In Harmony(51)

“Why aren’t you in school?”

He shrugged sheepishly at the ground. “I don’t know,” he said. “Don’t want to go.” Now he looked up from his shoes and his eyes widened. “What happened to you?”

“You know what happened to me,” I said. “I want to know what’s happening with you. You can’t not go to school.”

“Why not?” he spat back. “You don’t go to school.”

“I stayed in school until they kicked me out and now I’m taking a test to finish. You are in the eighth grade. You’re fucking up your future if you don’t go.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, no commitment in his tone. I hadn’t gotten through to him. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to do or what to say. I didn’t have the words. I wasn’t his dad. I was just the neighbor with the drunk father.

And suddenly I was so fucking tired. Weary to my bones.

“You want to help me run lines?”

“You’re not going to take me to school?”

“I can drive you there every day of my life, Benny, and it won’t matter if you don’t know it’s important. This play I’m doing right now? It’s important to me. So yeah, I could use the help.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I handed him my script and he sat down on the semi-truck tire. “Where are you at?”

“I have it marked.”

He found the dog-eared page and flipped it open. “To be or not to be?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said, taking a final drag off my cigarette. I dropped it, ground it out with my boot. “I’m not acting it, just running it for the lines.”

“I’m ready,” Benny said.

I stood in the middle of the scrapyard clearing and closed my eyes.



“To be or not to be, that is the question.

Whether t’is nobler in the mind to suffer

the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

or to take arms against a sea of troubles

and, by opposing, end them?”



My shoulders sagged. “To sleep. To die,” I said my voice low. “To die, to sleep perchance to dream.”

“You skipped a bunch of stuff.”

“I know.”

“What does it mean?” Benny asked, his voice hushed now.

“He’s asking if it’s worth it. To keep going or not.”

“Is it?”

I don’t know, I thought. Sometimes I just don’t know

“What’s the next line?” I asked.

“Ay, there’s the rub,” Benny said and wrinkled his nose with a small laugh.

I went through the rest of the monologue, Benny stopping me now and then to correct my mistakes. I got to the end, where Ophelia entered, and fell silent. My thoughts filled with Willow, imagining her stepping onto this stage with me—this crappy junkyard—looking beautiful and fragile, but strong and resilient too.

Benny thought I had forgotten my lines. “In your orisons, may all my sins be remembered.” He wrinkled his nose again. “What are orisons?”

“Prayers,” I said. “She can’t hear him yet, but he’s asking her to remember him in all of her prayers. Like saying goodbye.”

“Is he going away?” Benny asked.

“Yeah, he is,” I said, the words dropping from me like stones. “And he can’t take her with him.”

I walked over to Benny and took the script out of his hand to shut it.

“Benjamin, if you were ever my friend, you will stay in school. For me and for your mother. You have to take care of yourself because no one’s going to do it for you. Your mom is going to try her best but it’s up to you, in the end.”

“Where you going?” Benny asked, blinking back tears.

“I’m going to go stay at a friend’s house for a while and after Hamlet closes, I’m leaving Harmony.”

“Will I see you again?” His voice trembled now.

“Yeah, of course. You’ll see me around. And I’ll come say goodbye before I go.”

Benny sniffed and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt. “Sucks, man,” he said. “But I’m glad for you. I’ll miss you.”

I reached out, ran my hand over his close-cropped hair. “Come on. I’m taking you to school.”

I dropped Benny off at Elizabeth Mason Middle School, then drove my truck back to the trailer, my thoughts still full of Willow and a page covered in little black X’s.

I would ask nothing of her. She owed me nothing. But I’d give her the play as best as I could. I’d help her get through to the end, to tell her story and find the relief she kept asking me about. And when it was done, I would go.

Pops was in his room with the door shut when I came back. I went directly to my own small room and packed up a bag of my things. It wasn’t much. Everything I owned fit in one small suitcase.

Outside my dad’s bedroom door, I paused. I raised my hand to knock and then let it fall again. Instead I tore out a sheet from my script and wrote on the back:



I’ll pay the bills and send you money. You don’t have to worry about anything.

--Isaac