Garrett tried to focus on the bags moving toward him on the belt loader, to mentally process their tags before they got to him, but it was like trying to keep track of someone else’s thoughts or being trapped in a dream where everything eluded him. He was so tired he couldn’t see straight. Félix wasn’t helping matters, reporting every time Garrett threw a bag in the wrong direction.
“Another Boise,” he said indifferently from the depths of the pit. As usual, he pronounced it “Bwa-zé.” “Wrong side.”
“It’s pronounced ‘Boys-ee,’ ” Garrett said angrily, after he’d caught his breath. They were waiting for the next baggage cart to pull up. It was ninety-three degrees and the pit reeked of BO and jet fuel and the charred-marshmallow smell of the shimmering tarmac.
“Ha ha,” Félix said.
“I’m not joking! It’s true!”
“It is an interesting controversy.”
Félix turned from him and began to look for duffel bags from Vegas that might contain rolls of quarters. He liked to steal the rolls and hide them in his socks. For the third time that day, Garrett excused himself to pee, then jogged across the tarmac when Burelli wasn’t looking and used his badge to slip inside the terminal. As usual, it was easy to find an open computer. Garrett logged in and checked his Yahoo! account. His heart pounded, he was clutched with fear, he trembled once again with dread and half hope, lobbing Hail Marys to a God he didn’t believe in. He waited for his email to load, staring at the little hourglass on the screen. It seemed to hold his life in the balance, to contain his salvation or destruction.
Nothing. Some spam for “FASTER CHEAPER MEDS.”
Garrett logged out of the computer. His face burned with shame. He’d sent the email to Cece at some godforsaken hour, then sent the second email, both of which mortified him now, filled him with a feeling of humiliation and doom. What had he been thinking? At first there’d been a shred of actual hope: the idea that she might read his first email, powerless to resist, and write him back with an astonishing confession of her own. The shred of hope persisted into the morning, with the ancillary hope that she had yet to check her email. But as the day wore on, as Garrett found himself choking down a few bites of cereal and getting dressed for work and then doing his best to focus on the luggage riding up the belt loader, trying not to get creamed by a duffel bag or screamed at by Burelli, he realized she must have seen the emails already and been too aghast to write back. It had been ridiculous to hope otherwise. Who did he think he was? When he imagined the look of disgust and astonishment on Cece’s face as she read his email, his trite, childish, melodramatic confession—“my only ambition in life is to see your face again,” he’d written!—he had to keep himself from purposefully getting sucked into a turbofan.
Baboons! What was he, an idiot?
Most likely she’d talked to Charlie about it. Or maybe Charlie was the one who’d found the emails first—for all Garrett knew, they shared an account. Probably they were laughing over the most embarrassing bits. They didn’t want to laugh (Oh, god, we shouldn’t laugh!), but they couldn’t help themselves. No, worse than laughing: they pitied him. Poor Garrett Meek, baggage handler in love.
He’d never thrown up from shame before, but a sour taste curdled in his throat.
The tarmac seemed to writhe in the heat. Another cart had arrived and Burelli was tossing bags onto the belt loader, one on top of another, exhibiting his usual disdain for the humanly possible. “The hell you been?” he demanded. His bad ear, normally abloom this time of day, was still swollen shut.
“In the restroom,” Garrett said, breathing slowly.
“Christ. What are you, an old man?”
“I think I ate something funny. For lunch.”
“I don’t care if someone shat in your Post Toasties. No breaks before pushback—Mr. P’s orders. Get your ass up there before those bags do!”
“Too late,” Garrett said matter-of-factly. The bags had reached the top of the belt and formed a kind of luggage jam in the mouth of the pit; suitcases began to plummet off the belt and smash on the tarmac, one of them exploding in a burst of clothes. T-shirts, caught by a gust of wind, scuttled under the plane. Burelli shut off the belt loader.
“Are you looking to get fired?” he said furiously.
Garrett pondered this, treating the question nonrhetorically, which seemed to throw Burelli for a loop. Was there a flash of envy on his face?
“Go clean up those clothes,” Burelli said quietly, “or I’ll make sure your next potty break is your last.”
After work, Garrett sped down the highway, heading god knows where. One of his wipers had broken midswipe, when he was spritzing his windshield with fluid, and now it stood at two o’clock in front of him, bisected by the ghoulish rainbow of a smeared moth. Garrett hardly noticed. He’d checked his email one more time after his shift, stopping by the Maverick counter on his way out.
Still nothing. Zilch. Exactly what he deserved.
A buzzard hovered in the sky ahead, occupying the segment of windshield he could see through. Garrett, who was straddling the yellow line, moved back into his lane. He’d lost his mind, his pride, and probably his best friend. At least now he wouldn’t have to officiate the wedding.
Of course, there was another possibility. The other possibility was that she’d read the email and was secretly in love with Garrett and didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe she’d even written him back, on the eve of her wedding, but was too frightened to send it.
The idea, no matter how far-fetched, simmered in the back of his brain. It was unlikely—though far less unlikely than, say, the existence of angels, which supposedly 77 percent of Americans believed in. Garrett had read that somewhere. If angels existed, perhaps Cece was in love with him too.
His truck turned off the highway of its own accord, heading up the road toward his father’s house, which is generally what happened when Garrett wasn’t sure where he was going. This was true of his thoughts as well. Washing the dishes, or gazing at the train cars outside his window, he would turn a corner sometimes in his mind and end up suddenly on his father’s porch. It was the secret terminus of his dreams.
“Who are you supposed to be?” his father said, greeting him at the door.
“Very funny.”
“I’ve left you five voicemails.”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I’ve been super busy.”
His father scoffed. “With what? Hat shopping?”
“Important stuff.”
“What’s more important than visiting your sick father?”
“Well, I’ve had that speech to write,” Garrett said. “For the wedding.”
His father stared at him.
“And…I drove up to Glacier. To go hiking.”
“By yourself?”
“No.”
“Aha,” his father said. “I knew something was up. When I saw your new hat. Who’s the lucky girl?”
Garrett didn’t respond to this.
“Must be hot and heavy, if you can’t even return my calls.”
Garrett nodded, letting him persist in this misunderstanding. It was a convenient excuse for neglecting him the past couple weeks. They grabbed some Budweisers from the fridge and settled on the porch. It was a beautiful day, cloudless and hot, the smell of wildfire merely a tartness in the breeze. His father avoided his eyes. Garrett was touched by his resentment, though also annoyed; if his father wanted to talk about neglect, they should back up a bit and start with Garrett’s childhood. They should get some historical perspective.
His father met his gaze finally. “I don’t know who this new acquaintance of yours is, but it looks like you haven’t slept in two days.”
“More like a week and a half,” Garrett said.
His father turned to the yard, as if he didn’t want Garrett to see his face. My god, was he jealous? He seemed skinnier than ever, maybe because he was wearing shorts, his legs as frail, as dainty, as a little girl’s. Were these really his father’s legs? The same ones that had held Garrett in place, secure as a vise, when he was learning to ski? It was one of his earliest memories: nestled in his father’s thighs as they snowplowed the bunny slope together, weaving miraculously downhill, Garrett smiling so big that his teeth turned to icicles. His dad had gripped him under the arms, hard enough that it hurt—but Garrett didn’t mind, so exotic was it to be held. The only time, really, that his father touched him. Once, he’d zipped ahead by accident, his father’s mittens tucked inside his armpits. What joy and terror he’d felt! Later, at eight or nine, the thrill of blasting past his father on a mogul run, of finding that perfect line where he was skimming the top of each bump, skipping like a stone on a lake, showing off for all the tourists on the chairlift, who cheered and whooped and made him feel like the best skier they’d ever seen. The powder days when his dad rousted him out of bed so they could be first in line for the bowls to open, boot-packing along the ridge till his goggles fogged with steam, his long johns soaked with sweat, the Adam-and-Eve thrill of dropping into virgin snow. The pure tethering delight of looking back at their tracks. Neither of them wanted to take a break, to lose a fresh line, so his dad filled his pockets with Almond Joys they could share on the lift. “Joy?” he’d ask, and they’d laugh. The snow coming down fat and beautiful. How could Garrett have forgotten all this? He’d pushed it out of his mind. He’d turned to backcountry skiing as a teenager, traded his father in for his high school buddies—early pioneers, they’d used telemark gear and didn’t even have beacons—coming to disdain the resorts his dad had taken him to as a kid, the whole corporate rape of land and wallet. At the time it had never occurred to Garrett, caught up in self-righteous disdain, to wonder if his dad missed skiing with him.
His father bent over to tie his shoe—he was wearing brand-new running shoes without socks—and when he sat up again he seemed winded, breathing through his mouth. Garrett, braced for a coughing fit, watched him uneasily. For some reason, the new shoes saddened him.
“I ran into your friend Charlie,” his father said after a moment.
“You did?”
“At the IGA. He recognized me, if you can believe that.” He stretched his legs, unfolding them one at a time. “Was he always that handsome?”
Garrett frowned. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
His father eyed him curiously. “His fiancée was with him.”
“So?”
“You were right. She’s kind of weird-looking.”
“I never said that.”
“She’s got that thing where each feature looks like it came from a different face. Like one of those flip books where you mix up the parts of different animals.”
Garrett felt himself redden. “Everyone looks weird in the supermarket.”
Barnabas was creeping across the lawn on three legs, attempting to stalk a chickadee, which seemed to realize that it was in no real danger and continued to pick seeds from the grass. Garrett, trying not to betray his feelings, could feel his father’s eyes on him. When he finally looked back, his dad’s face had changed completely, sprouted the tiny bud of a smile, as if he’d put two and two together in his head. Cece was the woman—the “acquaintance”—who’d been sleeping in his apartment. Garrett and Cece were having an affair. The triumphant certainty was written all over his face. He seemed, in fact, strangely impressed. Garrett was not immune to his father’s pride, no matter how misplaced. To disabuse him of the notion, Garrett would have to delve into the details of his infatuation, which he had no interest in doing.
“You probably don’t want to hear this,” his father said.
“You’re right. No ‘probably’ about it.”
“Before I met your mother,” he said, ignoring Garrett, “there was a boy I knew in high school. Bobby Malpas. In fact, he was my first kiss. We used to meet behind the groundskeeper’s shed sometimes and, you know, do things together. The problem is, he was going out with Kristen Segal, a cheerleader. Yes, an actual cheerleader! They still existed back then, in an indigenous state. Pom-poms and everything. They were like an ethnicity unto themselves. Kristen Segal and Bobby Malpas were on the homecoming court, if you can believe that. A gay homecoming prince! He made me swear on my life not to tell anyone. I was madly in love with him and would have killed Principal Weaver if he’d asked me to. Then one day Kristen saw us together, fooling around behind the auditorium at a dance, and she threatened to report me to the police for sexual perversion. So I never talked to him again. Bobby wrote me a letter after they broke up, a couple months later, but I never responded to it. I was too scared of what might happen.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. I just find myself thinking sometimes about what-if. About Bobby Malpas.”
Garrett tried not to think too hard about this what-if, maybe because it precluded his own birth. “You’re just romanticizing. It only means something because you didn’t respond to his letter. Probably if you’d ended up with him—like you’d moved to San Francisco together, wine and roses—you’d have grown completely sick of him. You’d hate his guts right now.”
His father sighed. He seemed to lose interest in the topic, or perhaps Garrett himself, as if he’d disappointed him in some way. “You’ve never forgiven me, have you, for your mother’s happiness. Unlike me, she found the love of her life.”
“Kirby? Jesus, Dad. He’s a fucking periodontist.”
“That’s hardly the point, is it? Whether you like him or not.”
He started to cough, muffling it in the crook of his elbow. The coughing flared and died down, several times, before mounting a sustained attack.
“I’ll get you some water,” Garrett said, standing up.
“You won’t!” he wheezed. “I can still get my own water.”
His father cursed himself, as if disgusted by his own infirmity, and then walked into the house, leaving Garrett alone with Barnabas. The cat yawned in the sunlight. He eyed Garrett from the lawn, as if aware of being watched, then sprang onto the fence and climbed up to the top and began to funambulate across it as best he could, as if this time he thoroughly intended to get all the way across. A relief that Garrett’s father wasn’t around to wager on his chances. The betting was just a pretense to give Garrett money, they both knew it, and Garrett was sick of the whole charade.
Barnabas teetered along the fence, past the safety net of hydrangeas he usually fell into. Garrett watched his progress, worried the cat would drop into the rosebushes and get impaled on some thorns. The cat swayed a bit but hung on, righting his balance. Incredibly, he passed the roses. He passed the wild strawberry patch. He passed the trellis of overgrown vine weed. Garrett stood from his chair. His heart was in his throat. Barnabas wobbled the last few feet, serenely, then made it to the end of the fence. Garrett cheered from the porch. The cat seemed as surprised as anyone, enthroned atop the corner post, as if wondering what to conquer next.
Garrett turned to his father, hoisting his Budweiser, and was met with an empty chair. He’d forgotten he wasn’t there. Garrett called into the house. Silence. He wandered inside, pissed at his father for missing Barnabas’s triumph. It seemed emblematic somehow: he was never around when it mattered.
Garrett stepped through the clutter of the living room, his eyes adjusting to the dim house. It smelled like cat shit; no doubt the litter box hadn’t been cleaned in a week. He turned into the kitchen and almost tripped over his father, who was lying on the floor.