It's All Relative

by J. M. Snyder

  Stephen didn’t buy that. “The way we’re friends?” he asked.

  That right there should’ve told me that he considered us something more. But I nodded, yeah, friends like us. Two guys who hung out together, spent the night over each other’s house, talked on the phone and went to the store for candy and rode bikes through the woods, friends like that. “He’s like my best friend,” I told Stephen. I saw the wounded look in his large eyes and amended, “Back home, anyway. You’re my best friend here.”

  “He’s your friend the same way I am?” Stephen pressed. When I nodded, he asked, “He kisses you?”

  No, I thought, but because I wanted him to and he wasn’t there to defend his honor, I just shrugged again. Don’t hate me, I prayed silently. Please Joey, I didn’t say it, you know? But if that’s what he thinks…what was so wrong with that?

  Apparently everything, because Stephen didn’t speak again. Instead he pushed his swing slowly, almost thoughtfully, and watched me. Uncomfortable under the scrutiny of his gaze, I turned Joey’s letter over in my hands and told him, “He’s from New York. Joey Kneesi. It’s spelled like knees but you say it ka-nee, the way it looks. He’s in Korea now—”

  “So you said,” Stephen interrupted.

  I didn’t hear the warning in his voice. With a laugh, I describe the way he was dressed the first time we met. “Like he was right out of the city,” I said, calling Manhattan the city as if I were native. I always liked to pretend that I was more of a northerner than I really was. “I swear his hair never stays down, ever. He spends more time on it than any girl does, honest. One time we went swimming at the pool and he refused to get into the water because it’d wash out all his mousse.”

  Softly, Stephen said, “I don’t care.”

  I thought he meant about Joey’s hair, so I tried to think of something else to talk about. “He loves those baggy pants,” I said. “You know, the ones yous guys have up here? He says that all the time, yous guys. You’d think he was from Philly or something.”

  “Michael,” Stephen sighed. At my quizzical look, he asked, “Is he the only thing you’re going to talk about? ‘Cause if so, I can leave now. I truly don’t want to hear about him.”

  “Okay,” I murmured, chastised.

  We sat in silence for a few moments, me lost in thoughts of Joey and what he was doing now on the other side of the world and Stephen staring at the designs his sneakers were making in the dirt beneath his feet. Something else to talk about, I thought, though nothing came to mind. Finally Stephen asked, “How’d you do in school this year?”

  “Mostly okay,” I told him. “I had a D in pre-Algebra but Joey helped me bring it up to a B. He’s amazing in that class. All those Xs and Ys, he picks it up like that.” I snapped my fingers and gave Stephen a grin he didn’t return. “My mom even paid him like five dollars to tutor me, but we really didn’t study much.”

  Stephen jumped up from his swing. “Joey Joey Joey,” he cried. “You know what, Michael? I didn’t come out here to listen to you go on and on about some boy I don’t even know.”

  The sudden outburst startled me. “Stephen?” I asked. I reached for him but he was already storming across the blacktop, heading for his bike. “Steve, wait. It’s not like that—”

  He shook my bike off his. “I don’t care what it’s like,” he told me as he straddled his bike and started to pedal away. “Call me if you think of something else to talk about.”

  Angry tears burned my eyes. I told myself he was jealous, which he probably was—jealous of me with my letter from Korea, jealous of what I had with Joey…which is nothing, my mind whispered, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t need Stephen Robichaud. Aunt Evie had a whole damn house full of kids my age, I didn’t need anyone else.

  That lasted three days. The first night, I watched a movie with Ray and wished Stephen was there to watch it, too, because Star Wars was his favorite. The second day I picked up the phone to call him before I remembered we weren’t speaking to each other, and that night I couldn’t sleep for wondering if my friend thought of me. By the third day, Joey’s letter had become crumpled, its appeal worn thin. Before noon, I dialed Stephen’s number and didn’t let myself think—when the ringing stopped, I took a breath deep enough to let everything I had to say ramble out. “Stephen, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean what you thought I meant, he wasn’t my friend the way you are, I promise, I never did anything with him and I want you to come over here now, I put the letter away, please come over and I said I’m sorry so can we just forget about it now? Because I was just kidding, we weren’t like that—”

  Only it was Stephanie’s voice that filled my ear, not Stephen’s. “Like what, Michael?” she asked. My blood froze in my veins and I almost dropped the phone. With a malicious giggle, she said, “Oh please, don’t stop now, it’s just getting good.”

  I slammed the phone down, my hand trembling. Oh shit, what did I say? I couldn’t remember, my mind was blank. Did I mention the kisses? The way Stephen touched me sometimes? My God, did she know?

  When the phone rang, I jumped. It was her, I just knew it, calling to tease me, I’d never live that down. It rang again, a third time, a fourth before Aunt Evie came into the hall, wiping her hands on a washcloth and frowning at me. “Michael?” she asked. “You just going to watch it ring, honey?”

  I picked the receiver up, put it to my ear, listened for…“Michael?” Stephen’s voice this time. “Stephanie, are you sure it was him? What did he say? Mike, are you there?”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, well aware of Aunt Evie hovering nearby. “For everything, Stephen. Just come over here, okay? I won’t—I’m not…just come over. Please.”

  His reply? “I’m on my way.”

  It was that easy to mend our friendship after Joey Kneesi. But now? Could I call him up and apologize, would that make everything better between us? I have a feeling I could say I was sorry until my dying breath, and still nothing would change. There was too much hurt in Stephen’s eyes when Caitlin mentioned Dan, too much sorrow in the way he pressed his lips to mine. How can I possibly put those emotions into words to explain to my lover what I’m feeling now? The pain in my old friend’s face, pain I put there, how can Dan understand that without seeing it for himself?

  Why didn’t he come sooner?

  I didn’t think I had anything to worry about, isn’t that what he said? And that wasn’t the issue at all. I simply needed someone there with me, I needed Dan, and he didn’t come. He was too damn busy helping my father that he couldn’t spare a thought for me.

  I don’t feel like going back upstairs, so I close the door to the back room and lock it for good measure, then sit down on the floor. I’ll clean this room and stay away from everyone else for a little while, just until this feeling of quiet desperation disappears. Maybe I could apologize to Stephen, try to get back the innocent friendship we had before the first kiss…

  But I don’t remember his phone number. For some reason, that makes me sad, it brings everything home. He’s gone to me now. I might see him at the funeral but after that, there will be nothing more. I can’t call him because I’ve lost his number over the years, I can’t just pick up the phone and dial it from memory anymore. It’s gone.

  And Dan doesn’t understand, because he wasn’t there, he doesn’t know how we were together, he didn’t realize that there might have been something between us that I didn’t want brought up today. If he had been a few minutes sooner, that’s all, then Stephen would have never said he loved me and I wouldn’t be sitting here now, remembering each kiss, each word, each touch. If he had come just a little bit quicker, then maybe the three of us would have gone out for a drive, we’d be laughing together now, we wouldn’t each be alone with our separate hurts, our individual pain. Any other time I call him, he comes running, except when I need him the most.

  He’s outside now, waiting for me to come to him. Well, I think, you know what? You’re just going to have to wait. Furiously I start on the
closet, tearing through boxes and bags, sorting through old clothes and records and books, anything to keep me busy and occupy my mind.

  Chapter 26: Just Trying to Help

  The afternoon passes in a blur. I work hard to keep my mind blank, my heart empty—I concentrate on filling boxes with old books and trinkets and clothes, I pile up bags with broken toys and scratched records and torn magazines that should have been thrown away years ago. If there’s anything I want to take home to remind me of Aunt Evie and all the times I spent at Sugar Creek, I’m quite sure it will be in this back room, not in one of the overflowing bedrooms upstairs. This is the room where as a child I came to find something to play with on rainy days, the room full of costumes we could wear year round, a place full of books and music and magazines, coloring books and sketch pads, toys and knickknacks and everything under the sun, it all wound up back here. And I go through it all, focusing on each item, flipping through each magazine, surrounded by memories as warm as summer on my skin…

  A little stuffed cat that I bought one year at Grosso’s, spending my whole allowance on it as a gift for Penny. A large hole gaps in one seam now, and the whiskers have been trimmed short—Ray did that, took a pair of scissors to half of the stuffed animals in here, and when my mom found out, she spanked him so hard with a yardstick that the wood snapped right in half. I remember him laughing, and eighteen inches of thin plywood went smack!, right across his mouth. He had a welt on his cheek for days.

  A stack of horror paperbacks that Evie bought for me from a garage sale, back when I was younger and would read anything even remotely scary. I went through these books in one summer, devoured them, sometimes reading two in one day. They’re quick, nothing spectacular, just a bunch of fluff tucked between the covers, stories about vampires and werewolves and a few true crime serial killers. I only remember a handful of the storylines—as I pick up the books one by one, the plots and characters whirl together in my mind, the equivalent of those outrageous B movies from the fifties. They go back into their paper bag, and the bag goes by the door.

  A box full of shot glasses, a collection of Evie’s I never understood. Each tiny glass is wrapped in tissue paper with a date and name written on a strip of masking tape—08-23-92, one reads, and below that, Kenny. 12-25-89, Ray. 01-28-90, Michael. I open that one, carefully pulling back the tape so I don’t tear the tissue paper. Inside is a clear small glass with the state of Virginia etched onto one side, a cardinal and a dogwood tree blossom on the other. I don’t remember buying this, or packaging it, or mailing it to Aunt Evie, but the weight feels familiar in my hand, and I can imagine the hug I received as thanks for the gift. Here in the back room, amid the dust I’ve stirred up, the memories, I choke back a sob as I feel warm arms envelope me. I swear I smell gardenia, Evie’s favorite scent. My heart threatens to burst in my chest.

  I have to get out.

  Out into the kitchen, where Aunt Lennie stands in front of the sink, shirt sleeves pushed up to her elbows and hands plunged into thick, soupy water that stinks of bleach. She looks at me through frazzled bangs and, without a word, goes back to scrubbing what looks like the glass housing of the porch light. A thin black scum crusts the water, dead bugs and flies, I presume. Better her than me. I would’ve hosed the thing off and called it done.

  Boxes and bags line the wall beside the door to the back room, things I’ve put there just to get them out of my way. The bags are trash—I lug them two at a time outside, where the sun slants low across the yard now, dusk approaching. By the shed, the trash cans are overflowing and the garden is bare now, the dead plants pulled up and bagged, the leaves that once littered the ground raked up or swept away. I make one trip, two, and the third time I start across the yard, a bag in either hand, I feel someone’s gaze on me. I turn to see Dan watching through the railing of the porch, hammer in one hand and a mouthful of nails. I almost stumble at the look in his eyes, unreadable even after our ten months together.

  I throw the bags with the others by the shed, then head back for the house, my head down, though I can’t keep from stealing glances at my lover as I approach. I could say I’m sorry now and things would be mended between us—it’d be that easy. I could lean over the railing and plant a quick kiss on the top of his head, feel the stubble of his crew cut tickle my nose, tell him I love him and everything would be alright. I do love him. Just because I’m a little ticked that he didn’t drop everything and come running to meet Stephen doesn’t mean it’s over between us. I just need some time to get past it, that’s all.

  So I don’t stop, I don’t smile, I don’t even meet his eyes—every time he looks at me, I look away. The screen door slaps shut behind me and if I had more trash to take out, I’d leave it for now, I don’t want to go back outside and feel him watching me, an almost silent plea to open up to him. One more trip and I probably would apologize, drop the bags at the shed and race around the porch steps to where he stands, wrap my arms around his waist, hug him close to me and rest my head between his shoulder blades, feel each breath he takes as intimately as if it’s one of my own. But not yet. I’m not quite ready to let go of this anger yet.

  Anger directed towards him, though he did nothing. Because he did nothing, maybe. Anger at Stephen for taking my heart in his hands and squeezing, the same way I must have twisted his own all these years. Anger at myself because I was too damn blind to think that we were never more than friends, and hell, for somehow blaming Dan for all that.

  No, I’m not ready to forgive yet. But not Dan—myself.

  The boxes I’ve filled are still by the door to the back room. One by one I carry them through the kitchen and down the hall, out onto the front porch where other boxes have been stacked into pyramids waiting to be hauled away. Oversized bags full of old clothes and bedding hem in the piles like sandbags to hold back a rising tide, and kids crawl over everything, scavengers digging for treasure in all this trash. Most of them are my cousins but a few I’m not so sure about—Sugar Creek is small enough that the news of Aunt Evie’s passing has spread like wildfire, and some of the children going through the boxes of books and toys are definitely no relation to us. I have half a mind to shoo them away, but I suspect they’ll just run out of reach, hover around like gulls until I disappear inside, then circle back again for more. The only thing that keeps me quiet is the thought that Evie would have let them stay.

  But by the time I’m down to my last box, the others have been torn open by over-eager kids, paperbacks and magazines passed around like artifacts from a lost era. I’m sick of this. “Get out of there,” I say, swatting at a little girl rummaging indiscriminately through Evie’s shot glasses. I drop the box in my arms onto the floor and snatch an unwrapped glass from another kid, a mean-looking boy who glares at me with Stephanie Robichaud’s angry eyes. “Do you belong here?” I ask him. He doesn’t reply, just gives me that sullen look and has the audacity to stick his hand in the box for a second glass. “Hello?” I slap his hand away and give the kid a shove for good measure. He looks too much like his mother, like Stephen, and right now I don’t need to be faced with him. “What are you, deaf? Get the hell out of here.”

  From behind me, someone whistles low. I turn to find my sister standing there, arms crossed, face hardened in her perpetual pout. “Picking on the little kids now, Michael?” she asks, venom in her voice. Our cousin Trevor clings to her jeans and stares up at me with those wide eyes. “Jeez, you’re out to piss off everyone today, aren’t you?”

  “Shut up,” I growl. When the little Robichaud brat makes another move for the box, I kick him in the shin. “Damn, you’re as relentless as your momma.” His scowl deepens but I don’t care. “Go on,” I taunt. “Tell her I said that. You tell her Michael Knapp called her a—”

  Caitlin smacks the back of my head before I say anything I might regret. “You know what your problem is?” she tells me, pushing her way between me and the kid. “Go on, Adam. Go play somewhere else, will you? Just until Mr. Dumbass here gets hi
s shit together and leaves.”

  The boy stares balefully at me and I know he’s going to echo her words when he opens his mouth, so I pinch his cheeks with one hand to keep him quiet. “Don’t you dare,” I tell him. His expression doesn’t change and I squeeze harder, until his lips pucker like a fish and his skin turns white beneath my fingers.

  “Let him go, Mike.” My sister claws the back of my hand, fingernails scratching into my skin. “Michael, let go. If you don’t…”

  With a slight shove, I release Adam and he steps back, away from me. He looks at Caitlin with eyes I swear I’ve seen before, eyes like Stephen’s, and I hate that. “Go on,” she tells him, and as he stumbles away, she mutters to me, “Just because you broke his uncle’s heart doesn’t mean you have to hurt him, too.”

  “Shut the hell up,” I tell her. I don’t need her to remind me of the pain I saw in my friend’s eyes before he left.

  But Caitlin doesn’t know when to stop. As I wrap the shot glass up again in the torn tissue paper, she nudges me with her shoulder and asks, “So have you patched things up with Dan yet?”

  “That’s none of your business,” I say, and it isn’t. I busy myself with straightening the glasses in the box, counting them to keep from looking at my sister and the reproach I don’t want to see in her eyes. What’s it to her if Dan and I aren’t quite back to normal yet?

  Apparently everything. Not taking the hint, she plops down on a nearby bag with a rush of air from the plastic and reclines back on the boxes. Trevor stands at her side like a servant, watching me. Jesus, but that kid’s always watching me anymore. “You know what your problem is?” my sister asks. I’m sure I don’t want to know what she thinks my problem is, but she’s going to tell me anyway. She picks at the tissue paper even as I smooth it down, and I have to swat her hand away as if she’s just another one of the kids looking through all this old stuff. “You,” she tells me, pointing at my chest, “need to get laid. A mind-blowing fuck, it’ll straighten you right out. So just march around the house and tell that hot boy of yours that you’re sorry so he can freak you silly—”