Summer hung thick and heavy on us; the humidity and mosquitoes were taking their toll. I was sitting in the church with the usual group, listening to Stan talk on and on about sin and redemption, a message I’d heard him give a number of times before. I looked at Jordan. He watched Stan so earnestly. I remembered the many times when we were kids when Jordie had had that same enraptured look on his face. I still found it as endearing as I found it heartbreaking.
I knew then that I had been wading through the humid days marking time. Jordie had a new drug of choice in the person of Pastor Stan, and I wasn’t going to be able, this time, to share it with him.
I wondered what Shawn was doing all the time now. Was he working full-time during the summer or did he have classes? Would he be sunning himself on the beach with his friends? Would he be picnicking in the evenings with Kevin by the light of his little battery-powered camping lantern? I could see him in my mind with his gray rubber tub of dishes, wiping off tables and throwing that smile -- that impossibly bright, beautiful smile -- around Nacho’s bar. I knew so little about him and I’d told him less about me, yet I think he understood me better than most everyone here who’d known me all my life.
* * * * *
I ambled down Main Street toward the library and Mary Lynn. More and more, I took refuge in the silence there. It might have been the only place in River Falls where I didn’t feel I owed anyone an explanation. I bought a coffee to go for myself and one for Mary Lynn, and crossed Veterans Park. The fountain burbled busily and there were birds scattered around, eating birdseed that I suspected Yarnista owner and avid needlewoman, Sally Lindstrom, put out in the morning before anyone else was up. I’d never caught her at it. I suspected her because she always watched the birds from the front window of her shop when she was bored.
I passed the memorial and was walking by the benches, and there was Shawn. Sitting.
On a bench. In my hometown. With his eyes closed, allowing the sun to warm his amazing upturned face.
82 Z. A. Maxfield
Well, damn. Everything can change in an instant. I’d always believed it to be one of the great truths. But now, for the second time in my life, it had happened to me.
I sat down next to Shawn and he opened his eyes. The moment he saw me, they lit with a mixture of emotions it would take even the experts at Yarnista a lifetime to untangle.
I saw surprise and more than a little annoyance as he slapped his spare phone into my hands.
“You didn’t even tell me where you were going,” he said. “I discovered that I resent that. A lot.”
“I thought,” I began to say, confused, and then realized I had to type it. I texted, I thought you understood. I had to come back for o s meone else. I know I told you that Jordan
needed me. That I couldn’t still be with you and come back and be here for him.
He grinned at me, and I wanted to put my hands on his face. His touch would be warmth and color and vibrant life in a place where I’d been feeling all that choked out of me.
I swallowed hard. Those amber eyes sparkled for me. He reached out, I thought, to brush my hair back. Instead he thumbed the barbell piercing on my eyebrow.
“I never heard you say a word about any of that.” What could I say? He had me there.
Shawn put his hands behind his head and leaned back, once again with his eyes closed, absorbing the summer morning. I nudged him with my shoulder and gave him Mary Lynn’s coffee. It wasn’t strange at all, sipping our coffee in mutual silence. It was the strongest feeling that I’ve ever had: that rightness that we shared in mutual silence. We stayed like that for a long time until a shadow fell over our faces.
“Hello, Cooper,” said Pastor Stan. I looked up and had to put my hand to my eyes because he was backlit by the sun.
“Hi, Stan,” I said, standing up. Shawn stood with me, and I could feel his hand at the small of my back. Stan was looking at Shawn and me expectantly.
“Stan, this is Shawn, a friend of mine from California.” To Shawn I said, “This is Stan.” I finger spelled the name. Because I didn’t know how to sign what I wanted to say and the idea of Shawn hitting town was just beginning to strike me as complicated, I decided to retreat.
“We were just going to the library,” I said, taking Shawn by the hand and giving him a tug so he’d follow me. As we walked, I could feel him looking around.
One of the most interesting things about coming from an aging, insular town is seeing it through the eyes of someone who comes from someplace else. It wasn’t the first time I wondered about the potholes in the street or the cracked bricks in the storefront facades, and yet, when I imagined them through Shawn’s eyes, its homeliness could have turned a little shabby, its charm a little faded. That’s the inevitable consequence of taking something that’s precious to you and sharing it with someone else. There’s always the fear that it won’t measure up.
St. Nacho’s
83
Yet I knew, as sure as I knew there would be air to breathe as we crossed the street and everyone would be watching us do it, that he would see everything exactly as I saw it. Shawn would overlook the aging and the flaws and find in River Falls the same kind of troubled beauty I did.
“Cool town,” he said as we entered the library. I found Mary Lynn in the stacks, and I hate to admit it, but I felt a surge of pride when she did a double take on seeing Shawn. Faint color bloomed in her cheeks and she got a sweet, kind of silly look in her eyes.
“Mary Lynn,” I said. “I’d like you to meet Shawn.” Mary Lynn held her hand out and Shawn shook it warmly. “Pleased to meet you,” he said in his uninflected voice. Her eyes met mine. I’m dead sure that the look on my face gave away everything I was thinking.
“Shawn is my friend from California. The one I’m trying to learn sign language for.” Mary Lynn’s eyebrows rose, and she signed what I could tell were different things about River Falls. I guess she asked him how long he was planning to stay.
“I don’t know,” Shawn said aloud and signed. “I don’t know how long it will take.”
“What?” I signed. At least I’d learned something while I was here.
Shawn gave me a sweet smile for my trouble. “I’m just here to collect something that belongs to me,” he both signed and spoke. “And then I hope to be going back to California.” Mary Lynn’s fingers strayed to her heart.
Shawn turned to me and spoke. “I’m staying at the Comfort Inn at the end of Main Street. That’s where I’ll be, unless I’m out exploring things around town.” He tapped the pocket of my shirt where I put his spare cell phone. “Keep in touch,” he said, and turned on his heel and left. Mary Lynn chased after him for a minute, and they exchanged a few brief signs. I wasn’t privy, apparently, to that part of the conversation because no one spoke. After a minute, she came back and stood beside me, watching out the window as he passed by.
“Oh, my.” She sighed.
I said nothing but I probably sighed too.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“I told him to be sure and stop by Hallowed Grounds,” she said. “That the owner was your sister and she could probably find him a job.”
“This is a train wreck waiting to happen, Mary Lynn,” I told her.
She looked at me very seriously. “What this could be, Cooper Wyatt, is a way for you to put your past behind you once and for all and move on. I find I like the prospect of that very much.”
I wondered for a while if I had anything even to say to that, but when I finally realized I didn’t it was too late anyway. Mary Lynn had moved on.
* * * * *
84 Z. A. Maxfield
“What?” Jordan demanded, and I heard the agitation in his voice. We’d planned a quiet dinner on the patio because the evening air was perfect and balmy, scented with wood smoke from barbecues, and the sun was behind clouds. It was humid with the promise of a good rain before morning.
“I didn’t ask him to come here. I never told him where I was. He found me because Jefferson called the references on my job application.” I had exchanged texts with Shawn since he’d arrived in town, but I hadn’t seen him since then. Stan had apparently wasted no time telling Jordan I had a friend he didn’t know.
Jordie sat down on his patio chair hard, placing the plate he’d brought with him in the middle of his place mat carefully, as though if he got it wrong it would matter. “Where’s he going to stay?”
“He’s staying at the Comfort Inn until he finds someplace else.” Jordie took a bite of his pasta. “But we’re supposed to be us. Together.” For some reason I noticed how he held his fork. It was quirky, childlike, and had survived both our mothers’
efforts to correct it. He picked up his knife and used it to fold linguine onto his fork and with his infantile shovel grip put another bite into his mouth. I loved him. I’d always loved him.
But I would never again be in love with him.
“I think you need to know that I don’t feel the same way about starting over in River Falls that you do, Jordie.”
“What do you mean?” He stopped his fork midtwirl.
“I guess I just don’t see things the way you do. Being part of the church, being back in our hometown doesn’t do the same thing for me that it does for you. I like the library --”
“Coop.” Jordie’s fork hit the table. “This is about us, dude, the gruesome twosome. It’s about getting back what we had.”
“What did we have?” I asked him. “What did we have that we were smart enough or sober enough to appreciate when we had it?”
“You’ve got to call Stan.” Jordan got up and started through the slider. “You’ve got to tell him that you need to talk to him.” He disappeared into the apartment.
“Why do I need to talk to Stan?” I asked, when he brought me the cordless phone and sat back down.
“You need to tell him how you’re feeling. You need to tell him you doubt yourself. You have to let him help you.”
“Jordan.”
“No, I mean it! Stan can help you. If you have doubts, he can make you see what you need to do to get back the spirit.”
“I don’t know if I ever had the spirit, Jordie, and I don’t think talking to Stan’s going to help me. I’m fine.”
St. Nacho’s
85
“No, you’re not,” Jordan said, folding his arms across his chest. “You’re not fine.”
“What?” I took a sip of cold lemonade and then a deep breath. “What do you mean I’m not fine?”
“You haven’t connected with anyone at church. You don’t go to meetings. You’ve blown Stan off when he’s tried to help you. Now you’re getting back with this guy from someplace you landed when you were rolling around on your motorcycle, running away from who you really are.”
I’m sure he was getting ready to go on, but I interrupted him by putting a hand out.
“Wait. What?”
“Stan told me. He said you’ve been running away from who you are and what you’ve done. He told me he could help you.”
“I don’t want his help! I don’t need his help. What if I’m not running away from who I am? What if I’m running toward who I want to become?” Jordan glared at me. “Because you can do it all by yourself, is that it?”
“Something like that. I can do lots of things by myself, and frankly, I don’t even know what it is we’re talking about doing!” I calmed my thoughts. “Look. There’s no question Stan is there for you, and that’s a good thing. I just think for me --”
“Every day,” Jordie said. “I wake up in the morning thinking, why the fuck can’t I have a damned drink?”
“What?” I asked. Where had that come from?
“Every day, it’s just as hard as the day before. Everything here reminds me. If I’m not thinking about scouts, Little League, raiding the sacrament wine, or rolling around between the pews copping my first feel of your ass, I’m remembering the times when we were little high school fucking gods, Coop, thumbing our noses at the small-town assholes and drinking and smoking dope and fucking till we couldn’t take a breath anymore!” Did he see that as the good times? No wonder there was no way I could connect with him. “Jordie,” I said. “We can’t go back to that.”
“I know that!” He raked a hand through his hair. “’Cause now I’m remembering the look on Mrs. Johnson’s face when she saw Bobby under the wheels of our truck. Our truck.
Stan tells me that we’ll be forgiven. He says that we have a chance to be clean again. It’s the only thing that keeps me from taking that drink, trying to score some dope… It’s the only thing holding me in place, ’cause not even gravity feels like it’s working anymore.” He lifted his lemonade to his lips with a shaking hand.
“I get that,” I said, hooking a hand around his neck. I squeezed and rubbed little circles on his shoulders to soothe him. “I do.”
“So keep coming with me; we can do this. We can find a place where it doesn’t follow us. We can do that if we do it together.”
86 Z. A. Maxfield
“I can’t do that, babe.” I sighed. “It’s not right for me. I don’t think it’s the same for me as it is for you. I won’t drink again. Not because something is keeping me from it, but because it just isn’t where I get what I need anymore. And I know Stan and the church are giving you what you need; I’m so fucking happy for you, Jordie, you have no idea.” I wrapped both arms around him and held him hard. “But I need something different.
Something I’m not going to find here in River Falls. Something I don’t want to do without anymore.”
Jordie pulled away a few inches and looked at me with such contempt. I guess I hadn’t seen that before, but it might have been there all along. “I can’t decide which is worse,” Jordie said, shoving me aside. “That you’re an amazing fucking snob, or that you’re the world’s biggest hypocrite.” Jordie left the chair, the patio, and the apartment without a backward glance.
* * * * *
By eleven that night I had an ashtray full of smoked cigarettes. I called around and no one had seen Jordie, and I assumed the worst. I hoped he’d run to Stan, but I worried that he couldn’t handle things and had started drinking again, and that he’d have to go back to day one, back to where it all starts. I was so fucking sorry for him I couldn’t even see him as a person anymore. That night I got, for the first time maybe, how deeply fucked my decision to come home and try to help Jordan had been. He was like a drowning man clinging to a lead anchor for safety.