Year After Henry (15 page)

He closed the front door behind him and stood there, staring out at the night that had swept in over Bixley. His neighbor's windows were warm yellow squares. Music wafted in from one yard, the canned laughter of a television sitcom from another. A car sped by, braking for the stop sign at the end of the street. It was the first time in a week that Larry had been out of the house, and now it felt good to have the cool night press itself down on his shoulders. It felt good to open his legs up in an ample stride, something he didn't have space to do within his cramped bedroom. He found the mailbag where it had landed on the grass. He picked it up, checking to see that no letters had fallen out on impact. He shouldered the bag and crept back to the front of the house.

The geranium pot, that cast-iron sentinel, kept watch on the street. Larry had to be certain the house key was beneath it, just in case his mother had
sensed
he would sneak out without her seeing him. She had that talent when it came to her boys, a kind of built-in radar. Once, in the eighth grade, Larry and Henry had slipped out at midnight to meet up with other boys down at the quarry, to throw rocks at the moon and share four cans of beer amongst seven of them, the worst thing they'd done yet in their young lives. But when they'd come home two hours later, they saw that a light was on in the kitchen, a light white with anger. Someone was up, and it had to be their mother. That's when Henry lifted the geranium pot to discover that the house key was gone. After an hour of shivering in the damp night, it was decided that Henry should be the son to knock on the front door. It had opened immediately, and there stood Frances, a dozen pink sponge curlers in her hair, wearing her blue bathrobe and waiting to deliver the little speech she'd had plenty of time to practice.
You
are
both
grounded
for
three
full
weeks
and
that
means
television
too.
For the rest of that night, lying on his top bunk as dawn rimmed the horizon, Henry kept asking Larry, who had no answer himself,
“How the fuck did she
know
?”

Larry tilted the heavy pot that held the red geraniums over to one side. There was the silver house key, glittering up at him in a sliver of porch light. He eased the pot back down and then, the mailbag secure on his shoulder, the way a good mailman would be certain it was, he left the light of the porch and headed out into the blue velvet of night.

...

Jeanie wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting in the Buick, pulled up to the curb on the opposite side of the street from where Evie's
Spiritual
Portraitist
sign was driven into the tiny front lawn. At least, she wasn't sure in the way that time is measured on a clock. But using her new way of telling time, it was easy: she'd been sitting in the Buick at Evie's Cooper's house for two wine coolers and three cigarettes. She had made a decision just that morning, as the sausages cooked for breakfast, that she was done smoking. And wine would be that lovely glass of white that she ordered over lunch with Mona, now that they'd started their eating ritual again. Or it would be a glass or two of red when she and Larry met up for a visit. That is, if she ever got over her anger at Larry Munroe enough that she cared to visit him again. But it was seeing the orange bonnet spin out of the drive, with no concern whatsoever for her feelings, that prompted Jeanie to put off the no-smoking resolution. And since it wasn't the best day to give up cigarettes, maybe it wasn't wise to give up the wine coolers either. She didn't blame Chad. She understood every move the boy was making. She knew it was his own way of hitting imaginary fists against the world. With all this talk of Henry in the air, all the pain had been brought to the forefront, away from those quiet, private places where people can grieve alone. Jeanie knew because it had happened inside her, as well. After all, when you memorialize someone, you're admitting that he no longer exists. You're putting the idea of his life on a small bronze plaque for passersby to stop and read. The memorial was on Sunday. As Jimmy Buffett once sang, “Come Monday, it'll be all right.”

Dear Jeanie,

I am so very sorry for your sadness. I have seen your car outside my house on many nights.

Jeanie got out of the Buick and closed the door softly. There were no lights on inside the house where Evie Cooper lived, and there was no little car sitting in the drive. Jeanie had already spun past Murphy's Tavern and saw the blue Mazda lost in a sea of other cars. Evie was at work, so Jeanie made her way quietly up the walk.
Would
you
like
to
come
in
and
talk
sometime? I would then have the chance to apologize to you in person, for I owe you that.
Neighbors came out of the house next door, loud voices rushing against the night, a kind of Friday evening excitement. Jeanie stepped back into deeper shadows by the front steps and waited until car doors slammed and an engine roared to life. When the car and its occupants backed out of the drive and sped off down the street, she went up the steps to Evie's door. She lifted the top lid of the wrought iron mailbox and dropped the fisted bits of letter inside. Shards fell upon the porch by Jeanie's feet and she bent to find them, to stuff them into the box as well.

I realize we will never be friends, but life is too short for us to be enemies.

Evie Cooper

“Damn straight we'll never be friends,” Jeanie said to the mailbox.

She turned and went back down Evie's walk, crossed the dark street to where the Buick was waiting. She had two wine coolers left. She would save them for the back patio, once she got home. It looked like a full moon night, and there was no better place to sit and watch the moon than out on the little wooden patio, a place that smelled of cedar and phlox. Henry had finally built the patio for her, after years of her nagging, and now she had it covered with flower boxes that brought hummingbirds by day and moths by night. She had her favorite lawn chair out there, the kind you can lie back on, stretch out your full length in order to sunbathe. Or at night, you can just lie still and wait for the moon to inch its way across the sky. She would drink the last two wine coolers out on the dark patio, under the white moonlight, and wait until she heard the whine of the motorbike coming home again. It would mean another day that Chad Henry Munroe was still safe. Another marker in their lives.

On the drive home, Jeanie turned up the oldies station on the radio and smoked another cigarette.

...

Evie had unhooked her bra and pulled it off before she lit that lovely joint. With her breasts now free and cool beneath her T-shirt, she kicked off each of the brown leather sandals. With one foot, she gave herself a strong push. Soon the fresh evening air was moving over her as she swung back and forth. Her feet ached in that way only a bartender's feet can. It would kill Murphy to put any kind of thick, protective mat behind the bar. Unless the girls bought it themselves, it was pretty much thin rug over sheer cement, the hardest surface yet for feet and knees.

Evie inhaled the smoke and held it. A mockingbird was singing from a neighbor's tree, singing late to the moon, looking for a mate no doubt. They had moved gradually north, mockingbirds had. Maybe they had come looking for a new life, a chance to start over, just as Evie had done. She took a second long toke. It had been a week since she had seen Larry Munroe. And she hadn't heard from him either, no late-night phone calls as there had been in the past. Evie would be just about to go to bed when the phone would ring its soft bleat and Larry would say,
Hey
there, what's going on? Did I wake you? I was just watching this old black-and-white movie and I started thinking about you.
The steady sound of his voice could bring such a calm over her, as if, okay, maybe she was all alone in the world, and maybe she'd made a lot of mistakes, but Larry Munroe was there now and everything would be all right. There had been nothing but silence for a week. So why was Evie still watching the door at Murphy's as if it were the spot where the Second Coming would occur?

On the short drive home from work, she had already decided to forget about Larry Munroe. She had spent too many precious minutes thinking about a man who was treating her as if she didn't exist. Yes, she had a brief affair with his younger brother, Henry. She was far from perfect. Sometimes, she was just lonely. But, realizing the error of her ways, she had ended the affair. She couldn't rewrite history. If Larry didn't accept those facts, so be it. If he couldn't even come back to Murphy's as a client,
c'est la vie
. Evie had been thinking that Bixley really wasn't the best place for her, anyway. And maybe the mockingbird was thinking the same thing, thinking it so much that he'd been singing late into the night, a mournful song. Bixley was a big town that wanted hard to be a small city, a town with an ambitious mayor, an ambitious Chamber of Commerce, an ambitious group of city planners. Maybe what Evie needed was a truly large city, a place that had been ambitious before there ever was an idea called America, a place like Paris, France, maybe. She'd never run out of clients in the City of Lights. If she wanted her spiritual business to thrive so that her feet could have a good rest, maybe she should move, learn to speak French, put the whole damn Munroe family behind her.

That's when Evie saw the white shard of paper lying on her front porch. She put the joint in the ashtray and got up slowly from the swing. Her bare feet felt good on the cool boards of the porch, her toes finally able to breathe after six cramped hours. She picked up the fragment of paper and held it to her parlor window, where the light of the crystal lamp inside offered enough light that she was able to read. There were only four words since the rest were torn away. But four words were enough for Evie to recognize her own handwriting, as well as the piece of linen stationary she used for her important letters. She took the piece of paper back to the ashtray and picked up her lighter. She watched the paper burn, curling slowly at the edges, until it swallowed those four pitiful words:
sorry
for
your
sadness
.

...

Larry had resealed the envelopes in the
Still
to
Deliver
pile as best he could. Three of them had small dabs of folded tape to hold the flaps. It didn't take him more than a few seconds to stuff Andy Southby's two rejection letters into the dented silver mailbox that stood near the street at 566 Gray Lane. The first was from that restaurant management school in Kansas City.
Perhaps
your
services
would
be
put
to
better
use
in
some
other
industry.
And the second was from the world-renowned Howard F. Honig College of Nebraska.
Dear
Sir, Fuck off.

Next, he delivered the wedding invitations from Debbi Sutton, all to their proper addresses. Then the three birthday cards and two sympathy cards, since they were no doubt important to their recipients. The cards would be
late,
of course, but everyone expected that of the post office these days, so why disappoint them? He then dropped off a couple important bank statements and a notice that the electricity would be cut off if Verna Hilton didn't pay up in thirty days. Larry had always liked Verna, who was living now on her social security. He wouldn't want her to end up in darkness one night and not know why, or have the chance to prevent it. He had even left two twenty-dollar bills on top of the envelope. Verna could wonder forever where the money had come from, but at least she could wonder beneath the glare of her sixty-watt bulbs.

From Verna's house, he cut across the back alley where the old drugstore used to stand, and there he dumped all the flyers and ads and wasted paper into the garbage bin that sat there. He hated delivering this junk every day, just as much as people hated getting it. Now, it was a quick jaunt over to Oakwood Street, where Marshall Thompson had rented the upstairs apartment at number 45. The lights were out in the apartment and the big black Harley was gone from its usual spot just beneath the entrance stairs. But it was Friday night. Why would a guy like Marshall squander a Friday night by staying home? Larry had wondered long and hard if he should deliver Paula's letter.

Dear Marshall,

I think you know by now that this is the end, and I mean it this time. If you bother me again I'll get a court order, so help me god.

Would threatening him only make him worse? Knowing Marshall, Larry figured it would. But what else to do if someone is beating up on you? He dropped the letter into the box marked Thompson.

Then, as if savoring this delivery for last, Larry stood on the sidewalk in front of Stella Peabody's tiny bungalow and studied the quaint architecture of the house, its one and a half stories almost hidden in rose brambles. It was a romantic idea in itself, the bungalow, with its broad porch and elephantine columns, its low and overhanging roof, the knee braces under the eaves, the fieldstone foundation, the tiny dormer window. A picture of the house, along with a plea to save it, had appeared a few times in the local paper. Larry knew Stella had been writing to her congressman, to the governor, to anyone who might listen. Her parents had built the bungalow back in the early 1930s, and they had brought their only son to live in it, a boy who went off to World War II and never came home again. Stella had been born in the house, in the winter of 1936. And so the Peabodys set about life without their son by raising their only daughter, a shy and quiet girl who kept her nose in a book and her ideas to herself.