The Best of Me(87)
Oh no, I thought. Please don’t embarrass me. I was just wondering who the other important person might be when she said, “With us today is the outstanding soccer team from…” She named a high school in the Triangle Area and concluded with, “Let’s give them all a great big hand!”
The woman behind me whooped and cheered, and when no one joined her, she raised her voice, shouting, “You people are…assholes! I mean, what the hell, you can’t even applaud for your own teenagers?”
I’d meant to but figured the team was back in coach. They wouldn’t have heard me one way or the other, so what difference did it make?
“Pathetic,” the woman spat. “Too wrapped up in your…smartphones and iPads to congratulate a group of high school athletes.”
You couldn’t say she hadn’t nailed us. Still I had to bite my hand to keep from laughing. It’s so funny to be called an asshole by someone who doesn’t know you, but then again knows you so perfectly.
“See that woman?” I said to Hugh when he met me at the baggage claim a few minutes later.
I told him what had happened on the plane, and he folded his arms across his chest, the way he always does before lecturing me. “She was right, you know. You should have applauded.”
“We’ve been apart for two months,” I reminded him. “Would it kill you to take my side in this?”
He apologized, but after I’d wrestled my bag off the carousel and we’d started toward the parking lot, he added quietly, but not so quietly that I couldn’t hear him, “You really should have clapped.”
From the airport we drove to my brother Paul’s. There we met up with my sister Gretchen, who had a cast on her right forearm and held it aloft, like someone perpetually being sworn in. “It helps ease the pain,” she explained.
I hadn’t seen Gretchen since the previous spring and was startled by her appearance. For as long as I could remember she’d worn her hair long, and though it still fell to below her shoulder blades in the back, the top was now cropped and stood from the crown of her head like the fur of a graying German shepherd. Odder still, she had a sun visor on. “Since when have you had this mullet?” I asked.
Only when she lifted it off did I realize she was wearing a cap, the sort sold in joke shops. “The hair is attached to the top of it. See? I got it at the beach last month.”
I hadn’t been to our house on Emerald Isle—the Sea Section—since we’d bought it five months earlier, though Hugh had. He’d flown over in late September to start making improvements. Gretchen joined him for a few days shortly before Halloween and fell into a rut while walking on the beach. That’s how she broke her arm. “Can you believe it?” she asked. “No one has worse luck than me.”
When there’s no traffic, it’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Raleigh to Emerald Isle. We left at around eight p.m., and on the way, I asked Gretchen about her job. She works as a horticulturalist for the city of Raleigh and had recently discovered a campsite in one of its larger parks. That’s common enough, but this one was occupied by someone we once knew. His name was familiar, but I couldn’t picture his face until Gretchen put him in context. “He used to come over to the house and hang out with Mom.”
“Oh, right,” I said.
Kids like to believe that their parents will get lonely after they leave the house, but I think my mother actually did. She delighted in her children and always enjoyed talking to our friends and the people we were going out with. “Why don’t you invite Jeff to dinner?” I remember her asking Gretchen one night in the late seventies.
“Because we broke up a month ago and I’ve been in my room crying ever since?”
“Well, he still needs to eat,” my mother said.
The fellow who wound up living in a city park—Kevin, I’ll call him—started dropping by in the early eighties. His parents and mine owned some rental property together, and over the years both he and I performed odd jobs there. I remembered him as directionless and guessed from what my sister told me that he pretty much stayed that way. Still, it seemed incredible to me that something like this could happen, for we were middle-class and I’d been raised to believe that our social status inoculated us against severe misfortune. A person might be broke from time to time—who wasn’t?—but you could never be poor the way that actual poor people were: poor with lice and missing teeth. Your genes would reject it. Slip too far beneath the surface, and wouldn’t your family resuscitate you with a loan or rehab or whatever it was you needed to get back on your feet? Then there’d be friends, hopefully ones who went to college and might at the very least view you as a project, the thing they’d renovate after the kitchen was finished.
At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe? Which drunk or junkie or unmedicated schizophrenic was I crossing the street to avoid when I put it all together? I didn’t know what the story was with Kevin. The two of us had had every advantage, yet now he was living in a thicket three miles from the house he grew up in.
My siblings and I used to worry that once our father was gone a similar fate might befall our sister Tiffany, who had committed suicide six months earlier. Like all of us, she received an inheritance a few years after our mother died. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was certainly more than I had ever seen. The money arrived just after I really needed it, at a moment when, for the first time in my adult life, I was finally on my feet. I paid off my student loan with a portion of it. My father wanted me to invest the rest, but I didn’t want the idea of money, I wanted the real thing, so I parked it in my checking account and would go to an ATM sometimes twice a day just to look at my balance on the screen. A year earlier the most I’d had was a hundred dollars. Now this.