The Grievers (12 page)

  CHAPTER NINE  

W
hen Neil dropped me off at the bank, Sue was standing under the drive-thru canopy to shelter herself from the rain as she smoked a cigarette. We’d made eye contact as Neil pulled into the parking lot, so there was no point in telling him to keep driving. Not that he would have listened—I could tell he was pretty pissed at me for the stunt I’d just pulled on the bridge. Besides, he was already so late for work that there was no real point in showing up at all. At best, he’d lose a sick day. At worst, he’d be written up for dereliction of duty or something equally onerous. That was the thing about having a real job, Neil said, breaking the tense silence between us to remind me that only one of us had fully crossed over into adulthood. You couldn’t just ditch work for the hell of it. You had to show up every day, whether you wanted to or not.

I could have put up a fight if I wanted to—could have insisted that I did, in fact, have a real job with real consequences and all the other grown-up shit Neil was talking about—but the oversized dollar sign shedding glitter on his backseat made winning the argument an unlikely prospect. Instead of arguing, I mumbled an apology as I wrestled the ridiculous costume out of his car, and I asked if he was still up for helping me write the invitation to Billy’s memorial service.

“I’m sure Frank can handle it,” Neil said, barely glancing over his shoulder to respond.

“That isn’t the point,” I said. “I don’t want him in charge of this. Or Ennis, either. This is ours. I want it to be ours.”

“Okay,” Neil said. “But no fucking around this time. I mean it.”

“Right,” I said. “No fucking around.”

I closed the door and tapped on the roof of Neil’s car by way of goodbye. He was barely out of the parking lot when I turned around to find myself toe to toe with my supervisor. The rain was still falling, and she didn’t have an umbrella, so I guessed that whatever she had to tell me was worth ruining what had to be her best off-white ruffled blouse. I guessed, in other words, that I was about to be fired.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Where have you been?”

“Sorry,” I said. “It was an emergency.”

“Unless someone’s dead, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Someone
is
dead,” I said. “A friend of mine killed himself.”

Had there been any color in Sue’s face, it would have drained away right then and there. Her mouth hung open, silent and uncertain, for a full minute as her brain tried to decide whether or not I was telling the truth.

“I’m sorry,” she eventually said, reaching out to touch my forearm.

“Yeah, well.”

“Really, Charley, take the rest of the day off.”

It was the first time that Sue had ever used my name—at least that I noticed, anyway—and hearing it made me want to cry. Not my name, so much, but the way she said it, the way she was so willing to believe what I told her. And even though it was true, even though a friend of mine had, in fact, killed himself, I felt sick to my stomach over saying it, over using Billy’s death to hang on to the dumbest job I’d ever had in my life.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think that would be a good idea.”

“Charley?” Sue said as I started toward my car. “We still need to talk, okay?”

“Talk?” I said.

“You’re up for a performance review. We need to talk about the work you’ve been doing.”

“Right,” I said. “Work.”

“But it can wait,” she said. “It can so totally wait.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Totally.”

I
CAME
home to walls of bare, jaundiced plaster and furniture draped in old bed sheets. On Thursday, Karen and I had tried to paint the walls of the dining room only to watch the paint bead up as soon as it came into contact with the plaster. Apparently this meant that there was still glue on the walls, and that we still had countless hours of scrubbing and scraping ahead of us before we could try once more to paint the walls and make the house our own.

If I had any sense at all, I’d have started scrubbing long before Karen got home, but I opted instead for pulling away the lavender sheet that covered our television and catching the end of a soap opera, a vice I’d picked up in the early days of grad school. Initially, I’d attributed my fascination with the constant rise and fall of convoluted love affairs to a dutiful urge to immerse myself in the tropes and themes of lowbrow American culture; but in reality watching soap operas was oddly comforting. There was a certain logic to the genre that was hard to resist, a constant reassurance that as tangled and hopeless as circumstances were bound to become, things would always even out in the end.

Plus the women were hot.

Aside from that, what made me reach for the remote almost as soon as I’d walked in the door was the eternal prospect of characters returning from the dead. A year earlier, I’d seen a teenager die in a fire only to come back without any memory of his former life. Not long after that, an evil millionaire was found frozen alive in Antarctica after being presumed dead for over a decade. Then there was the supermodel who drove her car off a cliff only to be rescued, it was revealed three months later, by a megalomaniac arms dealer.

Given the apparent propensity for the dead to return to life on all my favorite soaps, it wasn’t so crazy for me to lose myself, if only for a little while, in the fantasy that maybe there’d been a mistake, that maybe Billy wasn’t dead. Yes, there’d been a suicide, I allowed myself to think, but it wasn’t him. The old man who identified the body was wrong—he had to be. Someone else had jumped—some poor, tortured soul I’d never met. But Billy had just gone away for a while and forgotten to tell everyone. Someday soon, he’d come back healthy and strong and full of stories about his travels—how he’d fallen in and out of love with a Russian spy, how he’d foiled a hijacking plot off the coast of Belize, how he’d nearly lost an eye in a barroom brawl when a ninety-year-old woman with a hook for a hand took a swipe at his face. In fact, I thought wistfully, still lost in the soap opera logic of denial, it wasn’t inconceivable that Billy was already back in town and waiting for the right time to call.

Then the telephone rang, and I sprang from the sofa, afraid I’d been caught dreaming impossible, childish dreams.

“Charley Schwartz?” a gravelly voice asked when I picked up the phone.

“Yes?” I said as if I weren’t sure.

“Joe Viola,” the voice said. “Saint Leonard’s Academy. I’m calling about this Bobby Chang thing.”

“Chin,” I said. “His name was Billy Chin.”

“That’s the one. Were you thinking doughnuts or crudités?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Doughnuts or—?”

“Crudités. Your buddy Frank suggested egg rolls, but that runs into money.”

“He’s not my buddy,” I said.

“In any case, he said you’re the point man on this one, so it’s entirely up to you.”

“Frank Dearborn is
not
my buddy,” I repeated. “You need to understand that.”

“So nix the egg rolls.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Nix the egg rolls. Nix everything Frank tells you.”

“That leaves us with doughnuts and crudités.”

“Fine,” I said. “Doughnuts and crudités.”

“You want both?”

“Why?” I said. “Is that wrong?”

“Usually it’s one or the other.”

“Damn,” I said. “How soon do you need an answer?”

“The sooner the better,” the voice said. “We’re on a tight schedule with this thing.”

“How tight?” I said.

“Three weeks,” the voice said. “Give or take a few days.”

“Bastards,” I muttered. “I’ll call you right back.”

But I never called back. Instead, I paced the living room, boiling with rage at Frank for commandeering Billy’s memorial service and leaving me to deal with shit that didn’t matter. Doughnuts? Crudités? How was I supposed to know? I wouldn’t know a crudité if I choked on one.

When Karen came home from work, I told her in fits and starts about my meeting at the Academy, about Ennis and Frank and how they were suddenly lifelong pals, about their plans for Billy’s memorial service and how Ennis wanted me and Neil to sign a letter inviting everyone to attend or, failing that, to at least send a check. I was about to mention the call from Joe Viola and my subsequent dilemma over whether to serve doughnuts or crudités at the service when Karen interrupted my diatribe to ask if I was okay.

“Of course I’m okay,” I said as Karen hefted a thick stack of term papers from her schoolbag and laid them on the kitchen table. “I’m just telling you about my day.”

“Telling me would be fine,” Karen said. “This feels more like a rant.”

“A rant?” I said. “Really? You think I’m ranting?”

“I think you seem a little wound up.”

“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Absolutely. Grade your papers. We’ll talk over dinner.”

We didn’t exactly talk over dinner. Instead, I sighed and grunted and made a lot of aggrieved noises with my upper respiratory system, while I wondered whether or not the steamed carrots and broccoli on the plate in front of me might be considered crudités by those in the know. Meanwhile, the fact that I
wasn’t
among those in the know—that I didn’t have
any
idea what crudités were—was beginning to get to me, so I nodded on occasion as Karen spoke and supplemented my repertoire of grunts and groans with a bare minimum of noncommittal verbal responses based less on the content of our conversation than on my wife’s tone of voice. If she noticed I was out of sorts, she didn’t let on—at least, not until bedtime as I was pacing our narrow, unfinished hallway and shoving my toothbrush in and out of my mouth, the issue of whether to serve doughnuts or crudités at Billy’s memorial service gathering force in my head and twisting me up inside.

“Let’s try it for real this time,” Karen said. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I said, spitting toothpaste into the bathroom sink. “By the way, what the fuck are crudités?”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. What the fuck are crudités?”

“So, what? We’re dropping f-bombs now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re dropping fucking f-bombs. Do you know what crudités are or not?”

“They’re like canapés,” Karen said. “But without the bread. In much the same way that the man I married is like you but without the attitude.”

“Attitude?” I said. “What are you talking about? I just want to know what crudités are.”

“Vegetables, Charley. What’s bothering you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

“That’s funny. Because in my experience, people who are fine don’t lose their shit when they hear a new word.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did, Charley. And you are. You’re losing your shit because you don’t know what crudités are. Now tell me what’s wrong.”

I squeezed some more toothpaste onto my toothbrush and shoved it back into my mouth before realizing that I’d already finished brushing my teeth.

“Damn,” I said, spitting into the sink again. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Charley!” Karen said. “For Christ’s sake, would you tell me what’s going on?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s Neil. He’s moving.”

“That isn’t nothing,” Karen said. “He’s your best friend.”

“I know. I just—”