The anger helped him focus. There was stuff he had to do, and it wasn’t going to get done if he sat around here feeling sorry for himself. The anger helped him shake off the sluggishness and stand up, then rummage around in the kitchen drawers until he found the phone book.
He sat back at the kitchen table and pawed through the yellow pages. Food Banks…Foster Care…Freezers…Fumigating…Funeral Services.
Matt was disgusted by the cheesy pictures on the advertisements. A soft golden sunset over a cluster of islands in the bay. A wreath of flowers surrounded by candles. Three generations of a family-owned business, standing around in suits with camera smiles frozen on their faces. Why did everything have to be so fucking fake?
Matt skipped all those, found a place with a simple ad, no pictures and no bullshit. Just the name, After Care Funeral Home and Cremation Services, an address and a phone number.
Matt picked up the phone, started to push the numbers, put the phone down again.
He walked slowly down the hall. He had closed the door to the bedroom and he stood in front of it now. He thought he was going to open it up, but he just placed his palm on the door. He slowly leaned forward until his forehead was resting on the wood.
He stood that way for a long time, trying to gather up his will to make the phone call. Saying goodbye.
Eventually, he walked back to the kitchen, pulled out his phone and dialed the number.
—
Matt was sitting by the window when the van drove up. He opened the door to the funeral workers.
“Hello, I’m Greg from After Care,” the one with dark hair said, his features appropriately composed. “Are you Matt Nolan?” Matt nodded. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Matt.” Matt just stood there. Greg spoke in a lower voice. “We’re here to pick up Jack.”
Matt pushed the door open for them and stepped back into the trailer.
Greg paused. “Maybe you’d like to get a little air, Matt. Maybe take a short walk around outside?”
“He’s down the hall, in the bedroom.” Matt didn’t move.
Greg from After Care cleared his throat. “It’s really for the best, Matt, I can assure you. If you’d leave the premises, just for a short while. This part can be upsetting. Maybe you could—”
“Just do what you have to fucking do.”
Greg glanced at his partner, who nodded once. Matt sat on the couch, his arms crossed over his chest.
The two men walked down the hall. They didn’t speak while they worked, but Matt could hear them fumbling around in the bedroom.
When they walked back through the living room, each man was carrying one end of a black body bag. Matt stared at it. There was no way the tiny bulge was big enough to be Jack, no way that bag could ever contain him.
Matt wished he had listened to them and left the trailer.
—
A few hours later, Matt walked back down the hall. The bedroom door had been left open.
The funeral home guys had made the bed, every corner tucked in, every pillow in place. The bed had never been this neat, not ever, and there was no sign left that Jack had spent so many nights there. Matt was so furious that he slammed his fist into the door. The thin wood crumpled and splintered under his fist, but he didn’t punch all the way through. There was just a big, jagged dent in the middle of the door.
Matt closed the door and walked back to the living room and sat on the couch. The trailer grew dark around him.
He was still there when the trailer park regulars stopped their hooting and hollering and drifted one by one back to their trailers. He was still there when the gray light of a new day filtered in through the windows.
When the trailer park started stirring again, front doors slamming and cars driving across the gravel, headed for town, Matt made coffee and poured a bowl of cereal. Not because he was hungry, but because that was what people did in the morning.
He sat at the kitchen table for a long time. There was no reason to get up. No medicines to fetch, no schedule to keep. Nothing.
—
A few minutes after breakfast, or maybe four or five hours, there was a knock on the door. Amanda stood on the gravel outside. When Matt opened the door she was rummaging around in a grocery bag. “I brought something for you,” she said. She found something at the bottom of the bag and pulled it out. It was a box of adult diapers. “Before you say no, just give these a chance. It’ll be better than cleaning up the bed, plus we can always—” Amanda looked up at Matt’s face then, and instantly her expression changed. Her eyes grew round and her mouth opened, and then her whole face contracted in concern. “Oh, Matt, I’m so sorry.” Tears welled up in her eyes.
Amanda dropped the box and the grocery bag and moved toward Matt with her arms open. He held one hand up and stopped her.
She pulled back immediately, then wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. “I’ll give the funeral people a call, okay? We can take a walk or something while they come over. Maybe down to the riverside or the park or somewhere.” She searched his face. “Okay?”
“They already came by. Yesterday.”
Amanda’s face crumpled. “I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.” She buried her face in her hands, sobbing.
They stood that way for a long time, Amanda crying, Matt standing there and looking out over the trailer park.
When Amanda’s sobs leveled off, she took some tissue out of her purse and cleaned up her face.
“Do you want to take a drive? Go to a restaurant or something? We don’t have to eat or anything, we could just sit there and talk. Or not talk, and drink coffee. It would just be, you know, somewhere to be. Somewhere else.”
Matt shook his head. He still didn’t look at her.
Amanda studied his face. “Matt, is there…I almost said ‘Is there anything wrong?’ but that’s a stupid thing to say right now.” She paused for a few moments, clearly to let Matt speak if he was going to. “But is there…is there anything else?”
Matt avoided eye contact and shook his head.
“Matt, don’t do this,” Amanda whispered. “Don’t go back to the way it was before. Don’t go back to the way you were.”
“Not going back. Always been like this.”
Amanda shook her head. “That’s not true, Matt. You know you—”
“You weren’t here!” Matt blurted out. Amanda took a step backward, as if she’d been slapped. “You weren’t here when I needed you. You’re just like everyone else.”
Amanda opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Matt glared at her for a few moments, then turned and walked back into the trailer. He had moved to shut the door when Amanda put her palm against it, holding it open.
“Matt, I had to go to my afternoon classes and then meet with my Independent Study advisors after school. They had to check my work and sign a bunch of forms. Then I had to help my mom go shopping in the evening. I told you all that!”
“No, you didn’t.”
Amanda’s hand fell from the door. She stared at Matt as he took another step backward. “Then maybe I forgot. Or maybe you forgot I told you. It’s been so crazy lately. But none of that matters. I’m here now, Matt. I’ll stay as long as you need me to. And then I’ll come back tomorrow. And the day after that.”
Matt retreated farther into the dim interior of the trailer. “Don’t worry about it. He’s dead, you know? I don’t need help anymore.”
“Matt…I don’t think that’s true.”
“I don’t need anything.” Matt stepped forward and closed the door.
He stood there for a long time, staring at the door. The Buick hadn’t driven away yet, so he knew she was still out there. After a long time he heard her call to him, “You don’t have to be alone.”
She didn’t know that it wasn’t a choice. He was alone.
Matt started to take long walks. No direction, no destination, just one foot in front of the other.
He set out at the time when he normally would have gone to school.
By lunchtime he would reach one of the neighboring small towns, where he would stop and chew on a tasteless burger at a fast-food place, head bent over his food at a booth in the corner. Afterward he would walk around town and then back home, sometimes getting there before dark, sometimes not. When he finally crashed on the couch in the evenings—he never used the bed in the bedroom—the physical exhaustion would pull him under and he’d be able to get some kind of sleep. He had learned that if he made himself tired enough, he wouldn’t have to think about anything.
Amanda came by every evening. At first she knocked on the door, quietly but insistently, for a long time. When she got tired of knocking, she would say, “You don’t have to go through this by yourself.” It was easy to hear her through the thin walls of the trailer.
After the first week of Matt not opening the door, she gave up on the knocking altogether. Instead she parked her car in the driveway and read a book by flashlight. She stayed there for two or three hours at a time, sometimes even longer. Matt could see her, framed by the kitchen window, when he got a glass of water, or through the tiny bathroom window when he stood at the toilet. Sometimes he peeked around the curtain in the living room before hitting the couch for the night. It was easier to get to sleep on the nights when she was still out there.
A few weeks after Jack’s death, Matt opened the door to the bedroom for the first time. It looked very small.
He brought a trash bag and a cardboard box. He tossed all the medicines and tissues and other reminders of Jack’s illness in the trash bag. In the box, he carefully placed the rest of Jack’s things, the clothes from the drawers, his watch and wallet and some jewelry and other things. He found a piece of scratch paper where Amanda and Jack had recorded the winnings from their cribbage games, Amanda way out in front. Matt put this into the box.
Without quite knowing what he was doing at first, Matt started to search the room, looking in the very back of the drawers of the bedside table, behind the headboard, potential little hiding places. He was looking for something that Jack might have left him, a note or a picture or something. It was exactly the kind of thing Jack would do. Matt could just see him, sitting in bed alone, thinking about Matt finding a little posthumous surprise and grinning his ass off. Matt could picture it perfectly, and it made the hollow place in his heart ache.
But Matt couldn’t find anything like that. Jack was gone.
Big Ed called about more border crossings, and Matt went just to have something to do. He did not need the money.
He felt nothing the entire time, just a dull calmness as he waited in line at the border and spoke to the agent at the booth. He didn’t think this would change even if they asked him to pull over and found the box of product in the trunk. He would just go where they told him to go, do what they told him to do. The idea of prison stopped being scary. Became almost comforting. Inmates didn’t have to think about the future.
The border agents never asked him more than a question or two before waving him through. Matt couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed as he drove back to the trailer.
One night Matt had the dream. Jack’s car dream. The one where Jack was stuck on a long, dark road. But he didn’t think about Jack; the dream wasn’t about Jack. It was Matt in the car.
The only difference was how fast he was going. There was the same feeling of being trapped, the same total lack of control, the same stark fear of where he was headed. But he was flying on the way there, road signs whipping by in a blur as he rushed toward the blackness.
Matt was usually able to empty his mind on his long walks, take some comfort in the mindless repetition of one foot in front of the other. But after the dream he had to give them up. Didn’t want to spend all that time on a road again. Couldn’t risk facing that feeling when he was awake.
That evening, or maybe an evening some weeks later, someone knocked on the door. Loudly.
Matt nudged the curtain aside and saw Amanda’s Buick in the driveway. He stayed on the couch.
“Matt, please open the door.” More knocking. “Please.”
Matt almost said “Go away,” but his throat felt rusty with disuse. He didn’t know if it would work.
Eventually, the knocking stopped. But when she spoke again, her voice was louder. Stronger. “He made me promise to wait until Halloween. That was going to be his big joke. But I think you should have this now.”
Matt looked at the door. An envelope slipped underneath and lay on the faded carpet.
A few minutes later the gravel crunched under the tires as the Buick left.
Matt stared at the envelope for a long time. When he finally got up to take it, his head was very light. He felt like he was floating across the small living room.
He didn’t open the envelope and remove the card until he’d walked over to the kitchen table. When he saw the doctored illustration on the front—a group of ghosts sporting orange beards, flaming hair and red-Sharpie freckles all over their arms—his legs collapsed, and he slumped down into one of the chairs.
His hands trembling, he opened the card. It was filled with Jack’s unmistakable scrawl, so much writing that it went over the pictures and spread to the back of the card.
I got time to write because you won’t bring any ladies back to this damn trailer for me. Would it kill you to find a nice working girl? Hell, take it out of the budget for my meds. I never paid for it, no, sir, but before I kick off for good I’d trade a handful of them pills for one more hour with a woman who knows what she’s doing. How many dying wishes does a man get, for fuck’s sake?
As for kicking off, if you are reading this it means I’m gone. That sucks. Not for me though. The part that sucks for me is now. The pain I can deal with. I been busted up before, car wrecks and bar fights. The bad part is the other stuff. Not being able to eat hardly anything or go outside or take a shit by myself. That’s no kinda life. Sorry if it pisses you off to hear it, but I’m just about glad it’s almost over.
No, the part that sucks will be for you. After. We don’t say sentimental shit, never been that kind of family, but I know you’ll be missing me at least for a while anyway. Wish I had some advice for you but I don’t. Hell, if I’d known how to live a good life and make a pile of money and be like people in the commercials then I would have fucking done it, you know?
And I don’t have a will or nothing else for you. That sucks too and I’m real sorry. Been thinking hard and the only thing I have to give you is the picture I have of you as a kid. We don’t have no scrapbooks or home movies or trophies sitting in boxes somewhere. Like I said, never been that kind of family. But trust me, you were a great kid, Big Matty. Curious as hell, always laughing, crazy-ass imagination. We hardly never turned the TV on, Cassie and me, you know that? We’d just pop open a couple of beers and sit on the couch and watch you. You probably don’t remember none of that. Bad stuff sticks longer than good stuff for some fucked-up reason. But the good times was there. You always thanked me for coming around when you were a kid but you know what? I did it because I liked being around you. My life got pretty messed up sometimes, no lie, and being around you made me feel better. You liked to cut up and carry on and were excited about things. Really.
And you ain’t changed as much as you think. I know all teenagers act like assholes because they’re going through a shitty time, and you had it shittier than most. And I know you can’t go back to being exactly like that little kid again. Nobody does. But you don’t want to stay like this always neither. Some people actually do that, you know. Their generally a big pain in the ass.
So if you won’t bring me a willing woman to warm me up, then you need to do these things. First, try to forgive your mom. I know she fucked up but she’s been through a lot. And she protected you from some pretty nasty stuff when you were a kid.
Second, with me gone you got to start some kinda new family. I don’t mean married and kids and all that mess. Just like me, you might never do that. Don’t matter. But you need people. Good p
eople. Everybody does. Start with that sweet girl that’s been coming around here. She’s been taking care of our sorry asses so maybe do something for her. It won’t kill you.
And last, get the hell out of here. We stayed here because we had to, I get that, but it’s time for something different. Tell you what, I’m going to come back as a ghost in six months and if your still sitting in this trailer with that surly look on your face I’m going to haunt the shit out of you. It won’t be pretty.
Goodbye.
Uncle Jack
The next day Matt started to take his walks again. When he returned in the afternoon, there was only one of the picnic table regulars out at the usual spot, sitting there and having a smoke. He waved Matt over. Matt approached him.
“What’s up, my man?”
Matt shrugged. “Nothin’ much.”
The picnic table regular nodded as if Matt had given an answer. He took a long drag on his cigarette and blew smoke at the sky. “Janice told me about Jack. Sorry to hear about that, man.”
“Thanks.”
“Jack was a good guy, you know? Cracked me up. Used to come out here and have a beer with us when he was in town. You were just a little shit.” He smiled broadly. “Some a the stories he’d tell, you know? Didn’t even matter what they was about, just the way he’d tell ’em. Cracked me up.” He looked at Matt and his smile faded.
Matt realized that this guy had been part of the trailer park landscape since he could remember. “How long have you lived here?” he asked.
“Forever,” the man said, chuckling. He took another long drag on the cigarette. “We lifers, you know? We understand this place.” He spread his arms wide, indicating the entire trailer park. “Same deal with Jack. He didn’t always live here, but he understood this place, understood us, you know? He was a good guy.” The man pulled a crumpled cigarette pack out of his pocket. “You wanna smoke? On me? We’ll smoke to Jack.”
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