Sorry for Your Loss

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “Pup.” Annemarie was already behind the steering wheel, waiting.

  “Okay.” He circled the car, squatted down near the front tire so his face was level with Luke’s. “Dude. You gotta get off the car. Just let Annemarie park it for you.”

  “Oh, do I.” Luke’s chin rested on his hands. The boozy smell coming off his pores was enough to make Pup’s eyes water.

  “Yeah. You do. Please.” He stood very still, silently begging Luke. This was the moment, he knew from experience, when it would go one way or the other. Annemarie sat in the front seat and turned the ignition, and the car restarted with a rumble. Luke, with the engine vibrating underneath him, continued to stare at Pup and the moment grew and grew and Pup braced for it and then it snapped and everything relaxed and Luke rolled off the hood, suddenly compliant.

  “What did I ever do,” he asked, propping himself against the door frame and watching Annemarie ease the Jeep into the empty square of concrete next to their father’s Buick, “to deserve not one, not two, but five pushy older sisters?”

  “Dude, you shouldn’t drink and drive.”

  “The more you know.” Luke hummed the jingle from the PSA, then rummaged around in his pockets and produced a stick of gum. He folded it into his mouth and tossed the foil wrapper on the ground. As Annemarie climbed out of the car and slammed the door shut behind her, Pup could see by the stiff way she walked that she was trying to contain her fury. She cranked her arm behind her head and threw Luke’s keys at him as hard as she could. He tried to catch them, but they bounced off his chest and clattered to the asphalt.

  “Try to imagine the sound of a two-thousand-pound vehicle slamming into a human body,” she said.

  “Jesus.” Luke bent down to pick up the keys. “I didn’t hit anyone. Except that garbage can just now. Are you gonna file a wrongful death suit on behalf of the D’Amatos’ leftover chicken bones?”

  “Okay, then. Try to imagine how it would feel to have to explain to Mom and Dad why you weren’t allowed to sit for the bar exam because of your DUI conviction. Are you really willing to throw away three years of law school because you’re too stupid to call an Uber?”

  “I was at Mishka’s. It’s, like, two blocks away.”

  “It’s nearly two miles away, and if I ever see you drinking and driving again, I will call the police on your ass so fast you’ll be in jail before that last shot is even down your throat.”

  “I wasn’t even doing shots.”

  “Fuck you, Luke.”

  “Guys.” Pup tried to step between them, but, as usual, no one paid attention.

  “Good to know you’ve got my back.” Luke smiled contemptuously at her, his swollen face gleaming beneath the streetlights. “You’re just like Carrie. Loyal to the end.”

  “What does Carrie have to do with any of this?”

  “Carrie doesn’t have anything to do with anything, anymore. But when I find out who she’s sleeping with, I’m gonna track down his address and then I’m gonna go to his house and kill him. You gonna report that to the police too?”

  “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound right now?”

  “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound always?”

  “Guys.”

  “Everybody’s still inside, you know,” said Annemarie. “Everybody’s going to see what a drunken mess you are right now.”

  “So? You think I give a shit what everyone thinks?”

  But as he staggered toward the back gate, Luke seemed to consider this: the thought of walking into the tail end of Sunday dinner, having to deal with four more angry sisters, and their husbands, and their screaming, demanding children, not to mention his aged, fragile parents. He veered suddenly away from the gate and began lurching down the alley, whirling around once to flip Annemarie off before turning at the street and disappearing into the night.

  “Where do you think he’s going?” Pup asked.

  “Who knows? Who cares?” She glanced over at him. “So Carrie dumped him, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Pup walked over to the D’Amatos’ garage, uprighted their garbage can, and began collecting the scattered trash and placing it back in the bin.

  “Well, good for her.” Annemarie watched Pup distractedly as he picked up a clot of wilted lettuce and tossed it into the trash. “It’s about time that girl wised up.”

  9

  ON MONDAY, Pup had barely flopped into his seat in Studio Art before Mr. Hughes sidled up to his desk, scratching at a frizzy patch of chest hair that stuck out from his unbuttoned collar.

  “Flanagan,” he said. “Got my project for me?”

  “I’m almost finished,” Pup promised. “The negatives are all done. I just need to enlarge them on the photo paper, and then—”

  Mr. Hughes stopped scratching and crossed his arms. “Flanagan, a word at my desk, please?”

  Marcus Flood shot Pup a sympathetic look as he followed Mr. Hughes to his desk in the corner of the art studio.

  “The thing about deadlines,” Mr. Hughes began, settling into the chair behind his desk and lacing his fingers together behind his head, “is that they’re not suggestions, Flanagan. They’re not recommendations. They’re imperatives. If I said the project was due Monday, I meant it was due Monday. Not Tuesday. Not Wednesday. Monday. Which is today.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Hughes.” Pup trained his eyes on the grass-stained toes of his Nikes. “It’s just that I had kind of a rough weekend.”

  “Oh, did you? Tell me, Flanagan, do you have an ex-wife who just served you papers demanding full custody—without visitation rights—of Hershey Kiss, your beloved Cavalier King Charles spaniel?”

  “Um. No?”

  “Well, then. In that case, my weekend was worse than yours. I want that project by the end of the day, or I’m writing a zero, in pen, in my grade book, which drops you down to failing. You know that you need a fine-arts credit to graduate, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hughes,” mumbled Pup.

  “Good. I’ll be sitting at this desk after school until three thirty, when I have to leave for my meditation group. If you show up at three thirty-one, tough luck. Now get in that darkroom and get to work!”

  Pup fled back to his desk, grabbed his backpack, and hurried out to the hallway and into the darkroom. This time, he walked in as carefully as possible so as not to send photo equipment crashing to the ground again. “Hello?” he called softly, pushing open the door.

  In the soft red glow of the safety light, Abby Tesfay, dressed in dark jeans and a plain white T-shirt, was peering down at a proof sheet submerged in a tray of shallow chemicals, sloshing it gently back and forth with a pair of tongs.

  “Hey, again,” he said.

  “Hey.” She didn’t look up from her work.

  “I haven’t seen this much of you since fourth period freshman year.”

  “Were we in a class together?” She glanced up then, surprised. “I don’t remember that.”

  “English. For a little while, anyway.” He reached up, unclipped his negatives, and began arranging the photo paper Mr. Hughes had given him onto the enlarger. “It was the low track. I think Ms. Cole moved you up at the semester, though.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I was in low track. Because I’d moved out of ELL and they didn’t really have anywhere else to put me.”

  “ELL?”

  “English Language Learners. I didn’t speak a word when I came here.”

  “Whoa. Really? I’d never guess that. I still remember the speech you gave on Greek Mythology Day. It started like, ‘All hail! I’m the goddess with the girdle slung low!’ Or something like that. Jack Walters started snickering because you said ‘girdle,’ which I guess is sort of like underwear, and you stopped your speech and told him to shut up. Do you remember that?”

  “Oh, yeah!” Abby laughed. “I completely forgot about that! Jack Walters is such a meathead. I was Demeter, goddess of corn and wheat. I wore a cornflakes box as a crown for my presentation. And a
homemade necklace made out of Cheerios.”

  “I remember the cornflakes box!”

  “Oh god. I hope nobody else does.” Abby used the tongs to fish her photograph out of the chemical bath and clipped it, dripping, to the line. “Okay, so what god were you?”

  “I was Pan, the god of the forest. Which, like, of course I was. Even though we were supposed to be assigned at random, all the jocks somehow ended up with the cool gods. Zeus. Aries. Poseidon. And I was a half boy, half goat who prances around the woods playing a flute.”

  “Oh my god!” Abby had a loud, unselfconscious laugh. It filled the tiny space of the darkroom. “I remember now! I remember your tinfoil ears. And the goat legs! They were these green shaggy things. You told Ms. Cole you made them by cutting up a bath mat!”

  “Yeah. The kids with the crafty moms had these crazy good costumes. I had tinfoil ears, a ripped-up old bath mat, and some loose-leaf paper hooves taped to my gym shoes.”

  “And I wore a box of cornflakes on my damn head.”

  They giggled, and were silent again, so that all that could be heard between them was the hum of the enlarger machine and the drip of the drying photographs.

  After a while Abby asked him, “So what’s this final project about, anyway?”

  “Well, that’s the thing.” Pup lifted his paper from the enlarger and submerged it carefully in the stop bath with the long silver tongs. “There is no project. Mr. Hughes just wants us to turn in something ‘representative of our personal aesthetic,’ using any medium we want. But look at me!” He posed for her in his baggy, too-short jeans, his stained Nikes, his Chicago Park District T-shirt, his wiry, untamable hair. “I don’t have an aesthetic. When I asked him what he actually meant by that, he said I should find a way to ‘articulate the emergency inside of me.’”

  “Oh man. Whenever Mr. Hughes starts quoting Leonard Cohen, you know you’re in trouble.” Abby leaned forward to scrutinize the photographs he’d enlarged. “What about this one? This is good.” She squinted her eyes and peered closer at the image. “Actually—wow. This is really good.”

  She was pointing at the image of Luke, curled up on the roof with the sun lightening behind him and the early morning birds on the power lines, the scattered beer bottles, his unshaven sleeping face so inscrutable, even in sleep.

  “That? I don’t even know why I took that. That’s my older brother Luke. He’s the kind of guy who threatens to punch you if you look at him for more than, like, a second. He was asleep, though. So I was able to look at him. Maybe that’s why I took it. Because it was sort of nice to just stand there and look at my brother.”

  Immediately, he felt like he had said too much. He braced himself for what he knew Abby would say next: Awww. Izzy was always saying awww to Pup, in this high, singsong voice. It was the same expression she reserved for YouTube videos of kittens playing with balls of yarn, and implied how totally adorable he was in a completely nonsexual way. No girl had ever, or would ever, say awww about Brody, or Declan, or any other guy who was halfway decent-looking.

  But Abby didn’t say awww. She didn’t say anything. Instead, she just stood there in the red light, cocking her head and observing the photograph.

  “I’m trying to figure out what’s so magnetic about it,” she finally said. “I think maybe it’s the composition. Your subject looks so—closed off or something. He’s a person I want to know more about. Like he has so many things buried inside himself. And the objects. Did you pose those, or are they just arranged like that?”

  “You mean the beer bottles?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, they were just like that.”

  “And that glass of—what is that, anyway?”

  “It’s a protein shake.”

  “See, that’s so random. But it works. Mr. Hughes always says that unexpected objects can elevate a photograph.”

  “Huh,” said Pup. “I didn’t know that.”

  “And I love the way the dawn sky contrasts with his dark hair,” she went on. “It’s such a beautiful way to take advantage of the black-and-white film. Awesome point of view. Awesome juxtaposition and use of negative space. Awesome mood. I mean—I can tell how much this person means to you. And I can tell that you were seeing him when you made this picture.”

  “Wow.” Pup lifted a hand to his neck. It came away hot. “Thanks.”

  “Portraiture is kind of my thing, too,” she said. “What do you think of this one?”

  She inclined her head at the photo that was dripping gently onto the counter. It was a portrait of a woman leaning on a cash register, chin cupped in her palm. She had a thin, calm face, and her deep brown eyes were fringed with thick lashes. Her skin stood dark against the white wall behind her. She was not pretty—pretty was a word that was too bubbly and young for what she was—but she was handsome, which was a word Pup’s mother used for elegant women whose style she admired. Behind the woman was a refrigerator with clear sliding doors, lined with cans of Fanta, and Styrofoam containers with masking tape labels. Taped on the counter was a little Eritrean flag and a sign that said CASH ONLY.

  “Your mom?” Pup asked.

  “My amoui,” Abby said. “My aunt.”

  “Wow. I can tell you guys are related.”

  “She’s basically raising me. My mom’s back in Eritrea.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a silence, broken only by the drip of the water.

  “It’s funny what you said.” Abby’s voice was quiet. “About everybody’s moms making their costumes for Greek Mythology Day. Remember Ali Larson?”

  “You mean Persephone? Goddess of spring? With those big yellow wings?”

  “Mm-hmm. That shit was embroidered. Her mom hand-stitched the whole thing. Pretty sure Ms. Cole gave her an A-plus.”

  “I don’t think she stayed in low track much longer, either.”

  “But I remember thinking that. About the other kids’ costumes. I was so mad about it, you know? Because my mom doesn’t even live here, so it didn’t seem fair.”

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better, my mom didn’t help me with my costume, either. In case you couldn’t tell by the tinfoil and the ripped-up old bath mat.”

  Abby laughed. “Yeah, I guess I should have figured.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “My mom? Three years ago.”

  “Three years?”

  “Yeah.” She reached up to straighten her drying photograph. “But it’s okay, because we’ve got this immigration lawyer helping us, and we’ve finally straightened out the visa stuff. We find out any day now whether her application is approved. Until then, my life is sort of in suspension, waiting for that moment.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hey,” she said suddenly. “What kind of name is Pup? Is that like short for something?”

  “It’s a nickname. When I was a baby, I had real big hands and feet for my size, like a puppy.” He held out his hands, spreading his long, spidery fingers. “So Luke started calling me Pup. And even though I hate it, it just kind of stuck.”

  “If it makes you feel any better,” she said, “I hate when people call me Abby. It’s not my real name, either.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Nope. My real name is Abrihet. It means ‘She brings light.’”

  “‘She brings light,’” Pup repeated. “That’s the most perfect name ever for a photographer.”

  She smiled. “I never thought about it that way, but yeah. It totally is.”

  “So how come you go by Abby?”

  “Because. First period on the first day of freshman year PE, Coach Miller couldn’t pronounce my name. She tried a couple times, and then she just put down her attendance book and said, ‘You know what? How about I just call you Abby?’ I was too afraid to say no to a teacher. And besides, I’d already figured out that here in America, people have trouble meeting you where you are. They have to bend you to become whatever they already know. So I just said to myself
, hey, what difference does it make if my PE teacher calls me something that isn’t my name? But then the other girls in my gym squad started calling me Abby, too. And then the girls in the other squads. And then the kids in my other classes. And then everyone at our school.”

  “So, does that mean that outside of school, you’re still Abrihet?”

  “Yes. Because that’s my name. When my mom gets here, if she overhears anyone calling me Abby, she’s going to laugh her butt off.”

  “Hey,” said Pup. “At least outside of school you’re still Abrihet. I’m Pup no matter where I go. I mean, what kind of future does a guy named Pup have, anyway? President Pup? Hey, guys, I’d like you to meet the new CEO of our company, Mr. Pup Flanagan. Pup Flanagan, MD. I’ll be performing your heart surgery this morning.”

  She laughed. “Well, what is your real name?”

  “James.”

  “James,” she repeated, extending a hand. “I like it. Hello, James. It’s nice to meet you.”

  He stuck his sweaty paw into hers and shook. “Hello, Abrihet,” he said. “It’s really nice to meet you, too.”

  At the end of the day, just after eighth period, Pup ran to the darkroom and found it empty. He carefully removed his picture of Luke from the drying hooks and placed it, still damp, in a manila folder he had begged off his Spanish teacher. Then, without even the time to look and see if it turned out decent, he ran into the art room where Mr. Hughes sat, his eyes closed, clouded in the haze of a burning incense stick.

  Pup cleared his throat, and Mr. Hughes’s eyes fluttered open. He glanced at his watch.

  “Three twenty-eight. You like to live dangerously, Flanagan.”

  Pup pushed the folder across the desk, and Mr. Hughes rested his fingertips on its manila surface. Pup stood there, waiting.

  “That’s all for now, Flanagan.”

  “But—aren’t you gonna look at it?”

  “Of course I am. But not while you’re standing here, breathing down my neck. I’ll have a grade for you tomorrow. These things take time. Effort. Thought. I, unlike you, do not take the responsibilities of art lightly.”

  “Come on, Mr. Hughes. It’s one picture.”