by J. S. Bailey
She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Are you sure you didn’t come up with that just now?”
“Well…”
“It wasn’t funny.”
“Don’t remind me.” He feigned a look of shame.
“But if I keep reminding you, then you won’t do something stupid like try to make your own stand-up act.” She winked at him.
He sighed. “What would I ever do without you?”
“I’m sure you would weep with loneliness, and the rest of the world would weep with you because of all your awful jokes. Now let’s hurry up and get this done before I change my mind and decide to stay here.” Not that that was possible—her landlady wasn’t about to let her live there for free. Though it would have been nice.
They continued hauling Jessica’s things down the stairs and out of the apartment complex, and soon Wayne’s truck became too full to load anything else on board. It was an odd feeling, seeing her belongings piled there like pieces of her life about to be hauled away. Tears brimmed again. She banished them, thinking instead of how interesting it was going to be living with her two best friends. Of course it was going to be interesting. It would probably even be fun. Once she was settled in, she could resume the reconstruction of The Plan, and life would be good once more. “I never realized how much junk you have,” Wayne said as Jessica helped him strap the furniture down so none of it would fly out while in transit.
“It’s not nearly as much as you’ve got. I’m not sure how all this is going to fit into your house.”
They climbed into the truck. A cardboard tree dangling from the rearview mirror made the cab smell like apples.
Wayne started the engine and let the vehicle coast down the winding hill into town. “What doesn’t fit upstairs goes into the junk room or the basement with the spiders. I’m sure they’ll look after everything just fine.”
“I guess if it takes up too much room, I can try to sell some of it.”
“I wouldn’t do that just yet. One of these days you might find a job that’ll make me look like a pauper.”
“Not with my high school education.”
“Bill Gates dropped out of college. Look at him.”
“He’s a geek.”
“So are you.”
“Am not. Computers bore the heck out of me.”
They stopped at a stop sign covered in paintball splatters and turned right onto Buckeye Street.
“How many job applications have you turned in now?” Wayne asked.
“I think about a hundred. It feels like a hundred.”
“Hasn’t anybody called you back yet?”
She shook her head. Her phone had barely made a peep at all the past few weeks, and when it had, it had only been Sidney calling her about something or another. “Nope. Some days I think I’d be better off on welfare. Mom and Dad would be proud.”
They made a left onto Lockwood Street and another right onto Sunset Street before pulling into Wayne’s short gravel driveway off to the right. His front yard consisted of two yellow patches of grass on either side of the driveway. Some dead decorative plants in pots lined the edge of the cement-slab porch.
Home.
“Don’t mention to Sidney that you’ll be living here almost rent free,” Wayne said. “She might take it the wrong way.”
“Probably. But it’s either live with you or live in a box in a back alley somewhere.”
“Or with your parents.”
Jessica unfastened her seatbelt and hopped out of the truck.
Living with her father wouldn’t be so bad, but he was married to her mother, so living with him was out of the question. “I think I’d rather live in a coffin.”
“Then ask them for money. God knows they’ve got plenty of it.” Wayne opened the driver’s side door and eased himself to the ground, hanging onto the handle for support.
“They wouldn’t lend me any.”
He let down the tailgate. “Did you at least call and let them know you’re moving in here?”
“No.” She’d considered writing them a letter but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Without meeting his gaze, Jessica carefully undid the straps holding down her furniture and hoisted a freed chair over her shoulder. “Is the house unlocked?”
“Should be.”
“Good.” Jessica started toward the porch. She could practically feel his gaze boring into her.
“Jessica…”
She turned around. “What?”
Wayne was still standing at the rear of the truck. He opened his mouth as if to continue then closed it and shook his head.
“Never mind.”
She had known Wayne too long to always be left guessing at his thoughts. “I know what you were going to say.”
“Oh, really?”
“You were going to say that at least I have parents and that I should appreciate the crappy ones I’ve got.”
He nodded. “Yeah. That’s about right.”
A cascade of leaves drifted down from the towering oaks and made landfall around the granite markers that documented the birth and death dates of the residents who moldered six feet below.
Though Jerry Madison had once marveled at the beauty that autumn brought to the world, it no longer interested him. This autumn looked the same as those of his childhood, which in turn were likely duplicates of autumns that existed in the years preceding humanity. It was as if time progressed in a circle, repeating itself over and over again without end.
In truth, this was not so. Time slipped by with an inhuman cruelty, yet despite this, the end of eternity lay further away than the paradise he would never know.
He stood back from the crowd of mourners gathered in the cemetery and watched them with mild interest. Mostly all he could see were the backs of people’s heads. The gray-haired minister stood next to the casket at the front of the congregation reciting prayers for the newly deceased. The man constantly paused to deliver very un-pious bouts of ragged coughing that made Jerry suspect he was about to keel over into the pit into which the casket would soon be lowered.
About five yards away from Jerry stood a mother and her young son. The woman’s head was bowed in prayer, but the kid, who could have been no older than two, was busy staring out at the headstones with a look of curiosity on his face. He was probably too young to know anything about death and would not understand the significance of the burial markers or the funeral that he had been made to attend.
The little guy was facing the opposite direction from the rest of the mourners. His baby-blue eyes twinkled in the sunlight. He caught sight of Jerry and smiled.
Stunned, Jerry lifted a hand and waved in reply.
The boy giggled. “Funny man!”
“Shh!” His mother bent down and scolded her son in a whisper. “What did Mommy say about no talking?”
“But he wave at me!” He giggled again. “Look, somebody color all over his neck.”
Oops. Jerry raked his mind for more pleasant matters to contemplate so that what the kid had seen would go away. Fortunately he hadn’t been thinking about the other thing, too, because the kid surely would have gone into hysterics. Though it might have been funny.
“Jeremy, be quiet!” The woman scooped up her son and held him on her hip, glancing around in Jerry’s direction with suspicion in her eyes. “You crazy kid.” She turned back around and lowered her head once more.
Jeremy peeked around her shoulder at Jerry and scrunched up his face as if detecting a terrible smell, but then he made that childish cackle again and turned away.
What a weird kid.
Jerry wondered again what the kid would have done if he’d appeared as he had at the very end. He should try it out on somebody else when the time was right. Anything for a thrill.
An unexpected voice distracted him from his thoughts. “Hello there, good looking!”
The speaker was a young woman who had approached him from the right.
Jerry acknowledged her with a look of skepticism. “
Hi,” he said. He had no idea who she was. He had never seen her before.
“You sure aren’t much of a talker, are you?”
“Not generally.”
The woman, whose strawberry-blonde hair was cropped just below her ears, smiled. “You look lonely over here.”
“There’s nothing I can do about that.”
She stared at the inflamed cut on the back of his hand but thankfully did not ask about it. Abigail had once thrown a glass at his head, and he’d held up his hand to protect himself. A good thing, too. The impact split his skin and he had to get stitches. He never forgot about it, which was why the mark could be seen now.
He jerked his head in the direction of the casket. “Is that you?”
The woman grinned. “Used to be. But if you pried the lid off that thing and took a peek inside, what you’d see doesn’t look a tenth as good as this.” She indicated her slim figure. “This is the best anti-aging treatment I ever tried.”
He gaped at her. “Tell me you didn’t—”
“Oh, no, no, no.” The woman shook her head. “It was lymphoma. That was a joke, see.”
He looked away from her, focusing his attention on the ailing minister. “I’m glad to hear it.”
His new companion was silent for a moment then asked, “Why are you here?”
“There’s nowhere else to go.”
“Are you an atheist?”
“Catholic,” he corrected. “But God and I haven’t been on speaking terms in a long time.” And probably never would be again.
“It’s never too late to fix that. Say, what happened to you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“It’s a long story.”
“We’ve got time.”
Jerry threw her an irritated glance. He wasn’t going to pour out his life story to random strangers who couldn’t mind their own business. “Don’t you have someplace to be?”
Seemingly hurt, the woman frowned. “Well, of course—but I’d just wanted to stay around for a little while to see how things were going—”
“Isn’t that depressing?”
“Not when you know that their sadness is only fleeting.” She nodded toward the crowd. “They’ll find happiness again. I know it.”
Jerry looked up at the expanse of sky populated with thin wisps of cloud. No angels swooped around them with their halos and golden trumpets, nor could he hear any choir of heavenly hosts singing praises to their Creator. “Miss…”
“My name’s Janet.”
“Once you’re there, if you could—will you pray for me?”
She nodded. “I can do that.”
“Thank you. And if you run into three little ones who look kind of like me, tell them I’m sorry I can’t be there.”
He turned away to see if they had started lowering the coffin into the ground, and when he looked back, the woman was gone.
THE CEREMONY ended a short while later. In tears, the grieving family and their kin hugged each other and bade their farewells. The parking lot soon emptied of vehicles, and in solitude Jerry watched three burly young men shovel dirt back into the grave. The men said little to each other while they worked. They wouldn’t have had much to say, anyway. Woman dies, family cries, life goes on. Fill in the hole and go home.
The men completed their job and left. Jerry sat down on one of the cemetery benches and gazed unseeingly at the woods that surrounded the graveyard. He should leave here, find some other place to lurk about in. But where? Everywhere was nowhere, and nowhere was everywhere. Nothing mattered or would ever matter again.
He didn’t know if he should be sad or angry or bitter. Sometimes he was all three, and sometimes he was none at all. On occasion he would even think of something pleasant he had forgotten long ago and a spark of joy would light up his whole being for an instant, but then he would remember.
And he would grow depressed.
Then he would become angered by his sadness, because being sad wasn’t going to help him get out of this mess. Besides, it only made him feel worse.
Then bitterness would consume him like acid dissolving an old coin. They had done this to him. If they hadn’t, he wouldn’t be here at all.
If he could get back at them…
He couldn’t take it anymore. Something had to change.
Anything. But what could he, Jerry Madison, do?
Nothing.
Jerry buried his face in his hands and wept, wishing that he could find a way to end his life so the pain of existing would go away forever.
Which, of course, was impossible, because Jerry Madison was already dead.
THE BUSY morning of loading and unloading the Taurus and pickup truck came to an end. After they had labored at putting Jessica’s belongings away so as to maintain some sense of order in the house, Wayne suggested that they take a break for lunch.
“Does pizza sound good to you?” he asked, peering into the freezer.
Jessica lowered her gaze to stare at the orange and green gourds Wayne had recently purchased at a local farmer’s market to use as a fall centerpiece. Her limbs still hurt as they had when she’d awakened, which was odd, because she hadn’t done anything to strain them. And now her back hurt, too. “I’m at a bit of a disadvantage to be picky. Are there any pepperonis?”
Wayne pulled out the frozen disk of crust and looked at the label that had been shrink-wrapped over the toppings. “You’re in luck. It’s got the works.”
“If the works include anchovies, you can count me out.”
“I’d count myself out.” He put the pizza on a tray, set the oven temperature, and slid the tray inside. “Are you all right?”
She massaged one of her forearms to try to ease the pain. “I hurt all over. Too much heavy lifting in one day wears a girl out.”
Wayne leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. “I’ve got Tylenol in the medicine cabinet.”
“I should be fine in a while. I’m just not used to this.” Massaging herself obviously wasn’t going to work, so she folded her hands and placed them in her lap. “This is going to sound dumb, but I have no idea how you do it.”
“Do what?”
Wayne wasn’t the type to get his feelings hurt, so it was never an issue for her to discuss his disability with him. “You know. You being the way you are and still being ten times more in shape than I am.”
“You do know I exercise every morning.”
“Yeah.” Sidney had mentioned that sometimes Wayne accidentally woke her up in the mornings doing jumping jacks in his bedroom.
“When was the last time you exercised?”
“I did some pushups a couple months ago.” It was true, and it had almost been disastrous.
“It’s never too late to start working out. We can even do it together sometime, if you’d like.” He winked.
“In your dreams,” she said.
“Frequently.”
Jessica felt her face turn red.
“You know,” he continued, “if you want to get your parents all riled up, just tell them you’re shacking up with an older guy who wears pink and gets his nails done every month.”
“I’m pretty sure they know you’re not gay.”
“I know. Steve and I had a little chat about that one time before they moved away.”
“You did?” The Roman-Dells had worked with Wayne at Reynolds and Korman, Eleanor, Ohio’s one and only public accounting firm. Wayne’s often-misperceived sexuality did not seem to be a likely topic of discussion in that place of business, except perhaps behind his back.
“Don’t worry. He didn’t threaten to kill me if I ever touched you.”
Jessica imagined that the color of her cheeks was deepening from red to scarlet. “Should I even ask?”
He laughed. “It’s not what you think. We ran into each other at one of the checkouts over at Eleanor Market, and we both saw a tabloid in the display that said something about a celeb coming out of the closet, and your dad asked me when I was going to do that.”
>
Minding his own business was not one of her father’s strong points. “What in the blazes did you say to him?”
“I told him I’d never done a man in my life, and then he asked me if I’d ever done any women, and I told him that was need-to-know information. The conversation sort of progressed from there, I guess.”
She pictured the scene in her head and couldn’t help but grin. “What was Dad doing there, anyway? He never goes shopping.”
“I think he was buying a tube of Preparation H.”
Jessica clamped her eyes shut. “Thanks for that.”
“No, he was getting a bouquet of flowers for your mom. He said it was their thirty-first anniversary.”
Jessica nodded. That would have been in 2009, just over a year ago. “It’s amazing how they’ve put up with each other for so long,” she said. Her parents, known to most people as Stephen and Maria Roman-Dell and known to her as the dysfunctional couple whose house she had slept in for twenty years, were both an unfortunate combination of workaholic and perfectionist. Her mother had the complete inability to show affection, and her father, who had little personality of his own, tended to go along with everything she did without question.
They had found better-paying work at an accounting firm near Indianapolis last fall, so they sold their house and moved away. Jessica had felt no burning desire to go with them.
“Maybe there’s something about their relationship that the rest of us just can’t see,” Wayne said.
“Not that we’d want to see it.” Her stomach growled. “That pizza needs to hurry up and cook itself. I’m starved.”
“You aren’t the only one. I did five times the amount of work you did.”
“Then take a nap after lunch.”
“Can’t. I told Father George I’d come in and get some work done.” Aside from his job at the accounting firm, Wayne also volunteered his time at the Holy Trinity church office. “I hope you won’t be bored here without me.”
“I don’t have time to be bored. I’ve got a bunch of recordings to listen to and watch.”