Authors: Jessica Minier
“I felt...” he began, trying to
explain it to his friend. Billy waited patiently. “I felt nervous and ready at
the same time, you know? And… good. I felt good.”
Billy smiled and nodded
thoughtfully. “You were,” he said quietly. “All those things. And I should tell
you...” He leaned over a bit and Ben slid closer to hear his advice. “... It’ll
never feel quite that way again.”
1998
Ben arrived with a muted rush of
voices and the clinking of glass on glass, heard through the open balcony door.
The wake continued to progress, apparently, even after I’d retreated outside to
collect the frazzled ends of myself. He shut the door carefully, gently, as if
he didn’t want to disturb anyone.
“Hey.” Ben slid up beside me and
pressed a cold bottle against the back of my arm.
“Hey,” I responded, unable to
look at him. I was peripherally aware that his suit was a rich, dark blue with
a muted red pin stripe, and his shirt was so white it made my head ache. This
was probably the only suit he owned, and I found myself hoping he had purchased
it long ago for a wedding, or a press conference. No one should own clothes
whose only purpose was being the color we associate with death. I thought of
the Chinese, who reserved white for funerals and red for weddings. Death as the
blank landscape of winter, marriage in the color of blood. Maybe it was an
intensity thing; a presence of something rather than an absence.
We stood together behind the
concrete railing and drank two fancy “old fashioned” lemonades. They were fizzy
and sour, more a seltzer than the sugary liquid I was used to. Below the
balcony, a thick green lawn sloped quickly to the edge of a small lake. Not
quite big enough for anything with an engine: only a few families had bothered
to build small wooden docks, accessorizing them with shining silver canoes like
sleek river dolphins. Reeds ringed the edges of the lake and a great blue heron
picked its slow path through the dense green growth, one impossibly long leg at
a time. The heron paused and then its head darted down, so fast I could barely
follow the movement – in complete contrast to the exaggerated stillness of the
moment before. The bird rose with a bright mouthful of fish. Everything glowed
with the rays of a strong and vital sun.
“Casey...” Ben started at last,
turning and resting one elbow on the railing. I knew what he was asking, what
he’d like to be able to say. Our vocabulary was ill equipped for funerals. I
shrugged and he reached out to run one hand, cold from the drink, along my
neck.
“I’d like to leave, but I don’t
have a car,” I said. The two beers I had gulped down when I first arrived at
the wake, while not overpowering, were letting themselves be known in the slow
pull through my stomach to my aching brain. I was hoping the lemonade would
overpower them, muscle them back into the recesses of my body.
“I’ll drive you,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I want to be
somewhere quiet.” I thought maybe I meant his house. His expression told me
nothing.
“Come on,” he said, taking me by
the hand. “Let me take you home.”
From the sudden depth of his
voice, I thought maybe he meant his house too.
Lee and Jake were talking to my
uncle Fredrick when I left. Fredrick had moved to Arkansas fifteen years
before, abandoning his wife and four children, and started raising poultry for
some giant chicken conglomerate. Over the years he resembled my mother less and
less, until he no longer seemed a viable member of our family. Maybe that was
what he wanted: to no longer belong to anyone. I saw Lee’s head tip up a bit,
the sharp point of her chin acknowledging my departure. I realized then that
she never really expected me to stay. How nice to have her expectations
confirmed.
Ben escorted me over to his tiny
Honda and fumbled for a moment with the keys. I watched his hands as he moved
to slip key into lock and missed. His fingernails were slightly ragged, as if
he sat alone in his kitchen and chewed them, late at night after we’d all gone
home. I found this picture somewhat incongruous and therefore believable.
Taking a deep breath, he turned and looked at me, his face not embarrassed so
much as hopeful I was feeling the same way. Not yet, I thought, alcohol numbing
my senses. He smiled sheepishly and unlocked the car.
Why was it that tall men owned
such small damn cars? The Honda was old, battered, familiar like my Corolla. It
could have been any crappy used Japanese car, with cracking vinyl trim and a cheap
stereo that was added later and didn’t exactly sit right, rattling slightly as
he navigated the speed bumps in the parking lot.
We were silent at first, Ben
tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, me staring out the window but not
seeing anything. The roads were no longer memory-inducing. Unknown houses and
shops lined the back streets; a community I had no part in, one I didn’t
understand existed here. This place was about money and the perfect
coordination of curtains and valances and upholstery. At home I had mini-blinds
from the big home store down the street. Lately I’d been hating mini-blinds.
They were the representation of all that renting entailed. Generic,
interchangeable – I wanted to own something.
I was not particularly surprised
when we slid to a stop at a small gas station. This was the turning point. One
road would take me to Lee’s house, the other to Ben’s. He killed the engine and
we sat for a moment with the singing of the cicadas.
“Be right back,” he said, and
stepped out of the car. I watched as he walked across the tarmac to the little
window where the clerk waited. Ben’s shoulders were hunched as if he were
protecting himself from a bitter wind. A sheer curtain of heat rose from the
pavement and billowed across the empty lot in front of me. Up on blocks, an old
Chevy rusted quietly into the kudzu beneath a collapsing sign: The Kuntry
Kitchen. I saw no sign of a restaurant.
I opened Ben’s glove compartment.
He had his car manual, his registration and his insurance card in a neat little
black vinyl wallet. A plastic grocery bag was balled up in one corner. Three
dollar bills lay tucked beneath the manual. There was nothing else.
He stood outside the driver’s
window, one hand on the gas pump, the other in his pocket. Despite the easy cut
of the suit pants, he seemed uncomfortable, as if he’d rather be wearing
anything else. I could sympathize. My own dark suit scratched the back of my
neck and stuck to the tender skin on the backs of my thighs. I bought it in
Seattle, for a conference, and that was how it felt. Briskly efficient, a
working woman’s suit. Underneath, I had a cool lavender silk shell. I should
have taken the jacket off, but frankly, I was afraid of the color of that
shirt. Like liquid evening light, that delicate shade of lilac seemed
inappropriate for a funeral. Purple was supposed to be a mourning color, but
what was it when it had been diffused with white, watered-down and softened?
Ben opened the door and slid in
stiffly beside me. We both hesitated, creating a sudden unnatural stillness.
“Do you want to be alone?” he
asked at last.
For propriety’s sake, I should
have said yes. I should have sent away this man who was tapping one finger
against the stiff woolen fabric of his pants. I found myself staring at that
hand, imagining the subtle scratch of fabric against skin. I was tired of
mourning. I felt like I’d been mourning my whole damn life, I just was never
sure what it was for. And I missed my father. The feeling was so elemental, so
essential that it became indescribable.
“No,” I said. He nodded
gratefully, wearily, and we started up the road to his house.
We paused at a stop sign,
watching as an ancient Volkswagen bug chugged reluctantly across the road, each
wheel well painted a different color.
“Do you have anything to drink at
your place?” I asked and he cleared his throat as we started again.
“No,” he said. “Do you want me to
stop?”
I shook my head and we sped up.
Ben shifted restlessly beside me, clearly driving too fast in the effort just
to get us somewhere. He pulled up with a sudden jerk in the driveway of his
house, stopping with a finality that made me want to stare at him, but I
didn’t. It occurred to me he might be nervous about having me there.
It occurred to me that I might be
a bit dense, in spite of the strong summer light.
I stayed outside on the porch
while he hunted down two glasses of water from the interior. He had an old
fashioned porch swing, but it looked a little suspect, as if no one had sat in
it for years. Instead, I leaned over the balcony and watched the road, empty in
the mid-day heat. Lizards slipped from stones in the garden to threaten one
another, heads jerking skyward. Deep green dragonflies buzzed past the porch on
their way out to the swamp. I was astonished, in my Northern-ness, by the
tropical decadence of the place. Didn’t Florida understand I was in mourning?
If nothing else, the porch was a clear haven for mosquitoes, but netting hung
suspended in fat sausage rolls above my head, ready to be deployed like a flak
jacket as evening crept in. A jay the color of the sky flitted down and paused
in the browned grass of Ben’s lawn, hopping closer and closer to me before
screaming and flapping violently off into the trees. I understood the
inclination.
“It’s no cooler in there,” Ben informed
me when he returned, sans his suit jacket and tie. “I really ought to fix that
air-conditioner.”
“Only if you’re going to stay,” I
said and he nodded, taking a long drink from his glass, sweat glistening on his
throat, collecting in the hollows of his collarbone. He sat down on the top
step, legs wide, hands hanging loosely between them. The glass refracted a
glimmering pattern of light around his feet.
“Shit,” he said and lowered his
head.
I was still standing at the
railing, so I couldn’t see his face. At last he lifted his head and his profile
was too sweaty, too peeked for me to tell if he’d been crying.
“Are you ok?” I asked, without
moving. He nodded and took another drink. I hadn’t touched mine. Water seemed
too inconsequential, too prone to evaporation.
“Did you find out anything else?”
he asked, and he patted the stair beside him, once. I stared at him until he
looked away, then I came to sit next to him.
“No, but then, I haven’t asked
anyone anything. I can’t tell Lee and I don’t think she knows anything anyway.”
“Probably not,” he replied, and
then he carefully slid his hand under my own and lifted it, letting the weight
of my fingers intertwine us. His skin was cool from the glass of water, and
damp with condensation. “Have you thought about why he wanted you to know?”
“Selfishness?” I speculated.
“Pride? Conscience? Who cares? I only know I didn’t want to know.”
He slid his fingers over mine,
slowly, sending sparks of recognition up my arm. “Why not? It’s the truth,
right? And that’s what we all want from one another, isn’t it?”
I thought he sounded bitter, but
couldn’t really hear anything clearly beyond my own throbbing head. Lifting my
glass, I took a small sip of water, letting only a little slide past the sour
taste of my own mouth.
“You don’t understand,” I said,
which was lame, but I was angry and sad. “You can’t imagine what it’s like, to
have this ideal conception of him all my life and then to have it destroyed.”
I was standing, loosed from him,
pacing the paving stones set into the dead lawn.
He spoke without anger. “Of
course I can.” As if this should have been obvious to me, which it probably
should have been.
“I don’t know who I can believe
anymore,” I said at last and he nodded.
“I know, Casey. You keep
forgetting that I know.”
He stretched out his hand to
touch mine, to pull me back over to the relative shade of the porch.
“Sit down,” he said. “I have
something to tell you.”
I was really, really wishing for
a beer. I collapsed next to him and he took my hand in his again, hot and
sweaty as my own. His voice was slightly nasal, as if he had a head cold.
“He told me when I was in the
hospital for the second surgery. There I was: career over, arm destroyed… and
in comes Billy Wells, wearing his Series ring and sitting next to me – crying,
wringing his hands and begging for my forgiveness. I was furious and hurt and
thought he was the most selfish man I had ever met. I told him he couldn’t have
my forgiveness. Ever.”
He paused to squeeze my hand
almost tentatively.
“What did he say?” I managed,
since he was watching me, his face turned slightly away so that I couldn’t look
him in the eye.
Ben shrugged and finished off his
water. “He begged a bit. Then he got angry at me, said I didn’t understand what
he was going through. When he calmed down enough to realize how ridiculous that
sounded, he asked me not to tell anyone. He explained that he was in debt.”
“My God. Must run in the family,”
I said, and Ben raised a curious eyebrow. I shrugged. “Never mind. It’s a Lee
issue. Go on.”
“Well, we didn’t make the kind of
money then that players do now. I mean, a quarter-million was really something.
I guess he wanted to free himself so you and Lee and your mom wouldn’t be
burdened. But to his credit, he made a mistake, and he knew it. The great
irony, of course, is that he only won the bet for the fourth game by chance.
They took him out in the fourth inning and put me in.”
“Yeah, but he threw the second
game, and probably conned Andy or whoever it was into throwing the third. And
he would have thrown the fourth. He was trying to throw the fucking World
Series, Ben.” I found it impossible to listen to Ben without the anger at my
father rising to the surface.