A Hard and Heavy Thing

by Matthew J. Hefti

Kevin chose his words carefully. “I don’t blame him for not wanting to relive it all.”

  Charlotte had disappeared and Robert had been the last to leave. Nick walked around with a trash bag cleaning up paper plates with half-eaten pieces of cake and plastic cups that weren’t quite empty.

  Paul leaned against the refrigerator and drank a bottle of beer. When he had finished, he looked at his watch and said, “I suppose.” He put his bottle in Nick’s trash bag, left the room, and came back in a black peacoat. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  When they had finished with the bulk of the cleaning, Kevin and Nick sat at the island across from each other. They drank in silence for a while. Kevin pinched his lips between his thumb and forefinger, wiping off the excess beer. “I should have known better,” he said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Just proud I guess. And thinking more about showing off than thinking about what he would want.” He looked down and peeled the label on his beer bottle.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Nick said. He wished he could say something more edifying, something less cliché, but nothing came to him. “You meant well.” That too sounded weak.

  Kevin nodded and dropped little bits of metallic paper on the counter as he continued to pick at his label. Nick wished he could go over and hug him—after all, he had become as much a part of that family as any of Kevin’s own children—but he kept his seat.

  They heard a clunking in the back. Nick spread the blinds to look out the window above the sink. “It’s Levi.”

  “Better if you talk to him,” Kevin said.

  Nick took a seat on the cascading step next to Levi. He set an extra beer on the landing between them. He grabbed a cigarette and held the pack out to Levi, who tried grabbing one between two fingers. He swayed and his eyes crossed and uncrossed. His face was slack. He missed twice before finally grasping one. They sat on the step, their backs against the edge of the deck, their cold breath indistinguishable from the smoke that filled their lungs.

  “Think I’m like the worst person ever?”

  “No,” Nick said. “Not the worst ever.”

  “I’m the worst person ever.” Levi nodded and took a drink. “Trust me on that one.”

  Nick looked out toward the swaying shadows of the denuded trees. “Who am I to judge?”

  “So do my parents know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That it’s all a bunch of bullshit?”

  “That what is?” Nick knew what he was talking about. He could Google as well as anyone. He knew that his letters home had no truth in them, that his brigade had not been sent home early, that his service commitment should have kept him in the army for the next two years. But he wanted to hear him say it. He wanted to hear the details. He wanted him to open up to him so he could help him. So he could somehow be a friend.

  “Whatever.”

  “So then, tell me what happened.”

  “Rough night tonight, huh? I sure was a dick to my mom.”

  Nick kept quiet, hoping he’d keep talking.

  “Just drank too much is all.” Levi took another drink. “I drink too much.” He turned his chin toward the sky; he extended his neck. He tried and failed to blow smoke rings. “I have drunk too much.” He lifted a finger and pointed it at his head. “And tomorrow?”

  “You will have drank too much?”

  “Nope.” Levi shook his head in disappointment. “No, sir. I will have drunk too much.”

  Levi’s dad opened the sliding glass door. “I’m headed to bed, boys. Don’t throw your butts in the lawn. Your mother hates that.”

  Levi didn’t turn around. He took another drag off his smoke, and he drank another swallow of beer.

  “Levi, it’s good to have you home.”

  Levi lifted a hand and let it drop.

  His dad waited for a moment, and when it was clear that was the only response he would get, he turned and quietly closed the door.

  “Anyway,” Levi said. “Married. Renting? Owning?”

  “We bought a house in La Crosse. North side. The drive to the bar every day sucks, but Eris likes living in town, in her old neighborhood.”

  “Can I stay with you for a while?” Levi made eye contact for the first time since Nick came outside. “I hate to ask—”

  “No, no. That’s ah. That’s fine.”

  Levi turned away again and flicked his cigarette into the lawn. “Forget it. I should have given you notice. I’ll figure something out. I’ll get a hotel or something.” He shook his head. “I just can’t stay here. A grown man living with his parents? It’s pathetic.”

  “No,” Nick said. “It’s fine. Stay with us. I’m sure Eris won’t mind.”

  “Oh yeah. Forgot you’re domesticated now. You need permission for everything, I s’pose.”

  Nick bristled at the suggestion he wasn’t in charge of his own decisions. “Gimme a break. We’ve shared tents, bunk beds, the cover of a tire under enemy fire; I’m pretty sure you can share our house for a while. Besides, it isn’t like Eris never stayed at our apartment when the two of us were in college.”

  “Ah yes.” Levi closed his eyes, turned his head toward the sky, and breathed deeply through his nose.

  “Yes what?”

  “Nothing. Sure it’s not a problem?”

  “Not a problem. Anyway, I’d say I owe you.”

  “I’d say.” Levi punched him in the shoulder. “You owe me every year of your life.”

  Nick looked over at him to gauge his mood, but he sensed no jocularity. “Okay then. Need to grab anything?”

  “Nah. All my crap is still in your wife’s car.” He stood up and spread his arms. He breathed deeply, let out a tremendous yell, and threw his beer bottle over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. It fell with a great crash of broken glass. “Hello, Wisconsin,” he screamed into the cold night.

  Before getting in the car, Levi turned. “Hold on a sec.” He ran to the front door. Finding it locked, he lifted a flowerpot near the steps. He unlocked the door with the hidden key and disappeared inside. When he reappeared, he was carrying the frame. He set it in the bed of the truck on a blanket of snow before getting in.

  “Pardon the mess,” Nick said. “I don’t usually have company.”

  “What is all this crap?” Levi kicked around the garbage on the floor of the passenger’s side. He started lifting things and throwing them through the back window into the rusted bed with the frame and the snow. “Cigarette boxes, an old newspaper, a McDonald’s bag. Classic: a half-finished breakfast sandwich.”

  He pulled out a flat black box, slightly larger than his hand. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he said. “You have your Purple Heart on the ground with all your garbage?” He opened the box and ran his fingers along the ribbon.

  Nick pushed in the cigarette lighter. “What the hell do I care? Just a bit of string and steel.”

  Levi shook his head slowly and his mouth dropped open. Nick was unable to determine if Levi’s exaggerated display was ironic disbelief or if he was being serious.

  Levi set the box on the dashboard. “Well what about your Comm with Valor?”

  “Keep digging.” Nick drove. Fresh snow fell and the headlights shone on each sparkling flake. Nick weaved across the powder-covered highway lines.

  3.7 NO, THIS IS NOT A FRAT HOUSE

  When Eris was a girl, she spent a summer with her mother at a beachfront home on Florida’s Emerald Coast. The home was owned by a family friend, and they had gone there during one of the separations before the divorce. It was the first time Eris had ever been near the ocean and she could not sleep for days. When she closed her eyes, the rolling of the waves made her sick, as if she herself were rocking. Her mother spent her days in bed before she dressed up, put on makeup, and left for the nights. Eris spent hours alone watching the caps break onto the white sands that spread out from the condo. The sands glowed in the moonlight. When she eventually returned home, she could not sleep without the waves.

  The mem
ory was remote and distant, as if it had happened in a dream rather than in her childhood. She had not thought of this period in her life in years. Yet, this is what she thought about as she tossed and turned, unable to sleep without her husband by her side.

  By the time Nick did return—drunk, tiptoeing, bumping into furniture in the dark—she only had two hours before she had to rise for work. He was snoring within seconds, and within minutes he had pulled the quilt from her and wrapped himself into a chrysalis. As uncomfortable as she was with her meager sliver of top sheet, she finally drifted off to sleep until her alarm woke her.

  She showered and dressed in a pinstriped skirt and a button-up top. She went to the living room to find a pair of tights from the baskets full of laundry she hadn’t gotten around to folding. Just as she found one, she heard a rustling behind her. She jumped up and hit the light switch on the wall.

  Levi lay on the couch, his eyes wide open and locked in on her, his brow furrowed in concentration. His hand frantically swept along the floor next to the couch as if he were trying to grab something that wasn’t there.

  “What the hell?” she shouted. “What are we running here, a frat house?”

  Levi let out a deep breath. “You just about gave me a heart attack,” he said. He lay back down on his side and turned to face the back of the couch.

  Eris stared at the lump of blankets on the couch for a moment before heading back up the hallway. She then turned back and hit the wall with the towel she held, wanting to impress upon him the level of her displeasure. “What if I had been naked?”

  “Nothing I’ve never seen before.”

  “What did you say?”

  He rolled over and sat up, but gave her no response.

  “Did you say what I think you just said?”

  He wiped his eyes. She couldn’t tell if he was giving her a sleepy smirk or if he was just squinting against the light.

  “Are you still drunk?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “What?”

  She stormed back to her bedroom and threw the towel at her sleeping husband. “Get up.” He made no move. “Is someone else opening for you today or what?”

  “No,” he said. “Tired.”

  “Get up. No one made you stay out last night.”

  He sat up and put his feet on the ground. He sat with his head in his hands a moment before standing. He looked down at his watch. “It’ll be fine. I’ll make you some coffee. Want eggs?”

  She sat on the bed and put on her tights.

  “Eggs?”

  “You know I don’t like eggs.” She zipped her boots before following him into the kitchen.

  She felt intense jealousy when he walked into the kitchen wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. His immodesty offended her. Maybe offended was the wrong word, but apart from the doctors and nurses, she was the only one who had seen him in anything except full pants and a collared shirt. Yet here he was walking around exposed when they had a guest.

  Levi leaned against the sink looking out the window. He was barefoot in jeans and a white undershirt. He held an empty glass.

  Nick slapped his butt on the way to the fridge. “Good effort last night.”

  Levi nodded. He turned on the tap and refilled his glass with water. He chugged it down. “Not so bad yourself.”

  He turned around. Eris saw the way Levi’s eyes only flickered along the motley colored scars that ran the length of Nick’s body. He acted like he didn’t notice the appearance that was marred beyond that of any man she had ever known. She saw the way Levi averted his eyes from the scars on his legs and torso and stared only at Nick’s eyes. It was the same way that men refused to break eye contact after they had been caught staring at your breasts.

  “What’s on your schedule today?” Levi said. He didn’t even glance at Eris.

  “Work. I should have been there half an hour ago.”

  Levi turned to look up at the clock on the soffit above the window. “This early?”

  “Lots to do. I have to reconcile the books, do some inventory, meet with our food service rep. Not to mention, it’s crunch time on getting W-2s out and then prepping for taxes. The place doesn’t run itself, contrary to what my wife thinks.”

  Nick set a cup of coffee in front of Eris, who sat at the round kitchen table, ignored until then. She rolled her eyes, but no one noticed. It wasn’t that she thought the place ran itself or that someone didn’t need to put the hours in, she just didn’t understand why Nick had to do it all himself.

  As if reading her mind, Levi said, “Geez. Don’t you have your people to do that?”

  “Don’t I have my people? My peeps?” Nick laughed and turned around to pour himself a cup of coffee. “What people?”

  “I don’t know. Like employees.”

  “Can’t afford more than a short-order cook and a few bartenders. Certainly can’t afford what a good manager would deserve right now.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Of course, Eris disagrees.” He said it as if she weren’t sitting right there. As if she didn’t have a voice of her own.

  Eris stood up. She reached behind Levi and dumped her coffee in the sink. “Excuse me,” she said. “And excuse my husband.”

  She saw Levi point at her and lift his hands like, What’s her problem? As if she weren’t there. She also saw Nick shrug and shake his head like, How should I know? As if she weren’t there.

  She was still angry by the time she reached her first break at work. She went outside to smoke a cigarette, and as she sat there shivering and alone behind the building, she said a quiet prayer for the strength to let it go, whatever it was. As part of her program, she was supposed to identify her triggers, and she had been trying to carry that philosophy into every aspect of her life. She was trying to be a better person. She had been angry when she had found Levi on the couch, but her anger had come more from her fear.

  Everything else was more complicated. She had been angry when Nick hadn’t thought of covering himself in front of Levi. She felt protective, and yes, jealous. She was the one who had nursed him, who had rubbed salves on his tight, inflamed skin. She was the one who had seen and loved him through his secret pains when no one else could. She was the one who had waited for him to finally trust her enough to accept him. She was the one. She had always been the one.

  Now there was Levi. Breezy, carefree, self-absorbed, wild, and rude. Worse than all of that, dangerous.

  She lit a second cigarette and closed her eyes as she inhaled.

  But wasn’t it unfair of her to deny that those two also had a history? To deny that they shared formative years before they met her? And before they left for the war like a couple dunces, hadn’t she been the third wheel anyway? But there was also the secret history. There were those things they did together in the dark of night or in the heat of the blistering sun on strange highways and in dusty towns a world away. They shared things she knew nothing about. There were things they had done and things that had been done to them, and she knew nothing of those things except the damage they left behind.

  One late night shortly after Nick had returned home—before they were married, when things were complicated, when Eris didn’t know what they were together—they had gotten drunk behind the pub after it closed. It was four in the morning, and the alley smelled like cigarette smoke and rotten garbage. She couldn’t remember what song it had been, but Nick played his guitar gently, with only the side of his thumb on the strings. His voice was near a whisper. When Eris started humming a harmony, he started crying. Weeping, really. She asked him what it was.

  “Nothing,” he told her.

  “You can tell me,” she said.

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “But I want to know.”

  He laughed and sniffed and wiped his eyes. “So do I.”

  She must have started crying as well because he reached up and wiped a tear from her cheek.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m okay. But I can’t answer questions about what I d
on’t know.”

  Since that night, he had offered nothing more, and that was the last time she had seen him cry.

  But now, she had to know. For herself and for Nick, she needed to share that too, whatever it was. She decided she would go home at lunch and apologize to Levi. She would talk to him.

  She wanted to be a better person. She wanted a better marriage.

  When she walked in, Levi was hunched over a notebook, writing. A small stone sat on the table in front of him. He finished a line, dropped a period onto the page with finality, and he closed the notebook. It was one of the cheap black-and-white composition books that he had always carried around in high school.

  “What are you writing?”

  “Nothing.” He put his hand over the stone on the table as if to hide it. “So do you still write poetry?”

  She shook her head. “What kind of nothing?”

  He slipped the stone into his pocket. “One rung below juvenilia.”

  “Still want to be a writer?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’d rather do something useful.”

  She sat down across from him. “So what are you doing that’s useful today?”

  “I need to buy a car.”

  “I can get you a good interest rate at our bank. I know someone who works there.” She winked at him, trying to be casual. Trying to be friendly.

  He didn’t smile back. “I don’t need a loan.”

  “Sorry.” She picked at her fingernails.

  “I set up in the basement. Nick said that was okay. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah sure. Sure, that’s okay.”

  “Okay. Because if it’s not—”

  “Tell me some war stories,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tell me some war stories.”

  “Why do you want me to tell you war stories?”

  “Nick never has.”

  “Then why should I?”

  “So I know what happened over there.”

  “We played Xbox over there.”

  “What else?”

  “We watched movies over there.”

  “What else?”

  “We went running before dawn when it wasn’t too hot. We started running west so we could see the sun rise on our way back to our hooch.”