What We Never Had

by Zach Wyner

  The woman stood up from the bench and stretched her hands above her head. In the green glow of the traffic light it was impossible to tell, but her silhouette was a dead ringer. You could feel your pounding heart in your throat. All you needed to do was turn away, cross the street, and she would be eclipsed by apartment buildings.

  Your phone rang and you quickly dug into your pocket to silence it but it was too late. The woman turned. She was too far and it was too dark to clearly make out her face. She might have been June. But there was no way to be certain without moving closer or calling out her name. For a few seconds, you stood there in fog-rendered anonymity. Finally, you summoned the person you were with Adrienne, stepped into his posture, his prudence, his confidence; you walked away, waiting at the curb for a few cars to sail by before crossing the road amongst the drift of dead leaves and energy bar wrappers. You fought the impulse to look back until just before you rounded the corner. The woman had vanished.

  The apartment was empty. You switched on the living/dining room lights and suddenly everything became clear. It was time to move. This home didn’t belong to you anymore. You’d surrendered dominion. The couch now belonged to Amare, the floor to Bill, and invisible tracks laid by June’s ceaseless pacing haunted all the spaces in between.

  You ventured out to the balcony, the old refuge, and for whatever reason, the lone place that remained sovereign territory. Cigarette butts, survivors of the broom’s bristles, wedged themselves against the doorframe. You gazed at them dolefully, mourning the loss of smoking the way you might a reliable companion who moved away. You were never going back. In the past, when you’d tried to quit, you fantasized about some minor tragedy or crisis that might give you an excuse to fail—being dumped by a girl, a false positive on a pregnancy test, getting fired from a job. In the fantasy, your transgression would be excused and you would be granted a finite window of guilt-free smoking because after all, a smoker was still a smoker when the chips were down. You recognized that, just as it was time to leave this apartment, it was time to leave the person who needed those toxic companions to feel secure. Let go the slouch in your posture, the mumble in your voice, the sweat on your brow. Let go the one who whispered “sleep” when it was time to wake and “panic” when it was time to sleep. Let go the phantom, haunting this balcony. Move on and encroach upon his territory no more.

  Amare came home moments later and joined you on the couch.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “I can’t get over how weird it is to be the only pedestrian on a Thursday night in a big city.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going to miss things about this place though.”

  “Yeah?”

  Amare looked around the apartment and nodded.

  “Well I’ll sure miss you,” you said. “I would have been seriously lost without you guys.”

  He chuckled. “That’s a pretty generous perspective. You’re a great friend, Josh. Far as I’m concerned, you’re the best thing this city has going for it.”

  You lowered your head, nodded, took a deep, quiet breath and slowly exhaled. “Any word from Bill?”

  “He’s out getting drinks with that Sadie girl.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Said it’d be a quick one. He’s got the morning shift tomorrow.”

  “Our working man.”

  The intercom buzzed. You sprang from the couch, noting a faint but selfish hope that Bill’s drink with Sadie was already over, and pushed the talk button.

  “Hello?”

  “Your male escort is here.”

  “All right,” you said, “but you better be short, bald, and furry like in the picture. The last guy had a head of Samson hair and the body of an Olympic swimmer.”

  Bill laughed. “You won’t be disappointed.”

  You pressed the buzzer and broke the seal on a bottle of twelve-year-old single malt scotch you’d sagely tucked away in the recesses of a cupboard.

  “You’ve been holding out,” said Amare. You grinned. “I don’t blame you, dude. You don’t break out the good stuff for couch-surfers until they’re on their way out the door.”

  The three of you drank, watched Red Sox highlights, and avoided talking politics, opting instead to calculate Bill’s chances of scoring with Sadie. You encouraged him to eschew the conventional don’t-shit-where-you-eat wisdom and go for it, despite the fact that you could see yourself asking her out sometime soon if she didn’t go for Bill.

  Liberated from uncertainty, the conversation flowed like water down an unclogged drain. Absent was the outbreak of uncomfortable pauses that had infected breakfast at Loretta’s, but discomfort was replaced by a tacit melancholy, the nostalgic laughter that accompanies the final days of summer. Back east, the leaves would have long since turned, but it took the approach of winter for the languid crawl of Los Angeles to acquiesce to the year’s desire to wind down. It was just after midnight when you realized there was no milk in the fridge.

  *

  The Wizard’s silver hatchback sat alone in the 7-Eleven parking lot, but it wasn’t until you were abreast of it that you realized why it sagged so low to the ground. Like the solid iron core of the earth, the Wizard sat within. You crossed in front of the windshield and waved cautiously. He stared straight ahead, unblinking and pale. The hairs on your forearms and the back of your neck rose to attention and you moved quickly to the passenger door. You knocked on the window. Wearily, his head turned. A smile creased his waxen face.

  “You all right, Ozzie?” you said through the closed window.

  He nodded and gestured with his hand for you to open the door. You did so and a deluge of fast food wrappers and coffee cups spilled onto the ground.

  “Damnation,” he said. “Just toss them back inside.”

  “Don’t worry about it. There’s a trash can right here.”

  You gathered crumpled wax paper with bits of congealed cheese and ketchup-gone-brown, resisting the urge to flinch in revulsion.

  “I hate to contaminate Habib’s noble receptacles with my foul refuse.”

  You shoved handfuls of the garbage into the trash, got a tissue from your back pocket and wiped your soiled hands.

  “Out, out vile spot,” the Wizard murmured.

  You mustered a hollow laugh.

  “I’m sorry, Joshua. Care to sit with me a while?”

  More garbage was packed solidly into the legroom between the seat and the floor. You’d have had to sit cross-legged.

  “I’m just picking up a couple essentials,” you said. “You want to come inside? Habib looks bored.”

  “I would like that very much, but I’m just now in the middle of catching my breath.”

  You frowned. “Oh.”

  “Don’t look so concerned,” he said, smiling thinly. “A mere bout of indigestion has left me a bit fatigued.”

  You laughed, relieved to not be burdened with a fresh, unexpected worry. “I’m gonna buy you something to help take care of your belly. Don’t refuse. I owe you at least that much.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Any preferences?”

  “I leave the decision to you, my friend.” He winced and pressed his fist against the center of his chest.

  “Ozzie? You sure you’re okay?”

  His face contorted with pain and turned scarlet.

  “Ozzie!”

  He let out a thunderous belch capable of penetrating the thickest of fog and guiding lost ships to shore.

  “Excuse me,” he said modestly, as if he had sneezed or done something equally prosaic.

  You laughed. “Holy crap!”

  He wiped his forehead with a checkered handkerchief. “One too many bacon-cheeseburger dogs.”

  You pressed your hand against your chest. “Jesus, Wizard. You scared me.”

 
“To be honest, I scared me too.”

  “I’ll be back in a sec. You sure you’re all right?”

  “Much better, my friend. Thank you.”

  You crossed the threshold and the electric doorbell chimed. Habib looked up from a crossword puzzle and smiled, his handsome face fresh and alert despite the late hour and longevity of his workday.

  “I have meant to ask you how your shoulder is healing, Joshua. Is it much better now?”

  “It is,” you said, rubbing it gently. “I hardly even notice it.” You snagged the last box of Honey Bunches of Oats from the shelf and put it on the counter.

  “And your friend with the head injury. I haven’t seen him for a few days. He is okay too? No headaches, nausea, confusion, fatigue?”

  “Well, fatigue and nausea are sort of Bill’s baseline, so that’s kinda tough to say.”

  “Is this true?” said Habib, frowning in concern. “He should go right away to a doctor if he…”

  “I’m kidding, Habib. It’s a joke. Bill’s fine.”

  You moved to the drink isle and contemplated the cheap beer, trying to remember which kinds Amare refused to drink on principle because of fascist CEOs and/or contributions to right wing political action committees.

  “I was glad to hear that he found a job,” said Habib.

  You decided to splurge, tucked a sixer of Sierra Nevada under your arm, hefted a two-gallon jug of low fat milk, and placed the items on the counter beside your cereal.

  “Yeah, Bill’s all set up, but I’m afraid Amare’s leaving us.”

  Habib stroked his mustache and nodded. “I do not believe that this city was the ideal place for him.”

  “I’m not sure it’s the ideal place for anyone,” you said.

  Habib’s brow furrowed.

  “I’m not saying I’m leaving right away or anything, but it’s starting to feel inevitable.”

  Habib scanned the milk.

  “Maybe it’s not the city at all,” you said. “Maybe it’s me.” You dug your wallet out of your back pocket and rifled through your cash in search of a twenty. “I can’t seem to figure out where I fit.”

  “I thought you said you were a teacher.”

  “I guess.”

  “Well are you or are you not?”

  “Okay. I’m a teacher.”

  “Teachers are needed everywhere.” He scanned the beer and typed your birth date into the register. “Everywhere a teacher goes, they transcend their environment. By helping students connect their small worlds to the larger one, teachers demonstrate how to think beyond the constraints of individual lives. If you are a teacher, you will have students wherever you go, and if you have students, wherever you go, you are home.”

  Habib put the scanner down, folded his arms across his chest and looked you dead in the eyes. Ashamed of your inexperience and uncertainty, you lowered your gaze to your tattered sneakers.

  He cleared his throat. “May I say something presumptuous?”

  “Of course.”

  He sat down on his stool. “To have an easy upbringing is a good thing, but it does not prepare one for life’s more difficult decisions. You have kindness in your heart and an inquisitive nature, and that is most important. Go and share those qualities with your students, many of whom have not had to invent worries and manifest their own suffering because they are overwhelmed by the guilt of having been born into privilege and love.”

  You cleared your throat but found no words waiting to come out. You nodded.

  “Good. One hundred dollars please.”

  You chuckled. “These microbrews sure are expensive.”

  “I’m kidding.” He smiled. “It was my joke. Sixteen-seventy-four.”

  You looked down at the paltry items that sustained you. “Shit. I forgot to get Ozzie some Pepto.” You turned to signal the Wizard, to assure him that you were looking after him. Even from a distance, through the glass doors and the loud advertisements alerting customers to specials on beer and soda, you could tell that something was wrong. You bolted outside and halted a few feet from the car, immobilized by the Wizard’s impossibly blue eyes, wide-open to eternity, gazing beyond his car’s streaked windshield as if attempting to take in the whole of the starless night.

  *

  Summer had its last gasp the day the Wizard was put in the ground. Trapped by the resurgent heat, a thin film of brown smog hung over the Valley. The funeral home was having trouble with their air-conditioning and the cloying stink of flowers lacquered the inside of your nostrils and sat heavily in your lungs. You imagined the Wizard soaking the inside of his silver and baby-blue casket with bucketloads of sweat, decorously mopping his brow with a handkerchief as he prepared to embark upon the ever after.

  It was mercifully short service, with the pastor reciting a generic bit of scripture that could have applied to anyone. The three of you sat in humbled silence, you in a wrinkled grey suit you hadn’t had the time or the skill to iron, Bill and Amare in borrowed button-down shirts and their darkest pairs of jeans. Habib and a elderly Black man with snow white hair and a burgundy Members Only jacket rounded out the mourners. No one spoke but the pastor. The entire service took fifteen minutes.

  Afterwards, as you walked to your cars to drive to the cemetery, Habib pulled you aside.

  “Josh, I must go back to work. Can you do something for me?”

  “Of course.”

  You followed him to his silver station wagon, marveling at your easy rapport. You realized that, even as you were getting acquainted, you’d never anticipated a relationship with the Wizard or Habib outside of the context of the convenience store. The fact that you could suddenly see yourself being invited to Habib’s house for dinner, or vice versa, excited you. This was something that, a few months ago, you could not have predicted. And that was a welcome sensation. It suggested you were doing something right.

  Habib ducked inside the car, retrieved a plastic 7-Eleven bag and handed it to you.

  “I do not know if this is appropriate, but I thought that if he…it would be a comfort to me to know that we are not sending our friend off empty handed.”

  You looked inside the bag and smiled.

  He extended a hand and you shook it. “I will see you soon?”

  “You’re a prince, Habib.”

  He blushed. “Six months ago I could not have imagined that Ozzie’s presence in my store would be something I would miss.”

  “I hear you.”

  You and Amare drove to the cemetery, Bill following behind in the Chevette. Amare’s suitcase sat in the trunk of your car, packed for a one-way flight to New Jersey later that evening.

  “Bill’s cutting it awful close,” you said. “Doesn’t his shift start soon?”

  Amare shrugged.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine. Ozzie’s the one being buried.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Not especially.”

  You nodded and drove on.

  Thankfully, the family plot, located on a rise in the Forest Lawn cemetery overlooking Burbank studios, was shaded. It was also, considering the fact that there were only three bodies interred there, quite spacious. Jaques Oswald Hinton, born on September 23rd, 1955, had died on September 23rd, 2003, just minutes into his forty-eighth birthday. He was laid to rest beside Bernard and Lucille Hinton, loving parents, dead fifteen and three years respectively. They had been old parents, born forty-four and fifty-two years before their son. Ozzie must have been a surprise, maybe even a miracle, coming along years after the couple had given up trying and resigned themselves to their childless lives. This seemed to fit. Ozzie’d had a certain quality—he’d been precious to somebody once. You couldn’t help but imagine him taking care of his mother for those twelve years after his father had passed away. Maybe that was when he quit working, dropped
out of society, began the overeating that accelerated his demise. Caring for the elderly can make a person exceptionally fearful of growing old, especially when faced with the prospect of doing it alone. Maybe he had lost the will to care for himself on the traffic-clogged freeways that led to his widowed mother.

  More words were spoken but you didn’t pay much attention. You kept a curious eye on your friends. You’d expected the kind of demonstrations of physical discomfort you get from children—the unbuttoning of collars, tugging at their bunched-up, tucked-in shirts, scratching and fidgeting. But they engaged in none of that. They stood there stoically and solemnly and you could see, in their composure, their fortitude and experience. You saw men acquainted with loss.

  The casket was lowered into the ground. You, Bill, Amare, and the man in the Members Only jacket lined up on one side, the pastor and the gravediggers on the other. “Shy, quiet young man,” said the stranger, which sounded natural enough coming from someone well over seventy, “but you catch him in the right mood, he’d just about talk your ear off.” He watched the casket as though he were waiting for a light to change. “Didn’t know he had friends.”

  “We weren’t friends exactly,” said Amare.

  The man scrunched up his face, his lips pursed like a lumpy lemon rind.

  “He was something of a local legend,” you said.

  A hoary left eyebrow climbed the man’s forehead.

  “He helped me out of a serious jam once.”

  “Good,” the man said tersely, so everyone could hear the period. “Ozzie needed something to feel good about.”

  Amare winced but refrained from comment; as the gravediggers began to shovel dirt onto the casket, he wandered off a few paces and stood in the pounding sunlight. You removed the contents from the plastic bag that Habib had given you—a Lotto ticket and a bacon cheeseburger dog in a red and green cardboard container.