“Last Friday there were fifty people in here. Hey, I never saw you before. Where’s Carl?”
The attendant pushed his tongue through the gap in his teeth and whistled. “Son, you been drinkin’?”
“No.”
“Then you’d know I own this place. And I can’t remember seeing you before in all my days.”
Patrick lit a cigarette with a trembling match.
“No smoking, kiddo.”
“What?”
“Get gone. You make me nervous.”
He didn’t want to go anywhere else. In just an hour and a half the night had taken a bad turn, a surreal tinge, and all he wanted now was for it to end. But he couldn’t just go home. Not on this night. And he needed to see one more place…
Patrick pulled into the parking lot of the Double-T Diner and was immensely reassured by the bright lights, the busy parking lot, the other kids milling around outside… it was all familiar. It was all right.
But he didn’t know anyone. He always knew at least a handful of the kids who milled around out front or talked loudly at the tables, sucking up milkshakes through straws and picking at limp fries. And there was always, always someone he could sit with, a table he could join.
Not this time. Not now.
And he realized, with a cold shock, that he didn’t belong here, that he needed to find another place to go. He just didn’t know where.
So he went home.
When he arrived, Patrick half-expected the house to be dark, or to find a strange car parked in the driveway, or even for the whole place to be gone, only an empty lot left in its place.
But it was there, lights reassuringly on, cars in the driveway reassuringly familiar.
He let himself in, and there were his parents watching television, his dog asleep at his father’s feet.
“Hey, you’re home early, kiddo!” his father exclaimed. “Only ten o’ clock!”
“I’m glad,” said his mother. “Tomorrow’s a big day.”
“A bunch of people called for you,” his father added. “Bill and Charlie and Lisa. Lisa was angry she couldn’t get a hold of you. Isn’t your phone working?”
“It was acting up,” said Patrick faintly.
“So where did you go then, if you couldn’t find your friends?” his mother asked.
“All over, but there wasn’t...” He paused. “I couldn’t find them tonight. Because… because of my phone. So I came home.”
“Well, just as well, like your mother said.” His father smiled. “In case you forgot, tomorrow afternoon you’ll be a high school grad! You’d better be rested for the ceremony.”
Patrick nodded, did his best to smile, and went up to bed.
“Graduation,” he said to himself as he walked up the stairs. “Did they really think I could forget?”
And for long, long hours, after everyone else had gone to sleep, he thought about all the things from which he was graduating.
Comfortable Silence
He was on an airplane, wearing an uncomfortable suit, book untouched on his lap, plastic cup empty on his tray, when the older woman next to him leaned over and asked, “Where from?”
He didn’t roll his eyes—he was too polite—but he wanted to. He had no interest in talking, or at least engaging in idle chatter, but courtesy won the day.
“Pittsburgh,” he said, then added, two moments later, “and yourself?”
“Cleveland. I’m going to my high school reunion.” A chuckle. “My fiftieth.”
“Hmm! Well, that’s nice. I hope you have a good time.” He eyed his book.
“I’m not so sure I will,” she said, and the blandly affable smile often afforded strangers faded.
She wanted him to ask why.
“Why?” he asked.
“Well, you know, it’s been so long. I haven’t lived in Aurora for thirty-six years. And all my old friends…”
She didn’t finish the sentence, so he simply nodded.
“It’s not the old clichés that worry me,” she went on. “You know… ‘Oh, what if Sally Henderson’s career went better than mine did? Oh, what if everyone aged better than I did?’ I’m past all that. None of it matters.”
“So what’s worrying you?”
She shook her head. “It’s silly, but what’s kept me up these last few nights is just one question: what are we all going to talk about?”
“That’s it?”
“Good heavens, isn’t that enough? Think about it! Fifty years since we graduated. It was a small high school and we all knew each other. But after graduation we went our separate ways, and now we’re all spread out across the country. A few of us even live abroad! It was easy to know each other and get along when we all had geography in common—the same town, the same classes and school hallways—but when you’re thrust back into a room with people and that common ground is gone, what then?” She paused. “I’m Grace, by the way.”
“Adam.” He extended a hand. Grace took it.
“It was wonderful to know them,” she said, sighing. “But I have a fear that’s all it will ever be now—a past-tense relationship.”
“So you didn’t keep in touch with any of them?” Adam asked, surprised the conversation had pulled him out of himself a bit; he was interested in spite of everything. “I mean, a good friend that’s lasted all the years?”
“Ah.” Grace quieted, fiddling with the ice in her empty cup of water. She did this for quite some time, until Adam thought she wasn’t going to respond at all. Then, quite suddenly, she said, “One of those.”
“Yes. Is there one?”
“There was,” she said. “Dorothy Price. A dear friend.”
“Was?” he said. “I’m sorry…I don’t mean to pry.”
“No, no, not at all. Dorothy died three years ago. Heart attack. Quite unexpected.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
There was an awkward silence. Then Grace said, “That’s funny. Looking back on it, you know what really defines a true friendship? One that lasts the years?”
“What?” He really wanted to know. He’d been thinking a good deal about friendship over the last few days.
“It’s the silences. Do you know what I mean?”
Adam shook his head.
“You’re still a young man,” she said, “but as you get older, you’ll see for yourself. A friend, a true friend—the kind you keep for life—is someone you can sit in the same room with for a minute, an hour, even three, without saying a word… and not feel uncomfortable that whole time. Not needing to fill the gaps with idle chatter. Comfortable silence. That’s the test.”
He thought about it for a long time. “Yes,” he said finally, “I see what you mean. That makes good sense. I… I have someone like that in my life, in fact, although I never thought of it quite that way.”
“Well do me a favor, Adam, if you don’t mind.”
He looked up. Grace was gazing at him steadily, earnestly, without blinking.
“Hang on to that person. Keep them in your life always.”
“I will,” he said firmly. “I promise.”
* * *
Adam disembarked, stretched, got his luggage, took the shuttle from O’Hare to his rental car, and drove straight to the funeral home. Once there, he checked his watch. Two hours early.
He went inside. An attendant greeted him. Adam asked if he could have some time alone with the deceased.
“Are you a relative, sir?” the man inquired, his tone a perfect blend of somber empathy and professional detachment.
“A friend,” he said simply. “A good friend.”
The man smiled understandingly—Adam was grateful for that smile; it seemed more real than the tone—and
invited him into a small anteroom.
The coffin, closed, gleamed in the half-light, a sideways monolith of polished brass. Far different from the elderly man whose remains it contained: Adam’s dear old friend, a professor from long ago whose lessons spanned all the years. Someone who had listened in college when his family was far away, given advice, and helped do what he could to set him on the right path. The man inside the coffin had been a powerhouse of humor, good stories, energy and dynamism. A kind man. A kindred spirit.
He thought of silence—the silence of eight years, when his life had taken him away from that old friend and sent him off to start a career, a family, a life far removed from those college days.
Adam should have sent a card. Many cards. And letters. And called him every month, especially during the years after the old man had been forced to retire, victim of the degenerative illness that eventually killed him.
But he hadn’t.
Silence. What kind of silence had it been? He wondered. Grace had spoken of hours without speaking, of comfortable silence.
Could a comfortable silence last eight years?
If he’d sent cards, written letters, called, would they have picked up right where they’d left off? Would his friend have understood?
Adam sat for a long, long time in the dim room, and the silence drew out, lengthened, like shadows in a late afternoon.
Then he started talking.
On the Edge of Twilight
At least half the time, when the young man walked briskly through the park at twilight, he saw the old man sitting on the bench beneath the oak tree. And every time the old man was there, he called out to the young man and asked him a question.
And the young man sometimes stopped and sometimes continued on without bothering to answer, but the question, and the answer (when it came), were always the same:
“Have you seen the ghost?”
“No.”
And then the young man was gone, gone to meet the girl he loved at their special spot. Or they were already together, walking hand in hand, to sit for a moment before going on to dinner, a movie, or someplace private to explore their love in new, breathless ways.
Neither knew what happened when they left the old man, and neither thought much of him; when their thoughts strayed to him and his strange question, they only focused on those things for a little while before excitement or happiness or a combination of both drew their attention away.
Both attended high school across the river. Both were seniors. They had been together, inseparable, for a year and a half. And in that time their routine on weekends, when the weather allowed, always included the park.
When they came together in the fading half-light she always slid her hand into his, either before they began to walk or when they met at their bench—always empty, as if waiting for them. The path to their bench led through the fields bordered by hedges and trees, past the old man’s spot, through a gate, then finally down to the edge of the river, its shifting waters reflecting distant lights of houses on the far shore.
And when they chose to remain there instead of venturing out for the evening, they sat for hours, sometimes talking, often in murmurs, and night fell upon them and they came to life, focusing on each other with words and without, while staring at the river and the moonlight, and feeling rain and wind or stillness against their skin. Fireflies blazed around them in the summer-scented air. They rarely saw other people besides the old man; the park was old and difficult to find, and perhaps no one wanted it anyway. And then she would take his left hand again, threading her fingers through his, and he would put his right arm around her and pull her close, settling his cheek against the side of her head so he could smell her perfume and shampoo.
Every so often he would kiss her neck, and she would rub his knee, and they would shift their bodies so they touched in different ways. Then eventually, always, they found the rhythm of the night, and were lulled by it, and closed their eyes, drifting into a doze through the comfort of their attraction and the culmination of their surroundings.
And sometimes shortly after midnight, often not until several hours past, they would rouse each other, move into each other, run their hands over each other, whispering, kissing, sighing, before finally standing, walking, leaving their spot and returning to the world where other people lived and their love continued, but in the ebb and flow of an active world.
And the young man often thought, by day and at night, that he was fortunate, so fortunate, to have found someone who cared about him like she did, who understood him like she did, who loved him like she did.
Early on in their final year of high school, they spoke of attending the same university, and applied to several local schools together. But then, as the autumn progressed, they came to an obstacle. She was accepted to a university in California. He was accepted to a college in Maine. They were good schools, excellent schools—perfect for their interests and far better than those they might attend together. So they accepted the invitations, figuring a long-distance relationship would work, that they would make it work. And so they settled back into the comfort of their routine and didn’t think of it.
Or said they didn’t. For as the young man ticked off the days on his calendar and their 18th summer approached, he began to worry they would eventually be swept apart by time and circumstance and the need for something more—swept out of each others’ lives forever, never to return, because perfection is fleeting, and elusive, and always becomes a thing of the past.
So he lived in the present more than he ever had in his life. Instead of looking to the future, he embraced where he was, when he was, who he was with and how he felt. Healthy, he thought. It’s healthy to do that.
He told her that once, when the future weighed heavily upon them and she, too, suddenly became sad. And she agreed with him, and her mood brightened, and that was the last they ever spoke of it.
Once, out of the blue, when they were holding hands and looking out over the river, the bench warm and comfortable beneath them, she said abruptly, “I will never meet anyone else like you. And if I meet someone who is half the man you are with me, I think I could be content.”
He nodded, took it only as a compliment, and chose to ignore the deeper implications.
Until suddenly the future became the present, and they were done with high school, graduation two months a memory, the cross-country moves in opposite directions just a day away.
At their spot, sitting on their bench, they said they would write, and keep in close touch, and see each other several times a year, but he knew it was all over, and he knew she knew it, too. And when true night fell and midnight knelled, the dark beginning of a new day, everything they shared retreated into the past.
They stood up from the bench for the last time.
She left quickly. He lingered a long while.
Eventually he walked slowly back toward the street, where his car waited in the shadows of the trees.
But he didn’t go to his car. At the last moment he changed direction, instead approaching a second bench, the distant bench where the old man often sat in silence. He was there now, still awake; his watery eyes gleamed in the faint sliver of moonlight.
“I’ve seen you many times,” he told the old man. “Why do you always come here?”
The old man looked up at him. “I wait for the ghost,” he said simply.
“Is this place haunted?”
A nod.
“What does the ghost look like?”
“Different things to different people.”
He gazed at the old man, then peered toward the dew-covered fields, the lengthening moonlight shadows, the cold river.
“Have you ever seen it?”
The old man nodded.
“How many times?”
“Every
night.”
The young man paused, blinking rapidly. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.
The old man looked surprised. “No… but why would you want to?”
The bench creaked under new weight. The old man slid over a fraction of an inch.
“Because I want to see it, too.”
And the sliver of moon began its inevitable descent.
Supper-Time
“Get in here, Hank. No use turning my hallway into a wind tunnel.”
Henry McMurran limped in with a grunt and shut the door behind him with a tremulous hand, cutting off the frost-flecked breeze and stomping slush from his galoshes.
Simon Farber led the way back to his kitchen, cane tapping the worn linoleum. “One lump or two?” he asked over his shoulder.
“In all my years, have I ever taken sugar?”
“Always a first time.”
“And don’t ask if I want milk, neither.”
Strong coffee met chipped mugs, and the two old widowers creaked down in their chairs at the scarred kitchen table, fixtures in the room as much as the decades-old stove, hand-cut cabinets, and fly-specked overhead light.
Farber observed, simply, “Cold outside.”
“How would you know? You got to go out to see what the day’s like, you old recluse. You even know what month it is? What season?” Hank grinned, then grimaced. “Damn, this coffee’s hot! Make the devil himself wince.”
“Stop your whining. Mine’s better than yours and you know it. And I don’t go out because there’s no good point.”
Silence followed—the quiet of old friends who, after 75 years, don’t need to talk in order to feel comfortable in one another’s company.
Finally: “I had a dream last night, Simon.”
Farber set down his cup. “I guess you’ll have to tell me all about it, then. You always do.”
On the Edge of Twilight: 22 Tales to Follow You Home Page 13