Sam pulled out a small felt box from his pocket. He said a few words about their relationship and time together, but none of that was heard by the family since they were deaf with shock in the noisy restaurant. Jessica, reduced to tears, sobbed and nodded yes. Sam kissed her and put the ring on her finger. Jeremy and the family had expected a proposal at some point soon, but nobody expected it to be made at the Olive Garden.
33. WEDDINGS
A month after graduation, Carrie and Zack were wed. Jeremy attended, sitting with fellow alumni in the Clover United Presbyterian Church. Carrie looked spectacular in the off-white gown and veil. She maintained a brave, plastered smile throughout the ceremony. Zack looked genuinely happy, with a broad smile and puffed-out chest. Afterwards, there was cake and dancing in the assembly hall, but Jeremy excused himself as fast as he could. He didn’t want to witness any more than was necessary. He wanted to be alone. He got his wish in spades.
He mowed lawns all summer long, declining any roofing jobs. He moved down to the basement and converted the place into his own man cave. It made perfect sense. Nobody else in the family used it much anymore, and Jeremy spent so much time down there that he often slept on the couch.
Sam and Jessica’s engagement, which had been scheduled for mid-October, was moved up to the first week of September. Jeremy, decked out in a tuxedo, served as an usher. Even though he had gained weight, he thought he looked good in formal wear.
Jessica had a few Wichita State softball players as her bridesmaids, while Sam only had his younger brother as his best man. The wedding was held at the Plainview Baptist Church. Dinner and dancing followed at the old gym, where the prom had been held.
A short, stocky girl with bobbed, dyed-red hair and glasses made eyes at Jeremy, and when Jessica had pulled Jeremy reluctantly to the dance floor, he found himself dancing next to her. Although he wasn’t initially attracted to her, she was soft and warm when they did a slow dance. He felt electricity running through his body and it was hard to resist her toothy grin.
There was an after-party in somebody’s motel room near Emporia, and Jeremy found himself in conversation with the redhead again. Her name was Christie, and she was Jessica’s first college roommate.
“What do you do?” she asked him.
“Oh, I, uh, mow lawns, mostly.”
“Anything else? After September the grass tends to stop growing.”
Her voice was high pitched, but endearing.
“Well, there’s a community college in Clover. My parents want me to go, so I’ll probably do that. How about you? You’ve graduated from college, right?”
“I’m not doing anything right now. I have a sociology degree, so employers aren’t banging on my door. You know what I mean?”
Jeremy didn’t, but he smiled and nodded.
“But I am going to Korea at the beginning of next year,” she continued.
“Korea, really? What for?”
“To teach English. It’s a two-year program.”
“Do you know Korean?”
She shook her head.
“Do you know anybody over there?”
“Nope. But I’m excited. I’ve never been overseas.”
That blew Jeremy’s mind. He had rarely been out of Kansas, and never in another country. He was certain he’d never eaten Korean cuisine. Christie didn’t even know if she would like it over there, yet she’d signed up for two years. It was crazy. Although she was barely over five feet, she suddenly seemed taller and even more attractive.
Christie invited Jeremy over to her motel room. He felt uncertain walking through the door. It was as nondescript as the room they had left, but now that they were alone with only the dim glow of a bedside lamp, the room seemed like an exotic, foreign bedchamber. She turned to him and he bent down and kissed her. She opened her mouth and pushed her tongue against his mouth. He opened his and tasted the sourness in her tongue. Fiery sensations tingled every inch of his frame and for a brief instant he had an out-of-body experience, realizing that he, Jeremy Rogers, was making out with a woman. They awkwardly kissed and groped for several minutes. He felt the heat radiating from her little body and he sensed she wanted him to do something more, but he wasn’t sure what the next moves were.
“Sorry, it’s my first time,” Jeremy said.
“Oh, really?” she said, and then softened. “It’s okay. I don’t have too much experience myself.”
A moment passed as they stared at each other. Jeremy thought she might throw him out, not wanting to waste her time with the inexperienced.
“I’ll start,” Christie whispered.
She unbuttoned his shirt. Jeremy felt self-conscious about his stomach pushing over his belt, but she didn’t act repulsed as she kissed and rubbed his chest.
She turned her back to him. “Help me out of this.”
It was hard to find the tiny zipper in the darkness and even tougher to hold on to it, but he managed to unzip it. She let the straps slide off her shoulders and the dress fell to the floor. She turned to him in her underwear. Jeremy gazed at her curvy body, hoping his jaw wasn’t hanging wide open.
“Can you take off my bra?”
Jeremy’s throat caught. He nodded instead and told himself he could do it. But he was thrown off when she stepped forward and kissed him instead of turning around. After a moment, she looked up at him.
“What are you waiting for?”
Jeremy fumbled as best he could around her back, trying to figure out the hooks on the strap.
Christie giggled. “Here, I’ll do it.”
Jeremy felt embarrassed, looking away. He didn’t know what he was doing and she could tell. Why hadn’t he practiced before? When he looked up and saw Christie’s round breasts and touched their warmth, he felt like the luckiest man in the world.
“Let’s get you out of these pants,” she whispered.
They made clumsy love full of apologies and encouragement. Later, lying in bed with Christie, Jeremy determined that he may have just had the best time of his life. He left her room early in the morning so he could sneak downstairs to his basement bedroom before going to church with his parents. He had a smile all day long.
34. TIME IN A HURRY
Jeremy met Christie for an intense rendezvous in a cheap motel two weeks later. Since she lived in southern Nebraska, they met in Salina, almost in the middle of Kansas. They continued meeting every couple of weeks, when she wasn’t working at Starbucks. He had signed up for classes at the community college, but after finding out that attendance was not enforced, he stopped attending by the midterms. He used the classes, however, as an excuse to get out of the house and meet Christie. They had nothing in common, but Jeremy felt lucky for the little bits of time they spent together. Neither of them told Jessica, who was busy with her newly announced pregnancy.
Jeremy was going to be an uncle. It felt weird and too soon, though his mother embraced the idea of being a grandmother. Gary was too stressed out by work to give an honest opinion about it.
At the end of the year, Christie caught a plane from Kansas City to San Francisco International and then on to Seoul. Jeremy had flunked out of KCC and hardly came up from the basement during the winter. The guilt that both of his parents threw at him for his flunking and joblessness was overwhelming. He emailed Christie almost every day. She told him about her adopted family, the city of Gwangju, new foods she was trying, and so many other new and exciting experiences. Jeremy, unfortunately, rarely had anything interesting to say, and could only reference TV shows or sports. In late February Christie emailed that she had met somebody, but they should still be friends. Jeremy felt more alone than ever.
*
He wasn’t sure how it happened so fast, but he was an uncle in early March, mowing lawns in the summer, hibernating in the basement for the winter, and then mowing lawns again. His high school friends who came back from college were about to start their junior year in the fall. He found it hard to talk to Erik and Graham anymore. Not only would they reference history, literature, and current events, but also fraternity parties, roommate situations, and dating women pursuing different degrees. Jeremy got lost in the details of a world he didn’t understand. The one person he could talk to was his niece, Kalya. She wasn’t even two, but she would watch him intensely when he talked to her and would giggle whenever he acted goofy.
She quickly turned two, then three and four. Talking, walking, and then running. Sam kept advancing at his job, taking on more and more sales territory. He dropped off Kalya to eager grandparents if he was in the area. Jeremy never knew when she was scheduled to come over, but he would be woken by her in the morning, pulling off his bed sheets and wanting to play.
“Unka Jammy, Unka Jammy. Wake up.”
Anybody else and he would have been upset, but he couldn’t be at his wide-eyed, curly-blond niece.
“Wake up, sleepyhead.”
Jeremy would usually pull a blanket over his head and then jump out of bed, chasing Kalya around the basement to her delighted screams. But then Sam was transferred to Omaha, and Jeremy only saw Kalya on holidays. By the time she had turned six, they were out of sync. She didn’t dare venture down the basement and he couldn’t get her to laugh anymore.
*
When Jeremy turned twenty-five—a quarter of a century old—most of his friends had completed college and were starting families in different towns. Carrie was having her third child. He had seen her at the IGA grocery store, pregnant and carrying a crying baby while the oldest pulled on her other arm, demanding a sugary cereal. She looked haggard and closer to forty, but smiled when he said hello. He felt awkward for her and himself, looking just as disheveled, but without the excuse of children.
Most of the jobs in town were staffed by high schoolers who looked incredibly young. More than one of his customers mentioned that Jeremy should find a new line of work. “Mowing lawns is a kid’s job, you know.” But where and what?
Then Gary threatened to throw Jeremy out unless he paid rent. He already had to pay his own cell phone bill, which crippled him after the summer. Jeremy couldn’t afford rent anywhere, so a compromise was brokered by Gail. Jeremy would do a list of chores each month, from raking leaves to washing their cars or running errands. For every chore not performed, he would have to pay twenty dollars towards rent and board. It was a deal Jeremy grew to hate.
Gary was never satisfied with any work Jeremy did, and he felt like both his parents were constantly yelling at him, telling him to do something every other day. Jeremy wasn’t sure when, but at some point his father had lost all of his sensitivity. Jeremy tried to avoid him by surfacing only when he was at work. Gail interceded on Jeremy’s behalf every now and then, and even bought the snack foods he loved against Gary’s wishes. But she wasn’t always an ally, and often she turned on him as well. So when the atmosphere felt too tense, Jeremy stayed in the basement as long as possible, surfacing only to raid the pantry or do the odd job.
Though he already felt outdated and stuck in a cavernous rut, nothing made him feel as old as the day he heard that Crazy Eddie was released from prison.
35. CRAZY EDDIE RETURNS
A chill blasted through Clover when Crazy Eddie was released from prison. It was hard to comprehend that eight years had passed so quickly. The Clover Reporter confirmed the early release. Even though his sentence was for ten years, he was eligible for parole at six, and on the eighth year he was free.
Jeremy received emails from high school friends, including several he had not talked to since graduation. They all wanted to know if Jeremy had any Crazy Eddie sightings. Jeremy reported all the rumors he had heard, even though he rarely ventured outside.
A jacked-up orange Bronco with tinted window had been spotted rolling through Clover. Residents had craned their necks to see if it was Crazy Eddie, but nobody could verify that the “big dude behind the wheel” was he. Also, somebody who knew somebody related to a prison guard said that Crazy Eddie was suspected of killing up to five prisoners, but there were never any witnesses to prosecute him.
A little more than a month after his release, sightings of Crazy Eddie were verified. When he entered the IGA grocery store, parents grabbed their children, pulling them the other direction and telling them to hush. Most people ignored him straightaway, but a few stood ramrod straight and tried to hold a disapproving scowl. Crazy Eddie would stare back with his cold killer eyes until the other person blinked. They always did. By several accounts, it seemed like he was a head taller than anybody else.
Not long after he came back to town, drug use in the next town of Shelby skyrocketed. Then the problem leaked into Clover. It started with a group of twenty-something ne’er-do-wells who began to lose their beer guts and became gaunt and scraggy. Within months, dark circled eyes and yellowish rotten teeth followed, like living zombies—if zombies were jittery. A few of the trailer park crowd where Jeremy had gone to the ill-fated barbeque were labeled as meth-heads. Theft increased, and those caught with the crystals, including two high school football players, would not say where they got it. Nobody had proof Crazy Eddie was the supplier, but it seemed as if he had planned to take down Clover with meth.
The public called on Clover Sheriff Dempsey to do something about Crazy Eddie. However, a recent land survey determined that while the road to the Cooper property resided within the boundary of Clover, the property itself was in Shelby. It was well known that the Shelby sheriff was a corrupt weasel who had a strong hand in his town’s politics. It wasn’t a surprise that he wasn’t in a hurry to investigate Crazy Eddie.
Although Clover residents were upset, it was clear no one was going to confront the huge ex-con. By the end of that summer, every bit of crime and mischief seemed to be attributed to him. Jeremy wouldn’t have been surprised if Crazy Eddie would be blamed for the freak snowstorm at the end of September. It seemed like only a matter of time before some big tragic inevitability would happen. It wasn’t if, only when.