Pretend I'm Your Friend

by MB Caschetta

  “It’s been a long day,” Andy says, so the others know there’s a good reason for Will’s irritation. “It’s been very stressful planning this wedding.”

  Rusty shifts her ice pack and raises her hand. Will wonders if he is supposed to call on her.

  “We voted,” she says. “We wouldn’t have missed it. Besides, Bo couldn’t stay overnight, and he really wanted to come.”

  “Bo?” Will says. “Bo isn’t here.” He keeps himself from sneering at Andy’s mother.

  “Look here, Wilhelm,” A.J. says, “it’s not like Andy’s been the ideal brother or son, or anything. We did what we could. We got here when we could. It’s more complicated than you think.”

  “Really?” Standing in the middle of the room, the fire roaring at his back, Will keeps his voice level. “Well, thanks for the effort, A.J. You’re a real doll.”

  “Effort? Let me tell you about effort,” A.J. says. “Do you know why Bo wanted to come so badly to your wedding? How about this? Bo is dying. Did you know that, Andy? No, of course you didn’t. If you had called us, even once, during the last two years, you might have heard the news. If you had returned one of Ginny’s phone calls, but no, not you. Not since Daddy died. You washed your hands and moved on.”

  Will watches Andy shrink under his sister’s gaze, not uttering a syllable in his own defense.

  “That’s right, Andy: Bo is dying. And we tried to get him here because he loves you, and wants to see you happy. Ginny, too. She’s been distraught. She’s losing Bo, and he’s all she has. Do you have any idea what it’s like trying to arrange getting a dying man across state lines?”

  No one answers.

  “The logistics alone are hell.” She looks at Will when she says logistics, drawing out each syllable into three small hateful words. Her eyes scour Will’s face. “So he’s going to die without saying goodbye. And don’t you lecture me about effort, Mister Whatever-Your-Name-Is. Andy is the one who didn’t make the effort.”

  Will sits down hard on the sofa cushion next to Rusty, who tucks in her swollen feet to make room.

  “I didn’t know about Bo,” Andy says. “You should have said something.”

  Andy kneels on the rug in front of the fire near a pile of wedding presents, tears welling in his eyes. Something hot prods Will’s ribs.

  “Why don’t you tell them about all your troubles, Andy?” he says.

  Andy leans forward, looking down into the empty “O” his hands are making.

  There is only a small window for bold decisions, which can change the course of people’s lives.

  “Tell them what’s been happening to you these past years,” Will says. “What you’ve been doing that’s kept you away from them.”

  “Listen, here, Wilhelm...” A.J. starts.

  Will points at her left elbow for no reason, but she quiets, surprised. “Don’t think you can come here, into Andy’s home, into my home, and take that tone. You’re not the boss, here, Alice-James.” Her name feels funny in his mouth.

  A.J. gets to her feet, but Will steps toward her. Everyone tenses up.

  “I don’t have to take this kind of abuse,” A.J. says.

  Will is close enough to see the eye makeup unevenly applied to her left eyelid. He barks out a laugh. “Abuse! Oh, now we’re talking! That’s just rich!”

  A.J. glares at him.

  Rusty leans forward to sip her coffee from the good china, careful of her swollen lip. “What’s he talking about, Andy?”

  “Let’s not do this.” Andy’s voice is soft, a hint of terror in it. Stop now, Will tells himself, suddenly sorry to be the one pressing forward.

  “What on earth is he going on about, A.J.?” Rusty prods.

  “Nothing, Ma.”

  Something dislodges in the very back of Will’s throat, warm saliva moving forward on his tongue—the catalyst for the chemical reactions that make sounds into words and words into meaning. (Or else he is going to vomit.)

  “Take it easy, big fella,” says Marion Carroll, who is standing in the doorway, drinking what must be his tenth cup of coffee.

  Andy stands, struggling to walk over to a chair. “Willy, please.”

  “But it’s not nothing. It’s something.”

  The room is too hot. Will strains forward, watching the fire.

  Andy pleads. “Not today. Please, honey.”

  Will heads toward the bathroom to calm down. As he passes by, Marion Carroll flinches, acting like Will might rush him to make a tackle.

  Despite his height and bulk, Will is not the violent type, but these people do not know him.

  He runs water from the bathroom sink, splashes his face with the cold, and stands looking at himself in the mirror, his large face red and distorted. His eyes are tired, forehead like a ham hock. This is not the face of his youth. It is an important moment. All moments are, he realizes.

  Everything counts, doesn’t it?

  He opens the cabinet and chooses his weapons.

  Rusty sees Will first, tensing her jaw. A.J. stands by the sofa, ready to step forward, if necessary. At Will’s approach Andy freezes, shaking his head vigorously back and forth.

  “I’ll tell you what.” Will aims for the sofa with the mother on it. “Just so you know.”

  She glances nervously at the amber-colored bottles in his fists.

  Will can hear Andy swallow in the dead-silent room. “Not this way,” Andy says gently, as if Will is the problem.

  Will holds one of the bottles above his head. The hand—his hand—swings forward, letting the pills drop into Andy’s mother’s lap. “ddI,” Will says. He flings another at the sister. “d4T.” Then he is flinging all the bottles into their laps, the vials of poison keeping the newly married couple alive. “Crixivan! Bactrim!” His voice is no longer calm. “You could have asked! You could have taken an interest!”

  Pill bottles roll in every direction, bouncing off the sofa, spinning toward the curtains, the soft thud of plastic in Will’s ears as they bounce against the wall, rattle under the Biedermeier. Everyone in the room watches them come to a rolling stop, settling in a loose constellation where the old wood floor slants in the corner.

  Marion Carroll touches one with his toe. “They’ve made quite a few scientific advances,” he says.

  For a minute, no one speaks. Then Andy’s sister cranks herself up to shout, “Who do you think you are?!”

  Will can’t hear what she’s saying—there is a dull roar in his ears, which turns out to be his voice yelling back at her: “Selfish, selfish people. And you, sister! You ruined his childhood, you made it so he didn’t know how to protect himself. You’re the one—with your mind games and your…abuse! Do you hear me?”

  Andy rises to his feet. “That’s enough!”

  Will drops the remaining pills. Several lids pop open, bright-colored pills spraying like confetti everywhere. Stavudine, didanosine, indinavir.

  “You’re crazy,” A.J. says. She looks at her brother. “He’s crazy, this guy!”

  The truth is the better heritage, Will thinks, even if it is a borrowed truth. Not Will’s exactly, but Andy’s family’s truth. And isn’t Andy now Will’s family?

  His smile feels like a snarl.

  Rusty gets to her feet. To Will’s surprise, she limps over to him. “No one tells me anything.” She sits on the brick edge of the fireplace, and puts her hand on his.

  “Maybe you should pay closer attention.” Will is calmer now. “Maybe we all should.”

  Marion Carroll sighs.

  After the war the British came and lived in Will’s grandmother’s house for eleven years. That’s when his mother and father came to America to start their new life. Was that a fitting punishment for looking the other way?

  Everyone is quiet now in the room filled with pills.

  When the doorbell rings, they are all watching Marion Carroll pour another cup of coffee.

  No one moves.

  It rings again.

  Marion Carroll takes
a step forward, but Rusty suddenly recovers: “Don’t you dare touch that doorknob.”

  The front door swings open.

  “Ginny!” A.J.’s voice is a mix of surprise and fear. “What did you do with Bo?”

  In the foyer stands Andy’s missing sister, blue-lipped, teeth clattering, hands raw and ungloved, a lacey covering of snow down her black hair. She is singularly beautiful: a frozen bundle of expectation.

  As if an invisible thread were connecting them, Will crosses the room to meet her. As if she feels it too, she looks at him, then rushes in for an embrace. The others stand.

  “Is it over?” Ginny can barely speak, shivering in Will’s arms. “Did I miss it?”

  Andy lifts a blanket from the sofa, and rushes forward to cover them both.

  first

  in

  line

  Ms. LeChance is five years old.

  On good days, she waits at the bus stop by herself. Her mother watches a few feet away in a station wagon that is puffing out exhaust. On bad days, Ms. LeChance lies around in her bathrobe, while her mother drinks orange juice and vodka, watches Oprah, and pats her arm. “We’re in no mood for kindergarten today!”

  Refusing to let life get her down, Ms. LeChance lives by memento mori. She mimes asphyxiation because her twin brother Gerald (currently deceased) couldn’t get enough air to keep his skin pink and healthy. This was during childbirth. In truth, as babies, they’d both arrived a few months earlier than expected, which caused some complications for little Gerry, whose lungs were not entirely formed.

  “Anyway,” says Ms. LeChance. “I’m the lucky one, coming out first and getting the air.”

  Bon Chance, her mother sometimes says.

  It’s French.

  At home, they also speak a little Latin.

  Her father says, Carpe Diem. It’s a philosophy she adores.

  At the supermarket, her mother gloats. “My little Mary really wows ’em during Show and Tell!”

  In truth, five-year-olds are cruel, and Ms. LeChance is insecure.

  The smell of her need, raw and unfiltered, makes her classmates antsy. No one likes to see a child unmothered.

  Driving home with a car full of groceries, her mother makes confessions. “I think the veggie man is awfully sexy.” (On bad days, barely a word.)

  With their bright puffy jackets and their boxes of organized lunch, the children from the neighborhood seem to know what’s what.

  The mothers tell them everything: Poor little Mary and her dead brother Gerry.

  Either way, she lives in the now. “I never let anyone use my Christian name,” she tells Mimi Schwartz, who is always second in line. “My name is terrible luck and rhymes with the dead.”

  Mimi Schwartz shrugs her off. “I wouldn’t know. I’m Jewish.”

  A blonde kid with dirty jeans and a black eye gives Ms. LeChance a shove. He is notorious for having five older brothers and a snail collection. Mimi Schwartz offers him a winning smile.

  Ms. LeChance cuts her losses. “You can call me Mary-Kay if you’d like.”

  But no one calls her anything.

  Today, she doesn’t turn and wave when the school bus comes to take her away.

  Imogene’s

  Island

  of fire

  Outside the bus station, Imogene stood with her mother at the row of wire-slotted vending machines. She put some coins in the one with the cheese doodles and the ketchup-curls.

  “Who comes up with such things?” her mother said.

  Imogene made an ordinary choice: E-5, potato chips.

  “A spinster is a spinster in any town,” her mother said, “a no-prize pig.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  She hoisted a pack of paint tubes and brushes over her shoulder, freeing her hands to lift the straw suitcases she’d taken from her stepfather.

  “Don’t suppose I’d start to worry now,” her mother said.

  It seemed a hundred years ago since her mother had taught her to be pleasant to men who paid attention—suitors, she’d called them. Even Henry, who was technically Imogene’s uncle, her dead father’s half-brother, then suddenly her mother’s second husband.

  Behind the depot, the bus doors heaved open with a mechanical sigh. “Henry says you’ll get five miles down the road, come to your senses, and make the bus driver turn back around.”

  For her entire adult life, Imogene had painted houses for a living and little cards with watercolors on special paper. She was forty. It was time for something new.

  “Nothing out there you won’t find here,” her mother said.

  By now the sun was up. A harmless breeze carried the thick muddy odor of the Ohio River.

  “I’m going,” Imogene said.

  When the bus pulled away, she imagined her mother still standing outside the depot, lips pressed together, watching her leave.

  It was wonderful to dream of going somewhere new, a place she’d read about in a book. Images of Mingo Junction, now her past, started to fade: the two red traffic lights, renovations at old town hall, farmers carving straight brown lines into the earth with yellow tractors; women at kitchen tables, pouring from pots of coffee; children asleep in their beds. Imogene was leaving the place where everyone resembled everyone else: gaunt and muscular, dishwater-blondes.

  “People are horrible, Imogene,” Leslie had said. “They don’t just accept you. You have to convince them, negotiate, make your own way. You can’t just go wherever you want like you’re a character in a book.”

  Leslie, the town librarian, had gotten most of the books Imogene requested from far off collections in Bowling Green and Toledo: Colette, Capote, Stein, Carson McCullers, Virginia Woolf.

  “I want to live in the world,” Imogene had said.

  “The world is not your home, Imogene. The world is unkind.”

  Imogene had had her fill of Mingo Junction, where an obligatory handwave across the street was as close as she got to people all her life.

  During a last wordless night, lying restlessly on top of the covers, she’d wrapped herself in Leslie’s arms and held on tight. Leslie mumbled Earl’s name as she drifted to sleep. In the morning, she asked if Imogene would be a bridesmaid at her wedding.

  Imogene had almost laughed—the idea of asking her to wear a dress!—then felt like crying.

  She hadn’t seen it coming.

  In the hallway, she’d put her shoes on and found her jacket.

  “I’m going to go find something better than this,” she said.

  “That’s just the kind of thing I’m talking about.” Leslie sighed. “I want a husband, you want ‘something.’ You’re just so vague, Imogene.”

  “Love,” Imogene said. “I’m talking about going out to find love.”

  She pictured her mother moving around the kitchen in slow motion. She thought of Henry, who since childhood had been cruel about her books and solitude.

  “What kind of Mingo Junction girl are you, Imogene?” he liked to say.

  Her father had taught her to be a man. She’d spent her early years trailing him around the farm, learning to pull calves from the muscular insides of their mothers. Imogene appreciated the smell of the blood and the effort that rose from the warm exhausted bodies of the cows, as if they held the secret of life. Her father appreciated her strength and encouraged her natural gifts.

  She understood animals better than people.

  It wasn’t until she’d grown as tall as her own mother that Henry stopped calling her names. After she outgrew Henry, he stopped speaking to her altogether.

  “Maybe Henry’s just trying to do you a favor, Imogene,” her mother had said.

  *

  Two days, three buses, and a ferry later, Imogene arrived at the place she’d thought she’d never reach. At first glance, the ocean-side community seemed no more than a narrow strip of beach houses lifted off the sand by rotting planks, but the air smelled clean and salty. Her mother’s words still ringing in her ears, Imogen
e hoisted her paint tubes and brushes over her shoulder, picked up Henry’s two scratched suitcases, and headed for the nearest bar.

  The sign on the door said “Cherry’s.”

  Stepping inside, Imogene saw a wide open space with a dance floor, a jukebox, a few round white tables with matching iron chairs—more like an ice cream parlor than any bar Imogene had ever been in. There were red-and-white-striped curtains and cloth napkins with ribbons on the tables. It was early in the day. Except for an older woman seated under a yellow poster of Marlene Dietrich, the bar was empty.

  A barkeep with wide hips and a bow tie appeared in a doorway.

  “Name’s Cherry,” she said loudly. Her thick accent sounded strange. “It’s a little early in the season for day-trippers.” Imogene could smell the heavy scent of her perfume as she came nearer; it rose above the smoky remains of the previous evening.

  “I’ve come too far for just one day.” Imogene dropped her backpack on top of both suitcases, as if she intended to sleep right under the bar. “Some 600 miles.”

  “You here for the season?” Cherry asked.

  “I’m here for forever,” said Imogene.

  Cherry flashed a wide red smile at Imogene, who suddenly felt stooped with exhaustion. “Only a few die-hards stay year round. But I do hope while you’re here, you plan on ordering a drink.”

  Imogene looked at her.

  “Sometime soon would be nice,” Cherry said.

  Imogene was still standing awkwardly halfway between the door and the bar. “Whiskey,” she said quickly. “Is there a pool table?”

  Cherry pointed over her shoulder. “In back.”

  Straddling a striped bar stool, Imogene looked around. “It’s pretty in here.”

  Cherry lowered her voice and leaned in. “Thanks, but I don’t date customers.”

  Imogene’s smile was mostly polite. “Too bad for me, then.”

  Cherry pulled back cheerfully. “It must have been a long trip.”

  “Long life.”

  Cherry laughed loud and low, posing like an actress, her chin tipped slightly up, “New member of the church?”