TIM PRATT
I left home five years ago, and haven’t been back since—so why do I still think of it as home at all?
After almost a week spent driving across the country on I-40 East, I cut north on Highway 202, and within an hour reached the outskirts of my hometown, Cold Corners. The only corners are in the endless rectangular fields of soybeans and tobacco, and with triple-digit heat and 90 percent humidity in summer, it’s hardly “cold,” so I don’t know where it got the name. (Local wisdom contends the name is a corruption of some Cherokee word meaning “fertile land,” but I’m willing to bet that’s pure Carolina invention.)
I thought about pulling off to the gravel shoulder and calling David to let him know I’d arrived safely, but decided against it. When he threw all my clothes, my best saucepan, and my knife bag out the window of our—technically his—condo in Oakland, that was probably his way of saying “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” His flair for the dramatic was one of the things I’d loved about him, when he wasn’t being dramatic at me. David was my first real boyfriend after culinary school, and I’d been dumb enough to think it was forever. Dumb enough to think I could go more than a couple of years without screwing it up, anyway.
The closer I got to Cold Corners, the less eager I was to finish the trip. I decided not to go up to the “big house”—once owned by my grandparents, now home to my older brother, Jimmy, his wife, and nephews and nieces I hadn’t seen in years—right away. I wonder, if I had gone to their house first, taken my place as the younger child, slipped into those old patterns, put up with the teasing and sympathy for my televised failure for a few days, then slunk back to California … would I have ever truly found my way home again?
I tell people the only thing I miss about home is the food, and that much is true. I got to town at lunchtime, more or less, and thought I’d be able to face the prospect of Jimmy, Mom, Dad, and the extended F if I got a bite to eat first. After a week of greased-up fast food and limp pizza delivered to motel rooms, I was hungry for something real—being picky is an occupational hazard of being a chef—and the prospect of Eastern Carolina barbecue sounded like a gateway to heaven.
You can’t get it on the West Coast. Oh, there are places that serve “Carolina-style” barbecue, but at best it’s an approximation, carob when you want chocolate. In North Carolina alone, there are two distinct styles of barbecue, though both start with slow-cooking a pig in a pit full of burning hickory chips: there’s the One True Barbecue, with vinegar-and-red-pepper sauce, favored in Eastern North Carolina, and the heretical Lexington-style barbecue more common in the western half of the state, with its hideous gloppy tomato-based sauce.
I pulled up in the weedy gravel parking lot outside Willard’s B-B-Q, a Cold Corners institution renowned far and wide for the lightness and perfection of its hush puppies and the skill of its pitmaster. What a great title for a cook—the best I’ve ever had is “executive chef,” and that doesn’t come close. (Of course, just then, I didn’t have any job title at all, unless you count “recently fired for trying to punch a customer.”)
There were no cars or pickups in the lot, which was beyond bizarre—it should have been packed, even on a Tuesday. For a heart-stopping moment I looked up at the faded sign (depicting the inevitable smiling pig wearing a chef’s toque) and worried that Willard’s had closed … but then I saw movement inside the greasy windows and climbed out of my car.
Summer in North Carolina. Stepping out of the air-conditioning was like having a sheet sopping with warm water wrapped around my face. A sudden, brutal pang of homesickness for the East Bay hit me. I remembered the place in the hills where David and I used to sit and watch the cool fog roll in over the bay below, but I couldn’t see a way back there that ended in anything but pity or pain.
I hit the button on my key chain to lock the car, then felt stupid. When I was a kid, people barely locked their houses here, let alone their cars. Then I remembered some of my brother’s recent e-mails complaining about tweakers and thieves, and left it locked. My friends in Oakland used to joke about how I was a simple country boy too trusting to make it in the big city, but I bet meth heads made up a bigger percentage of the population in my hometown than they did in the East Bay. I’d lost at least two of my innumerable second cousins in home meth-lab accidents.
I pushed through the front door of Willard’s into a dim space full of empty square tables draped in red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloths. A couple of ceiling fans whirred away like the propellers of ancient planes, swirling the hot air around.
“You driving one of them hybrids?” the brassy blonde leaning on the counter said, and I braced myself for contempt and sneers as I nodded, but she just said, “The way gas prices are going, I oughta get one of those myself. The pitmaster drives a van rigged to run on biodiesel, and he ain’t bought gas in years—just strains out the hush puppy and french fry oil and uses that. What can I getcha?”
The menu was chalked up on a board behind the counter, and looked like it hadn’t been changed since the last time I’d been there, at least half a decade before. “I’ll take the number two plate and an iced tea.” No need to specify sweet tea; that was the only way they did it at Willard’s.
“Sit down anywhere. It’ll be right out.” She sauntered back to the kitchen.
I took a table near the counter, and like all the other tables, it held a glass bottle of hot sauce, a squeeze bottle of sweeter barbecue sauce, a cage of sugar packets in case your tea wasn’t sweet enough (hard to imagine), and a roll of paper towels in lieu of napkins, the latter an innovation I considered suggesting to the owner of my restaurant back home, before I remembered he’d fired me. It seems unfair to get fired for something you did when you were so drunk you barely remember it, but that’s life.
I pulled out my phone—I’d finally turned off the keyword alert that told me every time my name was mentioned online, but I still occasionally, morbidly, checked the social media sites to see what people were saying about me—but there was no signal. I didn’t have time to be annoyed before the waitress was back with a red plastic oval tray that held a heaping scoop of barbecue (“pulled pork” as the rest of the world calls it), a white bread roll, and a wax-paper-lined basket of hush puppies.
The food was … well, I’m a cook, not a food writer, but it was like eating my own childhood memories. The barbecue was cooked to perfection, seasoned just right, spicy and vinegar-astringent sauce combining ideally with the meltingly delicious fat in the pork. The hush puppies were perfect, too: oblongs of deep-fried cornbread, just a little crunchy on the outside, sweet and fluffy inside. The tea was sweet enough to make me want to schedule a cleaning at the dentist, but even that tasted like home.
I ate with single-minded intensity, then leaned back in my chair and belched quietly to myself. The waitress squinted at me from the cash register. “You look real familiar to me,” she said. “You always had blond hair?”
“Oh. No, but if you recognize me it’s probably because—I’ve been on TV lately. That reality cooking show, Stand the Heat.”
She did not seem awed by my fleeting celebrity. She frowned, and I revised my estimate of her age from thirties to forties. “Had to cancel the cable a while back,” she said. “Never seen it. Did you win?”
I shook my head. “Came in fourth. Got cut right before the finale. That episode just aired last week.” I think I kept all the bitterness out of my voice. There were three finalists. Even the two who didn’t win would get perks: money, bragging rights, invites back for a future all-star show. They were good chefs, and one of them had even been a friend—a summer-camp kind of friend, though, and we hadn’t kept in touch since we stopped living in the same New York town house—but I didn’t believe any of them were better than me. I’d been a front-runner, and I knew it, winning lots of the weekly competitions … but one fish bone in one fillet served to one flamboyantly vicious guest judge had ended my run.
“Too bad,” she said. “Still, fourth place ain’t bad. I never came in fourth place at anything. Maybe I saw you in a magazine or something, though I swear … Huh. I’ve always wondered about those shows—is it all real, or is it fake, like pro wrestling?”
I hesitated, unsure how to answer the question, even though I’d been asked its equivalent many times. “It’s … the contests are real, the games and competitions, though they cut out a lot of the boring stuff to make it seem more fast-paced and exciting. But when you watch the shows, the stuff you see people say, a lot of that’s encouraged, if not exactly scripted. And … ” I tried to think of a way to say what I meant. “The me on-screen isn’t the real me. I don’t think I’m that cocky, for one thing, and they really tried to play up the fact that I come from the South—I swear they showed every time I said ‘y’all,’ four or five times at least. The producers turn you into a character.”
In fact, the bizarre falseness of reality TV had knocked me off balance in my own life, causing me to question all sorts of assumed truths—was I the person my friends thought I was, hotshot chef and grinning joker, or was that just another character I was playing, or a character they needed me to play? Who was the real real me? My anxiety over that question had led me to make some lousy decisions and burn way too many bridges. This road trip was supposed to help me settle the question of who I was and what I wanted, but it wasn’t working so far.
I could tell I’d lost the waitress—at least, I thought so, until she said, “I reckon we all have to play different parts for different people. Sometimes I think the only time we can really be ourselves is when we’re all alone with nobody to disappoint.”
I laughed and said that was true. I left a generous tip on the table, then went up to the counter and paid the bill—I was stuffed, and the whole meal cost less than a happy-hour cocktail at a decent restaurant back in Oakland. “Is Junior out back?” I asked, leaning on the counter across from her.
She raised an eyebrow. “You know Junior?”
“I used to live around here. Even worked here at the restaurant one summer in high school, just running the fryer. My first real cooking job.” Junior was the owner and pitmaster, and he’d been in his fifties back then, a big man who got up long before dawn to start cooking the day’s pigs, and who always smelled of fragrant smoke.
“Well, ain’t that something!” she said. “We should hang your picture on the wall, you being on TV and all. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, honey … but Junior passed on last year. Wasn’t a heart attack, either—everybody always thinks it was the food—it was cancer.” She pronounced it almost like “CAIN-sir,” and I wondered if I’d pick up my old accent again while I was in town, the way unwrapped butter will pick up the flavor of onions or garlic sitting next to it on the counter.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. He was … ” Kind of a son-of-a-bitch, really, bossy and short-tempered and a perfectionist, but then, lots of chefs were like that, and he was a chef, even if a very specialized one. “He was something else,” I said at last.
“He left the restaurant to his assistant,” she went on. “None of his kids wanted to get into the family business, and he knew they’d just sell the place, so he gave it to TJ instead. Lord, there was a fuss about that! But it’s all settled down now. Did you know TJ?”
“No, I don’t think so, but that’s funny—I’m a TJ too.” Terrence James Brydon, and even though everyone called me Terry nowadays, to my family I’d always be TJ.
“Small world. Where you living now?”
“Oakland, California.” Even though, on the show, they always put “San Francisco, CA” underneath my name on the screen. Irritated the shit out of me. Some of the best, most innovative cooking is happening in the East Bay, where newer chefs can actually afford to open restaurants—some of them, anyway. I couldn’t afford it, hence my attempt to make money by going on the show, my brush with temporary fame, and all the unpleasantness that followed. And also hence my decision to accept this year’s invitation to the family reunion, because three thousand miles away from my new life seemed like a good place to be.
“California,” she said, and didn’t add the perfunctory “land of fruits and nuts.” For which I was grateful, since I was just the kind of fruit and nut people thought of when they said that. Part of why I’d gotten on the show was because the producers liked the idea of a six-foot-three, former-high-school-football-playing, Southern-food-specializing gay chef. (I’m not even gay—I’m bi, but reality show producers like bisexual contestants only when they’re cute women.) “What brings you back here?” she asked, and seemed genuinely interested.
“Family reunion.” I dredged up a grin. “You can’t get good banana pudding on the West Coast.” The closest I’d come was a gourmet small-batch banana-pudding-flavored ice pop.
“I believe it. Have a good day, now, and come back and see us before you head west.”
“I’ll do my best.” I didn’t tell her I’d walk across the surface of Mercury for another meal at Willard’s. After all, people who lived here could come by anytime they wanted. Barbecue was as everyday here as good burritos are back on the West Coast. I just thanked her and went outside, the bell over the door jingling above me.
I paused for a moment, the heat enfolding me like a monster’s embrace. The air seemed wavy, distorted like flawed glass—like the heat shimmers you see over blacktop. I wiped sweat out of my eyes. Though the idea of my air-conditioned car was tempting, I decided to trudge around back to see the pit. Open-pit barbecuing is an endangered species even in North Carolina, with old restaurants closing down and not many new ones opening, and even though I was sure nothing had changed since my brief stint as a fry cook, I wanted to take a look at the setup while I still could.
Before I made it around the corner, though, I saw something that made me stop dead. A man wearing soot-stained overalls came toward me from behind the restaurant, mopping at his neck and brow with a filthy white cloth.
I stared at him, because he was me. Same mole just below the right eye. Same crooked nose from when it got broken and set not quite right during a game back in high school. He was wearing smudged glasses, and he outweighed me by twenty or thirty pounds (most of it beer belly), but the only other real difference was his greasy flyaway brown hair—and mine had looked the same until I buzzed it short and dyed it blond.
I took a step backward, but he didn’t look a bit surprised at meeting his doppelganger. “Huh,” he said. “Never thought we’d see you around here again.” His accent was thick, far more so than mine, which had mellowed a lot after a few years out of state. My native Californian (ex) boyfriend David used to laugh whenever my dad or brother called and asked for me, because he could barely even understand their hellos.
What do you do when you’re faced with yourself, or at least some version of yourself? David was doing a lit degree in grad school (on his rich parents’ dime), and he told me once that the writer Jorge Luis Borges claimed to have met a younger version of himself in a park, and had a pleasant conversation with his counterpart while sitting on a bench.
But I’m no Borges. And this other Terry—this TJ—wasn’t a younger me, some fry cook unstuck in time, but a me my own age, early twenties, but living another life. Time travel, I could just about comprehend, but this?
I ran, faster than I ever ran in an attempt to score a touchdown or catch a bus. I jumped into my car and tore out of the parking lot, watching myself diminish in the rearview mirror.
By the time I got to the big house, I’d stopped shaking and had convinced myself I’d just seen someone who looked a little like me and freaked out. I blamed days on the road with no company but my own, compounded by the collected stresses of getting a little bit famous, getting a lot drunk, doing stupid things, going from semi-celebrity chef to unemployed, and getting dumped by my boyfriend and kicked out of the house, not to mention the cognitive dissonance of returning home for the first time since I left at eighteen.
I pulled up in front of the big house, next to a dusty station wagon (hers) and a gleaming, pristine black half-ton pickup (his). Before I’d even gotten out of the car, the screen door on the front porch banged open and a stream of nephews and nieces flowed out. I’m a fairly terrible uncle—I could tell you all their names, I think, but not which kid each name belonged to—but I’m not utterly hopeless: I had a bag of gifts for them, with a snow globe containing the Golden Gate Bridge, a collapsible miniature telescope, a little puzzle that had something to do with spherical magnets, and other gimcrackery that would fall apart under their zealous attention, but would delight them in the meantime.
Once I’d distracted the pack with presents, I made my way up the porch, into the embrace of my older brother, Jimmy, who had a farmer’s tan (he’s a contractor), a sloping potbelly, thinning hair, and a grin as wide as the world. He’s a dozen years older than me, because I was a “bonus baby”—in other words, the accidental surprise my parents hadn’t meant to have, though they did their best to never let me suspect it. Jimmy hugged me hard, but not hard enough to crush the inevitable pack of cigarettes tucked into his shirt pocket. His wife, Emily, fluttered in the background, blond and insubstantial, cooing noises of welcome. She looked exactly the same as she had at their wedding (I was a groomsman, sweating like only a twelve-year-old in a borrowed suit can): like a rare and fragile bird, though I knew she was a lot tougher than she seemed.
Before long I was settled in a rocker on the porch beside my brother, each of us holding a beer, looking out across the long fields, the wife and children off somewhere else, and it was like I’d just been here yesterday.
“So why come back this year?” Jimmy said. “We’ve invited you for every reunion, and you always said you were too busy. So, what—sixth time’s the charm?”
I shook my head. “Things back in Oakland just got … weird.”
Jimmy grunted. “My brother, Chef Hollywood.”
I snorted. “Being on TV is a pain in the ass. My boss liked it—a lot of people came into the restaurant when the show started—and he gave me a raise to make sure I wouldn’t leave. But getting recognized on the street is just weird, and having people come into the restaurant, not because they heard the food was good, but because they wanted to get a look at me … ” I shook my head. “And then, I don’t know, some of the attention, maybe it went to my head, got me in a little trouble … ”
One night I’d gotten very drunk—I’m a chef, and we drink, as a rule, but this was orders of magnitude beyond my tolerance, with admirers buying me round after round, and this one guy, maybe twenty years old and adorable, paid me a lot of attention. One thing led to another. My boyfriend, David, found out, and that was it. We were over. The funny thing was, David and I had an open relationship, and were both known to see people on the side. But we also had rules: check in with your partner before getting intimate with someone new, and always practice safe sex, and … I failed on both counts.
I was so upset I kept on getting drunk, right on through my next shift, and when some asshole at table four started yelling about how overrated I was, how my food looked pretty on TV but tasted like shit, I came wading out of the kitchen and tried to hit him. I was so messed up I didn’t even connect, just knocked the table over and fell on the floor. That spared me an assault and battery charge, but not my job.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell Jimmy all that, especially about David dumping me. He knew I wasn’t straight, of course—at this point, everyone with a TV did, but I’d come out to my family when I was seventeen. My parents took it in stride; they live in the very buckle of the Bible Belt, and if pressed I’m sure they’d say they were Christian, but they’d never been churchgoers. My mom sort of suggested that if I liked women too, I might as well just find a nice girl and marry her, nobody’d ever know the difference, but she didn’t press the point. When my brother found out I’d been involved with other men, he just nodded and absorbed it—like the desert absorbing a spoonful of water—and we never spoke of it again. So I just said, “I acted like a real asshole, and pissed off a lot of my friends, got in trouble at work, and it seemed like a good idea to get away for a while, and come home, and try to remember who I really am.”
Jimmy nodded like that made sense. He’s a good brother.
I wasn’t willing to go into my interpersonal breakdowns with him, but maybe he could set my mind at ease about something else—the mysterious pitmaster TJ. Maybe he was some cousin I’d forgotten, which would explain the family resemblance. I said, “I stopped by Willard’s on the way in—”
Jimmy whistled. “That’s a shame, ain’t it? When Junior passed, his kids thought they’d sell the place and make a pile of money, but nobody wanted to buy it. I guess it’s hard to find anybody who wants to get up before dawn to cook pigs every day. I hate seeing the place all closed up, though, the windows broke, and all that graffiti the meth heads scrawled on the walls … End of an era. We can run over to the White Swan later if you want, they do a good barbecue plate, even if it’s not pit-cooked.”
My belly was still full of Willard’s pulled pork, and even after two swigs of beer, I could taste the last residue of the hush puppies in my mouth. Was Jimmy messing with me? For what possible reason? If Willard’s was closed … what did that mean? Was I having a nervous breakdown?
I put my beer down gently. “I, ah … It’s been a long trip. I think I could use a nap.”
Jimmy nodded. “Sure. I don’t know why you had to drive the whole way—you could’ve flown in, rented a car in Raleigh.”
“I just wanted some time to think.” Which was true, though in point of fact, I wasn’t sure I’d had any thoughts worth thinking in those long days on the road. The problem is, no matter how far or fast you drive, you can’t leave yourself behind. And if you can’t feel at home in your own head, where can you?
“We’ve got one of the spare rooms made up for you. You’re lucky—tomorrow night we’re going to have a full house, people staying over, sleeping on every couch and cot and bit of floor, and you’ve got a bed to yourself. We’re gonna have to stack cousins around you like cordwood.” He grinned. “I hope you’re ready to get stared at and whispered about tomorrow. Prodigal son and celebrity all rolled up into one.”
“I can’t wait,” I said.
I’d expected to sleep until dinnertime or so, but when I woke up blinking in that stale room that smelled of mothballs, it was full dark, which that time of year meant it must be past nine p.m. I fumbled for my phone and saw it was closer to two in the morning. I groaned and rolled out of bed, switching on the lamp by the bed. My belly rumbled unpleasantly, and I slipped out, going down the hallway in my socks, past family photographs that had hung on the walls since my grandparents were alive. Jimmy and his wife hadn’t altered the decor much, so it was still all done in Country Cluttered.
I went downstairs, avoiding the creaking step with my ancient instincts, and into the kitchen, where a single light burned above the stove, as always. I poked my head into the fridge, which was absolutely packed with food ready for tomorrow, or prepped to be popped into the oven according to a byzantine schedule devised by the wives. Most of what I’d learned about the logistics of meal prep had come from getting underfoot in Southern kitchens during the holidays, when hordes of women worked with clockwork precision to turn out their respective specialties, all ready to hit the table at the same time: chicken pastry, baked macaroni and cheese, candied yams, fried chicken, collard greens, green bean casserole, black-eyed peas, banana pudding, two dozen kinds of pie …
I didn’t dare disturb that shrine to Southern cookery, so I sat at the table and ate a bowl of kids’ cereal and topped it off with an apple so improbably large and red that there was no way in hell it was organic. After I finished eating I thought for a moment, then scribbled a note to leave on the kitchen table—couldn’t sleep, went for a drive, home by morning—and went outside.
Willard’s was shuttered and graffiti-covered, and when I peered in the shattered windows, there were no chairs or tables, just heaps of unidentifiable trash and empty beer cans. I went around back, to the pit and the smokehouse, and found just a dirty hole in the ground next to a tin-roofed shack, all looking entirely unlovely in the moonlight.
Okay, then. I was going crazy. Fair enough. Good to know.
After that, I drove around some old familiar roads, past the high school where I’d been a minor football hero, through the half-empty remnants of our main street, and around the graveyard, whose underground population vastly outnumbered that of the living in Cold Corners.
Eventually I drove over the long bridge that spanned the river, and the air went all blurry for a moment—or, more likely, my exhausted eyes watered.
I slowed down, and on the far side of the river saw my first sign of light and life in that postmidnight world: a long low wooden building near the bank of the river, with a dirt lot packed astonishingly full for the late hour: pickups, motorcycles, station wagons, sedans, SUVs … everything but a hybrid like mine. Some little country bar, the kind I’d brazened my way into often enough as a teenager, armed with a fake ID and the certain knowledge that I’d always been big for my age. I thought, I could go for a drink, and turned into the lot.
I sat in my idling car, staring at the sign above the door, illuminated now by the wash of my headlights.
It said TJ’S PLACE.
The door banged open and a man staggered out, lifting his hand in front of his face to shield himself from the glare of my headlights. But before his hand rose, I saw enough of his face to recognize him easily. He was dressed in a flannel lumberjack shirt with the sleeves ripped off, grease-stained jeans, and a dirty baseball cap—all things I’d never wear—but his face was familiar enough. I saw it every day in the mirror.
He lowered his hand, squinted, and gave a hesitant wave.
I reversed out of the lot, making my little hybrid’s tires squeal, and roared back toward the big house. Once I’d flown across the bridge, I forced myself to slow down, because I knew the local cops love nothing better than pulling over speeders with out-of-state plates.
And I was a bit terrified that if I did get pulled over, the smirking cop would be wearing my face.
I did sleep, a little—a thin sort of sleep, just before dawn. I woke after a couple of confused hours to the smell of frying bacon and went downstairs, where an epic breakfast was under way: yellow heaps of scrambled eggs, fluffy as clouds; fried slices of ham; scratch biscuits and sausage gravy. The nieces and nephews were arrayed around the big kitchen table, devastating the food set before them, while my brother and sister-in-law leaned companionably against the sink, sipping mugs of coffee. “Domestic bliss” is a funny phrase to use in a room where between three and five children (it was hard to count with them in motion) are making colossal amounts of noise, but nevertheless, it fit.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and joined my brother and sister-in-law. “Sorry I slept so long. I was more wiped out than I thought.”
“Mom and Dad stopped by for dinner last night,” Jimmy said, and I winced. He laughed. “It’s all right, they’ll be along to see you soon enough. Mom did peek in on you when you were sleeping, though, just like she did when you were a little boy.”
I watched the kids demolish their breakfasts. “I should have helped cook. I feel bad.”
“Nah,” Jimmy said. “You’d just get underfoot. You could whip up some pork brains and eggs if you want. Emily won’t make ’em.”
I mimed gagging. Our grandmother had loved brains and eggs for breakfast. I’m hardly squeamish—I’ve cooked my share of kidneys and sweetbreads and made feasts of offal, and I’ve been known to defend chitlins and pickled pig’s feet to certain chefs of my acquaintance, but just the thought of those grayish brains mixed with yellow scrambled eggs has been enough to turn my stomach since childhood.
“You can help fry up the chicken for lunch, I reckon,” Jimmy went on. “None of that ‘fried chicken three ways’ business you did on the show, please, if you can restrain yourself.”
“Buttermilk fried chicken, Korean crispy chicken, and Middle Eastern style,” I said, grinning. “That dish won me the car I’ve got parked out in front of your house, you know.”
“I don’t believe Aunt Helen has ever even heard of turmeric,” Emily said. “Or coriander either.”
“She’d call it terrorist chicken if you put it on her plate,” Jimmy said. “She’s real proud of you anyway, though. I imagine she’ll be along in a couple hours. She always comes early. Lots to do before then. Give me a hand setting up, little bro?”
I finished my coffee and got to work. We set up long folding tables underneath the spreading branches of the ancient oak trees in back of the house, where the shade would protect us from the worst of the day’s heat. We shook out plastic tablecloths and set up folding chairs, giving me flashbacks to catering jobs I’d taken during cooking school. As we worked, I glanced at Jimmy and said, “You know of a bar down by the river? Right close to the water, just on the other side of the bridge?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “There used to be a pool hall down there, but I believe it burned down four, five years ago. Why?”
“Oh, I thought I saw a place when I was out driving last night, that’s all. So much has changed around here, I’m just trying to get my head around the way things are now.”
“Ha. Sure. I know the real reason. The reunion hasn’t even started yet, and you already need a drink. Ain’t that right?”
“You got me there,” I said.
“We’ll crack a couple beers after noon,” he said, and winked. “Any earlier and Emily gives me this look. You aren’t married, so you can’t understand, but ninety-nine percent of making it work is avoiding doing things that get you that look.” He suddenly took an intense interest in the mechanism of the folding chair in his hand. “Mom told me about your, ah, friend, that y’all broke up, and I just wanted to say, I’m real sorry to hear that.”
I don’t think I’ve ever been more touched by anything in my life. I knew better than to spoil the moment by showing him how much it meant to me, so I just waved it away and said, “Plenty of fish in the sea.”
“Just don’t let Aunt Helen hear you’re single. She knows every single girl in the nearest five counties, and she’ll start planning your wedding before you’ve finished saying hello to ’em.”
“If you need me later,” I said, “I’ll just be hiding under this table here.”
But I didn’t hide. My parents got there around noon, and Mom and I did the big hugs, the it’s-been-too-longs. Dad shook my hand solemnly. He’s always been a formal guy, and after a two-minute conversation we’d pretty much caught up as well as we were going to. More people started trickling in soon after that, and the trickle became a flood by around three p.m. By four, there were at least a hundred members of the Brydon family tree and associated branches milling inside and outside the big house. Several packs of feral children roamed wild among the fields, countless half-familiar faces grinned at me, and I got my cheeks kissed far more often than a man of twenty-three years ever should.
Oh, a few of the second cousins pointedly refused to talk to me—being openly queer and Californian was too much for them—but most of the relatives were willing to ignore my moral failings, and a few made a great show of being especially liberal-minded and asking after my boyfriend, which was a twist of the knife I could have done without, even though they meant well. Aunt Helen was one of those, much to my surprise. (She’s not really my aunt, technically—she’s something like my grandmother’s second cousin—but where I come from every female relative over a certain age is an aunt, and yes, you pronounce it “ant,” like the bugs that ruin picnics.)
When the memory-lane walking and inevitable sympathies over my failure to win on Stand the Heat got to be too much, I holed up in the kitchen for a while, helping Emily and a rotating cast of Brydon women handle the cooking. They were willing enough to accommodate my presence, giving me trivial tasks, though traditionally men do not pass the kitchen’s threshold during our family’s high holy days. I was able to lose myself, as always, in the rhythms of preparing food. Eventually, though, the pies were being taken outside, and the puddings, and the cakes, and the lemon squares, and the divinity fudge, and there were no more excuses to hide away.
I strolled outside with a can of beer in my hand, listening to the sound of a hundred separate conversations, the clang of horseshoes hitting a metal post, and the trash talk of some of the teenage boys playing basketball against a hoop set up beside the barn (which hadn’t held livestock in a generation, but was full of all manner of broken mechanical junk).
I ambled out under the tall trees, feeling nearly at peace. I was among my people. They ate what I liked to eat. They had the proper degree of reverence for college basketball. Their accents were the ones I heard spoken in my dreams; the one I still took on myself, after a few drinks. Sure, I wasn’t really one of them anymore, but they were a part of me—maybe even a bigger part than I liked to admit.
Clearly, I decided, seeing these doppelgangers—these other versions of myself—was indicative of some kind of identity crisis. I’d gone through a lot of upheavals and changes recently, and I hadn’t entirely figured out what it all meant. My brain was trying to make sense of all the changes I’d gone through, that was all. Coming home, remembering who I used to be, was just a little too much for my brain to bear, too many aspects of myself coming into conflict, so I’d gotten a little sleep-deprived and let my imagination get away from me.
Maybe I was done with California. I wasn’t necessarily ready to come back here—I couldn’t see myself taking over Willard’s and becoming a pitmaster, vision of myself doing exactly that notwithstanding—but it did occur to me that I’d spent five years desperately running away from my hometown. Trying to avoid the life I’d seen so many of my old friends fall into: knocking up a seventeen-year-old girlfriend, dropping out of high school, marrying too young, getting a job at the turkey plant—
I walked past a pecan tree, the air shimmered, and there I was: another me, sitting on a folding chair beside a woman with hair the color of fresh-mown hay, both of them cooing over a baby in my—in his—lap. I knew the girl, too. Kelly White. My senior prom date, still pretty enough to be the obvious date for a football star.
We’d made out, and more, in the back of the car I borrowed from Jimmy after the dance, and we’d dated on and off that last summer, but then I’d gone off to college on a football scholarship for a semester, before dropping out to go to culinary school, and we’d never even talked since—
This other me, this father me, wearing a polo shirt and steel-rimmed glasses (unlike my own contact lenses), looked up. He frowned. “You’re here?” he said, handing the baby to his wife. She didn’t appear to notice my existence at all. “We never thought we’d see you again.”
I closed my eyes. Without opening them, I said, “I do not understand what’s happening.”
“Huh.” His voice was closer—he must have walked toward me. I still didn’t open my eyes to look. “I guess it has been, what … over a dozen years, since you saw the rest of us?”
I had a flash of memory—vague and secondhand, like the memory of someone else’s account of a dream. Walking into a field, the air filled with heat shimmers, and other kids, ten-year-olds, standing in clumps and chatting, and apart from different clothes and haircuts they all looked exactly the same—
“Go to the bar,” the other me said kindly.
“What bar?” I whispered.
“Don’t do that. You pulled right up into the parking lot last night. We all saw you. Just go.”
I turned, eyes closed, and walked ten or fifteen steps before I opened my eyes and looked back. No me. No Kelly. No baby.
I didn’t say anything to anyone, just went to my car, navigated around the dozens of other vehicles parked on every available scrap of the property, and set off toward the river.
The air shimmered as I crossed the bridge, and there was TJ’s Place. The parking lot wasn’t as full as it had been last night, just a handful of cars. I parked on the gravel, far away from the front door, and approached the bar slowly, like I was stalking prey.
I pushed inside, and it was pure honky-tonk: board floor, beer signs on the walls, dust in the corners, a couple of pool tables, a bunch of mismatched chairs, and a scuffed-up bar along the back wall.
“They say you can’t go home again,” a voice slurred, and I looked to my right, where a version of me—except maybe thirty pounds lighter, skeleton-thin—sat gazing into a mug of beer next to an untouched basket of onion rings, shiny with grease. “But here you are.”
Two other Terrys were playing pool. One of them—he had an outlandish mustache—tipped the rim of his trucker hat with one finger in greeting. The other, leaner and dressed in a wife-beater, was focused on lining up a shot and didn’t pay me any mind at all.
I went toward the bar and slid onto a stool. The me behind the counter wore a black T-shirt, tight, that showed off his biceps. I had the brief and horrible thought, He’s pretty cute, and shook it off. I hope I’m not that narcissistic.
“Just tell me,” I said, when he sauntered over toward me. “Is this hell? Or purgatory, or something?”
“Nah. That’d be kind of a disappointment, wouldn’t it?” He shook his head. “You went far away. Clear to California. A couple of us went to Australia, New Zealand. One to Japan, teaching English as a second language, ended up staying over there. You’re the only one to go so far away and then come back.” The bartender drew a beer and slid it in front of me.
“The only one,” I repeated.
“Sure,” the bartender said. “You don’t remember? You were at the big gathering when we were ten years old, I’m sure of that. You missed the one when we were fifteen—a few of us missed that one, there was an away game that day, a lot of us played ball. And of course, by the time of the eighteen-year reunion, you were gone.”
“I used to pretend,” I said slowly. “That I had … a brother, an identical twin, I mean, except … wait, that’s not right—”
The bartender drew himself a beer too, and took a sip. “Aunt Helen used to say I was the only little boy who ever had himself for an imaginary friend.”
I remembered then. Being a little kid, pretending, and … “Playing with myself—shit, that sounds wrong—”
“We make that joke all the time,” the bartender said. “We’ve always been able to see each other, hear each other, and every once in a while, we get together. Some of us who went to college have theories about why, about how it works. Science and all that. The ones who got religion have theories, too, and their ideas are totally different.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if we’re ghosts or projections from alternate dimensions. Doesn’t much matter to me. What we are is family. Most of us—at least, a lot of us—stayed close to home, and so we run into each other a lot. We started having reunions every year when we turned eighteen, most of us living away from home, with a little more autonomy. We started comparing notes, using each other to test things out. What would happen if I dated that girl, or bought that truck. Eventually I thought, hell, I’ll open this bar, a place we can all get together, anytime. Guaranteed clientele. Best decision I ever made.”
“I’ve been wanting to open my own place for years,” I said. “How’d you afford it?”
He grinned. “I have investors. The fellas all clear out on weekends, when I open to the public. Officially, the bar is closed for private functions every other day of the week. My friends think I named the bar like I did because I’ve got a big ego—TJ’s Place. I never tell them, it’s just a description. It’s a place for TJ. All of us.”
“How many of us are there?” I asked.
He leaned on the bar and looked thoughtfully across the room. “About two dozen regulars.” He pointed to a row of photographs behind the bar, without turning to look. “Those are some who’ve died. Two in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. Oh, that one on the end, he’s not dead, he went into pro football. Rode the bench in Baltimore for a few seasons, only played in about three games when injuries took out the starters, but, hell, it’s something. Most of us who tried that path just blew out our knees in college. Those guys ran into each other sometimes, in college—a bunch of them got the same scholarships. We have to split them up when we all play flag football at our get-togethers, so they don’t form one team and crush the rest of us. Not many of us took your path, as far as I know. That’s probably why you never ran into any of the rest of us out in California.”
“I … I don’t understand what this means … ”
The bartender nodded. “Sure. None of us do. Doesn’t have to mean a lot, I guess. Except, you’re never alone. What’s that old saying? Home’s the place where they can’t turn you away?”
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” the drunk by the door slurred. I turned to look at him. He grinned, showing the gaps of lost teeth. “Robert Frost, ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’ 1915.”
“We might have a picture of that one up on the wall soon, too,” the bartender said, nodding toward the drunk. “If he goes on the way he’s been. He was a schoolteacher for a year, but being new he got laid off after the budget cuts, and nowadays … he’s a cook, too. But he cooks meth, and he snorts up a lot of his own profits. We’ve tried to help him out, but … ” He sighed. “Some of us don’t want help.”
I swiveled back on my stool, unwilling to see a vision of myself fallen so much farther than I’d ever feared possible. “But … does all this mean I’m not real, or that I’m the figment of somebody’s imagination, or … ”
“I think I’m the real original TJ, for what it’s worth,” the bartender said. “Of course, so do most of the rest of us. I think I’m definitely one of the most plausible ones. But you? Moving to California, telling everybody you like to sleep with men—I mean, most of us keep that to ourselves—getting on TV? Un-fucking-likely.” He took another sip of beer. “Still, here you are.”
“Are … any of us … happy?” Something like this, a miracle—no matter how prosaic the bartender found it—had to have some meaning, didn’t it? Had to provide some kind of revelation?
“Happy?” he said. “Sure. Off and on, anyway. And some of us are miserable. About like anybody, I guess. All our lives … it seems amazing, I know, to think of them all lined up next to each other, all those possible worlds, rubbing up together. But every one of our lives is just a life, man.”
I drank my beer. It was one of my favorite kinds, a pale ale. I wasn’t surprised.
The bartender tilted his head. “So, TJ—or, wait, you’re one of the ones who likes Terry, right? How long are you in town for?”
I blinked. “I don’t know. I told Jimmy I was just going to stay a couple of days, but … I don’t know what I’d go back to, really. I was hoping to start my own restaurant, but I didn’t win the big prize money, and the whole idea of trying to make my own way, it’s just exhausting.”
He chuckled. “Oh, we could probably work something out. Those investors I mentioned? They’re other versions of me. Some of us do all right, and we’re always willing to chip in to help each other out. The logistics get tricky—we have to convert our cash to gold or something, can’t risk bills from one world having the same serial numbers as bills in another, they’d think you were counterfeiting. But we’ve done it before.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. Silent partners? With myself?
“That’s … incredibly generous. But I’m not even sure opening a restuarant is what I want to do. It’s what I’m supposed to want … ” I shook my head, and was surprised by tears welling up in my eyes. I stared hard at the scarred wood of the bar before me. “I don’t even know who the hell I am anymore, you know?”
“Oh, yeah. I definitely know. But we’re here for you, brother. We missed you, too. And anything we can do to help … ”
“I don’t know what you could do. If I can’t figure out my shit on my own, I’m not sure how having even more of me around would help. If I had a little time, to get my head together, to figure out what I want to do, who I want to be … ”
The bartender grinned. “Tell you what. Sometimes, in extreme cases, we’ve been known to switch places. Strictly temporary—unless everybody agrees they want to make it permanent. You can step out of your own path, and walk on another’s for a while. Get a taste of another TJ’s life, or take a vacation from life entirely. Say one of us needs a break, and another one needs a change … we help each other out. Like I said, you’re an outlier, you’ve got a pretty rare path. I’m sure we could find a TJ who’d want to take your life for a spin for a while. Give you some breathing room in the meantime. And lots of us know how to cook.”
I lifted my head. “Really? Would I have to, like, take someone else’s place, or … ”
A shake of the head. “Not necessarily. Unless you want to. One of us could just say he’s going camping, or taking a solo hike up the Appalachian Trail, or going on a fishing trip, and disappear into your life for a couple of weeks. Even if they act a little funny around your friends, that’s all right—you’re in a weird place right now, right?”
I frowned, thinking of horror stories, doubles and body snatchers, and the bartender must have seen something on my face, because he snorted.
“You think someone might steal your life? Really? Is it all that great?”
“No,” I admitted. “I fucked it up pretty good.”
“There you go. We wouldn’t put up with that kind of identity theft bullshit, anyway. We’ve had to cast some of us out before, for crimes against the self, though we hate to do it. We don’t put up with nonsense.”
“So you’d do that, one of you—one of me—just out of kindness?”
He nodded. “We’re family. What else is family for? And it doesn’t get much closer than this. Every one of us who makes bad decisions … hell, we all know it could have happened to any of us. There but for the grace of good luck. If you decide to step off your path, and want to hide away, you can stay here for a while. There’s a room in back with a cot, you can use the kitchen, there’s even a shower I got some of the guys who went into contracting to install.”
I looked around at the tables and chairs, the jukebox in the corner, vintage tin signs on the walls. Running a restaurant sounded pretty daunting. But I could work in one. I didn’t know much, but I sure knew my way around a kitchen. Maybe if I didn’t have to do anything for a while but pay attention to what I had in front of me on the grill or the chopping block, things would sort themselves out in my head. And if I got stuck, there were people around here I could ask for advice. People who knew me at least as well as I knew myself.
I took another sip of beer. “Have you, ah … ever thought about selling food here? I mean, something besides onion rings and greaseburgers? Because, maybe … ”
The bartender snorted again. “Ha. Well. I guess you know what kind of food my regulars like, don’t you?”
He reached out to shake my hand, and I was home at last.