After the Parade (42 page)

“I know,” Winnie said.

“I better get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.” He laughed.

“Wait,” Winnie said. After a long pause, she blurted out, “I love you, Aaron.” They did not usually say this to each other, and he tried to make the whinnying sound, but his voice broke, so he set the phone back on the hook without replying, then lay on the hotel bed and cried some more, sick with the realization of how long it had been since he'd said “I love you” to anyone.

For thirty minutes, he sat in his rental car outside Winnie's house. It was a cool, clear day, not unusual for Minnesota in April. Just hours earlier, he had awakened to the smell of bacon and eggs and Gloria's exaggerated cheerfulness, which meant that his mother was being difficult, for that was how couples worked, he knew, one always trying to offset the other's behavior.

“Is she still in bed?” he asked as he and Gloria sat down to eat.

“Yes,” Gloria said. “But it's not you, Aaron.”

He cocked his head to indicate that he knew better, and she said, “Well, of course it's your visit that's thrown her, but the way she is? That's not about you.”

“Thank you, Gloria. I know that.” He supposed he did know it. “But it's nice of you to say so.” He ate some bacon, drank his coffee. “You know, after we finally went to bed, I still couldn't sleep. I started to think about the day we moved to Mortonville, how I woke up that first night in the Rehnquists' house, and she was gone. I looked for her everywhere. You know where she was? In the closet. I'm sure she heard me calling, but she didn't answer, yet when I finally opened the closet door, she seemed happy to see me. She invited me in. I sat on the floor, and we talked. She was in there almost every night that first year. I thought it was because she didn't want me to hear her crying.”

“Maybe that was part of it,” said Gloria. “But knowing your mother,
I'm pretty sure she sat in there because she wanted to keep reliving it, wanted to keep the pain fresh. She just couldn't forgive herself, you know.”

“Forgive herself for what?” he said. “He was the one who locked us up, who kept us there all night and pretended he'd shot himself.”

“I know it doesn't really make much sense, at least not to us, but she believes your father fell off the float because he was distracted and tired from being up all night. She blamed herself.”

Aaron had tried to explain the word
blame
to his students once, so he knew what a slippery word it was, that it reflected how a person perceived an event, not necessarily what was true. When his mother followed the causal chain backward, his father fell from the float and died because she had packed Aaron's suitcase, intending to leave. Without the suitcase, there would have been no closet, and the parade would have been just a parade instead of the moment that their lives split in two: before the parade and after.

“I don't understand it,” Aaron said. “I don't understand how she could feel that way. You know, all those nights she and Pastor Gronseth sat in the booth talking, mainly they talked about forgiveness. They both felt it should be much harder to earn, that people get off too easily. I always thought it was a theoretical discussion, but I see now that they were talking about themselves.” He pierced the yolk of his other egg and thought about how this fork might be the same fork that Clarence had driven into Gloria's hand all those years ago. He wondered whether Clarence had ever apologized, or whether he too had counted on easy forgiveness.

“Her closet was nothing like my closet in Moorhead,” he said. “It was big, the size of an office really. There was an overhead light, and she kept a chair in there. But still, I should have remembered something about that night. Right? It makes me feel like I'm crazy—because how could I not remember?”

“You were only five, and memory's a strange thing. Sometimes it protects us from ourselves. Look at your mother. Look at what remembering did to her.”

He ate his last strip of bacon. “That was the best breakfast I've had
in months,” he said. “I'm fortified for the road, so I guess I better get going.” He had put his bag in the car before he sat down, preparing for an efficient departure.

“Will you at least go in and say good-bye to her?” He did not want to. Gloria knew this. “Do it for me, Aaron? Because when you leave, I can tell you it will be that much worse if she has to face the fact that she didn't even have it in her to say a proper good-bye. And I'm the one who's going to have to deal with it.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Yes, of course, I'll say good-bye.”

“Thank you.” Gloria stood up and began removing their plates, and he stood to help her. “I'd like to give you something of Clary's,” she said. “It would make me happy to think of something of his with you. Would that be all right?”

“I'd like that,” he said. “Very much.”

He knew what he wanted: the book Clarence had shown him that first afternoon. He did not recall the name of the photographer, but they went into Clarence's room and looked for it together. Diane Arbus.

“I remember this book,” Gloria said. She laughed and put one of her big hands to her mouth. “I was horrified when Clary first showed it to me, but he loved the pictures.”

Aaron thought about the letter to Diane Arbus that Clarence had read to him. Clarence had written to a person he thought was alive, a person he believed would understand him and photograph him in a way that made him feel understood.

“Thank you for the book,” he said to Gloria. “And for taking care of her.”

“I guess you won't be coming back?” Gloria said.

“No,” he said. “I guess I won't.”

*  *  *

He knew that Winnie was at her store, but showing up unannounced seemed melodramatic, as though he expected her to stop earning a living in order to tend to him. Then he remembered the way she had said, “I love you,” the way she hesitated first because she was nervous, and he started his car. When he arrived, she was discussing a Madurese bed
panel with a woman who was taking notes and snapping photos with her cell phone, so he pretended to examine a dowry chest. Winnie came up behind him and threw her arms around him. “Go wait in the backroom,” she whispered. “I'm almost done with her.”

“I'm sorry to just show up,” he said when she joined him. He sat contritely atop a teak daybed.

“Don't be sorry. I'm happy you're here. I was worried about you.”

“Still, I don't want you losing sales over me.”

The front door buzzed. “We'll talk tonight,” Winnie said. “You're staying, right?”

“If you'll have me.”

“You'll need to earn your keep,” she said. She handed him a bottle of oil and a rag, and as she tended to customers, he oiled furniture, his preferred task when visiting Winnie at the store, finding comfort in the way the wood came back to life, in the ease of working beside her without speaking.

At six they closed up. He drove behind her in his rental car, back to her house, where they opened a bottle of wine and began making dinner. Soon Thomas and the boys arrived, all three of them excited to find him there. Thomas hugged him tightly, but even after all these years, Aaron found himself gauging the hug, wanting to be the one who pulled away first. He knew what Walter would say: this was just proof of the distrust that existed between gay and straight men. But maybe it was just proof of the distrust among human beings.

The boys hugged him also and then went to their rooms to change. “We'll be right back, Uncle Aaron,” they said. They had always called him that, Uncle Aaron, but after dinner, as he and Winnie talked quietly in the living room, he asked, “Do they know about me and Walter? You know, that we're not together?”

“Of course they know.” Then, because Winnie had always sensed what he was thinking, she said, “You're still their uncle. You've been their uncle their whole lives. That's not going to change.”

“Okay,” he said.

“You know, he called every day that first month. Once he called at two in the morning.”

“Walter did?” This shocked him. Walter had always adhered to proper telephone etiquette. He said it was unfair to send people to bed or welcome them to the day with the feeling of unease that a call at an inappropriate hour triggered.

“Just once. He'd been drinking,” Winnie said. “He told me he was calling because he finally got what you'd been saying all these years about king-size beds.”

“We won't be getting back together,” Aaron said. “You know that, right?”

She held up the bottle of wine they had started before dinner, and he nodded.

“I do,” she said, “but you have to give me time to get used to it, to keep getting used to it. The two of you were together more than twenty years. And now it's been what? Four months?” She stopped talking and took a sip of wine. “When you left, he waited until Christmas to call, three whole days, and then he acted like it was our usual holiday telephone call, him calling to wish ‘the gentile' a merry Christmas. He and Thomas talked for a couple of minutes, and then he talked to the boys and wished them ‘half a merry Christmas.' Finally, I asked him to put you on the line, and he said you weren't there. I said, ‘What do you mean
not there
? Where is he?' And he said, ‘Well, I imagine that by now he's settled in his new home in San Francisco.' ” Winnie looked at him. “And that's how I found out you were gone.”

“I'm sorry,” he said again, because she sounded angry.

“So that's it?” Winnie said. She held up her wineglass as if making a toast. “To the end of a twenty-year friendship.” She was definitely angry.

“Okay, you're right,” he said. “I should have told you I was leaving. You're the closest thing I've got to family. Still, you're Walter's sister, not mine, and we have to think about his feelings.”

“Well, that's the thing,” Winnie said. “He won't tell me what those feelings are. Even back in January when he was calling every day, he'd spend the whole conversation complaining about some mix-up with the room scheduling for his Advanced Spanish class. Once, he did note that he'd switched to buying quarts of milk instead of gallons,
which was the closest he came to talking about it, about you. So I was actually thankful when he called like that in the middle of the night, drunk.”

“I guess you know I haven't called him?” he said, and Winnie nodded. “Every day I think about it, but then I just, I don't know. I can't bring myself to do it.”

“Do you miss him?” Winnie asked.

“Of course I miss him. I miss him all the time.”

“Then why haven't you called?”

“At first I was afraid I'd hear his voice and want to go back. Now I'm afraid I'll hear his voice and feel nothing. Lately, it's like I've reverted to childhood, when everything made me cry, yet I feel oddly removed from emotion also. When I say it out loud to you like this, I can hear it doesn't make sense.” He paused. “Maybe I just don't think I deserve his understanding right now.”

Winnie looked away from him. “What do you think Walter deserves?” she asked.

*  *  *

They set out on Saturday, at dawn. Winnie did not like dawn, was no good at mornings. She sat beside him, not speaking, and he considered turning around, worried that she had changed her mind, though it had been her idea to go. The whole thing started when he told her about Jacob. “I don't know why,” he'd said after he finished the story, “but lately I can't stop thinking about him, wondering what happened. It's strange. The more my own life seems to be closing in on me, the more obsessed I've become with knowing what happened to some kid I've never even really met.”

“Once, years ago, when Thomas and I were in southern Spain, we crossed over into Gibraltar for the afternoon. We were walking along in the park, enjoying ourselves, when this young Moroccan man came up to us. He looked awful, feverish. He was sick, he told us, and didn't know what to do. Go to the hospital, we said, but he said the hospital wouldn't help him. He had no money and was there illegally. We gave him aspirin and ten dollars. There was nothing else we could do. We
were tourists. That's what we told ourselves. For years I wondered about that young man, whether he was okay. It weighed on me. He'd singled us out to ask for help, us out of all those people strolling by. We'd looked like the ones who would help, and we got rid of him with some aspirin and ten dollars.”

“So what you're saying is that this is not about Jacob. It's about me.”

She laughed. “I thought I was being more subtle.”

“You might not be skilled at subtlety, but that doesn't mean you're wrong.”

“So why not call the motel and talk to that receptionist? She probably kept up with things.”

“I've thought about calling her, but it feels strange, especially now that so many months have passed.”

“Well, what if we go there?” Winnie said at last.

“Go there?” he said. “To the motel?”

“Yes, to the motel.” She sounded excited. “A road trip with just the two of us.”

They both knew that there were other ways to find out what had happened to Jacob, more practical and efficient ways that did not involve driving for days, except the driving was the point. Aaron had always been most comfortable talking in cars, staring ahead with the knowledge that he did not have to rush through the conversation because there were miles to go.

They spent the first night in North Platte, Nebraska, at a motel that evoked the artificial peacefulness of a funeral parlor. When Aaron told the man behind the counter that they would like two rooms, the man said, “Well, at least she's not making you sleep in the doghouse,” engaging in one of those jokes that husbands make to other husbands. The man winked at Winnie to let her know that he was just having fun, which meant there were two things to be annoyed by: the comment and the winking. Winnie rolled her eyes but did not respond to the man. She knew how Aaron hated confrontations.