Red Shirt

by A. J. Stewart

  Chapter Twelve

  Sunday was chore time at the Dunbar residence. It had always been so, and in New England such traditions stuck fast. Some folks headed off to church, but Coach always said he did his talking with the almighty on Friday nights, so Sunday he was out raking leaves in the front yard. Kerry and Mrs. D set about dusting and vacuuming while I tended the back yard. Kerry’s kids followed me like I was an alien life-form that they wanted to study a little more closely, so after I had raked the leaves into a large pile we took turns jumping into them, making leaf angels and dispersing the litter all over the yard again. Once apparently wasn’t enough, so I raked once more and we jumped back in, and then we did it all over. I was lying in the pile, autumn leaves covering half my body, when I saw Kerry standing on the back porch, watching with a smile.

  Chores were done with military timing and precision, and were always completed by noon. As we washed our hands and changed into clean clothes, Mrs. Dunbar made sandwiches, ham and cheese for the adults, PB&J for the kids. We sat at the table and ate and discussed the prospects for the afternoon. Coach seemed in good spirits.

  By one o’clock Coach was in his recliner ready for the afternoon of football. The selection of games usually involved the New England Patriots, the New York Giants or the New York Jets. Sometimes games conflicted and sometimes you could watch all three, one after the other, until well into the night.

  I watched the opening kickoff of the Giants game from Pittsburgh. They must have exploded some kind of fireworks display during the ad break because the ground was smothered in an unnaturally thick, white fog that hung in the cold air like a blanket.

  Mrs. D had the kids in the dining room making centerpieces for their upcoming Thanksgiving dinner, motifs of turkeys and pilgrims. Kerry came into the living room and sat on the arm of the chair I was in and watched for a while. The Giants went three and out and then Coach flicked the channel over to another game for a moment. The graphic on screen said it was the Chargers at Washington, and I struggled to recall where the Chargers played out of these days. It wasn’t the east coast—that much was obvious—because they all looked cold and uncomfortable and they dropped two passes and got slammed on a run to go three and out. Coach flicked the channel back to the Giants game. It felt like it was going to be a long day for them all.

  Kerry put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m going to go for a walk,” she said, standing. I got a hint of subtext there, like I was supposed to go too, so I followed her to the coat closet and she passed me one of Coach’s old workout jackets, a nice big down-filled thing that would have kept Shackleton warm, and we headed outside.

  Kerry wore her stylish coat and her scarf and woolen gloves, and I shoved my hands in my pockets. I had worked just hard enough in the yard to keep warm, but ambling down the street was another story. The sky was a metallic gray that showed no sign of rain but no hint of sunshine, either.

  We walked down the middle of the road. There was no traffic. It was a quiet, suburban area, and it was Sunday afternoon, so people around here were bunkered down in front of televisions, just like Coach. We walked a little while, gently kicking at fallen leaves on the road. Then Kerry spoke.

  “Did you have any luck?”

  I knew what she meant. She hadn’t wanted to speak of it in the house, within earshot of her parents. Mrs. D hadn’t asked about it, and I wasn’t sure if that was because she didn’t want to think about it, or if she figured it was all in hand, now that I was there.

  “I had a word with Brett,” I said, the air clouding in front of my teeth.

  “And?”

  “I’m going to spend some time in his office tomorrow.”

  “Does he have the money?”

  “That’s what I’ll find out.”

  “How did he seem?”

  I wanted to say that he seemed fine, that there was nothing to worry about, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t that I couldn’t tell a lie to save Kerry the worry. I’m as capable of a lie as the next man. But I knew that she would see through it. Some people can do that—not necessarily to everyone, but to some other people. Brothers and sisters, wives and husbands. Sometimes the slightest hint of untruth told on a face, and when you knew the face so well, you knew the lie beneath. But sometimes people were self-delusional. Sometimes they didn’t want to see the lie, even in a face they knew. Even in their own face. But Kerry wasn’t that person. She was as close to a sister as I would ever have, and she had watched me across the dining table too many times while I tried to hide my pain. She knew the face and she knew the look, and she would read the untruth in it.

  “He’s in denial,” I said. “He hasn’t quite bought into the idea that he’s done anything wrong, that there’s any problem.”

  “Is Mom wrong about him? Is there nothing going on?”

  I shook my head. “No, your mom’s intel is good. He’s in all sorts of trouble, that much is obvious. He just needs to appreciate the gravity of it all.”

  “Will he?”

  I looked at her, and she turned to me.

  “Oh, yeah. He will.”

  We kept walking in silence, moving aside for the occasional car. There was a good dose of woodsmoke on the wind, fires being lit as the smell of Sunday roasts hit the air. We turned a corner and then another, but every street looked pretty much like the last. Lined with trees, wisps of smoke from chimneys, yards cleared and claiming the first new leaves to fall. I had walked and run and played these streets my entire childhood, and I had known them like the back of my hand. Maybe better. Now they felt unfamiliar to me, or perhaps that was me telling myself a lie.

  I paid so little mind to where we were walking that I was surprised when Kerry stopped moving in the middle of the street. I knew where we were, but it took a moment for my mind to give me permission to see it. We stood on a street unremarkably similar to that from which we had departed, looking at a colonial house that was itself not dissimilar from the Dunbars’.

  It was my parent’s house, or at least it had been. I didn’t think of it as my house and hadn’t for a long time. My house was in Singer Island, or in Miami or wherever the hell Danielle happened to be. This was just the house I had grown up in.

  Unlike the Dunbars’, this house looked different to me. It had been an off-white color in my day, a combination of paint choice and weathering. Now it was a steel blue, the color of the Atlantic on a stormy afternoon. The shutters were white and the front door was red and the path leading to it was framed by perennial flowers that hadn’t been cut back but were retreating for the winter all on their own.

  I looked the house over with the dispassion of a property investor, and then I glanced at Kerry. She was looking at me.

  “Is it the same people?” I asked.

  Kerry shook her head. “No. The people you sold it to were there about ten years, though. Then they sold it to a young professional couple. I think they have two kids now.”

  I nodded and watched the house. It was dark and no smoke rose from the chimney. No one was home. It didn’t feel strange to me that another family was living in my childhood home. In a way it felt good. Houses were nothing more than structures. Homes were built in the mind. They were places of emotion and memory. Houses often contained a home, but a home could also move. Houses just changed. They shook off the remnants of one home and became another, changing color like a chameleon, adjusting to a new family. I was glad this family had painted the house. It made it theirs, to them and to me.

  “Did you ever hear anything?” I asked.

  “About the girl’s family?”

  I nodded.

  “A little. The family moved away after you sold the house and put the money in trust. The girl’s sisters went to college, both in Boston. I heard on the grapevine that they are both married and still up there now.”

  I nodded again but said nothing.

  “You never kept tabs on them?” Kerry asked. “Being a private eye and all?”

  I took a deep breath and watched
the still house. I had learned to walk inside its walls, and I had learned to ride a bike on this very street. We had built a homemade slip’n’slide with a length of plastic and a garden hose that ended up turning the front lawn into a mud bath. I had dashed around the backyard with mouth agape at the beauty of fireflies dancing across the lawn at dusk. I had hit a baseball through the window on the left side of the porch. I had played my own one-man World Series games on the front lawn and could still hear the sounds of Jackson Browne coming through the open window in the spring, my mother singing along, telling me that lawyers, too, could fall in love.

  I remembered how quiet the house was after the funeral. The well-wishers had gone and left me and my dad alone. The television remained off and the sun sank away and left the house in darkness. The only sounds were creaking floor boards and the hump as the furnace kicked in. My father sat in the living room with a bottle of something cheap. I came to him for something, anything. A hug, a tear, outrage. He gave me the blankest stare I have ever seen and then turned his eye to the darkened television.

  He had never hit me. Later I told myself that I wished he had, that it might have shown me that he cared about something, but that line of thinking was a lie, too. The truth was he cared too much. He had built his everything around this woman and when the cancer came and took her from him, he hadn’t known what to do. Psychology books might have said it was weakness. Romance books might have said it was love beyond the grave. They might both have been right.

  A teenage boy doesn’t understand these things. The silence of a house where once there had been laughter and music. My father drank just enough to make the pain go away but not enough that he couldn’t go to work the next day. He didn’t go so deep as to end up on death’s door. He went just deep enough to no longer be able to see the light, and there he stayed.

  I don’t know how it was that my dad had come to know the President of Yale University. Perhaps it was the same way the lord of a manor knew his servants, but know him he did. The President had promised my dad that if my grades were good enough that Yale would offer me an education like no other, at no expense.

  I told myself that my grades weren’t good enough, but I knew the truth was otherwise. From the day I had stepped onto Florida soil to play in a high school baseball tournament, I knew. I was approached by a couple of local schools with scholarship offers but the only one I paid attention to was Miami. Everything about it was different. Where there had been cloud, there was sun. Where there had been silence, there was Cuban rhumba and Latin rhythms. Where there had been vacant stares, there were smiles, like everyone wanted to be there.

  I was in Miami, drowning in the sun and the music, when the accident happened. The police said my father had an alcohol reading well over the limit, which was nothing unusual. What was unusual was that he had gone out like that. He had always drunk at home and stayed there. But for reasons I would never know he went out that night, and he sped through the red light and he hit the girl’s car, killing them both.

  The lawyer who handled my father’s estate was a professor at Yale. He told me there might be a contest, that the family of the girl might sue. He said it might be expensive to defend, especially given my father was at fault. Bedside manner was not his strong suit. But I told him to tell them not to bother. I told him to get word to the girl’s family that they could have it. All of it. I wanted no part of it. The estate passed to a trust which I inherited a few months later, on my eighteenth birthday. The Yale professor then saw to it that the house and possessions were sold and the proceeds were put into a new trust for the education of the two younger sisters of the college student dad had killed.

  I hadn’t returned to Connecticut for any of it. Not for the funeral, not to empty the house, none of it. I stayed in the sunshine and listened to the Cuban music and I might have found solace in the same bottle that my father had lived in, had I not run into a man called Lenny Cox. He had been my guiding light and my voice of reason, even when he suggested I do unreasonable things. I missed Lenny every single day.

  I started walking. I just turned and ambled away, not in a hurry to be away from the old house, not in a hurry to be somewhere else. It was just a habit. When all else fails, keep moving forward. Kerry dropped in beside and we walked along the old street.

  “I’m sorry,” I said after we turned the corner.

  “For what?”

  “Everything. Being in your house all the time. Taking your dad’s attention. You must have hated it.”

  She breathed deeply. “I didn’t hate it, because you never took his time. Every second he spent with you was sports time, football time, baseball time. Not my time. If I would have felt jealous of anything, it was his job. But I didn’t because, you know, I never felt neglected. It was my childhood, it was normal to me. And besides, I had always wanted a big brother. I really don’t know why, but I had. And then I got one.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “No, I’m not. Do you know how many kids I knew at school who had no brothers or sisters?”

  “Not many, not back then.”

  “I knew two. Me and you. And by tragic fate and circumstance, we were brought together.”

  We walked further, looping around back toward the Dunbars’. Kerry looped her arm through mine and we walked close together.

  “Do you remember offering to take me to the prom?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “Because I was an hysterical teenage girl who thought no one would ask her, and you said you would come back from college and take me.”

  “But you got a date.”

  “I did.”

  “I would have come back for that.”

  “You don’t think I know that? You’ve only been back once in all these years, and that was for my wedding. You can’t know how much that meant to me.”

  “I’ve not been good at keeping in touch.”

  “You had a lot of reasons not to. You had to move on in your own way. But you know, I think sometimes you need to look back in order to move forward.”

  “Is that why you asked me to come back?”

  “No,” she said as we reached the front lawn of the house. “I did that because sometimes a girl needs her dad, and when it’s her dad in trouble, sometimes she needs her big brother.”

  We stepped up onto the porch and sat down on the glider despite the cold.

  “You’re not so helpless,” I said.

  “No, I’m not. I didn’t call you because I needed a big strapping man to save me. I called you because I needed the boy who my father looks on like a son, even after all these years.”

  We sat tight together as the afternoon got heavier and dragged down the sun, and we pushed in tight against each other to keep warm. I asked Kerry about her kids and her husband and how she liked living in Hartford, and she told me about their community and friends and how it was home, and I thought about Beccy Williams, and how Hartford sounded like a very different place when she told it.

  We sat for the longest time, until my phone trilled annoyingly in my pocket, and I fished it out and saw the text message.

  Where are you? Lobster pound, now!

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Lobster Pound was a modest little shack on the Branford River, just east of New Haven. The name was somewhat contentious, given that lobster pounds were really a designation in Maine. Back in the 1800s the name had been given to the holding pens constructed in the mouths of rivers and inlets in Maine, where lobster were put after being caught to keep them fresh prior to sale. In most of the rest of New England and certainly in Connecticut, the simple places that sprung up during the summer were known as lobster shacks. The story was that this place had been opened by a lobsterman from Bar Harbor, so he had used the Maine terminology, and the name had stuck.

  The lobster hadn’t. The once plentiful Connecticut lobster no longer lived in the Sound, warming Gulf Stream waters driving them further north. The dock on the Branford River had
once been home to a full lobster fleet, but now did little more than joyrides for tourists, and the lobsters were trucked down from Ogunquit.

  I pulled into the large dirt parking lot. There were only a handful of cars. The Pound was a seasonal endeavor, and it would close for Thanksgiving and not open again until Memorial Day next year. There was good reason. The business was no more than a small shack where the lobster were boiled and prepped, sold by the pound with boiled red potatoes and garlic butter, or on a lobster roll. That was the menu. There was nothing else. No fries, no hot dogs. Lobster and a Coke, unless you brought your own beer.

  Which the boys had. They were sitting at the wooden picnic tables overlooking the water. Some had devoured lobsters, other were sticking with cans of Narragansett Lager. I parked and took a deep breath and then got out. The afternoon was late and my headlights had lit the parking lot so that every eye turned my way.

  “Redshirt!” They seemed to yell all at once, and a couple guys got up to greet me. Colt Leyton, who had been my center all the way through school gave me a bear hug. He was as big as ever.

  “Redshirt, I can’t believe it’s you, man.”

  “It’s me, Colt.”

  “My man, Redshirt,” said Davis Wilton. He was still stocky and powerful, and hadn’t gone to flab at all. As a running back he had been the heart of our rushing game back in the day, a black flash of lightning with a step that could bamboozle the best defense. He had been the only other player, other than me, to go on to play football at college.

  I slapped a few high fives and shook a few hands. Dustin was sitting at the end of one of the tables and he gave me a high five. He had managed to round up a dozen or more guys from our old team.