This Is What I Want (22 page)

OMAR

Omar Smothers fidgeted in the pew, fixing his attention on the missionary donation cards, the tithing envelopes, the spines and right-angled corners of the hymnals, and the dust on the pencil holders. As he used a fingernail to gouge off a piece of hardened eraser, his mother reached over and set her hand on his, and he withdrew it.

He closed his eyes tight and then opened them again, and he tried to pick up the thread of the Reverend Franklin’s sermon, something about love and forgiveness, topics number two and three on the pastoral hit parade, right behind sin. The genial old pastor’s words found his ears again and then morphed into meaninglessness, and Omar was back inside his own head, pulling up the carpet and looking under it.

He hated this church. Well, not this church so much as church itself, but this was the only one he’d known. He hated the sitting still during the sermon when he’d rather be home shooting hoops or playing
Call of Duty
with Gabe. He hated the old guys who slapped him on the back and talked to him about nothing but basketball, as if he was the vessel for the dreams they’d once had for themselves. He hated the eyes that followed him for just a little too long. He hated the whispers that were a little too loud.

His mom nestled closer to him and slipped an arm around his shoulders. She seemed to carry none of his burdens, and to boot she had been in a fine mood this morning, at least until the news of Mr. Kelvig’s losses had reached them. She’d been thrilled to see him come home at a sensible hour, and not a whiff of alcohol on him. She’d asked him to sit with her on the couch—“We’ll watch anything you want,” she’d said—but he’d said he was tired and went to bed.

Rest had not come as easily as lying.

He thought now about how he’d gone over to Gabe’s afterward, to find out what the cops had said to him. He’d stopped cold in the street, seeing Chief Underwood’s cruiser there, and he figured he’d better move right along. As he headed for home, he passed the Country Basket, and there John Rexford sat with his buddies on the hood of his car, eating a burrito.

“Hey, half-breed,” Rexford had said. “You tell your friend Bowman we’re gonna get him.”

Omar had tried to play it cool.

“For what?”

“He knows.”

Omar shuddered now in the pew. Damn cowardice. He’d balled up his fists last night, but there was no percentage in taking on Rexford there, with his three friends at the ready. He’d had to slink home and pretend to sleep, all the while piling up his resentments in neat little stacks.

The Reverend Franklin droned on. Omar looked left, across his mother’s lap, to the emptiness of the pew. Mr. Kelvig and his family hadn’t shown up, the first Sunday in forever that they’d been absent—and certainly the first Jamboree Sunday that they’d missed. “I hope he’s all right,” Omar’s mother had said. “The poor man, losing his mother and his brother today. We’ll have to take them some food.” The unoccupied space left an abscess in the church, and everyone had moved away from it.

Omar went back to playing with the pencil, and his mother reached out again.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“Nothing.”

When at last the Reverend Franklin let the air out of the sanctuary, with a call for peacefulness and contemplation, Omar was up and out of the pew.

“Honey, don’t you want to go to the breakfast?” his mother called after him.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Where are you going in such a hurry?”

“I have to go see Gabe.” The first of his lies floated to the surface; there’d been many since. “We’re going to go through his tackle box and get set up for tomorrow.”

“Well, come by the store for lunch, anyway.”

“I will.”

Omar pushed and squeezed his way through the narthex, past well-wishers and wistful old men. Once clear to the street outside, he turned south and sprinted full-on toward his friend’s house, his questions fairly spilling from him. What had the cops said? What about his parents? Was he in trouble? Did he tell Chief Underwood that Omar was there, too?

He zigzagged through alleyways and backyards, paved streets and sidewalks, four blocks of sprinting harder than he ever had on a basketball court, his lungs engulfed like wet sponges, until at last he pulled up at Gabe’s place and saw his friend’s father kneeling in a flower bed. The strangeness of the scene took a second to register with Omar. The boxy off-white house, one he’d seen nearly every day and pretty as could be with a manicured lawn and a newly built wooden porch, sat before him, and spray-painted on the front of it, in rising, sloppy, red letters were the words “WE WILL GET YOU.” Gabe’s father dabbed at the marks with a brush of too-white paint, just beginning the job of blotting it out.

“Don’t have the right color,” Mr. Bowman said as Omar approached. “Will have to get it tomorrow. Maybe I’ll just repaint the whole thing.” He spoke with deliberation, in a flat tone—as if it were somehow disembodied—that shook Omar. Mr. Bowman, always quick with a joke and a kind word, seemed beaten and mournful.

“Can I talk to Gabe?”

“He’s inside.”

Omar stepped toward the door.

“Omar?”

“Yes?”

“Were you with him last night?”

Omar braced for something. He wasn’t sure what. “Yes.” He watched Mr. Bowman from behind, waiting for a reaction that wasn’t going to come.

“Your house is plaster, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mind it, then. It will be harder to paint over than wood.”

After a grim welcome from Gabe’s mother, Omar found his friend in the basement, strumming discordant notes on his guitar.

“You saw what they did to the house?” Gabe said.

“Yeah.”

“Why couldn’t you go get the cops if you were so interested in it?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“I am.”

“What good does you being sorry do me?”

Omar sat down on the couch, at the far end of it from Gabe.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What did the cops say?”

“Nothing much.”

“What did you say?”

“Less than they said.”

“Come on, Gabe.”

Gabe struck the guitar with a downward chop across the strings, and they screamed at the assault. Omar shrank. “The fuck you care? They didn’t ask about you, if that’s what you want to know. I think the chief suspects, though. She was asking if I was alone. Who else was I going to be with?”

Omar tried to patch himself back together. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

Gabe went back to picking at the strings. “I didn’t even want to be there.”

“I know.”

“Nobody’s going to mess with you. You know? Big basketball hero. This time next year, you’ll be out of here. I’m gonna have to watch my ass every second.”

Omar softened his voice. “Come on. This will blow over.”

“You think?” Gabe’s voice dropped in register, too. A sullen quality infused it. “This isn’t insults in the hallway, dude. They spray-painted my house, threatening me. Do you get that?”

“Yeah, I get it.”

“I don’t think you do. My dad looks at me like I’m a coward. Terhune’s dad is on his crew, and he can’t say anything to him about what he’s done. The cops won’t be able to do anything about it, because they can’t prove it, just like I couldn’t prove they were gonna kill that dog. It’s over for me here, and you made that happen. You didn’t mean to, but you did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care. So there’s that.”

Omar walked down Main Street toward home. Past the Country Basket, past the hole where the mayor’s office used to be, past Mr. Kelvig’s Farm and Feed, past the Sloane Hotel, which had survived another Jamboree weekend. Sadness lapped at his insides. How was it that life as he knew it three days ago seemed so much simpler than what he saw ahead of him now, with its infinite complications?

He could count on no help from Gabe tomorrow. That much was certain. Also certain was the fact that Omar had made a promise to Clarissa, and now he had even more motivation to see it through, to keep another friend safe from John Rexford’s menace. The lies and deceptions—and the consequences should he be found out—were the price of doing the right thing, he figured.

Clancy Park came into view, in front of it Omar’s turn toward home. He’d lie low today, and tomorrow he would do what he’d vowed to Clarissa. He broke into a light jog, and then, just as quickly, he came to a stop.

At the corner, Rexford’s Mustang idled. The rising sun glared off the windshield. The Mustang’s engine revved, and the tires left a rubber scratch in the intersection as Rexford made a right turn up Main Street, a middle finger dangling out of the open driver’s-side window.

SAMUEL

First in a trickle and then in a steady stream, the people of Grandview covered the two blocks from the Lutheran Church to the serving line in Clancy Park. They came on foot and by car and by medical scooter and bicycle, the alphabet generations and the boomers and the pensioners, in their Sunday best and flip-flops and cutoff jeans. One by one, they took a plate from Maris Westfall, plastic knives and forks from Marlene Wolters, coffee or juice from Nancy Drucker, and pancakes from Samuel at the griddle—“One or two, your call,” he’d tell them—and then found suitable spots to sit in the grass and along the bandstand.

There had been inquiries, of course. Nobody much expected Samuel’s father to be there, what with the injury and the recent sadness, but all the busy biddies wondered aloud about Patricia. “Oh, she’s not feeling well,” Samuel had said, simply enough, and that had brought about much cooing and invocations of “oh, dear” and a few who got to the most salient question of all: “Is she going to miss Raleigh? That would be such a shame.”

She would, indeed, miss him, and Raleigh Ridgeley was hard to miss. He sat alone by the microphone stand where he’d soon be holding forth. He ate the pancakes in small bites, daintily, nibbling at the tines, not like the other men in the park. Not like anyone who still knew what it was like to be from here.

Samuel watched him and molded bad thoughts from the wet clay of his mind. He wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them, though. It wouldn’t be fair to say he considered Raleigh a friend; until recent years, Samuel hadn’t considered him at all, but he’d reread
The Biggest Space
out in California and had found wisdom there that he hadn’t seen the first time around, in his own callow youth. He and Raleigh had settled in at a restaurant after a book signing in Mill Valley and had talked into the evening, two Grandview expats sharing what they’d learned in their exposure to the wider world beyond the beet fields and the oil trains. So maybe they weren’t friends, exactly. Compatriots? Absolutely. As such, and as a son standing outside the triangle Raleigh had formed with his folks, Samuel felt a gnawing at his gut that he couldn’t quite define and didn’t care to endure.

From behind, hands slid across his eyes, blacking out his vision.

“Guess who.”

He cracked a grin. “Andy Warhol.”

“What? Andy Warhol? He’s dead.”

“Houdini?”

“Deader than Warhol.”

“Rush Limbaugh?”

“Well, his career is dead, anyway.”

Samuel broke into a rollicking laugh, and Megan let him loose.

“You look like a natural,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to come back to paradise for good?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Really?”

“Maybe not.”

She brushed a slap against his shoulder, and they laughed together again, and Samuel thought now that he’d given short shrift to what it meant to him to have a friend. It had been a long time and a lot of intense, futile energy poured into Derek at the exclusion of all others. For the first time, he felt something—in his heart and in his mind—akin to breaking the surface.

“Have you eaten?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Starving. I was waiting for you to ask.”

He turned to the helpers down the row and asked if he could be excused. Maris Westfall shooed him away, saying, “You love-birds go have fun,” and that set off a whole new stratosphere of laughter. Oh, the many things Maris didn’t know would blow her damn doors off.

Samuel flipped a couple of cakes onto a paper plate for Megan, and they headed off into the gathering crowd on the park lawn.

As Megan ate, Samuel recounted the bad news, each piece of it catching her by surprise. That, in turn, surprised him, though he knew it shouldn’t have. He’d spent his first eighteen years in this place, and he knew well the inconsistencies of what information got laid bare for everyone’s consumption and those things that could rest shrouded in open view. The news simply hadn’t found Megan yet, even as they were surrounded by people who knew that Blanche and Henrik were gone, and who cast excruciatingly sympathetic looks and nods in Samuel’s direction.

“I’m surprised you’re here,” she said.

He shrugged. “Staying away wouldn’t change anything. Grandma definitely would have wanted this to go on.”

“Your uncle, though.”

They sat atop a picnic table, and Samuel leaned forward, arms propped on his knees, hands cupped under his jaw to hold his head. “I didn’t know him, not really. I think maybe my dad is feeling more than he’s letting on, though. I don’t know. It’s a lot to process.”

“Even after yesterday?”

“Maybe especially. You know?”

She set down her plate. “No.”

“I don’t know. I’m kind of scattered. I was just thinking, though, it’s his brother. I think it would be cool to have an older brother, don’t you?”

“I never really thought about it.”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “You’re an only child. You wouldn’t want the competition.”

She play-slapped him again. “Shut up.”

“I’m just saying,” he said, “maybe there’s something Dad wanted to say, or maybe he hoped things would get better. Now?” He let the question hang there.

“Yeah,” she said.

He pushed on through. “I used to think I hated my sister—”

“You
did
hate her. I remember.”

“OK,” he said, “yes, in that narrow teenage sense, where anybody who isn’t glorifying you is the enemy, yeah, I hated her. But the truth is, I just didn’t know her. Still don’t. And maybe we never will figure out how to be friends, but here’s the deal: I’m getting to know her sons. My nephews. I love those little guys. And that makes me want to know her, too.”

They sat awhile. Sunday had come in warm but not choking, a slight breeze tickling the grass from the west, the kind of mottled purple-gray sky that provides cover without threatening, even as the suggestion of rain plays at the nose. Samuel brushed his eyes across the faces he knew and the ones that had shoved into his town in the decade since he’d had a stake here. Unless you counted the bank, white-collar jobs didn’t exist in Grandview. Everyone—man, woman, and child—had the look of having earned what they had, and that included snippets of happiness like breakfast in the park. For the first time, he realized that he missed it, the satisfaction of a life claimed from the surrounding squalor.

He looked at Megan. The rims of her eyes had gone red.

“You broke my heart, you know,” she said.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I forgive you.”

“Thank you.”

He crab-crawled down from the tabletop, lowering himself to the bench seat. She followed him there and closed the distance, and they watched as the plastic seats that fanned out from the bandstand began to fill with matronly posteriors.