by Sergio Gomez
“When did he die?”
“Heart attack,” she responded. Another practiced statement.
“Right,” Raymond said. He jogged his mind all the way back to the Spanish courses he’d taken to find the word. “Cuando?”
“Ah. El Domingo, por la mañana.”
Sunday morning. Which meant he hadn’t met his great-grandson, after all. He hadn’t seen the family coming up from Mexico to visit with him, either.
Raymond felt a tear roll down his cheek, though the emotion behind it was still being buried by his mind.
“Will there be a funeral?”
Rosa nodded, then reached into her cardigan sweater and pulled out an index card. It’d been written by someone else—the handwriting was more attributable to a young teen. Probably one of Ernesto’s grandsons.
He scanned the card; it was information for the funeral. The date, location and time were written on it. “I’ll be there.”
“Gracias,” Rosa said, giving a slight bow. “You were muy important. Mi papa loved you. So much.”
“I loved him as well, Rosa,” he said, his eyes dropping down to the picnic table.
“I must go señor,” she said.
“Thank you, Rosa. See you at the funeral.”
Rosa smiled sadly, then turned and headed back toward the van.
Raymond felt the emptiness creeping up on him the farther Rose got from him, spreading throughout his body, throughout what Father Alexander might refer to as a soul.
It was always the same when someone dear to you died. Heaviness in the heart, disbelief in the mind, and a piece of you leaving—the part that your loved one takes with them to their grave, perhaps.
Rosa stopped at the van door before getting in, and waved to him. He waved back to her as she climbed in. The van started up and then pulled off.
That was the last time he’d ever see the van coming to this park. And last week had been the last time he’d ever play rummy with that old kook, the last time he’d ever care about a card game like that.
He got up, wiped the tears away from his eyes and cheek, and tugged his hat down on his head tight before walking back home.
There are things you don’t think about when you are young; like your friends dying from one week to the next. Sure, his brother Ronnie had died when they were teens, but that was different. That was a rare event, an anomaly in the mind of teens who thought themselves invincible.
No one else he knew would die after his baby brother, or so Raymond had thought until he woke up one day and realized he was an old man. Then Dad died, then Uncle Joe, Uncle Barney, and he heard of some of his friends from college dying in between the uncles. He hadn’t talked to any of them in years—decades, even—but it still all added up.
Finally, Mom died, but by then Raymond already knew death was a part of life.
It all seemed to have happened before his very eyes. One day he was a teenager with the rest of his life in front of him, surrounded by people full of life and energy. Even the adults had seemed invincible in those times. Then the next, he was in his late 40s, balding, with joints that creaked and hurt more than they had the previous year, and he had a nose hair trimmer he used on the gray hairs growing out of his ears.
And now, walking back home from the park with the heaviness of Ernesto’s death weighing on his heart and mind, he was even older than that. Much wiser to the reality of death’s plague in life. But knowing it was coming didn’t make the sting of death taking your loved one away any better.
This time wasn’t like the other times he’d walked through Myers Park. The brisk air of Fall, the warmth of his hands in his pockets, the singing birds, the chirping crickets, the smell of a bonfire in the distance filling his nostrils—none of it felt good.
Chapter 11
Jenna’s mom was in the hospital. Plans had to be scrapped. New plans had to be made. She was flying out to Wyoming tonight, but first she had to drop Jack off at his father’s.
The arrangement she had with her ex-husband was that their son spent Thanksgiving with him, and then Christmas with her. This emergency was going to add a few days to his father’s time, but she couldn’t be petty about it at a time like this. Scott had agreed to help her, and that was what mattered.
Jack’s school didn’t like it, but at the moment she couldn’t care less about him being in school for the last few days before Thanksgiving break when all they were going to do was watch movies and screw off, anyway. She’d already explained the situation to the school principal, and he’d been oh so understanding, while complaining the whole time that a boy Jack’s age really should be in school and wasn’t there some other way and blah, blah, blah.
She herself wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the situation but things were what they were. She’d thought about having Jack come with her, to see his grandmother in the hospital, but quickly abandoned the idea. It had started to become more and more difficult to talk to Jack last year. In the blink of an eye, Jenna had gone from being Wonder Mom to lame lady that he was embarrassed to be seen with at the mall. And she was at a point of desperation in which she tried to do anything to appease him and try to connect with him on any level.
There was nothing he wanted to talk to her about, though. He wasn’t into cartoons the way he’d been two years ago. He hated school so much that talking about it just made him angry and so she avoided it. There was no way she was going to ask him about his social life because she’d made that mistake once, and instead of answering her he’d just snorted and walked out of the room.
She had to figure something out though, because otherwise all of these weekend trips into Dutch County to his dad’s house were going to be long and painful.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wondered if maybe this had been Scott’s plan when he moved out here with his fiancée; to get Jack to hate her because of the awkward car rides.
Those thoughts weren’t good. Her therapist had told her so, and she tried to drown them out with the radio or with thinking about her mother and the upcoming flight to Wyoming. But like a buoyant object in water, they just kept bobbing up to resurface.
Besides, she thought. Scott isn’t that bright.
The sign up ahead read: DUTCH COUNTY, NEXT EXIT.
This was the first week she was bringing Jack up here, and another bad thought that kept coming into her mind was the hope that he would hate it up here and tell his dad he didn’t want to come visit him here in the sticks.
“We’re almost there,” she announced.
Jack didn’t hear her because he had his headphones in and the zombies on his Gameboy were screaming in agony, but he saw her lips moving out the corner of his eye. He pulled one headphone away, and said, “What?”
“We’re just a few miles from Dutch County,” she said. Then, trying to remember the route to Scott’s house, she added, “And around fifteen minutes from your dad’s house.”
Jack looked out the window. He’d been so lost in his game that he hadn’t noticed when the industrial parks and housing developments had been replaced by trees. The trees were so densely packed together, it made him think of a fresh box of Q-tips.
“This is where Dad moved to?” He asked, but it was more rhetorical and not exactly aimed at his mom.
Jenna couldn’t help but smirk. “Yep. Don’t go getting lost in the woods.”
He’d learned about a half a year ago that groaning at his mom’s attempts at humor was hurtful. He’d done it so much in one week that she’d almost cried. Since then, he decided to change his tactic. Now he just ignored her jokes altogether. “Didn’t expect this from Dad.”
“Why not?”
“I guess ’cause Grandma is always calling him a city boy.”
“Yep,” Jenna gazed out at the trees, “and this is just about as far from the city as you can get.”
“Might be cool to break away from that scene, though,” Jack said. He’d moved the Gameboy from his hands to his lap when he saw the trees, and now he was w
orking on wrapping the headphone cord around it.
Jenna saw that the screen was off for the first time during the whole car ride. She sighed. Damnit, he’s intrigued.
This was another bad thought, the kind that the therapist told her to try to stay away from, but it didn’t feel good to be the lame parent in her child’s eyes. Didn’t feel good at all.
“Can I put the window down?” Jack asked.
“Sure.”
Jack hit the button, but only let the window creep down a few inches. He inhaled the air. “Smells fresher.”
“Does it now?” Jenna asked, wanting to add, Or is it just in your head?
A strange tennis match always happened between her thoughts and her feelings when Jack got excited about something involving his father. On one side, she wanted to ruin it so that Scott wouldn’t become even “cooler” than he was now. On the other side, she knew Jack’s happiness was more important than a contest between her and her ex-husband.
Jack read the sign on the side of the road that welcomed them to Dutch County—Home of the Cow Pies.
He turned to Jenna, grinning. The first sign of excitement—or any emotion other than playing video games—she’d seen from him in the last hour. “Cow pies? What in the world are those?”
Jenna shrugged. “Not sure. Guess you’ll have to ask your dad, huh?”
“Maybe Dad can take me to go get one,” Jack laughed.
“I’m giving you money for the whole time you’re there, so you could just buy your own instead of asking your dad.”
“Yeah, I guess I could just do that,” Jack said.
The end of his sentence came out deflated, and out of the corner of her eye Jenna saw his grin disappear.
Her selfishness beat out her son’s happiness. The tennis match in her head was 15-all, now.
Chapter 12
There was a tunnel in Myers Park that led to a hole in the Earth. Raymond could remember scaling down the side of the quarry when he was eleven or twelve, using the jutting rocks as a crude ladder to get down to the water.
It was nowhere near deep enough to swim in, and Lake Myers wasn’t far from this spot, but it was the element of danger of climbing the rock wall that he and his friends had enjoyed when they were in their early teens. At the bottom they’d splash around for a few minutes, then climb up the way they’d come down.
That only lasted for two summers until it got boring and they’d just go to Lake Myers from then on. At some point, long after they lost interest, the quarry had dried up and talk of the county filling it up with cement began around town.
When they first heard the news, he and his friends felt like someone they knew was moving out of town or something. But besides talking about it once while they were drinking beers by the lake, they never really cared much. Some of it had to do with them being seniors in high school, but mostly because they were more interested in other things. Mostly, they were interested in girls at that time.
For the rest of Dutch County though, it was the hot topic. Everyone wanted to know what the county was going to do with the “chasm” as it came to be known. There was debate about whether it was environmentally friendly to fill it, while others claimed it was historical and needed to be preserved. Some of the town folk even had running bets on the chasm’s fate.
For all the talk, nothing came of it. The county put up some traffic cones and caution tape around its perimeter to discourage anyone (mainly kids) from climbing into the chasm or even hanging around it, and that was that. Talk of the chasm’s fate slowly started to fade away, relegated only to small talk between neighbors in the houses by Myers Park. Eventually, as more time passed, no one spoke or thought about it much.
Not until a year later, when a teenager died by falling into it.
The teen and his buddies had been hanging around the chasm, smoking pot and drinking beer on a summer day. The alcohol started to make them feel a little rowdy, and they started pushing and shoving one another. It was fun and games and laughter. Nothing but a good time.
Until one of them fell.
Then the others ran out of the park, afraid of being blamed for the wrongdoing. They were too scared to tell anyone about what happened, until nighttime when one of them broke down in tears and told their parents. The parents phoned the police, and the police went out on a rescue mission, but the boy was found dead by that point. He’d hit the rocks head first and broken his neck.
Talk of the county filling up the chasm began again, and the county’s response was to put more caution tape and safety cones around it. The talk died again as the town got over mourning the boy’s death half a year later.
Raymond’s little brother, Ronald Gibson, eventually became nothing more than a faded memory to the town.
For Raymond, of course, that wasn’t true. He missed Ronnie every day.
Ernesto had been the last friend Raymond had left, the last one he would care about until his own number was picked.
It was like doing a full circle on his feelings back to when he’d heard the news of Ronnie dying. He didn’t want to go home because he knew what was waiting for him on the other side. A house much too big for a seventy-three-year-old man to be living in by himself. A feeling of emptiness. The death of his last friend, of his last truly loved one, would only exacerbate the loneliness.
The porch steps creaked underneath his boots, each squeak louder and more irritating than the last. Raymond stopped at the front door. A Fall gust blew by, making the hanging basket behind him rustle and the neighbors’ windchimes jangle.
Raymond peeked over at the new neighbor’s house just as a red minivan pulled into the driveway. A pretty blond was driving, and there was a young boy in the passenger seat. On the front step was his neighbor, Scott, sitting on the porch. He stood up when he heard the van coming, and the boy jetted out of the van to embrace him.
The boy must have been Scott’s son, and the blond woman driving must have been the boy’s mother, and Scott’s ex-wife.
What a lucky guy.
A bolt of envy shot through him. Scott had two pretty ladies in his life—the blond who was carrying the boy’s bags across the front yard and the shapely Latina girl he was with now.
He heard them talking, but Raymond wasn’t interested in what they were saying, so he fished his keys out of his pocket and went inside the house.
He threw his coat and hat on the rack, and then flopped down on the recliner. Pulling the lever on the side of it, he leaned it back until his knees were just bending the way he liked. He laced his fingers across his belly, then unlaced them, then laced them again, then unlaced them…
He couldn’t even work up enough motivation to watch television and fantasize about another life. All he wanted to do was lie here on the recliner, looking up at the dusty corners of his ceiling, and think back to the day when Ronnie died.
Trying to fight the new pain with old pain, or something like that.
It was strange how similar the feelings were then, to now. A feeling of extreme disbelief damming up an agonizing pain.
Well, at least Ronnie and Ernesto are in the same place now. With Mom and Dad, too.
Tears rolled down his eyes.
His family had never met Ernesto, because he’d met Ernesto long after they were all gone. But he wondered if in Heaven your loved ones had an ability to find other of your loved ones so they could hold hands and fly through the sky and clouds, sharing stories of the good times they had with you.
Raymond smiled at the thought.
Ronnie would be up there, up to no good as usual. Telling Ernesto about the time he gave him pink eye by farting into his pillow for a week straight when Raymond wasn’t home. Or the time he slipped chocolate laxative into his milkshake at the State Fair, so Raymond was constantly getting out of line to go use the bathroom and only got on one ride that year.
That jerk.
Raymond laughed to himself. The laughter seemed to boom in the stillness of the living room, in the expanse
of the loneliness.
And Ernesto is probably telling Ronnie he beat me at rummy. That old kook.
Maybe it would be better to just end his life.
That kind of surprised him. Because he’d never considered the thought until now, but he had plenty of sharp objects in his workshop that he could do it with.
Of course, the Big Man upstairs wouldn’t like that, and wouldn’t let him through the pearly gates if that’s how he went. Then he wouldn’t be with Ronnie and Ernesto and Mom and Dad.
He’d be by himself, just as he was now. Nothing would change, so it would be a pointless endeavor.
Besides, he had no motivation to get up out of the recliner to go and do it.
Instead, he just continued to stare up at the ceiling. Thinking about Ernesto, about Mom and Dad, about Ronnie, and about death, and about his toys, until his eyelids grew heavy and he was fast asleep.
Chapter 13
“Dad!”
Jack tore across the yard and into Scott’s arms.
Scott caught him as he jumped up the porch steps. He was getting exponentially bigger every time he saw him. Pretty soon he was going to have to tell him to ease down when he bolted into him. Especially now that he was only going to see him on the weekends.
Scott hugged him tight for a second, then pulled him away. “Hey bud. Nice to see you, too. How was the car ride?”
“Long,” Jack stepped off the porch step onto the lawn to get a better view of the house. “Your new place is huge.”
“Beats the tiny townhouse back in Philly, that’s for sure.”
Jack nodded. “I gotta show you the new game I got, Dad. It has zombies. I think you’ll like it.”
“Oh yeah? You’ll have to show me later, though, bud.”
But Jack didn’t hear that last part because he was already running back to the car to grab his game. In the excitement of seeing his dad, he’d left it in the van.