Summerlong

by Dean Bakopoulos

  Maybe now he can.

  ABC had helped unpack his things. Everything he needs for work he keeps at his small office downtown, so he has only his clothes, a few books, and a box of things he had wanted to save for sentimental reasons. The Lowrys had rented a storage unit out at the Munger farm—his old pal Ike Munger had built sixteen storage units out there long ago, when corn was not so lucrative for a time—and a lot of the family’s stuff that had not been sold or given away was there. Ike had waived the rent.

  There is one thing ABC might not have let Don bring into the house, so he hides it from her: the gun his father had given him remains hidden away in his shaving kit.

  Back at the Manetti place, it does not take Don and ABC long to bring up Don’s remaining things to the attic bedroom. They have not even woken Ruth, who is napping in her usual spot, in the first-floor study. It’s a sweltering day, and when ABC appears with two already sweating bottles of Bud Light, Don is happy to see the beers. He drinks most of his in the first minutes of swigging and ABC, who has been sipping hers, hands her own bottle to Don.

  “I actually don’t feel like a beer,” she says. “I feel like a shower and a nap.”

  “Jesus,” Don says. “This is too fucking weird.”

  ABC goes over and rubs his back the way she might try to calm a scared dog.

  “You packed light,” ABC says. “That’s a good sign.”

  “Yes. I promise that it’s temporary. We have stuff in storage.”

  “For your family’s sake,” ABC says, “I hope it is temporary. But Ruth doesn’t mind. You can stay as long as you want. She told me that. She likes you.”

  “And do you mind?” Don says.

  “No, I’m glad we could help. I’m glad Ruth could, at least. I’m also a squatter. Anyway, go ahead and get settled in—I’m making tacos for dinner. Will you join us?”

  He nods.

  “Okay, Don Lowry. Come down around seven thirty and fill your belly.”

  With that, she turns, almost like a gymnast might turn, sharp and tight, one foot six inches off the ground and pointed forward, the other foot a pivot. Then she stops and faces Don again.

  “If something happens to me,” she says. “You’ll take care of Ruth for a while, right?”

  “What’s going to happen to you?”

  “If I die, Don.”

  “If you take your own life, you mean?”

  Don goes to the shaving kit and takes out the small handgun. He has a box of bullets in there too, and he loads one into the chamber and sets the gun down on the desk.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Don!”

  “This is a gun my father gave me.”

  Without looking up from the gun, he tells ABC the story of his father, of Matt Good, of the murder, of the strange way he became the owner of this accursed weapon.

  “Why do you have it here?”

  “If you’re serious about killing yourself,” Don says. “Here. Do it now.”

  “What are you talking about, Don?”

  “You say you want to die. Stop saying that unless you mean it.”

  “Do you want to die?”

  “Right now? Yes.”

  “Why?” ABC asks.

  “Look at me. Look at my life.”

  “Don, it’s not that bad.”

  “But it is for you. You can go around telling people you want to be dead. Why? Because you’re young and beautiful and that makes it all somehow romantic?”

  “Don. Stop.”

  “Do you love me? ABC? Do you love me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, are you in love with me?”

  “No.”

  “It’s just, when Ruth was on the porch that day, she wanted you to tell me something. Like a confession. And I want you to know I am open to it.”

  “To what?”

  “To loving you. I know my marriage is still in the process of crumbling, but I can see it. I mean, if that’s where you’re going with this.”

  Don fingers the gun on the desk timidly, as if picking it up again would cause it to go off.

  “Just don’t kill yourself, ABC. Don’t say that’s what you’re doing.”

  “Don. You’re confused. I just—listen, when Philly was alive, we used to joke about you.”

  Don starts to unpack some more, and doesn’t look at ABC. It’s been an exhausting day and the thought of another emotional conversation makes him feel nauseous. She tells him the whole story, though, of Philly, in bed, telling her that she’d come back through Don Lowry.

  “Why me? Why did you joke about me?”

  “I know. It’s dumb, but—we used to laugh about your billboard. Your slogan.”

  “It’s my business?”

  “Yes. That. When we were stoned we found that unbelievably funny.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then one night, after we’d had sex, I felt this overwhelming melancholy—and for some reason I said to Philly, I said, ‘What will I do if you die?’”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “No, but you know what she said? She said she would send you to get me. She said she’d send you to lead me to the spirit world.”

  “What?”

  “I know. I mean it seemed like some dumb stoned joke you make in college, but, I mean—that evening when you found me under the sycamore, and I realized who you were, well . . .”

  “So you’re friends with me because you think Philly sent me?”

  “Is it not a weird friendship?”

  “I thought it was a friendship.”

  “It is!” ABC says. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I know it’s fucked up, but I mean, how weird is that? And when I told Ruth about all this, she was convinced. She believes somehow you’ll lead me back to Philly. And maybe it’s only in dreams. When we get high, and I fall asleep next to you, I always dream of Philly. Isn’t that weird?”

  “It is pretty random.”

  “I don’t believe in random things anymore,” ABC says. “Ruth says I have to follow this, see where this leads me, even if it ends in death. I believe she’s out there, in the beyond, waiting for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because love like that doesn’t disappear.”

  Downstairs, Don hears the voices of his children. They said they would walk over, they wanted to see where he would be living. They wanted to see him in this small rented room, the symbol of his shredded life.

  “Yes it does,” Don says. “It disappears all the time.”

  “The gun,” ABC says, and just as she says this Don takes the gun, then the box of bullets, and slides them into the desk drawer. There’s a key for the drawer, which he locks at just the right moment, just as the kids come running in saying, “Dad! Daddy! Is this where you live?”

  JULY 3,

  94 DEGREES

  Claire has been generous with the children: she’s allowed them to bring as much as they wanted to the new house and now they are busy upstairs unloading boxes of clothes, toys, books, and keepsakes. Charlie’s been generous too—“Spread out,” he says, “hang stuff on the walls, mi casa es su casa.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, this is temporary. I know that.”

  “I know it’s temporary, Claire,” he says, “but the kids should still feel like it’s home. And I just want you to be happy.”

  She has to admit, it does feel like home, already, in little ways. The simplicity of it, the clean lines of an uncluttered life: as she unpacks the kitchen, she can see the next few months evolving; she’s been promised full-time work at the dining hall in the fall, a prospect she once found pathetic and discouraging, and now feels as if it is a step toward something else, some new unseen life. She’ll be a shift supervisor, most likely. She’ll take the kids to school in the morning come autumn, after feeding them a healthy breakfast in this really amazing kitchen, and then she’ll go to work at the college. She’ll chop vegetables and stock the salad bar and put puffs of whipped cream on lemon bars all day, then greet the
students—who are a naturally friendly sort at Grinnell, all please and thank you—and head home before the dinner rush, perhaps, just in time for the kids to be done with soccer practice and after-school art class and piano lessons. On Wednesdays, Don will take them for pizza. On weekends, he’ll take them on hikes and adventures they’ll remember into adulthood.

  It will not be a terrible life. The kids will be okay and so will she, Claire says, hoping she believes it.

  And Charlie? Where will he be? Done with his mother’s charge, his father’s study put into order? Perhaps he will be back on one of the coasts, giving acting one more shot? Or maybe he’ll still be out in the guesthouse, editing his father’s abandoned book after all? Or maybe even in the house with Claire and the kids, maybe sleeping in the same bed as Claire? One never knows. She will never admit it to anyone else, but she does picture it. Not necessarily with longing, but with a kind of fictional curiosity. What would that life be like? What would that road lead her to later?

  She had tried to store most of her family’s kitchen stuff, but since the Gulliver place was largely empty, she has packed four or five boxes of things and is unwrapping glasses when she sees movement in the long shadows of the backyard: Charlie, shirtless, cleaning the pool.

  Despite the waning light, it is still so hot outside.

  It is almost unbearable.

  JULY 4,

  95 DEGREES

  On the Fourth of July, Grinnell, like most small towns in America, has a party that includes almost everyone in town. It begins with a Pioneer Pride 5K at seven in the morning, then a parade down Main Street at ten, and then a BBQ chicken dinner at noon at the American Legion. There are games for the kids at the municipal pool, a Vietnam vet who skydives into Ahrens Park at the afternoon ice cream social, and a rock and roll concert/sock hop heavy on patriotic anthems by Willie Warren & the Wayward Sons. The holiday ends with the town’s fireworks display and a series of drunken gatherings to watch said fireworks.

  It is not Don Lowry’s day with his children—that will be tomorrow—and as he wanders through the gathering crowd in the sweltering downtown, the only thing he notices are other children. The sweet, happy packs of four and five—two adults at each helm. He sees old high school friends married to their old high school sweethearts, leading their children through the growing maze of people, looking for a spot along the curb. He sees a professor of history with one child on his shoulders, holding the hand of his wife, a professor of political science. He even sees the college president, with his partner, two well-dressed men chasing two running boys across the expanse of the downtown park. Don, unsure of what to do with himself, stops for an iced coffee at Saint’s Rest, and when he emerges, sucking the bitter brew through a straw, he looks across the street to the front of the post office and sees his own children: Bryan is sitting sullenly in a lawn chair, large noise-protective headphones on (he hates marching bands, fireworks, and gunshots, so he’s pretending to listen to music during the parade, his old trick). He sits next to Claire, who has on a white sundress and white sandals, and she is laughing and looking up at the man standing beside her, Charlie Gulliver, and holding Charlie Gulliver’s hand is Wendy, Don’s younger child, Don’s little girl, and she is pointing with one hand at something coming down the street (the parade is starting!) and with her other hand, she pulls on Charlie Gulliver’s arm.

  Don walks into the street. He turns to his right and sees that yes, the first fire trucks of the parade are maybe twenty-five yards away. He stops in front of them, right in front of Claire, and Charlie, and the kids.

  “Daddy!” Wendy yells.

  The fire engines inch closer, two firefighters throwing candy from the bucket of the cherry picker.

  The band is playing Sousa, behind the fire engines.

  Wendy and Bryan wave, squinting into the sunlight.

  Claire says, “Don!”

  Charlie says, “Dude, come over. The parade’s gonna mow you down.”

  Dude?

  Don keeps staring at his family, unable to speak or move. In front of the approaching fire engines, the parade marshall, Olympic speed skater Leslie Hammer, is waving to the crowd. She wears red, white, and blue shorts; sneakers; and a white warm-up top. She is ten yards away. The candy flies from the fire engine. Her smile meets Don’s eyes and then her smile fades and Claire says, “Don! Move!”

  It is a police officer who finally moves into the road, and escorts Don to the side, away from his family, and when the slow fire trucks pass between them, Don Lowry disappears.

  JULY 5,

  95 DEGREES

  The heat would not break and even the sun at the city pool could grow unbearable after ten minutes, and so, because it is Don’s day to take the kids, his first outing as the noncustodial parent, he drives them to an indoor waterpark outside Des Moines; Claire has found him a deal on Groupon, a cost-saving move she’s taken to since the separation, and he is grateful for the idea.

  Back home, in the sultry late afternoon, Charlie takes an ice bucket of six beers out to the deck by the still-empty pool. On his fourth beer, he reads another cache of his father’s letters; these he finds in a manuscript box in a bursting file cabinet in the closet. Letters in front of him, both from the admirers and to the admired—fervent declarations to Melinda and Sidney and Jamaica spilling out in front of him, all of them carefully photocopied and dated and saved in manila folders. His father had been serious about saving these, and he wonders, if early-onset dementia comes for him someday, would there be something shameful like this that he too will leave behind?

  Do we all have secrets and do we all leave evidence behind of such secrets when our end comes without notice? What would Charlie want burned if he were to become incapacitated someday? Maybe that is the sign of a good, ethical life? The idea that there is nothing you need to burn before you die.

  He watches Claire walking through the backyard toward the pool. She is wearing a pair of paint-spattered white overalls over a white ribbed tank top. She has been eager to earn her keep around the place, and has taken to painting the mildewed walls of the laundry room and the downstairs bath. She tells Charlie it will help him sell the place quickly when he’s ready to do so. She’d said so yesterday as she recaulked the upstairs bathtub where Wendy would soak for almost an hour nearly every night.

  “Don called,” Claire says to Charlie now. “They’re having so much fun that he is using that coupon to stay at the hotel tonight. The kids seem happy about it.”

  “Oh,” Charlie says, barely looking up. He is reading a letter about a woman wanting to go back to a riverfront hotel in Davenport with his father and he reads it aloud to Claire: “‘Gill, can’t believe you got me to go to a gentlemen’s club! That was kind of naughty. I was drunk!’”

  “Jesus,” Claire says.

  “Right?” Charlie says. “Crazy, right?”

  “He wrote a lot of letters. But why torture yourself?”

  “Some to you? Maybe?” Charlie says. “There were some to ABC and some to a woman named Claire.”

  “I am sure we wrote notes. I took like four classes with him. And then I was his colleague for two years. All of this before e-mail. So we wrote notes. Not like that one though.”

  “At any given moment,” Charlie says, “it seems like my father was in love with a hundred women.”

  “I think you shouldn’t read these,” Claire says. “We could burn everything without reading them and set you free.”

  “But there’s a book somewhere in these piles. His life’s work, Claire.”

  “He won’t know the difference. And if there was a book, why would—” she says, and then stops herself, reframing her statement. “Wouldn’t he have published it if he had wanted it published?”

  “He was a perfectionist,” Charlie says. “He would have been afraid to, I think. Afraid of rejection, maybe?”

  “I understand that. One bad review in the Times is enough.”

  “Your book got a bad review?”
r />   “The worst!”

  Claire stands near him for a long time, not speaking. She is glad to see him. Her whole body sways, as if she might fall on him without meaning to, and she plunges her hands into her pockets and feels the warmth there.

  “Why didn’t you ever write another book?” Charlie says.

  “I didn’t want to,” she says.

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Something happened to me,” Claire says. “I don’t know what. I stopped wanting things.”

  “And now?” he says.

  “Now,” she says, “I just want.”

  JULY 6,

  97 DEGREES

  The house is filthy, at least by Ruth’s standards, and had, in her able-bodied days, been impeccable. ABC knows she has not been as good a live-in aide as she had first set out to be when she arrived in Grinnell. She loves Ruth. She genuinely wants to do a good job, and she knows she has left Ruth home alone for stretches that are too long, spending her time with Charlie, sorting through his father’s papers, or with Don, smoking, hoping to take a nap beside him and dream of Philly again. She knows she has not made the meals as nutritious as they should have been—frozen pizzas and grilled burgers. She knows the house is not as clean as it could be. But it is an odd situation, incredibly informal. In exchange for room and board (ABC has a monthly grocery store allowance to spend on Ruth’s behalf) and a small monthly stipend, Ruth hasn’t asked for much: an eye on her, keep her company, help her with whatever she needs help doing.

  Mainly, ABC has helped the old woman stay high.

  So that morning, ABC apologizes to Ruth for any recent oversights and inadequacies.