$83,888.00
I hated being wrong. I especially hated being wrong when it mattered.
Now Chan’s acute disappointment and frustration toward the airline made sense. His ratty attitude in the restaurant: the trip he’d planned for months ruined. His telling me, “It’s irreplaceable.” My believing he meant his sketchbook. My believing he was selfish. This ring is a replica of the one in the photo of Grandpapa John.
I stumbled over words. “I’m sorry I ruined dinner,” I said, and escaped through the front door with Chan on my heels.
This farm had a million uneven places. Water pumps and drain covers. Five forking gravel roads jutting off the central lane. Hundreds of tree roots. I ran fearlessly into the night until my lungs burned. Chan caught me at the maples.
The summer after middle school, we planted two dozen red maples alongside the farmhouse driveway. Gran sold a memoir about the Hive and from the proceeds Granddad sprang for larger trees. Ten-footers with burlap-wrapped root balls. They were terrible to plant, especially compared to the tiny seedlings we sowed in previous years. And we couldn’t afford to rent the backhoe that would have made planting easy.
As I put my hands on the bark of the maples, bending to catch my breath, I remembered Chan saying, “Buying them with roots feels like cheating. You have this much baggage, you should stay put.”
And I had said, “So when you leave here someday you’ll go as a seedling?” Chandler’s answer had been a peal of laughter, and then, “I’m keeping my gigantic roots balls right here.”
He was fourteen. I had been stupidly charmed by his crudeness. But now I wondered if his feet were roots stretching into the ground. If he was another Hive kid who became a Hive adult. And I just couldn’t bear it. I lay on the damp ground and stared at the midnight-blue gauze of clouds covering the stars.
“Will you talk to me?” Chan asked.
“You’re the one who stopped talking.”
“Why did you bring them here?”
“Are you serious?”
“They aren’t part of this.”
“They are this, Chan. No one else is more this than them. We were all on a bus together. That’s never going to change. Five years from now, that bus blew up. Ten years. Know what happened on June fifteenth? Twenty years—”
“Stop, Go. I’m not an idiot.”
I reached out to touch him, apologize, but he moved slightly, and I pulled back.
“I understand hiding from your fears. I’ve been hiding from mine. But why are you hiding from me?” I’d tried to say this before, but only with anger and frustration and selfishness. I’d wanted Chan to talk so I would feel better. But seeing Chan, the anguish, knowing him the way no one else did, I said everything now with the vision of someone who loved him without wanting anything in return.
“Please, trust me.”
Chan squeezed his temples with the tips of his fingers. And without looking at me, said, “We need some space. I need to think.”
Heat rushed to my face. My heart rate spiked. Everything moved faster except words. “You don’t mean that.”
I watched his reaction and he watched mine. And then he said, “I do.”
“You’re quitting me?”
“I’m quitting us. Like I should have right after the bombing.”
He didn’t mean that. I changed tactics. “Screw New York, Chan. We’ll go some other time, but don’t do this. Don’t throw everything away because you’re scared.”
Chan touched my knee and glanced sideways, catching my eye. “If you could stop yourself from doing this, you would have already. I might not be able to come with you, but I won’t keep you here anymore.” His arm curled around my shoulders, and I leaned into him the way I always had. My heart was adrift. It was like I’d had it removed from my body and I could see it beating in the air. He kissed my cheek, and his voice caught. “We always said we’d want the best for each other. And . . . this . . . this feels like an impasse. Go on to New York. Meet those families. Tell them I’m sorry.” He sounded so logical. So done. When had he decided this? Everyone had impasses. But then he said, “Go on and choose him too.” His muscles slacked; his posture fell. “If that’s what you need.”
God, it hurt to have him say that and mean it.
“I’m not choosing him.”
“You already did.”
“Come on, Chan. Rudy isn’t the reason we’re here. You can’t give up because it’s hard.”
“And you can’t hold on because we’re easy.”
“You gave me a ring in front of the Hive.” I put my left hand on his knee. “Why bother if you thought we were finished?”
“I gave you a ring for the same reason you put five hundred dollars in my cigar box. We tilt toward each other. And that’s probably not our faults—look at where we were raised. We’ve been the only two people on our planet our whole lives. But it would be our fault if we stayed together for the wrong reason. I shouldn’t have asked you in front of the Hive. I shouldn’t have asked at all. I just . . . God, Go, I didn’t want to lose you.”
“You haven’t.”
“Go.”
“You haven’t,” I repeated.
Chan stared longingly in the direction of the chapel. He pulled his hat as low as it would go, where I couldn’t see his eyes. “We lost each other in June.”
“Then let’s fix it in April. This Sunday.”
“You drove to Florida for someone else.”
“Chan, I drove to Florida because you wouldn’t talk to me.”
“I’m sorry I failed you. That I keep failing you.” His fingers clenched mine. He brought our hands to his lips and brushed kisses on my knuckles. “I’ll tell the Hive so you don’t have to.”
“I don’t care about the Hive.”
I was boneless and empty, a mold of skin in the shape of me.
“It might be asking too much, but will you come with me for a minute?” he asked.
Chan led me zombielike over the hill, past the greenhouse, through the valley where we used to make dandelion crowns, and toward the barn Granddad raised the year he died. I rarely visited here anymore. When the barn was under construction, I’d sat on the roof across from him and Chan, hauling sheet metal, handing over screws, and running extension cords for the drill.
Chan paused and said, “I told you I had a gift for you.” He slid the big barn doors sideways in their tracks and fumbled for the fluorescent lights. The light popped from dim blue to ultra-white. An old, gray Mount Zion Methodist Church bus sat in the barn’s biggest bay. A big dent in the grill, but otherwise intact.
“They were going to send her to a salvage yard. I talked them into towing it here instead. You said you needed to be able to get on a bus. Here, you could practice with no one watching.”
I was gobsmacked.
Always, when I thought he wasn’t hearing me, he was listening the hardest.
He wiped his eyes with his sleeves. “You need photos of the world. And I’m just Chan.”
Just Chan?
I hated Simon Westwood.
Hated him.
He’d done this to us with his stupid hate-filled vests.
When I was finally able to speak, I said, “This is the most outstanding gift of my life. I have to believe that something in you understands how important this is. I know I asked you before, but I’m asking again. Come with me. Come with us. Please. I need you. I don’t think I can get on that bus without you.”
He held my face in his hands the way he’d done since we were kids. “When you get back, we’ll talk. And Go”—sadness turned the corners of his mouth down—“no matter what, I’ll always know the way home.”
44. THE WOODEN CONGREGANTS
$85,025.00
Four years ago, I got lost in the woods behind the Hive.
The Claude Ridge Fire Tower was built in the eighties after a tornado tossed the old structure into the forest. In winter, when the trees were stripped naked, you could see the tower from our living room. I was a
s enamored as a tourist in London or Paris catching sight of the London Eye or the Eiffel Tower.
All the older Hive kids bragged about climbing to the top. They also bragged about their sexual conquests. The mile-high club, they called it. At that age, I didn’t care about the mile-high club, but I was insanely curious about the view. A photograph of the chapel from that vantage point would be spectacular.
Getting there was complicated. In some sections of Gran’s nine hundred acres I could map individual trees, but once I crossed the creek into the national forest, the territory was unfamiliar and expansive. Forty thousand acres. Chan was in a phase where incessant rule following made him feel safe. Which meant he would never (1) skip chores on a Saturday, or (2) head to the tower without permission. We’d been given strict instructions by Gran to “never go anywhere near that thing.” Probably her idea of birth control.
Armed for the below-freezing temps in my coveralls, coat, and double socks, I strapped my camera around my neck and walked into the woods and over the creek. Hours passed in camera clicks and almond snacks. There was no way to track progress from inside the foliage.
The tower rose out of a clearing like a very large accessory to a G.I. Joe play set. One story up, I felt the wind. Five stories, the tower swayed. Seven stories, I reached the trapdoor to the wooden six-by-six fort. It was decorated with the trash of teenagers: a ripped condom wrapper was caught in a corner crevice, five of a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon were on the floor—that decision was either charity or the inability to continue—and a lone toothpick was wedged into a notch along the rail. Below me, miles and miles of forest made mountain shapes as if they were the wooden congregants gathered together for the tower’s Sunday worship service.
I propped myself against the railing, eyes roaming the inky, magnificent darkness. It was too dark for a photo, and considering all that land between home and me catapulted my fears. I’d been cold. For hours. I’d warmed myself by the quest of the tower, the delight of an adventure. After, the wind struck my bones and singed my throat. The sun was down. There was no sign of the snaking creek, and I’d thought that would be my ticket home. There was nothing to do but pick a direction and walk.
I walked twenty miles that day.
Chan walked another twenty searching for me.
He found me at three a.m., curled under a sycamore, waiting for morning light. “You wandered a little off path, Jennings,” he said, knocking the snow from my hair and dropping his hat on my head. “Lucky for you, I memorized the way home.”
CAROLINE
This evening made me reconsider everything. Go and Rudy were wandering the way they do even when they’re sitting still. The Hive smelled of clean growing things. Honeysuckle? Jasmine, maybe? There was no light pollution; the night was a vast black dome, punctured by light. As if God were a boy intent on playing with his star collection, cataloging each name alphabetically: Altair, Arcturus, Europa, Hyades, Pleiades . . .
Becky and I walked to her Mustang. We drove without ever discussing if we wanted to or not.
She is the only person I’ve met who always seems free to come and go.
She was smacking her gum, putting on lipstick, and going a million miles an hour on a road that warned Speed Limit 35 and Dangerous Curve Ahead. That’s apparently how everyone drives in Kentucky. We took the “five-dollar tour,” in which she showed me town and their school. We drove by her house, and she pointed out a pink playhouse her dad built when she was little. I thought about dads who built playhouses versus dads who built bank accounts and how much I prefer the former.
We ended up at the community tennis courts. Her at the net. Me standing against the fence. She lobbed a flat tennis ball she found in the grass in my direction. It died before reaching me, and I lay flat on the court and launched the ball at myself a few times. My scalp was cold against the red clay.
Becky lay beside me.
We held hands in silence until a cloud covered the moon and she said, “We should get back,” and I said, “Okay,” but really I was thinking, What if we just sleep here?
On the way back, Becky said, “So, yeah, I sort of love the hell out of you, and if you die on me anytime soon, I’ll kill you.” Her eyes were on me instead of the road.
We were heading toward another curve. The car going faster than my heart.
“What did you say?”
“I’m not saying it again, but just so you know, me handing out love is like a dentist giving away lollipops.”
There was no room in my life for life, much less love.
“You don’t have to say it back yet.” The yet was so Becky.
Yet implied a future.
Part of me wanted that future, but . . . if she knew me, she wouldn’t have said it.
I slipped off my headband and put it around her gearshift. “I sort of love you too,” I said, because I didn’t know if there would be another opportunity for her to have something to remember me by.
45. A POOR KID’S TREASURE HUNT
$86,350.00
When you live in the country, the sounds of night are a welcome refrain. Bullfrog songs bubbled from nearby ponds while the coyotes and bobcats howled their existence to the forest. A vehicle rumbled down Tobacco Road. Chan? Out driving off this awful love hangover? But then I heard the low growl of his chain saw and noticed the light in his workshop. He was in there, carving Mary the Mother of Jesus.
I did not have to search each Hive cranny and crook to know every square foot of this land was tied to Chan. Chan was the swings under the pavilion, diving off the rocks in a summer heat wave, fishing for crawdads in the ditches, homework at Gran’s table. He was stepping on a hornet, tobacco salve in the wound; there is no Santa Claus; I got an F in algebra. He was sneaking through a window, memorizing Beyoncé lyrics incorrectly, catching the grill on fire, fessing up.
Chan was my childhood.
I had anger next to my sadness, and that snapped me back to reality. I called Stock and gave him the facts.
“Hey, there,” he said in his low country drawl.
“Hey, Stock. Will you leave four tickets for me at the hotel?”
“Your family making the trip?”
“Caroline Ascott and Rudy Guthrie. Our friend Becky is coming too. I tried to . . .” My voice nearly broke. “I tried to get Chandler Clayton, but he’s not ready.”
“That’s understandable.”
Maybe for you, Stock.
Stock must have sensed my frustration. “Golden, can’t nobody tell anybody what’s good for them. You be proud of you now. He can be proud later.”
“Thanks.”
“No, thank you. People are gonna be grateful you’re coming.”
I was thinking about people, all the watching people. How they’d line up on the sidewalk with their cell phones held out, taking videos and photos of me standing beside Bus #21. I tried to see myself putting a foot on the bottom step and I couldn’t do it.
I made my way to the barn and took the shovel off a hook. On the right side, where Granddad’s boat used to be parked, I put my back against the Cooper Feed sign and counted ten paces toward the silo. I sidestepped right the length of a yardstick and dug until I hit metal.
The summer Chan moved here we buried “geocaches” all over the Hive—a poor kid’s treasure hunt. He hid four boxes; I hid four boxes. We turned each other loose with clues. I found all of his, but he never found this last one of mine. Every now and then, he’d remember the lost geocache and snuggle beside me. “When will you tell me where you hid the last box?” he’d say. And I’d kiss the end of his nose and say, “When we break up or when you marry me.”
That’s the sort of thing you said when you thought your names would end up side by side on a tombstone one day.
The box was rusted and the hinges fussy. I pried the lid open with the shovel. Remnants of Lisa Frank stickers lined the interior. The Ziploc bag was still sealed. Our photos were safe from the weather. A whole roll of Kodak 110 exposures. Mostly sill
y up-the-nose and wooly thumb shots. Chan was chunky. Hell, I was chunky. We wore more mismatched sweatpants than a colorblind baseball team. We were such kids. It was hard to know those kids would grow up to be us.
I should take the box to Chan’s house and leave it on the porch. He’d know immediately we’d reached the real end.
But I buried the box and returned the shovel to the barn.
I could always tell him tomorrow.
46. SUMMER IN AN UPSIDE-DOWN SPOONFUL
$88,880.00
Rudy’s voice traveled from the shadow of the red maples. “Your mom’s in there showing Caroline and Becky how to knit.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “I asked to learn, but they wouldn’t let me.”
He wanted to make me smile, and while it didn’t work, I appreciated the effort.
He stretched in his chair and twisted his neck from side to side until it crackled. “Things go badly with Chandler?” A pause. “You don’t have to answer that.”
I sleeved off my dripping nose. “The worst.”
“Want a distraction?”
“Sure,” I said, because I could not bear facing my mother’s invasive questions yet.
“Give me the Golden tour of the Hive?”
I adopted what I assumed was a Realtor’s voice. “Well, sir, you are standing on one of the most beautiful properties in Kentucky.” I cringed at my use of the word standing, but he didn’t react. “What would you like to see?”
“Somewhere you love. Somewhere that makes you happy.”
There were many places I loved. Too many to count even. These trees. The blue hole. A little table in the greenhouse where the light filtered through the plastic sheeting and made rainbows. The lightning bug valley. I chose the grain bin. “Can you stomach a walk?”
He flexed his bicep. “I can walk for days on these babies.”
I appreciated this about him. He was proud, but he didn’t trip over his arrogance very often. Certainly not now.
“This is different from where I grew up. ’Course you know that. You’ve seen it.”
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