck out strongly.  My son, my strange son.  His voice had a weight in it.  It could’ve been the weight of someone who was almost in one of the pine boxes that Rose was laying in. Or, if the body had been lost in that cold winter water, it could’ve just been an empty coffin with rocks approximating his weight.  Although he was sitting in front of his wife’s dead body, the lifeless form that still carried so much life for him – more than fifty years worth – what made Ben’s heart lose its humor, lose its guard, was his son’s strange face and voice.  The fact that he tried to kill himself.  In a house where nothing was sacred, there were two things that were sacred: Rose and Tom’s attempt at suicide.  My son my strange and smart son.

“You know what I mean, Thomas.”

“Finnegan’s Wake.”

Ben smiled.  He put his arms around Tom and Liza.  He hoped he didn’t look too pleased.

Douglas Bryant looked at Ben O’Donnell with his hands around his youngest daughter and that enigma of a son – the one who tried to off himself.  He’d seen him take that drink from his flask.  It took everything in his power not to go over there and scold Ben O’Donnell, even if it was his own wife’s funeral.  However, that’s what made the Bryants who they were – cold composure. Funeral Director Bryant checked his watch.  He’d give the general attendees a few more minutes to pay their respects before he ushered them out and allowed the immediates (Rose’s nuclear family) to pay their respects privately.  Then, when they were ready, even that drunk, they’d have the body transported past the house andthen to the place of rest – which was to be out in Calverton if he was not mistaken.  He didn’t quite understand why they were not going to have the requiem mass as most Catholics did.  Especially when he knew that Rose O’Donnell was a dutiful parishioner at St. James.

Douglas Bryant felt the wall against  his back.  Besides the moistness in his armpits, he was comfortable.  He looked at the O’Donnell family sitting together in the front row.  To him, it was a funny thing to have watched those front rows occupied by so many different families over the years.  There had been families stoic in their grief, others who calmly displayed their sorrow with tasteful tears, and still others who put on displays of distress that bordered on something maudlin.  Days and nights of mourning passed and then, if all concerned parties were lucky, no business or interaction had to be done again.  But the chairs remained sitting there in neat rows, and the platform always stood in the front.  These objects marked the space, cleanly and orderly.  And even with the passing of people in and out of the home, Douglas Bryant remained a fixture for them, for the town.  A person who provided a service of death – or more appropriately, memorial – or more optimistically, of closure.
Funeral Director Bryant took a cloth out from his back pocket and lightly tapped the back of his neck.  He checked his watch again.  He’d give them a  few more minutes.  Douglas surveyed the O’Donnell’s.  He did feel bad for them.  Rose O’Donnell was a kind woman.  It seemed as though she knew everyone in the town.  He could recall many meetings he’s had with her in Stop N’ Shop.  She’d catch him by the melons and ask how business was; how Frank was.  She’d even commend him on how he continued on in a line of work that faced him with such everyday sadness.  And he’d weigh his banannas and thank her for that.

It baffled him that a woman of her caliber could stay married to that full-time drunk, or how a son of Rose O’Donnell could try and drown himself in the St. George Creek.  Or, also, how the eldest, Maggie, could be the spitting image of her mother but be so flamboyant, such a rebel and so uncaring for a stable home life.  He’d seen her accolades in the Herald.  He’d also heard the announcement of her broken engagement.  In so many ways, the O’Donnell family was beyond Douglas Bryant’s understanding.  Especially the fact that they had only attended this final wake and that is was the sister-in-law, Erin, who had made all the arrangements.  Nevertheless, it was time to give them their space, it was time to give them their time.

Tom watched as Mr. Bryant walked up to the kneeler in front of his mother’s body.  He whispered to Mrs. Post who was kneeling with her sons Mike and Bryan.  Mrs. Post stood and fixed her long business skirt.  She ushered the boys along and they followed Mr. Bryant, looking uncomfortable in their blue and silver striped ties.  Tom closed his eyes take and seeee and listened to the sound of people exiting the room.  He heard coughs, shuffling of loafers on carpet, the thump of an odd chair leg or three.  With his eyes closed, Tom felt a growing presence within his stomach.  It was as if something were spreading and beating throughout his whole body.  I feel my heart beat rapidly. I feel it even though I didn’t see her when I walked in.  How could I have really hoped she would come? What is it that happened to us last night?  In that dark, the moistness of her chest skin.  My soul was hot – my soul was –is – a flake.  It wasn’t just his heartbeat, he felt the pumping coming from even the small roll of fat right above his groin.  In the darkness of his eyes, fluorescent squares gave way to shifting and grotesque visions of bodies.  He couldn’t control their ebb and flow.  He saw raw flesh, he saw the stink of carcass and the rise of flies in the air.  The form of the crucifix appeared too, but quickly flew out of the sight of his darkened vision.  Tom took a breath.  I breathe and pass the throbbing from my mouth to the air.  It feels like I am breathing too heavily.  I am strange, aren’t I, doc? With his breathing, came an ease.  He smelt the perfume of the flowers all around the room and, reminding himself that flowers did exist and that they were beautiful and fragrant, felt relaxed.  He opened his eyes and looked at the coffin.  His mother’s nose stuck up in profile.  Nothing in him told him what to do, so he felt the curiosity to look behind him.  Uncle Connor was still standing behind Aunt Erin who remained in her seat in the back; they were the only two left.  Tom bowed his head in the direction of his mother.  Then, he felt his father’s hand on his knee.

“What do you say we pray?”

“Sure, dad.”

“Who first?” his father asked.

I want to be the first one to go up.  I’m the one who killed mom, so that gives me the right.  Who would she’ve wanted to be first?

“Well, I’m the oldest,” Maggie said, “so I might as well…”

“No,” Liza said.  Maggie first looked surprised, but quickly smiled at her sister. “I want to be first.”

Maggie held out her arm towards the coffin.

Liza stood up and flattened her skirt against her thighs, the fabric felt soft and cool.  She listened to her shoes as they pushed the carpet on the way to the kneeler.  She reached it and knelt.  When she looked up at the coffin, she first felt nothing.  Liza groped within herself to try and connect the finished wood and gold she saw in front of her, with the final resting place of her mother.  She closed her eyes and pressed her lips close to her pressed knuckles.  The touch made her smile reflexively.  It just looks like a big bed.  An uncomfortable bed, too.  I wouldn’t want to be put into one of those.  But would I want them to burn me?  This is my mother!  Her mind soon turned to thoughts of beds, of James’ big bed with the black blanket and white sheets, to Maggie’s bed that still had that blue and brown patchwork quilt, to her own bed with the white and fluffy douvet, and the pink striped sheets.  But then, her mind led her to Christmas morning.  She was only seven and with the shape of 6:57 from the clock beside her bed behind her she’d moved into the hallway.  Her small feet had padded on the carpet, down the hall to her parents’ room.  She reached up and pulled down the curved handle and the white door swung open to darkness.  At first she saw the red numbers in the darkness of her parents’ room. 6:56.  Then, she felt the first tinge of coldness in her little feet. “I used to carry you around in my pocket. Did you know that?”  That’s what he used to say to me and then mom would just nod at him and smile.  Nod and smile. I feel like much of a girl’s life is spent nodding and smiling.  And is that right or wrong? Even though her feet were cold, her cotton pajama leggings - with Disney figures embroidered in them - kept her warm.  There was The Little Mermaid on her thin thigh, Princess Jasmine on her undefined calf, and Minnie Mouse pointing toward her ankle.  She padded onward toward the dark, soft, square mass that stood outlined in the room. 6:57.  When she was close enough, she slowed her movement and lifted her right, leg onto the bed.  The quilt was soft and cool with air.  She shook this off and raised her other leg up.  She made sure that every move was light.  It made her almost giggle aloud when she heard her father’s snort from further ahead.  There was a tightness to the quilt right by where his feet were.  She could make out their shape; she even touched one, curious if there would be a reaction.  One foot flinched.  The valley between her mother’s form and her father’s form was open.  She lay down in it, listening to the sounds of her parents sleeping.  As she looked up, she saw the darkness turn to ceiling – the off-white color she knew when she’d run in and jump on the bed after school.  The light slowly showed its true color.  All the dark forms of objects she knew were becoming grey, if only in slow progressions of shade.  She couldn’t lay in the valley any longer.  She turned toward her father first and jumped on his shoulder.

“MARY CHRISTMAS!”

He didn’t budge and the room’s grey became a dull orange of the morning.  She heard her mother stir and mumble.  But, then, it was her father who she wanted to wake.  So she redoubled her efforts, propelling and sprawling herself gently across her father’s shoulder like children often do.  His shoulder gave slightly and she could feel its softness.  It seemed, to her, that with each shove she gave her father, each press of the matress, a sort of smell was released out into the room.  The first description would have been stinky, then perhaps stale, but that morning, as she lay and smelt her father’s arm while he woke, she realized that that smell was what she smelled like.  Liza was dismayed, slightly, because a little girl didn’t smell like what her father smelled like: sweat, sleep, laundry, whiskers, his nose.  Little girls were supposed to smell like soap and small touches of their mother’s hug and perfume.  However she was proud of it, because if she smelled like her father, then James smelled like him too, Tom, Maggie, and even her mother – maybe that was the smell of them all, the smell of their home.

Liza opened her eyes.  She had been pulled so far away from the moment.  However, the coffin was sitting exactly where it had been.  That wasn’t even praying, what I was doing.  Those were just memories coming back to me.  Its amazing how I can put memories onto that coffin, onto what is and is not my mother and make them part of me in a way.  Liza readjusted herself on the kneeler and closed her eyes.  She set herself to pray in the way she’d been taught in religion class.  Dear Lord, please take care of my mother as you bring her into this new world she is about to enter.  Please let my father get over this loss easily and also Maggie, James and Tom.  Eve too.  I don’t know how we are going to do it, but we need to try.  I know I can say it better than this, Lord, but I’m sure you understand how tired my brain is.  Liza couldn’t help but open her eyes.  She looked at the coffin again.  Her mind was wandering. Kneeling and praying were not going to help her, she couldn’t formulate a prayer.  I’m sorry, Lord.  I just want to lay between the valley of my mother and father.  She felt stale and she made the sign of the cross.  As she rose, she flattened her skirt against her legs once more.  She hoped that the touch, the smoothness of the fabric would bring her goosebumps, that it would make her feel something important – or at least make her feel alright.  However, she felt nothing.  She bowed her head and clasped her hands as she sat.

Maggie wasn’t sure what to make of her sister.  Watching her rise and sit, it had immediately struck her that Liza was depressed and taking their mother’s death harder than she’d let on.  Maggie’s vision lingered on Liza’s meek and uncomfortable form.  It didn’t surprise her that Liza might take their mother’s death the hardest. She had been the youngest and the last one in the house – the only one of the children who had not been given the chance to see themselves in a relative distance from their parents and also their home.  She couldn’t be sure, and that also upset Maggie, because it had occurred to her the night before that she didn’t know her sister at all and that she had no way of being able to read her.  Maggie had always taken pride in her perception of people’s demeanors and moods – she felt it enhanced her ability to take a good photo.  However, looking at Liza smooth her skirt once more, she felt that she may have neglected her sister – and perhaps her whole family – for too long.  There was a nervous flutter in her stomach and an image of her quiet apartment appeared before her.  One of her sandals rested under the coffee table, her boots lay on their sides by the door.  A sundress of hers was draped on the couch.  Three stainless steel pans were stacked next to the sink, only the top one was clean.  There was no one there to help her clean.  She could not smell Irish Spring soap.

Maggie stood and approached the casket.  She remained standing and regarded the roundness of her mother’s face.  Her mother looked round and smooth.  It appeared as though she were one with the coffinbed, that they both existed as a single shape.  Maggie marked her mother out, she separated the lines of her face from that of the pillow and the wooden finish of the casket.  Her eyes felt strained, as if she’d been in the dark room for too many hours or had drank too many cups of bad coffee.  She knelt onto the cushion.  It was so important to separate her mother from those other parts of the casket.  She couldn’t let them all become one – her mother’s  body would not be assimilated into the fabric of the bed, the cushion of the pillow, just like in some way it would never be a part of the earth. 

    The cushion stuck to her exposed knee and Maggie recalled the first time she gleaned the importance of keeping an object separate.  To her, the idea had at first seemed silly to even dwell on.  A person first knew themselves as a separate object, or knew how to separate objects from other objects when they were an infant – breast from mouth, hand from foot, head from table.  So when she sat in her photography class, her brow furrowed, feeling very much sixteen and misunderstood, the goosebumps that rose up her shoulders in waves that could almost have been palpable, were not be to taken seriously.

    “Maggie?” The teacher had said. “Is something wrong?  Do you understand.”

    “Yes,” she’d said curtly, the only tone she knew. “Why?

    “Oh, you just had a funny look on your face.  Like you didn’t understand.”

    Maggie had shaken her head at the teacher, Mrs. Teller.

    Mrs. Teller continued. “Which is why I emphasize, that when you want to take a picture, you do not need to see a whole scene.  It would be foolish to concentrate first on the complete scope that is in your lens. Focus on one object and see how it stands out.  Focus on those lines, what sets it out.  What makes it what it is.”

    The goosebumps slithered in more waves and then felt as though they emnated off of her body out into the art room with the olive paint and the grey corked stools.  Mrs. Teller was the fifth best teacher she’d had in her life.  However, those lessons were – at their core – elementary, not just in theory, but in relation to photography, as Maggie saw and felt it.  It would be foolish, it seemed to her then, looking at the white paper scraps on the dull peach floor, and still did now as a photographer looking at her dead mother, to not take advantage of the complete scope of a lens.  To see the space provided for its full area, to the edge of its boundaries.  However, the logic then would reverse itself.  For a panorama, a shot of mountains on purple orange sky, the vision of a noontime Turkish marketplace taken from its from its most removed perspective, still would separate itself from what was not marketplace, what was not mountain and maroon sky.  The fault being, that you couldn’t just decide to focus on one object – that would be amateur.  You had to learn to negotiate both. Like a child, who at first thinks itself one with the world, one with each object it encounters and only later knows the pain of bumping the crown of its head on the edge of a glass table, so too did photography have to be learned.  It was only later in life and in taking pictures that you could separate what is what from what is not what.  And cognition in many ways is easier than art, than photography.

    Without realizing it, Maggie was in the dark.  She opened her eyes again and the casket was still there.  Her mother’s nose, the flowers backing up the wood – these separate entities were all there.  Each one with an inner light  begging to be rendered.  If I took a photograph of my dead mother, is that maudlin or is that beauty?

        Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
         They called Maggie O’Donnell
        A fire-crotched…

    She had learned the term “inner light” in college.  It was in an aesthetics class and it was in relation to Cezanne.  The professor was a large man with a well kept goatee, his hair was thinning and stuck out around his ears in strands.  She had forgotten his name, which was not to say that he was a bad teacher, but like most college students she had been too full of herself to remember many names.  It’d been a Cezanne still life.

    “Look at the way he paints the table.  Three legs seem to be in harmony.  Three legs of this table are something you would buy in a store.”

    “This dude know about Ikea?” a student in the back asked.

    The professor laughed, took off his glasses and cleaned them. “No,” he paused and put his glasses back on. “In any case,” the class laughed as he continued. “Then we have the fourth leg, the leg in the foreground, it is shorter than the rest and if you follow the edgeline of the table, it is uneven, keeping true to the form.  Now follow the table’s top to the fruit bowl.  The bowl is off-balance, the fruit looks like it is about to tip.”

    “So he could draw a crappy table, what is so impressive about that?  We could all do that,” the same student in the back said.

    “Yeah,” Maggie spoke. “We could all say that in response to art, 'I could do that.'”

    The professor laughed.

    “Very true, Maggie.  If you look at the shapes you will see how true to life Cezanne keeps them.  In many ways it is only important because he was coming out of an era of the French academic painters.  But it was also important because he was coming out of the impressionist era and bring the importance back to the objects themselves, the imperfections, not just the imperfection of seeing them.  He knew that objects were imperfect, but that their inner light lets us see them as imperfect and as beautiful.”

    The way the professor had described the theory struck Maggie as wrong.

    “That is some real sixties bullshit,” she’d said.

    The professor shrugged.

    Later, Maggie walked through the snowflakes across campus.  She felt furious at the idea of letting something just be imperfect for the sake of being imperfect.  There was no point she felt, with her short uneven hair, her knit woolen gloves and scarf, and used maroon rain boots, to give yourself up to that thinking, whether it was in life or in art.  She looked at students skipping to class smoking cigarettes, wearing expensive winter hats and boots.  That idea had led her generation for too long.  She turned her face down the brick path and watched as snowflakes melted on the cracks where little bits of grass still stood even in the cold.  And she felt like she could cry from her great anger, and the beauty she felt in herself and in the sight of a snowflake melting on red brick.

    Maggie’s lids were squeezed tight and she felt the moisture right on the edge of her lashes.  She opened them once more.  She had no sense of time and immediately felt a pull on her heart as she looked upon her mother.  It seemed as though there were no way Maggie could ever understand how she had come from that tortured academic youth to the position she was in now, a woman over thirty, with pictures and postcards from all over the world and now a mother who no longer existed.  Why had she never called her mother on the phone in college and talked to her about aesthetics?  Maggie knew that she was interested in those things.  The image of her mother sitting on the wicker rocking chair in her room, the corner lamp on – the worn book of Thomas Aquinas open and, even though it was made of cardboard and coffee colored thread, the old cover seemed to shine onto the unlit portion of the room.

    “Mom, I’m going out.”

    The dull pain persisted in Maggie.  How could one hope to see their life as something complete and understandable?  You could never see the point to point creation that put you into whatever position you currently saw the world from.  Maggie knew this all too well as the image of her apartment appeared again and she saw the one clean pan sitting next to the sink.  She thought of Jake, as one who, in a state of emotional flux, will think of the person who they have loved more than anyone or anything else in their life.  She saw him by the sink in his grey sweatshirt - the one he had worn since he was a junior in high school - cleaning the dishes.  She saw and thought of him and felt a terrible earnestness, because for the first time she could feel the word “mistake” come to the very front of her mind and to her lips.

    She looked behind her and saw her family still sitting in the front row.  Maggie turned quickly back to the rail in front of the kneeler.  A flush came to her cheeks.  She felt foolish and incredibly angry at herself to look back, to hope that he was standing there or sitting in the room. How could she possibly think of going back?  How could she possibly be thinking of her love that went wrong while her mother was dead and gone and now laying with a bed of flowers around her, but not in the way that any poet would’ve written it or any folk song would have sung it? She was dead and now she was just another object to be taken in with the rest of them.  Maggie felt sick at Siberia, the Turkish evenings she’d seen, the Morocco she would be flying to in a month.  She wished that her camera were there so she could smash it right on the edge of her mother’s casket, right where the glare from the lights reflected on the wood making it seem white.

    Her mother’s face was round and waxy. The plastic quality of her skin and the whiteness of the glare made Maggie remember a full moon.   The night she remembered was dry and cool she could see her breath, but it was a night that is usually unique to December in that there was a mild quality to its edges – you could feel comfortable taking off your coat for a while to soak in the winter darkness.  The night was the night before Christmas Eve.  The white lights were draped along the front gutter and, with the strength of the moon, it made the bare flowerbeds glow; even the old mulch seemed distinct and profound.  She stood out on the front porch, running her shoes along the mortar that filled in the spaces between the stones.  The door opened and Jake stepped out with a glass of whiskey in his hand.  Maggie looked at the perspiration collected on the sides of the glass.  Jake blew smoke as he stepped out, shutting the door and rubbing the curled collar of his black sweater simultaneously.  He asked her what was wrong, knowing well that she was anxious and uncomfortable having him this close to her family. To her, having him this close, having him look at ornaments of her sitting on Santa’s lap, made their intimacy all too real – which forced her further away from the two of them together as a couple, as finacees as, perhaps, soul mates.  She told him nothing was wrong, she could just use a cigarette.

    He curled his glass towards his left armpit and poked his hand into his right pocket.  She could freeze him there carelessly rummaging his pocket, handsome like a movie star entering the  frame.  He kept moving and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.  She hated him for doing that.  She hated that he could know her and buy things for her.

    A cigarette hung from his fingers – one solid cylinder. She took the cigarette and let him light it.  She smoked and he kissed her cheek.  Her anger faded again with the comfort of the night and the way branches and stones were lit; even the grass as one whole uneven shape.  Jake could, at that time, feel the strain in Maggie.  He knew that for all her talking and articulation, that she could still not articulate herself.  He wrapped his arm along her waist and pulled the corners of their hips together so that they locked in the strange way that bodies familiar with each other have a habit of doing.  He looked out into the edge of the lawn where the light turned abruptly to black and wondered what more there was.

    The front door opened, the handle clicked and Maggie saw her mother.  The sound of Django Reinhardt’s music drifted out.  She quickly flicked her cigarette.  A trail of smoke rose from the bush where it landed.  Rose smiled.  She told the two of them to come in for coffee when they wanted.  Jake put his whiskey down on the arm of the bench.  He grabbed Rose by the right arm and swayed drunkenly with her as the guitars strummed in an ignorant and timeless bliss.  Maggie watched Jake spin her mother in the door and state that she was too good a dancer for someone as clumsy as himself.  He looked to her with his hands on his hips, his chest broad, sticking out in his sweater.  He smiled and his well defined jawline followed.   Maggie felt herself grow restless then as he stood there with her in the comfortable cold.  But with him dancing with her mother, nothing was comfortable.  The white lights and the shadowy tree limbs, which had seemed familiar and enchanted, now mader her nauseous.  Her cheeks itched.

    And as Maggie pulled her kneees up from the kneeler, she inhaled the flowers.  They smelled sour.  Love is not charming someone’s mother.  Maggie’s eyes fell upon her mother’s waxy cheeks once more.  She turned her head back.  He wasn’t there, the flowers stunk and Maggie felt weak.  She could feel her ears and feet itch.  But she walked back to her seat, unable to itch either place.  She knew that it was her problem, not her dead mother’s, and certainly not Jake’s.

Maggie sat down and Tom gave his father a pat on the back.  The girls had gone youngest to oldest, so it seemed appropriate to him, as though it were a tradition or ritual, for him to go next as the youngest male.

    “My turn, dad.”

    Ben nodded.  Tom felt that his father’s gaze lasted a long time on him.  It was only a brief passing of seconds, but Tom’s attention extended the moment and he turned to the casket and kneeler.   He approached with his hands held piously locked right in front of his groin. 

    The hymn “Take and Eat” was stuck in his head.  When his body was posed piously the way it was, this hymn always came to mind.  The hymn’s tune had a murmering quality, it bubbled along and even the high notes did not reach so high.  He’d heard women sing it high in church, but it didn’t suit the song and it did not suit him.  The refrain was most appealing to Tom; he enjoyed the simple repetition, the actions of the title.  “Take and eat,” he could see that very clearly in his mind.  In fact, it reminded him a favorite poem of his.  “Love (III)” by George Herbert:

        Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
                    Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
                    From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
                    If I lack'd anything.

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
                    Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
                    I cannot look on thee."
  Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
                    "Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
                    Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
                    "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
                    So I did sit and eat.

His mother used to recite that poem to him; his mother smelled like roasted beef and garlic. When Tom saw himself as a child that is what she smelled like.  That odor association was him then, but Tom was not him then, he was him now and his mother did not smell like meat in the oven, she smelled like nothing.  That smell was new to him.

    Tom kneeled his right knee into the cushion and kept his left one bent.  He wiped his face with his arm.  Then, placing pressure on the wood bannister with his forearms, he lifted his body slightly up, the way he did when he was a child and not who he was now kneeling. He let himself drop.  He placed his forehead to his knuckles.  He thought of the words of the poem instead of how it looked on a page.  His soul was drawn to the phrase “yet my soul drew back,” because he always marvelled at the idea of a soul drawing back, because he often felt something similar in himself but could never give word to it in that way.  It seemed to him that this was one area where he was not alone, that many people also felt their souls drawing back, receding from themselves and the world,  but not knowing it – not knowing what to call the sensation.  Tom imagined Liza sitting behind him in her chair smoothing the black skirt she wore.  There was something meek about her.  He imagined her smoothing and then crossing and recrossing her legs, a faint white on her kneecap.  He saw himself the way he used to look, sitting on the floor of the kitchen, listening to the stove click and rain fall on the skylight.  He heard his mother’s voice. “I the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear, I cannot look on thee.”  It was the flatness of her vowels that he remembered.  He heard the words, saw them collect their strange shapes in the darkness and he saw his sister, as she was then – a little girl, who knew nothing about guilt or shame, but who now carried it with her, if only vaguely. 

As Tom saw his sister’s childsbody and his as well, he could see no connection with his kneeling form and her sitting form.  If a stranger saw the way he looked now and the way he looked then, there would be no recognition.  However, those he knew, connected the two distinct objects by a thread called time - he wasn’t inclined to call that memory.  Yet those two people were two different people: him then and him now.  His father, when looking upon him,  held his gaze because of this.  Because Ben felt that the two different objects he saw were the same thing when known and seen from a certain perspective.  Tom tested himself with this sensation.  He did not know himself so he was a stranger to that other self, which time told the world was him.  He thought of the bubbles in the club soda he had drank the night before with Natalie.  The smell of the tuck of her neck came to his nose.  What  remained constant so that he was the same thing last night that he was today? It was not just the passage of time, because the passage of time meant that the object was the same thing seen from a different moment.  However, that object sitting on a screened in porch looking at a girl with a pointed chin and sharply cut brown hair, drinking club soda, was not the same object kneeling, looking at his mother in a casket.  The boy on the floor who smelled roasted meat was not him.  Yet, Liza was still his meek, blonde sister.

    Tom rubbed his knuckles into the space between his eyebrows.  He smelt the moistness between his fingers – it reminded him of envelope glue.  What also disproved his notion was his mother.  In the moment, her life was complete. Every time from her life was now frozen and wrapped by the cool body that lay in the casket.  Even though he was not the boy who sat and listened to her feet step lightly on the kitchen throw rugs, she was the same woman dead that she was then.  She was the same woman who, earlier in July when he had come over unannounced to weed the gardens in the middle of the night, wiped his brow when she found him sitting, sweating on the back porch at seven in the morning.  Tom turned back, he looked past his family.  He saw quickly his Uncle Connor, Aunt Erin.  No one would see Rose as a procession of times any longer, she was now all times.  There would no longer be a then and now, there would only be this – the culmination, blackness, completeness.

He hummed the tune to “Take and Eat.”  He didn’t know how his father saw his mother.  He had an idea, but there was nothing in him – nothing that drew his soul – to feel the confidence to say “This is how my father sees my mother.”  Then, after turning the idea and feeling his knee grow numb, Tom felt he could understand the mystery he felt towards his father.  While anyone looking at his mother saw in this one moment all of the moments they had known her, his father never needed a moment to draw up all of the substance and outline that made her the presence she was.  For him, there was no moment; how does a husband look at or remember his wife’s funeral?  Tom felt his father looking at him. He heard his mumbling, “My strange son.  My strange boy.”  However, they were both strange.  Their strangeness was in the way they saw things.  At that moment, Tom was as close to and as far from understanding his father as he’d ever been.  His eyes watered slightly and he felt tremors of coolness from his neck to his ankles.  He opened his eyes, closed them and opened them once more.  What Tom wanted was to feel Natalie in the room, feel the electricity of her walking on the red carpet with the white vacuum lines.  But he knew she wasn’t there.  He crossed himself and said “I love you.”  He rose.

As Tom returned to his seat, he looked at James.  The few steps Tom took seemed to elongate in their duration.  He saw his brother and he saw Eve.  Tom was tempted to laugh when he looked at Eve.  It was amazing, to him, that he could have believed that he loved her.  He wasn’t sure if that emotion he had was truly a romantic longing in direct relation to his want of love and of the warmth of a body, or if it was something more mature – a vision of her true character and true beauty, that even though she was beautiful to his eye, it was more the way she sat in relation to other things which made her beautiful, the way she moved and fit into the world.  He let that thought run along the edges of his skin.  It made him tingle, and once again he thought of Natalie.  He thought of the curl under her neck, the way her eyes were moist in the dim porchlight and how he wanted to curl her hair behind her ear and did.  The chair eased his body to a stop and he crossed his right leg over his left knee.

James tugged on his pants, pulling the pleat over and against his knee. 

“My turn, I suppose,” he said.

He stood and Eve stood with him.

“I’ll kneel with you,” she said.  Eve looked at him in the way that a woman, especially a wife, looks at a man she loves when he believes and postures himself in the manner that says – this is something I do alone and no one comes with me.  And this is a posture that always has to do with death, and no man believes that a woman will die.  James saw the look in Eve’s unwavering grey eyes and remembered how he’d first seen that look during their wedding.  His body had not communicated any form of solitude, but she adopted the look and her eyes drove straight into him below the thinnest sheen threads of the veil and he knew that this woman whom he’d known deeply, whom he’d been in and out of, whom he felt the most mature in his feelings towards, was attached to him in a way that he could never have imagined and she now had a look that would always tell him that.  The part that made his heart throb, was that she would never use it to control him, but only to love him and understand him.
“Let’s go,” he said and took her hand.  Feeling her fingers within his, the room dropped away for a moment.  James no longer felt any anxiety at seeing people he knew, people that knew his family, people that required something from him.  Part of his relief was from the fact that they had exited, but it was also the sense memory of Eve’s fingers.  In one step, he marvelled at how he could constantly overlook that simple rub of the inside of their fingers so many times and only feel the clamminess of two palms together.  Yet, in one instance the touch would bring everything rushing forward at once, so fast that he couldn’t make one memory out from another – everything was simply their fingers locked together.

With their fingers linked they approached the kneeler and coffin.  They paused and kneeled in front of the body.  As his knees touched the pad, James thought of what his father had said to him the night before.

“People love you for something else and I can’t see it so clearly right now.”

The words hadn’t come into his head for most of the day with all of the motion of getting his father up, getting out of the house, getting to the funeral home, preparing himself for seeing members of the family – all of the ceremony.  However, now he was in the middle of that ceremony,  participating in the small mechanical motions which made the ritual of death.  James let go of Eve’s hand and locked his fingers together. He smiled as he felt his fingertips touch his knuckles.  The standing, sitting and kneeling made the ritual and that is what made the whole scenario real.  Just as he had done so many times in church when he was younger, he clasped his hands together. The repetition was a white noise in his mind, but it brought a reality to what he experienced because it was real and it felt holy and important.  Most of all it was familiar and its familiarity brought his father’s words back into his mind.  The sentiment that his father tried to convey stung him because there was something absolutely true about it.  James felt that he had lost something.  However, he didn’t know what it was.  He took a brief look at the coffin before closing his eyes.  The muscle in his tricep twitched.

James frowned and focused on his mother.  His mother was dead and he didn’t know what that meant.  She had been a woman, she had  been a mother, she had been kind, she had been intelligent, but she’d never been dead.  It was a strange thing to try and define the roles that a person played, especially when that person was your mother.  James tried to forget that his actual mother was beyond the closed lids of his eyes and laying lifeless.  He tightened the muscles in his face so that the pressure on his eyes made him cry slightly. Through the tepid warmth of his tears, the vision of his mother holding Tom in the hospital came to him.  The day of Tom’s birth was one of those instances when a child comes to a distinct recognition that transcends the small sphere of its understanding.  For James, seeing his mother hold his new little brother – the brother he had named Mike when it was in his mother’s belly – he understood the distance of things in the world.  The hospital room was far from his house, his mother up on the bed and him standing beside the white blanket was close, but also very far in a way that made him uncomfortable.  He’d looked out the room’s window and saw the early morning sun and the sky becoming a perfect blue.  At the bottom of the window, in the distance, were trees blowing back and forth, and they were very far away.  This he’d come to understand when his brother was born. He’d looked at Tom’s little pink face and felt his stomach throb with a feeling he didn’t understand at all then, and was still perplexed by it now as he saw the memory in front of him and mouthed, unconsciously, the words that he’d said.

“What’s his name, mommy?”

“His name is Thomas, honey.”

“I thought we were going to name him, Mike.”

Maggie held a pink comb and poked him in his back with it. “That’s what you wanted to name him, but Mom picks the name.  She named him after her favorite author. Thomas Alinus.”

“Aquinus,” Rose said.

“Aquinas,” Maggie repeated.

“Thomas Aquinas,” James said, gripping the white hospital blanket and looking at the baby cradled in his mother’s arms.  And he’d remembered the first time he saw Tom when he arrived at the doorway to his brother’s room at Mather hospital on that January night.  He walked in with his pea coat draped over his forearm and listened to his work shoes clack on the pea green floor.  Tom was sleeping and they had monitors and an IV hooked up to his arm.  James hung his coat on the bed end.  He touched his brother’s foot and squeezed it.

“Why the fuck did you do it, idiot?” He stepped closer to his brother’s head.  “What the fuck did we have all those years together for if you were just going to drown yourself in some ice water?”

He squeezed Tom’s sleeping arm.

“How could you let this happen to you?”

James felt as though he were going to cry.  Then he tried to think about who he was talking to.  He looked down at his work shoes and his pant cuffs, damp from the slush, and felt a restlessness.  His head pounded and he couldn’t concentrate on the great love he had for his brother.  A strong feeling of guilt clouded his heart and he wanted to scream at himself and the walls for the fact that that feeling could rise in him, when the moment was not about him at all.  It was about Tom.  Thomas Aquinas.  The little pink faced baby who’d been wrapped in towels in the same hospital seventeen years before.  That same Tom was now lying on one of the hospital beds and James didn’t know who he was.
James exhaled at the kneeler.  He still wasn’t sure who his brother was.

“People love you for something else and I can’t see it so clearly right now.”

Remembering Tom as an infant, drew James’ mind back to the main source of his insecurity.  He opened one eye and glanced at Eve.  She was kneeling with her eyes closed.  James almost laughed thinking of the situation he was in.  It was inevitable that she would find out.  She would be in the bathroom one morning throwing up in the toilet with morning sickness when he walked in to take a shower before work.  The scenario unfolded and took shape in his mind.  She’d be sitting in front of the toilet on the soft new tan shower rug she’d bought – the way women did in the movies or on TV when they found out they were pregnant – and she’d look up at him.  He’d take her look in and feel the swelling importance in the center of his gut.  He'd feel the pride a man gets when a woman looks up at him, because all men want women to look up at them, since in some way that means they are responsible, in charge, and all men want to feel that responsibility whether it is real or not; whether the woman conveys that or not.  Then Eve would smile, she’d wipe the strands of hair on her forehead back off to the side and smile.

“I’m pregnant,” she would say and twitch her feet slightly so that they hit the tile, making a slight dull thud.  Then James would have the choice.  He would have the choice to pretend it was news to him or that he’d known.  He had the opportunity to tell her now, to tell her at any minute he felt like it.  However, if he told her, it would make it real. The reality of her being his wife would become even stronger.  The reality, that once he gave life to another being he could never escape, would strike him.  He hated to know that feeling lurked inside himself, but it was true.  He didn’t want to run away from Eve and he never would.  However, there was something in him that felt an attachment to the idea that he could if he wanted to, that there had been no life created between them to make everything so real and beyond them, beyond her and beyond him.  It was the control, or the lack of it, that a child signified to him.  James felt ashamed to think that a small innocent infant could signify such shallow thoughts.  However, there was an illumination he felt too at knowing that his insecurity and his fear were very much connected to his own brother and the fact that his brother’s birth first communicated to him that he could control nothing in the world because things could be far away from him.  And in some way, he’d been trying to get that back all of his life.

James exhaled and passed his hand through his hair.

“People love you for something else and I can’t see it so clearly right now.”

If that was what his father said to him, it was difficult for James to imagine what his mother would say to if she saw the way he was acting.  He knew that Eve saw the difference, she’d confronted him about it the night before.  However, she let him off the hook easy.  She loved him in the way that only a soul mate could.  Eve would be satisfied with his stammering answers about his family, because she’d do her best to be right there with him.  That is why he married her: she challenged him in the ways he needed to be challenged. She respected what he truly wanted, because she knew him and knew that he didn’t want anything easy, but in the end she loved him and would let him off the hook – not because she had to, but because she wanted to.

James wasn’t sure what his mother would do.  She had raised him to be a man, a well-rounded man.  She wanted him to treat women with respect, he treated women with respect.  She wanted him to seek the good in the world, he tried his best to seek the good in the world.  She wanted him to be humble, he was humble when he wasn’t drunk, and even when he was, very rarely was he brash.  His mother had dressed him in a red bow-tie when he was a baby.  There was a photo of him wearing it from Maggie’s fifth birthday party.  Their parents had sat him next to Maggie when she was going to blow out the candles.  Maggie wanted her friend Nicole to sit next to her.  The picture was of Maggie with a frown, cake on her hands and James, in his red bow-tie and vest, smiling with cake frosting all around his mouth and cheeks.  Ben stood behind Maggie.  That photo always made him tear up with both a sense of joy and of sadness.  There was a joy in looking at himself as a child dressed up properly in a man’s clothing.  The red bow tie became more than an accessory, it was a sign of his mother’s care, her embrace of motherhood.  She had loved his little body  and cared about his entrance and his appearance in the world.  However, there was a sadness because that little boy in a red bow tie now wore red ties, blue ties, and nice grey coats to work and he was a man, but he could not face the fact that he had created another life.  There was a piece of him growing inside of Eve, a new child who he could dress and shape in his own image – but he wasn’t sure if he liked that image.

What also made James sad when he thought of the photo and of his mother was the that the fact he had a worn a bow-tie as a child only reminded him that maybe his whole life had been formed by his mother’s vision of what it should be.  And it wasn’t only true for him; it was true for Maggie, Tom and Liza.  Maggie was the first child and a girl, which naturally made Rose take an aggressive approach towards parenting.  She didn’t know how to be a mother, there was a feeling inside of her that felt very natural, but she didn’t know what to do in each circumstance.  So she tried very hard to make Maggie into a sweet little girl, which was easy to do because she was very striking and cute with her red brown hair, especially when it was pushed up in  pigtails.  However, what she failed to realize, in those early days, with all of her intuition was that it was Maggie’s spirit that defined her, the non-feminine, non-sexual fire that always kept her seperate.

For Tom, perhaps she had indulged him too much.  James thought of how Rose was always protecting Tom.  She never pretended that he wasn’t guilty of being odd.  When Tom’s friends’ mothers came over to report that Tom had told their sons there was no Santa Claus or when their CCD teacher called and told Rose that Tom had stated that he did not believe in God but only the air, Rose always made him apologize.  She made him come to the door or come to the phone no matter how old he was.  However, afterward she would always pet his hair in a strange way.  James could remember sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework when Tom had to apologize for telling his friend Jeremy that he didn’t care what it would be like to be an NFL wide receiver, he only wanted to know what it would be like to be dead.  Tom was seven and James was fourteen.  Tom had apologized to Jeremy’s mother and Rose kneeled in front of him to make sure he understood how serious she was about him saying upsetting things to his friends.  But then they walked back in the kitchen and she pet his head; it was some symbol telling him that she knew he was different.  James never wanted to let Tom have that, though.  Tom was too smart not to know the things he was doing; he knew the way the world worked, yet he did these strange things, not out of some kind of malice, but simply because he saw the world.  And the way he saw the world was his way and although he  knew all the different ways the world could be  and was seen, he never let those ways intrude on his vision.

He wondered if Tom could survive in the world.  Despite the fact that Tom stuck to his view, he was extremely sensitive to other people and their pains and struggles.  James felt that was something they had in common.  Yet, there was a small difference that seperated them.  James wasn’t quite sure what it was.  He knew it had something to do with their mindsets.  Tom took everything to heart and had difficulty differentiating the empathy he felt for others with his own pains, fears and ambitions.  James knew where the lines ended and where he could do nothing more than help – his short coming was never knowing when to quit. There was something abstract in the way Tom related to other people and the world.  James remembered a conversation he and Tom had a few years before.  James had been home for Labor Day and Tom was going back to school the next day.  They stood at the edge of the garage door, where the white concrete met the black tar of the driveway, there were a few leaves already stuck in the divot between the two.  They stood drinking beer and listening to the crickets. James remembered the eve of the first day of school from when he was a child, he smelled the slight coolness of the air and his heart beat  uncontrollably.  His mind was wandering away, thinking about how he hadn’t changed so much since he was a student.  Then, Tom had spoken.

“Jimmy,” he said.

James laughed. “Yes, Thomas.”

Tom bowed his head and looked out into the dark.  James tried to follow his gaze but the darkness pressed and all he could find was a backlight glowing from the neighbors yard.  He didn’t know what Tom saw.

“Do you ever get that feeling when you smell the freshness of the air?  I mean the freshness of a cool summer night?”

“Yeah, you mean that school day feeling?”

“No,” he paused.  “I mean.” He stammered. “I mean, I mean, that feeling that makes the edges of leaves strange to you.  That you don’t understand exactly why they’re there, or how they live and make air and make the world go on the way it does.  Then you keeping thinking about their edges and you remember school, and you remember a sunny day in summer and always wanting to flop down underneath them in the shade and not care about anything else in the world.  When I smell that air, when I smell the trees or the night I think about how nice it would be to just lay down under a tree and just die.  Become part of the rest of it, you know? Not walk around to smoke cigarettes and drink beer, just cry and fall and lay down and die to become a leaf too.  Or a piece of grass.”

James didn’t know what to say.  He felt strongly that the throbbing feeling in his chest was the same feeling his brother was talking about, but he simply couldn’t see it in that way.  So he pat and held Tom’s shoulder.

“Its funny to get older, Tom. All of that is the good stuff, though.  Summer days and nights growing up around here.  Those are all the things you remember.”

Tom turned away from the distance and looked at him.  His lips were pursed and his eyes were wide.

Then his face focused, his lips tightened and he frowned.

“Are you afraid to get married?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you love Eve?”

“Yes. I do. What are you getting at?”

“Nothing,” Tom looked away, back out into the dark. “That must be nice.”

James stared at the side of his face and took a drink of his beer. 

“People love you for something else and I can’t see it so clearly right now.”

The phrase caused his stomach to churn again.  He shook his head unconsciously and stood up.  It occurred to him that he and Eve had been kneeling too long.  James took Eve’s hand and they walked back to the chairs.  James shook his head again, he hadn’t even thought of Liza.  He looked at her in profile.  She looked like Tom in a way.  They had the pointer features.  He admired her chin and thought, poetically, that it looked like a crescent moon.  James noticed her smoothing her skirt against her thighs,  her hands moving out from the center where the thighs touched while her knees nervously bobbed. He shook his head once more as he sat.  There was too much to pay attention to and that was one of the reasons he had always hated coming home.  He imagined each of the people he loved in a list and could not help seeing the boxes next to each of their names, the boxes that his mind would check off when he felt he had satisfied them, or satisfied his idea of what they needed.  James hung his head for a moment and then looked up at his father.  He wanted to tell him he would be a grandfather.

“Dad,” James said. “It’s your turn.”

Ben O’Donnell smoothed back his hair.  He always enjoyed the thrust that hair, when pushed back, gave to the palm of his hand.  He stretched his legs out and felt a pain underneath his ribcage.  One of the things he hated most about getting old was the disconnected pain.  Little things like that, although painful, amused him – even though he knew the human body in and out, in ways clinical and sexual, he still would never be able to explain why for some reason when he stretched his leg his chest hurt.
Ben stood. “Thanks for warming the crowd up.”

All four of his children and Eve looked at him.

“Bad timing.”

The thought of his brother standing at the back of the room gave Ben pause.  He did not look behind, however.  He pulled the lapels of his suit jacket, running his fingers – his thumb especially - along their smooth edge, and stepped forward.  His hands fell to a natural position by his waist and he locked them together.  Out of habit, he bowed his head.  A faint memory, something gold, touched the tip of his mind and he felt drawn to look at his brother.  However, he did not and kept walking toward the dead body of his wife.  When he reached the kneeler he crossed himself.  He almost smiled thinking how a motion, remembering a murder upon a solid piece of wood, felt so fluid and comfortable.  Ben O’Donnell then knelt.  He looked at his wife lying down in a strange new bed that he felt she would never have approved of and closed his eyes. After remaining in that position for a few moments, he rose to his feet.  He crossed himself again and stood looking at his wife’s dead body.  Then, Ben nodded his head, wished he had worn a hat and walked back to the seat he had been sitting in.  He felt the eyes of his children on him.  A flash from a night when he was younger came to him.  There was music and light, there were handsome faces, but nothing seemed definite to him.  A familiar dread rose in his stomach.  He pushed his hands into his pockets and appreciated the comfort and familiarity of the posture.  Ben sat back down in his chair and stretched his legs out once again, this time crossing them over each other – right over left.  He admired the shine on his pointed black shoes.  This time the back of his leg hurt.  This time he knew it was tightness in his calf.

Douglas Bryant’s hands were crossed behind his back right above his rear.  He pushed himself off the wall uncrossing his hands as he did so.   He placed his hands together and walked toward the front of the room.  As he walked, he thought about how strange it was that Ben O’Donnell knelt for such a short time.  It was well known that he adored Rose and always had.  If he hadn’t, he never would have stopped drinking the way he did – the way she wanted him to.  The fact that he knelt briefly added to the doubt Douglas Bryant had about Ben O’Donnell’s devotion to his late wife.  It surely would not have been her wish to defer from the traditional Catholic funeral ceremony.  It struck Douglas as a lack of planning and order.  He felt his hairline itch.  The air of carelessness that Ben O’Donnell had given off angered him.  How could so many people trust him as a doctor?  Douglas understood how they could trust Connor.  Connor was reserved, respectable, thoughtful and orderly.  But Ben, Ben was none of those things.  Perhaps if he had been any of those things he would not have killed Connor’s daughter.

Douglas Bryant shook his head.  He remembered that he was conducting business.  He faced those who remained and took a breath.

“We will now begin the procession to the place of rest.  Those of you who will be joining the procession, kindly exit out to the front. We will be bringing the casket out to the hearse.  You may follow the hearse once we have begun. Thank you.”

Douglas Bryant turned toward the O’Donnells.

“Ben, Tom, James. You three will help us carry the casket?”

James stood. “I don’t know if dad is feeling well enough.  He’s been a little sick.”

“I see,” Douglas Bryant said.

Ben stood up as well. “I’m fine.  I can carry a piece of wood.  I don’t know what you’re trying to say, Jimmy.”

“Ben,” Eve said, touching Ben’s hand. “James didn’t mean anything. You haven’t really been yourself is all.”

Douglas Bryant watched as Ben O’Donnell looked down at Eve.

“Thanks, darling.  But this is myself.  This is who I am.  And I am who she made me too.  I feel strong as ever.”

Douglas saw Ben squint at James O’Donnell, but he couldn’t help notice as Connor walked in their direction.  Connor pushed his greyish brown hair behind his ears as he approached.  Douglas always forgot how tall he was.  Connor stopped and stood next to Ben.  Ben looked behind him and saw Connor standing there.  Douglas Bryant felt the importance of the moment.  He watched as Ben switched his posture in relation to his brother.  He pulled the lapels of his jacket together and his chest seemed to get broader.  Connor had some strange power over Ben.

“I’ll help carry the casket, Ben,” Connor said.

Ben smiled. “You will, will you?”

“Yes, I will,” Connor said, pushing his hair behind his ears once again.

“Thank Erin for me,” Ben said.

“You can thank her later.” Connor turned his head in the direction of the casket.  “Let’s just carry on.”

“Yeah, sure,” Ben said and he looked at his children. “Are you all going to say hello to your Uncle Connor?”

All four children and Eve greeted him.  Douglas Bryant didn’t feel as though he belonged among them all; he felt as though he were intruding.  He hated to feel that way, he always wanted to be humble and cognizant of the boundaries and courtesies of any social interaction.  However, Douglas shook off his pride and humility because he knew that he had a job to do; he had to continue with the ceremony.

“Well,  Connor, thank you for offering your services.  Now if you will, whomever will be carrying the casket please follow me.”

Ben looked at each of his children.  He then turned and looked at his brother.  There was something in him that wanted to speak.  Ben felt the alcohol flush in his face and he thought of himself on the day he had let Lucy die.  It was the him from that day that wanted to speak.  That him had been muffled by years, memories, simple chores, the day to day difficulties of paying mortgages, college bills, insurance, remembering to eat fruits and vegetables  and keep his blood pressure low,  however, that him never ceased wanting to speak, to say that he’d loved Lucy like a daughter.  He’d loved her because she was his neice, because she had alluring blue eyes even for a child, because she had a small tight smile with white teeth, because she was just a little girl and he’d had two of his own and knew how weak his heart was against their beauty and charms.

“Well, there’s six of us here,” he said, looking at Connor. “Why don’t we all carry it.”

Connor pushed his hair back behind his ears and nodded.

“Very good.” Douglas Bryant  was pleased with the order and the way the number of people fell into place.  There had to be three pall bearers on e ach side. He almost smiled as he walked briskly over to the casket.  Douglas stepped onto the raised platform where the casket lay.  As he stood behind its open panels, he resumed an air of complete solemnity.  There was a familiar tingle throughout his body as he touched the panels.  There was something about the sensation that was reminiscent of self pity, however Douglas Bryant had always liked to think that it was an appreciation of the moment.  A taking in of the loss of life and the importance that the person in the casket once had.  Yet after so many years of seeing wakes and conducting them, there was something of a show in it no matter if anyone ever watched.  And Douglas Bryant enjoyed that, because he never had a chance to put on a show in any other avenue of his life.  So when he grew solemn and hung his head, touching the tarnished wood panels of a casket, the sensation inside was self pity.

Douglas shut the panels of the casket.

Liza saw the casket shut on her mother.  She felt scared for a moment that she wouldn’t see her mother’s face again.  However, she remembered her grandmother’s funeral.  There was a last chance to see the person before they were buried, at least in the only other ceremony she had seen  or remembered.  She wasn’t old enough to remember Lucy’s funeral.  What she did remember, was driving to her grandmother’s house during her eleventh summer to take her over for a day on the sound.  Her grandmother lived right on Shore Road looking at the harbor.  They pulled up to the house and there was a strong warm breeze blowing, the flag on the pole in the back of the house was flapping rapidly.  The shepard dogs from the house next door were running along the lawn and barking.  Liza had always wanted to go and play with those dogs, they looked so well behaved.

She followed her mother up to the back steps.  The wooden screen door was open.

“Mom,” Rose said.  As a child, Liza enjoyed to hear her mother say, “mom.”  It amused her to think that her own mother had a mother and that at one time her mother was a little girl too, who had to listen to her mother and who cared about silly things like doll hair and boys.  There was no answer, however, so they opened the door and walked into the kitchen.  The kitchen was in order as usual, there was a bowl of fruit on the table.

“Mom,” Rose repeated.  There was still no response so they walked into the main hallway. “Hello?”  Liza held her mother’s hand.  Her mother turned off into the parlor room with the windows that looked out onto the harbor and the boats that floated there.  When they walked into the parlor, Liza saw her grandmother laying on the sofa, her face was buried in the arm.

“Grandma?” Liza said.

“Shhh,” her mother said.

There was a tea set on the table in front of the sofa.  Three cups were set out, as well as the shining white teapot her grandmother always used, the one wit the big blue ribbon painted along the top of the pot.  One of the cups was filled with tea.  Rose went over to her mother and poked her gently.

“Mom?”

Liza touched the teapot.  It was still slightly warm, like a roll in a bread basket at a restaurant that a child waits so earnestly for when she is out to dinner.  Liza looked up and her mother was kneeling next to the arm of the couch, where her grandmother’s face was now turned upwards.  Liza saw her grandmother’s eyes were closed, her mouth open.  Rose began to cry.

Liza touched the casket.  The wood was slick and cool.

“Alright everyone,” Douglas Bryant said. “Please line up on each side.  Let’s have two men and one woman on each side for symmetry.”

Ben frowned at Douglas Bryant.

“Yes, Connor and Ben you stand at the back of each side, then let’s have Liza and Maggie in the middle, with James and Thomas at the back.”

Liza stood behind James and in front of Uncle Connor.  She looked across the casket at Maggie. Maggie glanced at her and, keeping a serious face, turned forward.  From in front of Liza, James turned around.  He pet her on the top of her head gently.  Then he looked at Funeral Director Bryant.

“Wait, what will Eve do?” he asked.

“She can walk alongside with me.  Now, are we ready?”

Ben mumbled and grunted and they all bent down to prepare for the lift.  Liza let her brother and her uncle lift first, then she put her hand under the casket to help hold the weight.  It was much heavier than she imagined.  They began walking away from the stage and toward the door.  Liza focused on James’ jacket and thought back to her first reaction to their grandmother’s death.  When she had touched the tea kettle, it first struck her child’s mind that death could happen so swiftly.  Her grandmother had made the tea and she was alive.  Her grandmother had died.  The tea was sitting warm.  Before that moment, death seemed to her like a concrete and planned event.  Not planned, but it was an event, not something that came and passed n the middle of the day.  People became sick and then died, they had heart attacks, there were plane crashes and car accidents that killed people or you were hit by a bus or drowned.  Death was separate from normal life. But, she thought, feeling the weight and the movement of her feet as they exited the room of the wake, death always coexisted with life and they were in fact never really separate.  Life and death supported one another. In a way, they understood each other more than any two things in the world – maybe not as much as her parents understood each other, though.  And the tea that sat on the table that day, still warm and drinkable, told her that.

The procession of the family continued solemnly.  The O’Donnells carried the casket through the lobby.  Douglas Bryant admired the family as they moved.  He was surprised how nicely the shape had fallen into place.  He liked the boy-girl-boy order that was reflected on each side of the casket.  It was a shame that Connor was not a part of the nuclear family, but the healing that might occur between the two brothers over this moment and ceremony was far more dramatic.  Douglas Bryant looked up at the portrait of his father.  This was why his father had gotten into the funeral home business: to help families reunite over a ritual.  That was the power the home had; families and individuals could connect with each other, could connect with something greater, something they always felt within themselves but could never really understand.  That was why there were death rituals, so that one could hope to make that greater universe understandable.  It wasn’t the most appealing profession, but it helped soothe people in its repetition and reliability.  Douglas watched Connor and Ben O’Donnell as they walked at the rear of the casket.  He had to admit that they did look very similar.  It was something in their faces, a childish quality, playful, yes, but also something adventurous, especially with their hair wispy and somewhat unkempt around the ears.  Funeral Director Bryant felt his heart skip.  If he could bring these two brothers together, then this job would have been a true success.

Douglas took a deep breath.  He looked at Eve.  This was the first he had ever seen of James O’Donnell’s wife in person.  He had seen her in the Herald in the “People” section towards the back of the paper.  There was a picture of the two of them with a  notice that they had gotten married, the ceremony was in Georgetown.  He found her to be quite beautiful and he wondered how old she was, how old they both were.  She looked to be about thirty.  Douglas thought they would probably have children soon.  Although, looking at her trim frame, he couldn’t imagine her gaining the creamy glow that a woman’s skin and overall appearance took when she was pregnant.  He remembered when Eileen, his wife, was pregnant with Frank.  He was never more attracted to her.  To Douglas, it was the greatest pleasure of his life that he loved a woman and was able to have a child with her, that simplicity made everything else bearable.

The main doors of the funeral home were open and Douglas could see the hearse parked outside.  Everything had been set up correctly and was going according to his vision.  The family would pass the casket into the hearse and it would be driven to the place of rest.  Once the casket was in the hearse, his job was over.  Douglas stood behind the O’Donnell family as they carried the hearse out of the funeral home and down the concrete steps.  He heard the constant whoosh of the car passing on Old Town Road.  The extended family and other well wishers were gathered along the steps as the family passed through with the casket to the back of the hearse.  Douglas remained on the top step.  He saw the fine polished wood pass partly, then fully, past the opened black back door of the hearse, the spare tire with its silver hubcap looking directly at him.

Funeral Director Bryant sighed and continued to listen to the cars.  He heard the back door of the hearse slam and felt the eyes of the mourners fall on him.

“Our service here is concluded.  The hearse will guide you all past the last residence and then out to the place of rest.  Kindly follow the procession and know that my heart and the hearts of all those at Bryant & Sons Funeral Home are heavy with your loss as well.”

The O’Donnell family remained near the hearse.  However, Ben O’Donnell shuffled up the stairs, Thomas followed him.

“Ben?” Douglas Bryant said.

“You did a good job.”

“Thank you, Ben.”

“For a real son of a bitch, I think I can understand you,” Ben said, smiling.

“I appreciate that, Ben.”

Ben turned and looked at Thomas for a moment. He turned back. “You and I aren’t so different.”

Douglas Bryant shuffled his black shoes on the cement step. “No.”

Ben held out his hand.  Douglas shook it.

“Thanks again.  You did a good job,” Ben said and walked away.

Thomas remained for a moment.  He held out his hand.  Douglas Bryant shook it.

“Thanks, Mr. Bryant.”

Douglas released his hand and looked up at Tom’s sharp face.  There was a kindness in it, but also something around the eyes that disturbed him.  Douglas felt himself lose his control.

“You’re OK, aren’t you?” he blurted.

Tom smiled and looked out to the cars. “I’d say so.”

“You know,” Douglas said, “people always had great things to say about you.  They just never understand why you were.  Well, why you did it.”

Tom continued to smile. “Thanks, Mr. Bryant.”

Douglas watched Tom turn away.  As he did, he paused for a moment.  Douglas followed Tom’s vision and saw a girl standing on the front lawn of the home.  Tom and the girl both stood frozen for a moment before Tom moved toward her on the far side of the hearse.  Douglas wanted to watch, but something from Tom’s tone made him turn away.  He listened to the sound of the cars in the road and turned his head back to the high school.  Douglas Bryant frowned and bowed his head.  He hoped his son would never come to the crossroads Tom O’Donnell had come to when he jumped in the frozen creek.  He hoped his son would forgive him for being hard on him.  Douglas breathed in the fresh air.  Frank would come to understand him someday, he hoped at least. However, Douglas Bryant thought, as he dug his hand into his pocket, all of the order he surrounded himself with and took pride in for years with his own father and the job he had been given seemed to fall by the wayside when he had to face his own son.  When Douglas thought of Frank, he felt a great swell of love within himself, but could never translate it into something real.  His hugs were false and his kisses non-existant.  The warm air blew the thin front strands of Douglas Bryant’s hair.  He grabbed onto the iron hand rail that split the front steps of the home and eased himself to a sit on the top step.

Douglas Bryant watched Tom O’Donnell talk to the girl on the grass.

*              *                           *                         *                              *                          *                            *

Peter Kosciuzko waited at the light at he intersection of Main Street and Gnarled Hollow Road.  As he waited, he itched his forehead with the hard, plastic bridge of his driver’s cap.  Peter pushed his hair back and then placed his cap back on his head. He looked out the window and saw a Blue Point Brewery sign lit up in the window of the Country Corner.  He would stop in there for a toasted lager once he was finished with work.  After driving to and from a funeral, he enjoyed sitting at a bar and drinking a dark, somewhat sweet ale. When he rested his lean forearms on the curved wooden edge of the bar counter, it eased his mind away from the death and mourning he was used to and brought it closer to the jagged, sticky surface of life.  Now, however, he had to steer the funeral procession through the town and out to the cemetary in Calverton – the military cemetary.

    The light at the intersection was the longest one in town.  The traffic on Main Street was much busier than the traffic going around the bend on Gnarled Hollow up to Old Town towards the high school and the Bryant Funeral Home.  Mr Kosciuzko’s family had lived in town for generations.  His grandfather was a young man when there were still farms on Gnarled Hollow and the tire factory stood across from the intersection where he now idled at.

    The light turned green and Peter eased the limo into the left turn.  It was important to ease a limo into a turn – a long slow roll of the wheel.  Peter had driven taxis, limos, coach buses and now limos again.  In between driving limos and buses, he had been a teacher of English, only briefly, at Nassau Community College.  Though he liked to imagine himself as a patient man, he did not have the patience to teach.  His thoughtful nature was best suited to a more private setting; to the front seat of a luxury sedan, where he could collect his thoughts and have them to himself as the yellow lines, mailboxes and house lights stretched and passed.

    Peter pressed gently on the gas to ease the limo up the hill of Main Street, which cut through the center of town.  The glare of the sun caught his eye and he had to pull down the mirror to block it.  He knew the roads so well that no maneuver felt dangerous to him, no small movement made him lost control of the car.  They passed Ben O’Donnell’s office on the left and the firehouse next to it.  The firehouse’s red, electric banner read the temperature: 68°. Peter Kosciuzko glanced in the rear view mirror at Ben O’Donnell.  He’d been at the party Ben and Connor had thrown for the firefighters.  It was after the old Setauket post office burned down.  It was a small post office, but it was the first one – an historical landmark.  And for a town that valued history so much, it was devastating.  So Ben O’Donnell threw a party for the firefighters.  It seemed like a bad idea, to get the town firefighters drunk, but somehow he got away with it.  He had that charm about him.  Mr. Kosciuzko knew from sharing drinks with Ben at the corner that if Ben O’Donnell grinned and said, “Hey, take a night off,” a man was more than inclined to listen; even the chief.  There was no food at the party, just cases and cases of beer.  They hooked up a record player to the station PA and played music.  Ben insisted on Billy Joel.  “Born to Run” had just come out and all the firefighters loved that.  Peter had loved that album too – Bruce Springsteen smiling and looking to his left with a scruffy beard. A handsome musician looking to the side like that made him feel that there was some answer out there, that there was a be to free; to be like the air. 

The party had spilt out to the street and even some of the cops pulled in to have a few. Rose O’Donnell wasn’t there.  She was at home watching their baby.  Ben was showing pictures of her to the firefighters and the cops with one beer in his hand and a second bottle of beer tucked into his pocket, making a little patch of moisture on his pocket.

They turned right at the intersection of Main Street and Old Main Street.  Peter Kosciuzko looked in the rear view mirror.  He saw Ben O’Donnell with his nose no more than a centimeter from the window.  He looked pensive, his pointed jaw was working and it gave his face a muscular look – like an actor.  Peter’s favorite actor had been Paul Newman and he thought that Ben looked like him, maybe a little more gaunt.  Ben’s jaw was less square too, but there was something going on behind the chinline and the face – there was character there.  Ben’s pensive look made Peter think that there might be some similarity between them, that they shared some inclination for wistful thinking.  Peter felt goosebumps rise on his skin and he knew that they were not the same. A school bus switched gears and groaned past the limo.  Mr Kosciuzko was not a social man, but he found himself in social settings, drawn to social men like Ben O’Donnell.  He liked a man that could tell a good story, though he could not tell a good story himself. There was a time at the Corner when Ben had been there with Connor – it was before the incident between them – and was retelling one of his night’s out with Billy Joel.  They were sitting at the bar near the wall, while Peter had sat opposite them near the bathrooms.
“So Billy knocks them dead. Finishes with ‘Only the Good Die Young.’ I was feeling good on the side of the stage talking to a blonde who was from Baltimore, no, Annapolis – she had that marble mouth way of talking.  Anyway, she was pretty – ˝

Conner put his hand on his shoulder and Ben pushed it off.

“But nothing to compare to Rose.  I just like playing around with these girls.  Billy comes off stage and says we’ve got to go to a party afterward at Studio 54.  I know I should be figuring out a train home, but I can’t say no.”

Ben took a drink from his pint.

“You see,” Connor had said, “you’re going to drive Rose crazy if you keep staying out.  Plus you can’t still be riding your motorcycle when you get like that. You’ve got to think about the family.”
Ben turned in his seat to Connor. “You did spend too much time with mom.”

Connor shook his head and took a drink.

“Anyway, we get to the bar and it’s the same crowd.  People doing blow all over the place and you know how I can’t stand to see that stuff.  But I just like the energy in a place like that.  Billy had two blondes with him – one was really fantastic looking – and walks up with Chevy Chase.”

Mr Kosciuzko had leaned into the bar to hear better, the waist of his jeans pinching his hips.

“From Saturday Night?” Connor said.

“That’s right.  So he comes up and Billy introduces him to me.  He’s a good looking guy.  I tell him that I like the Weekend Update stuff.”

“And what did he say?”

“He pretended to spill his drink and then gave me this big smile and said, ‘Thank you very little.’ I laughed because I liked the line and told him that Akroyd was wrong, that he wasn’t such a smug bastard.”

Connor laughed.

“His eyes got wide and then I slapped him on the back and we had a laugh.”

“Did you get to talking?”

“Yeah we swapped some jokes and he told me some of the ideas they were working on.”

“Was Belushi there?”

“No, I would’ve loved to talk to that guy.”

“Anything going to come out of it, Benny?”

Ben shrugged and finished his beer. He exhaled and stretched his back. “I’ll just keep talking, keep drinking, keep making jokes, keep working at our little practice here to keep Rose happy and then hopefully I’ll be earning my keep the right way.”  He tussled Connor’s hair and stood up on the rails of the bar stool. “Another, brother?”

Connor held up his glass.

Mr Kosciuzko looked out of his window as he slowed the limo through the school crossing in front of the Setauket School.  He nodded his head at the statues of Benjamin Tallmadge and Abraham Woodhull at the peaks of the two wings of the school – those honorable American revolutionary spies.  He sighed and felt his heart grow heavy, too, as he drove past the Emma S. Clark library with its beautiful latticed windows, lush landscaping, and wood structure that seemed to be something out of a fairy tale.  Peter checked the time on the library’s small clock tower, which faced the road; it was the same as the time in the limo.  His heart was heavy, because he wished that he could tell a story too.  He wanted to write a story about the town, about all of its landmarks because he found it fascinating and thought that there was some similarity in this town and its history that anyone could relate to.  His grandfather had told him that there was a recluse who used to live in a  barn behind the library.  When his grandfather was a teenager they would spy on the recluse – they named him Hank.  Peter’s grandfather told him that whenever they spied on the recluse they would only see him sitting in the far corner by his candlelamp reading a book, they imagined that it was the Bible.  However, one time his grandfather had gone alone to look at the recluse.  He went at the same time of night he and his friends had always gone at.  However, this specific time when he looked in the window he had seen the recluse masturbating.  His grandfather had been shocked and slipped on the pale and crate he used to peer in the window.  When he looked up from his fall he saw the recluse’s eyes in the small window, the candlelight glowing around and behind them.  The eyes both frightened and full of rage.  His grandfather had been so scared that he didn’t even wipe the mud off his hands as he ran down Old Main Street.  When he was far enough away, he had caught his breath in the street underneath one of the streetlamps and wiped the mud off his hands on the grass.  He noticed a decent gash in the space between his thumb and pointer finger.  When he got home he didn’t try to sneak into the house as he usually did, he simply went in the front door.  His parents asked him where he had been and he told them.  He didn’t tell them what he had seen.  His father gave him the belt that night and, his grandfather said, he didn’t blame him that time.

 
“You know, Petey,” Mr Kosciuzko’s grandfather had said. “There are times in your life when something happens, could be big or could be small but you realize inside of yourself that you are learning something profound. Maybe you can’t define it then or maybe even ever, but you can feel it.  I think that night, I realized what growing up was.”

Peter took deep breaths as he stopped at the three way stop sign next to the reconstructed Setauket Post Office and the Mill Pond Bridge. There were swans out on the pond and he saw leaves falling off trees. He thought of his grandfather and the vanilla tobacco he smoked with his suspenders and his slicked back hair, always parted to the left.  Peter wished his grandfather’s story of the recluse could have been his.  Why was it that he had nothing in him to tell?  He turned right and continued on Old Main Street.  Maybe it wasn’t that he had nothing to tell, but that he did not know how to tell it.  He believed that every monument had a story – even the Mill Pond with its swans and ice hockey in the winter had a story to it.  However, he probably could not tell the story correctly and after seeing men who could tell a good story, he had to retreat to his driver’s seat.  All of the changes that were seen through his driver’s side window would remain in the repose of his chaffeur’s mind.

Mr. Kosciuzko turned the car left up Ridgeway and along the perimeter of Detmer’s Farm.  He remembered picking pumpkins with his children while the sky grey dark grey over the dirt.  On the left, they passed St. James Church.  Rose O’Donnell had been a fixture at the church.  Peter’s wife, Ellen, hadn’t really been friendly with her, and neither had Peter himself.  But they saw her each time they went to mass, which wasn’t so often, though they weren’t negligent parishioners.  Everyone knew that Rose would be a mass every Sunday and the kids would be there with her, all lined up and dressed neatly – the boys with wet hair.  Mr. Kosciuzko could not ever remember seeing Ben with the whole family at church.  Although, it was more like the Irish to dissent from the Catholic Church than it was for the Italians. Peter could not remember where his identification of Rose O’Donnell as Italian came from, but something told him it was true.  She did have the red hair, but stranger things had happened than an Italian with long red hair.

Peter checked his rearview mirror as they turned back onto Main Street. There was a GMC SUV following him.  He saw the older O’Donnell daughter, Maggie, moving her lips through the divider.  She had the same red hair that Rose O’Donnell had, although not as uniquely beautiful as Rose had been – graceful might have been the better word.  Mr. Kosciuzko’s son, Chris, was about the same age as Maggie.  Peter wondered if Maggie had any children.  They would most likely be riding in the limo.  But Ellen had showed him that notice in the paper a year or two ago that said Maggie O’Donnell’s wedding had been cancelled.  Kids were waiting longer and longer to get married and have children these days. Especially a girl like Maggie O’Donnell who was supposed to be quite the successful photographer.  If you were a woman and successful or even a man and successful at an art or a career, why stop to go through the pain’s of childbirth or father hood?  Peter could understand that point of view.  There was more ambition in the world – he could see that from TV and the internet.  However, there were certain lines he couldn’t draw.  He wasn’t sure if he was losing touch or if he was right.  Too often it seemed to him that there was an abundance of ambition, but also indecision and inaction in equal doses.

A Volvo stopped in front of Mr. Kosciuzko and he stamped on the break. There was a light ahead.  He checked his rearview mirror again.  He saw Maggie O’Donnell’s lips moving still.  What was she talking about? What were they all talking about?  He respected the families that kept the sound divider up during the rides, although it always raised his curiousity – a trait he hated about himself.  Maggie reminded him so much of his own daughter Sonya.  It wasn’t Maggie’s appearance that reminded Mr. Kosciuzko of his daughter, it was her reputation.  Peter hadn’t spoken to Sonya in five years – it would be six in the upcoming November.  He knew that Ellen still spoke to her.  The last Ellen had told him, Sonya was teaching to deaf children in Washington D.C.  Before that it was working for some small town newspaper outside of Iowa City.  

The traffic resumed and Peter felt the smooth purr of the engine pick up.  She had run off with Lee when she graduated college. He was from San Francisco and that’s where they moved.  Mr Kosciuzko remembered when she told them.  It rained on her graduation day and they stood under the green awning of the restaurant they were going to eat dinner at.  Peter saw the polished gold and bronze of the bar railings through the tinted window.

“Lee and I have a flight tomorrow. We’re going to San Fran.  I’m sorry this is such short notice. But we’re in love. This is what you’re supposed to do right? Just go?”

Peter had bought her a gilded volume of Aquinas.  He had it wrapped in thin navy wrapping paper with a red ribbon around it.  He held it behind his back as he told her.  Later, as they ate dessert and drank coffee, he pushed it across the white tablecloth, past a wine stain.  He wanted her to keep her mind active after she graduated – to never forget the glow of being a student, of having a wandering and active mind.

“Here, honey,” he’d said.

She smiled at him and the way her eyes glistened, he felt like the child. She teased the ribbon until it fell off and onto her lap. Then she tore the wrapping paper so that it almost evaporated, leaving only the book – the gild of the pages shining in the restaurant ambiance.

“Thank you, dad. Its beautiful.  I’ll always keep it by my bed.”

Sonya held the book to her chest and Lee put his arm around her, pushing his long brown hair to the side with his other hand.  He was unremarkable with his scruff of a beard and glasses, but she seemed to love him.  

The traffic slowed up again at the turning light onto Nicolls Road.  Mr Kosciuzko looked at the Domino’s Pizza out of his window.  He focused on the logo and realized that it had been changed to Papa John’s – he’d passed it so many times. He leaned back in his driver’s seat and pushed his cap up as they idled. He caught Maggie O’Donnell’s red hair once more, it was almost unavoidable, just as was thinking of his daughter.  The fact that they did not speak, did not stop him from thinking of her. 
He rememered the phone call. She called him in the middle of the night.

“Dad?”

“What’s up, honey?” He pictured her in some sparsely furnished San Franciscan apartment with a red spiral staircase.

“I’m at the train station.”

“Where? Stony Brook?”

“No, Dad. Here.”

“What’re you doing there?” He’d felt the dryness of his throat.  He padded to get a drink of water.

“I don’t really know, Dad.”

The electric green light on the stove shone 2:14.  That meant 11:14 there.

“Are you alright?”

“I think so,” she’d sounded tired. He heard the station noise behind.  The sound of people talking in a large room with a high ceiling.  The sound of ongoing sound.

    “You sound tired.”

    “Dad.”

    “Is Lee alright?” He held a glass under the faucet.  It had nutcrackers on it.  Ellen brought them out when the weather turned and the holidays approached.

    “That’s the first time you’ve asked that,” she’d sounded impressed.

    He took a drink and pressed his hand on the counter.  His feet were cold.

    “Well, you don’t call me at two that often.”

    “I’m pregnant, Dad.”

    Peter cradled his glass against the armpit seam of his t-shirt.  He hadn’t known how to react.  He looked at his water in the dark.  He felt a great joy fill him – the same joy he felt when reading an eloquent sentence or seeing white blossoms on a tree in mid-April.  It was the feeling he had always though of as the melancholy of creation.  That same feeling Little Chandler had considered the melancholy of the poet’s soul or the artist’s soul as they stood before the easel or page.  He himself had never created anything but his children and he had not felt a melancholy at those moments – it was more duty and the heat of his loins.  But then, maybe the creation of a child was a prolonged melancholy – a melancholy of creation and of life.  Perhaps the throbbing he felt with the blossoms, the refined language and his children were all in fact that melancholy that is life.  Peter had sipped his water. He felt the moment he was in fill around him – his wife’s choice of glassware, the small window above the sink, the  draft on his feet.  He remembered to speak.

    “Oh, honey.”

    “Don’t worry, Dad. I’m going to take care of it.” Her voice had an edge.  She was attempting to assume responsibility, but it didn’t fit.

    “What does that mean?”

    “Dad.”

    “Does Lee know?”

    She was quiet and the noise of the station returned to fill the space. “Now you’re so interested in Lee.”

    The wind rattled the windows.  He’d heard the sound of branches brushing each other.  The last remaining wind chimes struck and sounded like a ghost.  He walked away from the window.

    “Honey, I can’t say I approve of this.”

    More station noise had filled the receiver; he thought he heard a woman announce a train going to Los Angeles.

    “I can’t stay here. I can’t have this.”

    “Why? Why can’t you?” He sat on the floor with the glass of water between his legs.  It hurt his knees and his lower back to sit on the floor.

    “Because I’ve got to go. This is who I am.  My train is here."

    “Sonya,” no response. “Sonya.”

    Mr. Kosciuzko picked up speed as the light showed a left turn signal.  He followed the slow sloping turns of the drivers ahead of him as they merged onto Nicolls Road under the train trestle and past the North Entrance to the university.  There were white flowers spelling out “SBU” by the North Entrance sign.   Peter pushed the limo up to sixty.  He imagined his daughter driving from the cornfields of Iowa across the Missippi, through the long blue grass of Kentucky and the mountains of Virginia before she landed snug in the nation’s capital.  She was like one of those wandering men from Old America, from the Depression or earlier, that he’d admired in old movies.  He imagined her, with her brown hair in a bun with hairpins, innocent, and a satchel over her shoulder. The difference was that she was his daughter and she wasn’t innocent and he didn’t want her to wander.  She had to wander and that was what he had wanted to encourage in her, albeit simply intellectually.  She wandered in her action and her decision and Mr. Kosciuzko saw that as a fundamental reaction to her pregnancy.  Sonya had loved Lee – maybe – but when she knew the child was inside of her, instead of life she saw the nails being driven in, the force of circumstance and responsibility.

Peter pushed the limo through stoplights until it reached the intersection of Nicolls Road and Nesconset Highway.  The trees on the side of the highway were still lush wth their deep summer green and Mr. Kosciuzko’s back felt hot.  He adjusted the air conditioning.  Sonya was like the rest of the kids of this new generation.  She was intelligent like Maggie O’Donnell sitting behind him.  Sonya was full of the same ambition too.  She wanted the entire experience of the world and had enough education to have a tangible view of the earth and history – the sphere of the plane graspable in ones hands, so that if you squeezed hard enough, the ruins of Rome, the pyramids of Egypt, the secrets of Confucius and Christ, the prehistoric mystery of a morning haze would all come bursting out, like the nectar of a fruit; they could drink it all.  However, it did not always work that way – more often than not, it was you that was gripped and compressed to the breaking point.  There were governments and taxes, financial institutions with mortgages giving you a way to buy a home and build a dream, but making you a servant to payments towards established orders.  The dreams of being a philosopher or musician died with the grocery bills and a leak from the upstairs bathroom.  He thought of Sonya coming home to her apartment after a day of work. What kind of kitchen table did she have? Did she have one? And if so, what bills lay waiting for her there?  Would these children know the value of something simple to get them past the vicegrip, the mess of their nectar?  Would they know the pleasure of a cold beer and the feel of finished wood on their forearms and wrists?  The stupid things that had shape and were real and not made out of the stars and spirals of imagination and ambition?

High towered signs for Best Buy and Home Depot passed by Mr. Kosciuzko’s window.  Through the highway trees, Peter could see the humble and blue sided homes of the town of Centerreach with their chain linked fences.  They were nothing like the homes from the Three Villages.  Their town had remained snug and sheltered from the influence of strip malls and hastily built homes.  Their town progenated an old Long Island – fishing villages, established families of many generations with homes on bluffs and colonial sign posts, horse farms and the stink of salt.  It was a place where a family like the O’Donnells could exist.  Peter wondered if there were still many places like it in America.  Maybe that was what this generation saw around them.  There was no orange tinted America left for these kids, there were only the rapid flashing images of the world – dead bodies in Iraq, grim Muslims in Afghanistan, the gleam of Japan, and the red shroud of China.  And why would you want to stop to create a family in that world of possibility and death?  Mr. Kosciuzko looked in the rearview mirror at Ben O’Donnell and his poised jaw.  Why would you risk loving someone to see them die, to engage in these ageless rituals of burial and mourning? 

Peter felt his heart throb or skip a beat.  This sensation with the sun shining and the passing of trees and homes in the heat made him feel as though he were on to some great truth.  If only he could stop the car to write it down.  These kids were smart, they knew the risks of love and death.  Mr. Kosciuzko thought of the funerals of his mother and father.  His father had died when Chris was a baby, so he did not have to explain it to him, did not have to explain that “Grampa was dead.”  Peter could still wallow in his grief then, in the fact that his father had died and that he was now the patriach of his family.  That thought was a burden - something he did not want then, but a role he had since, he felt, grown into.  The thought that there would be no more consults for advice about being a husband, no more phone calls asking his father about his knee or his golf game.  He’d cradled his father’s sapphire tie pin when they lowered the coffin – his mother crying on his shoulder.  Then his mother too had passed.  Chis was ten or so and Sonya had been five or six.  It was harder then to explain that they would not be going to grandma’s to sleep over anymore, that grandma wouldn’t be making them a little blanket nest of the floor of her bedroom for them to sleep on so they wouldn’t be scared. 

Mr. Kosciuzko sighed.  He put his right signal on, turned his head back to check his blind spot and merged lanes. He itched his right armpit.  You missed the people you loved terribly – there was no escaping that.  When the children were little and Peter’s parents would come to visit, Chris and Sonya would grab onto their grandparents’ legs when it was time for them to leave.  It was that same sensation that lived in and was shared by all people – the desire to hold on, to not let someone go.  Because it wasn’t the phantoms in horror stories with red faces and claws that were scary, it was the real live ghosts of someone who was there and not there – that was the fear you truly felt.

The divider rolled down and Ben O’Donnell put his head up to the space.

“Hey, Pete,” he said softly.

“How’re you holding up, Ben?” Mr. Kosciuzko asked.

“Oh, we’re just fine back here. Fine. Smooth ride.”

“I’m glad.”

“Would you mind turning the air up a bit?”

“No problem at all. Thanks for asking.”

Ben O’Donnell nodded.  He reached his hand through the space.

“Sorry about keeping this thing up.” He paused. “It just feels right.”

Peter was moved by the sentiment.  Ben O’Donnell was a good man.

“Of course. By all means. I get it all the time.”

Ben  O’Donnell laughed softly.   He patted Mr. Kosciuzko with his fingertips and rolled the divider back up. Signs for the L.I.E. appeared on the right.  Ben O’Donnell was a good man.  Mr. Kosciuzko remembered how Ben had held himself with dignity when his son Tom had tried to drown himself in the creek by the train tracks.  He showed no sorrow, but never seemed hard.  Everyone expected Ben to turn back to his drinking then, but he surprised them all.  Ben had stayed away from the bars once Rose made him quick drinking.  However, he had come into the Country Corner after it happened.  He ordered a club soda.  He had come in “just to get a breath of fresh air.”  And he sipped at the club soda and looked at the NBA highlights on the TV. To lose a child would be the ultimate loneliness.  Mr. Kosciuzko could barely wrap his mind around the thought.  He wondered what terror or loneliness Tom O’Donnell had felt to throw himself into the frozen creek to die.  What question was he looking to answer?  What question had he failed to answer?

Mr. Kosciuzko merged onto the access road for the L.I.E.  He passed Pete’s nursery on the right.  He signalled left and merged onto the interstate.  You had to forgive your children.  He knew that he would eventually forgive  Sonya for what she had done; for all she had done.  For maybe she did understand the importance of moving through life and loving.  Maybe she had loved Lee and the fact that she had gotten pregnant was just bad timing – she wasn’t ready to take that risk, to put her stakes down with him.  But if she moved to San Francisco to live, wasn’t that love?  And if it was, then how could you turn your back on it?  When was true love supposed to occur? How could you give it a sell by date?  Maybe that was what the youth were victims of.  An internet that let you Google, “When am I supposed to fall in love?”

Peter pushed the gas and moved into the left lane heading east.  He passed a truck.  He wished he could tell it all in a story.  Why it was important to love and to risk it all by having a family and investing yourself in another person. Mr. Kosciuzko thought himself a smart man, maybe as smart as Sonya or Maggie O’Donnell, and had bought into love.  He remembered seeing Ellen on their first date.  They had gone to one of the college bars in Oneonta. It was called the Rat.  He’d been nervous to ask her out for months in their European History class, but he had to do it.  Then she showed up at the bar, wearing a red blouse that made her skin especially tan and the freckles on her face seem so – impossible.  He had to excuse himself to vomit in the bathroom.  After he frantically chewed gum, he went back out and asked if he could kiss her. It was the boldest thing he had perhaps done in his entire life  before or since.  And she obliged.  It was over then.

Mr.  Kosciuzko accelerated eastward into the sun.  That was what life was for, he felt it strongly. It was love, it was family.  If you weren’t tugged in a million directions by people you loved, then you weren’t experiencing life.  He knew the universe was made of light and love; books had taught him that much and he felt that much.  Highway trees and exit signs flew past.  He felt, too, that Ben O’Donnell believed the same thing deeply.  That was what they shared, or what Peter felt they shared when he saw Ben’s jaw working and the character behind it.  Their children would learn someday.  All children would learn someday.  Although he’d been a teacher, he could not teach that.  Mr. Kosciuzko gripped the steering wheel tight and looked at another car he passed – a Subaru.  Perhaps he had been a failure.  He’d underachieved and been prone to inaction.  But he’d loved and tried his best to be loved.  He’d fished with his father and made love to his wife, he’d bathed his children and drunken a beer.  Peter felt his heart flutter in the glare of the sun.  It was like white flowers and the pull of an eloquent sentence.  He pitied and envied the O’Donnells.  All he could do was to put his foot on the gas.  If only he could write it all down in a story – to put word to it all.  But he couldn’t pull over now.  He had to bring the O’Donnells to their funeral.

*                                     *                                       *                                    *                                       *

The crowd gathered around the open grave site.  The sun was positioned high in the sky and the heat beat down over the manicured grass. There were red and purple flowers. Ed Verlaine held his shovel like a walking stick as he stood under one of the nearby sycamores.  He moved it across his body, holding it, momentarily, like a microphone in front of himself. Then, he pushed it over to his left and held it once more like a walking stick.  He wiped his brow. Ed looked at Jack who was leaning against the trunk of the sycamore, watching the crowd intently with his new short hair.

“I should have gotten a haircut like that,” Ed Verlaine said.

Jack Simmons stared ahead.  He watched the priest standing before the open grave.  It was a sight he had become accustomed to.  Jack wiped his brow with the cuff of his white long sleeve shirt.  He smelled the dirt as he did so – the summer never ended.

“Yeah, it keeps it cool.” Jack said.

Ed Verlaine studied Jack’s correct posture as Jack leant on the sycamore trunk; it seemed like the right thing to do.  Ed ran his left hand through the back of his moist, thick black hair.

“What’s the next hole, Jack?”

Ed followed Jack’s eyes on the gravesite.  He saw a girl with a head of big red hair standing near the casket as the priest spoke.  He wondered if her carpet matched the shades.  But the sun was hot and the thought faded quickly from his mind to that of the ocean.

“Olivero.”

“What?” Ed Verlaine said.

“Olivero. That’s the next hole.”

“Oh.”

Ed looked back at Jack Simmons.  He liked working with Jack.  There was something – what was the good word he had heard recently? – nonchalant, about him. What was he thinking about staring out at the crowd like that?  Sure there was a lot to think about in a graveyard dealing with these dead bodies, but Jack could be very quiet.  Ed wondered if Jack was thinking about that girl with the red hair.  They’d seen some good looking girls at these funerals, but Jack never said anything.  Ed guessed that he had a fiancee or a girlfriend or a wife or something.

The sun was bright. It really felt like the Fourth of July – the colors, the green of the grass, the reds of the flowers, the little yellow dandelions poking up, were bright.  Ed Verlaine loved the Fourth of July.  The summer was never higher than on that day – and he always remembered the bright and hot Fourths.  When he was a child, the days were real with the sweat of basketball games on the black top of the cul-de-sac by his house.  The nights sticky but in some way refreshing with the dark and then the fireworks and the fried chicken he would eat with his family.  Ed Verlaine smiled.  He thought about the Fourth of July as he watched the priest raise his hands and the crowd swooned in the heat.  As he grew older, it was the feeling of watching the world move that disturbed Ed.  How people you knew were always coming and going in the heat.  Moving from one bar-be-que to another; in town for a few days and then moving on.  No one could sit down with him and drink a cold Busch underneath the orange light of a back porch with a moth flipping around the black cap, while beer condensation dripped onto the sedimentary concrete.  Ed saw the white stones and the brown concrete.

Across the grounds, the priest closed his book and moved to the side of the casket.  Jack Simmons knew that this was the time to move in to the hole. The family members would have their chance to speak now.  Then, the time came for the dirt.  Jack felt the gristle of dirt on the edge of his fingertips – he saw the black-green under his nails.  He appreciated it.  Slowly the motion from brown to green, he thought, slowly the step of the grass underfoot.

“What do you think, Jack? Time to move in, huh?” Ed Verlaine asked.

Jack Simmons rolled his jaw and nodded. “I’d say so.”  He watched the priest in black against the green and blue of the rest of the world.  He looked at the girl with the crimson hair.  “It’s damn hot today isn’t it?” He thought of a steak for dinner and the watery blood on the plate.

Ed wiped his forehead.  “It is.  That’s why I say, I wish I had a fucking haircut like yours.”

They moved from the shade of the sycamore into the sun.  Ed Verlaine cradled his shovel like a lacrosse stick. He’d been a defender.  He didn’t have the skill that was necessary to get you to a school like Princeton or Syracure or Duke, but he had the brute strength.  That quality had gotten him a college education and that had been enough.

Ed continued to walk down the hill next to Jack.  He looked at the dirt stains on his hands and on the cuffs and sleeves of his shirt.  It was true that this job was not his chosen profession,  but it would work for the time being.  He knew that his education had not been wasted, although his memories of beer cans and of looking out the window at girls caused him to think differently at times.  There was something wrong now with the world in front of im.  It seemed to  be too far open.  This job was not perfect – all of the manual labor, the burying of bodies – but it let him hold onto something, some part of a life that he knew as familiar, but which seemed to be getting further and further away from him – the tailing smoke of the fireworks.  The smell of his body odor rose up.  There was sleep to be had and there was beer to be had too.

Ed Verlaine looked at Jack Simmons’ brown stern face as they walked toward the crowd.

“Jack.”

Jack Simmons raised his right eyebrow and looked at Ed with his left eye.

“Yeah?”

“You have a girlfriend?”

Jack Simmons continued walking, his eyebrow levelled out.

“You never talk about yourself or anything.” Ed said.

Jack Simmons remained silent as they walked.  Ed dug his hands into the wide pockets of his pants.  He felt dry fabric and he found his pack of cigarettes.

“Do you want a smoke at least?”

Jack eyed the box of Marlboro Lights.  He turned forward toward the crowd.  There was a woman standing in front of the casket.  She had brown hair and held her hands out evenly in front of her, moving them slightly from side to side.  Jack could see that she was speaking.

“Yeah, thank you.”

Ed Verlaine shook two cigarettes out. Jack grabbed one of the white sticks.  He pulled out matches from his pants pocket. He lit the match against his pants.  He held out the match for Ed.  Ed leant in and lit his cigarette as well.  He squinted and inhaled.

“Thanks,” he puffed.

A light wind blew across the grounds.  The priest remained by the casket and the crowd stood in the sun.  A woman removed a black hat, touched her hair with a cloth and placed the hat back on top of her head.  Jack Simmons could smell the warmth and moistness of the dirt.

“Looks like you were right,” Jack said. “She was a daughter. A sister.”

“I guess she’s still a sister, huh?” Ed pat Jack on the back.

Jack nodded. “Yeah, a sister.”

There were some  coughs amid the mourners. The priest looked out to the crowd, pleadingly, for someone to come before the casket and speak.  Jack noticed the man who had spoken nudging someone else.  It was a boy.  The kid looked to be about Jack’s age.  The boy paid little attention to the man, instead, pushing strands of his hair to the side.  The boy casually shifted his head and Jack caught his glance.  The face was thin and the cheekbones were high; there seemed to be shadows underneath his eyes.  The boy squinted and frowned in Jack’s direction holding his gaze.  He appeared to be regarding both Jack and Ed, their postures. Jack planted his shovel next to him and dug his hands into his pockets.  The boy’s glance passed.  Jack looked down at his boots and the pieces of grass that stuck to the toes. In some way or another he had witnessed the passing of the ages and the transfer of age to age.  The grass and the dirt had tasted the washes of blood that saw one life give to another. And he had thrown his spade into those layers of life and death.  He had taken sprouts and roots home with him, stuck in the cuffs of his pantlegs to dry and rest on the brown straw welcome mat of his basement apartment. The boy had looked at him with grey eyes marked with shadows.  However, Jack had seen something there.  There was no defiance or mockery – those storms, those eyes suggested something to him.  Something that rhymed with Gettysburg, something that smelled of dying roses, the taste of dried lipblood, the feel of grainy sand on a kneewound – the end and the beginning. Jack could feel a transferrence.  Jack tapped his boot against the base of his shovel’s spade.  The gravesdigger’s life.  There was a song to sing, the sun was shining in rays through the sycamores and on the blades of grass - slowly the spring of turf undertoe.

    The boy stood up and adjusted the collar of his shirt beneath his black coat.  He moved forward to the casket and the priest.  The boy made the sign of the cross before the priest. There was a small purple flower on the lapel of his coat. Jack saw the boy and the purple flower.  The flower was the same color as the dress Emma had worn the first time he’d seen her. Flowers didn’t have names to him, they had shapes.  However, she had a name and he’d called her by it for so many years.  They grew together.  They saw the horses from the neighbors’ farm die and the foals and phillies grow and ride.  They’d seen the rain pour down from the pink sky in the summer and the waves of the sound, made of ice, pull slowly in the winter.  And the smell of honeysuckles was always familiar and strange to him when he rode in his car around corners, the edges of his truck brushing the roadweeds.  And she’d been there. And he saw them bury her with a scrap of that purple dress draped across her breasts. What he’d known naked and clothed, now covered in black satin – he’d touched it – with a stretch of purple.

    “Mom,” the boy started. Jack cupped his hand across the bridge of his nose to see. “Mom.” The boy stopped talking and frowned at the mourners.  He took a deep breath. “My mother was the one who gave birth to the world.  You all know what  I mean when I say that and she knows right now.  If this is the end, then surely she will come to know the beginning of something new. Matter is neither created nor destroyed.  Dad and Uncle Connor know that better than anyone else.”

    The boy stopped again.  He ran his hands through his har.  He puffed it up, but it kept a clean shape, much like the man who’d spoken before him. The man who was his brother.

    “Yes, my mother gave birth to the world. Amen.”

    The boy held his hands clasped in front of him and bowed his head.  Strands of his hair fell further down into space.  Then, the boy raised his head.  He seemed to look over the crowd.  His eyes widened and he lowered his head and moved away from the casket.  Jack kicked the spade of his shovel and pieces of still moist dirt fell to the grass.

    Ed Verlaine cleared his throat and spit.  He felt goosebumps from immediate guilt, but it had been necessary.  What a strange speech for that kid to make.  When Ed’s mother died, he knew that it would be a sunny day like this one, but not quite as hot.  He’d wear a classy black suit and he’d see his Uncle Frank standing in front of his family next to Ed’s sister and dad.  His Uncle would probably be crying, because even if he was perpetually tan and perpetually tough, he was really soft in the end.  Ed had seen him cry more than a few times and he knew that his uncle secretly loved that movie “Terms of Endearment.”  He would stand in front of his family in the sun in his suit, sweat collecting under his knees as it was now and he would say confidently, without his voice breaking or cracking, all of the things that he felt for his mother.  The things he had always felt for her.  What those things were he could not exactly say – the words did not show themselves in his mind or begin to take shape and sound on his silent tongue.  A slow excitement began to burn in Ed Verlaine’s stomach through the bloat that he felt from the chicken cutlet he had eaten for lunch and the 16 oz Budweiser he had dranken to wash it down.  He felt the excitement rise and he thought of the feeling of being a boy at the town pool.  The chlorine from the pool was strong and it stung his eyes. His mother wore a plain black bathing suit and would hold his baby sister and cover her with suntan lotion.  Sometimes, she would put her in the daycare center in the shade and if the day was especially hot, she would jump into the pool with him.  He remembered the sensation – the excitement – of watching his mother jump in the pool just like him.  The way she held her nose as she jumped in and she would pay attention only to him in the clear and unclear aqua blue of the pool. 

He would say all of this in slow prepared sentences in front of his mother’s casket. The words would come out – he was positive they would.  His Uncle would have tear streaks down the sides of his red nose.  But what did all of that mean?  What was that feeling? Ed Verlaine rubbed his stomach; he felt his intestines pushing out, his skin taut like a drum.  Was that what the feeling of love was?  Or was love that soft spot in the middle of a girl’s thigh? The curves of the hips and the small freckles?  He did not want to think about that.  He wanted to think about the water and the pool and his mother and the speech he would give at her funeral, the speech that would make his family cry and would make a stranger come up to him and shake his hand and say, “You’re a fine American.  That was a some damn speech.” 

“Hey, Jack” Ed said. “Is your family all still around.”

Jack nodded.

“Mother? Father?”

Jack nodded again.

“Grandpas? Grandmas?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh,” Ed said.  He looked down at his shovel. “What kind of speech was that? Imagine giving a speech like that at your mother’s funeral.  I wonder what that kid was thinking.”

Jack Simmons turned to Ed Verlaine.  “Maybe it was the best he could do.”

“Maybe.  But you have to do better than that.  I mean, at a funeral?”

Jack Simmons looked at Ed Verlaine. “What would you say?” He said in a calm voice.

Ed Verlaine took the loose cigarette out of his pocket and slid it behind his ear.  He rubbed his thumb along the rough edge of his lighter’s wheel.  He thought of the pool, the whiteness of the sun on the water, and the chlorine smell in his nose, the chlorine feel on his skin, his sister as a little baby stomping on puddles on the sedimentary concrete, crying when one of the rocks hit the center of her foot, and his father driving his purple car somewhere far away into New York City to try to sell toys to rich businessmen. 

“I would say,” Ed started.  The sensation of water dripping from an icicle ran along his shoulder.  There were girls walking along the paths that had been cleared of the snow.  He thought of their boots and their legs.  Worlds were moving away from him, wrapping and unwrapping themselves.  What was that feeling?

“I would say something damn good,” he said confidently.  “I don’t know what the words would be, but I know the feeling.  I know what I would try to say.”

Jack Simmons frowned.  He shifted his lips sideways to the left.  There was an older man walking up to the casket now.  He took long steps.  The man’s strides seemed serious, they were measured, but there was no awareness to them – he stood tall, his shoulders slightly back, looking forward.  The older man brushed hair behind his ears.

“Why?” Ed Verlaine asked? “What would you say?”

The older man was tall and he was lean.  There was a weight about him, even though he held himself high and natural.  The man brought one hand up to his mouth and wiped his mouth.  Jack thought that he could’ve been exactly like the wind.

“What would you say? That man is born astride the grave? Some short bullshit like that?”

Jack Verlaine shrugged.  His eyes remained on Ed Verlaine.  Jack raised his right eyebrow and pointed to the older man.  Ed Verlaine looked behind himself and then back to the crowd and the older man.

“What?”

Jack pointed again.

“I always admired, Rose.  I did.  At first it was because she was able to know my brother so well.  That she was able to walk so much beside Ben, that in a way she was part of Ben.” The older man took a deep breath. “I suppose that is what being married is, but, to me, it seemed especially different in their case.  Maybe it was because Rose always carried herself so gracefully and never gave any of herself away.  Maybe that was why she walked the  same way as Ben.”

“What about this guy?” Ed Verlaine said.

“Listen.”

“Seems like he can speak fine.  You know these people or something, Jack?” Ed pulled his loose cigarette out of his pocket and cradled it in a limp fist.

Jack Simmons shook his head.

“You’re pretty damn interested. I –”

Jack Simmons looked at Ed.

Ed shook his head.  He eased the hand with the palmed cigarette back into his pocket.

“My brother,” the older man continued. “first met Rose while he was in med school.  He drove taxis at night.  Maybe some of you know this story already.” The older man paused.  He wet his lips and pushed strands of his hair behind his right ear. “But I like remembering it so I am going to tell it.  Rose was also originally from the Island, but she had just moved into our town. She had gotten a job at the university library.  Ben drove her home from the Park Bench that first night and he wouldn’t stop talking about her.  We used to tease him about the ‘red headed passenger,’ which is what we called her.”

The older man smiled, apparently playing images of long past memories through his head. He reached both hands into his pockets and leaned back.  The hum of a passing plane in the distance droned overhead.

“But my brother was hooked.  It really was the best thing for him because we didn’t know if he would make it through school at the time, but he meets a new girl who works in the library and who is smart and he begins spending all of his time in the library.”

A low laugh came from the mourners.  Ed Verlaine saw a few women dabbing their eyes with black veils or handkerchiefs.  The older man did not smile or laugh.  He kept his eyes forward and pushed strands of his hair behind his left ear.  Ed Verlaine felt the heat of the sun underneath the zipper of his uniform.

“It really was the best thing for him – meeting her.  She was patient during the ‘Billy’ years.” The older man focused on one point in the crowd.  Jack Simmons couldn’t follow his gaze.

“And she gave him and helped him raise his four thoughtful and wonderful children.” The older man kept his gaze on his focal point.  He squinted. “And when we lost Lucy –” He stopped.  “Yes, she really was the best thing for him.  I know that I will miss her.  I don’t know what Ben will do without her.  That is just something he will have to get used to.”

The older man nodded.  He squinted and slowly left the casket;  his posture held up and back; his steps measured, even, paced – the spring of turf underfoot.  Jack Simmons watched him as he returned to the black and white mass of the crowd.  The older man exhaled.  Jack could feel his grace – the inside of a dress pant leg, the smell of skin and the soft curl of hair after leaving the ocean.  Jack bit on his chapped lower lip – he felt the raised skin with his teeth.  That older man, his grace was made up of all of those things and still even more: the light given off by one candle in the dark, the light slanting through his living room on a Sunday afternoon when he was a child, the way Emma’s hands moved when she passed the thread through fabric, her legs crossed, her back sloped forward, her forehead smooth and round with hair pulled back and bunned at the top of her head.  That was all grace and life and the purple sash of death slung between two shoulders.

“So, what do you make of that?” Ed Verlaine asked. “What do you make of him? I thought that was good.”

Jack Simmons nodded.

“After all your pointing, all you’re gonna do is nod?”

Jack Simmons nodded once more.

Ed Verlaine laughed.  He picked his shovel up and drove the spade into the grass.

“What do you want me to say?” Jack asked, raising his right eyebrow.

“I don’t know,” Ed said. “That you knew him or something.  That there was a reason you were pointing at him like he were an example of something.”   

“No,” Jack said. “There is no reason.  He’s just an old man.  I knew he would have something to say.”

Ed swung the shovel to his right shoulder.  His forearm felt damp. A faint chemical smell came to his nose and then quickly faded.

“You knew he would have something to say?” Ed smiled. “How did you know that?”

“I just did.”

“Why? Because it is a funeral?  Because he’s old? Because all of these people we watch putting coffins and urns into the ground have something to say? They all look sad and important.  This isn’t even a funeral in the cold and the rain where the people are wearing blowing trench coats. You know those look even more dramatic.”

Jack turned to the mourners, the casket and the mound of dirt they would soon be shovelling to fill in the hole, which they had dug the evening before in the fading drizzle and mist.

“Something in him reminded him of me.” Jack paused. “Are you happy with your questions?”

Ed locked his hands on top of the wood end of the shovel. “Do you want a cigarette?”

Jack shook his head.

Ed took the loose cigarette out of his pocket, raised it up, holding it by the filter, brought it close to his lips and then slid it out, up and behind his ear.

“It is damn hot,” Ed said.  “Where’d you get that haircut?”

Jack Simmons looked down. “Place by my house.”


“Yeah, I should cut mine short.”

Jack pulled his spade handle close to the break of his chest and faced the funeral.

Ed Verlaine exhaled smoke. The purple shine on the round edges of his father’s car came to him.  The orange and sepia that came through the windows of the car.  He remembered his father’s profile, the trapped heat in the car and the rolls of grey highway unfurling and shaking in front of them.

“What are you looking for out here, Jack?”

Jack Simmons held his posture straight, his legs spread slightly and poised.

“I don’t know what I’m doing out here,” Ed continued. “I don’t know what I’m looking for or if I’m even looking for anything.  But you, you’re trying for something out here.”

Jack remained silent.

Ed pulled on his cigarette and exhaled. “Alright. No more questions,” his words were softened and rounded by the tobacco smoke. “We’ll just keep on watching. We’ll just keep on watching and then fill in the hole.  Isn’t that right, partner?”

Jack Simmons rotated his shoulder blades back in a close circle. He did not respond.

Ed remembered the wheels of his father’s car and the feel of the leather.  The look of the green trees on the side of the highway as the yellowed and towering buildings of Queens began to rise through and around them, and further Manhattan lay like upside down icicles.  There were no girls then, no trails of snow and melted ice.  It was only sun, the heat like the heat on the legs of his uniform, and his father’s profile.

Ed looked over Jack’s shoulder to the casket.

“Look,” he said. “There’s the redhead.”

Jack Simmons turned his head to the side, giving one eye to Ed Verlaine.

The girl with the crimson hair stood at the casket, her hair curling down in two even fans on each of her slightly raised shoulders. The cars in the harbor parking lot would scrape sand under their tires as they pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road.  After summer rainstorms, the sand stuck and made a smoother sound against the tires before they hit the puddles in the road.  The clouds would slowly break purple and then the crimson came out behind the purple and over the green that edged the harbor water.

Jack breathed in deeply and clenched his hands into fists. The girl was more of a woman.

“I’ve been in heat and humidity this bad – maybe worse,” the redhead said.  “I was in Croatia in late August the summer after I graduated from college.  Mom actually paid for the whole trip to Europe.  I’m sure dad did as well, but she came to me and told me that the trip was from her.  She never did things like that, so I always figured that she meant it.”

The girl with the crimson hair stopped.  She breathed, folding her posture in slightly, her arms turning.  Her eyes were fertile.

“I took a picture of a girl there, in Croatia in Dubrovnik.  She was nine years old or ten.  She wore a faded purple dress and poked a little white flower into one of the white city walls.  With the light of the sun and the whites of the flower and the wall, the dress became more than purple – it became a new color I could only take a picture of. And I did immediately.  The first photo she didn’t notice and she was so curious of the flower and the way it hit the wall.  Then she saw me and started smiling and laughing.  I smiled and laughed with her and took the pictures and I even shook her little hand afterward and asked her in bad Croatian if she were my friend.  She nodded.”

The redhead shook her head and looked down.  Ed Verlaine knew of plenty of girls who had studied abroad.  They came back with short haircuts and different shoes and talked about men they had loved.  In the end, they still walked the same paths with him, still liked to get drunk and make love to boys instead.  But they knew something he didn’t know, maybe knew what they wanted better than him.  They did still talk to him and drink beers with him – but they moved away from him, just as they had moved to that other continent.  Their worlds unravelled around him and reformed.

Ed pulled towards the white freckled filter.

The girl with the crimson head shook her head once more, slowly and, slowly, lifted it again.  Tear streaks marked her cheeks.

“What this story has to do with mom, with her dying, or with her life with dad and with us, I don’t know.  I just remember that little girl and how I felt that must have been how mom always saw me: poking around in things, smiling, innocent, cute, but with something sinister behind it.  Maybe she just knew all that and loved me for some reason – because she was my mom. And I know that I loved her and I tried to show her.  But what do you do? Sometimes you just can’t show her.”

She raised her right hand, hinged, to her nose.  She shook the crimson.  Breathing out she smiled and put her hands at her side.  The clouds passed over the sun.  The afternoon was stretching and Jack noticed the cicadas for the first time.  He hoped the rain would not come.

“I’m sorry,” the redhead said. “That I am rambling on like this.  I can usually hold it together.”

Ed looked over and the priest was nodding at the redhead. He looked at her with some kind of empathy.

“This has been a long few days,” the redhead continued, her smile carrying into her voice. “I know that mom liked that picture of the little girl.  I know that she probably liked all my pictures, even with her discerning mind.  I’m a photographer and I think I love taking photos.  I’ve been to Dubrovnik in the heat and to Siberia the freezing cold and taken picture of a dog’s funeral.”

The girl with the crimson hair turned to the priest.  The priest nodded piously and held out both of his hands.  The girl turned, shaking the fans of her crimson. She smiled, her eyes wide and unfocused; intent on something unseen, but present. “I’ve taken a lot of pictures.   But I don’t think I will ever understand the rest.”

Her eyes became dark with focus once more.  The clouds moved past and the sun slanted down intermittently.  The world was a fishbowl.  The girl with the crimson hair began to cry and the tears fell in rolls and not in streaks.  Jack felt the heat inside each of his nostrils.  She moved from the casket with her hands folded in front of her by her waist and her hair swishing behind.  The priest took her place by the casket, keeping his hands outstretched.

“Some girl,” Ed Verlaine said.

Jack lifted his shovel to his shoulder and raised an eyebrow.

“Time, isn’t it?” Ed asked, bouncing his spade from one shoulder to the other across his body.

No one broke from the crowd of mourners to move beside the casket.  The priest lifted one hand in the direction of Jack Simmons and Ed Verlaine. Ed pulled his spade from the turf and they began walking slowly to the mound of dirt.  The priest straightened his posture and led the mourners away from the gravesite back to the winding cemetary path where hearses, limos and other luxury sedans idled.
As they approached the hole, Jack followed the girl with the crimson hair as she walked across the grounds, the spring of turf underfoot.  The crimson bobbed along with the black and white of the rest of the crowd.  He watched her stop and hug the older man who had spoken.  Behind them, the boy stood, his hands in his pockets.  His hair fell across his forehead, giving his head a round look, though his face and chin were sharp.  He was a dash of grey next to the crimson and black and white.
One of the heads groundskeepers, Louis, came from the crowd.  He approached Jack Simmons and Ed Verlaine.

“Ok, boys.  We’re going to lower it down now.” He nodded. “Good service.  I like that Father Charles.”

Jack Simmons raised his mouth slightly, keeping his brows lowered.  Louis walked over to the platform the casket was seated on.  He reached below one of the edges and hit the switch.  Jack had never seen the switch before – he just knew where it was.  The casket slowly sunk into the ground.

“You’ve done burials with him before?”

Louis looked at Ed Verlaine.  Ed shrugged.

“He looked familiar.”

Louis nodded as the casket moved halfway into the hole.  The top of it still brown-red, sheen, with panes of white running along its edges from the  sun and clouds.

“He did John Lennon’s funeral,” Louis said, tucking his chin and watching the casket.  He rubbed his red cheek skin. “He did it in New York.”

Jack Simmons listened to the hum of the machine and the rattle of the casket as it burrowed further and further into the hole.  The shadow cutting away its shine more and more.  He looked at Louis’ well kept brown moustache.

“Strawberry Fields Forever.  He was there for all of that.”

The coffin nestled itself within the walls of the grave.  Stray pieces of dirt crumbled down the neatly packed sides of the hole.  Jack saw the coffin snugly fit in the grave, a shadow cast upon its entire face.  The sun beat on his neck and it felt good to him as did the familiarity of the humidity.  However, the coffin fit, it was dark with shadow and it was cool.  The coffin was as familiar as the harbor in winter, or following Emma by the shade of the docks.  Jack felt that the mother inside of the indian orange wood panels and on that soft silk pillow was cozy in her bed.  There were pieces of root sticking out of the grave wall.

The machine stopped.

Louis bent down and checked the button.  He stood up and clapped his hands, they gave off a soft echo.

“OK, boys.  It’s your time now.” He tipped his head first to Ed and then to Jack and moved across the grass towards where the mourners were in the distance. 

Ed Verlaine dug his shovel into the mound and held it there.  He pulled out his pack of cigarettes and lifted one with his mouth.  He held the pack out to Jack Simmons.  Jack took a cigarette.  Ed threw him the lighter. Jack caught it, lit the stick and passed it back to Ed who did the same.  Ed dropped the lighter into the pocket on the front of his uniform.  He pulled the spade out, weighed with dirt and turned it down into the grave.  It hit the casket with a scratch and a thud.

“Thank you,” Jack said.

“Strawberry Fields Forever,” Ed puffed.

Jack looked over his shoulder and saw the girl with the crimson hair up the hill on the gravesite grounds.  He turned back to the mound.  He struck his spade in and pulled it out swiftly, turning dirt earthward.  His back flexed with his hamstrings and he moved the dirt once more.
The scratching continued below Ed Verlaine and Jack Simmons as they worked.

“It’s a shame isn’t it, Jack?” Ed thrust his shoulders forward with the shovel, weighted, then lightened his load.

“What is a shame?”

“That after all the nice craftsmanship they do on these caskets that we go and scratch them all up with dirt and pieces of clay and little rocks when we cover them up.”

Jack Simmons’ biceps strained as he lifted a spadeful of dirt. Sweat moved up and under his jaw.

“That’s just the way it is.”

“Why do they spend so much time on them?  I always wondered that.  We should’ve just left them like the old west coffins like in A Fistful of Dollars. Planks of wood.  At least when the Egyptians used gold they gave them pyramids and plenty of room.”

Jack Simmons stopped shoveling.  He took a long pull off his cigarette and exhaled it.  His short hair was soaked with perspiration.  He rubbed it and felt it spike.

“It’s just the way it is.”

Ed looked at Jack standing and smoking. “I suppose you’re right.  I suppose that’s the way it has to be.  Especially for someone you love.  You’ve loved someone right, Jack?”

Jack nodded his head and picked up the shovel, setting to the mound of the dirt again.

Ed Verlaine smiled.  “They loved her.  That family that is.  They must have.  That’s why they all spoke so strange.  She must have been a good mother.”

    Ed let his eyes move up the hill of the grounds to the mourners who still remained.  The crowd had grown smaller.  He listened as Jack scraped and dumped dirt, quietly grunting and breathing.  He used to watch the girls outside his window in class as the water from the icicles fell.  He’d sat in his backyard underneath the porchlight and drank cool beer and  let the fireworks play in the sky above him.  Jack shovelled more dirt onto the coffin.  He’d let the dark of the night, the navy of the night sneak in and wrap around him as his canvas shoes rested on the sedimentary walkway in the middle of the grass.  Ed sighed and flicked his cigarette.  It hit the edge of the dirt pile, slightly red and still smoking.

    “What was the next hole?” Ed asked, holding a shovelful of soil.

    “Olivero.”

    “Olivero, that’s right.” Ed dropped the dirt. “That red head is still up there.”

    Jack Simmons nodded and dug deeper into  the mound.  They were making good progress.  He stopped and turned his neck to see the girl with the crimson hair.  He  could see her up the grounds.  The crowd had thinned considerably. She was standing with a man.  Her posture was slightly slouched and he seemed to stand above her; stand into her.  Jack resumed digging. He dug slowly and without effort.  He turned again to watch her.  She and the man had walked away from the remaining mourners.  Cars continued to idle by the roadway.  The girl with the crimson hair and the man she walked with stood by one of the neatly contained thickets that were littered throughout the cemetary.  There were small yellow and purple flowers in the thicket.  Jack tilted dirt into the hole – it made thumping sounds now, hollow, warm repeating thuds.

    The girl with the crimson hair sagged her shoulders and threw her arms around the man.  Her hair fanned and swished.  The man held her and turned to the side.  The girl moved her face from his shoulder and kissed him directly.  Jack felt his stomach rise and fall deep inside, he felt his kneecaps grow warm and then cool with sweat.  They stood by the thicket, the clouds covered the sun again leaving few slants of grey light to fall solemnly by the yellow and the purple eminence of the flowers.  The wood of the shovel chafed Jack Simmons’ palm calluses.  The faces of man and the girl with the crimson hair separated.  Jack thrust his shovel back into the mound of dirt, he strained his forearm muscles lifting the next shovelful out.  He didn’t look as he floated the shovel above the grass and into the grave; he only watched the two of them.  Their faces moved together again in a kiss. Jack thrust the shovel once more, feeling a pain down through his abdomen and groin as he did so.  The man and the girl with the crimson hair kissed once more.  Jack Simmons’ chest was on fire and he felt a persistant and primordial urge within his chest and attached to his brain that told him to run away.  To explode and disappear into the grey, the light and the heat of the day. He drove his spade into the brown, brown dirt.  He  saw the purple sash of  his youth that was life and that was death.  The purple sash across Emma’s soft round underchin and the way her hair still looked alive.  His chest burned but he continued to dig – it was all he could do to remember.

    Ed glanced up from his digging and saw Jack rapidly moving the dirt into the grave.  Both of Jack’s eyebrows were raised and his face was red.

    “Are you alright, Jack?” Ed asked.

    Jack nodded.

    “Sure?” Ed put his shovel into the ground and pushed his hand through his hair.

    “Yeah, just have to finish this hole and move to the next one.” He continued to dig fervently.

    “You got it, Jack.”

    Ed looked over and saw the red head walking with a guy over to the idling cars.  Another funeral was finished and Jack was right – they would move on to the next hole until the sun went down and it got cool and then they could leave.  He’d get a beer once he left.  He could taste it.  Actually, what he felt was the bottle’s cool perspiration against his finger tips. Ed laughed, the feeling of the wetness made him think of the taste of beer and of refreshment.

    Ed Verlaine pulled his shovel up and pushed it into the pile.  He pulled out an even shovelful and tossed it into the grave.  The coffin had long disappeared.  He shook his head.  All of those words, those strange speeches from this family, gone into that hole as well.  He collected another clump of dirt in his shovel.  But that wasn’t necessarily true.  Those words didn’t get stuck underground with the body, they weren’t trapped.  Maybe they lived on and escaped through the cracks and floated away: disappearing: reappearing and moving away in the trees and the light, just like the worlds that moved and disappeared from him – the girls, the friends, the look of the stone walkway under his porchlight.

    He kept his eyes on his shovel and the pile and listened to Jack’s persistent breath and motion.  Ed Verlaine was looking forward to the night, though.  Maybe there would be a breeze that would blow against his legs, the cool breeze of a school year starting and he could remember that feeling near his heart from when he was younger and the summer was ending.  That feeling he had thought was love. Ed’s shovel struck a big rock. He lifted it and flung it over the near sycamore tree.  He and Jack could finish the next hole and the one after that and then leave in their cars, driving out in the highway away from this green field of bodies.  Ed Verlaine knew  that if it didn’t rain, he’d roll the window down and hold his elbow out the window.  The cars in the other lanes would swish by and the neon signs from  the strip malls would too: Stop N’ Shop, McDonald’s, Sporting World IV, GameStop.  He’d lick his lips and think of a beer.  He wouldn’t reach for one like he used to – he’d wait and think of the cool.

    Ed took a look at Jack and then looked up the hill.  The last cars were pulling away and he heard a strange bird’s call that might have been an owl.  He turned back to Jack.  The family had all gone and he and Jack would be gone too soon.  At night, the breeze would hit him and it would be like the cool of the swimming pool in the bright light and heat of the summer.  He floated above the black T’s at the pool’s bottom and they stayed until the sun turned red and it was time to go for dinner.  He would help his mother pack the suntan lotion into her canvas bag, gently placing his mother’s sunglasses on top of the towels last.  Then, Ed would hold his sister’s hand and they would walk past the concession stand with the smell of chicken fingers and into the dark, dank cool of the entrance tunnel.  His bare feet slapping on the chipped maroon paint.

    “Maybe we can go down to the water and see fireworks tonight, Eddie.”

    “Fireworks?”

    “Of course, it’s July.”

    Ed took another shovelful of dirt and lifted it high up, feeling the strength of his biceps.  He brought it down slowly and tipped it evenly into the grave.  Pieces of dirt stuck to the spade.  The dark of the maroon tunnel gave way to the square entrance and the way out to the scorched brown grass.  One square of light against the black.