The sun had already probably been up for at least an hour when Tony woke, and he took note of the perfect temperature. Not much later in the day, it could easily be too hot again, and day by day it would grow colder each time he woke. He shook it off the thought and stretched his arms in the warmth of the sun, but stopped short when he felt a pain in his gut. He recoiled and held his hand to where the pain had been, regretting that he hadn’t tried harder to find something more to eat the night before. The struggle to eat well was consistently the most difficult part of this life for Tony. Sure, it took him a while to get used to his natural scent, but that hardly bothered him anymore. Not being able to eat whenever and whatever he wanted was a different story. Without a job or the willingness to panhandle, finding something to eat could be a real obstacle at times. He typically ate one meal a day, in the evenings, after spending the day collecting cans and various metal scraps that could be sold to the recycling guys whose shop was near the landfill on the southeast side of town. He hadn’t been able to find much that he could sell the day before, so when it came time to cash in and find something to eat, his options were very limited. He thought back on the can of soup longingly, wishing he would’ve been able to afford two. Or maybe that he would’ve eaten it later in the evening, so that he wouldn’t feel so hungry now.

He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes as the hunger pangs subsided and took in the beauty of the woods around him, already busy with the day’s work of living. The walk path and the occasional park bench along the side of it were the only reminders of the civilized world beyond the small stretch of peaceful woods. He sighed as he thought about the fact that he’d have to get up soon and go back into the fray. He pulled out his pouch of tobacco. The morning cigarette would be so much better if he had some coffee with it, but sometimes it could be such a hassle. He had enough change for a cup of coffee; it was only a matter of whether or not he wanted to make the walk to get it. He put the tobacco back into his pocket, deciding that the cigarette would be much more enjoyable if accompanied by a cup of coffee. Together, they provided the incentive to get moving and get the day started.

He wondered, as he made his way down the walking path out of the woods, who would be working at the gas station this morning. The clerks there did appreciate one thing in particular about Tony—he didn’t use their place of business as a place to panhandle. It was inevitable that panhandlers would hassle customers for spare change in the parking lot from time to time, and the attendants had very little patience for it. Tony could recognize the look from clerks who didn’t know him; he could see how they waited for him to misstep so they could tell him to hit the road. But he never asked for anything from anyone. He hated the idea of making people uncomfortable, and he didn’t like drawing attention to himself. He tried to interact with only as many people as he absolutely needed to, which amounted to essentially the employees at the gas station and the recyclers at the junkyard who bought his scraps each day. If he could get through his day to day life without irritating any of those few people, he considered himself successful.

The pan-handlers are high-rollers on the street, a little bit of change here and there really adds up over the course of a day. Some of the panhandlers need to make a lot of money to support their drug or alcohol habits, but others have places to live and no real excuses for not working straight jobs, except for laziness or difficulties with authority. Tony didn’t look down on them for not wanting to work, but it disgusted him that they take the best of both worlds: living on the streets by day and sleeping in homes at night. Tony once had a home, and he couldn’t imagine trying to live the two different lives at the same time. He was living in an entirely different world now, and saw about as much use in thinking about his old life as he saw in imagining living on the moon. People who lived in any sort of a home didn’t live in the same world as Tony, even if they did roam the streets by day.

As he reached the park, Tony scanned the horizon to make sure no one would see him emerging from the woods. He hated being seen as a homeless person, and being caught waking up in a park seemed about as undignified as being seen taking a shit. This was why he insisted on scrapping for the money that he used to buy his food. It might not have been a job, but it was his work, and he was getting by on his own right. The park was clear, so Tony made his way across the picnic and playground area. Sometimes he’d sit near the playground for hours on mornings in the summer months, when stay-at-home parents and babysitters brought children to play. He sat far enough away to avoid the glares of the more suspicious folks, who doubtlessly presumed he was some kind of pervert, but close enough to appreciate the innocent joy and pain of the children playing. He was sort of a sponge; he couldn’t help but be infected by the carefree spirit of the kids. If doing heroin was really anything like being a child again, as he’d once heard it was, he could understand why it would be so addictive. As he passed by the swing-set, he longed for the return of the warmer months and the children playing. Soon enough. Not much traffic on the street, he noticed, crossing from the park to the business district. Maybe he’d woken up a bit earlier than he’d thought.

Walking through the downtown area wasn’t bad in the morning. Later in the afternoon, more panhandlers would be out asking for hand-outs, and pedestrians would try to preempt any solicitations from Tony with dirty looks. In the mornings, the business types were too wrapped up in their thoughts about the day ahead of them or still trying to wake up, and they treated Tony with indifference that he found comfortable. He recalled a time when he’d been the one to ignore the urban landscape that he now had to pay close attention to. The few people he passed on the street this morning showed no signs of noticing him, making the walk a pleasant one.

As he approached the bakery, Tony caught the scent of fresh pastries, which directed his attention once again to the empty feeling in his gut. The smell alone was enough to tease his stomach, which responded with pangs demanding substance. His gaze fell involuntarily on the croissants and Danish in
the window, and he couldn’t seem to avert his eyes, so he quickened his pace to get past. Memories of fresh Danish or warm scones with butter in the morning floated in the air around the bakery, trying hard to creep into his mind through his nose. It would be possible, at the right time of day, to go to the dumpster around back and get some of the leftovers, pastries no longer fresh enough for the paying customers, but Tony refused to go there, if for no other reason because he didn’t want to spoil his good memories of baked goods with stale rejects from a dumpster in an alley. Fatigue or weakness was overtaking the muscles in his arms and legs, so he stopped once he’d made it far enough to be free of the smell of the bakery. He leaned against the brick wall of the next building to regain his strength. It was just the temptation from the bakery; coffee and a cigarette could curb his appetite until later in the day, and he was almost halfway to the gas station. He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing as the feelings of weakness waxed and waned with each breath. He began to feel stronger. He could make it.

If he was willing to forgo the coffee, he could pick up some sort of little snack if he wanted to, a pack of donuts or maybe granola bars, but he quickly discarded the idea, not wanting to sacrifice the coffee, and worse—end up hungrier later. It was better to eat nothing at all than to eat just a little bit, because if he waited an hour, his feelings of hunger would subside, but if he had a snack, he’d end up twice as hungry in two hours, with no money to do anything about it. Eating had become a vicious cycle for him; the more frequently he ate, the more often he found himself hungry. Coffee and a cigarette would give him the steam to get out and find enough pop-cans or other salvage to get money for dinner, and with how hungry he was, he was determined to get enough for a painfully filling evening meal. One meal a day, especially if it had lots of protein, was quite sufficient to keep him moderately healthy. It wasn’t like he was withering away.

Once the gas station was in sight, relief passed through him, giving him a renewed sense of hope. Each step felt easier to take and he lost sight of everything except the entrance. He reached into his pants pocket on the right side, the only pocket without holes, to fumble with his money. He hated having to try to get his change out while standing at the counter—the clerks’ patience wore thin quickly when he did—so he made sure to count out the proper change and have it ready before going to the counter. His twenty-four ounce cup of coffee would cost a dollar sixty-seven, and he had a dollar eighty-one when he checked the night before. As he made his way across the gas station parking lot, he pulled coins from his right pocket and placed them into his left hand one at a time, keeping track of the total in his head. He was up to a dollar fifty-four when he approached the door, where he stopped walking so he could finish his counting.

A woman, probably in her thirties, opened the door and walked out, giving Tony a meek smile when their eyes met briefly. She looked down at the ground quickly, but stood holding the door open. He realized that she was holding the door for him so he began to walk in, half-coughing as he tried to clear his throat to utter a Thank-You. Talking to a woman as attractive as this one—dark brown hair, fair complexion, stunning green eyes, and a slender, almost athletic build—was without exception the most humiliating experience he could imagine in his current state. He managed to get his Thank-You out almost intelligibly as he walked through the doorway holding a random assortment of coins in each hand. Had his smell disgusted her? Did she think he was stupid for barely being able to thank her? He wished she would’ve walked out without paying attention to him, or better, that he would’ve counted out his change farther from the entrance, and she wouldn’t have seen him at all. This act of kindness, insignificant to her, had made him grossly uncomfortable. If only it could’ve been a man holding the door for him. The woman was an unpleasant reminder of something he missed, maybe more than anything else—affection. He sighed as he looked at the change in his left hand. He would have to count it again.

When he’d gotten a dollar sixty-seven counted out in his left hand, he clenched the hand into a fist and walked down the aisles, trying hard not to notice the candy bars and bags of chips whose shiny packaging screamed in his peripheral vision. How much would the company really lose if he lifted one bag of peanuts? Keep moving; the coffee is straight ahead. He fixed his eyes on the stack of cups and refused to look away. He managed to make it to the end of the aisle without being swayed by the immense gravity of temptation.

He pulled one of the twenty-four ounce Styrofoam cups from the stack with his right hand, his other hand still gripping the change in a tight fist, and placed it under the coffee urn. He filled the cup and set it by the stack of lids, where he found the appropriate lid and placed it carefully on top. He could feel the sweat building against the cold metal of the coins that he clutched in his left hand, urging him to hurry as he attempted to secure the lid with one hand. At least he didn’t have a dollar bill in his fist, soaking up sweat. That was always embarrassing. But not as embarrassing as the time he knocked over a full cup of coffee during his one-handed lid-affixing procedure on one cold winter morning. He’d made a mess all over the counter, spilled coffee down the front of his pants, and dropped his change all over the floor. The clerk who’d been working that day helped him clean the mess and told Tony he could pour himself another cup. Tony thought he should pay for the cup he spilled, but the clerk insisted that he only needed to pay for one cup, so he graciously accepted. It had been at least a year since the last time Tony had seen that clerk, and Tony imagined that he was probably doing well for himself, wherever he had gone. He was a really nice kid.

Tony walked up to the counter with his cup of coffee and fistful of change and waited as a young man paid for gas and a bottle of soda. When it was his turn, Tony placed his coffee and his change on the counter, carefully with the change so it wouldn’t scatter. The clerk thanked him, and Tony responded with a Thank-You much more understandable than when he’d responded to the woman at the door. He took his coffee from the counter and walked outside, ready to enjoy his morning cigarette at long last.

The best, closest place to sit and smoke was a bench on the other side of the street. Some mornings, Tony waited for a bus to come and go before sitting on the bench, so as not to confuse the bus driver by appearing as though he was waiting for a ride. He didn’t have the patience, this time, so he made his way to the bench without delay. His hunger demanded something, and the coffee would be his answer. He took a seat on the bench, sitting on the end farthest from the intersection, and set his cup of coffee beside him. He got out his thin, yellow foil pouch and unfolded it to reveal the dry, stringy tobacco and a pack of cigarette papers. Probably another day’s worth of tobacco left, Tony noticed as he pulled out enough for one cigarette. He rolled it carefully, his back turned to the gentle breeze, and then exchanged the pouch for the lighter in his pocket. He sat back and relaxed, the cigarette in his left hand and lighter in his right. It was a beautiful day, and this was his favorite part of any day, beautiful or otherwise. He put his cigarette in his mouth and held the flame to it, taking a puff to get it burning. The familiar feeling of smoke in his throat and lungs sent sensations of gratification in waves through his body. He felt his muscles loosening as he exhaled the first drag, his shoulders dropped and his legs went limp. He took another deep drag, the smoke not
too harsh or too mellow, indicating that the tobacco had reached the perfect moistness. He picked up his coffee and sipped gently, testing the temperature and taste, and then drank more eagerly. The coffee was good and fresh and had cooled enough since he poured it that he could enjoy it without burning his mouth. With a large gulp, Tony reeled in his enjoyment of this simple pleasure that gave him the motivation he needed to get through each day.
“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space,” he thought with a chuckle. This park bench, the coffee and cigarette, the bright blue sky with only patches of fluffy white clouds; this was his nutshell, and he ruled it with joyful benevolence.

His feelings of ecstasy had peaked and began to decline, then his thoughts drifted to the rest of the day—the loathsome chore of surviving until this very same time of the following day. He was nearly half-finished with his cigarette and had about a quarter of the cup of coffee left, and each time he tried to enjoy a drag or a sip, he couldn’t help but think about how he was bringing himself that much closer to the end his respite. He continued to smoke and drink his coffee, trying to put the thoughts out of his mind, but he was growing restless. The restlessness was familiar; he’d experienced this nagging sense of despair before.

He impatiently flipped what was left of his cigarette into the street and kicked back his cup of coffee to finish it off. The moment was over; his nutshell had shattered. He looked down the street to his left, wondering where he should begin the day’s search for scraps. He tried to think of what day of the week it was, which garbage routes would be collecting the next day, but he was having a hard time focusing. He could see a man walking in his direction about half a block away and he began to feel rushed. He didn’t want to be sitting on the bench when the man reached him. Another pang of hunger came, a sharp sensation in his stomach that pushed him past the threshold of patience. He stood quickly and began to walk. He only made it a few steps, however, before his legs gave out under the weight of his body, which had lost all strength to support itself.

“Hey! Hey, man! Are you okay?” A young man was on his knees at Tony’s side, shaking him gently. As Tony regained his wits, he recognized the young man as the one he’d seen walking toward him down the street. “You fell out, man! Are you alright? Are you feeling okay?” Tony sat up slightly, trying to piece together what had happened. His shoulder hurt a bit, presumably from falling, but it was overshadowed by the empty feeling in his stomach. He looked up at the young man, whose light blue eyes projected genuine concern.

“I…I’m fine,” Tony insisted softly, tears forming in his eyes. He wiped them away with his shirt sleeve, not wanting to see the young man’s reaction. Who could feel anything but disgust for such a wretched person?

“You’re sure?” the young man asked softly, still gently holding onto Tony’s shoulder.

“Maybe I could call someone, or walk you to a hospital so they can check you out, don’t you think?”

Tony shook his head at the man, still not looking at his face, and pulled away from him as he struggled to get back on his feet.

“I’ll be alright,” he said more firmly, “I just got a bit dizzy; that’s all.” He was back on his feet, and the young man stood with a puzzled look on his face as Tony walked away trying to seem as calm and composed as possible.

It was over, he told himself as he put distance between himself and the Samaritan. Soon he would be pulling valuable scraps of metal from dumpsters and putting together his stake for the day, and he would feel so much better with a nice, hearty meal. He could do this.

The top of his desk clear, he opened his middle drawer and pulled out two stacks of staff paper. The smaller stack was still in the cellophane wrap, two hundred sheets in four packages. The other stack, some sheets wrinkled and folded in places, carried the ink of Simon’s pen in the form of notes scribbled out in a hurry and then revisited to ensure accurate transcription. Simon set the stacks next to each other on his desk and looked over the top sheet of the bigger stack, letting the music come to life in his mind.

As he meditated on his music, Simon’s thoughts wandered to his mother, Sarah, whom he would soon see in the hospital. A new melody, similar in feeling to those he usually heard when he felt comfortable and safe, drifted into his mind. There was an unusual movement to it this time, hints of more somber notes as he wondered about her condition. He began transcribing these notes on a fresh sheet of staff paper, but anticipation of his father’s arrival vied for his attention. The emergence of a dissonant tune, nervous and angry, made it difficult to capture the first. He tried to separate the two in his mind as he scribbled notes alternately on two sheets, all between frantic bites of his sandwich. If he could at least capture the essential spirit of each melody, he would be able to recreate pieces later, when his mind wasn’t so clouded.

He filled three quarters of the first sheet with parts of the peaceful, sad tune and almost half of the second with the darker, scary tune before his efforts were interrupted by the sound of a horn from outside. The sounds of the world around him regained priority and he recognized the hum of the diesel engine. He jotted down a few more notes, grabbed his sandwich, and ran down the stairs and out the front door.

***

In his childhood, Simon hummed or whistled the vibrant and energetic tunes that came to him, and his brother Benjamin would smile, laugh, and bounce around in an effort to dance. There was no time for music when their father played with them, as he insisted on tossing a football or baseball around, or coaching boxing between them after he bought child-sized boxing gloves for Christmas one year. Simon was never as enthusiastic about the sports as Ben, who wanted to impress their father. After their parents divorced, Benjamin went to live with Donald and Simon stayed at home with his mother. The boys only saw each other on the weekends, which they spent alternately at each of their parent’s homes.

***

Donald was listening to classic rock on the radio while he waited outside. Simon said hello when he climbed into the truck, trying to recall the last time he’d seen his father. It must’ve been the last time he’d gone to his house for dinner, probably two or three months back. The two remained silent and Simon tried to endure the classic rock. He rarely listened to music, but when he did, it was strictly classical. Lyrics and singing consistently interfered with his ability to understand music. And he might’ve been more able to endure if his father was not obviously in a sour mood. When his father was in better spirits, he’d vent lightheartedly to Simon about how stupid his coworkers were or how one particular sports team stood no chance against another. Simon knew that his father didn’t care much for his opinion, but he felt good smiling and nodding in agreement anyway. When his father wasn’t in a good mood, Simon tried only to avoid being a source of irritation. The ride to the hospital was tense, but as long as Simon didn’t say anything, he wouldn’t become a target for his father’s anger.

***

The last he had dinner with his father, Benjamin had been the target. Donald made snide comments about him to Simon, who knew what it felt like to be the butt of his father’s jokes. He laughed along with his father anyway, taking full advantage of the opportunity to be Donald’s ally, even though he didn’t harbor any ill-feelings toward his brother, who knew better than to be offended by his brother.

Benjamin, just like Simon, had learned long ago to side with his father whenever possible, no matter what you really felt on an issue. Simon thought back on the evening just as they pulled into the lot at the hospital and found a parking spot. Donald had spent the better part of dinner that night criticizing Ben for not getting involved with some girl. The daughter of the union’s vice president. Donald couldn’t get over the fact that his son, who wasn’t otherwise involved with anyone, wouldn’t just take the girl out a few times and make her feel special; it would’ve been good politics, and not only was she attractive, she really liked Ben. “Not good enough for my son, I guess,” Donald chided.

“I guess not,” Simon had agreed with him. “Must be waiting for a real princess.”

***

The two walked into the waiting room and Donald asked the girl at the desk about Sarah and Benjamin. After a few words, he turned and walked toward Simon, who stood back, casually glancing around the waiting room.

“It’ll be a bit before we can go in and see them,” Donald said to Simon, walking past him to the seating area. “The doctors are just reviewing test results to make sure everything’s okay. They seem to be mostly okay.” Simon followed his father and sat down after him, leaving an empty seat between, for comfort. He wondered if his father would visit his mother, too, or if he’d only come to see Ben.

***

His parents had arrived at the decision to divorce calmly and mutually, except for the fact that Donald insisted that Benjamin should live with him. Simon, firmly in place in front of the television with his brother, overheard an argument between the two coming from the dining room shortly before the divorce took place. His mother said that the boys should live together, but told Donald that he wasn’t sensitive enough to handle Simon. Donald explained, calmly at first, that he wasn’t worried about Simon. “He can live with you; I don’t care,” he said, voice rising. “I’m just letting you know that Ben will live with me. If this ends up in a custody suit, I’ll take them both, if that’s the only way you’ll let me keep Ben. So keep Simon. The boys will get along fine visiting each other on weekends.” For the first few years, the kids spent their weekends alternately at each parent’s house. Simon’s visits to his father’s house trailed off after that, falling to one weekend a month, at best.

***

He looked over at his father, who was reading articles from a Popular Mechanics magazine. His father glanced up at him after a moment, as if to ask, “What are you looking at?” Simon looked away before their eyes met. This trip to the ER must’ve been the closest to intimacy he had shared with his father since his early adolescence. Since then, he only visited his father when he was able to visit with his brother too.

***

Not long after the divorce, Benjamin had begun making fun of Simon when he whistled, calling him a sissy. Donald gave Simon a hard time about not playing for Benjamin’s little league team and criticized Sarah for indul
ging Simon in music. She enrolled him in lessons for three different instruments in one year, each time spending a substantial amount of money to buy the instrument. The instructors were inevitably frustrated by Simon’s refusal to practice the music they gave him; they didn’t realize that he spent all his time teaching himself to mimic his imagined melodies with the instruments. Aside from teaching him to read sheet music, Simon’s instructors were at a loss to direct his learning. When the third instructor—violin—told Sarah that he could not teach Simon, she simply let him spend his evenings playing with his instruments. Benjamin complained about the music on his visits with his mother, as Simon would spend hours experimenting as Sarah and Benjamin prepared dinner or watched movies together. Then Benjamin would bring up the topic of music during Simon’s visits with his father, so Donald would go on about how Simon should get a paper route or mow yards to learn a sense of responsibility. Simon wouldn’t say a word to these suggestions, but instead glared at Benjamin, who had been so much nicer before the divorce.

***

Simon couldn’t think of a reason that his brother Benjamin would’ve been with his mother, and didn’t think that asking his father for more details would be worth the hassle. He got up and wandered over to the vending machines, reaching into his pocket to grab his change. It was all he had left of the twenty-dollar bill his mother had given him a few days before. Four packs of staff paper and a couple of cheeseburgers. Now a Dr Pepper; twenty dollars gone. He walked from the vending machine to the reception desk and asked the young lady how his brother and mother were doing. He refrained from turning to look at his father.

“I’ll check with the doctors and see if someone can come out to update you,” the young woman told Simon. “You can have a seat and someone will be with you soon.” Simon turned around and walked back to his seat, trying not to look at his father, though he could feel his eyes burning on him.

***

After high school, Benjamin became an apprentice in his father’s carpenter’s union and Simon enrolled in classes at the community college. His father criticized the fact that he hadn’t stayed in the high school band after all of the time that he spent horsing around with instruments. His father was the sort of man who not only lived by the John Wayne Handbook for Being a Man, but he also believed strongly in seeing what you wanted in the world and taking it. Where Benjamin earned his father’s accolades for engaging himself in a career path, Simon was ridiculed for his aimless efforts at educating himself. It didn’t bother Simon that he didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself; he knew that he loved nothing more than to capture the music that came to him. He knew his father and brother wouldn’t understand that, even if he ever did get the courage to try to explain. He wondered, briefly, if his brother Benjamin loved the work he did in carpentry. He’d never bothered to ask.

***

“Why were they riding in a car together on a Tuesday afternoon?” Simon turned to ask his father, who looked up from his magazine slowly. “I mean, shouldn’t Ben have been at work or something?”

“What the fuck am I, your brother’s secretary?” Donald eyeballed him questioningly with an air of irritated superiority. Simon slumped down in his seat and crossed his arms as he looked up at the reception desk; Donald rolled his eyes at Simon before going back to his article. Simon made an effort to put his father’s cruelty out of his mind and let his mind wander to the young lady in front of him. She was quite attractive—dark hair in a pony tail, fair complexion, and soft brown eyes with a trace of naiveté—and probably just a few years older than Simon, maybe Benjamin’s age. Simon imagined that his father had already calculated the amount of time and number of drinks it would take to get her back to his place.

***

Since the divorce, Donald consistently dated women much younger than he was. Sarah had only dated two men, each of them very close in age to her. When Simon was seventeen or eighteen, he overheard his mother telling someone on the phone about her last date. She was talking and laughing with her date when Donald walked into the restaurant with some young girl. He spotted Sarah as they waited for a table and told his date to wait at the front. He went to Sarah’s table and said hello to her, not looking away from her companion. She introduced the companion, who extended his hand to shake. Donald slapped his hand away, telling the man that he could buy Sarah dinner all he wanted, but that he’d better not find him hanging around in the house he built. “You’ll be sorry,” Donald told him. Sarah hadn’t been on a date since.

***

Donald shifted in his seat, crossing his right leg over his left knee and resting his left arm on the top of the seat next to him. His knuckles had little cuts and bruises, some from occupational hazards, others perhaps from bar-room scrapping. His quick temper with other men had led to countless bar-fights over the years.

***

Simon could remember the last time he’d been afraid of his father. He was sixteen and trying to complete his hours of supervised driving to pass driver’s Ed. It had been three months since he’d spent a weekend at his father’s.

“Come on, Dad!” he yelled up the stairs. It was nine a.m. on Saturday morning. “I gotta practice driving if I’m gonna get my goddamned license!” He tried to reach out and grab the words as they bounced their way up the stairs to Donald’s bedroom. He didn’t care if the boys used foul language, unless it was directed at him. Simon began taking steps backward instinctively, even before he heard the footsteps, first from his father’s bedroom, very shortly after from the hallway. They were moving closer quickly. It was amazing how his father, small man as he was, could make such heavy footsteps when he was angry. Donald came down the stairs two at a time in his boxer-shorts; Simon continued backing up, not paying attention to what was behind him. Just as Donald reached him, fist loosed and on a collision-course with his cheek, Simon bumped into an ottoman, falling backwards and out of his father’s reach. He found himself on his back, his legs draped over the ottoman, his heart pounding. His father stood on the other side of the ottoman, his fists clenched tightly and his face red.

“Serves you right you ungrateful punk. I’ve got company up there, and it’s not enough that I buy instruments you don’t fucking use, you think I’m here to be your goddamned driver’s Ed instructor.” He kicked the ottoman and Simon felt the impact run up through his back. “I’m going back to bed, so try not to be down here sulking around when we come down for breakfast.” Donald turned to walk back toward the stairs and Simon rolled over slowly and got up off the floor. An energetic tune surged through his head as he watched his father lumber up the stairs, and he was soon overcome by the music. He began whistling the loud, shrill, vibrant tune. His father stopped and looked back at Simon, his mouth partly open in awe. Simon continued whistling, staring directly into his father’s horrified eyes. The tune made the hair on Donald’s neck stand up. His hands went slack and he headed back up the stairs, not taking his eyes off his son until he rounded the corner at the top of the stairs. Simon stood proud, his whistle trailing off. He’d inherited his father’s small build, just like his brother. Unlike them, he was neither strong nor quick. He was clumsy and awkward, but he learned then that he could be more frightening than his father.

***

Donald made it to the back cover of his magazine and they still hadn’t heard anything from the receptionist or any doctors.

“Did they tel
l you anything new when you went up there?” he asked Simon, frustration clear in his voice.

“No, just that someone will come out and talk to us soon.”

Simon couldn’t help but wonder why his father didn’t know more about what was going on. Simon knew that Benjamin didn’t necessarily work on the same crew with his father, even though they worked in the same union. Still, he thought that if Benjamin had needed to leave work to do something with his mother, his father would’ve caught wind of it somehow.

***

The last time Simon spent time with Benjamin had been one day in March when he called, seemingly out of the blue, to say he’d like to come over for dinner that night. Before that, the two boys and their mother hadn’t been in one place together since Christmas. Sarah made a big deal of Benjamin’s visit, leaving work early to clean up the house and prepare a nice meal. Baked chicken, dressing, and au gratin potatoes; Benjamin’s favorite. Benjamin arrived half an hour late, still dressed in his work clothes and old tattered baseball cap. He seemed to be in a great mood and had a very lively conversation with his mother over dinner. Simon occasionally spoke up, feeling more comfortable than he usually did around his brother. When they’d finished eating, Simon told his brother it’d been nice to see him, and he meant it.

“You got homework to do or something,” Ben asked, turning his full attention to Simon. “How’s school been going, anyway? Are you still doing your music stuff?” He seemed genuinely interested.

“Well, I’m not really doing music at school,” Simon told him, mildly uncomfortable talking about himself. “I don’t really like the way they try to teach music. As far as school goes, I’m just trying to take the basic classes and figure out what I should be doing.”

“That’s cool,” Ben nodded, “you’re bound to find something you like. Do you still work on music in your free time, though? You were really into that, weren’t you?” It seemed like a strange question at first, but Simon realized that he probably hadn’t actually talked about his interests with his brother in years.

“Yeah, I still like to try to write music and play around with my instruments. It’s just for fun though.”

“Well, if it’s what you like, you should try to do something with it,” Ben said earnestly. “Worst case, you’d find out that you can’t or don’t want to do it. It wouldn’t be like you’d lost anything.” Simon felt like his brother was making things sound much simpler than they actually were, but he appreciated the unexpected encouragement, and didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed uncharacteristic of the brother who’d always been so much like his dad.

Simon declined his mother’s offer of homemade cheesecake, knowing he could get some from the kitchen later if he wanted to. He said good-night to his brother, who got up to hug him. Simon patted his brother’s back uncomfortably while Ben held him close with open hands. Ben held on longer than Simon expected, and when he finally let go, Simon stepped, or stumbled, back. He gave Benjamin a nervous, questioning smile and said good-night again before going up to his room.

He didn’t hear his brother drive away until two hours later, and he waited another half hour before going downstairs to get a slice of cheesecake. His mother was still sitting at the dining-room table, her eyes looking a bit red and her arms folded over each other on the table.

“Is everything okay, Mom?” Simon returned to his seat at the table, but looked to the kitchen, regretting that he hadn’t gone to get a piece of cheesecake first.

“It’s your brother,” she said after sighing deeply. She sat up straight and crossed her arms over her chest. She took a slow breath and held it, then looked at Simon and exhaled, “He says he’s gay.” Tears formed in her eyes, which she wiped with the back of an index finger.

Simon couldn’t help but grin, his typical reaction to tense situations.

“What?” It was all he could say. He did his best to suppress his nervous smile.

“I knew something was going on with him, but I never expected this. Not with the way your father is. I thought maybe he’d gotten some poor girl pregnant,” she tried to laugh, but it sounded like a sob to Simon. Her tears were flowing freely. How would his father take something like this? “I think he might just be confused,” she said hopefully. “He never really did date any girls in school or anything, right? He just hasn’t met any girls that he really liked! If he met a nice girl…” she trailed off, her wishful thoughts falling apart as soon as she gave them breath.

Simon folded his arms over his chest and stared blankly at the floor. He looked up at his mother. “He’s not going to tell Dad, is he?” He blinked back tears as he hugged his mother. He went to his room after the conversation and wrote a long, slow piece as he tried to imagine how long Benjamin had known or suspected what he admitted to his mother that night. He stopped to cry several times before finally finishing the piece.

***

Simon had to wonder now, here in the waiting room, if this recent revelation had anything to do with Benjamin’s reason for being with his mother. Maybe they’d had lunch together? She hadn’t mentioned spending more time with him.

A doctor came to the reception desk and began talking to the receptionist. He leaned over the desk and spoke too quietly for Simon to hear. He looked up at Simon and Donald after a moment, a look of concern on his face. Simon looked over at his father, who was intently reading from another magazine. The doctor walked around the desk and through the door to the waiting room. Simon stood and his father looked up.

“Simon?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Your mother and Benjamin are fine,” he said calmly, “and your mother is asking to see you.” Simon felt a wave of relief.

“I can go see Benjamin now?” Donald asked, firmly gripping his magazine.

“Sir, your son has specifically requested that you not be allowed in to see him,” the doctor said apologetically, holding his open hands up to demonstrate his inability to do anything for Donald. “We can’t allow you in,” he went on, taking a half-step back and resting his weight on one leg.

“What the fuck is this?” Donald said, raising his voice. He tossed the magazine on the seat beside him and stood up, raising one finger to point at the doctor. “That’s my son in there, and I have a right to go talk to him!”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the doctor said, taking another step back, “but if you don’t lower your voice you’ll be asked to leave the hospital altogether,” he went on, his voice cracking a little. “Your son doesn’t want to see you, but your ex-wife said that you could talk to her, after Simon does, if you want.”

“What a bunch of happy horseshit this is!” He threw his magazine down on the chair he’d been sitting in. “Have fun with the fucking winner’s circle in there,” he said to Simon. “You fit right in.”

When his father was gone, Simon made his way to his mother’s room and peeked cautiously through the door, partly to make sure it was her room and partly because he felt anxious about how she might look. He continued on into her room; she was in bed, looking out the window. Aside from a bandage on one side of her forehead, he could see no signs of major injury. He took a seat next to her bed.

“Hi, Mom,” he said quietly. She muttered hello without looking at him.

“You know,” she said after a few minutes, turning to look at him, “I just can’t figure out whether I should be mad at myself or your father.” Simon cocked his head, unsure of what she meant. “I didn’t think your father would make
good father when I first met him. I bought into his bad-boy image the same way all those other young girls do. I thought he would change. You hear that so much, but I really believed it.” She looked into Simon’s eyes and said firmly, “He might be a violent man, but I knew he’d never hurt me.” She rested her head on the pillow and looked at the ceiling. “But I guess I knew that I’d never do anything to make him that angry. Your brother, on the other hand…”

“You mean Dad hurt Ben?” Simon interrupted, seeing a new piece of the puzzle. She turned to look at him.

“Your father didn’t tell you? Ben told him that he was gay. Your father went berserk. Mike was working with them, but he was in the other room. When he heard the commotion he had to come in and pull your father off of Benjamin. Mike called me to pick up Ben, and I was taking him home when we got into the accident. We were both so emotional; I was in no condition to be driving,” she said, beginning. The sad melody that Simon had written for his brother returned, drowning out his mother’s voice. He should go see his brother. The room was down the hall.

Simon found the room walked in without hesitation. Ben lay there with his eyes closed, and Simon resisted the urge to wake him abruptly and talk about what had happened. Ben’s left eye was swollen shut and he had stitches down his right cheek. It was impossible to tell what his father had done and what had happened in the accident. Simon wiped his eyes and sat in the chair next to his brother’s bed. He tried to picture his brother, how he’d been as a little kid. As images of their childhood play came to mind, he hummed along with the happy music that accompanied. Benjamin turned his head toward the music, tension leaving his face to make way for a pained smile.

I went to the Super Wal-Mart one night after driving through the parking lots of the other two stores. The one I ended up going to was pretty far out of the way, a mile or two south of the main part of the city. There wasn’t more than a half dozen cars in the lot; there had been somewhere between ten and twenty cars at Meijer’s and Super K-Mart. Of course, it still would’ve been nothing like going to one of those stores during the day, when people stand around and give you funny looks. I don’t like it when people watch me. I got inside Wal-Mart and tried to remember what I needed to buy. I always start off by going to the electronics section to see what sorts of DVDs and CDs they have. I would have time to think about what I needed while I looked around there. Just as I was walking through the scanners at the electronics section, sure as shit, I had to pee. It happens every time I come into these places. It’s better than going to a bookstore or library, where I always end up having to take a shit. Public restrooms are the worst, but I just had to pee and there weren’t too many people around. I’d probably have the bathroom to myself. I walked down the aisles wondering if the guys watching the security cameras at night sit around and talk shit about the customers. They’re probably sitting back there right now, I thought, laughing at me for walking all the way to the electronics section only to turn around and go back to the bathrooms. I was tempted to flip the bird to one of the black plastic globes on the ceiling. I wonder if those guys even really watch the cameras at night. They sure did during the day; I had come to one of these stores with some friends in high school to steal CDs and shit, and just as we got to the door, a couple of guys grabbed my friends and searched them. I was lucky—they didn’t have the CD I wanted.

I walked into the bathroom and headed for the urinals. Making my way to the last urinal, I saw someone’s feet, pants around the ankles, under the first stall. I was screwed. If I could pee fast, I would be able to get out of there before the dude even made it out of the stall, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I took the middle urinal so the guy wouldn’t be able to see my feet, and I stood there, waiting. Come on, pee, I commanded myself. It wasn’t working. The guy in the stall grunted. Motherfucker, I just want to pee and get out of here. I wondered if he heard me walk in. Maybe I should just go out and wait for him to leave. I stood there, trying to concentrate, when I heard him flush. Great, he’s going to walk out and see me standing here at the urinal, not peeing. He walked out and I stared at the wall in front of me. Don’t look over; don’t look over. I looked over when he got to the sink. He nodded at me. I mumbled an attempt at “how you doing,” but it probably just sounded like I was coughing or something. God, he probably thought I was a fucking idiot. Just wash your hands and leave, goddammit. He finally left and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to pee. I flushed the urinal anyway and just left. Whatever I needed, cat food probably, was going to have to wait. Motherfucking public restroom. I didn’t even feel like I had to pee anymore.

I went ahead and stopped at the McDonald’s drive-thru on the way home. I just get their double cheeseburgers most of the time. They screwed up bad when they put them on the dollar menu. I could go there with four dollars and get three plain double cheeseburgers—a satisfying meal. I don’t like getting all of the other crap on there, and I don’t like drinking soda with them. The burgers have a good flavor, and all of that extra stuff ruins it. Sometimes the cheeseburgers are a little too greasy; other times they put too much of the seasoning on them. If I go to the same McDonald’s at the same time of the night, they’re usually just right. Enough grease so that it drips on the paper, but not so much that it drips on my pants. And enough of the seasoning that I can taste it, but not too much so I feel like I need something to drink afterwards.

My brother, the vegan, always gives me a lot of shit for eating at those places. He tells me that I’d probably lose weight if I didn’t eat garbage all the time, but if it means not being a self-righteous prick like him, I’ll stay fat. He went vegan when he was a sophomore in college, and we were about the same size back then, each weighing in around two-twenty. I’d been a senior in high school then, and I didn’t end up going to college for long. I took classes at the University for like three semesters before deciding that I wasn’t all that into it. I hadn’t picked a major and I was getting really tired of all the classes that would never have anything to do with whatever I want to do with my life. Anyway, he just graduated with a degree in plant biology, and all he does is work at a stupid organic co-op, and he doesn’t seem to want to look for a real job. Good thing he took out so many student loans, asshole. He probably weighs like one-sixty or one-seventy now, and I’m up to two-sixty, but I’m a good five or six inches taller, too.

I’m sure I’d lose some of this weight if I wasn’t working in telemarketing, but it pays the bills okay, so I’m gonna stick with it for now. Especially since I don’t have to deal with people face-to-face. People are so much easier to deal with over the phone. Sometimes people cop an attitude about being called in the middle of the evening, but if I get straight into telling them why I’m calling, they usually come around. I wouldn’t want to be the type of telemarketer who sells magazines or other garbage. We call and solicit contributions to charitable organizations, and people usually like the idea of trying to help out. The ones who don’t want to give anything feel bad enough about it that they don’t want to give me a hard time for calling them during dinner.

My co-workers can’t fuck with me too much because we have separated cubicles. All I have to do is call the numbers on my screen and talk people out of their credit card numbers. I even get to smoke a cigarette every hour by giving up my lunch break, and the supervisors are lenient about letting me smoke two if I want to. I usually wait until I see people coming back from cigarette breaks before I go out. Once in a while someone comes out when I’m smoking and I have to make small talk with them. One of the guys who’s come out a couple of times is pretty nice, but he’s always pressuring me to take my cigarette breaks with everyone else or come to some
of the parties they have on weekends. A lot of the people who work there are college students and only work two or three days a week. I know that if I went out with all of them, people would just push for personal information or make smart-ass comments about my weight or the fact that I’m not in school. I don’t want to deal with that shit.

I was ready to pee by the time I made it home with my McDonald’s, and I pressed the play button on the answering machine as I danced my way into the bathroom, trying to hold it until I got my pants unzipped. I sighed in relief as I try to hear the answering machine. It sounded like my brother Will. We were supposed to go to lunch with Mom the next day. There was really only one place where he could get his vegan garbage and I could dine on seared mammal flesh. It’s a pain in the ass to go there, but I know Mom gets worried about us if she doesn’t have lunch with us once a month. I set my alarm for eleven in the morning and went to bed, experiencing the monthly frustration of knowing that I’d have to get out of bed early.

***

“What’s up, Curt,” he greeted me getting into my car. “Where are we having lunch?”

“Where else,” I mumbled, looking to the left to see if I was good to pull out of the parking lot and onto the street. I drove toward the “Smart Heart Café.” I never would’ve thought that I’d find something good to eat in a place with a name like that, but I found something that would work for me when Will forced me to go there with him a year or two ago. They serve omelets made with low-cholesterol egg-substitute, but it turns out that you can get real eggs by request. The waitresses there always give me dirty looks, because I ask for the real eggs, and I ask them to use real butter to cook the omelet instead of cooking spray. If that wasn’t enough, I always have to ask for butter too, so that I can choke down their dry-ass “extra-lean low-cholesterol” sausage links. I sometimes ask if the sausages are tofu, just to see if one of them will slip up and admit that real meat couldn’t taste that bad. They keep their stories straight and always give me their spiel about free-range pigs that do cardiovascular exercises, or whatever it is they say to justify serving sausage links in a heart-friendly restaurant.

“You know, you could be a little more open-minded about taking care of yourself. You could end up like Grandpa or Uncle Jeff, if you’re not careful,” he started. I’d heard the same lecture half a dozen times in as many months. “Our family doesn’t have the kind of hearts that can take the way you eat.” At least he was coming up with new ways to say the same old shit.

“Come on, man. None of them probably had a heart as big as mine,” I joked. It was true; they were a lot smaller than I am. “Besides, they drank all the time. I probably haven’t been drunk twice since my twenty-first.” I’m twenty-three now, and I’m sure that getting drunk once a year isn’t going to do any harm that my body won’t overcome. “Besides, it’s not like it makes that big a difference, anymore, whether you’re fit or not. Unless you’re trying to hook up with someone. Strippers and porn are happy to take my money no matter how much I weigh, so why would I want to go to all the trouble to lose a hundred pounds to give my money to some chick who’d probably dump me if I forgot to buy her flowers?”

“Strippers and porn don’t put someone in your bed with you at night, do they?” he asked. He knew plenty about having people in his bed, ever since he’d been working at that co-op full-time, he’d been on and off with all sorts of hippy girls.

“Why, so they can steal the covers and kick me and leave my pillow smelling like patchouli? No thanks, Will. I’ll do the job just as good, or better, myself, and then I don’t gotta worry about making breakfast for anyone,” I fired back. I was starting to get mad. He can’t get over this idea that everybody wants to have somebody. He tried for a couple of months to get me to go out with some girl he worked with, probably a fatty, and I tried to get it into his head that I couldn’t give a shit less about hooking up, whether it was for twenty minutes or twenty years. I have a hard enough time dealing with him, Mom, and the people I work with, let alone some companion who’d want all sorts of shit from me.

“Whatever, Curt. Don’t miss the turn,” he said.

“Yeah, I see it. You wanna drive, buy a car,” I said, pulling into the lot. I parked next to Mom’s car and we walked into the restaurant together.

We spotted Mom sitting at a table on the right side of the restaurant, toward the back. The place was pretty busy, and I had to walk past all of these tables of people, squeezing in between chairs and brushing up against people. I must’ve said “excuse me” seven or eight times before I finally made it to my seat. The fucking people were probably looking at me as I walked past, but I kept my eyes on our table. Will had a smirk on his face when I sat down, and I wasn’t sure why, but I mouthed “fuck you” to him when Mom wasn’t looking.

“The waitress was just here; I hope she doesn’t take a long time to come back,” Mom said, trying to spot our waitress. “How are you boys doing?”

“Work’s been crazy-busy, lately,” Will said. I knew I could count on him to take care of the conversation. I looked through the menu to see if I’d missed something before, or if maybe they’d added some dish with substance to it since the last time I’d come. I was disappointed as usual, and geared myself up to explain the order to the waitress. Mom and Will were talking about the co-op still, and I looked around, trying to figure out if we were going to have a waitress who’d served us before or somebody new. I hated trying to explain my order to new waitresses; they would raise their eyebrows at me while I explained things, and they wouldn’t bother writing any of it down. They’d look around the restaurant after I finished my order, like they were looking for someone who would come tell me to fuck off. I’d have to explain nicely that I placed the same order all the time; I knew they could do it my way. I was relieved when one of our regular waitresses approached the table.

“How ‘bout for you, hon,” she asked when she’d taken down Mom’s and Will’s orders. “You get that special order, don’t you,” she smiled.

“Um, yeah. The ham omelet. Extra portion of ham and cheddar cheese, with real eggs, not the fake ones. And make sure they use three eggs? Cook it in butter, not spray. An order of sausage links on the side, and can you make sure they aren’t too dried-out?”

“Did you want that with the toast, or some granola?”

“Oh yeah, toast, please. White, buttered.” This was the only restaurant that I’d ever been in that didn’t butter your toast unless you asked.

“Something to drink, doll?” she asked, still scribbling furiously on her notebook.

“A glass of whole milk with the meal, please, and some coffee right now.”
“I might have to check on the milk, okay? But I’ll be right back with your coffee,” she smiled. She sure was a nice waitress, one of the few in the place.

“You know, it’d make lot more sense if you had breakfast before meeting with us,” Will said, “it’d make it a lot easier for you, and you could eat all of the real meat you wanted. You know that stuff they’re giving you isn’t real meat, right?” he chided.

“Fuck you. And it is real, they just take all of the good stuff out of it.”

“We don’t need that language here, Curt,” Mom said casually, taking a drink of her orange juice.

“I mean it, those sausages are soy-based,” he went on. “We started getting them at the co-op. And they’re organic, too, so you’re not even getting any of those pesticides or p
reservatives you love so much,” he said, grinning wide. I stood up and he flinched a bit, so I faked like I was going to throw a punch before walking past him to a little stand where people put their newspapers when they were done with them. He held out his hand, middle finger extended, as I walked past. I returned to my seat and looked through the front page as the two of them talked about family or politics, or family politics. Mom always ends up talking about the same things, and Will knows everything about everything, so I don’t even pretend to be interested in the conversation anymore.

Once or twice, when Will couldn’t make it for lunch with us, Mom and I went out by ourselves. She did most of the talking, but she’d also ask me how things were going. She liked to ask when I would be signing up for classes again and whether or not I still wanted to go into medicine. I tell her every time she asks me; I haven’t wanted to go into medicine since I was seven. I asked for a Fisher-Price medicine kit and she’s thought I wanted to be a doctor ever since. Sometimes she talks about what Dad was like before he left. Apparently he thought a lot about going into medicine when he and Mom met in college. She was studying nursing and graduated the same year they started dating. He ended up moving in with her and then dropped out of school. She worked full-time and he smoked a lot of pot and partied with his college buddies. They graduated and moved away, so he started driving a truck. They never got married, and when I was eight, Dad left for a run to Ohio and didn’t come back. Mom always seemed so sad after that, and anymore she just seems disconnected. The last time we ate lunch together, she asked if I still wanted a class ring. I’d been out of high school for at least three years.

I considered going outside for a cigarette, but the last time we’d come, one of the waitresses came out and asked me to go stand in front of the neighboring store because I was “offending” the customers. They can’t stand to see someone enjoying themselves, I responded, dropping the cigarette on the sidewalk and stepping on it. Usually I put the cigarette out and put the butt in the trash somewhere, but I wanted to leave them a reminder that they’d spoiled my few moments of pleasure. I wouldn’t even bother trying to smoke here anymore.

I glanced through the obituaries in the local section, checking the ages. I liked to speculate about how people had died, but old people were no fun for that. They died because they were old. I’d always find the youngest person and try to see if there were any clues in the obituary. Sometimes they would say that donations could be made in the name of the deceased to the leukemia foundation, the motocross club, or the skydiver’s association. Those were easy ones. I took a drink of my coffee and realized I’d forgotten to add cream. Er. CreamER they had here. Goddammit.

After lunch, we walked Mom slowly back to her car, listening to her talk about the cats as we did. Her silly cats…she had like eight of them or something. And there was always some sort of drama between them. I hugged her good-bye before Will and I walked back to my car. I lit a cigarette before starting the car.

“Fucking smoker,” he said, rolling his window halfway down. “Let me get a couple of drags,” he added, after a pause. I passed him the cigarette and he took a couple of slow drags. He gave a little cough as he handed the cigarette back to me. We arrived at the co-op a few minutes later. “Alright dude, take it easy, huh?” he said, holding out his fist. I made a fist and hit his.

“Yeah, man. Have fun with your hairy-pit bitches,” I laughed.

“Whatever dude, I make them shave that shit if they’re gonna get with me! Peace.”

“Peace.”

I put in Nine Inch Nails’ “Downward Spiral” when he got out, cranking the volume for track one. The track has great heavy riffs. I jammed out on the way back to the apartment.

When I made it back to my apartment, I started quickly up the wooden stairs. It was the type of staircase that they put on the side of a house when they split it up into apartments. They were a little rickety, but not too bad, though I had to be careful when it was wet, ‘cause they’d get pretty slippery. I was going up them pretty quickly that day, until I got about three-quarters up. I had to stop. Then I started to feel it. Thud. Thud. I could feel my heartbeats just behind my ears. They were far apart, and my fingers went numb. The edges of my vision were fluttering, closing in. My skin was cold, all of a sudden, but it felt like I was sweating. I tried to squeeze the railing as hard as I could, but I felt like my hand wasn’t closing. My mind was racing. Could this be it? It was as though I could feel myself being pulled away from my body. I was terrified, but it was invigorating. I felt like my entire body was going numb, so I might not have been able to tell, but I would swear that I nearly got a hard-on when I felt like I was just about to blink out. I could still see, though, I was staring at a cigarette butt at the top of the steps. I couldn’t see anything else, but I was concentrating on keeping that in my vision. Thud. Thud. Thud. It started to pick up pace again, each beat feeling like it could make my neck burst. I closed my eyes slowly, opening them again to see that my vision was coming back. I turned myself around, still gripping the railing, and set myself down gently on the step I was on. I took my hand off the railing and held it out in front of me. I was getting back to normal. I looked out at the street and watched the cars pass by. I pulled out my cigarettes and lit one up as I soaked up the afternoon sun.

I was stopped at a truck stop just inside Iowa when I saw a guy holding a sign that said Council Bluffs. I was taking a load out to Omaha, so I could get him all the way without going out of my way. I went inside the truck stop and picked up a few things for the road—two-liter of soda, couple packs of crackers with peanut butter, pack of Lucky Strikes, and a Snickers bar—and went back outside to see if my guy was still there. Sure enough, there he was waiting, so I headed over to him.

“Tryin’ to get to Council Bluffs, are ya?” I took a look at the guy’s shoes. Sometimes you can figure out what sort of guy you’re working with when you check out his shoes. He had on a pair of some tennis shoes that looked like they had a real flat bottom. They were real low cut, looked almost like slippers. They were pretty clean, and his pant legs rested on the tongues and covered up the back of the shoe. I couldn’t see a brand name on the shoe anywhere, but then I took notice of those jeans. They weren’t denim, but a dark-colored canvas, or something like that. Hadn’t really seen pants like that. They were pretty clean, but looked like they had been around for a while. They were in that good phase in between the time when pants are too new and stiff and the time they start falling apart and getting holes. If I had to guess by his pants and shoes, I’d say this guy wasn’t a bum—he’s got some idea of the value of a dollar and isn’t a stranger to work—but he seemed like the kind of guy who works real hard at doing jobs that don’t break your back, something like managing a record store or a mom-and-pop restaurant. I couldn’t see him working in some chain place.

“Yeah, trying to get out and see family.” He lifted his bag and let his sign drop beside him. “Are you going that way?”

I told him I was going that way. I could get off I-80 early and go right through Council Bluffs. We walked over to the truck and I climbed in my side and unlocked his door. I’ve got some nice air-ride seats and a sleeper in the back, so it’s a pretty comfortable rig. We didn’t say anything as I got the truck fired up and made my way back onto the interstate. I turned on the radio, to a classic rock station that I thought might be agreeable. We rode along for an hour or so before I decided to pull out a joint to loosen things up a bit. It was seven o’clock or so when we left the truck stop, so it was just starting to get dark, and I didn’t want him falling asleep on me. That’s always uncomfortable. “You wanna burn one with me?” I held it up so he could get a look. He stared at the joint for a moment and looked up at my face. I caught a look on his face and knew I’d made him uncomfortable. I looked at the road ahead. “It’s alright if you don’t want to, but do you mind if I do?” I looked at him again. He sat up in his seat and breathed in deeply.

“Well, I guess I’d rather you didn’t, if that’s okay,” he said after a pause. “See, I am trying to get clean.”

“Yeah? From pot?”

“Yeah. I’m an addict. It doesn’t really matter what drug it is for addicts, but pot was my drug of choice.”

“I guess I hadn’t ever really thought somebody would get so out of hand with pot that they had to quit.” And I hadn’t. I was kinda thinking that this guy might just be melodramatic or something. “You had a pretty big problem with it?”

“Well, all I did after I graduated high school was smoke pot. That’s been about ten years ago. I went to the community college where I lived for a couple semesters.” He took out a pack of cigarettes and pulled one out. I handed him my lighter, the Zippo instead of the Bic, and he lit it before he continued talking. “I just never wanted to do anything but smoke though. That second semester, I just stayed around in Mom’s house playing video games and getting high all day. I missed a lot of classes and ended up flunking out.” He took a long drag from his cigarette.

“That sucks,” I said. I still didn’t think it meant he was a drug addict. School isn’t for everyone. “What were you studying?”

“That’s just it; I didn’t even know. I started by getting the basic classes out of the way, but I didn’t even know what I wanted to get into. I was a decent student through high school, but nothing ever really stuck out to me that I liked. So it didn’t seem like a big deal to me that I flunked out. I just figured I’d find a job and eventually move out of Mom’s place.”

“Can I get one of those cigarettes?” I couldn’t smoke my joint; I might as well smoke something. “Thanks, man. So did you get a job?”

“Yeah, I ended up getting an assistant manager job at the video store where I always went to rent games.”

“Ha! I had you pegged for a record store guy! Video store isn’t far off!”

“No, guess it isn’t,” he responded, a smile briefly interrupting the thoughtful look on his face. He finished the rest of his cigarette without talking. I was kinda interested in his story, but I figured he was lost in reflection, so I left him alone for a while. Forty-five minutes passed before he started talking again.

“Want another cigarette?” he asked, holding his pack out to me after pulling one out for himself. He looked around the cab like he was waking up from a dream, trying to remember where he was. He glanced back at the sleeper.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, taking one of the cigarettes. I told him how comfortable that sleeper could be after driving for hours on end and he nodded.

“I was actually doing pretty well for myself for a while, after I got that job at the video store, that is,” he went back into his story as if we’d been talking all along. “There was this girl working there when I started, Katie. She was really something special. Light brown hair, shoulder-length, dazzling green eyes. I was in love with her the moment I saw her—my first day on the job. Her shift ended just as mine began. I knew it would’ve been too much to hope for that we would work the same shift. And I was surprised that I’d never seen her before, since I went there to get games all the time. She always worked the same shift, though, and I never got there that early in the day. Funny how six in the evening can seem so early when you’re up playing video games until three or four every night.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, not wanting him to feel like I wasn’t interested in the conversation. I wasn’t saying much, after all. “My sleep schedule is never the same working this job. Sometimes it seems like the middle of the day to me when people are just getting up in the morning. Other times, it’s hard to imagine that people have put in a full day of work by the time I’m getting my first coffee of the day.” I watched as a sporty-looking car zipped by on my left.

“Yeah, exactly. I liked that about working at the video store—I could sleep until three or four in the afternoon and still have a few hours to kill before going to work. The best thing was always rolling in ten or fifteen minutes early to make small-talk with Katie. She was there every time I came to work for like the first two weeks. I just started to assume she’d be there every day. Then I came in and some guy was working. He was a guy who’d worked my hours before I started; I used to rent games from him. I asked him where Katie was,
and he said she didn’t work Wednesday afternoons, usually. ‘She kinda digs you,’ he told me. I asked him if she’d said something, and he told me that she’d said something about a little crush she had on the new guy. I was floored. I mean, this girl was really a catch. What would she want with me?”

“Hey, give yourself some credit; you seem like a good-lookin’ kid. And you seem pretty charismatic, too.” I hoped he didn’t think I was trying to hit on him. Everybody’s heard at least one creepy story about truck drivers, but I don’t swing that way. He didn’t seem worried.

“Thanks, I appreciate that. I sure didn’t think that at the time. I was sorta awkward in high school, you know, and I didn’t do much afterwards but hang out and play video games. Even my pals who smoked pot with me and played video games were either putting more time into school or getting some kind of real jobs. I kinda felt like they were abandoning me because they were tired of my shit or something. I was pretty surprised when Katie asked me out.”

“Wow, she asked you out? Sounds like some kinda girl!” I really hated that when I was younger, the girls who played coy and waited for the guy to do the asking.

“Yeah, I’m telling you. I came in for work one day, early as usual, and just before she left, she asked me if I’d be up for going out sometime. ‘You mean like go out with some friends to a bar, or like go out to dinner and maybe a movie,’ I asked. I didn’t want to get the wrong impression. She laughed at me and said ‘dinner, silly.’ I told her I’d love to. Neither of us had to work that following Saturday, so we made it a date.”

“Cool. Did you go someplace nice?” I asked.

“Yeah, a really nice place. French-Vietnamese place called ‘Le Mekong.’ It was great. We agreed when we first sat down that we would go see a movie after dinner, but we ended up having such great conversation that we sat around drinking the Vietnamese coffee until the place almost closed. We didn’t want to leave. We drove there separately, and I walked her to her car, where we stood talking for another half hour or so. Before she got in her car, I kissed her. I’d had a few girlfriends before that, but no kiss was ever like that one. It left me speechless.”

“I know the type,” I said. I’ve had week-long affairs with women that weren’t half as exciting as a three-second kiss with the right girl.

“I knew I had it bad after that,” he went on. I took out the two-liter and offered him a drink before taking a swig myself. “We ended up dating for six months or so before getting an apartment together. I’d been itching to get out of Mom’s place for a while, and Katie’s lease was ending. We found a cozy little place not too far from the video store and got settled in. She was going to school during the day and working afternoons, and I was still working four evenings a week and like one or two afternoons. We didn’t get to spend a lot of time together. It’s weird, ‘cause it was like we were spending less time together after moving in than when we lived in different places. I’d cut down on my pot smoking during those first six months, but when we moved in together, I started smoking more again. We’d talked about me getting into classes again, but I began to doubt it a few months in. Long story short, after we’d been living together for six months, she told me that she didn’t think that things were going to work out. ‘You smoke too much,’ she said, ‘and you don’t seem to want to do anything with your life.’ I tried to talk her out of going, telling her that I’d really get involved in school, and I wouldn’t have time to smoke so much once that happened, but she knew that it wasn’t true. She went and stayed with a friend for a few weeks until she found a new apartment for herself. She told me that if she couldn’t help me up, she’d have to help me down.”

That’s pretty cold, I told him. She must’ve cared a lot about him or a lot about herself. Probably herself.

“I went on working at the video store—she apparently found another job right before she broke up with me—and stayed in that apartment, smoking day-in day-out. Eventually I got behind on rent, and my landlord called and threatened to evict me. I only had two months left on the lease, so I went ahead and moved back into Mom’s. I think he must’ve figured that it wouldn’t have been worth the time to sue me, ‘cause I never heard from him again.”

“That’s a lucky thing. That looks really bad on your credit.” So he wasn’t cut out for school and couldn’t handle paying bills. I still wasn’t sure about the drug addict thing, I’ve known plenty of lazy bastards in my time. I asked him what his mom thought.

“Mom always really liked Katie,” he told me. “She either didn’t know that I smoked so much pot, or was too timid to say anything, ‘cause all she ever told me was that I should try to work things out with Katie. ‘You were doing so well for a while.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Katie couldn’t stand it that all I ever did was smoke pot. Anyway, that was all like eight years ago. Things stayed the same—me living at Mom’s and smoking all the time—until about a year ago. I had seen Katie walking down the street one day, looking just as good as I remember her, if not better. I just kept driving, but thought about her a lot for the next few days. I was in the Laundromat that weekend and saw a poster on the bulletin board. ‘Do you use drugs,’ it said. ‘If you do, that’s your business. But if you want to stop and can’t, maybe we can help.’ It had a phone number on the bottom. It had a symbol on it, but nothing that said who it was or anything. I kept thinking about it. I decided later that I would just see how long I could go without smoking on my own.”

I’d done that a few times, myself. I obviously hadn’t quit, but that was always a good way to cut down when I felt like I was smoking too much. I asked him how well it worked for him.

“Horribly. That first night, I only played video games for like half an hour before I couldn’t even pay attention to what I was doing. I just wanted to smoke. It was all I could think of. I think I actually made it forty-five minutes before breaking down.”

“That’s pretty bad,” I said. I can usually go a week or two before I break down.

“Yeah, I thought maybe I’d give it a few more tries. I did the same thing every night, holding out as long as possible. I made it an hour and a half on the second night, two on the third, and three on the fourth. When I got home from work on the fifth day, I started right back in again. Smoked from the time I got home until I went to bed. It stayed like that for the next two weeks, and I’d almost forgotten that I even tried to quit. I had to do laundry again and Mom still hadn’t gotten the machines fixed. I saw the sign again and it really freaked me out that I hardly remembered trying to quit at all. I couldn’t think of how long ago it had been. I wrote the number down before leaving and went home and got high.”

“Sounds like you did have a bit of a problem, huh?” I was figuring that he just didn’t have much will power.

“That’s for sure. I sat there playing my games all night without even thinking of the phone number. When I got ready for bed, I took all the shit outta my pockets and found the number again. I looked at it for a bit, thinking that if I didn’t call then, I probably never would. I looked at my alarm clock. It was three-thirty. The number was an eight-hundred number, though. Might as well give it a shot. You want another cigarette?”

“Sure, man.” We lit our cigarettes and didn’t do much talking as we drove through the city. We were going through Des Moines, a little more than halfway through the trip, and the city lights lit the dark cab off-and-o
n like a strobe light. We got through the city and finished our cigarettes. I asked him about the phone number he called.

“Well, it was one of those twelve-step programs. They had an answering service to answer questions about the program and put drug addicts in touch with other drug addicts who’d quit using. They told me when I could go to one of their meetings. I had to wait around for my next evening off, and I made a note and left it on my coffee table.”

Nothing’s better than potheads leaving notes for themselves. True comedy.

“I kept smoking on the nights until that meeting, but I ended up remembering the meeting and went to check it out. They all seemed to have their shit together, and a lot of them were saying that the only reason they were able to do anything with their lives was because they got clean and ‘worked a program.’ After the meeting, I went up to one of the guys who seemed to know what was going on. I asked him how I was supposed to ‘work the program.’ He told me that I should get a sponsor. I asked him if that meant that I should have companies pay me to stay clean. I knew that wasn’t what he meant, I was just trying to be funny. He laughed and said he could sponsor me for a while, if I wanted. I said sure and asked him what that meant. He said we should get together sometime to talk about recovery. I told him that I usually only had two days off each week, and he told me I should meet him at the noon meeting the next day, that we could go out for coffee afterwards. Noon seemed awfully early to be doing anything, but I knew I wasn’t going to kick this habit myself. I said I’d do it. I went home and went straight to bed.”

“No smoking?”

“No smoking. I met him the next day, and kept going to that noon meeting every day. He told me I should go to ninety meetings in ninety days. It sounded bad at first, but I realized quickly that I would have to be doing something to keep my mind off smoking pot.”

“Wow. So how long you been clean?”

“About three days.”

“But that was like a year ago, right?”

“Yeah. I did good for like six months. That’s when Mom died. It was so out of the blue. And she was all the family I had. Some of the people from the meetings were kinda cool, and my sponsor was always willing to bend over backwards to help me out, but I didn’t tell him that she died. I didn’t want sympathy or anything like that. I went to her funeral by myself and went and got a bag when it was over. My old dealer was happy to see me again!”

I bet he was, too. This kid was gonna be back to smoking an eighth every night and playing video games until all hours of the morning. I don’t know how these kids do it. I played some space invaders years ago, and I couldn’t stand the shit.

“And that’s what I’ve been doing the last six months. My sponsor left me a handful of messages that first week, but he must’ve gotten the hint after that.”

“So you do smoke or you don’t?” I was curious; he’d declined my joint. Why wouldn’t he want to smoke it if he wasn’t in the program anymore? I opened my pack of crackers and held them out to him.

“No, thanks. Here’s the thing: I changed jobs when I got clean that first time, and I was having a lot of problems being a librarian after I started smoking again. For the last week or two, I’ve really been considering trying to quit again or going to see if the video store has any open positions. I figured going back to the video store would be easier. I was going to tell my boss at the library the other day, but then I got a letter. It was addressed to my mom. It was a regular old first-class mail, not an ad or anything, so I went ahead and opened it up. It was from some girl who said that she’d been given up for adoption years ago. I’d heard Mom and Grandma talking about something like that twelve or thirteen years ago. The dates matched up for when Mom lived in Indiana, sometime after she got out of high school, she’d told me about it when we were driving out to Cleveland a long time ago. She asked if I knew that she’d lived in Gary, and when I told her I didn’t, she just said, ‘Well, I did, a long time ago.’ She seemed really sad and quiet for the next few hours. The evidence really seems to add up, so I think I have some family left, after all.” His voice cracked on those last few words.

“Can I get another one of those cigarettes,” I asked. We smoked in silence. Council Bluffs was only another forty-five minutes or so. “So she’s in Council Bluffs?”

“Yep. Letter said she’d been living there all her life. She’s married and has two sons. After I read the letter the other day, I called my sponsor up. We got together and I told him about how Mom had died and that I’d been back to the pipe. He said that he figured I was back on the pipe, but had no idea that my mother had died. I told him about how I felt, having no family. I just couldn’t deal with both having no family and being such a worthless person. He said that after being in the program for ten years, he considered the people in the program more his family than his regular family. ‘There’s a part of me that my family just won’t ever get. It’s something that only people in the program will ever understand. It’s this disease.’ I know what he means. That’s why I decided to give this getting clean thing another chance. I have blood family, again, and if I get back into the program, I’ll make a new family for myself there.”

“So what do you mean by disease?” I had kinda heard this terminology before, but I’d never wanted to look like a dumb-ass asking about it. Who better to ask than somebody who has it? I put my turn signal on and got into the left lane, passing some little Honda that seemed to be having a hard time keeping up.

“Well, I guess what I mean by disease is that I can’t control my use of any mind- or mood-altering substance. Sure, pot was my particular flavor, but I know that when I was in high school, partying with the guys and that sort of thing, I always just did as much as I could of whatever we had. When I was clean before, I started to realize that my disease wasn’t just about using drugs. They say ignorance is bliss, right? Well, that was what I wanted. I wanted bliss. I couldn’t just un-think and un-feel all of the thoughts and feelings I had, so ignorance wasn’t really an option anymore. The first time I got high, I became oblivious to shit. Being oblivious is the next best thing to being ignorant. When I was high, I didn’t have to think about the fact that my dad deserted us when I was five. I didn’t have to think about how terrified I was of women. I didn’t have to think about how Katie had proved that I would never have a successful relationship. I didn’t have to think about Mom being dead and me being all alone. I just sat for hours in front of the TV screen, playing RPGs and ripping bongs.”

What’s the difference? I had to wonder, clean or using drugs, you still got all of the same problems. Using drugs might not make those problems go away, but getting clean doesn’t, either.

“The biggest thing that changes is my attitude. They say that the core of the disease is self-centeredness. I was always so worried about myself that I couldn’t handle my thoughts and feelings. Everything was always about what was going my way and what wasn’t going my way. In recovery, my goal is to just see how things are going, and go with them. That way I don’t get so worried about me and how I’m going to get what I want or need.”

“I guess that makes good sense,” I said. “But if you know that, then why not go ahead and smoke? Your attitude was your problem, right? Couldn’t you just keep on smoking weed and try to keep a better attitude—you know, smoke weed every now and then, but try to make a life for yourself in the meantime?”

“That’s just
the thing. I don’t know if I’ve always had this disease, or if it was something that came on over a period of time, but I can’t make it go away. I know that any time that I use, weed or anything else, I can’t predict how I’m going to act. Maybe it’d go well for a while; I could smoke two or three times a week and be responsible and productive the rest of the time. But eventually I’d get tired of dealing with real life and just want to go back to smoking non-stop. I already know that drugs will give me that oblivion…” He trailed off for a moment. “Oblivion. That’s what it is. I want to be oblivious to things, and I end up numbing myself to oblivion.” He looked over at me and smiled. “I want to have a life. And I know I can’t handle it if I smoke.”

“I’m glad for you, man. I hope you can keep on with it.”

“Long as I stick with the meetings, I think I got a shot.”

We rode along quietly for a while longer. Only about fifteen minutes to Council Bluffs. I got this habit of speeding up when I get closer to the destination, so I picked it up a little bit and got in the left lane to pass a couple of the trucks I was rolling with.

“So your sister knows you’re coming?”

“No. This trip was really an impulsive thing. After I talked to my sponsor, I decided to do this. Just seems like it will make a nice way to get my new beginning rolling. I didn’t want to tell her over the phone that her mom, our mom, is dead. I’ve never even met her. I could’ve planned this out a little more, taken the time to make sure I had a ride and all of that, but I just want to get things moving.”

“What are you going to do when you get to town?”

“I figure I’ll get a room in a motel and stay the night. Tomorrow I’ll give her a call and see if she’d like to get together. I have enough money for a cheap room, a decent meal for two, and a bus ride home. After that, I’ll go home and get back into this recovery thing.”

I told him it sounded like a good plan. I liked this kid. I hoped he could take care of himself.

It was eleven-thirty or so when I took the exit to 24th Street. I knew a hotel in Council Bluffs with a restaurant built-in. I told him I’d drop him off there so he could get himself a good breakfast before taking off. We didn’t say anything else as I made my way to the hotel.

“Hey, I appreciate the ride, man. And thanks for listening. I feel like I talked your ear off.”

“No worries, pal. Anything to break the monotony of being on the road alone all the time. Tell you what, man. Take this money,” I said, pulling a fifty-dollar bill out of my pocket. “Make sure you take your sister someplace nice, and maybe try to get out and buy her something nice.” He looked at me and down at the bill I held out to him and started to shake his head. “Take it, I’m serious,” I told him. He looked ahead. I forced it into his hand.

“Are you sure, man?” he asked.

“You got it,” I said. “Now go on, get yourself some sleep.” He thanked me and I told him to get going. He walked up to the motel, turning to wave good-bye as he opened the door to the office. I gave the air-horn a little pull and got back on the road. I shook my head and made a little wish for him that things would go well with his sister. Then I pulled out my joint.

Oblivion. I like it.

I take the back-roads when it’s possible, taking part in the scenery. I must’ve picked the perfect time of summer for my trip, because the weather was beautiful. The sky was bright blue with sparse fluffy white clouds and the plains and woods were thick and green. The wind was nice against my face, not too cool, and the sun warmed me, but not too hot. I enjoyed the ride, feeling all the while like a part of the world around me. I popped onto the interstate in Colorado somewhere after about five days of aimless riding, wanting to speed the trip up a bit so I could go through Taos. I’d been through a number of times in the first years that I was riding bikes, so I didn’t want to miss out on it this time. Maybe I was just feeling nostalgic.

I got on the interstate near a city, and apparently there was some kind of accident or construction slowing things down. Traffic was merging from the left lane to the right, but there was a whole lot more traffic than there was road. I was on a westbound road and looking for the southbound connection, so I’d already been in the right lane for a while. As I got closer to the bottleneck, I ran into more and more people who weren’t looking out for me, trying to roll into my lane because they didn’t see me. Nothing pisses me off like people in cars who aren’t looking out for motorcyclists. The sun beat down a little harder when the wind wasn’t blowing through my hair, and I must’ve avoided half dozen collisions in the space of a half mile. I was getting close to my exit, so hope was in sight. Then I saw that the left lane ended just where the exit began. People were still squeezing in, showing no regard for those of us who were already in the right lane. When I came within ten or fifteen yards of the exit, I could see that a jeep on my left side was going to try to edge into my lane. They pulled ahead of me by a bumper and then I pulled ahead of them by a fender, and we took turns being ahead until right when we got to the bottleneck. The last of the cars ahead of the jeep merged into my lane ahead of me. It was down to the two of us and I was clearly ahead of their front bumper by a full front tire. I looked over at the driver for the first time; he was looking back at me. His girlfriend looked at me, then at him. She rolled her eyes at him and folded her arms over her chest. He accelerated, edging into my lane. I pulled forward to keep him from getting in front, but he wasn’t stopping. He tried to get around and I continued rolling forward, and soon his bumper was within a foot of my bike. I stopped and looked over at him. He looked pissed off and threw his hands up as if to say that I should have let him in. He started to creep forward, getting even closer, so I reached into my vest for the gun I keep in a shoulder holster. As soon as he saw me reaching for it, his eyes got really big. He cranked the steering wheel to the left and hit the gas, driving over road cones into the closed lane. I could hear his passenger screaming as they headed down the closed lane of the highway, probably looking for a spot where they might be able to try again to merge. I edged forward in my lane until I was clear to exit to the right.

Aside from that little moment of excitement, the trip to Taos was pretty relaxing. The heat got worse as I continued south from Colorado and became unbearable in the last stretch before Taos. I stopped under an overpass at one point and sat in the shade, no breeze to cool me off, and drank some water. I took off my shirt and put it into my saddlebag, content to drive down the highway with only my vest on. When I rolled into Taos, I stopped at the first little bar I passed. I had quit drinking years before, but I am usually more apt to run into my types of people in little bars like that. Even if there weren’t any people to talk shit with, I could get a burger and a coke and enjoy the air conditioning. There was only a car and a bike in front of the place, and I looked forward to some peaceful relaxation, not always possible at seven o’clock in a bar.

The cool air hit me like a city bus when I opened the door. The sweat on my face and arms felt like it froze on contact. I went in and found myself a comfortable seat, tossing my vest on the booth before pulling on my t-shirt. I walked up to the bar and ordered my coke and asked for an ashtray. I glanced over at the three people sitting at a table on the other side of the bar, a man and a woman sitting close to each other with their back to me and a woman opposite them who smiled at me when I looked over. Right after smiling at me, she looked down at her drink, which she was stirring slowly with a straw. I recognized that quick smile; I’d seen it hundreds of times before. When I’d been a drinker, those looks were sure signs that I’d be going home with someone that night, or fighting someone’s boyfriend or husband, anyway. I didn’t seen that look nearly as often when I stopped drinking, and it felt good to see it again. Some of my tension and frustration from the heat and the highway wore off, my shoulders loosened up and I walked back to my seat with a newspaper I’d found on the bar. I sat and smoked my pipe, reading through the paper to see what was going on in the world. Every once in a while I’d look up when I went for a drink of my coke and meet eyes with the girl on the other side of the room. She smiled every time. I did my best to smile back without giving her the “I’m gonna take you home” look. After half an hour or so, I walked back up to the counter and asked what kind of food they offered. The bartender let me look at a menu and I picked out a sandwich. I went back to my seat to wait for the food.

As the bartender was getting my plate together, the woman from across the room walked up to the bar. She spoke briefly with the bartender, turning to look in my direction after a few words. The bartender looked at me too, and then nodded to her before she walked back over to her seat. He brought me my sandwich and asked me if I wanted something to drink, “on the lady.” I told him that I was okay with the coke and looked over at her, holding up my drink and nodding as the bartender walked away. She smiled. When I’d finished my sandwich, she walked over to my table.

“Hey there,” she said. “You didn’t want a drink?”

“No, but thank you,” I said, “I just don’t drink anymore, is all. I appreciate the gesture.”

“You seem like you’re a long way from home. You need somewhere to stay tonight?”

“Well…I appreciate that offer, too,” I said, showing her the backside of my left hand, wiggling my ring finger, “but I’m married.”

“If you change your mind, h
andsome, this is where you can find me.” She placed a napkin on the table before walking away. “Have a good night, either way.”

She and her friends left the bar, but business had started to pick up while I was eating, so there were a few handfuls of people for me to sit and watch as I smoked another pipe. I looked at the address written on the napkin a few times, contemplating the whole thing. As it was right now, I’d have to go find a spot somewhere and set up the tent. I usually didn’t have a problem finding places to set up where I wouldn’t be bothered, it was just a little one-man pup tent that fit into my saddlebag when it was all wrapped up. I stayed in the bar for the rest of the night, sipping coke and occasionally talking with people about the weather and my trip and bikes. When the bar closed at one in the morning, I walked out the front door and thought about what I’d do with myself. I decided to at least go see what the woman’s house looked like.

I pulled up in front of the house, which hadn’t been too hard to find, and looked it over. It was a small ranch-style home and the porch light seemed to be the only light in the place that was on. I sat on my bike for a few minutes, thinking about my wife and our marriage. I couldn’t ask for a better wife. I thought about the little tent and sleeping alone, and I thought about the woman who’d been so bold as to invite me to stay in her house. I got off my bike and walked up to the door.

After a few sharp knocks at the door, I heard stirring inside. She pulled open the main door slowly, peeking out at me with sleepy eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” she said. “I told you to come if you changed your mind.” She closed the door and undid the security chain. She opened it again and opened the screen door. “Come on in,” she said, “the bedroom’s this way.”

“Uh, before we go there,” I said, “I want to let you know, I don’t want to take advantage of this situation.”

She gave me a funny look and then motioned to the seats in the living room. I took a seat as she wandered off. I thought she might be telling me to sleep on the couch, but soon she came out with a can of coke and a glass of water.

“You’re probably one of the strangest guys I’ve ever met,” she said, taking a seat next to me as she handed me the coke. “You want to just talk?”

“Sure,” I said, not sure where to begin. She started, though, telling me that she didn’t usually ask random guys to come stay the night at her house. She explained that she’d been divorced for about three months and knew most of the guys that lived in the area, especially the ones who went to that bar. She didn’t want to have anything to do with any of them. The loneliness of the divorce really began to set in during the last week or so, and when she saw me walk into the bar, she knew that it might be her only chance for an indefinite amount of time to meet a new guy. I talked to her about my marriage and what my life had been like before, when I was still drinking. I told her that she might’ve had me for a lover if she’d met me three or four years before. She laughed and said it was nice just having some good conversation. We talked about other things, sitting up together for at least an hour or two before it was obvious that both of us were growing tired.

“You can still sleep with me,” she said after I yawned in the middle of something I was saying, my yawn causing me to forget what I was talking about. “I think you’re about ready to get some sleep, and I am too.” I looked at her, amazed that I was at the same time more and less inclined to sleep with her then than I had been when I first arrived. I’d gotten to know her and cared about her feelings, so I didn’t want to sleep with her, but I’d also grown to like her and felt reassured that she wasn’t crazy or clingy, and felt more attraction because of that.

“I don’t know…” I said.

“I don’t mean have sex, either,” she said. “Lay in my bed; hold me; sleep. That’s it. Even if I wasn’t too tired for sex, your wife sounds too cool. I would kick your ass for her if you cheated on her,” she said, laughing. I smiled and she led me to the bedroom. We got into bed, she in pajamas and me with nothing but jeans. It felt good to hold her, new and exciting, and I could imagine how easy it would be to start having sex. It’s so natural; it was a conscious effort to keep myself from going there. I did, though, and soon I found myself dripping into a soft, relaxing sleep.

In the morning, I woke to the smell of bacon and pancakes. Soon the woman, I’d rather not say her name just to be safe, came into the bedroom.

“Rise and shine,” she said in a harmonious voice. “I’ve made some breakfast for you!” I smiled at her and sat up in bed. She went back out to the dining room, where I joined her after splashing some water on my face in the bathroom. We ate a nice breakfast and drank some coffee. I smoked a pipe and we talked a bit more. Soon it would be ten in the morning, and I wanted to get on the road before it started to get too hot outside.

“Meeting you has been interesting,” I told her as we walked to the front door together. “I’m really glad that we didn’t do anything stupid.”

“Me too,” she smiled. “I think that I liked sleeping with you more than anyone else I’ve ever slept with!” We laughed for a moment, but soon fell silent, smiling as we looked into each other’s eyes. She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “Drive safely,” she said, letting the screen door close in between us. I stood and looked at her for a minute before turning to walk out to my bike. I climbed on and started it, looking back up at the door one last time. The main door was closed; she was nowhere to be seen. I rode off, eager to make it back to my beautiful wife.

The secretary who answered was really quiet when I asked to speak to him. After a moment, she said, “I’m sorry; you won’t be able to speak to him. Last night he had a heart attack; he’s…he didn’t make it.” I was stunned and couldn’t think of anything to say. “Can I ask what your call is regarding?”

“Uh…I was calling about the business account management position. I interviewed with him the other day…”

She asked my name, and when I told her, she explained to me that he’d already made it clear to the board in a meeting yesterday that I was the only one suitable for the position. She told me that she would call me in a few days to let me know who I would need to meet with.

“I’m Sarah, by the way,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll be meeting you soon,” she said with a saddened smile in her voice before hanging up the phone. She sounded pretty.
And she was. I met her the following week, when I went into the bank to begin my training. She looked up at me and smiled as I approached the desk.

“I’m here to begin my training,” I stuttered, barely able to look at her beautiful face. She giggled, holding out her right hand over the desk.

“I talked to you on the phone last week. It’s nice to meet you in person,” she said.

“Absolutely,” I replied, casually glancing at the bare ring finger on her left hand.
She directed me to the office of my direct superior and I went along and got to work. I spent the next few weeks getting familiar with the bank’s specific procedures. It wasn’t too difficult to pick up, and most of the people I worked with seemed like really nice folks. I worked up the nerve to ask Sarah if she’d join me for lunch at the end of the week, and she blushed as she answered, “of course!”

Over the next year, I cruised through the work at the bank and dated Sarah frequently. We moved in together after six months, because her lease was ending and her roommate was leaving town. I had grown tired of my small apartment and was interested in settling down in a house of my own. We looked at houses together and I bought one that I liked a lot, and she liked it, too. We agreed that it would be best if she continued to pay something as rent, trying to be clear with each other that, if the relationship didn’t last, the house was not something that we’d done together, it was something I had done for myself, and she had been around for it. None of that really mattered anyway, because in three months time I was ready to propose marriage. I woke up early one spring morning and was overjoyed at how comfortable I was in bed next to her, with cool fresh air carrying the songs of birds into the house from our wonderful yard. I went downstairs and made breakfast. After we’d eaten, I told her that I was perfectly happy with my life and couldn’t imagine not sharing the rest of it with her. She smiled and I got down on one knee, asking, “Sarah, would you marry me?”

We called off work that day and made love on into the afternoon before having lunch with all of our parents. Her parents lived in town, and by a stroke of luck, my parents had come down to this part of the state to do some shopping, so they weren’t more than a half-hour away when I called to tell them the news. Rather than tell them over the phone, I begged and pleaded that they drive to town and meet us for lunch. We sat down and had a beautiful lunch and talked, joked, and laughed with each other. When everyone was silent for a moment, I took Sarah’s hand and said to the group: “listen, everyone, Sarah and I have something that we wanted to tell you.” Our mothers simultaneously took our fathers’ hands and held their breath. “We’re going to get married.” They began crying and laughing, and our fathers beamed with pride. We married and took an extravagant honeymoon in the Caribbean. After a year, we decided to have children.

Meanwhile, things were going very well at work. I was the manager of my specific department and had taken on a position much like the one the man who’d hired me held at his time of death. I routinely had to fill employment gaps by perusing resumes and conducting interviews, and I was surprised one day to meet a man who said he’d been in the same fraternity as me. I remembered the man who’d hired me, all of a sudden. I had hardly thought about him since those first few weeks of work. I recounted the story to the man I was interviewing, and he responded by asking: “So you think you’re gonna hire me, then?” I told him that I would get back to him.

I had some difficulty making a decision about who I would hire for probably the first time since I’d ever been in a position to hire anyone. Fraternity issue aside, I probably wouldn’t have considered the young man. His resume wasn’t that much less impressive than the other person I was considering, but I wasn’t terribly impressed with his personality in the interview. The other man had been a little more charming and graceful, but not so much so that he was a shoo-in. After deliberating for an entire week, I decided that I could not hesitate any longer, and I hired the frat-boy. I decided that perhaps his demeanor in the interview might’ve been a fluke, and hiring him would be a nice way to thank the man who hired me.

When I went to call the frat-boy, I couldn’t find his number, or any of his other paperwork. I searched my office, going through all of my papers two or three times, and finally I asked my secretary if she had any of the information. She gave me a confused look when I told her the name of the man. I tried to jog her memory by describing him, and I was growing a bit frustrated. Finally, I asked her if she had any contact information for the other man I’d interviewed. She didn’t seem to recognize his name, either.

“The two men who came in last Thursday for interviews. You don’t remember them?” I asked, nearly irate.

“You haven’t interviewed anyone in a month, sir, I’m sure of it!”

I stormed back into my office and sat down at my desk. What could be going on? I got an idea: I called the frat house. Surely they would have records of
his membership. When I dialed the number that I’d dialed so many times in college, I was met with a message from the phone company, saying that the number I was trying to reach was no longer in service. I dialed the University switchboard and asked them to direct me.

“That fraternity has never been on this campus, sir,” the operator calmly told me. “I have records of the Greek-system phone numbers going back to the University’s foundation. Not only have none of the frat house’s phone numbers ever changed, but the frat you’re asking about has never had a number.” Flustered, I got on the internet to look for the number myself.

No search engine provided any results for my searches. I couldn’t find evidence of any chapters of the fraternity, let alone the local chapter. I decided to look up my old frat brothers instead. I started with my closest friends, and finding no information, I began going by each room of the frat house, trying to remember the names of all the guys I’d lived with. No one. Nothing. I stormed out of work early and drove to the university campus.

I arrived at the spot where our house sat, a ray of hope shining down as I saw that it still stood in place. I’d thought I’d been going crazy! As I pulled closer on the street, though, looking for a parking place, I realized that it wasn’t exactly as I had remembered it. Where our Greek letters had once proudly been displayed on the lawn, a different sign announced to the world: “xxxx Hall: University Housing.” A fucking dorm!

I drove home and climbed into bed, looking for some relief. When Sarah came home and came into the bedroom, she quietly called out my name.

“Are you okay?”

I told her I wasn’t feeling so well. I asked her if she remembered my frat.

“Right…your frat,” she said, rolling her eyes impatiently. It was clear. I tried to remember the face of a single one of my frat brothers who’d come to the wedding and couldn’t. I apologized to my wife and told her my stomach had been bothering me.

To this day, I’ve never spoken of my fraternity to anyone else. It’s been thirty years since I’ve breathed a word of it, though I can remember all of my college years vividly, except of course, for those occasional drunken blackouts. I’ve never been able to find any evidence to support these memories. Whenever I start to think about it now, I instead ask myself what couples in New York fight about. It just gives me an opportunity to let my imagination go, you know?

I excelled at the meditation and developed a close relationship with the group leader, Master Song. He and I sometimes met during the week to talk over tea. At his suggestion, we began to meditate together in the evenings at his studio. In the process of meditation, I began to reach increasingly higher planes of consciousness, reaching levels of awareness that transcended the known Universe. I try to explain to people that this awareness is not a conscious thing, that I don’t “know” everything about the Universe; I simply have an intuitive connection to levels of existence that are greater than the universe in which we live. Master Song understood this, as he was able to reach similar levels of awareness.

After a year of intensive meditation with him, I found that I was consistently becoming a bird in my meditation. Almost immediately upon sitting in the lotus and beginning my mantra, the whole of the Universe would become my body, and I would soar across a sky of astral energy. The far reaches of the cosmos were my great white wings and our own galaxy was the heart that sustained my life energy. I decided that I should tell Master Song of my visions.

“I’ve never told you about the prophecy of the White Heron,” he said. “I had my suspicions when I first met you, and in our time together I’ve come to believe it more every day. This vision you’ve had proves it once and for all.”

He explained to me that just as the mother of the enlightened one had envisioned a white elephant descending into her womb, recent Lamas had begun to envision a white heron that would swoop low and take humanity, which would become an olive branch, into its mouth, carrying it into the peace of timelessness. This fit incredibly well with my insatiable taste for olives ever since I was a child.

“What must I do, Master,” I asked. It was then that he told me about the Golden Cucumber.

“When humanity was banished to life and suffering, it was decided that the banishment should be temporary. Birth and Death were necessary for the Great Spirit to know Joy and Suffering, and because the Universe has existed, Joy and Suffering now are a part of the Great Spirit. In the beginning, a Golden Cucumber was given to existence as the key to end Birth and Death. Only when the heights and depths of life and existence have been reached will an incarnation of peace be able to reach this Golden Cucumber. It is believed that the White Heron might be this incarnation. You must go to Tibet and make the journey to the mountain where the Golden Cucumber is believed to be hidden.”

I agreed to the task and set out a week later for a monastery in Tibet where I was expected. Everyone treated me very well, but no one told me what to do. I spent a week in the monastery meditating with Master Tanz. After a grueling thirty-six hours meditating together in the beautiful main temple, Master Tanz addressed me.

“Now is the time,” he said. “Your spirit has absorbed all that it can here, and now you must make your journey. No one may accompany you, as the Golden Cucumber will obliterate all of those who are not worthy to be in its presence.” Convenient that Master Song left that out before. “The path on the east side of the village will take you as far as anyone has been. Beyond that, you must meditate for guidance.”

The following morning, I set out on my journey. I took nothing with me. I followed the path for three days until I reached a dead-end. I was famished and thirsty, so I made for myself a meal of snow and various roots that I could pull from the hard ground. I fasted for twelve hours before beginning my meditation.

In meditation, I saw clearly the path that I would take to a great gate in the side of the mountain. The gate would open into a vault where I’d find the Golden Cucumber. Upon returning to consciousness, the path remained visible where there’d only been forest and brush before. I continued my journey.

After another five days’ hiking, I reached the spot I’d seen in my vision. At the end of the path, there was a small clearing by a large rocky wall on the side of the mountain. In my vision, this wall was where the gates had been. Again I broke my fast with roots and snow, wondering how I should proceed. I began my meditation twelve hours later. In my meditation, I saw the rock wall change shape until it became the gates of my previous vision. They were much larger than I’d expected, at least a half-mile high and a quarter-mile across. How do you open doors like that? I meditated on the intricately ornate shapes and figures on the doors. After three days of meditation, the symbols began to light in a seemingly random sequence. When all of the symbols had been illuminated, the great gates began to rumble. They slowly opened into the mountain, revealing a vast cave. I returned to consciousness to find that the mountain now resembled the open gates of my vision.

Within the cave, I found hordes of great treasure and riches. What use would the creators of the Universe have for all of this junk? I made my way through the cave until I was at least two miles below the Earth’s surface, deep within the mountain. There, propped against the wall of the cave in between two great golden tomatoes, was the Golden Cucumber. I sat to meditate and find the guidance that I needed in order to fulfill my purpose. Now that I’d arrived, what was I supposed to do with the cucumber? And what would happen when I did that? The Universe would cease to exist, all matter and energy returning to its true form—spirit? I hadn’t given my task a great deal of thought up to this point, as I had believed that I should simply follow the path set out before me, but now that I had nearly reached the end of that path, I wondered about the truth of the prophesy. It obviously hadn’t been completely false; the cucumber did, in fact, exist, and it didn’t seem like anyone had made it this far before. But I was troubled by the fact that I hardly felt as though I had completed my spiritual progress in this life; surely the countless other spirits in the Universe had further progress to make, as well. I let these questions float through my consciousness as I fell away from it, hoping that I might gain some clarity in this communion with the Spirit.

Once again, my body fell away from me as I began to transcend my own life. Something was different this time. Typically, through meditation, my sense of a distinct individual consciousness gives way to the universal consciousness, and I lose touch with the illusion of Self. Of course, it hadn’t always been like that—letting go of Self comes only after much practice and experience with heightened awareness. I wondered if the doubt that I experienced as I began to meditate had affected my willingness to let go, but unlike my early experiences with meditation, I was aware both of Self and of Universe; I was conscious both of my existence in space and time and of the timeless formless truth of spirit beyond the material Universe. I had never imagined that it was possible to experience Spirit and Self simultaneously. I recognized what I had seen before, the Universe from the perspective of Spirit, but had never been able to understand with human consciousness. No matter how I’d transcended space and time before, my knowledge of truth had always been limited to a sort of spiritual knowing that I could never comprehend mentally. Now
I could see clearly, and mentally grasp, the truth of the Golden Cucumber and my role in this lifetime. I slipped out of the Spirit and returned to space and time, and I eagerly began my return trip to the monastery, cucumber in hand.

Many were surprised to learn of my reappearance, especially because I had the cucumber in my possession. If I was not the White Heron, why hadn’t the cucumber destroyed me? And if the prophesy was false, then what had become of all of the others who went in search of the cucumber? Or why would the cucumber exist at all, if the prophesy had been a lie? Many renounced me as a fraud, insisting that the cucumber I brought back was a fake and that the real one either never existed or I wasn’t the White Heron and therefore couldn’t find it. I gently explained that my role as White Heron is not as the one who will liberate spirit from time and space, but as the messenger to all conscious beings that the Universe must follow its proper course according to the laws that created it. Matter and energy arose from spirit long before it gave birth to consciousness, and long after conscious beings have ceased to exist, matter and energy will return to Spirit. I now travel the world and carry this message to all who will listen, that consciousness is the gift by which we experience joy and suffering, and the spiritual journey of each individual consciousness, along with the material journey of every particle, is necessary for the Universe to reconcile itself with Spirit. Move forward, I preach, live and enjoy life. Receive the message of hope that the Golden Cucumber represents: we are all Spirit, and when our individual consciousness comes to an end, we will return to pure being, where we will be free to fully appreciate all of the joy and suffering of the Universe, from beginning to end.

It all started when I got my first half-dollar from my barber. It was the first time that I was old enough to go to get my hair cut by myself. Mom gave me seven dollars, but haircuts at Blake’s Barber Shop only cost six fifty at the time. Blake kept plenty of half dollar coins on hand to make change without having to deal with a bunch of quarters. He finished cutting my hair—it was the first time that I was able to choose my own haircut, as well, so I got a spike—and I dug into my pocket for the seven wadded bills Mom had given me. Blake unfolded them slowly and counted them out loud as I watched patiently. He smiled.

“You’re not trying to rip me off,” he said. “I never know if I can trust a kid with spiked hair, you know.” I grinned as he pulled out a stack of folded bills from his pocket and put the seven ones in with it. He reached into his other pocket and produced the half dollar. He held it in front of me between the tip of his index finger and thumb, and I marveled at its beauty. I extended my arm and watched as he carefully placed it in my open palm. I pulled my hand back in close to my face and inspected the intricacies of the rare and valuable treasure. I turned and began to walk out.

“Hey,” Blake yelled. I turned and looked, worried that he might try to change his mind about trusting me with the piece of metal that I still clutched tightly in my sweaty palm. “You almost forgot your gum,” he said, lobbing the Dubble Bubble in a great arc across the room. I snatched it with my free hand and yelled thanks as I walked out the door. I made my way quickly and eagerly down the street to the post office. Hewerdine’s Coin and Jewelry was upstairs at the post office, right next to Geerken’s Card Shop. I’d come to the card shop with my older brother once, and while he examined baseball and basketball cards, I wandered through Hewerdine’s, inspecting the pocket watches and rare coins through thick glass of the display cases. Mr. Hewerdine recognized me from Sunday Mass and humored me as I asked questions until my brother had finished his business in the card shop. I couldn’t think of a better person to show my new treasure than Mr. Hewerdine.

“Well that’s a half-dollar,” he said, inspecting the coin I’d handed him after waiting patiently for him to finish talking with some man about a watchband. “I’d say it’s worth about fifty cents.” My heart dropped. That’s all? I felt cheated. He hadn’t even consulted any of big coin books. How could he be so sure? I thanked him and walked home slowly, imagining ways that I could expand my coin collection. Can you call it a collection if you only have one?

A couple of years passed and I managed to build a small collection of my own. Mom and Dad were supportive of my new hobby and bought me books and coins for birthdays, Christmas, and whenever I could convince them that it’d been too long since the last gift. After those three years, my collection was probably worth a little over fifty dollars, if that; and the books I had on coin collecting were probably worth over forty.

In the course of those years, I’d begun hanging out with my next-door neighbor, Matt. We were in the same grade and recognized each other during recess one day, so I began going to his house to play Nintendo. Sometimes we’d look through his brother’s dirty magazines, each of us saying “Ewwww” and “Gross!” as we slowly turned the pages. Matt told me one day that his brother snuck out of the house at night sometimes.

“We should try it sometime!” he said. “We could see what it’s like when everyone’s sleeping.” I had to admit, it did sound intriguing. I remained resistant for a few weeks before finally caving in and agreeing to meet him at a certain time of the night.

I waited in bed and watched the numbers change slowly on the digital alarm clock. One o’clock finally came and I crept out of bed. Just as Matt had suggested, I dressed in black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt before sneaking down the back stairs. Matt was already waiting for me when I walked out the gate in the chain-link fence in the back yard.

“Follow me,” he said, as though he had some plan of where we should be going. We wandered down the alley, staying in the far edges of people’s yards, occasionally hiding behind trees or fences if we thought we heard something. I would’ve believed that he knew where we were going, but we actually circled one or two blocks a couple of times. Navigating a small Illinois town can be difficult at one in the morning, particularly when you’re ten years old and traveling only through back yards. We passed by the mansion. Paxton had one mansion, but it was split into two levels. The retired priest, Father Mahoney, lived upstairs and the Baier family lived downstairs. They weren’t Catholic, which didn’t seem right to me at the time. I assumed that they were renting from Father Mahoney. They didn’t need to rent; they owned the funeral home and the ambulance service and a furniture store. As we passed their back yard, I noticed that the gate was open. I said something to Matt, but he shushed me and continued down the alley to some unknown destination. As I followed ten or twelve paces behind him, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Baier house. Just about any time that I’d gone and visited Mr. Hewerdine, he would drop a reference to some rare coin or other that Mr. Baier had. He must have a huge collection, I thought. And here I could get into his yard if I wanted to. Matt eventually led us back home. I watched as he walked through his yard and slowly opened his back door. As soon as he was in, I waved good-night and watched him close the door. I turned around and bolted back toward the Baier home.

I entered their back yard through the open gate and walked up to the house. I peeked through the basement windows and tried to see what sort of setup they had. It was too dark inside, so I wandered up onto their deck. The pool was covered and I looked at the wine cooler bottles that sat by lawn chairs. They must’ve had people over to visit that night. I went to peek through the sliding glass door. The living room was huge! They ran a furniture store, so of course they only had the nicest couches and chairs. They didn’t sell home entertainment at the furniture store, but they still had a huge TV and speakers everywhere. What a place. What if…I put my hand on the handle of the sliding glass door and pulled ever so gently. It opened! I couldn’t believe it; my heart was racing. I walked in slowly, leaving the door open in case I had to make a quick escape, and made my way up and down the hallways. I peaked around the corner of any room with an open door, carefully checking to see if anyone was sleeping. I didn’t dare open any doors. I just wanted to see the coin collection, if I could, but I had no idea where someone would keep something like that, and all I found were bookshelves, paintings, and expensive-looking dishes. I found some stairs into the basement and decided to check that out. There was another big-screen TV down there and three or four couches in a semicircle around it. Surely no one was sleeping down here, so I could check behind the closed doors. The first that I ventured to open was a closet door in the corner of the room. It was a large closet, and I walked in to find boxes lining the walls. Built-in shelves lined one of the walls, and on the bottom shelf I saw a box labeled “coins.” Would someone really do this? I lifted the lid from the box and peeked inside. I couldn’t believe it. It was the collection I’d heard so much about. I closed the lid and slid the box slowly off the shelf. It was heavy, but I could lift it. I didn’t stop to think; I began walking, awkwardly lugging this big box out of the closet and up the stairs. I walked out the s
till-open sliding glass door and made my way down the alleys. I’m sure it would’ve been a sight to see, a four-foot tall boy carrying a box three-feet wide down the alley. I set the box down on the ground behind a tree in each yard and sat down to rest for a moment, looking around to make sure the coast was clear before moving on. When I reached my gate, I set the box down again, opened the gate, and picked up the box before walking into the yard. I walked the box over to our little tin shed and set it on the ground again. The door to the shed squeaked as I opened it. I found a spot behind a couple of other boxes and hid my new collection there. I snuck back into my bedroom exhausted and glanced at the alarm clock—4:10 am—before finally going to sleep.

In the following weeks, I kept an eye on the newspaper. There was a blurb a few days later about the Baier’s dog, a purebred sheltie that had gone missing on the night I took the coins, but no mention of the coin collection missing. I hadn’t even seen a dog when I was in their house. I moved the collection into my bedroom closet one afternoon and took it out often to look through all of the coins. There were a lot of really old ones. A bunch of them were gold. I knew it was a good collection, but now that I had it, I couldn’t really do anything with it. And the Baiers didn’t even seem to notice that it was missing. Until a few months later.

An article in the paper mentioned a break-in at the Baier home. The problem was, they didn’t know when it happened. The insurance company had problems with the whole thing because there were no signs of an actual break-in and the only thing missing was the collection. The Baiers would have a difficult time proving that it was actually missing. The newspaper said that the collection was among the most valuable in the world. I couldn’t believe it. And I couldn’t do anything with it. Until a few months later. An ad ran in the paper.

“Have coins? Send us a letter.” A California address was listed. I imagined that it might be a solicitation for this collection. What could it hurt to send a letter? So I wrote a letter, saying that I had a few coins that I might be interested in selling. I received a response a week later. The letter said specifically that he strongly suspected that I might have taken the collection, because I was the only one to respond to the ad. Don’t be worried, it said. That was all. I sent another letter, asking how much he might be willing to pay for my “few” coins. A week later, another letter. Five thousand dollars. What would I do with all of that money? I looked through the coin collection and took out a handful of my favorites. I wrote another letter. How will we exchange? A week later, meet me at the 102, August 21, 4pm. Whoever this was, he’d done his homework. The 102 was a restaurant downtown. I was there that day, with the box. A man walked in, looking around suspiciously. He sat down at a table by himself, placing a manila envelope on the table. It was him. He glanced at me briefly, but mostly was watching the door. I picked up my box and walked over to his table. I placed the box on the table, picked up the envelope, and walked out.

“This is Greg,” Thom said when Mary walked up. He and Aileen had taken Mary in as a traveling companion. She had been infatuated with Thom when they first met, but he was really stuck on Aileen. Mary couldn’t be jealous because she liked Aileen too much, too. Thom introduced Mary to every guy he liked, but she usually thought they were dirtbags. She didn’t imagine this guy would be any different. “Greg is out here from some small town in Indiana,” Thom said. “You guys probably have a lot in common!”

“What’s happenin, Mary? Nice to meet you,” Greg said. He sounded like he might be trying too hard to sound cool, but maybe he was high. He was tall with an athletic build and shoulder-length dark-brown hair and a thick moustache. Mary liked his hypnotic green eyes and the way his high cheek bones made his eyes seem to smile. He was more attractive than most of the guys Thom introduced. It was early, so if Greg turned out to be an asshole, Mary could ditch him and still have a nice night.

“Hey Greg,” she said. “What’s goin on?” Thom had already wandered off to talk with someone else. “Do you have any grass?” Having the Midwest in common wasn’t really much to start with. She needed some kind of icebreaker. If the conversation was lame, at least the grass would make it tolerable.

“Yeah, I got this little number here,” Greg answered. He reached underneath his hair and pulled a joint out from behind his ear. “I was gonna save it for later, but now’s fine, too. Wanna sit down somewhere?”

“Sure,” she answered. Something in the tone of his voice put her at ease. He sounded a little different from other guys, but she couldn’t quite place what it was. She followed him through the house to the crowded front room. People sat in all the available seats and everyone else stood or sat on the floor. Greg pointed to the front door and gave a questioning shrug. Mary nodded. Fresh air would be nice. They were met on the porch by the cool breeze from the bay. Only one person was on the porch, probably because it was a cold night by Northern California standards. For a couple Midwesterners, it was nothing. Mary recognized the other guy on the porch from other parties or shows she’d been to. He sat on the railing at the far end of the porch and played his guitar softly. It sounded like something classical. Mary enjoyed it. She waited for the guy to look so she could nod in approval, but he kept his eyes closed and kept playing. She stopped waiting and took a seat next to Greg at the top of the steps.

“You’re not nervous about cops, are you?” Greg asked. He didn’t seem to be nervous, and it didn’t bother Mary much. She’d smoked joints at concerts and rallies with cops less than twenty feet away. Smoking on the porch steps didn’t bother her at all. She shook her head and Greg lit the joint. She watched as he lit the joint. He was even more attractive than she’d first given him credit for, which was a strike against him. Most of the good-looking guys she’d known were complete assholes. She dated plenty of them through high school and in her year at the community college before she left home. After the last asshole, she and a friend shared an epiphany—a vast majority of the assholes in the world must’ve been good-looking. The only ugly guys who could afford to be assholes were the ones who were pissed about being ugly. If she was patient, Greg was sure to demonstrate that he was an asshole sooner or later.

“No, the cops don’t bother me at all,” Mary said absent-mindedly as he passed the joint. She took a couple of gentle puffs. She didn’t want to seem greedy. It was pretty good weed. It had a rich, velvety sort of taste and tickled Mary’s throat as she exhaled. She focused on not coughing as she passed it back to Greg. She exhaled slowly and watched him take long, slow drags from the joint. His mannerisms, the way he carried himself—he didn’t seem like an asshole. He stared out into the street with a thoughtful, almost pensive look as he sat waiting for her to smoke. When the joint changed hands, he was careful, attentive. He seemed confident without being arrogant. Apparently he wasn’t going to force conversation. Mary’s curiosity one out and she asked a question. “So, what are you into?”

“Peace love and respect, man…isn’t that what everyone’s into?” he answered with an ironic grin. He passed the joint back, his smirk remaining. Mary smiled reservedly, not sure what he meant. If he was trying to be funny, she didn’t get it.

“Well,” she started. She considered trying to rephrase her question, but opted to hit the joint again first.

“Sorry,” he said. “I guess I’ve just been hanging out with these crowds a little too long. Everybody just wants to hang out and get high and listen to music, talking all the time about peace and love and never doing anything.” He looked into her eyes. “You know, wearing the same types of clothes as everybody like some new kind of uniform, and going around with everyone else’s ideas like they’re yours. I mean, not yours, but you know. It’s exactly the kind of thing we should be trying to get away from,” he said. He reached out and took the joint from her outstretched hand.

“Yeah, I see what you’re saying,” she said, feeling vaguely self-conscious. Did he mean to include her in the indictment? She looked at his clothes, which were rather conservative, but still fashionable. He could probably get hired for a straight job wearing what he had on. She didn’t want to get defensive. “I guess I could say that sometimes my ideas are a lot like the ideas other people have, but I feel like I’m working towards something with it, you know? Talking to people, raising awareness and stuff…”

“Yeah, yeah, all of that’s pretty important,” he said. His tone suggested he was talking with her, not at her. “I’ve been hangin these kids in the bay area for a couple of years now, though. I feel like we spend a lot of time trying to understand the problems, and trying to come up with solutions, and trying to raise awareness, and that’s all good. But sometimes it all just seems like a big excuse to party and do nothing but talk,” he said, staring blankly out at the street. He passed the joint back to Mary. “Hell, maybe it’s just me that I’m talking about. Maybe I just feel like I’m the one who’s not doing anything.”

He remained silent while Mary hit the joint and passed it back. It was now barely long enough for him to squeeze between the tips of his fingers as he tried to take another puff. He couldn’t close his lips around the narrowed edges of the paper. The smoke he inhaled came around the outside of the joint instead of through the opening at the end, and the paper burned right up to the skin of his fingertips. They must’ve been calloused already, because he didn’t flinch. He exhaled the little bit of smoke he got and passed the joint to his other hand. He wetted the burnt fingertips underneath his tongue and pressed them to the cherry, which hissed as it went out. He wiped his fingertips on his pant leg and dropped what was left of the joint into his front shirt pocket. He rested his arms on his knees and gazed out into the street for a minute or two. Mary forgot about him as she closed her eyes to enjoy buzz as it sank in. Then Greg looked over at her
and smiled.

“I paint, by the way. I’m into art…that’s what you originally asked about, right?”

“Oh, cool! Do you have stuff?” Mary asked. “I mean, could I check out some of your work sometime?” She was warming up to him. He seemed more sincere than any other guy she’d ever met. “I had a groovy art history class when I was in college.”

“Well, yeah. I could let you see some of my paintings, but I don’t feel like I’ve made a whole lot that means anything to me. The stuff I have here is all important to me, but now I feel like I’ve reached this level of social and political awareness and my work should do something to serve that, you know? If it doesn’t serve some bigger purpose, it’s just masturbation.”

“Yeah, totally…I see what you’re saying,” Mary responded, also staring vacantly into the street.

“Hey, so what do you do?” Greg asked, looking over at her. Their eyes met and she hesitated.

“I think I might want to write someday,” she started. She hated the idea of sounding like every other wannabe artist. “I mean, I feel like I’ve got lots of stories to tell, but I’ve just never been able to get myself to sit down and get them out. But I always feel like if I could get these ideas out on paper, it would really help people to see how messed up things are, you know? And maybe inspire people to do something.”

“For sure, for sure. You should do that,” he said, looking her in the eyes. “You seem like you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You’re an honest person.” She smiled at him and then looked away. A minute or two passed in silence, but she moved down to the step he was sitting on and slid a little closer to him.

“So where do you keep your stuff? Do you have a place?” she asked.

“No, I’ve been crashing with this guy at his folks’ house for the last month or two. They’ve been staying in their other house, in San Diego, so he let me stay with him for a while. His parents will be back in any day now, so I’ll need to be moving on. I keep my paintings in a shed there.” He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then turned to look at Mary. “Where do you stay?”

“Here,” she answered. “That guy Thom, the one who introduced us, he went to high school with the guy who owns this place. I feel like I’ve been crashing here too long, ‘cause sometimes things get sorta tense around here. There are like seven of us staying here regularly, and others come and go, so tempers get kinda hot sometimes.”

“Yeah, I know how that goes. Sometime people seem cool at first, but when you get to know ‘em, you realize they’ve got a bad vibe.” They sat in silence for a few minutes. They each gradually leaned in closer to each other until they were resting against one another. Mary felt more comfortable than she’d felt in a long time, probably since she the last night she’d slept at home in Illinois, where she shared a bed with her sister. She missed her brothers and sisters, and her parents. She wondered for a moment if her brother—the oldest brother, a year younger than she was—had been sent to Vietnam. She left home when her father insisted that he join the Navy, and now she didn’t know where he was. Sitting there with Greg, she missed her family a little bit less than usual. Then he stood up and turned to look at her.

“So you feel like crashin’ with me until my friend’s parents come back?” His voice trembled slightly. It was the only suggestion he’d given at any point that he had anything less than perfect self-confidence. Mary let the meaning of the question sink in as she studied his face to be sure he was serious. Before her mind could completely wrap around the idea, something deep inside her said it was the right move. Greg looked determined but nervous, as if he felt the same way—that this was irrational and hasty, but there was something that felt profoundly right about it anyway.

“Sure,” Mary blurted out. “Let me just grab my things.” Portability was one of the benefits of Mary’s lifestyle. All of her belongings fit into a duffel bag and a backpack. The living arrangements changed around from day to day, which meant picking up her bags and moving from one room to another when it was necessary. Some nights she had a room to herself, but other nights she had to share a room with people passing through. If she felt uncomfortable with the strangers, Thom and Aileen would offer to let her stay in their room for a night. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was getting into with Greg, but the good feeling she had about him was clear and persistent. She went into the house and grabbed her bags, and she gave Thom a hug and Aileen a kiss on the cheek on her way back out to the porch. She said she’d see them around. They smiled and wished her well.

Greg greeted her warmly when she came out the front door, and they walked together arm-in-arm to the place where he was staying. It must’ve taken them an hour and a half to walk, but it felt like it went quickly. They talked about art, politics, and how life should be. When they reached the house where he stayed, Greg led Mary to his room. He motioned to her to take a seat on the bed while he reached underneath and fumbled around for something. He found what he was looking for and showed it to Mary—a pipe. He what was left of the joint out of his pocket and broke it up into the pipe. They each took a hit and it was done.

They lay down on top of the blankets in their clothes and continued their conversation. Mary lay on her side in his bed, mostly staring starry-eyed at him as he explained his views. He was articulate and passionate, and everything he said seemed right on. When she didn’t understand what he was saying or didn’t agree with him, they talked it over until they reached a mutual understanding. When they began to talk about family, Mary explained that her dad had been in the Navy at the tail end of World War II. He insisted that Mary’s oldest brother join when he finished high school the year after she did. She fought with her father and her brother about it until she got so fed up that she decided to drop out of the community college and hitchhike west, because she didn’t know of anything else to do. Greg’s smiling green eyes exuded compassion as he listened intently to her story. He didn’t treat the story like it was nothing more than a supporting argument to be against the war. He seemed to care about what it all meant to her personally. After consoling her, Greg told Mary that he’d tried to sign up to be a Marine like his father. They hadn’t taken him because of his asthma. The asthma had been especially bad at the time, maybe because of the stress of finishing high school and wanting to make his dad proud. The California air seemed to be good for him; his asthma hadn’t bothered him much since he moved west, even with all the grass he smoked. His father never uttered a word of disappointment, but Greg couldn’t stand the guilt anyway.

When they were too tired to keep talking, Mary rolled over and put her back to Greg. He moved closer and put his arm around her. She leaned back and pressed her body to his. She trembled with anticipation as she waited for Greg to make a move. She fell asleep before anything happened, and woke up in the morning in the same position.

They spent most of the morning looking at Greg’s paintings in a small shed behind the house. They talked about art and what Greg hoped to accomplish with it. They wandered down to the wharf in the late morning or early afternoon and ate lunch. Mary told Greg about a story she wanted to write, using a group of kids in a neighborhood as a metaphor for international affairs. He told her to sit down and write sometime, to make it happen. He told her it was a very promising idea, and he meant it. When they returned to the house, Mary met Greg’s friends. They decided to cook a bunch of food and have peo
ple over for dinner. It turned into a nice, mellow early evening party. Mary was surprised at how many people at the party she already knew. She and Greg had so many mutual friends, how was it that they hadn’t met sooner? The house was calm and quiet later in the evening, after most of the people migrated to the real parties. Mary and Greg sat together on a loveseat by the fireplace and listened as Greg’s friends talked about music and politics. Mary didn’t say much. For all the facts and ideas people tossed back and forth, it really didn’t seem to change anything for her. If it didn’t reaffirm that the war was bogus, it reaffirmed that music and community were the solutions. She held Greg close, her head on his chest as she watched flames dance back and forth in the fireplace. Greg paid attention to the conversation, offering bits of seasoned wisdom on occasion, morsels for the rest of the group to chew on. Mary started to drift into a peaceful sleep, and Greg gently woke her and suggested that they go to bed.

They said their good nights and walked to his bedroom, Greg’s arm around Mary as she shuffled her feet across the hardwood floor. When they reached the bedroom, Greg began to undress. It was a little awkward. They hadn’t been anything less than fully-clothed with one another yet. Mary bashfully stripped down to her underwear and climbed under the heavy blankets. Greg joined her wearing nothing but boxer shorts.

“Mary, I want to talk about something,” he said, as he situated himself under the blankets. “I feel really good about you,” he said. “That’s why I asked you to come crash with me. But there’s something I should tell you before we get too involved.”
Mary felt like her kite had just lost all its wind, and it was falling fast. What could it be? He’s not looking for something serious? He doesn’t want to get serious with me? He’s queer? No, that can’t be it.

“I gotta go back to Indiana,” he said. “All day long I kept thinking about two things. The first was how glad I am that I found you. The second is the fact that I’m in a rut out here, and I don’t think I’ll get out of it until I move on. If I really want to change things, I have to go back and reach the people who need to hear new ideas. I know…”

“I’m kinda falling for you, Greg,” Mary interrupted. The wind picked up strong, and the kite soared so high that she nearly lost hold of the string. “If you have to go back,” she said, “I wanna come with you.” She stared at him silently for a moment, and then her smile began to fade when he didn’t respond to her. “I mean, only if you want me to, that is…”

“I would love that,” he said with enthusiasm. “I just didn’t think it’d be right to ask you to, you know? You haven’t been out here for very long at all, what if this place has more to offer you? I didn’t want to keep you from any of that.”

“I think you’re right about this scene,” she said. “It’s like a big party. I don’t see myself doing much of anything if I stay, except enjoying the party. That’s not what I want. I want to help you. I want to learn from you. We can go back, and you can paint and I’ll start writing. It doesn’t even have to be good. I’ll never write if I stay here, so anything at all is better than nothing. I already got the best of what I’m gonna get out here, if I got you,” she said. Greg smiled.

“You got me,” he said. He leaned in and kissed her, their first kiss.

***

They spent the next couple of weeks getting to know each other better. They tried to round all the paintings that Greg had left in people’s houses and garages. He managed to get a little cash for a few of them, and they tried to save up as much money as possible for the trip home. Mary waited tables for a week and Greg put in a few days of carpentry for his friend’s uncle. About a week before they had to get out of the house they were staying in, they met a man who was about to drive to Nebraska. He said they could ride if they had cash or weed, and Greg had a bit of both. It took a couple different rides to finish the trip from Omaha across Iowa and into Central Illinois, and catching those rides took a little extra time walking down the road, thumbs extended.

Once they arrived in Mary’s hometown, Mary sent Greg into the one of the many downtown bars while she called home from a pay phone outside. Her mother was shocked to hear her voice. She insisted that Mary come home for dinner with her family, and Mary explained that she was traveling with Greg, and that they were moving to Indiana together. Her mother suggested that Greg join them for dinner, but she didn’t do a very good job disguising the uncertainty in her voice. “Sure, I’ll bring him,” Mary said.

The two arrived at shortly before dinnertime. Mary’s father was a hard-working laborer and a devout Catholic. Greg was an artist and an outspoken atheist. Mary had warned Greg about her father, but her father knew nothing about Greg. He was able to make a few good guesses about Greg, based on the way he looked. He said very little to Greg after they’d been introduced and remained silent through dinner.

Mary’s younger brothers and sisters asked eagerly about California and painting and music. Mary’s father choked down his honey-glazed ham and green-bean casserole with a scowl. During the silences between questions from the siblings, Greg glanced around the house at the quaint furniture that looked like it could’ve been handmade, and the old paintings hanging against the faded floral paper on the wall. He was from the Midwest, too, but not a rural farm town like this. Mary couldn’t help but notice how old-fashioned her family must seem to Greg, with her hospitable mother and eager brothers and sisters. Even her father’s tension hardly seemed to faze Greg. His smile seemed to indicate that he found it all very quaint. Mary had been glad to learn that her brother was on a boat in the Mediterranean, not Vietnam, but she wished he was here to meet Greg.

Greg slept on the couch and Mary slept with her sisters in their bedroom. The next morning, Mary woke when her father tapped her shoulder and told her to come to the kitchen. She walked in just as he closed the lid of his lunch box. He glanced at Mary before he began to pour his coffee into a thermos. Mary waited. He screwed the lid tightly onto the thermos and then set it by his lunch box. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked over the rim of his glasses at her.

“Are you planning to live with him?” He asked.

“Well…” she said, not wanting to answer. Her father would never understand. He continued to stare, waiting for her to complete the thought. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “I guess that’s what we were thinking about…”

“When things go wrong,” he interrupted, “you’ll regret it. Your mother and I didn’t raise you to live that way. I want you to keep that in mind when you decide whether or not you’ll leave today.” He grabbed his lunchbox and thermos and walked out the back door without another word. No matter how deep her resolve ran, her father was always able to introduce doubt. She sat in the kitchen until her mother came in to make more coffee and start breakfast for the kids. Mary helped with breakfast and getting her sisters ready for school. When the last of the kids were out the door, she sat and drank coffee with her mother, who didn’t say anything about the situation. Greg eventually wandered into the kitchen, and Mary’s mother said she’d get him coffee and breakfast. He tried to decline, but she paid no attention. Mary watched Greg sip his coffee sleepily and watched him smile at her mother as she set a plate of fried eggs and toast in front of him. Mary knew she had to go with him.

***

When they made it to Gary, they stayed with Greg’s uncle Bruce for three weeks before finding an apartm
ent of their own, above a bar. Gary was full of rough neighborhoods, and theirs was no exception. The apartment was nice, for what they were paying. Mary found a job waiting tables in a diner a few blocks away. Greg painted houses with a union during the day and canvasses in a studio at night.

Mary worked second-shift, and usually finished up around nine or ten o’clock each night. Greg rarely made it home before ten-thirty or eleven. He generally finished work between five and six and stopped off at the diner for a quick snack before going to his studio, the back room of a run-down storefront his uncle owned. There were a few nights that he stayed out really late, painting until midnight or one.

“Do you have to keep at it this late?” She asked one night, when he didn’t make it home until one-thirty. She’d waited without eating all night so they could cook dinner together. “I wish you’d at least let me know if you think you might stay late some nights,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Mary. I just feel like I’m really close on this one piece, but it’s not going where I want it to. I can’t seem to get it right. It’s easy to forget about time and hunger and everything.”

“That’s easy for you to say, after you ate in the diner this evening.” She hadn’t written a thing since they’d been in Indiana, while he spent hours each night working on his paintings. “Well, I’m just going to make a bologna sandwich for myself, because it’s too late to eat much. If you want something, you can make it yourself,” she said. He didn’t respond, and the hurt look on his face nearly made her feel bad for being mad at him. But it wouldn’t make any sense not to stay mad for the rest of the night, so she kept it up. Greg didn’t say anything in his defense, but worked alongside her making himself a bologna and mustard sandwich, too. They sat at the table and ate in silence. Mary felt a bit nauseous as she ate. It was probably because she hadn’t eaten since lunchtime.

When she woke in the morning, Greg was already gone to work. She still felt a bit sick, but drank a couple glasses of water before making herself some coffee. She sat at the kitchen table sipping her coffee and decided to write. All morning she’d been picturing the look on Greg’s face when she’d told him to make is own sandwich, how his genuine concern for her shined through in his remorse at having come home late. It was a sad face, but she couldn’t help but be overjoyed by it. She spent the morning scribbling in a notebook, trying to put together a poem about the look. By the time she had to go to work, she still hadn’t come up with anything that she liked.

She felt irritable on the way to work, upset that she finally began writing and now she had to stop and go to work. She expected a frustrating shift at work, but the first few hours went well. Business wasn’t slow, but she had enough of a routine or a groove set at work that she was able to handle things without wearing herself out. She felt upbeat and cheerful, so when Greg walked into the diner, she leaned over the counter and wrapped her arms around him. He hugged back, and then she playfully kissed his neck in a spot that always seemed to tickle him. He laughed as he pulled himself away from her.

“Somebody isn’t mad anymore,” he said. “Having a good day?”

“Yes, an excellent day,” she answered. “I even did some writing this morning!”

“That’s great,” Greg said. “Maybe I should piss you off more often, huh?”

“Don’t you dare,” she said, swinging her towel like she was going to hit him. He pretended to cower.

“Is there anyone else I could fight for my dinner? I don’t think I can beat you,” he laughed.

“Damn right!” she said. She swung the towel a couple more times, then turned and went to get him a soda. “You want the usual, babe?”

“Yeah, that’d be good,” he said. He flipped open a newspaper and scanned the headlines while Mary got a house salad and a cup of soup for him, the only food items the employees could take without paying. She wasn’t supposed to give it to Greg, but her supervisor never said anything about it.

Mary gave Greg his food and continued waiting on her tables in her happy-go-lucky manner. Just before he left, she began to feel nauseous again.

“Baby, I’ve been feeling sick today. That bologna wasn’t old, was it?”

“No,” Greg answered. “I think it was fine, we just got it last week. Why, what’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing too bad. Just a little funny in my stomach,” she said. “I’ll have a bit of soup, too. I’ll be fine. Have fun with your painting tonight, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, standing up off his stool. “Hey,” he said, looking into Mary’s eyes. “I’m sorry again about last night. All I could think when you got mad was just how much I love you,” he said. He reached up and put his hand on her cheek. “I’m so happy that you came with me, hardly knowing me at all.” He leaned in and kissed her.

“Well, I knew you were the warmest, most caring guy I’d met,” she said. “That was good enough for me. Even if you do completely screw up once in a while.” She kissed him again and he smiled. He turned and left.

When she finished work, Mary walked home on her normal path. When she turned the corner to their block, she saw people milling around in front of the bar downstairs from their apartment. Apparently they were having some sort of special party in the bar that night, and it was so packed that people overflowed onto the sidewalk. She felt a bit uneasy as she unlocked her door, but she slipped in quickly and shut the door behind her, and then made her way up the steps to her hallway. The noise coming from the party below was still a bit much, but she went back to her notebook and started trying to figure the poem out again, tuning out the yells and music below.
Mary lost track of time until she began to feel hungry. She heard a siren outside and looked at the clock. Eleven-thirty. Greg should be home anytime, so she decided to go ahead and start dinner without him. She didn’t want to have to wait any longer than necessary. She whipped up a nice big batch of spaghetti and made some garlic toast, and brought it all out to the table. Fifteen after midnight. She could wait a little bit, she thought. She ate her garlic toast and played around with her poem a little more. When it was past twelve-thirty, she decided she wasn’t going to wait any longer. He had a lot of nerve to come late two nights in a row. She finished her spaghetti, put his in the refrigerator, and went to bed.

When she woke the next morning, Greg was gone again. Already out to work, she hadn’t even felt him get in bed the night before. She was nauseous again. It probably hadn’t been a good idea to eat a bunch of spaghetti right before bed. She went to the bathroom, and by the time she made it there she felt like she needed to throw up. She got it out of her system, and then brushed her teeth. She went into the kitchen for a glass of juice, hoping that Greg might’ve left an apology note for her somewhere. She opened the refrigerator and saw the plate of spaghetti. He hadn’t even eaten his dinner. She drank her juice and rinsed the glass, and then heard a knock at the door. She went to the door and found Greg’s uncle, who looked distraught.

“Bruce, what’s going on,” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry,” he said as his eyes filled with tears.

“What is it?” she demanded. Something didn’t feel right all of a sudden.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry…there was a situation at the bar downstairs last night,” he stuttered.

“So what happened?” She asked, not sure what he was getting at.

“Greg was killed when he was coming home,” he said, reaching out to hug Mary.

She pushed him away.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “He’s at work…why would anyone kill Greg?” She was beginning to feel faint.

“I’m sorry, Mary. I just came from the morgue. No one knew who he was, and when they figured it out they called me. He was killed downstairs last night. They said he came home right around the time a bar-fight worked its way out into the street. Someone pulled a gun. I don’t know anything more about it.”

Mary’s face felt wet, but she didn’t know why she was crying. She didn’t believe it. It didn’t make any sense. Bruce continued to try to hug her, and she pushed him again, weakly. She gave up and he got his arms around her, and she rested her face on his shoulder. She cried freely as she began to realize that she wouldn’t go to work that afternoon, and he wouldn’t come in for a house salad and cup of soup. But why not? She should be able to just go to work and then he would show up. She pushed Bruce away again.

“I’ve got to get ready for work,” she sobbed. She wiped her eyes and began to walk quickly to her room.

“He’s dead,” Bruce called after her. “I’m sorry!” Mary stopped at the edge of the hallway, leaned against the wall, and began to whimper softly as reality set in.

***

Mary went through the funeral and visitation with Greg’s family and hardly stopped crying from the moment she learned Greg died until the funeral was over and done with, four days later. She stayed in Bruce’s house with other members of the family who’d traveled for the funeral, including Greg’s mother and sister. Meeting those two was the most painful moment for Mary. When Greg had been alive, she had been terrified that the women in his family wouldn’t accept her. But as soon as she laid eyes on them, she saw that they were as warm and caring as Greg had been. Their eyes were red and puffy, but they smiled wide, hugged Mary and held her tight. They didn’t say much to her or to each other; the three just cried together.

After the funeral, Mary called home to tell her mother what happened. She asked to speak to her father, and after a long silence, her mother came back and said that he couldn’t talk. Bruce let Mary stay in his house for another week. He insisted that she could stay as long as she wanted, but she knew she needed to move on soon. In the rare moments she thought about anything other than Greg, she tried to figure out what she would do with herself. After a couple days of mourning, she decided to go back to work. On her first day back to work, Mary was sick again within an hour of starting her shift. She’d been sick a few times that week. When she came out of the bathroom, she complained about it to the woman she worked with.

“Have you ever hurt so much that you just keep getting sick?”

“I don’t know…I don’t really think so. Why, you keep getting sick?”

“Yeah, especially when I wake up in the morning. I just feel…a little out of whack. I thought it would go away after the funeral. I stopped crying so much and started to eat again. But I just have to puke from time to time, no matter what I eat.”

“Oh my God, Mary! What if you’re pregnant?” She asked. Mary took a step backward. That was absurd. But as soon as that heavy word worked its way from her head to her heart, and then settled deep in her gut, Mary shuddered. As much as she wanted her friend to be wrong, a feeling inside told her it was true. Now that she felt it, she wondered how she hadn’t known sooner.

A visit to the doctor the next morning confirmed it, and Mary stayed in bed and cried for the rest of the day. She knew she had to call home. Late in the day, when she finally called, her father answered.

“Dad?” she said, her voice as soft as she could manage.

“What is it?” He asked coldly, sternly.

“Dad, I’m pregnant,” she stuttered. He was so silent that she wondered if he was still on the line, but her sisters’ voices echoed in the background.

“You need to come home,” he finally said. “But not with the baby.”

“Dad?” She was horrified. What was he suggesting?

“Go to my brother’s in Chicago. I will call him and tell him you’re coming.”

***

On the ride back to Central Illinois from Chicago, Mary silently stared out the window at the passing cornfields. The plants, each a foot or two high, blended together in as they passed until they were nothing more than a light green blur going the opposite direction. The blur was like the eight months she’d spent with her uncle, each day a cornstalk indistinguishable from the others, up until the mid-June day in the hospital. The pain of losing Greg and shock of pregnancy were quickly muted by awe and anxiety about what took place inside of her. During the day, she read her uncle’s books, cleaned his house, and looked for ways to stay busy. Late each afternoon, she bought groceries at the nearby market and made dinner. Her uncle came home in the early evening, and they ate together in front of the television. The closest they came to mentioning the pregnancy was to talk about appointments at the doctor’s office or with Catholic Social Services.

Mary looked away from the green blur of the cornfields to the off-white blur of the pavement just outside the car. She was going home, and she could start a new life for herself. She stared at the bare road and prayed the first of many prayers that her daughter would be okay, would be happy and loved, wherever she ended up.