Anything Could Happen

by Will Walton

  “Hoo-wee,” I say. “Well done.”

  “Thanks, babe.” Mom yawns. In the background, Celine Dion is singing the refrain to “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Loudly.

  “OHHH COME LET US ADOOOOOORE HIM … OHHH COME LET US ADOOOOOORE HIM … OHHH COOOOOME LEEEEET UUUS ADOOOOOOORE HIIIIIIM …”

  “Nice music choice,” I say.

  Mom grins. “Shut up. It soothes me.”

  We make coffee in the kitchen with the French press. That’s how Mom prefers to make it—“cowboy style,” she calls it. She tips the press and pours the coffee into two mugs. The dark drink steams. “Tretch, we need a tree,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “I mean, Joe’s only gonna be here one day to see it, as it is.”

  Joe is leaving tomorrow for Dallas to go visit Nana and Papa for Christmas. I’m getting the raw end of the deal, with it being too expensive to send both Joe and me, and with it being Joe’s turn.

  “You’ll want to take it easy for a few days after exams, anyways, won’t you, Tretch?” she asks, reading my mind, or trying to.

  Not really, I think. I’d rather go to Dallas with Joe and see Nana and Papa than stay in Warmouth and be bored the whole time. Especially since Matt will be gone, too.

  I haven’t seen Nana and Papa in about six months now. They mailed me a present for my birthday a month ago.

  Mom walks to the pantry and pulls out a few rolls of wrapping paper. “I reckon when Joe gets back from his errands, you and him can go get a tree. I don’t know when your dad’ll be back. Work’s been H-E-double hockey sticks all week.”

  “I know,” I say, “I can tell.” Every night recently, Dad’s been coming home with this big old red rash creeping out from behind his shirt collar. Pretty soon that thing is going to get so big it’ll cover up his whole head, if he doesn’t find a way to relax.

  I don’t understand much about the insurance business, but I know there’s a lot of paperwork. And I know paperwork probably gets stressful, just like working next to Tim Handel probably gets annoying.

  I sigh. “Dad’s like Bob Cratchit,” I say.

  “Who’s that?” Mom asks. She’s unspooling some wrapping paper from the roll.

  “You know, from A Christmas Carol?”

  “Not ringing a bell.”

  I think for a few seconds. “The one Mickey plays in the version with Disney characters.”

  “Oh.” Mom lays out the paper on the kitchen table and seats herself. “Well then, who would be Scrooge?”

  “Well,” I say. And it seems like the answer is just as obvious. “I guess Dad would be, wouldn’t he?”

  Mom motions for me to bring her a shoe box with the Nike logo that’s sitting on the kitchen counter. “So Dad is both Mickey and Scrooge?”

  “Bob Cratchit,” I correct. “And yes.”

  “Now how would that work, Tretch?”

  “Well, he’s the one getting beat down all the time, like Bob Cratchit.” I set the shoe box on the table in front of her. “But, since he’s the boss, he’s also the one doing the beating, like Scrooge.”

  “What about Tim?” Mom asks.

  “Psh,” I say. “Tim Handel is nothing. No, wait, Tim Handel is like the second ghost. The Ghost of Christmas Present.”

  “Is that the scary one?” Mom takes a pair of scissors and cuts a large rectangle around the box.

  “No. It’s the fat one.”

  “Ah,” Mom says, balancing the box, the scissors, the roll of paper, and her coffee cup as she wanders off into her and Dad’s bedroom. Mom always acts suspicious and secretive when it comes to wrapping presents. I’m guessing this is wave two, after yesterday.

  I hear the front door slam and I know it’s Joe before I even look. He walks into the kitchen and pulls the carton of orange juice out of the fridge.

  “Joe! You want to go get the tree once Dad gets home?”

  He pulls off his coat and sets it on top of the counter. “No can do, Tretch-o. Gotta go snag Mom a Christmas present. Then I gotta go say bye to Melissa. I’m not gonna see her again until after Christmas.”

  “Ah. Gotcha.” My shoulders slump. Joe is now taking off a shirt he has layered on top of another one. The top shirt, the one he’s pulling off, is purple and has a picture of a brontosaurus on it. Veg, it says. That’s all.

  “You growin’ your beard out?” I ask him. That’s Joe’s and my way of saying to each other, Hey, you need to shave.

  “Actually, I am,” Joe replies.

  “Oh … Well, did you have a good last day at school yesterday?”

  “Sure did.” He starts pouring himself a glass of orange juice. “What about you?”

  “I did. You want some coffee?”

  He eyes me first, then his orange juice. “Nah, I’m good. Are, uh, are you okay, Tretch?”

  “Yuh. I just—we made a fresh pot.” That’s a lie. Why did I say that? We made it with the French press. Joe looks at the coffeepot on the kitchen counter, which has old coffee from probably a couple days ago still encircling the bottom of it. It gives the glass walls of the pot a dirty, syrupy kind of look.

  “That looks old,” Joe says.

  “It is.” I slap my forehead. “I just remembered. We made it in the French press.”

  Joe eyes me suspiciously. He takes a couple more swigs of his orange juice. I guess all good older brothers generally know when something is up with their younger sib.

  “Tretch,” he says, “you want to ride to Target with me?”

  Again, I wonder, What if Joe knows?

  “Yes,” I say. “I do.”

  “Hey, Mom!” Joe shouts. “Tretch and I will be right back!”

  “What?” I hear Mom say from the living room. We head out the front door, going down the front steps with the door swinging shut. That’s what you have to do in order to buy presents for your mom, I guess: Tell her you’re leaving, then shut the door real fast. Otherwise, she’ll just ask you where you’re going, and that would ruin things.

  Joe drives a blue Chevy truck—a ’91, I think. It’s a piece of junk, but Joe loves it. He loves that it has a tape deck. “Name one person you know who drives a car with a tape deck,” he said to me one day.

  Truth is, I barely know anyone who drives a car.

  Joe turns on the truck and a loud burst of music comes through the radio speakers. “Eeh-eeh-eeh-eeeeeh-eeh …” I’ve never heard it before, but whatever it is, I dig it.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “Uhh …” Joe puts the truck in reverse and spins it around, his head turning right and left. “Mixtape Melissa made me. This one is called …” He lifts up the plastic case the cassette came in. I can see the white paper insert where Melissa has scrawled the song titles and artist names.

  “ ‘Anything Could Happen,’ ” Joe says, “by Ellie Goulding.”

  “Eeh,” I sing, echoing the outpouring from the speakers. “I like this beat. Maybe I could do something with it.”

  “A new dance?” Joe swings his head around and sticks the car in drive.

  “I think so. But it’d have to be different than any other one I’ve ever done. This is kind of different.” And right now, different is awesome. “We taking the highway?”

  “Yeah. Bit of a time crunch today.”

  I nod, a little disappointed. I know Joe really wants to see Melissa before he leaves in the morning. Usually, though, we take back roads wherever we go. It’s one of the fun things about living in a small town.

  I watch mailboxes whiz by as Joe and I blaze down Watercress Road, then turn left onto the main road.

  “Well, I’m bummed you’re leaving,” I say.

  “Yeah, I wish you could go.” Joe wipes his nose with his long-sleeve flannel, then reaches for the heat controller on the dash. “I bet next year.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I slide down on the Chevy’s cloth seating, until the top of my head touches the bottom of the neck rest.

  “So really,” Joe says to me, “what’s going
on?”

  I think of Matt, and Matt and Amy, and Bobby Handel’s note, and Tim Handel being a total buttface. I think of how all these things have weight, and they’re tiring me out. Nobody’s going to take the weight off of me. I’m going to have to give it away.

  But is this really the right time? Joe’s being kind of close-mouthed. But then there’s the question of whether there will ever be a good time. The song coming through the speakers shouts, “Anything could happen, anything could happen.” I turn the volume down, taking the song as a sign. I’ve got to make this happen. I need to.

  “Joe,” I say. “I gotta tell you something.”

  “Shoot it to me, Tretch.”

  And then I just say it.

  “I’m gay.”

  It flops out like something I’d been chewing on while trying to speak, and the first thought I have afterward is, Well, maybe no one noticed. There’s a part of me that hopes Joe still hasn’t noticed, hasn’t heard. I said it quickly, so fast that I catch even myself off guard. How weird, I think. In one quick moment, it’s out—and so am I, I guess.

  The song on the stereo ends in a tail of eehs, and the cassette stops. I hear the dull knocking of the Chevy’s engine, a sound that makes a lot of Joe’s less frequent passengers nervous. It makes me nervous now. But not because I’m scared the Chevy will break down.

  It makes me nervous because it reminds me of a denting sound, like water pressure pushing in on the walls of a submarine.

  We’re going down, I think. But then Joe says, “Cool.”

  That’s all he says. I am kind of amazed.

  Really amazed, actually.

  The next track on Melissa’s mixtape begins to unfurl and sound fills the truck again. Joe whistles along. I don’t recognize the song playing, but it’s some down-tempo acoustic stuff. Not my favorite.

  “Thanks for telling me, by the way,” he adds.

  I swallow. “Well, you’re welcome.” There’s a little water in my eyes, which surprises me because I don’t feel like crying. We’re on the highway now, a gray sky rolling past us, above us, and, depending on how you look at it, ahead of us, too.

  “How hard was that?” he asks. “To tell me.”

  “Not as bad as I thought,” I answer.

  Joe gives a short laugh. “Well, good.” He pauses, thinking. “Supposedly that’s how it goes, actually.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Joe flips the Chevy’s blinker on and we merge right, our exit coming up. “I mean, with the whole coming-out deal. Melissa’s brother Marcus came out a few years back. He said he always thought it would be a lot worse than it actually is … and, you know, Melissa’s dad is a preacher.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I say. “Wow.”

  “And you know what he said when Marcus came out to him?”

  “What?”

  A grin forms on Joe’s face. “He said, ‘Well, finally, Marcus, we were wondering when you were going to tell us.’ ” Joe chuckles. “That’s what he said.”

  I breathe a kind of raspy laugh, some phlegm caught in my throat. We take a right off of our exit, the Target’s red rings suspended and glowing in the distance, higher than the big lighted Christmas ornaments the city hung from its telephone poles, and higher still than the restaurant marquees: a Ryan’s, a Golden Corral, a New China Buffet, a Wendy’s.

  Joe doesn’t ask me when I think I might tell Mom and Dad. He doesn’t ask about Matt Gooby, or Matt Gooby’s dads, or if I’m sure about what I’ve told him or not: Sure you’re not just confused about all this, Tretch? It can be complicated, you know … Nope. Joe doesn’t say anything like any of that. And I love him so much for it right then and there that I can almost tell him so.

  Almost.

  “So guess what Mom told me you have to do while I’m gone.” Joe is holding a DVD box set of a show called Charlie’s Angels. We’re standing in an aisle in the entertainment section of Target. The big TV screens on the wall behind us roar an ad for a scary movie.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Feed Spooky,” Joe says.

  “Are you kidding?” I put down the DVD box set I’ve been holding, a season of a show Grandma and Granddad like called Hee Haw. (Earlier, I asked Joe if he thought we should get it for them, but then he reminded me, “Tretch, they don’t even have a DVD player. How would they watch it?”)

  “I hate that cat,” I say, and Joe cackles.

  “Well, the Whips are going out of town,” he says. “They were gonna pay one of us and I was gonna do it, but then I remembered I was going out of town, too.”

  Spooky is bad luck. I swear, every time I lay eyes on her, something bad happens. That day in the sixth grade when Bobby Handel rammed me into a locker, I had seen her crossing the street on her nasty cat paws, swishing her black tail, on the way to school. And I’d just known something bad was going to happen.

  It doesn’t help that she has a bad attitude on top of that. She acts all superior and doesn’t let you pet her or anything. If you try, she will bite you.

  “I mean, Joe, we’ll all be out of town on Christmas and Christmas Eve! We can’t feed her on those days!”

  “I told the Whips that, but they weren’t too concerned. They just said she would catch her a bird or something.” Joe puts his hand on his hip and imitates our neighbor Mr. Whip, a really country-sounding man. “ ‘She’ll have her a right old Christmas feast!’ ”

  It’s pretty dead-on, and pretty hilarious.

  The TV screens switch from the scary movie advertisement to something about a boy and a puppy, set somewhere in Alaska. It catches my attention, until I hear this couple fighting nearby. Not real fighting or anything, but disputing. Usually I’d think it was just another couple parading their drama in public—call it Target practice—but this time something clicks into place and I realize I recognize one of the voices.

  “You hear that?” I whisper to Joe.

  He raises an eyebrow. “Yes.”

  Tim Handel, Dad’s business partner and long-time friend, the father of the kid who consistently tries to make my life a living Hades, is fighting with his wife, Sandy, one row over.

  Tim and his first wife, Mariana, were the reason my parents met. Mom and Dad were both in the Handels’ wedding party. Mom was friends with Mrs. Mariana from college, so she was a bridesmaid. Dad was Tim’s best man.

  When Bobby and I were five years old, Mariana got sick. Really sick. Cancer sick. I remember stopping off with Mom at the hospital in Samsanuk to see her. It’s a quick flash of a memory, since I was so young. But Bobby’s mom was in the hospital bed, and she didn’t have hair—I remember that, and I remember Mom holding my hand. I don’t remember talking, or what we did. I just remember it like a picture, quiet and with no movement, Mrs. Mariana’s quick warm smile frozen for all time, and that’s it.

  Mariana died not long after she was diagnosed. It was fast, my mom said, and Tim didn’t know what to do, with Bobby being so young. He married Sandy a couple years later, and he and my dad started Farm and Handel Insurance. Every year they give a scholarship to a graduating high school student in honor of Mariana.

  A lot of people in town think Tim Handel is a nice guy, just like they think Bobby is such a nice boy. These are the people who don’t know the Handel men very well.

  Right now, Tim’s voice is raised in a loud whisper. “We just can’t afford that!”

  “What do you mean? How can we not?” Sandy shoots back.

  Uh-oh. I look at Joe. If the Handels are having financial problems, it most likely means we’re having financial problems as well. Joe squints his eyes like he’s really curious now.

  “We have—” Tim sighs. “We have enough, Sandy. We just can’t afford to—”

  “To what, Tim?”

  “To give him everything he wants.” Tim sighs again, a big one this time. “His grades are bad and he’s getting in trouble more. We shouldn’t feed that kind of behavior—”

  “I know, but, my God, Tim. It’s Ch
ristmas—”

  Joe and I are so absorbed in overhearing that we don’t realize the Handels are rounding the corner until it’s too late.

  I don’t know what to do. So I leave that up to Joe.

  “Well, hey, y’all,” he says as the Handels spot us. “What’s up?”

  “Well, what do you know, it’s the Farm boys,” Sandy says. She comes up to us and puts a hand on Joe’s arm and a hand on mine. “Doing some shopping?”

  “Yeah,” Joe says, showing her the DVD set. “For Mom.”

  “Oh, she’ll love this. There isn’t a woman I know who grew up in our time who doesn’t miss watching that show. You see this, Tim?”

  He nods and smiles in a pained way. Tim Handel is big, round, and clean-shaven. He wears khaki pants all the time. His hair is cut short, military style, and pepper-colored. He has a rough face, too—he’s not the kind of guy you would say looks friendly. But when he smiles, I guess he looks friendly enough. “I see it,” he says. “You boys glad to be out of school?”

  “We are,” I answer and, wanting to sound friendly, add, “I know Bobby is, too.” At my mention of Bobby, his nod is thrown off a beat—I’ve surprised him. I wonder if Mrs. Cook called him about the note in class. Or if he just thinks it’s weird that a loser like me would presume to know what’s going on in the head of a jerk like his son.

  Sandy chirps in with a “Yes, I know all you boys are glad to be out.” She widens her smile so it can block any other thoughts from being expressed. “Well, have a merry Christmas, you two. Tell the folks hi!”

  I look at Joe once they’re gone. “Whoops,” I say.

  “Yeah, whoops.”

  “Probably shouldn’t have brought up Bobby.”

  “Probably not.”

  We continue shopping without incident. We tease and trash-talk and joke with each other just like we always have. I guess a part of me was afraid that me being gay would alter that, would make him retreat a little, or—even worse—make him pretend that everything was cool while retreating at the same time. But there’s no apparent sign of retreat, no pretend. And I am so grateful for that.

  When we get back to our house, I’m expecting Joe to come in with me. Then I remember he’s going to see Melissa.