A Little Hope(16)

She pulls over for a moment and dials his number, but she is on Luke’s street, and it feels disrespectful. She hits end before it rings. Luke’s neighborhood has not changed one bit. It makes her happy to know this: the trees, the driveways, the streetlights. Time has barely touched this area.

She wishes she had gotten Luke’s number. Maybe she would suggest drinks now. Tell him to drop by and see Thunder, who would certainly wag his tail and remember his old buddy. She stares at the clear road in front of her as she starts driving again and waves at the two little girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. What’s done is done, she thinks. Luke looks okay—mostly. A little disheveled, his wallet a bit bare. How could she even think about getting wrapped up in that again? Who knows what his story is? Maybe more drugs. Maybe unemployed. Hell, he may even have a girlfriend. Five girlfriends. What does she know? Does she need all that? But that sad smile. Those eyes. God. Her heart is thumping fast, and she hasn’t felt this nervous in years. She has never cared as much about anything as she did about him. That is what she is feeling now: the leftover particles of the care she once felt. What do you do with that?

Her phone rings in her lap, and she jumps. It’s Johnny. Maybe he can sense that something is different, that she’s gone to a place right now she won’t be able to return from. She ignores the call.

When she came home this time, she’d hoped to see Luke. She wished for it, and poof, there he was, waiting in the toy shop like a gift. It has to mean something. Luke. Goddamned Luke. She imagines him onstage singing each word, holding each note, watching her, her always waiting for him out in the audience.





6. Trying to Wake Up




Dear Mom,

I want to say I’m sorry for how I acted at Lizzie’s party. I had a lot going on that day, and the thought of Betsy being ripped apart made me feel crappier. When you said I smelled like smoke, which you always have to say, it got under my skin, and then you said calm yourself, which I hate, and then you exchanged looks with M. J., so it was a triple whammy. But I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I know it’s your job to say stuff like that, and if I had a kid (which I don’t don’t don’t, no panicking necessary), I wouldn’t want him to smell like smoke either. My point is, I get it. I get why you worry.

I started this letter and thought I knew what to tell you, but I think the only thing I want to keep saying is I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m a waiter. Sorry I don’t have anything going on that you can tell Patty and Helen at Bridge Club about, or that I messed things up with Ginger, and that I quit playing Grandad’s trumpet, and that I dropped French my junior year in high school, and that I didn’t do that internship you wanted me to do at Garroway & Associates, and that I look like hell when you see me, and that I still haven’t taken my drum set out of your basement. I’m sorry about all of that. I wish I was more like M. J. She is such a together person, and I watch her with Lizzie and wish I could have turned into something kind of the same.

Yesterday, I walked a few blocks to the Regent Theater because they are hiring a special events curator. For a second, I imagined myself there, more serious, working as part of the team, maybe even holding a clipboard and fountain pen, and it excited me. I didn’t know how I’d convince them, but I wanted to. I stood up straight. I wore a wool coat. I held a folder with my résumé in it. But when I got to the main door, a woman in the lobby asked if she could help me. I froze. I couldn’t do it. The ceilings were too high. The floor was too polished. The whole place seemed so big to me. I had to just reach for a brochure and leave. I don’t know what that’s about.

I’m trying to wake up. I’m trying, Mom. I wish something in me would snap, that I’d be closer. Closer to what HE was. Man, I still can hear his voice so clearly. Can you? I wish I could fix Betsy with my own hands, that you’d see me driving her and you’d feel proud, and somewhere, wherever he is, he’d feel good about me, too. It hurts. It hurts that I’m like this.

Maybe it’s better if you and I don’t see each other for a while. Maybe we should just write. I don’t want to fight with you. Maybe I can be better soon.

Love,

Luke





7. The Blue Bicycle




There are some things Alex Lionel can’t accept, and one of them is that St. Vincent’s switched to electric prayer candles a few years ago. As people shuffle out of five o’clock mass, he and Kay make their way to the front of the church. He rests his hand between Kay’s shoulder blades on the peacock-blue coat she’s had for years. She limps slightly from her broken ankle over the summer (she slipped on their wet deck steps) and his elbow has been bothering him (too much golf?). He wonders how they became an old couple all of a sudden, slowly making their way up the aisle.

He smiles at Theresa, the organist, who has just lit her own candle, and he nods to Will Garlin, who lost his wife last year. A boy in his twenties with longish dark hair and an old overcoat sits in a pew by himself in the middle of the sea of polished wood, looking up at the ceiling. He holds a book that Alex thinks for a second is a Bible, but then recognizes it as A Separate Peace, something Benny read once in school.

The priest is gone, the lights are dim. The electric candles flicker in their fake way, but there is still something touching and holy about the whole thing. The ceilings reach high, and in a few weeks, they will bring in the poinsettias stacked in a pyramid behind the altar, and place greenery along the aisle.