Pretend I'm Your Friend

by MB Caschetta

  “Do you remember our childhood?” Andy said. “Do you think about it?”

  When he was in the fourth grade Andy announced at dinner that he wanted to marry the music teacher, Mr. Florentine. Daddy asked Ma to please pass the mashed potatoes. Ma pressed her lips together, advising Andy not to talk with his mouth full.

  “Sometimes I remember,” I said.

  “Daddy hated me.”

  I said, “No more or less than he loved you, Andy. Or any of us.”

  “Hey, you two, come up here.” We looked up to see Alice-James’s fleshy face peering down from a window. “The empty bedroom,” she said. Before I’d married Bo our senior year in high school and moved out, the empty room was where I slept.

  We ran up the stairs. In my old room, relieved now of old high-school banners and photographs of Bo on the track team to make it comfortable for guests who never came, Alice-James stood muttering. “Daddy took his daily naps in this room. Help me move the bed.”

  We slid the single bed frame across the carpet and heard a clanking of glass by Alice-James’s feet. Several dusty bottles skidded out from under the bedspread. Empties piled high as the hem on her long skirt knocked against her swollen ankles.

  Andy eyed the labels: Listerine, Scope. “Mouthwash?”

  “Last few months, he was drinking these,” Alice-James said, holding up a bottle.

  “Drinking?”

  “Alcohol is alcohol.”

  “He wasn’t drinking,” Andy said. “The doctor said he couldn’t.”

  She shrugged.

  “Bo drove him to those meetings every week,” I said. “Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  “Evidence is evidence,” Alice-James said. She seemed relieved when we ran out of protests, giving us a minute to absorb the information. Daddy had always said she had the brains in the family.

  “Okay, let’s have a vote on this.”

  Andy was still five months shy of eighteen; according to Alice-James, who made the rules, his vote didn’t count. Even so he voted with the majority to not tell Ma.

  His first and only legal vote would be a few months later, for college: Penn State. Once he was gone, the voting became habit: forcing issues, building consensus, whittling wholly distinct opinions down to bottom lines. A single “yea” or “nay” on scraps of paper summed up our philosophies, folded in half and dropped in a shoebox, hoping for the best.

  Andy moved on, but we remained, polling our way through life.

  Me, Ma, and Alice-James gather around Bo’s hospital bed in the front room upstairs after dinner.

  “Time to call the question?” he asks. I can tell his head is aching by the way his eyes droop. I give him pills from one of the bottles lined up on the bureau.

  Soon the medication kicks in. He smiles dopily and pats my hand.

  Alice-James takes the only chair next to his bed.

  “As we all know, Andy doesn’t really want us to go to his commitment thing…wedding, or whatever.”

  “A.J.!” Ma is perched on the foot of the bed. “No stacking the vote.”

  “I’m recapping, Ma. It’s perfectly legal.” Alice-James puts on her most innocent expression. “Although I do find it interesting that I’m the only one who can face facts around here: We embarrass Andy.”

  “I got an invitation says otherwise.” Ma flashes a cream-colored card. Fancy letters say that Andy, our little brother, and Wilhelm Livingston, a complete stranger to us, invite us to a commitment ceremony celebrating their life together.

  Alice-James snorts: “It doesn’t mean they actually expect us to show up.”

  “You don’t know that, Alice-James,” I like to voice the opposition.

  “Don’t I?” Her voice is a sneer. “When’s the last time Andy came for a visit? Or remembered a birthday? And since this brain thing with Bo, has he so much as sent a flower? Bo paid for every last thing that kid has since long before Daddy died, college, food, clothes, books—and what? Andy can’t pick up the phone?”

  “Okay, now,” Bo says hoarsely. It calms us all.

  Some people get sharp and angular when they are dying, mean like Daddy, but Bo has gotten even sweeter than usual. I see it when the union boys come hold their meetings, sitting on the floor around Bo’s hospital bed, telling him plumber jokes, drinking beer, crying sometimes, big tough babies. Bo comes from a large family of plumbers. Like his father and his father’s father, he is, and will be until he dies, a respected union steward in the Local 307.

  “I thought guys like Andy were supposed to be sensitive,” Alice-James says.

  “I talked to him today, A.J.” Ma peers across the room. “He wants us to stay over, spend the night.”

  “Is that right, Rusty?” Bo says. I slide onto the bed next to him, rubbing his arms.

  Alice-James doesn’t bat an eye.

  “You remember that girl Andy brought home that one Christmas, Bo?” Ma keeps a steady gaze on Alice-James. “What was her name? We thought maybe he’d brought her home to marry.”

  “You thought,” Alice-James says under her breath.

  “The one with the hair?” I say.

  “The lesbian?” Alice-James says.

  Ma keeps talking: “Andy wants us to stay with her for the weekend. Ashley, I think it was. She has a house in New Jersey, somewhere nearby. But I told him not to go to any trouble; we were just coming for the day. And he said, ‘What trouble is that, Mother?’ ”

  “Thoughtful,” Bo says affectionately.

  “Something else, too,” Ma continues. “He’s changing his name.”

  “What’s wrong with ‘Andy’?” I ask.

  “That’s what I said!” Ma tilts her head. “And he goes, ‘No, Mother, my last name.’ He and this Wilhelm are hyphenating. That’s what he called it. Hyphenating. Wojak-Livingston.”

  “You got to be kidding me.” Alice-James barks out a cruel laugh.

  Ma glances around the room to see how the news is going over.

  “That’s our boy!” Bo leans back on the pillow, smiling. “Got his own beat, his own drum, even his own drumsticks.”

  Ma laughs, too. Suddenly we all let go laughing, as if we have entered some lighter existence. Alice-James pulls a Kleenex from her sleeve and holds it to her lashes as she rocks in her chair. Bo’s laugh turns to coughing and we quiet down, watching him.

  When his hacking doesn’t stop, I push him into a sitting position and pound on his back until he can breathe again.

  It takes two school board meetings and a petition three weeks before Andy’s wedding for Alice-James to secure the school bus. Superintendent was a friend of Daddy’s from way back, Alice-James reports for family minutes.

  She draws maps with colored pencils to mark out the stops on the roads parallel to Route 6. The map includes the woods where Bo loved to go hunting with the dogs, the high school where Bo and I first fell in love, and a drive through the Endless Mountains on back roads, Bo’s favorite place in the world.

  The entire trip is off the beaten path, a kind of nature ride.

  For every stop, Alice-James has put an asterisk. At the bottom of the page it says Health Permitting.

  She tacks the map to the side of Bo’s dresser. When we roll him on his side to check for bedsores, he reaches across the pillow, tracing the route with a fingernail. Ma stands in the doorway and shakes her head.

  “You voted, too,” I whisper, catching her by the arm.

  “I voted for the wedding, not for carting Bo around.”

  “Same vote. You could have called for a friendly dispersal.”

  She sighs.

  As she walks away I realize the family vote is a sham—another excuse to pretend someone else made you do it.

  *

  Jed, an orderly Alice-James used to date, gets the gurney for her as a favor, just like the hospital bed he salvaged from emergency room storage. He plans to rip out a few rows of seats to get it to fit in the bus.

  “Another favor,” Jed tells me the morning of the wedding,
when he drags a friend over to help with the bus.

  I pour them each a cup of coffee.

  Alice-James pulls up in the old yellow school bus, swinging open the door machinery to let Ma out. The engine is loud enough to spook the dogs, who bark and whimper on the front step.

  “Shut up, you two,” Ma says from the bottom step of the bus. She looks like a small stooped child clinging to the rail, leaning her body out into the open air.

  “Thank God your father’s not alive to see this!” she says, coming into the kitchen.

  I hand her two hanging bags for the actual ceremony: one with my dress and one with a suit for Bo. I’ve made a medical kit out of Bo’s hunting bag: pills, water, nasal sprays, mucous pumps.

  Alice-James is in sweatpants, a matching pink outfit with white racing stripes. “Ready?” she says. “How’s Bo today?”

  “Headache,” I say, “but ready.”

  Jed takes the bags to the bus.

  “All right,” Alice-James says, “let’s get this show on the road.”

  There’s some trouble getting him down the staircase, but Bo wheels smoothly into the kitchen. “I miss this place,” he says, making me wish I’d given the house a good cleaning.

  Inside, without three quarters of its seats, the bus is cavernous. Alice-James and her hired hands wheel Bo in through the rear emergency doors. Rubber mats line the floor. The metal is rusted, but there is plenty of room. We tie the gurney to a rig with rope.

  Through the windows facing him, Bo can see the sky. He insists the dogs come along for company. “You can’t bring those hounds to a wedding,” Ma says.

  Alice-James calls a vote. “They can stay in the bus. Who’s in favor?”

  It’s unanimous with Ma’s abstention. Even Jed and his friend raise their hands.

  I whistle Henny and Penny onto the bus. They shimmy their red sleek bodies, huddling together in a small corner near Bo.

  “Crazy damn bunch, you are,” Jed says, standing in the driveway and waving us off by one o’clock sharp.

  Alice-James leans out the window, restarting the engine.

  Ma studies the five rows of vinyl benches, picks an aisle in front. I sit a little farther back, next to Bo.

  Revving the engine, Alice-James pulls out of the driveway like a pro. “Just like the old days.” She smiles at me in the rearview mirror.

  I give her two thumbs up.

  Bo reaches for my hand. I bend down to catch his words over the sound of the engine rumbling low through the rubber floor.

  “The air smells so good,” he says. It’s been four months since he’s been outside our bedroom. “And everything, everything looks great.”

  “Thank God your father’s not here,” Ma shouts over the loud engine.

  “Amen to that,” Alice-James calls.

  “Alvin James Wojak, may he rest in peace.” Ma waves her hand in front of her face.

  It is a sunny day, but cold. We have worried all week about the weather. In these parts, there’s always a danger of snow.

  “Think of this as a tribute to Daddy,” A.J. says. “Or an apology for not pulling the plug while he was lying there all those months suffering.”

  Ma grabs the bottom edge of her seat as the bus rumbles. “I couldn’t do it,” she shouts over the engine. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

  “Well, I could have done it.”

  Bo says, “Not your fault, Rusty.”

  “I’d do it again exactly the same, too,” Ma says. “Say what you will, but I’d rather live in that corner hospital room for months than let him go. I never loved anyone or anything as much as your father. Not even my children, though I’m sorry about that some days.”

  Alice-James sits high in the driver’s seat, handling the gears with ease. She shifts her eyes in the rearview mirror, looking for Ma, who sinks low in her seat.

  “Terrible love,” Ma says.

  At every checked and noted location on Alice-James’s map, we vote to keep driving. Bo vomits once in a bucket Ma brought. “Told you so,” Ma says under her breath. Still and all, he’s in good spirits. For the two hours it takes riding parallel to Route 6, I administer pills, soothe Bo with a wet washcloth and wipe his brow. He’s thirty-three—Buddha Year, Alice-James calls it. The year Jesus died, Ma says ominously. When I met Bo, he was fourteen; when I married him, he was eighteen. The doctors say he won’t make it to thirty-four.

  Alice-James leans her elbow out the window and hums to herself, scanning the back of the bus with eagle eyes. Ma curls up in her seat and snores for about an hour, rousing to complain about her bladder. A few minutes away from the Endless Mountains, the longest leg of our journey, Alice-James pulls up in front of a brick McDonald’s for a pit stop and coffee to go with the lunch I’ve packed. It’s a nice one with a pond out back.

  Ma and Alice-James take coffee orders—three black with sugar; nothing for Bo—and head off to use the ladies room. I help Bo relieve himself into a plastic hospital bottle. There is very little urine, though it’s been hours.

  I peer out the window at the little pond. “We could feed the ducks.”

  Bo’s eyes roll slowly up my face. “We could feed them Percocet.”

  Alice-James has left the motor running for warmth, but I can still see our breath mingling silver in the cold air between us. Bo’s breath comes slow and labored.

  “Maybe we should go back,” I say.

  “No such thing. Besides, it’s good to have someone to say good-bye to. It’s good to have somewhere to go. I was born in that house. Person shouldn’t die in the same place they were born.”

  I let Henny and Penny run wild into the soft afternoon, scaring away all the birds. They bark at a family of ring-neck ducks and gallop, leading the way down the path near the water.

  After I use the ladies room, we settle back in the bus, eating the sandwiches I made from leftover roast. “What did we get him?” Ma says, pointing at the elegantly wrapped flat rectangle leaning against the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah, what’d we get?” Bo hasn’t eaten in several days.

  “Remember my trip to Florence?” Alice-James sits in the middle of the vinyl seats, big and pink, rolling her hair in plastic curlers. “I met that man in Florence, a famous artist now.”

  “Oh, yes, José Whoosits!” Ma hugs her down jacket. “Put the heater on, A.J.”

  “It was Pedro, Ma,” Alice-James says, “And I’m not putting the heater on. We brought plenty of blankets for Bo. Why don’t you use one?”

  “You were so young, A.J., seventeen.” Ma lights a cigarette.

  Bo leans his head against me, hot with fever. I feed him pain medicine from a brown paper bag of pill bottles, and some water, which makes a gurgling noise against his lips.

  “It’s artwork,” Alice-James says. “A charcoal drawing, a gift.”

  “A drawing?”

  “It’s a garlic on a black background.”

  Ma is skeptical. “How come I never saw it?”

  “Sounds pretty,” I say.

  “I had it put in a big frame with lots of matting around it,” Alice-James says.

  Ma clears her throat. “What’s with garlic?”

  “It looks so real, papery-thin, you want to reach right out and touch it.” She ignores Ma. “The card says, ‘May your love be equally mysterious.’”

  Bo looks up at me, smiling. “Sounds nice.” I hold his thin face between my hands.

  “I wanted to write, ‘Love is like garlic; it really stinks.’ ”

  Bo laughs.

  “In California,” she says, “they call garlic the stinking rose.”

  Ma sighs. “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t have to,” I say.

  “Poetic,” Bo closes his eyes.

  Alice-James cups her hand over her ear. “What’s that?”

  “He says it’s poetic,” Ma shouts.

  *

  Three hours into the bus ride, Alice-James starts to fiddle with the heat, banging the top of the
dashboard with her fist. By four-thirty, it starts to get dark, but we are nearly in New Jersey, where Andy and Wilhelm own a house.

  The ceremony is being performed in their home promptly at six, we’ve been told, by a Methodist minister.

  When I look out the window, all I see is the dim glow of day. Bo is lying still in the gurney, blankets piled high on top of him. He is resting his head on two pillows; his knees are bent in the middle. As he tries not to groan, Ma and Alice-James pretend not to hear him. The dogs rouse, coming over to nudge his thighs with their noses.

  “Warm enough?” Alice-James shouts over the engine.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ma announces she needs a bathroom.

  “Don’t think so, Ma.”

  Ma sits up in her seat. Alice-James revs the coughing engine.

  “A.J.!” Ma shouts over the engine, which is sputtering and sparking. The bus begins to kick. I hold onto Bo’s head, to keep it from rocking off his pillow.

  We’re a half-hour from the New Jersey border on a small back road, when Alice-James pulls over to the shoulder. “Pee in the woods, Ma. We just ran out of luck with the engine.”

  Ma is standing in the aisle, next to the driver’s seat, under a sign that says, Passengers are forbidden to ride in front of the white line. “What are we going to do now?”

  Alice-James pulls the key from the ignition and turns in her seat. “Wait for help.”

  Forty minutes pass with no sign of a car. The evening starts to come in all ice and silver. Bo’s lips are blue. “We’ll freeze to death.” Ma is shivering, pacing up and down the aisle.

  “Relax, someone will come,” Alice-James says.

  “We need to get him somewhere warm,” I say to Alice-James, when Bo’s eyes are closed.

  She nods. “Hey, let’s play some rummy.”

  “I’m too cold,” Ma says.

  “A word game?”

  “A.J., we’re having an emergency.” Ma stomps her sneaker against the back of her seat.

  Bo coughs. We pile more blankets on him, and Alice-James and I take off our coats and place them on top.

  Alice-James hefts herself out of the tight bus seat, touches the package, then tucks it under her arm, making her way slowly down the narrow aisle with Andy’s present, a smooth, large rectangle wrapped in fancy gold paper with a yellow ribbon.