consider a very dicey choice, if not absolute insanity.
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Partly because men usually get men sponsors and vice
versa. But that’s just so there won’t be any weird emo-
tional attachments, and with me being somewhere be-
tween old enough to be his mother and old enough to
be his grandmother, I guarantee that’s not going to be
an issue. More to the point, I don’t have any more clean
time than he does.”
“But you had a bunch of years before,” Roy said. “You
know a lot more than I do.”
“Other people know more,” she said.
“That’s not the point, though,” Roy said. “Here’s
the point. When she walked into that meeting the other
night…”
That’s when I realized he was talking to me. He wasn’t
looking at me. But when he called Zoe “she” rather than
“you,” I got it.
“…it just changed something for me. Because I knew
what she had in her past was so hard, you know? One of
those things you never stop regretting, that never really
leaves you alone. So I figured if she could pull it together and commit to getting clean again and keep going, so
could I. It sort of gave me hope for my situation. That’s
why she thinks I need to count my clean time from that
night.”
“Whatever,” Zoe said, shaking off his praise. “Bottom
line, we’re looking to give that a go, no matter what
anybody around us might think of the idea.” Zoe turned
her attention directly onto me. “Would that be weird for
you? If I was Roy’s sponsor?”
“No!” I said. Shouted, almost, though I hadn’t meant
to. “No, it would be great.” I felt as though a huge weight
had been lifted off me. I didn’t realize how much the
weight of saving my brother had been crushing me until
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Zoe lifted it away. “If you helped him half as much as
you helped Connor…”
“I didn’t do anything special with Connor,” she said.
But I knew that wasn’t true. “Don’t invest too much in
me, kid, like I’m magic. That boy just had some stuff he
needed to get off his chest. That’s all that was.”
I heard the distinctive sucking sound of a straw run-
ning dry. Hitting the bottom of its drink. I looked over
to see that Roy had rushed through the bottom half of
his soda and was pushing to his feet.
“I’ll go home and tell Mom I’m alive,” he said.
“She might be driving around looking for you,” I said.
“Don’t be too surprised if you run into her accidentally.”
He didn’t answer. Only shook his head. Because …
you know. That was our mom. What could you do but
shake your head about her?
“You need a ride, son?” Zoe asked him.
“No, ma’am. Finish your coffee. I need to practice
walking anyway. You two sit. I’ll go sort it out with Mom.”
I watched him swing along on his crutches, headed for
the door. Watched a local man with two little kids hold
the door open for him. The man nodded at my brother
proudly, as though Roy were some kind of war hero.
I wondered if Roy would get to keep that. Or if, in a
town this size, the truth would find its way out.
I looked back at Zoe, and she looked at me. We’d
been doing that a lot lately, I’d noticed. Looking each
other head on, both at the same time. Like we weren’t
afraid. Like we had nothing to hide and nothing to lose.
At least, not from each other.
“What did you do that helped Connor so much?” I
asked her. “I’d really like to know.”
“I just told you.”
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“But there had to be more to it than that. You couldn’t
have just sat there and said nothing while he talked.”
“Now and then I might’ve said something in reply.”
“Like what?”
She sighed. Rolled her eyes at me, like I was still the
little pest I’d always been. But not really in a bad way,
if such a thing were possible. Then she surprised me by
offering up a serious answer.
“Like when he talked about his mom, and how much
she smothers him, and depends on him too hard. I just
told him he wasn’t wrong for minding. Kids get to feel-
ing like they ought to be everything a parent needs, and
they feel guilty if they fall short. But I told him anybody
in his position would feel the same way, and it’s normal
to feel it. And his dad leaving the way he did. I just told
him it was between the man and his wife, something
that’d been going on years before he was born, and it
didn’t have nearly as much to do with him as he might’ve
thought. People need help with perspective sometimes.
If they’re all alone in their own head, they can lose
perspective. Sometimes you need to use somebody else
like a mirror. Let them reflect back to you the way the
world really is.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Not a problem.”
“Did he tell you about his kitten?”
“Oh yeah. At great length. It’s not hard getting Connor
to tell you about his kitten. The problem would be get-
ting him to stop telling you about her.”
But I could tell by the expression on her face that she
really didn’t mind at all.
* * *
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I didn’t want to go home, because I figured Roy and
Mom would need some time to have it out. And if they
were fighting, I didn’t want to hear it.
So I went over to Connor’s.
I must admit, in addition to his being my friend, I
really wanted to see that kitten again.
Connor surprised me by answering the door.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s you. Where’s your mom?”
“Not sure.”
I followed him down the long hallway and up the stairs,
and I didn’t need time for my eyes to adjust. There was
light. Lots of it. Apparently, after his mom left the house
Connor had gone around and opened all the curtains.
“She goes out now and doesn’t tell you where?”
We slipped through his bedroom door carefully, so
we didn’t let the kitten out. He never answered. Well,
not never. But he moved on to a different topic in that
moment.
“Uh-oh,” Connor said. “She’s under the bed. Well,
the best plan is to just sit on the floor and pretend you
don’t want her to come to you. And then she will.”
We sat cross-legged, facing each other. Just for a sec-
ond we smiled. Then we looked down at the rug, the
way we usually did.
Baby steps.
“She calls it ‘Me Time,’” he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought
we were still talking about the cat. And if that had been
the case, his comment would have made no sense.
“What?”
“My mom.”
“Oh. Your mom.”
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“She doesn’t say exactly what Me Time is, but once
she made some comment about needing someone to talk
to. So she might be going to talk to a friend, though I’m
not sure who that would be. Or she might actually be in
counseling. I’m thinking counseling, because if she had
a new friend, I think she’d tell me more about that. She
wouldn’t treat it like some kind of secret.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well. That would be good, if she was
in counseling. I mean … wouldn’t it?”
The kitten stuck her head out from under the bed.
And my mood just soared when I looked at that little face.
Those pink ears and those tiny, round blue eyes.
She looked at my hand where it sat on the rug, and
did that gearing up to attack thing kittens do. Front end
hunkered down. Tail end in the air. Eyes all intense. A
little swish of her body back and forth. Then she came
barreling across the rug, bit my finger with those needle-
sharp baby teeth, and ran under the bed again.
Connor laughed. I laughed, too. It hurt, but not so
much that it wasn’t still funny.
“I think it’s good,” he said. “It’s good to talk to
somebody.”
“Speaking of which. Speaking of talking to somebody.
You’re not going to believe this. Zoe Dinsmore is going to
be Roy’s sponsor in the program. But don’t tell anybody.
It might not be the right anonymity thing, and maybe
I shouldn’t have told you. And besides, I don’t want it
getting back to my mom.”
Connor and I had talked once, briefly, about whether
Roy would ever get serious enough to get a sponsor. So
Connor knew what that meant.
“Wait. Zoe’s back in the meetings?”
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“Yeah. Didn’t I tell you? I’m sorry. It was just a couple
of days ago, and I guess I haven’t seen you since then.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I’m really glad to hear that.
Good for her. And that’s good about her taking Roy
under her wing, too. I think she’ll help him.”
“Yeah. I think so, too.”
Then we had one of those long silences. Like the old
days. The kind that get stronger and more thick and solid
the longer they go on, and you start feeling like you can’t
break through them.
But I didn’t want the old days anymore. I wasn’t going
back there. So I broke through.
“She really helped you, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She did.”
“What was it about talking to her that helped you
so much?”
He didn’t answer right away. But I didn’t feel like he
was holding back or holding out on me. He seemed to
be really thinking about what he wanted to say.
“Sometimes it’s hard to put those things into words,”
he said.
“Yeah. Sometimes it is.”
“I think … she made me feel like I was worth having
around. And for a while there I didn’t really feel like I was.”
“It’s good that you believed her.”
“I didn’t,” he said.
The cat ran, pretty much sideways, in a wild arc
between us and then back under the bed. We were too
caught up in what we were saying to laugh.
“Oh, I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds,” he
said. “I just mean … I felt like I wasn’t worth much, and
sometimes on a bad day I still feel that way. But here’s
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nobody wanted her around, and she almost killed herself
over thinking that. But I know she’s worth a lot, and I
know I want her around. So I know she was wrong. So
now when I feel bad about myself, I think about that,
and I think maybe I’m wrong. Maybe things aren’t as bad
as I thought. So that’s one of those thoughts that, once
you have it, you don’t ever really forget it. Just that idea that when you feel like everything is terrible … it might
not be the truth. Once you get that in your head, you
don’t want to do something based on those feelings if it’s
something you can’t ever take back. And this may sound
like a strange thing to say, but…”
I waited. But he seemed less and less inclined to go on.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“No. Never mind. It was nothing.”
“Really. Go ahead and tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”
“No,” he said. “I know you won’t. I was just going
to say that I think maybe I helped her, too. Because she
said something like that to me once. Something like …
like she didn’t believe in herself, but she believed in me.
She even told me some stuff that was hard about her life.”
That made me feel bad. A little, anyway. But all I said
was, “Like what? If it’s not too private.”
“Like about her girls. And why she decided to stay in
Ashby. And how now she thinks that was a bad decision,
and that it was really hard for them, trying to make that
adjustment. Now she thinks it was selfish of her to stay
and that’s why they don’t really speak to her much. She
says they felt like everybody thought it should have been
them who died, not two kids who had nothing to do with
Zoe. Not somebody else’s kids. I don’t know if that’s true
or not. If people really felt that way. But I guess the girls felt it like a pressure, you know?
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“But I’m getting off track. I just meant to say that
it went both ways. She believes in me but not herself. I
didn’t believe in myself, but I believe in Zoe. You know, it really helps to have one person who believes in you, even
if it’s not you. Even if you can’t quite do it yourself yet.”
I opened my mouth to say something. Probably that
I could imagine what a game changer that would be. Or
maybe “lifesaver” would’ve been a better way to phrase it.
But just then the kitten came out and leapt onto
Connor’s back and grabbed on with her claws into his shirt.
And obviously also into his skin, because he screamed.
But he sort of laughed and screamed at the same time.
He reached around carefully and took hold of her
and pulled her close to his chest, where she couldn’t do
much harm.
“We have got to cut your nails,” he told her.
We didn’t talk about serious topics anymore that day.
In fact, we didn’t talk about those early times of his
going to see Zoe Dinsmore ever again. Not that I can
recall.
Then again, what more needed to be said?
If something works, I figure … just leave it alone.
Let it be a thing that worked. Not everything needs to
be picked apart for better understanding. Sometimes it’s
okay to just say thank you in the quiet of your head and
move along.
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PART TWO:
PRESENT DAY
AFTER FIFTY YEARS OF
MOVING ALONG
&nb
sp; CHAPTER NINETEEN
All You
I could have said right from the start that I’m retelling
this story standing beside the freshly dug, open grave of
Connor Barnes. While I’m waiting for my friend’s casket
to be lowered into the ground. I was tempted to. But I
might’ve given a false impression if I’d done it that way.
It might have sounded like I was saying Connor didn’t
make it.
Connor made it.
He made it another fifty years, after which he died of
stomach cancer at age sixty-four.
We would’ve loved to have had Connor around an-
other ten or twenty years, but still, he had a good run.
And he left the world a lot of value from his time here,
not only in the form of the decent life he managed to
live, but also in the form of three beautiful daughters and
seven grandchildren—five boys and two girls.
I’m standing here talking to one of the grandchildren,
and I have been for what seems like very long time.
His name is Harris, and he’s fourteen. He looks a
little like Connor did at his age. Lanky and awkward and
hopeless to sort out the world he’s been given. It doesn’t
escape my notice that he’s the same age Connor and I
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were in the story. I hope that makes my ramblings even
more meaningful to him.
“So why do we call you Uncle Luke?” he asks me,
shielding his eyes against the sun. “If you hate to have
anybody call you Luke?”
He doesn’t ask why everybody calls me Uncle Luke
even though I’m not blood family, and even though I
would be a great-uncle to him even if I was. But I guess some mysteries are more important than others.
I say, “Yeah, I figured you’d ask me that. But as you
get older, a name that makes you sound young loses its
sting.”
I can tell by the look in his eyes that something I’ve
said has gone over his head for the first time all day.
Maybe because it doesn’t involve being fourteen. I expect
him to ask more about it, but he veers off in an entirely
different direction.
“So by the time you were old enough for the draft,
the war was over?”
I breathe a huge sigh. Because it’s a huge subject. But
I’ll tell him the truth. I always tell him the truth.
“When I turned eighteen,” I say, “the war was still
not over.”
“So what did you do?”
“I didn’t go.”
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