The Long Wait for Tomorrow (25 page)

elly ignored the extinguished neon sign, the word OPEN reduced to a sooty, ashen color. Only one or two cars were parked along Broad Street. Scant traffic, especially for a Friday night. The funeral parlor across the street was on lockdown, green awning drooping like an eyelid.

There didn’t seem to be much life coming from inside On The Rail, either.

Kelly was seconds away from knocking when a wooden door at the other end of the building swung open into the street.

Casper leaned out, arm flat against the door, fingers spread out.

“Oh shit, Kelly!” he laughed, grin of a practical joker wishing for
you to just
see
your face right now.
“You are a gosh-damn lunatic, man! Get on in here with your friends.”

Inside, the house lights were off. Above the bar, a few nicotine-colored bulbs gave the immediate area a 1970s hue. The fluorescent lamps above the tables had also been turned off, save two or three. At one table, a pair of men in paint-spattered clothes were setting up a rack of nine-ball. The air was still dense with the exhaust from an evening’s worth of
Olympic smokers, fusing to the music of Wayne Shorter, a little number from
The Blue Note Years.

Kelly put an arm around each of his friends. “Can you dig it?”

“I can dig it.” Jenna grinned.

“I can dig it,” Patrick echoed, unable to remember the unease he’d felt when they’d first walked in there, just yesterday.

Casper strode behind the bar, downing the remains of a Pabst before slapping his hands down before his new invitees. “Glad you could make it, Kelly McDermott.”

“I know that yesterday you told me after two,” Kelly said. “But we were driving by, saw the sign turned off—”

“Closed up early!” Casper declared. “Kelly, what you pulled tonight … Got to give you ten out of ten for style.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s all over the news.” Casper grinned. “Local, ESPN, MSN,
all over.
Star quarterback takes off in the middle of the
national anthem
! I’m surprised anyone even bothered to watch the game after that. Oh, and your team won, by the way.”

“All part of my master plan,” Kelly said with a wink.

“Lunatic!” Casper wagged his finger between Patrick and Jenna. “Which one of you is driving?”

Patrick laid his hand out on the bar, face up.

Kelly dropped the keys into his waiting hand, cool as could be.

“Beats the hell out of catching them upside your head,” Patrick commented.

“Ha!” Casper smacked his palms together and crouched
down. He resurfaced with a squat bottle of bourbon. “May I interest the rest of you in a little Knob Creek?”

Jenna groaned, lowered her head to rest on the bar.

“Do you
sleep
in that outfit?” Casper asked her, leaning over to get a better look at her skirt. “Because that’s just fine with me. There ought to be a law, far as I’m concerned.”

“I
am
the law,” Jenna informed him, voice muffled. “None for me, thanks.”

“Kelly?”

“Can I get some ice with that?” Kelly asked, a wry smile saluting under tired eyes.

Casper shoveled some ice into two red plastic cups. He poured, setting one down in front of Kelly, raising his own high above his head. “To Kelly and his brass balls!”

The pair mashed their red cups together in a plastic toast and opened wide.

Casper grimaced with raw ecstasy, slammed his cup down. “Patrick!”

Patrick had been staring at a muted television screen situated on top of the fridge. “Huh?”

“Got my iPod hooked up to the speakers.” Casper motioned with his head. “Get on back here and let’s make ourselves a playlist.”

Patrick felt Kelly’s elbow dig into his ribs.

An hour or so later, the clock had drifted well past one in the morning. Patrick and Jenna were seated in a corner. The heavy wooden benches beneath them were built right into the wall, just below one of the sprawling front windows. A couple
of sodas rested on the table before them. It was covered in stained green felt, for the benefit of any card players who happened to be looking for a game.

At the nearest pool table, Kelly and Casper were shooting some stick. Mixing liquor, fresh smoke trailing from Kelly’s cigarette. Throwing money down left and right, gambling the night away.

“Patrick?” Jenna put her feet up on the edge of the bench. She wrapped her arms around her knees, chin cradled between them. “That was a good thing you did tonight.”

Hearing it from Jenna gave him a momentary lapse in memory. “What do you mean?”

“Helping Edmund like that …”

“Oh.” Patrick reached for his drink. “Well, it wasn’t much.”

“It was quite a bit much. Illegal, dangerous, and … I want to say, stupid, but … still, it was good.”

“It was Kelly, really.”

“Maybe. Partly, sure. But Kelly’s had twenty years to change. You’ve done it in less than three days….” Jenna scooted toward him. Shoulder to shoulder, turning her head to look at him directly. “I’m proud to be with you tonight, Patrick.”

He looked over, elated to find how close her face was to his. Even his imagination had never allowed for being this close, so close he could actually see the fragmented color of her eyes. It was never supposed to happen, being this close, and yet, there was her breath, close enough to brush his lips.

“Do you actually think this might all be real?” he asked.

She smiled, glanced over to the pool table. “Up until now,
it’s always sort of … been about Kelly, hasn’t it? Our lives, everything, bonded to Kelly.”

“That’s not so strange, is it?” Patrick followed her gaze with lazy ease, carrying the memory of her face with him. “Lot of people like you, me, and Kelly, lot of friends with the same … thing.”

“Before today, I couldn’t have told anyone who Kelly McDermott is. I’d always say boyfriend, that’s who he was. Even with Kelly, it might have been the same. Together for four years, and I’m starting to think that the only reason was … Kelly wanted someone to stay with. That if he wasn’t with me, he knew he’d have to … party hard, screw around with anything on two legs, do all those things expected of him. With me, he was allowed to play the part without all that. The football star and the cheerleader, can’t ask for a better way to keep up appearances.” Jenna sighed, the sound of acceptance. “We all use each other, I suppose, to keep from having to … be anybody.”

“It’s hard to argue otherwise.”

“Maybe that’s why there was never really any you or me. I mean, it was Kelly and me. It was you and Kelly …”

“There was you and me long before there was ever Kelly,” Patrick informed her.

Out of the corner of his left eye, he could see Jenna looking at him. Awaiting an elaboration he was now going to have to make good on. Patrick never doubted it would come. Watching Kelly take down a shot of bourbon, he sensed that there was no more Jenna and Kelly. Not the way it had been before. And
although he wasn’t ready to believe that Patrick and Kelly was a thing of the past, he knew that he and Jenna had only just found each other.

Whatever comes next
, his angels counseled,
there are no guarantees.

“I saw you in second grade,” Patrick said, refusing to accompany his confession with anything other than a fixed stare, straight ahead. “And here I’ll bet you didn’t know I used to go to Jefferson Elementary.”

“I didn’t.”

“Caught sight of you from my seat in the cafeteria. I was at the end of one of those long rectangles, right next to where each class would line up for the kitchen.” Memories were tricky, and as the years went by, Patrick never put much stock into what he had seen that first time. A younger Jenna than the one he would eventually get to know, that’s all Patrick had to go on. Standing in line, a body free of curves, face unwilling to let go of those remaining traces of baby fat; a thumbnail of what she would eventually grow into.

Patrick opened his mouth and let his angels speak for him. “Saw you standing in line that first time, and that was it for me. Every day, I’d sit at the same table. The same seat, good as behind home plate. I’d watch you stand in line. You’d stand in line, and that pretty much sums up my knowledge of you back then. Though I also knew, somewhere, that this would be as close as I would ever get to you. A girl standing in line. All that mattered reduced to a daily helping of indoor sunshine. A girl
standing in line, trapped behind the half hour between twelve and twelve-thirty.”

Patrick had a sip of his root beer, set the bottle down next to him. “I always thought that would be as lonely as it would ever get.”

“If that was second grade,” Jenna said quietly, “that means I was gone the next year.”

“Children vanish at that age. Transfer to new schools. Parents get new jobs. They lose jobs, move across the country, out of the country. Sometimes they get in car accidents…. There was no telling where you had gone. In the years that followed, I just allowed acceptance to be my guiding light.”

“And then, years later …”

“That’s the part I think is really funny….” Patrick wasn’t about to laugh, but he was somehow able to let a quiet smile creep into the narrative. “You and Kelly met outside of school, right before it started. My parents ran into you two at the mall, and …”

“They didn’t like what they saw,” Jenna finished.

“They’re cheap,” Patrick told her grimly. “My parents are cheap people.”

“Don’t say that—”

“How could they possibly not like you?” Patrick aired his dirty laundry, shaking his head as he would a sheet in the wind. “You’re kind, smart. Unaware of your own beauty, which I think only adds to the overall surplus you’ve got.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is … But no matter, my parents didn’t see it and … they just figured this girl from a working-class home, whose family split up, has no place in Kelly’s heart. You do know, my parents introduced us to get you away from Kelly.”

Jenna’s feet hit the floor and she leaped back a little. Her eyes were wide, mouth open in a disturbingly accurate impression of a blow-up doll Patrick had seen at a party once.
“That’s
what that was about?”

“That’s wight, wabbit.”

“You mean …” Jenna went back to drawing flies with her mouth, neck straining forward. “When they called me up and said, ‘Oh, why don’t you come over to our house for dinner with Kelly and our son, Patrick,’ that was all—”

“A trick,” Patrick said. “It was a trick to get you over to meet me.”

“So I wasn’t good enough for Kelly, but they had no problem foisting me on their
biological
son?”

“Not everybody’s born with biological imperatives,” Patrick sighed. “Someone today told me that you can rationalize just about anything. Kelly
is
their son. No DNA test on the planet’s going to make them feel otherwise.”

“So that dinner that was supposed to happen with you, me, and Kelly … Your parents said that Kelly, at the last minute, couldn’t make it.”

“They never invited him.” Patrick was actually beginning to enjoy the bloodshot memories. “But could you put yourself in my shoes? There I was, years divorced from second grade. In my own house, when you come special delivery to my front
door. You step in, my world goes head over heels. Before we can even be introduced, the first words out of your mouth—”

“Oh no!” Jenna cried, wrapping her arms around her head.

“That’s right, were
Is Kelly here yet?”

“No!”

“And my world quickly fell back into step,” Patrick concluded with a smile and a sad shake of his head. “The instant I heard you say that, I already knew, it was you and Kelly for keeps.”

“Baarg!”

“And all we talked about over dinner …”

“Much to your parents’ dismay …”

“Was Kelly.”

“Kelly!” Jenna screeched, jumping on the bench. “Everything you touch you destroy!”

Kelly swaggered over with the bottle of Knob Creek, two-thirds empty. He took a few steps back and forth to the Tom Waits song playing: “I’m a pool-shooting-shimmy-shyster, shaking my head. When I should be living clean instead.”

“Where’s Casper?” Patrick stood up, looking around. The two pool players had retired to the bar, beers clutched in chalky hands. Eyes glued to the close-captioned highlights on ESPN2.

“It’s a surprise.” Kelly winked, resting his ass against the bench’s back.

The side door popped open, and Casper strode in with Kelly’s car keys in one hand, Patrick’s saxophone case in the other. He held it aloft, cutting behind the bar. The surface was wiped clean with a sweep of Casper’s arm, the case set on top. He flipped it over, brass latches aimed in Patrick’s direction.

Casper reached back and disconnected the iPod.

“Get on over here and get your horn set up,” Casper told Patrick, voice echoing in the newfound silence. “You and I are gonna jam.”

“All right!” Kelly raised his fist in the air.

“I don’t know …” Patrick approached the bar with the hesitant hands of someone asked to hold a newborn for the first time. “I’ve never really played for people before.”

“You’re in the school band,” Jenna said witheringly. “First chair since sophomore year, you’ve played every basketball game since we were freshmen.”