The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2018 (retail) (epub)

  They ended up at an outdoor café, drinking tea. Ruth warmed her hands on her mug and sipped slowly. Gus noticed that the table wobbled on the uneven bricks, and so he shimmed one leg with a folded napkin. They both felt uneasy, wishing they’d gone to a bar instead, where it becomes easier for old lovers to ignore how well they know each other’s bodies.

  “I can’t believe no one else snatched you up,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “I doubt I made it very easy.” His eyes were trained to all the commotion on the street. “When Queen Elizabeth died, it was strange at first not having a tree there, like a pulled tooth when all you can do is trace the gap with your tongue.” He set his tea down. “Then I found myself sweating all the time. It took me over a year to realize that the house itself retained that much more heat with the tree gone. No more shade.” He paused and for a moment seemed ready to weep, but then he coughed and looked away.

  “I know what you mean,” Ruth said. “It felt so strange when I moved back to Boston, like I didn’t actually grow up here.” She didn’t tell him how for years she would think about him in the middle of the day, how some silly little thing would happen and she would make a mental note to tell him when she got home, only to remember hours later that she couldn’t.

  They went back to their tea, their own thoughts. It hurt Ruth to see the many ways Gus was still the same man, how her absence had not changed that, but it also hurt to see the many ways he was now different, to know that she’d had no hand in shaping his new quirks. He still palmed his mug rather than using the handle, but he took smaller sips now, probably because he moved slower. He was older, but he was also successful, could accomplish fewer things each day. He probably appreciated success in ways that she never would.

  “It’s strange seeing me, isn’t it?” she asked. “I can tell it’s strange for you.”

  He squinted at her for a long time, and she began to worry that he would never respond. She was thinking of that terrible note she had left him, though she wasn’t certain if he’d even seen it. Finally, he said, “Not strange, no.” But then he stopped talking and grimaced. “It’s like having phantom limb syndrome. I feel you over there, and I know you belong over here, but you’re there and I’m here and there’s no changing that.”

  A warmth crept into her limbs, like muscles being stretched. She had forgotten how his words could puncture straight through to her core. All these years separated hadn’t changed him in the important ways. She cried then. It was a dirty, messy sort of cry, not at all dignified. All the grief of her life seemed to surface: a loveless mother and father, an unfulfilling career, dead children, dead relationships. She couldn’t look at Gus. He didn’t reach for her or offer a tissue, just let her have it out as privately as possible.

  “I just worked,” he said, hoping to give her more time to recover herself. “Eventually, I could go five minutes without thinking about her, and that was a revelation. I learned how to function without pressuring myself to find joy in anything. But five minutes is as long as I ever got. Never more than that, not even now.”

  She already knew that Gus was the only one she could ever talk to about Annabelle, but she realized then it wasn’t that simple. It was all they would ever be capable of talking about. But she also realized that it was the only thing she wanted to talk about, and that would be true for the rest of her life.

  When she’d composed herself, she said, “It’s hard to know that you’ve used up all the good parts of your life so early.”

  She wanted him to disagree but he nodded. “Thank God we’re still young,” he said, perhaps as a joke, but perhaps not.

  They didn’t speak for several minutes after that, and neither of them had any intention to. It was the silence of age, if not of wisdom, and also the silence of those who have weathered the worst long before and now have little fear of the world’s residual cruelties. Occasionally their eyes met and lingered, but they managed only to grin at each other as if they shared some private secret that they would never try to articulate, not even to each other. Eventually, the waiter approached and silently placed the check between them—perhaps he saw that neither of them wore a wedding ring and wanted to be proper—and there it would stay, each of them ignoring it, hoping that they might sit together just a few moments longer.

  Dave King

  The Stamp Collector

  LOUIS HAD A FRIEND who collected stamps. Years ago, I won a small pot in the Massachusetts lottery and took Louis to Europe, and in every country we visited he bought sheets of postage to mail home to his friend. In Paris, I watched him from a hotel reception desk, choosing a table at an outdoor café, raising two fingers at a waiter, sliding his friend’s stamps into an envelope and addressing the envelope in his big loopy scrawl. By the time I’d paid our bill two coffees had arrived, and when I sat down beside Louis he was humming a club tune. This was Europe to me: sunshine and all the national coffees and Louis humming as he did his mail.

  Louis addressed the envelope to his friend, then he wrote postcards. He asked me to pick out a card for his mother, and even sixteen years later, I remember the Seine river scene I chose; it was the one I thought he’d have chosen himself. “Picturesque,” he remarked, then he suddenly kissed me—on that broad French street! I closed my eyes and took his hand under the table, and he sang me a love song to the tune of the French national anthem: “Je t’aime je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’ai-aime, Joe…” In those days I hadn’t yet learned to fear Louis’s mom, and I didn’t know the friends he wrote to at home. I barely knew Louis.

  We’d only been seeing each other five weeks when I won my money. Nothing like that had ever happened to me, and I’d never had a steady boyfriend, either, and between Louis and the sudden wealth, I believed life had changed. Louis had a fancy dining guide, and in Europe I spent a fortune on expensive dinners, after which we checked out the clubs, most of them just like places in Boston, but exciting nonetheless for being overseas. Then we came home, and I gave Louis fifty-five thousand dollars toward a salon on Newbury Street. It was the best thing I ever did, because it made me a partner, and through all the bad years, I’ve depended on that stream of checks, each with PREVALA printed fancily at the top. And giving him money tied me to Louis, too. Otherwise, how long would he have lasted after I drank up his goodwill? But Louis was loyal. He got me in a program and tried to watch out for me, and sometimes we still had dinner, once, twice, even three times a year. He knew how I felt.

  I remember saying the money wasn’t going to affect me, and perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps it simply heightened existing defects. For a while, I kept my job with City Cyclists, humping along as I always had, repairing flats and talking jargon with weekend athletes, but it was hard to convince myself that I needed to work, and even harder to resist squandering the sudden deluge. Besides the cash for the hair salon, I wrote checks to every gay charity in Boston and hired a muscle-bound design queen to fluff up my small apartment. I stood rounds of drinks all over town and bought Louis bouquet upon bouquet of flowers.

  I’ve never been good at planning for the future. Eleven months after I won my pot, I screamed at my boss and lost the bike shop job, and the thing with Louis barely made it to two years. And sometime between those two points, the money finally ran out. As I’d told myself again and again without believing it, even $237,000 can’t last forever.

  * * *

  —

  When the phone rang, I was wondering what small tidy gesture might make the place clean. I’d been struggling to stay dry, but I’d had my slips, and it was weeks since I’d closed up the fold-out couch. On the night table, perched like a tea bag on the handle of a coffee mug, lay the wrapper from a condom I barely remembered using, and when things reach this point I start to get worried. I watched Mr. Navy jump to the ficus plant and squat, and when I hollered at him he hopped down and rubbed my leg. I’d been out walking most of the night, approachin
g, then avoiding the usual taverns, and I still had on yesterday’s button-down shirt and briefs.

  The man on the phone said, “Mr. Meegan, Officer Lee McCabe of the Rhode Island State Police. Regarding a Louis Prevala, of Boston, Mass?”

  I said, “Yes, sir.”

  There’s a notion that such moments bring you to your senses, but the effect on me was to turn up the static. Louis had once called me a sports car with a headlight misaligned, and as the trooper explained the nature of his call, that crooked, unpredictable beam was hard to resist. I went to the kitchen and poked around for Excedrin, and as I knocked back the tablets I noticed my hand was shaking. I opened a Dr Pepper and wondered if I’d fed Mr. Navy, and through it all, the cop described the collision. He said Louis’s mother had turned into the wrong lane, and I pictured East Duffield as it was when I visited: the shingled storefronts, the chunky green window boxes. How inconspicuous I’d felt there! The officer said Mrs. Prevala had not survived—but she never thought I was right for her boy. Then he said Louis had not yet regained consciousness, and all I could say was, “Who gave you this number?”

  The officer paused. “Mr. Meegan, you do know a Louis Prevala…” Of course: handing him that fine piece of change was my crowning achievement. “Because his wallet listed you as emergency contact.”

  “We’re in business together.”

  “Well, at your business, it seemed you were closed for the holiday.” He paused again, then said, “Columbus Day,” and I nodded. Louis often spent long weekends with his mom.

  I bent down to pick up Mr. Navy, who gave a cry and leapt from my arms, and perhaps Officer McCabe thought I’d cried out myself, because he said, “Sir, are you all right?” I said I was. “You might want to get down here ASAP,” the trooper said, and it was a good thing he told me; I might have stood there all day.

  I took down the names of the hospital and Louis’s emergency room doctor and the garage in East Duffield that had towed Mrs. Prevala’s car. “How long before he comes to?” I asked. The cop said the doctor would answer my questions and told me to drive safely.

  I fed Mr. Navy and lay down on the crumpled sheets. I could hear him dropping kibble on the floor, then there was a thump as he joined me on the bed. Years ago, Louis had had a calico that woke him each morning by licking his scalp. “Doing hair’s just an interim thing for her,” he used to joke. “Until her big break in entertainment.” But I’ve never liked being groomed by a cat, and as I pulled away from Mr. Navy I rolled onto a black boot folded into the bedclothes and jumped up in a panic.

  * * *

  —

  Louis was in a small county hospital, in a jarringly quiet ICU. To his right lay an old man with some kind of plastic device on his mouth; to his left was an empty bed. Louis had a plastic thing in his mouth, too, and an oxygen tube running under his nostrils. His face was swollen and padded with bandages, and his body hung limply, like the tail of a kite. He looked awful.

  I whispered, “Hi, Louis,” and a minute later added, “Joe here.” After that I was at a loss. When Louis broke up with me he said he had nothing left to give, and I yelled that it was funny because that was how I’d felt since the money ran out. Now, standing beside the hospital bed, I reached for his hand, then noticed a tube running into a vein and thought I’d better not touch anything. Behind us, a nurse in a blue sweater was moving about a small, glassed-in office. I tapped the door and asked if the doctor would be around soon.

  “We’re real shorthanded here on holidays,” the nurse said. I took a seat on the empty bed and didn’t trouble her for anything else.

  Louis had two black eyes, and his cheeks were so swollen that the skin dimpled over his nose. It was a while before I realized the nose might be broken. Poor old Louis! In our twenties he’d had all the vivacity, but I was the one who got cruised when we were out together, and it made my passion for him seem like our secret. And then, how everything changed. I lost my hair and whatever small confidence made me attractive, and when I stopped racing bikes I got heavy. But Louis only got younger. A beauty salon is, after all, a fountain of youth. Even at forty, his hair was lustrously dark and his skin taut and nicely tanned. And though he never conquered the pudginess that made him a bit like a large hairy infant, I know he hit the gym regularly and had some baby fat removed from his tummy. But pudgy or not, he still made my mouth water, so it was heartbreaking to see that after all that cosmetic work he now looked so much more beat down than me. Me, with my gut and my desperation shirt.

  A tiny man stepped to the bedside and touched a stethoscope to Louis’s neck. “You friend of Mr. Pervawa? We just waiting for him to wake up.”

  “How long?”

  The guy glanced at the machines behind the bed, then reached out and hit a button. “His numbers very good,” he said, smoothing the blanket over Louis’s feet. “Brain activity, normal range. Maybe little, little depressed if you consider antiseizure meds…”

  “His face looks crappy.”

  “No! Not crappy. Not so crappy at all, really.” He patted my hand. “Not bad. Doctor tell you the same.”

  I nodded back. I’d thought this guy was the doctor. “Where’s his stuff?” I asked. “His clothes and all, whatever he was wearing.” They had Louis in a gown that tied at the neck.

  “Oh. ER orderlies generally…Yep. Right here.” The man reached for a bin attached to the bed’s undercarriage. “Of course, valuables usually set aside for safekeeping, although—oops!” He passed me Louis’s fancy watch. “Very shorthanded today.”

  Louis had been wearing a white shirt of some silky knit. His blood had soaked into it in ragged brown stains, and as I drew the fabric from the bin I felt sick. Beneath the shirt lay his folded socks, his expensive loafers and black designer jeans; also gray cotton boxers. Sometime, while my back was turned, he’d stopped wearing briefs. I let the foreign guy drift away, then dug around in the jeans until I found Louis’s billfold. And there was my name, after his mother’s and the name of the shop. As the officer had said: “In Case of Emergency.”

  I put a hand on Louis’s shin, and the next I knew it was evening, and nothing had changed. What on earth was I thinking as the sun slowly set? I was wondering if Louis’s recovery would be a long one, and if he’d let me take care of him while he got well. In the silence of the ward it was easy to imagine what a fine nurse I’d make; to dwell on my chance for regaining what I’d lost.

  The tiny man appeared again and touched me on the shoulder. “You can speak to him, you know,” he said. “Go ’head. Speak, sing. Important to let him know that you here.” He picked up the hand with the tube running into it and slapped at the fingers. “Mr. Pervawa! You friend is here. Time to wake up! You friend—” He said, “What you name?” and I told him, and he called out, “You friend Joemeegan!” and offered me Louis’s palm.

  “Hi, Louis,” I said. “It’s Joe. I’m still here. You had an accident, but you’re gonna be fine.” And then, to the foreign guy: “That’s right, right? He’ll be okay?”

  The guy nodded. “You wait. Mr. Pervawa’s doctor tell you everything. But…Maybe tomorrow. You go home now, get some food, shave, some rest. Conserve you stren’th.” He patted my hand again, and I stood to go. The old guy in the next bed hadn’t budged, and the thought of him lying like a stone made me queasy; but of course, Louis was just the same. “Go on!” said the foreign guy, and moved me toward the bed. “Go on, you can kiss him. Mr. Pervawa!” he called out, slapping Louis’s fingers. “You friend Joemeegan giving you good-night kiss!”

  * * *

  —

  Except for Mr. Navy, no one was waiting for me in Boston. I had a temp job I was expected at in the morning, but I could call and say I’d had an emergency, or I could let them figure it out for themselves. It wasn’t the first time I’d let someone down. The roads had changed since I’d visited Rhode Island, and I wandered blindly for a while,
then took a chance and turned toward the coast. Rounding a curve, I saw a frame house where a lantern shone on yellow clapboards and a gravel road led up a hillside, and I knew I’d seen the place before. Sure enough, a mile further, East Duffield’s streetlights began. A motel called the Franklin Arms looked shabby enough to be cheap, and as I passed over my card I realized that if I blew off the temp place I’d be short of cash, and I wondered if I should have borrowed something from Louis’s wallet. I found a fish place on the main street, but when my meal came I couldn’t eat. I can always drink, though.

  I haven’t been around much. Other than one miserable season house-painting for an AA acquaintance in Key West, I’ve lived my whole life in Boston. And though Louis continued to travel as he made money, that trip to Europe was my only time abroad. It might have been years since I’d set foot in an unfamiliar establishment, and when I caught myself watching the barkeep handling the tap I lit out lickety-split. I stopped at Cumberland Farms for a six-pack of Dr Pepper to take back to my room, and as I pulled up to the motel it began to rain.

  By morning, I felt I’d conquered something. Unlocking the car, I drew deep breaths of sea air, and if I hadn’t wanted to see Louis I’d have gone to the beach. I drove out of town the same way I’d come, and as I passed the yellow house I realized why it was familiar.

  Two men were in the front yard, running an American flag up a pole. The older man was thin and gray haired, and as he unfurled the flag, the stamp collector tugged at the rope. The stamp collector was in his thirties, but as I came into view he waved vigorously, letting go of the line, and the flag dropped into his father’s arms. I waved back.