Any Other Place

by Michael Croley

  ON THE PHONE the previous night, I told Julie I couldn’t do this, which led to an obvious question from her.

  “Why don’t you bring her back here?” she said.

  “Mom doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Your mother isn’t in charge, J.D. You are. Your whole life is here. Your job, your friends. What about us?”

  “I know, I know.” There was a long pause on the phone until I finally said, “I think she has to grow up here. You don’t understand that, I know, but it has to be here.”

  “I don’t even know what that means. People don’t have to grow up in small towns.”

  “What am I supposed to do, Julie? I gave him my word. You think I want to be here?”

  “So, what? It’s settled? Is that what you’re saying? We can’t even talk about this? You just said you couldn’t do this. We talked about doing this together. At least trying it. You were going to bring her up here after Labor Day and then we’d enroll her at a good school, let her get adjusted to the city. What happened to that? Didn’t you tell me he was always telling you how proud he was of you? How much he wished he could have gone off and done the things you did? Don’t you think he’d want you to still live your life too?”

  “It’s not that simple. Maybe if she were older. It’s too soon to move her.” I looked up at the sky, the field of stars, and I felt my throat closing, fighting back the urge to let go of my emotion and tell Julie just how afraid I was and how much I was beginning to love her just as I had to leave.

  Then the phone went silent again, and I heard Julie tapping her fingers against the window in her apartment, looking out over the traffic on Houston. “I thought we were in this together,” she said and what she meant by “this” wasn’t Carly Ray but life. I didn’t have to tell her how I felt, she already knew.

  “Things are hard. She’s just a little girl. I don’t know if the timing is right and—”

  “Of course the timing isn’t right, J.D. Her father died. But you sound like you’re giving up on everything. You don’t have to make every decision right now, do you?”

  “I promised him,” I said, but even that seemed so hollow to me. I thought about Julie’s face, the soft point of her chin that rested on the windowsill, her light reflection in the glass as she leaned her forehead against the window.

  “You’re unbelievable,” she said. “Listen to yourself. Have you even thought this all the way through? What if I came there for a few weeks? I have the vacation time. I could use a break.”

  “There’s no need for that,” I said.

  “Why won’t you let me help you? I love you, J.D. It’s not just a tough time for Carly Ray. You have to think about yourself too.”

  I SPEND MOST of the day cleaning up the house. I’m reorganizing the living room and Burl’s—now my—bedroom but leaving as much as possible the way it was for Carly Ray’s benefit. I cut the grass and pull weeds from the flower bed and then make a list for the grocery store, leaving enough blank spaces for Carly Ray to fill in what she wants.

  The sun comes through the trees in specks, and the heat feels like it has a hum to it. I wheel the lawn mower back in the shed and feel welcomed by the cold air resting inside. Everything is so neat and organized, hanging off of screws driven into boards. In the corner is a mini-fridge where Burl kept his stash of beer, afraid to let Carly Ray know he liked to drink one from time to time.

  I open up the door and pull out one of the silver cans and pop the top. I hear my throat rising and falling as I gulp down nearly half of it in one long pull. I sift through the drawers of a small filing cabinet that has all the invoices for customers built up over the years. I see Burl made a good living framing and roofing houses. I think in all those years I’ve been away he must have grown closer to other people, that when he died there’s no way he could still consider me his best friend.

  I finish the beer and grab another. And then another. I sit in the shed all day and drink Burl’s beer. I forget about our childhood races up and down Roosevelt Street on our bikes. I forget about the night we stayed up until dawn at my father’s cabin after graduation, matching each other shot for shot from the Maker’s Mark bottle, standing on the railing of the balcony, seeing which one would fall first while our friends cheered us on. I try to forget about his phone call to me when we were in our junior years of college, me at UK and Burl at Eastern, telling me Tracy was pregnant.

  I sat up still groggy with sleep. “I thought you were smarter than that,” I said. “Didn’t you wear a rubber?”

  “It was just the one time, J.D. I swear.”

  “Well, that’s all it takes, right?”

  “What am I going to do?” he said. “I ain’t ready for no kid.”

  “You don’t have to do anything about it tonight. You’ve got a little bit of time, man.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You know exactly what it means.”

  “Shit. That ain’t no kind of advice. I can’t ask her to do that.”

  “Why not? You think she’s found some religion all of a sudden?”

  “No. It just don’t seem right to me, that’s all.”

  “Well, what then? Marriage?”

  “Shit,” Burl said. “That ain’t no kind of advice, either. She’s crazier than a shithouse mouse. You know that yourself.”

  “She’s always been crazy for you,” I said, allowing a slight smile.

  Burl huffed into the phone and let out a sigh. “I’m in a fix this time. I’m going to have to quit school. Get a job.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said to him.

  “That kid’s going to need a father. There ain’t nobody but me and her to take care of it.”

  But it turned out he was the only one. Tracy took off after the birth. Never told anybody where she was headed. Just gone. Her parents moved off to Florida a year after Carly Ray was born, Jacksonville, I think, and like Tracy, they never kept contact. Burl was it. He was all Carly Ray had, and as I take the last beer out of the fridge I realize I’m now all she has.

  Cans are scattered at my feet. I stand up and start stepping on them in hard strokes, flattening them out. My skin is hot from the alcohol; a patch of sweat on my back feels cold. I keep stomping the cans until they are all discs. I kick at them, pushing them like hockey pucks into the yard.

  I go to kick another and miss, losing my balance. I fall backward and try to catch myself on the workbench, but my fingers slip and I fall. My coccyx cracks, shooting pain up my spine, and my left hand slams beside me, the last three fingers jam against the ground, bending the top knuckles backward. I hold my hand out in front of me and clench my teeth as I push them back into place.

  I walk out of the shed and into the house, straight to Carly Ray’s room. I shove my hand, my bad hand, under the mattress and ignore the thousand spikes of pain tingling under my skin and pull the picture of Burl out. I look into it.

  Burl’s in between two other men with his arms draped over their shoulders and grinning that easy, warm smile of his. His sandy blond hair is lighter than normal because of the sun, and his tool belt hangs around his waist, sloped down over one hip. A farmer’s tan at the sleeves of his tee shirt and the lines of an older man already around the edges of his eyes. I never saw him this way. My visits were too short, too sporadic to ever know what became of his life in the way a friend should know these things.

  I expected this picture to be of Carly Ray and him, but I see the appeal is how fully he fills the space, how engaging and bright he looks. I cuss him. I yell at him for dying and making me come back here to this place.

  My voice screeches in my throat and my temples pulse when I shout. I pound the wall with my good hand, feel the sheetrock crack. I grab at the poster on the wall as I fall to floor. My hand throbs with pain and I crumple his picture, believing I can press all the pain concentrated there into his image. I open my hand and look at the creased lines on his face. Tears run down my cheeks and I look up, to the doorway, where I
see Carly Ray standing with Mom holding onto her shoulders.

  “J.D.,” Mom says. “What in the hell are you doing?” She looks around the room, sees the poster ripped and lying on the floor, the imprint of my fist in the wall.

  Carly Ray jerks away from her and runs down the hallway and out of the house. I go to the window and watch her run away, her little legs pounding into the sidewalk, her arms swaying side to side, trying to cut the air. I hear my mother’s voice on the porch calling for her, asking her to stop.

  Mom walks back in the room.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” She grabs my cheek and pulls down on my skin. I jerk away from her and the picture flies out of my hand, falling on the carpet.

  “You’re drunk,” she says.

  “I am not.”

  “You were supposed to pick her up from school an hour ago,” she says. “Her teacher had to call me because she couldn’t get an answer here at the house.”

  “I forgot,” I say and try to walk past her, into the living room and then outside, but she grabs my arm. “What?” I shout.

  She slaps me in the face as hard as she can and one of her nails nicks me. She can’t control the contortions in her face. She looks at me more disappointed then than at any other time I can remember. “We’ve got to go get her,” she says.

  The beer is bouncing in my head. My steps are wobbly even though my mind is starting to clear. I realize what it is I’ve done and why I’ve done it and how it must look to Carly Ray who doesn’t know anything about life and decisions, sacrifices people make for others.

  “How could you?” my mom says to me in the car. “She’s just a little girl and she has to come home to see you there, destroying her room, ruining the one thing she has left.”

  I stay quiet because there is no explanation, not one that would matter to her or me, really. I press my forehead against the window and look at the rows of houses that haven’t changed since I was a boy, everything so unflinchingly the same.

  “You’re a grown man, for God’s sake,” she says. “Getting drunk in the middle of the day. And then. The gall you have to do something like that.”

  She goes on. Keeps repeating herself, keeps saying the same thing to me over and over, and I feel like a child. I feel like I’m ten years old and have broken a window by accident and she’s yelling at me for something I couldn’t control. And I want to say something to this effect back to her, to stand up for myself, but what I did is indefensible, inexcusable.

  “I get the point,” I say.

  “Do you? Well, congratulations. That’s great. You get the point. There’s a little girl you’re supposed to take care of running around town because she’s just seen you destroy her room and her father’s picture but you get the point. Thank God for clarity.”

  “I didn’t ask to take care of her.” I say it so softly that even I’m surprised I’ve said it.

  Mom slams the brakes and, having forgotten to put my seatbelt on, my head flies into the windshield before I can catch myself.

  “You didn’t ask to take care of her? You didn’t ask to take care of her? She didn’t ask for her father to die, J.D. That little girl hasn’t asked for shit and that’s exactly what she’s gotten her whole life.”

  I keep touching my forehead.

  “Get out,” she says. “She can’t be far. Start calling her name.”

  JUST AFTER DUSK, when the mosquitoes start to get thick and I can hear the frying of bugs in blue lights on back porches, I find Carly Ray sitting out behind the shed at the house. It’s been almost two hours, and I’ve been crossing through the same yards Burl and I crossed twenty years ago when we were about her age. My head aches from the beer and the knot on my head. Some lightning bugs pop and katydids are whining, but there is still enough light that I can make out her face and see she’s not been crying.

  “Hey,” I say as soft as possible. I’m not sure if it’s to comfort her or to make sure I don’t scare her.

  She looks up to me, but she’s quiet. Just like her father.

  She goes back to staring in front of her, ignoring me. I feel the pull of a thousand mistakes in my life compounded into this one chance I have at redemption.

  “Why me?” I asked Burl. We were twenty-five and he’d come back from putting his father in the nursing home.

  “You’re all the family I got, man. Tracy’s never coming back. Her parents don’t care about Carly Ray. I know if anything happens you’ll take care of her.” We were on the back deck, and instead of this shed being here, there was a dead maple tree, its trunk almost rotted out.

  I didn’t know what to say to him then except that I was honored and that, of course, I’d be Carly Ray’s godfather. Burl and I never talked about it again, but as I look at Carly Ray and consider all the years in the past and the ones she has coming, it’s on my mind how often I’ve not thought about it. The nobility and conviction of my word to Burl doesn’t have the strength it did seven years ago. I’ve let myself forget what it meant to Burl to ask me, for me to be the one, and in doing this I feel like I’m unworthy of taking care of his daughter.

  “Are you hungry?” I say, knowing I’m stalling. “My mom will be back any minute now and she’ll cook you some supper.”

  I squat down in front of her, like a catcher, and look into her eyes. They are Burl’s, round with small irises that give her the appearance of always being focused.

  “I messed up today,” I say. “I really messed up.” I think how awful this sounds, how unapologetic it is.

  Carly Ray blinks past me to the back of the shed, the chipped white paint on the boards and the dandelions that have grown up at the base.

  “Did your Daddy ever tell you about me, Carly Ray? Do you remember when I used to come visit you and him?”

  This breaks her stare, but she still won’t hold my eyes with hers. She is thinking.

  “When your daddy asked me to be your godfather I was proud to tell him I would do it and take care of you. And now all I can think about is what I did today, and how he would feel about it, what he would do to me if he was here.”

  “He’d kick your ass,” she says, and this time there is venom in her voice, the anger of her father’s death I’ve not seen until now.

  It’s what keeps me from laughing and forces the sting deeper.

  “You’re right. He’d beat me black and blue. He was a way better fighter than me,” I tell her. “I—” but I stop short of finishing.

  Carly Ray looks right into me, so hard I blink and almost fall back. “Why’d you do what you did today? Why did you rip my poster and punch my wall?”

  “I was angry at him for leaving. I was angry that I’m the one who is supposed to take care of you.”

  “You don’t want to take care of me.” She says it as a statement, not a question, and this hurts the most. This little girl who has nothing anymore, who is the daughter of my oldest friend.

  Mom’s car pulls into the driveway and illuminates the yard in a sweeping motion. I get up and walk out from behind the shed and wave to her. “She’s right here.” I point.

  Mom comes running up and bends down to hug Carly Ray. “Lord, you scared us to death. We looked all over town for you. I was fixing to call the police. Don’t ever do that again,” she whispers into her ear and turns up to me when she says this. “Don’t ever run off again.”

  They walk past me into the house, and I’m left standing in the dark, my hands in my pockets and dew collecting on the tops of my shoes. I pick up the cans from earlier and throw them in the trash. I lock up the shed and go sit on the porch steps and smell hamburgers frying inside.

  Mom puts Carly Ray to bed and says she’s going to stay the night. I’m still outside, slapping at gnats and mosquitoes, and I tell her I’ll sleep on the couch. She’s too angry with me to say much more than this, and I don’t blame her. I watch the red light of a radio tower flashing off by the railroad.

  After the house is quiet I walk inside and grab a burger from
the fridge and walk outside again. I can’t even stand to be in the house. I’m on the steps, and I lay my head back and feel the wood, cool and grainy, against my neck.

  Carly Ray comes outside, and I open up my eyes. She stands over top of me and then sits down beside me. I raise up and offer her a bite of my half-eaten burger, but she shakes her head.

  “Can’t sleep?” I ask.

  “No,” she says.

  “You’ll be tired tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I was tired today too.”

  “You need to get your rest. School’s going to be tougher this year than last year, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Sure it will be. That’s how it works,” I say, but then I stop myself. There’s no use trying to talk to her like this. She’s too smart to not see what I’m trying to do. We are quiet on the porch, listening to the trains being connected in the distance and the rumble of their movements echoing above us. I’m ready to pitch my burger into the bushes when Carly Ray speaks up.

  “I miss him, J.D.”

  “You always will,” I tell her. “You can talk to me about those things when you want. When you’re ready to.”

  She nods her head and folds her arms over her knees and lays her chin down on them. “Do you miss him?”

  I think about this for longer than I should. I hadn’t seen him since last Christmas and only then for a few beers. Our conversation felt strained and our emails became reduced to nothing but forwarded jokes. I do miss him, but not in the way I think I should.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “I miss him.”

  She stays quiet and I look out at the road with her, neither of us moving or talking until I say, “You know when we were kids and I’d make a mistake, your father would never say anything to me. Just go quiet for a few days and give me these awful looks. He wouldn’t sit by me at lunch and wouldn’t call me at home. Back then I had a car and he didn’t, so I’d usually pick him up, and when he was mad, I’d wait for him on the curb every morning. When he wasn’t mad anymore he’d come out and get in the car and we’d go to school and act like nothing had ever happened.