“Hey, wanna see a backflip?” Tina calls from her new purchase, a mini-trampoline, as I clean fish on the back porch.
“No. I do not. We’ve done well staying out of hospitals these days, let’s keep it that way.”
“Spoilsport!”
Garrett jumps out of his pickup, covered in mud from head to toe. Tina does a pseudo-jackknife to show off. “Where you been?” she asks.
Garrett holds up a portfolio for the world to see. “Had to meet Glen Dayton out at the site. They pour the cement tomorrow. I tell you guys, a more splendiferous camp house you will never see.”
Since Garrett had never mentioned the camp house after our come-to-Jesus in the woods, I assumed the project had been called off or at least postponed.
He rubs his belly and dances a little jig. “Hoo, boy. I feel like a kid again.” Garrett walks up the steps, pokes a finger in the ice chest full of catfish, and pulls back with a fake holler like he’s been finned. Laughing, he winks at me, turns around to wink at Tina, and goes inside.
I run my hand absentmindedly down the outside of the ice chest, unsure of where to look, what to say, or who to say it to.
Tina jumps for another couple of seconds before she hops off the trampoline and heads up the back porch steps with lethal determination.
I steady myself for a moment before reaching back inside the chest—snap!
I pull my hand out just in time, a big blue missing my finger by only a hair.
* * *
Garrett covertly opens a drawer below the top shelf of the bookcase. Slipping out a piece of candy, he unwraps it, pops it in his mouth, drops into his La-Z-Boy, flicks on the TV with the remote, and reclines, smacking like a cow chewing its cud.
The back door slams as Tina enters, talking to no one in particular.
“Be damned if I will,” she says, grabbing the remote from his hands and turning off the TV before tossing it on the sofa out of his reach.
Garrett swallows the candy with a gulp. Without so much as a sideways glance in his direction, Tina storms the bookcase, pulls the bag of chewy candies from the drawer, and shakes them violently in his face. “I know you’ve been hiding chocolates, and I just wanted to say thanks for the support.”
Peeking in from the back door, I try to make myself small.
“Keep up these bad habits and you’ll be heading down for a dose of carboplatin. How would you like that, mister?”
Tina empties the entire contents of the bag on Garrett’s head and blasts past me on her way down the steps.
Garrett peers up at me through the mound of cellophane before he sheepishly pulls a piece of candy from inside the collar of his work shirt. “Hey, Bo Skeet,” he says, like a ghost.
* * *
Since Tina was doing so well, Sis had invited me down to her place in Pensacola for the weekend. After I led Tina through a tour of the bins of grains and bags of greens labeled for her convenience in the Stalworth kitchen, she had finally ordered me out the door. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “You need a break. Go have fun!”
“We got this, Bo Skeet,” Garrett says, gnawing on a piece of seaweed.
Sis had a new girlfriend. We went to her house the first night for dinner. They danced and made out in the kitchen while they cooked dinner. Feeling like a third wheel, I played with the surly Maltese in the living room until he bit me.
“When are you going back to L.A.?” Sis says later that night over surprisingly good pasta and shrimp. “Tina is fine.”
“It’s time you got back to your own life,” New Girlfriend says, with a hand on Sis’s back.
“I don’t know. Soon.”
“Is it Joe?”
“Joe had to take a job. He’s gone.”
“Oh,” Sis says. “Then I’m sorry. Or whatever.”
“So,” New Girlfriend says, “now you’re truly free to go back.”
“I guess so,” I say, glancing in my napkin to see if the wound from the dog bite has stopped bleeding.
“How exciting!” Sis says.
“Is it still bleeding?”
“Oh, um,” I say, not really hearing her and noticing the dog shooting me a nasty look from the love seat. I shoot him one back.
New Girlfriend has put her fork down, gazing at me with eyes of genuine concern. “Is it?”
“No,” I say. “It stopped. I’m good.”
* * *
I’ve rigged an old work shirt of Garrett’s to shade the glare of the sun from my open laptop. The whiz of the fishing rod in its holster heralds movement on the other end of the line. Grabbing the rod, I set the computer on the pier next to me.
Needing some time to myself, I’d driven up to Garrett’s lake. Since he had a dentist appointment that afternoon, I knew I’d have the place to myself. I was relieved to find I could decompress underneath the shade of the cedars.
“Whoa, bro,” I say, more to myself than to the fish, letting the indomitable bastard take the line into deeper currents. On my way to the lake, I’d caught a glimpse of Joe taking the duffel he’d never unpacked to the pickup in front of his parents’ place. As far as I was concerned, stopping to say goodbye wasn’t even an option. I’d pushed every thought of his leaving to the back of my mind. I couldn’t begin to fathom the depth of suffering this separation could bring. I remembered staring at the ratty duffel in the corner of the room from the warmth of Joe’s arms, wondering if it had been with him when he lost Kyle.
I hadn’t paid him a visit since he’d given me the news, and I was conscious of the damage my absence could be creating. One day I had decided to make my way to his place but tripped on a pine branch in the middle of the path and became completely unhinged. I jumped and kicked at the brittle limb for what must have been two minutes. Catching my breath and whatever was left of my wits, I realized I’d come to depend on him in ways I was too terrified to count.
Sis was right, I decided. Since Tina was doing so well, it was time for her to fly on her own. I would pack my bags and return to the Golden State. And contrary to what my former agent might have to say about it, I did, in fact, have a life back there.
“I miss you more than you deserve, you little shit.” Caroline’s voice crackled through the cell phone the night before. Her speech was peppered with the language she always directed to L.A. traffic, a habit that wore on my nerves.
“Please don’t cuss traffic while you’re talking to me. You know how that grates.”
“Sorry.”
“So, I think I’m gonna be coming back. I mean not right now, but soon. And I don’t want that to mean anything.” I wondered what she could be thinking on her end. I knew it sounded harsh and insensitive. I couldn’t imagine she actually missed the black cloud that hung over our relationship those last couple of years. I know I didn’t. Still, it had been a union we both had found difficult to sever.
“Oh. Well, sure,” she’d said. I could tell she was making a valiant attempt to remain neutral.
“I’ve been seeing someone,” I said. “He’s…well, he’s a Joe.” Although there was a pause, this couldn’t have come as a big shock to her, as we’d had more than one conversation about my family history and my place in it.
“Oh, uh-huh,” she said, unconvincingly nonchalant. “And how is that?”
“I think I screwed it up. The whole thing terrifies me. You know how I am with these things.” I threw this out because I really needed to talk about it with my best friend.
“Look, I’ve gotta get out of the car,” she said. “I’ve got a class.”
“Oh, sure.”
“So, whenever you decide you’re coming back, just call and let me know and I’ll pick you up,” she said before she hung up.
The tugging on the fishing line brings my attention back to the task at hand. I focus on the cunning creature fighting tooth and nail for the chance to awaken another day in the muddy sludge of the swamp’s bottom.
I recall that, as I passed the Tischman place, Joe glanced briefly in my direction with no sign of acknowledgment. Too many days had passed with no word from me. The cliché about the pit of one’s stomach being the resting place for longing and denial proves truer than ever. I actually felt a pull in my solar plexus, like I was finishing off a set of crunches.
“Easy, buddy,” I say, letting the diving, swirling fish take its prize even farther away from the pier, my eyes falling on the handle of the rod in my lap, the line unspooling like unbridled thoughts released to some cold, black infinity.
* * *
Tiny plastic crates of purple petunias and bright pink zinnias line the front seat of Garrett’s pickup. Tina wanted something to brighten the sunroom in the late summer stubbornly lingering on the Gulf Coast. Having taken Blue Cove Road northbound from town for some time now to avoid the sight of the Tischman place, today I find myself entering from the opposite direction. Slowing the truck to a virtual crawl as I approach the house, I spot a thin, lively-looking couple who must be Joe’s parents taking luggage from a late-model BMW. The sobering sight reminds me of the one miracle I’d practically kicked to the curb.
I continue on before I could decipher which one Joe got his graceful good looks from.
Sometimes when we’re weak, we can only handle one miracle at a time.