JOEL MCKENNA NEVER REALIZED HE had sworn off love until it came back to him. Love was, in the end, an untrustworthy business. Love kept your mind from reality. You didn’t know where you were or what was going on. For twelve years Joel was sure he had a perfect marriage. He was sure Martha was happy to be Mrs. McKenna. He was sure that he belonged to a loyal family. Life was good. No, life was unhampered. Life was like the beginning of the Book of Job.
Joel had read Job—half of it—once. He wasn’t a Bible scholar. That just wasn’t him. Everyone talked about the patience of Job, the goodness of Job, but what Joel saw in Job was the predictability of his life and, suddenly, that predictability interrupted by God. Suddenly it didn’t matter if you were good or bad or whatever. Things just happened.
So, Joel had come home from work one day, before he was a bus driver. Back then he was still working at Ace. He’d come home early to surprise Seth and romance the wife. But Seth wasn’t there. Martha was, and she was in bed with his brother. They were right in the middle of it when Joel walked into his bedroom, and they looked at him partway in horror but also halfway in offense. They looked at him like, “What are you doing here?”
He dropped what was in his hand. Joel was never able to remember what was in his hand. Whenever he thinks about it, it is always a bouquet of screwdrivers and lug nuts, and there is something in his head that says, “No wonder... No wonder she left you.”
Joel does not picture his brother. He has a rare talent by which, when he doesn’t want to think of you, to see your face, he is able to forget what you look like and so when Joel imagines his brother’s face it is just a peach colored circle with indentations where the mouth and eyes should be.
But he remembers what John was like. John was no great shakes. John wasn’t very enjoyable to be around. So... why John? What was so great about John? Not that a man who brought home a bouquet of screwdrivers wasn’t worth leaving, but for John? Really, Martha could have done better than that.
The bouquet of lug nuts is so firmly placed in his mind, Joel has to remind himself that there never was one. After Martha left Joel always remembered bringing her boxes of chocolate covers shims. He always had dreams of taking her to the hardware store on a date.
“You just think you’re not romantic enough,” Sidney told him. “You keep on imagining yourself as a hardware salesman. That’s not why she left.”
“Then why did she leave?”
Sidney opened his mouth to say something nasty about her. Joel knew Sidney. But then Sidney just shrugged and smiled.
“I’d take her back if she came back,” Joel said.
Then there was the period that must have been confusing for Seth. The long year of the divorce. Divorce was not done. His parents were still married, if not happy. Divorce was a failure as much as it was a sin. It was something he didn’t talk about to his priest. And he was still in love with Martha. That was what made him angry about the whole thing. He was so in love with her and had so little dignity regarding himself that now and again she would come back and they’d sleep together. This was around the same time that Mark’s wife was dying and misery was all around the two of them. And then the divorce was final and Joel said he couldn’t do this anymore and then he trumped Martha. He got full custody of Seth.
Apparently Seth wanted it that way. And there was no Martha, and no anyone else for that matter. Joel made a sort of religious change without realizing it. He decided that all the love he’d given to Martha would go to the rest of the world. He decided he would devote himself to being mother and father to Seth. And then he realized that Cartimandua Mass Transit paid better than Ace—the hardware store that, right or wrong, he blamed for the demise of his marriage—and went to work driving first the Nine and then the Ten and now the Number Seven route.
And on the Number Seven Route he met, of course, Shelley. Shelley who was here on this couch, smelling good, looking young like March and April. Shelley who, little by little was opening something long closed and bringing up things he’d tried to bury.
They were on his couch and she must have seen something in his face. She said, “Joel, what’s wrong?”
“Huh?” he said, shaking his head.
“You’re different today is all,” she told him. “You’re... You seem dis—no, distracted isn’t the word. Afraid is the word.”
His eyes bulged out. She would have laughed except he seemed genuinely upset.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I am afraid,” he confessed seriously.
“About what?”
“It’s been so long,” Joel told her. “And... I don’t understand women. I... don’t understand myself.”
Shelley cocked her head and her eyes crinkled. They smiled with a sort of mercy. They were these beautiful tortoiseshell eyes. How could you have tortoiseshell eyes? But she did. All green to brown to grey and…
“You see,” Joel said, biting his bottom lip and caressing her hand, “I’m afraid that I’m in love with you.”
“THAT WAS AN AWESOME GAME! Tell me, why don’t we have a major basketball team in Cartimandua? How come we have to go all the way to Columbus?” Mark demanded from the passenger seat.
Before Rick Howard could answer, Mark continued, “He shoots!? He scores! The crowd is wild!” He put his hand to his mouth and made a noise like a whole crowd. “Mark Jacob Powers at five foot seven, age forty-two, the MVP of the—!”
Rick gazed at Mark in appreciation, watching the road in the night from the corner of his eye. “You’re kind of goofy. You know that?”
“Do you have a problem with that?” Mark challenged him, making a face.
Rick laughed and pushed the car horn.
“No, I do not. You just never seemed like a very goofy person. I mean, from the outside you’re practically anti-goofy.”
“Have you heard the message on my answering machine?”
“No.”
“Let me assure you, it’s amply goofy.”
Rick chuckled and shook his head.
“I really don’t think I’ve met anyone like you, Dr. Powers.”
“No one understands the real me,” Mark said in a deep radio announcer’s voice.
Then he admitted, “I don’t really show off the real me. I don’t know why. In the last few years... No, I guess it’s always been that way. I’m afraid to cut loose in front of most people. So, take it as a compliment that I’m an idiot around you.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Thanks.”
“You know what?” Rick began.
Mark turned to him and put on a silly smile.
“What?”
“I didn’t realize how lonely I was until we started hanging out together.”
Mark’s face turned serious. It was his deeply introspective face, but it looked like he was struggling with a bowel movement.
“Yes,” he said at last. “I feel the same way too.”
“But...” that wasn’t really his place to say. So he said, “This isn’t my place to say, but...”
“But you’ve already started. That means you have to continue.”
“You’ve got Chris and... I mean, I know children are different from friends and all that. But, you’ve got friends. I’ve seen them. Their kids go to my school.”
“Yes,” Mark said. “But, it’s almost like there was a different sort of loneliness, a whole other me and that me... was still lonely. Does that make sense?”
Rick nodded familiarly.
“Yes,” he said.
Rebecca Angstrom wasn’t religious, and she wasn’t imaginative. She wasn’t romantic either. Things more or less happened to her. She was beautiful. She knew this because that’s what she’d been told, and she was well off. She lived in Cartimandua Hills—Dewy Hills they called it for short.
Things more or less happened to her. She had been effortlessly popular. She didn’t have to work to be pretty. Some girls were working for it now, and then there were some who had never been pretty in the first place. They were employing a whole lot of makeup to look like they really didn’t. She felt sort of sorry for them. Becky had gone to her parties, been kissed by boys, gone from K-8 school to high school, and gone through her freshman year.
But then something had happened. Something had happened and she’d snapped into life. For the first time she’d met something not beautiful, not well managed, not predictable, not quite ordinary. It had long unkempt hair, a long, not entirely handsome face, large, expressive hands, intense ways, sarcasm, a very different look on the world. A look at all. Next to the well proportioned and vacuous blond boys, next to the dark eyed, dark haired fellows with perfect smiles, was Addison Cromptley.
If someone had asked: “Do you love him?” she would have thought they were stupid. It wasn’t a matter of love. You really couldn’t stay away from Addison. He was too much. There was something wonderfully ugly about him, rough, uncut. He didn’t fit, and she didn’t want him to. Everything fit in her world. Listening to him talk, kissing him in his car, having him—yes—take down her pants or lift up her skirt and touch her there, go down on her... It was too much. Doing the same for him. He was the first real sex she knew about.
And so, when it was time it was time. Becky didn’t think about it. She didn’t fear losing her virginity, but she didn’t really look forward to it. She wasn’t practiced in thinking. She didn’t reflect about things. She just assumed that the same way semester followed semester losing her virginity followed this. She did love Addison. She more than loved him. So this made complete sense.
But it was strange. Addison made her see more. Every time she was with Addison her eyes and her heart seemed to become wider and wider.
That first time, when she’d been under him, sometimes he hurt and sometimes he felt good. For a second he almost felt good, but really she felt like she was putting up with an invasion. And there was something amazing and powerful about having Addison Cromptley, all of him, almost six feet of him, his wildness naked on her and in her, striving against her. There was something that approached joy about seeing him that way. And there was something that made her a little embarrassed. Even now she didn’t want to think about his face. She’d looked down at him once, his face in her shoulder. Then she had tried to put him out of her mind. From that first time she was never really with Addison, she was someplace else.
She was looking at the walls of Mason’s room.
There was a unicorn, blood red. She didn’t know how it had been made. It seemed like a painted sculpture, there was a background that seemed almost black, but it was different shades of deep red and blue.
There was a woman, made of circles, with circles for breasts and face. She looked primitive, or like a Picasso and Becky felt herself drifting out to meet her.
She felt bad whenever she was having sex with Addison, primarily because she wasn’t. In the back of the van she was looking up at the ceiling and she could feel his hands gripping her shoulders, then under her, pulling her down, feel him pushing into her harder and harder, his face desperate, murmuring in her shoulder.
“Becky,” he gasped and her hand went to his head stroking his hair. His hair was so soft. He moaned something into her shirt and then he arched up and he was coming and he was going higher and higher in the black darkness of the van. She could just make out his face, as if he’d been struck by something. Then he reared up sharply and he was coming down, low and low, laying across her, his face in her neck.
“Becky,” he kept saying to her in a damp voice, muffled against her neck, “Becky,”
Becky stroked his hair gently. She throbbed a little.
She felt bad about how this all turned out.
She felt bad because the thing Addison was helping her to see now was that she did not love him.
Tommy Dwyer had never lived well. He didn’t live in Eastforth. There had been a Mr. Dwyer, but there was no Mr. Dwyer now. He had a brother, Philip, and Philip was irresponsible. Philip was always screwing things up, leaving things for Tommy to make right. He didn’t talk about him much. In fact he left his older brother out of his conversations to the point that when he brought him up to Mason and Addison, Tommy realized from the looks on their faces that they’d forgotten Philip existed.
He didn’t mean to be jealous and envious. Really he didn’t. And Tommy knew that Jesus didn’t give any of us more than we can bear, that the Lord had a purpose. But maybe because they didn’t know what it was like to have an alcoholic no show father or a mother who didn’t care about anything including herself, this was the reason, maybe, that they couldn’t understand why coming to know the Lord and finding Cedar Ridge Church was the seminal event of Tommy’s life.
Up until then being a Christian was just going to church on Sunday because you had to. You didn’t really believe or feel anything. But these people did. And they promised you could know the Lord. Jesus loved you, Jesus had a plan for your life. For his life. For Tommy. Tommy could talk to the Lord. He didn’t have much of a father on earth, but he did have a father in heaven.
And if he thought about it, he could see God’s hand all through his life, see how God was always there. Maybe the Lord had brought him to this place, just so he could show Tommy his love in a better way.
“You know what, Tommy?” Derrick said. “I bet the Lord is really going to reward you for Philip. I bet the Lord will bring Philip back to him through you.”
Derrick was a Godsend. Literally. He could only talk to Derrick and the others on the phone, but he knew just what Tommy was going through, what Tommy meant. He didn’t mean to complain about Mason, really he didn’t. Mason wasn’t bad. But Mason was another language and sometimes Tommy got the feeling that Mason really didn’t know, couldn’t know what it was like to know the Lord. How could he? He wouldn’t even use the phrase, “know the Lord.”
But Derrick was a brother in the Spirit, which is what he told him.
“I know just what you mean,” Derrick said.
“I... I need you to pray about something for me?”
“Sure thing,” Derrick said, waiting.
“Impure thoughts,” Tommy said. “I haven’t asked anyone else, but I keep having… desires.”
“Yeah,” Derrick said earnestly. “The devil tries to get to us through that. We have to be strong. We have to remember that true love waits.”
“I know,” Tommy said. “No one believes that.”
“These days,” Derrick said, “the Devil tries to get to us through the TV. Through the radio. Even in the drug stores. It’s a struggle. Do you want to pray about it?”
“I’d like that.”
“You want me to start?” Derrick offered.
Derrick was so good at inspired prayer. You’d never know he was Catholic.
“I sure would, brother.”
It sounded odd to say that, but Derrick was his brother in Christ.
“Father,” Derrick prayed in a soft voice. “We come to you now asking for help with Philip, especially, and all the people in our lives. And we come to you asking you to take us up out of the shadows and free our minds from... all impurities... And bring us to you, to your light and purity of thought. We ask this in the name of your son Jesus Christ. Amen.”
“Amen,” Tommy said. And then, because he knew Derrick was doing the same thing, he crossed himself.
There was a knock at Balliol’s door and when he said, “Come in,” he was surprised to see Mason and Tommy.
Balliol rolled off the bed, greeting them as he chucked the book he was reading under the pillow, all in one swift move. Cigarette smoke was in the room and he was holding a glass of wine.
“Your parents let you drink?” Tommy said.
“No,” Balliol told him. “So, what’s up?”
“We just came over to see what you were up to,” Mason told him. “I wasn’t doing anything and Tommy wasn’t doing anything and we thought you might not be doing anything so I thought we should all do nothing together. Unless you’re busy?”
“I’m busy doing this,” Balliol gestured to the wine with his cigarette. “And that’s about it.” He took one last puff and crushed it out.
Balliol’s bedroom was built out of the house so that there were windows on every side except for the south where was the door, and next to the door was a door that led to a full bathroom.
Mason said, “This room is the size of my house.”
“It is not,” Balliol said. “I’ve been in your house.”
“I could live here and you would never notice me,” Mason said, running his hands over the posters of Balliol’s bed. “You actually have posters. Christ. This is fantastic. The walls are a little bare, though.”
Balliol was actually relieved at the criticism. Sully was the only person who ever came to his house, and Sully never criticized or made comments. Not really. For the first time Balliol felt a little embarrassed about having money.
“Firstly,” Balliol said, rising to the challenge, “I’m not an artist, so I don’t have your creative flare.”
“Swear to God,” Mason told him. “I’m not gay, but for a million I’d totally redecorate this motherfucker for you. I mean, I’m thinking a big old blood red horse head over your bed, a monster over there.”
“Um,” Balliol smiled and made a contented sound, “I always wanted a horse head.”
“Everyone needs a good horse head,” Tommy remarked.
“Tommy said—” Mason began.
Tommy’s eyes darted over to Mason.
“That you mom is totally hot.”
“Mason!”
Balliol grinned.