Year After Henry

by Cathie Pelletier

  “I’m standing behind your mother,” he heard his father say. “I’m listening to this.” Larry smiled. Do couples who have lived together longer than they’ve lived apart not realize that, at the last of it, they become vaudeville acts? Aging, dazed parrots? Had he and Katherine been saved from this same fate?

  “Two days of not delivering the mail is one thing,” his mother now said. “But this is three days, Larry, and unless you’re ill, it’s quite enough.”

  “It’s been three days, son,” his father said.

  “What’s worse,” his mother continued, “is that Gil thinks you have some undelivered mail. For crying out loud, that’s a federal offense. You’re lucky your father is listening to this and can do something about it.”

  “Where’s the mail, son?” he heard his father ask, and Larry knew that the long face must be almost reaching the kneecaps by now. The first time Larry ever saw a rerun of Car 54, Where Are You? was the only time he had seen another human face as long as his own father’s, when Fred Gwynne had appeared, wearing a policeman’s uniform and not a mailman’s, but with a face so long it was almost impossible for it to ever appear happy. What must his father’s face think about a mailman breaking postal regulations, not to mention committing the most vile offense of all, which was purloining the mail.

  “I don’t have any mail,” Larry told the voices outside his door, as he pushed the mail pouch under his bed. He quickly grabbed up the letters on the floor and shoved them under the edge of his mattress. He got out of bed and picked up the torn envelopes he’d tossed on the floor. These he hid under the top mattress that had been Henry’s bunk, back in those glorious growing-up years. Henry wouldn’t care. Henry hadn’t wanted to be a mailman either. He had admitted this to Larry, one night at Murphy’s during a commercial break in the Super Bowl. “But hey,” Henry had added. “There’s no other job where a pretty woman will invite you in for a coffee while she’s still in her nightgown.” Larry would never tell anyone that Henry admired him for walking away from a heritage of registered letters, and money orders, and fountain pens that were chained like helpless dogs to the post office counter. May email destroy the American postal service forever. May it put the sucker out of business.

  The letters well hidden, Larry crossed the room and, quietly as possible, he unlocked the door. Then he hurried back to his bottom bunk where he covered himself with the sheet. His mother knocked again.

  “How much more do you expect your parents to bear?” she was now wondering aloud. “First, you get into a barroom brawl at school, at school, mind you, in a classroom. And Dad is good enough to hire you at the post office, good enough, where you should have been working in the first place, like your brother. And now this? How much more should we bear, Larry?”

  “I’m listening to this,” his father reminded him.

  “The door is open,” Larry said, the sheet now pulled up to his chin.

  “No it isn’t,” said his mother.

  “It isn’t, son,” said his father.

  “Yes, it is,” said Larry.

  And then they were both standing in his room, his mother looking older than sixty-seven, her face flushed with anger, the same anger as the day of the Playboys, his father’s face longer than the day when his son told him he wanted to teach history and not receive the silver letter opener after all. Longer than the day when Larry Munroe had walked into his parents’ kitchen and told them that their younger boy, Henry, was dead. Would they ever forgive him for being the harbinger of such bad news? Should he have written a kindly letter instead, put it in a yellow envelope scented with lilac, given it a few days to flutter its way to their street, to the pretty mailbox with the bluebird painted on its front, bringing the horrible word. Henry’s had a heart attack. Jeanie found him dead this morning. He died in his sleep. Please don’t forget to use your zip code.

  “Why, son?” was all his father really wanted to know.

  “Because,” Larry answered. How could he explain to his father that there was something in his soul, in his goddamned DNA that said, no more letters, no more letters, no more.

  “This is a fine shape for you to be in,” his mother noted, “what with Henry’s memorial service only a week away.”

  “I don’t have any letters,” said Larry. “Gil made a mistake.”

  “Good, son,” said his father, his face now like the faces Larry remembered from the House of Mirrors, that summer he and Henry together won eleven teddy bears at the carnival.

  “Oh,” he heard his mother say, a soft, broken cry, to go with those broken white hands that were still clinging to her arms. She was looking at a picture on the wall, of her two sons in their high school football uniforms, Larry the captain and Henry the best damn quarterback the Bixley Bandits had ever seen pass through their ranks. Larry and Henry, their arms around each other’s necks, the numbers on their chests like big bold answers to life’s questions. Henry got laid for the first time that night, right after the big game with Montgomery High, when he had thrown seven touchdown passes to Larry, his brother, who had been there to catch them. This was the picture that had been in the newspaper, the fabulous Munroe brothers in victory, and that was the night that Jeanie McPherson, the prettiest cheerleader on the field, had privately told Henry yes, yes, yes, something much warmer and finer than Playboy.

  “Oh,” Larry heard his mother say again, a broken word from her broken throat. “My boys,” she said, her chin bobbing erratically at the photograph, as if she hadn’t really seen it in years, hadn’t dusted it a thousand times since the day it was taken. “I’ve lost both my boys.”

  Larry turned on his side, covered his head with the sheet. He heard her broken footsteps on the loose board in the hallway, his father’s voice floating after her. The Trail of Tears.

  “I’ll send you a sympathy card,” Larry said from beneath his sheet. “As soon as I get my hands on a fucking stamp.”

  4

  Evie handed the finished sketch to her client, and when she did, she felt again that warm rush, as if something with wings had flown out of her chest. She had her own term for the feeling. Spirit departure. Simple as that.

  “Take a few seconds and look at it,” Evie said. She could see the surprise on Charlotte Davis’s face. Surprise, followed by that eternal sadness. “Remember, they come out of love. They come to bring you peace.”

  Evie always allowed each client, especially the skeptics, some time to come to terms with what they saw on the paper before them, to digest what they are never ready for: the faces of someone they find life unbearable without, someone they miss, even someone they had almost forgotten. The faces of the dead. It takes time, Evie knew. As Charlotte Davis stared down at the artwork before her, Evie turned toward the window and parted the lace curtains. There was the car again, parked on the other side of the street. A dark blue Buick LeSabre. Henry’s car. It was his wife behind the wheel, most likely, although the evening light was such that Evie couldn’t see who it was. The headlights flicked on just then and the Buick pulled away from the curb and roared off down the street. The driver must have seen her, peering out into the blossoming night.

  “It’s my father,” Charlotte said now, her voice breaking. Evie turned away from the window and let the lace curtains float back into place. She watched as Charlotte touched a finger to the face drawn on the paper. She stroked the full head of hair, the narrow lips, the thick eyebrows that Evie had taken pains to shade in fully. It was a face that cared about Charlotte, a face that knew her well, the eyes holding memories of many years. Evie smiled the sympathetic smile she always brought out at times like that.

  “I figured it must be someone very close to you,” she said. “He came through so strong, insisting that I draw him from all the others.”

  “Others?” Charlotte asked. “There were more?” Evie nodded, and as she did, she looked beyond Charlotte’s left shoulder.

&nb
sp; “There were several,” she said, “both men and women. One is still here with us. A young girl, maybe sixteen years old. Long blond hair.”

  “Phoebe,” said Charlotte, and again her voice broke with longing. “Phoebe was my best friend until she—”

  Charlotte looked back down at the sketched face of the man who had once been her earthly father, a face now shaped with pencil lead. She tried to say something, but couldn’t. Evie put a hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I already know. Phoebe died in a car accident.”

  Charlotte began to weep, and now Evie had to do what took almost as much strength and energy as channeling the dead. She had to comfort the living.

  “Honey, listen to me,” Evie said. She dropped to her knees in front of Charlotte and took the woman’s hands into her own. Tears ran from the corners of Charlotte’s eyes but she made no sound. Evie knew this was the kind of crying that really hurts. This was the kind that stabs deepest. “Why do you think they bother to come? It’s to tell you to find peace. They have pity for us, Charlotte. They wish we were as free as they now are.”

  Charlotte found her purse where she’d left it when the session started, on the floor beside her chair. She opened it and pulled out a check. She put it on the table, next to the crystal lamp and the small container of burning incense. She looked at Evie.

  “I think I’m gonna be okay now,” she said. “Just knowing those two are with me. They’re the ones I miss most.” This was when Evie knew she had done her job well. And she knew that this is all the dead want, too. They don’t want to tell us what horse will win the race, what lottery numbers to pick, where the lost ring is hiding. The dead want peace, just like the living.

  “Do I owe you any more than fifty?” asked Charlotte. “You know, for telling me about Phoebe?”

  “Not a penny,” Evie said. She put the sketch of Charlotte’s father inside one of the brown envelopes she had ordered specifically for her work. Charlotte accepted the envelope, then held it as if it were something newly born and fragile.

  “I know for a fact that you’ve never seen a picture of my father,” she said. “So how could you know, you, a woman from out of state and all? Jerry says I’m crazy for coming here. But I know the truth, Evie. How would you know about that scar on his cheek if you didn’t see him?” Evie had been in this battle with the skeptics all her life, people who couldn’t see the same things she could. But there was a time when man never believed he’d fly, let alone at the speed of sound. That he would walk on that bright and distant moon. When he didn’t know about electricity, or cameras, or computers and such things. What would Neanderthal man have thought about a Zippo lighter? The great discoveries were all ghosts that had to be invented to be believed.

  “Go home now and sleep,” said Evie. She opened the door and let Charlotte pass. “Sleep like you’ve never slept in all the years you’ve mourned them.”

  Evie watched through the curtains, waiting until Charlotte got into her car and drove off, before she lit her second joint of the day. Then she pushed open the door to the warm summer evening and went out to the porch swing that she had installed just before Henry died. She kicked off her sandals and undid her bra beneath her blouse. A swing, Evie knew, can be like a mother’s arms, a cradle that takes you in and rocks you gently when you really need it. And she needed it, as she always did after any session. Her spiritual portraits were doing so well for her now that she had finally cut back nights at the tavern, promising Dan Murphy she would fill in for emergencies. That night was one since Gail Ferguson, the other bartender, had to attend the wedding of a relative down in New Hampshire. But Evie still had an hour to kill before she changed her jeans and her makeup and got herself situated behind the bar, listening to tales of woe and bullshit from the customers.

  She took another long draw off the joint and let the smoke out slowly, savoring the warm tingle it brought to her muscles. There was always a soreness in her chest after a session, as if invisible fists had beat themselves against her. Nothing helped ease it better than a little homegrown pot. She finally looked out at the street, to where the Buick LeSabre had been parked. What did Henry’s wife want with her now? That’s what Evie would like to know. And where had Larry been for the past two nights that he didn’t, like a steady heartbeat, turn up on his favorite stool at the tavern, the one with the best view of the overhead television?

  Evie closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the swing, eased the strain on her neck. The sessions were getting harder on her as she got older. Maybe it was true what people told her, that she didn’t look a day over forty, but in two more months she would be fifty years old. One day, she figured, her own heart would explode with the pressure of channeling and she’d end up being the face some other spiritualist was sketching. But for whom? Was there anyone left on earth, now that her parents were dead, who would want Evie Cooper hovering over their shoulder, looking out for them? Larry Munroe? Well, how could anything important develop between her and Larry if he couldn’t get over his guilt and let it happen? She had heard a couple of the regulars talking the night before, saying that Larry hadn’t turned up for work at the post office. He had apparently come down with some flu. Funny, Evie thought, but Larry didn’t have any signs of flu three nights earlier, when the two of them had made love in her bed upstairs, in the room with the hanging strands of beads.

  It wasn’t the flu that was dragging Larry down, and Evie knew it. It was the knowledge of Henry’s upcoming memorial service just when it seemed that after a long hurtful year, Larry might heal. Now, Henry was being brought back by his parents in some kind of command performance so that Larry would be forced once more to hear how wonderful his brother had been. And then, for the first time, Larry had finally confessed to Evie that he wondered if Henry knew, somewhere out there in the gauzy film of the afterlife, that the two of them were together, lovers in the wake of his death. You’re feeling guilt, sweetheart, Evie had told him, that last night in her bed, his head on her pillow, her head against his chest. I love you with all my heart, but you’re just not used to someone loving you more than they love Henry. And that’s when Evie could hear Larry’s own heart begin to beat so irregularly and so loudly that she feared he, too, would die of a heart attack. But he didn’t. He got up, put on his pants, and left without kissing her good-bye.

  There was something about Larry that his younger brother didn’t have, and it was the one thing he and Evie shared in common. It was the one trait that made her think maybe, after all these years, Lawrence Munroe IV was the one for her. It was sadness. Pure, undiluted sadness. But when you know that kind of sadness, it frees you to know joy. And she had tried to tell Henry that, mere days before he died. You’re married, Henry. I’ve been telling you for weeks now that it’s over. Larry and I have been talking a lot, nights he’s at the bar and you’re home with Jeanie. I like him, Henry. And I think he likes me too. I wish we could, well, I wish we could see if there’s anything there. I want your blessings, Henry. What Henry had given her instead was an argument. Are you crazy? How dare you get the hots for my big brother? Besides, Larry wouldn’t give you the time of day, Evie. He knows I’m hoping you and me will start up again, just like we used to be.

  Evie put the last of her joint in the ashtray she kept by the porch swing. It was half-filled with the stubs of other joints. Later, she would roll a fresh one from all those remainders. She had even smoked a joint out at Henry’s grave, many times in the year that he’d been dead. She talked to him then, better than she had ever been able to talk to him when he was alive. The trouble with Henry was plain to Evie shortly after their affair began. He was a lot of good things, no doubt about it, but he was also spoiled. If things weren’t mostly about Henry they weren’t important things. Larry was the sensitive one. The only thing Evie never told Henry, those nights she walked out to the cemetery at the edge of town and leaned against his headstone, so late at
night no one would catch her there, was that not only was his big brother giving her the time of day, he was giving her most of the night, too.

  ...

  When Evie clocked in at Murphy’s Tavern, it was just past eight and the bar was already packed and explosive. It was Ladies’ Night, and that always brought out the sad and the wretched, the forlorn and the loveless, both male and female. The women drank for half price, which meant they were drunker and easier come closing time. It was Evie’s least favorite night to work. A bar full of giggling and irrational women, and horny and irrational men, was how she viewed Ladies’ Night. She worked her way down the bar, picking up dead soldiers, flipping empty beer glasses into the basin of soapy water behind the bar, and dumping ashtrays. Andy Southby was there, as usual, and already hard at work annoying the other customers.

  “Hey, Evie with the light brown hair,” Andy said, as she took away his empty beer bottle and wiped the bar in front of him.

  “How’s it goin’, Andy?” Evie hoped he wouldn’t tell her. But she had to at least ask. He was a customer.

  “Good, good,” said Andy, that smugness Evie had come to dislike spread across his face. “I’ve been accepted at four colleges already, but I dunno. The way I’m looking at it now, I might go into business with my uncle. I think college is a waste of time when there’s money out there just waitin’ to be made.”

  Evie wiped out his ashtray, made it shine with a wet cloth.

  “It will be academia’s loss,” she said, and moved on down the bar before Andy could respond. That he wanted to talk was obvious. He liked to use Evie as his sounding board, someone he could tell his large stories to since she was trapped behind the bar and he was a patron. But his bragging was meant for the men and women seated around him and Evie knew it.

  By the time she got to the boy in the orange wool bonnet, Evie was already feeling the beads of sweat run down the back of her neck. Dan Murphy needed a new air-conditioning system for the place but, like most bar owners she’d worked for, he was too cheap to buy one.