We Don’t Joke About Such Things
By Neil Serven
I’ve been working on my grace. By that I don’t mean religion; if you ask me, there’s not much that’s graceful about religion, apart from the hymns.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like about religion. For one thing, I like its sense of having always been there, evidenced in its Gothicky architecture, its medieval suffixes. I dig its hardwood nouns like sacristy and missal and vespers. And I can find beauty in stained glass. But in terms of the vulgar wars, the guilt and panic, the glory—nothing graceful there.
You live in a hot dorm with Catholics and you learn a lot.
I guess by grace I mean how you envisioned things coming together once you became an adult. How your shoes shine. The way you receive a compliment.
Take care not to let doors slam, don’t let yourself be driven by envy, never give the impression you’re in a hurry to leave.
I mean grace.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’m almost twenty. It won’t be long before I’ve outlived all the martyrs, and I’m running out of time to show my best self.
*
I was pulling off a glorious trifecta, failing three classes in my major, economics. The only class I was acing was ethics, which I was taking as an elective. Ethics was a breeze because there weren’t any quizzes. Instead we read Aristotle and Kant and tossed around questions like who’s to blame when a child conceived in a test tube grows up to be a prick.
I had my laptop open during a differentials lecture when Apollonia appeared in chat to tell me that Kyle, my best friend since childhood, was dead.
Her profile picture showed her and Kyle and their two-year-old son, Cooper. Each message appeared with a tiny pop, surrounded by a gray bubble made to look as though the words were coming from their mouths.
The bubbles kept coming. I tried to process.
it happened yesterday
Then, pop, a teardrop emoji.
I waited a moment, then typed: who found him
It might have been a gigantic presumption on my part, but you don’t just die in your twenties and not get found.
I waited while Apollonia typed the words. It was Rae, she said. In the laundry room.
junie called down the stairs but kyle woldnt ansewer and junie cant do the stairs bc of her emphezima so rae went down there
Rae was Kyle’s kid sister. Growing up, she would tag along, sketching pictures while Kyle and I shot hoops or skated in the park. It pained me to think of young Rae finding her brother dead—having to manage the paramedics, having to spell out to Junie what was going on.
will there be a service, I typed. Apollonia replied that the arrangements were still being made but that it would probably be held later in the week.
I tried to think of something else to say. What I didn’t say was sorry. What did sorry mean on the internet? Sorry about your kid’s father dying? Sorry I was a jerk when you came into the picture? Sorry I doubted you, you sorry soul?
Sorry is a handshake. If you don’t say sorry, you don’t accept the bargain.
So I didn’t say sorry.
I typed the words, Ill be there, then backspaced. Ill try to get there.
Three dots, pop, thumbs-up emoji.
I stood and slung my bag over my shoulder and walked loudly out of the auditorium, sensing the other students trying not to be disturbed. The door closed behind me, echoing through the hall.
*
I decided to drive the six and a half hours from Chicago to Pittsburgh. It was Monday night when I entered my parents’ kitchen. Donna Summer was playing. My father was freshly retired, with renewed vigor by all accounts, and had taken up mixology. On the kitchen counter stood a city of bottles and mixing implements.
I found my parents dancing in the living room, the coffee table pushed out of the way. It was the first time I had seen my parents in several months, and they were drunk. In spite of my reluctance to come home, I held no grudges against my parents as people, and on any other day it would have amused me to see them living it up. “We have a gentleman visitor!” my mother said on seeing me, clasping her hands. She wore a smirk like a debt had at last come due.
“Kyle’s dead,” I said, my voice straining over the music. I dropped my bag on the floor. I had managed not to cry during the drive, but at that moment I let go. “He’s dead, Mom!” She set her glass on the breakfast bar and reached up to hug me.
“Oh! Oh no. Oh, my boy.” She held my head in her hands, which were cold from the glass. “What happened?”
“He OD’d,” I said. “He was ruined.”
“No! Oh, Marty. I didn’t know he was doing that stuff.”
My father turned off the music. I stood wrapped in my mother’s arms as she filled him in. “When’s the service?” I heard him say.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Nobody knows anything. I’m not sure what I’m here to do.”
“It’s all right,” Mom said. She reached to stroke my hair, as she used to do. But I had grown taller and it felt strange. “You’ll find out. It’s gonna be okay.”
Then my father put his hand on my back and told me I’d have to sleep in the basement because my bedroom wasn’t mine anymore. They’d redone it over the summer, making it into a reading/craft room for the two of them. Between the emails about color palettes, it never sank in that the room I grew up in had vanished.
I was hungry. I said this out loud, wanting to be taken care of. My drunk mother squeezed my hand, then went in the kitchen and made me a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich. I took it down to the basement and ate it on a futon in the dim light of a workshop lamp.
*
Apollonia had dropped out early in senior year, and a few months later gave birth to Cooper. I had been swamped with college essays and SAT prep, and I only learned that she was pregnant as I swiped around on social media, between breaths, like anyone in her signal range.
I don’t remember how I responded. I didn’t say congratulations, because you don’t congratulate tragedy. It’s a tragedy when people fail to surprise you.
Naturally, I didn’t see much of Kyle that summer. My freshman year came and went. I applied for overseas internships and dropped hints of opportunities falling my way—the World Bank, conventions in Geneva or Tianjin where I could fetch coffee and bump shoulders with the movers and shakers of the world economy.
In the meantime, I won money off stoners at caroms in the student union, chased ass, and made an ass of myself. I spent the money I won on blues records and foreign cigarettes. I tried to get with Pamela, hoping she might find my resentments attractive. I read Bertrand Russell and scoffed at the Catholics on campus. They listened patiently, then told me to check out Pascal. I read Pensées under trees where I knew Pamela would be walking by. By that spring, I had won Pamela and lost Pascal’s wager.
*
Kyle had been apprenticing as a welder, working on things like railroad signals and rooftop solar arrays. One day he fell off some scaffolding, putting his ankle in a cast. He posted a photo on Facebook. I commented, Ouch! Feel better man! It was like the thirtieth comment down; I didn’t recognize the other names.
I got the idea to send him books to give him something to do while he was laid up. Vendors were always selling used editions for cheap on the quad. I sent him The Stranger. I sent The Call of the Wild. By his own admission, Kyle never had much of a head for reading, but I thought if I chose the right titles he might cultivate a sense of wonder about parts of the world he was never going to see by staying in Pittsburgh, welding sheet metal and bottle-feeding a kid. It might have been hostile, the message I was sending. I spaced the packages out every few weeks, like a subscription deal, and I inscribed the books with my fountain pen, which felt cosmopolitan but also made them harder to resell. He’d text a thanks, saying he was excited to crack them open, but he never told me if he finished them.
For my part, I was hoping the books might give us something to talk about. He knew I couldn’t bring myself to care about parenthood, and there was only so much I could tell him about school or Pamela. It was getting harder to keep up the act that things were going well on either front. When the internships fell through, I didn’t let Kyle or anyone back home know.
*
I practically grew up in Junie’s house, and as I entered the neighborhood, familiar sights leapt out, like the tennis court where Kyle and I would set off bottle rockets. For a long time the pavement was cracked and the net in shreds, but it had been fixed up while I was away. People were actually playing tennis. I passed the corner store where the Vietnamese clerks would sell us cigarettes in middle school. We said they were for Junie, but they never cared.
I walked around to the back patio and the screen door where friends and family were welcomed. Junie lit up when she saw me.
“There’s the Snuffleupagus!” She smiled through wet eyes.
Something that looked like a rope was trailing behind her. It was an oxygen tube. She wrapped me in a body hug, and I could hear the oxygen hissing into her nostrils. The tube went on forever, trailing into the house, through the kitchen, to wherever the tank was stored.
“I’m glad you’re here, kiddo.”
“I couldn’t believe the news,” I said.
“My boy got too far away, Marty,” she said before letting go.
Apollonia and Rae were in the kitchen. Apollonia’s hair was different: once mahogany, it had gone blonde at some point and was growing out, so it looked like a paintbrush that had been rinsed. She wore a sweatshirt in our high school’s green and gold.
Rae had wised up her look: a senior now, taller and thinner, wearing a stylish sweater, her blonde hair tucked beneath a maroon rebel beret. I hugged her, then gave a one-armed hug to Apollonia, who had the boy in her arms.
“I’m so sorry, A,” I said. She sighed into my ear. She looked at Cooper and I said, “This is your little guy.” Cooper’s shirt said I’m the one they call heartbreaker.
“This is Cooper. Can we say hi to Marty, Coop?”
With his sea-gray eyes, the boy sized me up warily, then, as though embarrassed, buried his face in Apollonia’s neck.
“We’re a little shy around strangers,” she said. And then, to me: “Thanks for coming, Marty. I know this is taking you away from a busy schedule. Classes and all that.”
I couldn’t help but think, And now it starts. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Apollonia would be passive-aggressive even in mourning. “He was my best friend,” I said.
I held back on saying, I knew him longer than you.
Junie was moving around the kitchen with her oxygen tether. “A Cherry Coke, Marty?”
Cherry Coke was a treat I had long associated with Junie’s house, since my parents never let me drink soda at home. At college, pour-over coffee had become my go-to morning beverage. Cherry Coke felt like a strange, childish decadence before noon.
“For old time’s sake,” she said, and proceeded to crack out some ice. The cubes clinked into a glass and the soda gurgled over them. With one sip, everything came back.
*
The furniture in the living room had been rearranged, which I suspected was to let Junie move around with her tube. None of the seats faced in a direction that made sense. Cooper’s play mat lay in the middle of the floor. A talk show was blaring, and nobody moved to turn it off.
Junie settled into her chair with a grunt. On her side table stood a village of pill bottles amid a rubble pile of junk mail and scratch tickets. “Excuse our blessed mess, Marty,” Junie said as I surveyed the room for a place to sit. “Been a hectic couple of days.”
The blessed mess was more than a couple of days old. The couch and chairs were piled with newspapers, toys, board books, and motorcycle magazines. There were cereal and cracker boxes and soda bottles on the floor. The scatter made me anxious even though I lived in a dormitory.
“I can help with some of it,” I said, trying not to sound judgmental. I looked for a coaster to set down my glass.
“Anywhere’s fine, Marty.” Apollonia said, almost with a sigh. She motioned me downward. “You didn’t come here to clean.”
“I’m here for whatever you want,” I said. I parked myself on the floor by the sofa. Apollonia set Cooper down on the play mat and stood over him.
“What I want is to go downstairs,” Junie said firmly. “It’s my house. I want to see his room.” I sensed she was picking up a conversation that had started before I got there.
“We can’t go down there, Nana,” Apollonia said wearily. “What’s that going to do?”
“The cops said, Ma,” said Rae, hidden from my line of vision by Junie’s chair.
Junie said, “See what happens when you get sick, Marty? The people who love you leash you up like a dog.”
Apollonia explained that Junie’s emphysema kept her confined to the first floor, doctor’s orders. “As you see,” Apollonia said, “we’re still adjusting.”
This was a new trick, Apollonia talking like she was the head of the household. Everything phrased with that we that moms use. Junie was “Nana” now because that’s who she was to Cooper.
“We just had a nap,” Apollonia said tiredly. She meant Cooper. He kept running back and forth past Junie, who had to jump rope her oxygen tube over his head so the boy wouldn’t trip. “And now we’re full of beans. Aren’t we, Coop?”
I moved to join Apollonia on the play mat as she tried to settle down the kid. He seemed perplexed that I was there. One thing I didn’t say was how much Cooper reminded me of Kyle: the gray bug eyes, the clumsiness. He was tumbling around on the same floor where Kyle and I would build cities out of Legos. Now the Legos were gone and in place of my best friend was this new miniature Kyle, slick and alien and without a vocabulary.
*
I tried making eye contact with Apollonia, nod toward the kitchen—you, me, five minutes?—but her attention was focused squarely on the kid. The TV was unnerving me, the talk-show audience applauding into my ear.
Rae spoke up from behind Junie.
“Marty,” she said. “Weren’t you in Geneva or something last year?”
I should have expected that the bullshit I had been feeding Kyle would have trickled out. “It was for this work-study thing,” I said. “There were only a few slots.”
I could sense a follow-up question coming.
“I stayed in Chicago,” I said. “I had some things going on.”
“Oh, right, your girlfriend!” Junie said. “Kyle mentioned a girlfriend.”
Rae said, “Nobody has girlfriends in college, Ma.”
“Since when? You don’t date? Is that true, Marty?”
I tried to explain but could hear it coming out ridiculous: I had a girlfriend, one that I dated in the way that college students date, as I gathered Rae understood: not about movies or dinner but where you’re in each other’s room all the time, like dorm spouses.
My relationship with Pamela strained over the summer when our crowd had thinned. Fall semester got underway and I knew my grades were beyond help, and we had an ugly, public argument in the library. Shushes rained down from the balcony.
“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be at school, to be honest,” I said.
Rae said, “For real?”
“I am getting an A in ethics,” I said.
“That’s not surprising,” Junie said. “You’ve always been an ethical kid.”
I felt like I should be doing something to help and needed to get away from the TV, so I offered to get lunch for everyone. I once heard that grief makes people forget to feed themselves.
“Oh, that’s sweet, Marty,” Junie said. “But I don’t think anyone’s hungry right now.”
Rae offered an alternative. “If you want to help, you can take us to the laundromat.”
Junie hummed like it was a good idea. I tried to puzzle out why it was needed.
“We’ll need clothes for the funeral,” Rae said. “We can’t do laundry downstairs, because it’s technically a crime scene.”
*
What Rae really wanted was a cigarette. The oxygen had made smoking in the house a no-go. Apollonia didn’t say a word as Rae and I lugged the baskets out to my car. I couldn’t remember the last time the two of us had been in the same place alone.
“Can’t listen to it anymore,” she said, exhaling smoke in the car.
“It’s so loud in there.”
“I mean the denial. It’s boring,” she said. “Hectic couple of days. Sure, Ma, let’s not overstate it.”
“Your mother’s in shock, I imagine.”
“She wants to replay what happened so she can blame herself. We had no way to get her down there. She thought she could just yell at him. I’m like, no, Ma, he’s unresponsive. We need 911.”
“When did this happen?”
“Sunday morning. I was making omelets and Ma called downstairs to ask if Kyle wanted one. There’s no answer, so I go down, and he’s sitting there on the fucking dryer, eyes half open, like one of those old dolls with the glass eyes. You know the ones I mean?”
“Jesus, Rae, that’s rough.”
“And Apollonia was useless. She couldn’t dial three numbers on the fucking phone. I had to do that part, too. All while arguing with my mother.”
“Oh, no.”
“I made them carry him out the bulkhead. I told the paramedics, you have to understand, my mother cannot see her dead son being rolled through her kitchen under a sheet. They got it, at least. They saw she was a handful. She wanted to see his body. ‘He can’t leave! He can’t leave!’ I’m like, Ma, he’s blue. You don’t want to see him now. Wait for the funeral.”
“When is the funeral?
“Reverend Colin’s supposed to come by and go over things this afternoon. You might want to bail. Apollonia’s gonna wig.”
“Why?”
“Why else? Because it won’t be about her.”
*
The laundromat had been in a run-down neighborhood, but in the time I’d been gone it had been gentrified—cocktail bars, a hipster bike shop, a café that sold nothing but soup. Even the laundromat had been converted into something extra. The washers and dryers were retro-designed, seafoam green and trimmed in chrome. There were arcade games, swing music, and a counter where a girl in a hoop skirt served root beer floats. The place was packed.
I helped Rae sort. The baskets were filled with gymwear and pajama pants, not items you’d wear to a funeral. In her itch to leave, Rae had grabbed whatever she could from the hamper. There was the Tintin T-shirt that I had bought for Kyle at a comics expo. I didn’t see the point of washing Kyle’s clothes, but it felt cruel to say this.
While the washers were filling, the pinball machine became available, so I ordered two floats while Rae got more quarters. She popped in two and the music started up. It was a Rocky and Bullwinkle machine. I stood at the side and watched the ball dither at the top of the columns before it fell through and the bumpers took over.
I asked why Apollonia had been so quiet.
“What’d you expect her to say?” Rae talked over the bells.
“I don’t know. She’s got to be wondering what’s next, right?”
“Marty, none of us know what’s next. Her kid’s without a father now. My nephew. We haven’t talked about that. We haven’t talked about anything. I’m missing school while we’re waiting for someone to come and tell us what to do.”
Rae was playing with serious attention while she talked. She lit up the WABAC machine on her first ball.
“Where’s he been getting the stuff?” I said, forgetting to change my tenses.
“Guys at his work, we think. You know how you fall in with people?”
“His new crowd then.”
“They were his buds.”
“Because I wasn’t around.”
There was a pause, then Rae said, “Not because, Marty. You just weren’t around. Shit.” She had taken her eye off the ball to look at me and it fell through the flippers.
I switched with her to play the next one.
“I’m confused,” I said. “From what Apollonia posted, it sounded like they were doing all right.”
“Why would you believe anything Apollonia posts?”
“Well, I’ve never known her to lie.”
“She doesn’t lie; she performs. What else is she going to do? Gets pinned to my brother, gets knocked up, then Ma gets sick. She sees an opening and moves in. That shit she posts is the Apollonia Show. ‘Here’s Cooper out with Nana! We’re eating ice cream! We’re having fun at the splash pad! Our daddy’s an addict and we’re living a lie!’”
I couldn’t help it: I laughed. Rae had it all down: the we I noticed before, the singsongy tone of Apollonia’s posts. Phony as they were, they were pretty much all I heard about Kyle.
“Then she’ll complain about how exhausting it is to raise a toddler. ‘We were up at five a.m. today! We had a tantrum and knocked our cereal on the floor!’ All so the other moms can throw their support. It’s a cult. You see it’s bullshit. That’s why she won’t talk to you. She knows you know.”
“Seems like so much work,” I said absently as I lost my ball. “It’s got to feel lonely.”
Rae took back over and said, “I don’t have time for people’s feelings, Marty.” She released the plunger. “I’m in high school.”
*
We took our floats outside and lit cigarettes. Rae said, “Do you remember Mr. Gus?”
“Of course.”
Mr. Gus was the longtime art teacher at the high school. He had a last name nobody could pronounce, so he was Mr. Gus. Barely five feet tall, he would slink behind you like he was evading a police spotlight, then stab a finger on your charcoal drawing, smudging the line. Then he’d say, “I love what you’re doing there. Keep going.” Everybody loved Mr. Gus.
“He’s helping me apply to art schools,” she said. “I’m thinking about Chicago.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s ambitious.”
I meant it as a compliment, but Rae’s expression showed she didn’t interpret it that way. I had seen her paintings on Instagram—uncanny figures with yellow eyes and green faces—and envied her talent. I was pretty sure Kyle had modeled for some. There were a few of Cooper, too.
Rae said, “You’re right, Marty, what was I thinking?”
“That’s not what I meant. I’m just down on school right now.”
“Are you really flunking out? What are you doing out there? You’re supposed to be the smart one.” She was mocking me in a fake mutter. I shrugged, hoping she would keep going.
“You made college sound awesome,” she said. “Reading books, the shows, the Geneva thing. Real conversations. I wanted to follow you. I’ve got to get out of here.”
“You’ll do great. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“So, what’s wrong with that? You go through and come out the other end and you’re different from when you left. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen? I always admired that you weren’t scared.” She looked upset and I was starting to catch on.
“Who said I wasn’t scared?”
“Well, you never came back to tell us! So we figured things were going swell. I know that’s what Kyle thought. Don’t come back and act surprised that people still care about you.”
Then she said, “I’m not going to wait for something to happen to me like Apollonia did. If things go right, then I’m going to Chicago. Be nice if I knew someone there.”
I drew the schematics in my head. “Who looks after your mom, then?”
Her face fell again. “Don’t do that to me,” she said. “Don’t you dare.”
*
There was a Prius in the driveway. Rae and I hefted the laundry in from the curb. At the kitchen table, Apollonia sat with Cooper on her lap, talking to Junie and Reverend Colin. On the table sat one half of a marble cake.
“Kyle’s best friend,” was how Junie introduced me. I felt a weight of responsibility tossed my way. “Since they were babies. He drove all the way from Chicago.”
“Sir,” I said. Fourteen months around clergy and I still didn’t know how to address them. On campus they walked alongside you; they chatted you up about any secular topic at the waffle bar while they avoided dripping batter on their frock sleeves.
Reverend Colin rose and shook my hand and held onto it in that discomfiting way that people of the cloth have. “I feel I’ve heard a lot about you, Marty,” he said.
He wasn’t wearing a collar. His relaxed look reminded me of the TAs at school: selvedge jeans, a red turtleneck shirt, wool socks, and slip-ons. I didn’t know how old you had to be to become a pastor, but Colin had to be barely over the threshold.
Kyle had never mentioned church, probably keen on my suspicions. Given his troubles, it was comforting to think that he had a place to look for answers. “This must be an extreme loss for you,” Reverend Colin said, looking at me intently. “Our childhood friends are our first friends. They know us in our purest form, before we’re discolored by adulthood. Marty, I’m terribly sorry.”
Without asking, Junie poured more Cherry Coke for Rae and myself and cut us each a slice of cake. Cooper squirmed off his mother’s lap and ran to his play mat. Reverend Colin invited me to join them, but there were only four chairs, and since I figured they’d be discussing family matters, I brought my cake into the living room. The TV had been muted and was playing local news.
Cooper was playing with blocks—the big, chunky kind they give kids who are too young for Legos. I said, “Whatcha building there, Coop?”
I felt like a cedar tree blocking his sunlight. He ignored me at first, but after a few moments he looked at me and spat out a word: om, or maybe it was home. It was the first sound he’d uttered since I had arrived.
I looked back to see if the others heard it, but they were deep in conversation. Stepping over the oxygen, I moved to the doorway to listen. Reverend Colin was handing out sheets from a folder. “It’s a bit of a standard choice, but I was looking over this one from Isaiah. ‘He will swallow up death forever.’”
“Like a black hole?” Rae said.
“In a way. It’s about a feast, essentially.”
The room was quiet as they read to themselves.
“I like the part about the food and the wine,” Apollonia said. I could hear her sniffling.
“‘Rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.’ I agree, Apollonia, there’s some evocative language there. My thinking is this, Junie. There’s going to be this giant elephant in the room. Everyone who loved Kyle knew he wasn’t getting fed what he needed. This shouldn’t be about his tragedy. A eulogy is how we tell a person’s story, and I know each of us at the table has a story about Kyle they think should be told, about the complicated person we knew and how he lived. How he showed his love even as he suffered.”
I felt the dread that descends partway through a lecture when you realize you read the wrong chapter, and nothing anyone is saying sounds like what you thought you knew.
I decided to leave them alone. I finished my cake and set the plate on the coffee table. The door to the basement was in the hallway. I slunk along the wall so the family couldn’t see me, opened the door, and slipped downstairs.
<
*
The basement was where Kyle, Rae, and I hung out as kids—afternoons of Xbox, pizza rolls, board games, movie marathons, bug juice. It had a black leather couch massive enough for three teenagers to stretch out with space left over.
But the couch was gone. In its place was Kyle and Apollonia’s bed, a mattress and box spring stacked on the floor. Next to it, a makeshift crib had been set up for Cooper. The door to the laundry room was closed with no light coming through the slats.
Detritus filled the space—clothes, toys, shopping bags, pizza boxes, receipts, comic books. Things from our high school days—posters, Kyle’s old wrestling trophies. There was a book on Kyle’s night table, and as I moved closer I saw it was the Camus I had sent him. He hadn’t finished it, but I could tell that someone had been reading it—there was a Walgreens receipt from two months ago where part one ended, right after Meursault kills the Arab.
I could hear voices overhead becoming upset. Chair legs scraped the floor. The heavy sounds told me that Junie was moving around the room.
Rae’s voice was rising: “He did this to us, Ma! You and me and A and Cooper.” There were words I couldn’t make out in the cross talk, then Rae again: “It’s right there and we’re gonna pretend it’s not?”
I put down the book and went upstairs. Junie was looking out at the backyard. “It’s my son’s service,” she said. “He doesn’t need to be analyzed.”
“We’re insulting him if we don’t talk about it,” Rae said. She looked at me like she was expecting me to back her up. But Junie had opened the screen door and stepped onto the porch.
Reverend Colin rotated his head as though trying to corral Junie and the others back to the table with his eyes. “We are talking about an addiction here. It’s a sickness. It traps you. Kyle was trapped by his sickness. And to feel rage at the beast that confined him is a normal, loving act.”
The room was quiet. I felt like I shouldn’t move. Apollonia had her face in her hands, tissues squeezed in her fists. Rae, still tense with anger, collected the cake dishes and brought them to the sink. She turned on the water and began to wash them as though needing to scrub something away.
“It’s okay to feel angry, and it’s okay to direct that anger at God,” Reverend Colin said. “But I think you should ask yourselves if that’s how you want this to—”
There was a thunk in the living room, something falling over. Apollonia said, “Is that Coop?” She pushed back her chair and shoved past me.
Rae turned off the water and glared at me. “Where were you?” she mouthed.
I ignored her and followed Apollonia. Cooper was on the floor. The oxygen tube was coiled around his neck like a python.
“Marty!” Apollonia said. “You were watching him!”
“I went downstairs for a second. I’m sorry!”
“No one’s supposed to be down there!”
Cooper started to cry. In order to free him, Rae had to coax Junie back into the kitchen to give the tube more slack. Then Apollonia pulled it over the boy’s head.
Junie asked, “Is he okay?”
Apollonia said, “We’re fine, Nana.”
She was furious. When Cooper was freed, he got up and started running around again. Apollonia flung the tube to the floor like it was a spiderweb stuck to her hand.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Marty didn’t know,” said Junie. “He’s not used to watching kids.”
“It’s not that, Nana.” Apollonia was wiping tears away, following Cooper with her eyes through her fingers. “Probably not his idea of fun, coming back to our scumhole.”
Cooper circled back and buried his face into Apollonia’s leg.
By that point everyone was looking at me, including Junie, who had lumbered back into the living room, and Reverend Colin, whose folded arms suggested that he had seen enough dysfunction in families to let it play out.
It occurred to me that grace had two kinds of opposites, like the way easy and soft were both the opposite of hard. You could be graceless, or you could be disgraceful.
“What does that mean, A?” I said. “I don’t get it.”
“I mean you’ve been holding your nose the whole time you’ve been here, Marty. I’m not sure why you even came.”
“I came to help,” I said.
“We don’t need you to do our laundry,” she said. “Really, we’re okay!”
“I can do the whole house, A,” I said. “I’ll scrub it till it shines.”
Everyone looked at me. After a moment, Junie came over and hugged me. The oxygen hissed in my ear. “No, no, Marty,” she said quietly. “We don’t say those things. We don’t joke about such things, not at all.”
*
I found my parents in the kitchen. There was music on and they were making a salad. Mom asked if I was staying.
“For good, you mean?”
She looked at me, knife in hand. “I meant for dinner. But if there’s a problem, Marty.”
My father was eating cherry tomatoes, a saltshaker in one hand. “Hey! How’s the family holding up?” he asked, as though he had just been reminded why I was there.
“Pretty sure I made things worse,” I said. They waited for me to explain, but I let it go.
“Probably not as bad as you think,” my father finally said, in his way.
He offered to make me a cocktail if I promised to stay the night. He got out the bourbon, the mixing glass, the jigger. I watched carefully as he measured, thinking I might soon need to learn a trade.
He made me a simple Manhattan with a maraschino cherry nestled at the bottom. I sipped it slowly. Then he made one for himself and one for my mother, and we toasted to Kyle.
Then he said, “Come see what we’ve done with your room,” and I followed him upstairs to where I once had my dreams.
