Year After Henry

by Cathie Pelletier

  Jeanie got out of the Buick and closed the door softly. There were no lights on inside the house where Evie Cooper lived, and there was no little car sitting in the drive. Jeanie had already spun past Murphy’s Tavern and saw the blue Mazda lost in a sea of other cars. Evie was at work, so Jeanie made her way quietly up the walk. Would you like to come in and talk sometime? I would then have the chance to apologize to you in person, for I owe you that. Neighbors came out of the house next door, loud voices rushing against the night, a kind of Friday evening excitement. Jeanie stepped back into deeper shadows by the front steps and waited until car doors slammed and an engine roared to life. When the car and its occupants backed out of the drive and sped off down the street, she went up the steps to Evie’s door. She lifted the top lid of the wrought iron mailbox and dropped the fisted bits of letter inside. Shards fell upon the porch by Jeanie’s feet and she bent to find them, to stuff them into the box as well.

  I realize we will never be friends, but life is too short for us to be enemies.

  Evie Cooper

  “Damn straight we’ll never be friends,” Jeanie said to the mailbox.

  She turned and went back down Evie’s walk, crossed the dark street to where the Buick was waiting. She had two wine coolers left. She would save them for the back patio, once she got home. It looked like a full moon night, and there was no better place to sit and watch the moon than out on the little wooden patio, a place that smelled of cedar and phlox. Henry had finally built the patio for her, after years of her nagging, and now she had it covered with flower boxes that brought hummingbirds by day and moths by night. She had her favorite lawn chair out there, the kind you can lie back on, stretch out your full length in order to sunbathe. Or at night, you can just lie still and wait for the moon to inch its way across the sky. She would drink the last two wine coolers out on the dark patio, under the white moonlight, and wait until she heard the whine of the motorbike coming home again. It would mean another day that Chad Henry Munroe was still safe. Another marker in their lives.

  On the drive home, Jeanie turned up the oldies station on the radio and smoked another cigarette.

  ...

  Evie had unhooked her bra and pulled it off before she lit that lovely joint. With her breasts now free and cool beneath her T-shirt, she kicked off each of the brown leather sandals. With one foot, she gave herself a strong push. Soon the fresh evening air was moving over her as she swung back and forth. Her feet ached in that way only a bartender’s feet can. It would kill Murphy to put any kind of thick, protective mat behind the bar. Unless the girls bought it themselves, it was pretty much thin rug over sheer cement, the hardest surface yet for feet and knees.

  Evie inhaled the smoke and held it. A mockingbird was singing from a neighbor’s tree, singing late to the moon, looking for a mate no doubt. They had moved gradually north, mockingbirds had. Maybe they had come looking for a new life, a chance to start over, just as Evie had done. She took a second long toke. It had been a week since she had seen Larry Munroe. And she hadn’t heard from him either, no late-night phone calls as there had been in the past. Evie would be just about to go to bed when the phone would ring its soft bleat and Larry would say, Hey there, what’s going on? Did I wake you? I was just watching this old black-and-white movie and I started thinking about you. The steady sound of his voice could bring such a calm over her, as if, okay, maybe she was all alone in the world, and maybe she’d made a lot of mistakes, but Larry Munroe was there now and everything would be all right. There had been nothing but silence for a week. So why was Evie still watching the door at Murphy’s as if it were the spot where the Second Coming would occur?

  On the short drive home from work, she had already decided to forget about Larry Munroe. She had spent too many precious minutes thinking about a man who was treating her as if she didn’t exist. Yes, she had a brief affair with his younger brother, Henry. She was far from perfect. Sometimes, she was just lonely. But, realizing the error of her ways, she had ended the affair. She couldn’t rewrite history. If Larry didn’t accept those facts, so be it. If he couldn’t even come back to Murphy’s as a client, c’est la vie. Evie had been thinking that Bixley really wasn’t the best place for her, anyway. And maybe the mockingbird was thinking the same thing, thinking it so much that he’d been singing late into the night, a mournful song. Bixley was a big town that wanted hard to be a small city, a town with an ambitious mayor, an ambitious Chamber of Commerce, an ambitious group of city planners. Maybe what Evie needed was a truly large city, a place that had been ambitious before there ever was an idea called America, a place like Paris, France, maybe. She’d never run out of clients in the City of Lights. If she wanted her spiritual business to thrive so that her feet could have a good rest, maybe she should move, learn to speak French, put the whole damn Munroe family behind her.

  That’s when Evie saw the white shard of paper lying on her front porch. She put the joint in the ashtray and got up slowly from the swing. Her bare feet felt good on the cool boards of the porch, her toes finally able to breathe after six cramped hours. She picked up the fragment of paper and held it to her parlor window, where the light of the crystal lamp inside offered enough light that she was able to read. There were only four words since the rest were torn away. But four words were enough for Evie to recognize her own handwriting, as well as the piece of linen stationary she used for her important letters. She took the piece of paper back to the ashtray and picked up her lighter. She watched the paper burn, curling slowly at the edges, until it swallowed those four pitiful words: sorry for your sadness.

  ...

  Larry had resealed the envelopes in the Still to Deliver pile as best he could. Three of them had small dabs of folded tape to hold the flaps. It didn’t take him more than a few seconds to stuff Andy Southby’s two rejection letters into the dented silver mailbox that stood near the street at 566 Gray Lane. The first was from that restaurant management school in Kansas City. Perhaps your services would be put to better use in some other industry. And the second was from the world-renowned Howard F. Honig College of Nebraska. Dear Sir, Fuck off.

  Next, he delivered the wedding invitations from Debbi Sutton, all to their proper addresses. Then the three birthday cards and two sympathy cards, since they were no doubt important to their recipients. The cards would be late, of course, but everyone expected that of the post office these days, so why disappoint them? He then dropped off a couple important bank statements and a notice that the electricity would be cut off if Verna Hilton didn’t pay up in thirty days. Larry had always liked Verna, who was living now on her social security. He wouldn’t want her to end up in darkness one night and not know why, or have the chance to prevent it. He had even left two twenty-dollar bills on top of the envelope. Verna could wonder forever where the money had come from, but at least she could wonder beneath the glare of her sixty-watt bulbs.

  From Verna’s house, he cut across the back alley where the old drugstore used to stand, and there he dumped all the flyers and ads and wasted paper into the garbage bin that sat there. He hated delivering this junk every day, just as much as people hated getting it. Now, it was a quick jaunt over to Oakwood Street, where Marshall Thompson had rented the upstairs apartment at number 45. The lights were out in the apartment and the big black Harley was gone from its usual spot just beneath the entrance stairs. But it was Friday night. Why would a guy like Marshall squander a Friday night by staying home? Larry had wondered long and hard if he should deliver Paula’s letter.

  Dear Marshall,

  I think you know by now that this is the end, and I mean it this time. If you bother me again I’ll get a court order, so help me god.

  Would threatening him only make him worse? Knowing Marshall, Larry figured it would. But what else to do if someone is beating up on you? He dropped the letter into the box marked Thompson.

  Then, as if savoring this delivery for last, Larry stood on
the sidewalk in front of Stella Peabody’s tiny bungalow and studied the quaint architecture of the house, its one and a half stories almost hidden in rose brambles. It was a romantic idea in itself, the bungalow, with its broad porch and elephantine columns, its low and overhanging roof, the knee braces under the eaves, the fieldstone foundation, the tiny dormer window. A picture of the house, along with a plea to save it, had appeared a few times in the local paper. Larry knew Stella had been writing to her congressman, to the governor, to anyone who might listen. Her parents had built the bungalow back in the early 1930s, and they had brought their only son to live in it, a boy who went off to World War II and never came home again. Stella had been born in the house, in the winter of 1936. And so the Peabodys set about life without their son by raising their only daughter, a shy and quiet girl who kept her nose in a book and her ideas to herself.

  Larry felt a deep respect for the letters addressed to 215 Thorncliffe. In his hand, he could almost feel them beating, the words so heartfelt and filled with love. Stella Peabody had been the same age as Larry’s mother and even shared the same classes. She and Frances graduated from high school together, tassel to tassel, one day back in the summer of 1954. Larry wasn’t told this information by his mother, since she wasn’t the talkative kind who loves the history of towns and old houses. It was Stella Peabody herself who regaled him with stories, sitting out under her low-hanging roof just behind the large, white columns, enjoying a glass of cold lemonade. When she saw Larry come ambling up her walk with the mailbag on his shoulder, Stella would insist on pouring him a glass, too. And he would sit for a while to rest his feet, as Stella called it. That’s when she would teach him interesting things, like how the word bungalow originated in the Bengal region of India, becoming popular first in California as a cottage house. “Where else but California?” Stella would say, with that nice smile of hers. And she’d warn Larry to watch out for heat stroke if it happened to be a sweltering day. Sometimes, she’d make mention of a special occasion, as in how many years her mother had been dead on that day. Or that it was her parents’ anniversary. One day, back in June, it was her brother’s birthday, George Peabody, who had ended up one of the twenty thousand prisoners who would die, beaten and malnourished, on the horrendous march from Mariveles on the Bataan Peninsula, in April of 1942. “I was only six years old when Georgie left,” Stella once noted. “He just went strolling down that front walk right there as if he owned the world. At the corner, he turned and waved good-bye to Father and Mother and me. That was the last time we would ever see him.”

  Larry needed Stella in his life because of her respect for the past, a place he mourned for daily. He stood now on the street and waited for the small yellow light in the upstairs dormer window to go out. When it finally did, he knew she had turned in for the night. She would have long hours at the library the next day, it being Saturday, and Stella being no spring chicken, as she liked to remind him. Life had been tough on her lately, now that 213 Thorncliffe, the lot next door to her tiny house, had been plowed under and a sign announcing a new McDonald’s was standing where once old Mr. Hart’s elm tree stood. “Trapped in the path of progress,” Stella herself called it, since that older part of town, with ancient buildings better off being torn down than repaired, at least according to the town’s ambitious planners, had been designated as commercial zoning.

  My own darling. How I have missed the soft velvet of your sweet mouth, the silk of your nape, the tender arch of your back, the hills of your snow-white breasts, which my lips have climbed so many times in the past.

  What Larry couldn’t figure out, and what he would never ask her, is where and when and how she had met a Sheila Dewberry, from Sioux City, Iowa. Had it been years ago, at some convention for librarians, one so far from Bixley that Stella Peabody felt free of her shyness? Had their hands touched one day, in some library in a large city where they had both gone for a needed vacation? Where they had both ventured in the hopes of finally, finally, meeting someone who felt the same desires as they did? Had they both reached for a book on the same shelf at the same time—Jane Austen no doubt—their lives touching, light as butterfly wings, but with enough meaning that from that moment on, they knew: This is the love of my life.

  Larry lifted the heavy lid of the old-fashioned mailbox that no doubt had been placed there when Stella’s parents first moved in. It was dignified, a polished brass, with the name Peabody engraved stylishly across the front. Sturdy, the way lives once were. Dependable, the way people were expected to be. Once.

  Please don’t keep me from you, nor you from me, for too much longer. My heart, no, my body, needs you and needs you now. I am all fire as I write.

  Larry dropped the two letters, resealed and good as new, into the brass box.

  He walked down Mason Court and from there, cut over to Dunbar, which led him back to the childhood street where he and Henry had ridden their first bikes. The old neighborhood always seemed to welcome him home, as if the past were a warm blanket you can wrap yourself up in when the present grows bitterly cold. Larry could have gone to Evie Cooper’s house, even though it was a half-hour walk. But he didn’t know what he’d say to her. Or if he was ready to say anything at all. Or if she would even want to see him now that he’d jumped ship on the world. Some folks saw that as a sign of weakness, and a strong woman like Evie was bound to be among the skeptics. Call him chicken, but he wasn’t ready to face her.

  When Larry got home, the house key was gone from beneath the cast-iron pot. He had no idea how his mother knew he was going out. Did she have spies everywhere? Did she have large, flylike eyes on the back of her head? He wondered what he would do now, since this time she was not in the kitchen, light burning, practicing her speech. Would he be grounded for a month this time, no television or bathroom privileges? On an impulse, Larry reached out and touched the doorknob. It turned easily in his hand, the door not locked. So what kind of game might this be? Were they waiting inside to spank him? Would the old man take him across his knee, reaching for the silver letter opener, which his mother would produce? He didn’t blame them. He didn’t blame them for anything they might do to him from here on. They knew now he had tampered with the mail. He was certain of it. And they would come for the mailbag, as they should. He was a failure as a son, and maybe if he could just admit that to himself, he could go on about his life being a failure. He didn’t blame them, but he did blame himself.

  At the top of the stairs, Larry heard the step squeak loudly. How could he have forgotten it? He had been thrown off guard by the key incident was how. He froze, waiting for the sound of her door opening, her footfalls, as in all those years gone by. But there was nothing. He could hear the distant rolls of his father’s snores, loud now that he was in his own bed and deep into sleep. But that was all. It made sense, once Larry had a moment to think about it. Why should his mother care? Why should she rise in the night from her warm and peaceful blankets if Henry Munroe wasn’t standing on the stairs? After all, it was only her oldest son, Larry.

  ...

  It was almost midnight when Jeanie woke in her chair on the patio and sat up. The full moon had crested the top of Mrs. Flaver’s roof and was now on its way out of sight. At first, she didn’t know where she was. The candle she had lit earlier had burned out and now, with all the neighboring porch lights out for the night, the world was too dark. She’d had an awful dream. As usual, she had been looking for Henry. In all those months since he’d been gone, he had not appeared to Jeanie in a single dream. The grief people said it was her own subconscious mind protecting her, that people seem too real and alive in dreams. You wake, reaching for them, still feeling the warmth of their breath, their kiss, their touch. You wake and realize that person is dead. And that there was no warm breath, no kiss, no touch. So, it’s better not to dream of those you love and miss. Not until you’re ready. And so Jeanie assumed that was why she didn’t dream of Henry.

  But she loo
ked for him. Night after night, she searched for that man the way some people search for lost treasure. She hunted everywhere for Henry Munroe. Sometimes, it was in their own house and Jeanie would go from room to room, calling his name, looking in the basement, the attic, his workshop in the garage. Other times, she would be reaching for the key that Frances kept beneath the pot of red geraniums, and she would take it and open up the house where Henry had grown into a man. She would search each nook, each cranny, lift each dust ball, trying with all her heart to find the man she had married. Other times, Jeanie was just driving, the way she used to on those nights when Henry didn’t come home until late. And there had been many of those nights. What she thought Larry was going to tell her the night before, as they sat over his spaghetti dinner, was that Evie Cooper was not the only woman Henry had taken the time to know well, after he married Jeanie. But Larry didn’t tell her that, and now Jeanie wondered if he even knew that Henry had had affairs with several women before Evie Cooper, and even a couple after Evie Cooper. Did Larry know that if his brother hadn’t died, he’d still be having affairs? Jeanie knew. She had turned in her badge as housewife and put on a new badge: Marriage Detective. She had learned to phone up motel clerks and ask for receipts, to use redial to its max, especially after Henry got his cell phone. She had known every illicit move her husband made, even finding phone numbers from his girlfriends tucked away beneath the velvet padding of the box his electric shaver sat in. Jeanie had become a female Sherlock Holmes, able to sniff the air for a smell of deceit. Evie Cooper was a tiny part of a very big problem. And now, having searched for Henry all these months in her dreams and failing to find him, Jeanie had to admit that maybe it wasn’t to tell Henry off that she was looking for him. Maybe it was just to tell him good-bye.

  “Mom?” The voice was so like Henry’s that it startled her. Her foot kicked one of the empty wine coolers and she heard the bottle roll, clinking all the way across the patio. And then she knew. She remembered.