The Cranberry Hush: A Novel

by Monopoli, Ben

  Beth appeared at the bedroom door, tying the belt of a pale yellow robe around her waist. Behind her Nosebag jumped onto the bed, where white papers were scattered like trampled confetti.

  “Vince,” she said curtly to silence me before I said anything. She pushed a balled-up wad of fabric against my chest and I realized it was Griff’s shirt. She relaxed noticeably as soon as I had it in my hands.

  “What happened?” I said.

  She was quiet for a moment, listening to Griff rooting around in the living room. “Nostalgia happened,” she said finally. She went back in the bedroom and closed the door.

  I stood looking at the shirt in my hands as though it were some kind of alien artifact. I heard the screech of springs and in a moment Griff and Zane were in the kitchen. Griff had his jeans on now.

  “Here.” I held his shirt out and he yanked it over his head and threw his arms through the sleeves.

  “I’m sorry, guys,” he said. His face was flushed. “This was a huge mistake.”

  “It’s all right,” I said reassuringly, happy to be that way.

  Zane grabbed the aloe plant from the counter. We put on our boots and our jackets and gloves, hats, scarves, and when we were walking down the rickety staircase for the umpteenth time that day, Griff said, “What the fuck was I thinking?”

  And I knew he hadn’t been thinking at all, but remembering.

  M O N D A Y

  “How was that cot, killer?” Griff said, holding out to Zane a wide wooden tray piled high with the fixings of a room-service breakfast. Steam seeped from beneath shiny metal plate-covers.

  “Hard,” Zane complained. “And usually I don’t mind having hard things against me all night.”

  “TMI, dude.”

  Zane smiled and began sampling Griff’s wares, lifting one dish cover and then another. He chose a corn muffin and a little goblet of fruit. “Your robe’s very classy.”

  It was one of the hotel’s complementary bathrobes—white and fluffy, it fell against Griff’s skinny legs like a cape. “Comfy as hell, too,” Griff said. “I may just gank it. Butter?”

  “No thanks.” Zane pulled the paper off his muffin and took a bite. Yellow crumbs tumbled onto the floral bedspread that covered his knees.

  Griff turned to me with the tray. “And for you, sir?”

  I uncovered a dish and found a stack of French toast underneath. I grabbed a fork. “How are you this morning?”

  He put the tray on my bed and sat down with one leg curled beneath him. “All right. I was so orange last night, though. Man! But I think it was good.” He took the cover off another dish; this one contained pancakes. He rolled one into a tube and dunked it in a carafe of syrup. “I mean, now I know it’s really over between me and her.”

  The night before, I’d fallen asleep the moment my head hit the pillow on the luscious bed—mere minutes after Griff checked us into the hotel and we drew straws for the foldaway bed. I woke once at flashing-12:00 a.m. and saw Griff standing at the window in his white robe, the vertical blinds bent around him like a bad disguise. He stood there a long time looking out, then he sat on the edge of his bed with his arms folded, staring blankly into a corner. A number of times while I watched him through squinted eyelids I almost got up to sit with him, to tell him things would be OK, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that, not after I’d felt so terrible about him and Beth maybe getting back together. So I just watched.

  “I really know it’s totally over,” he went on, looking at the end of his rolled-up pancake before popping the last bite into his mouth.

  “Yeah,” I said, “at least now you know.”

  We ate our breakfasts slow, lingered on morning cartoons and talk shows. I was in the shower, the last to go, letting the hot water pound against my face, when the bathroom door opened with a woosh of chilly air and someone knocked on the curtain. It bulged inward in the shape of knuckles.

  “Come in,” I said, joking, thinking it was Griff—then afraid it was Zane. Because Zane really might’ve.

  “You wish,” the visitor said. Whew. “Dude, it’s almost noon. We need to check out!”

  “Noon? I thought we had plenty of time?”

  “Time flies when you’re kicking it Ritz Carlton–style. Damn, it’s hot as a crotch in here.”

  I heard the door close behind him and I laughed all alone in the tub.

  We checked out of the hotel with five minutes to spare and helped ourselves to the individually-wrapped Starlight mints on the ornate reception desk. Griff put the room on his AmEx. Then we strode like a gang, like a band, across the plush carpet to the brass-trimmed revolving doors.

  As the three of us were spinning round Zane slapped the glass. “The plant!”

  “Awh, dude,” Griff said from his wedge, going around again. No one had gotten off after the first revolution. “Forget about it.”

  “No,” Zane said, “it’s good luck. I’ll go get it.” He got off in the lobby again.

  Griff and I got off too. “You don’t have a key,” I said after Zane.

  “I’ll get it back,” he said, halfway to the reception desk now. “Be right back.”

  “What’s with the plant?” Griff said to me. We sank into sleek purple armchairs in the lobby while Zane gestured to the woman at the desk.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s my fault for telling him it was good luck,” Griff said. “This chair feels good. Is this real velvet, do you think?”

  “Maybe they’ll sell it to you.”

  “Maybe they will. I’m in a spending mood.”

  A bellhop pushed a cart stacked with luggage in from the street. CNN was on the flatscreen TV that hung on the wall, muted but closed-captioned.

  “Was there something going on outside last night?” I said.

  “Outside?”

  “I saw you at the window.”

  “Oh.” He unwrapped another mint and put it in his mouth, pushed the wrapper into the front pocket of his vest. “No, I just couldn’t sleep. Blue balls.”

  “That’s what it was?”

  “Yeah—blue balls.”

  “Why didn’t you just breed the dolphin?”

  “I did eventually.”

  “It’s weird how not shooting can hurt so bad,” I said.

  “I remember the first time I got it, in high school, after a night of making out with this girl. Sophia Bedard, her name was. And I thought it was food poisoning. That was the only explanation I could come up with. I thought I was dying.”

  “You told me about that.”

  “It’s a Griff classic.”

  “I wonder if whoever coined the term blue balls had synesthesia.”

  “Haha. He probably did. Although it’s more of a vicious pink for me.”

  Zane returned with the plant and we went through the revolving door again. I thought it was unseasonably warm outside until I noticed the heat lamps above the door.

  “Enjoying your stay?” the doorman said. He wore a long blue coat and a top hat.

  “Our vacation is over, but yes it was enjoyable,” Griff said.

  “No luggage?”

  “No luggage, no—but plenty of baggage.”

  We took the T into Brighton and walked a few blocks more to Mason’s Garage. My Jeep was parked in the front, its floor covered in white paper bearing the blurry outline of workboot prints. Griff’s stuff looked undisturbed.

  The woman in the office leaned forward and peered at me through thick glasses. “Heard you fixed a fan belt with staples,” she said with a smile when I got out my wallet to pay.

  The city stretched out behind us, fake-looking like a page in a giant pop-up book, and then shrunk away as we sped south on

  I-93. I took up a permanent position in the passing lane. I was eager to get home. I was always eager to get home, but even more so when I knew Griff would be getting there at the same time. It felt like I hadn’t been home in weeks, and I wanted nothing more than to change my clothes and brush my teeth and dr
ink a beer with him by the fire.

  We cruised down along the South Shore, past Quincy and Weymouth. We went over the bridge and soon we were back on the flexed bicep of Massachusetts, Cape Cod. We passed snow-covered businesses and houses as the road widened and narrowed and widened. In the rearview Zane smiled when I looked back at him.

  “Can you turn around,” Griff said suddenly, “and go back there?”

  “Back where?” I looked in my mirrors but saw only trees.

  “To that Volkswagen dealership we just passed.”

  “OK...”

  “I want to go look at the cars.”

  “Cars. OK.”

  I turned around in the lot of an antique shop. We drove up the street, and drove and drove—long enough to make me wonder if Griff had imagined the dealership.

  “I was actually thinking for a while about whether to stop,” Griff said sheepishly just as I was about to ask.

  After five minutes we came to the dealership and I turned into the lot. Rows of cars were dusted with the remnants of hastily brushed-off snow and it was obvious from the paths snowblown around them that none had been driven since before the storm. They looked like big toys packaged in Styrofoam.

  “Can you buy a car same-day?” Griff asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “You have to get insurance and stuff.”

  “You’re buying a car?” Zane said, leaning forward between the seats. His arms hung chummily around the headrests, his hand lay against my left shoulder. I leaned an inch to the right.

  “Maybe if there’s one I like,” Griff said. He gazed out the window. “I like Jettas. Maybe a Touareg—that’s fun to say.”

  “Touareg,” I said, looking out over the rows of identically-shaped profiles. “Well do you want to go talk to someone?”

  “Yeah.”

  I parked beside a yellow Beetle with white plastic protectors on its hood and doors and the three of us went into the dealership. Two men in suits and ties were talking, one seated behind a desk, one sitting on top. They stood up when we came in.

  The salesman at the desk called us gentlemen. He wore a blue tie. Their eyes were hungry and with a glance they seemed to haggle over who, if we were in a buying mood, would get the sale—it was an eye-to-eye version of rock-paper-scissors. The face of the man with the black tie went into a smile and the other man sank back into his chair and turned his eyes to the window.

  “Great weather for looking at cars,” black tie guy said, extending his hand first to Griff and then to Zane and me. “Jim Ashby, hello.” He was tall and thin and his neck slouched forward at the shoulders, giving him the appearance of an upright hockey stick. “What can I help you folks with?”

  “I’m looking to buy a car,” Griff said.

  Ashby’s eyes lit up and the other salesman’s mouth turned down into a little frown.

  “That’s convenient,” he quipped, smoothing his salt-and-pepper comb-over, “because I’m looking to sell a car. We were made for each other.”

  I grinned humorlessly but Griff was all business. “Is that something I can do same-day?” he asked. “Because I’m kind of just—passing through.”

  Ashby told him that was no problem. “First let’s see if we have anything you like,” he said with a mustachioed grin, “and then we’ll iron out the details.”

  He pulled an overcoat off a metal coat tree by the desk and led us outside. Griff walked at his side talking about turbo engines, standard versus automatic, the pros and cons of diesel.

  Zane leaned close to me and whispered, “Is Griff OK?”

  “I think so. Why?”

  “First he pays for the hotel all by himself, now he’s buying a car? Is he having some kind of post-breakup crisis?”

  “He might be,” I said, watching Griff talking to Ashby. “But he can afford to have one.”

  “Is he rich?”

  I let Griff and Ashby get a little ways ahead of us, then I explained to Zane about Griff’s spiteful but wealthy late grandmother.

  Zane’s mouth fell open a little.

  “I know, right?”

  “I get socks from my grandmother,” he said.

  We caught up with Griff and the salesman at a cherry-red Jetta across the lot, its hood encrusted in ice.

  “This one here’s the model you mentioned,” Ashby said. “Leather seats. Enough goodies to give you a cavity.” He rested his gloveless hand on the roof and then yanked it back from the cold, a clumsy misstep in the workings of his charm.

  “I like the model,” Griff said, “but it would have to be in like dark gray or black or something.”

  “The man wants gray,” Ashby said, “the man gets gray.” He smiled and for the first time it occurred to me that he was flirting with Griff. It gave me the willies. “Let’s see. Ah—over here.”

  Glancing at the stickers on the cars’ windows, he led us down the line to a charcoal gray version of the cherry-red car. He rattled off features about the airbags, the tires, the turbo, the headroom, the trunk space. Griff nodded.

  “Can we test drive this?” he said, forehead pressed against the driver’s window.

  “Of course, certainly.” Ashby rocked back and forth on his heels, either from the cold or at the prospect of a sale, I couldn’t tell. “Let me run and get the keys. It’ll just be a second.”

  Zane said he’d be right back too and jogged over to the Jeep.

  “This is the perfect car for me—don’t you think?” Griff said. He kicked the tire. “I’ve wanted a VW ever since I saw that commercial from years ago. The one where they’re driving at night and they get to the party and then decide they’d rather just keep driving?”

  “This isn’t just a spur-of-the-moment thing, though, right?” I said as gingerly as I could. I was all for Griff spending some of his money, but fifteen minutes ago I didn’t even know he was in the market for a car; I was sure he didn’t either. “Not a post-breakup... crisis?”

  He was peering in at the back seat, hands cupped against the window. “I’ve had this money for almost a year and I haven’t bought anything more expensive than a fucking iPod,” he said. “Yeah, it probably is spur of the moment—but fuck it.”

  “But you have no job. How great is your credit?”

  “Who needs credit? I’ll pay cash.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

  “You know?”

  “Yeah. Why not? Fuck it!” It felt good to say so I said it again. “Yeah! Fuck it!”

  He threw up his hands and laughed. “Fuck it!”

  Zane returned with the aloe plant just as Ashby came striding over, the tassels on his loafers bouncing merrily with each step. I was surprised when he handed over the keys and we were allowed to go off driving by ourselves.

  We got in, me in the passenger seat, Zane in the back with the plant. We poked at the dashboard and tugged on the handles, squeezed the leather seats softly and experimentally like our first touch of a girl’s breasts (Griff and me, anyway), and tapped our knuckles against the windows. Everything seemed sound. I opened the glove compartment and reached around inside. The instrument panel told numbers in red.

  “God,” Griff said, “it smells good, doesn’t it? It smells like something I’d buy in a jar and pour on a sundae.”

  The Jetta drove smooth and with the steady whir of a turntable spinning recordless. White sped by in a blur and Griff had a huge smile on his face. After last night I was extra happy to see it.

  “Saw it written on a so-what’s-say,” he sang. “How the heck does that song go? Pinka pink. Pink moon, we’re on our way.”

  I wanted to roll down my window and reach for fireflies—the snowflakes hanging lazily in the air would suffice. We were driving along a windy street full of low cottages facing white woods when out of the corner of my eye I saw a deer step into the road.

  Griff slowed down and stopped and we sat idling in the road as another deer, and then a little one, emerged from the woods and followed the first slowly across the road. The second a
dult turned and looked at us. And then they disappeared into the brush and trees on the other side.

  “Looks like a river down through there,” Griff said, straining against his seatbelt. “I want to go have a look.”

  “Should we leave the car?” I said.

  “Just quick.”

  He pulled over onto the slushy shoulder and we got out. After a car went by we crossed the street and Zane and I followed Griff down a brambly slope. There was a river at the bottom, its banks crusted with ice, and the deer were standing beside it peering around with their big black eyes but not drinking.

  Griff squatted down on the slope to watch them but his foot slid out from under him and he ended up on his ass. The deer flicked their ears and walked farther up the riverbank.

  “Are you OK?” I said.

  “Just a cold bum,” he said, wiping it off.

  “The baby’s going out on the ice,” Zane said, pointing.

  “That’s not a good idea,” Griff said. “Let’s go down a little more.”

  Zane was a few steps ahead of me down the slope when he lost his footing. As he went down he grabbed at a pine branch that sprang back up and clocked me in the chin. The ground rushed up behind me and slammed my back, and all the breath in my lungs turned into a big white cloud over my face.

  ***

  Griff put his hand on my bare shoulder. “Zap!”

  I squirmed, pulled up the blanket. His fingers were freezing.

  “Wake up,” he told me, “there are big boxes in the Dumpster.” He had his jacket on, and his hat.

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes until I could read the numbers on the clock on my desk: 2:07 a.m. “There are what? Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  “Boxes!” he said. “Let’s go sledding.”

  “In a box? Who are you, Snoopy?”

  “You rip the box apart,” he told me, making a tearing motion with his hands, “and use the sheet of cardboard as a sled.”

  “Why do you have your jacket on?”

  “I was taking a stroll on the Esplanade.”

  “...?”