The Boys Are Back in Town (2 page)

Tugging his sweatshirt from the back of his chair, he got up and hurried from the newsroom, glancing at the clock as he rushed for the elevator. He was going to be late.

Thanks to Tad Green's bad news, the magic of the October day had escaped him, yet it returned the moment he set foot back out on the street. The air was still crisp, the sky ice blue, and he could smell the smoke from a fireplace or wood-burning stove on the breeze. Right here; this was the only kind of magic that mattered.

As he walked the four blocks to Carmine's Trattoria—a place he loved for the freshness of its food and the paper map-of-Italy placemats that set off an otherwise sophisticated decor—he took his sweatshirt off and draped it over his shoulder. The lunchtime crowd had hit the sidewalks, milling about and crossing the streets at abandon, slowing Cambridge traffic even further. Will passed a construction site, where surprisingly tactful men in hardhats watched a slender, model-beautiful woman walk her terrier down the street with admiring glances but no rude shouts or whistles.

Will watched her as well. The woman was breathtaking in a sheer, sky blue top and crisply new jeans. Seeing her—and the men loosening their ties and women tying sweaters around their waists—made it feel like spring instead of fall. Will found himself suffused with a feeling of well-being that brought a smile to his face and made him chuckle softly to himself.

When he walked past the front windows of Carmine's he spotted Ashleigh and Eric DeSantis at a table right in front. Grinning, he tapped on the glass. Ashleigh was on her cell phone, but when she looked up and saw him her eyes sparkled and her face lit up with a smile that made her look ten years old again. She wore a deep red cable-knit sweater that brought out the auburn highlights in her chestnut hair and was tight enough to flatter her slender frame. In a white oxford shirt and khaki pants, Eric sat tilted back on his chair and raised a hand to offer a casual wave. That was Eric, cool as could be, letting the world just wash over him.

When Will was a kid, Ashleigh had literally been the girl next door. Their mothers had walked them side by side in their strollers and planned play dates. They had grown up together on the broad expanse of lawn between their backyards, bisected by a row of tall shrubs, and on the swing set behind Ashleigh's house. They had explored the woods that began at the back of their property lines and stretched what looked like forever, into some primordial forest of their imagination.

She was his oldest friend, and he had never thought of her any other way. Even when his buddies at Kennedy Middle School and later Eastborough High teased him, Will looked at her thin, elegant features and lush brown hair and saw the girl he'd gone trick-or-treating with every Halloween since birth, the girl who had cried on his shoulder the first time she had ever kissed a boy, because the little shit hadn't kissed her back. Will had punched Jimmy Renahan in the head for that one, and Jimmy hadn't had a clue as to why.

Will's parents had never had any other children, but in Ashleigh, he had a sister.

When he walked into the restaurant she rushed to meet him. He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her several inches off the ground in a bear hug.

“Hey, Ash. Welcome home.”

She grinned and hugged him again. “You have to visit more. I miss you so much. You haven't come down to see us since New Year's!”

Ashleigh and Eric lived in Elmsford, New York, where she was a lawyer and he was the athletic director for a private high school, and where they still somehow managed to be fantastic parents to their twins. Though he knew it wasn't, they made it look easy, and that gave him faith.

Will made an effort to go down and see them a couple of times a year and always came away pleased that Ashleigh had married Eric. It could be difficult at times—when he had been with Caitlyn the four of them had often formed a social quartet—but his pleasure at seeing Ashleigh happy far outweighed whatever discomfort his own regrets might bring him.

With his arm around her he walked to the table and shook hands with her husband.

“Good to see you, Will,” Eric said. “Have a seat.”

They hadn't been seated for thirty seconds before Ashleigh leaned over and gave him a conspiratorial grin. “So, come on. You know you want to go.”

“I really don't.”

Eric shook his head and picked up a sweating bottle of Sam Adams from the table. “You do. You just want to make us all suffer and prove our love by begging you to come along. So no more of that shit.” His eyes were alight with mischief. “One comment from me, Will, then we're done. If I was single, I would take this opportunity to spend the weekend banging all the girls I wanted to have sex with in high school but never got the chance to.”

Ashleigh leaned over the table, chin rested on her palm, hazel eyes narrowed with interest. “Oh, really. And which ones were those, honey?”

“Nah, I'm not talking about me, sweetheart. But Will, he was a horny dog back then. I'm sure he's got a list.”

His wife pretended to look scandalized and Will just rolled his eyes and reached for his menu.

Ashleigh sighed softly. “Is it Caitlyn? Please don't tell me you don't want to go just because you don't want to see her. Otherwise I'll have to lock her in a closet for the weekend.”

“No. I don't think I'd enjoy seeing her, but it wouldn't kill me. Time heals all wounds, right?”

He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. Will's relationship with Caitlyn Rouge had survived high school graduation and four years of college, only to fall messily apart on what was to be their wedding day. It was an old wound, but the truth was that five years after their breakup, it still had not healed.

“So?” Ashleigh prodded, nudging him, knowing with absolute certainty that he loved her too much to take offense.

As he perused the list of salads Will shook his head slightly. Even if Caitlyn did show up, years had passed since the last time they had seen one another. The world had moved on, unmindful of whether or not he still loved her. Which was fine, in a way. A lot had happened in those intervening years, and it was not as though he had any illusions.

“I'll regret this later if I don't go, won't I?” he asked without glancing up from the menu.

“Horribly. Particularly because of the torment you'll suffer at my hands,” Ashleigh promised.

Slowly, Will lowered his head to the table and thumped it once against the wood.

W
HEN HE RETURNED
to the office the first thing he did was check his e-mail. The first of the two film screenings he had to go to started at three o'clock, so he only had about half an hour before he had to fly out the door again. There were twenty-seven e-mails, many of which were attempting to lure him to various pornographic Web sites or to sell him Omaha steaks or crystal penguins. Roughly one third of them were business; a handful were personal.

As he was responding to his e-mail, Will ruminated on the events of the day thus far. His feelings about the reunion did not stem from an actual aversion to attending, but from a general lack of interest. Certainly there was a curiosity about old friends and acquaintances, but the people he really wanted to see he had already made plans to visit with while they were in town. Lunch with Ashleigh and Eric had been planned because he had no intention of attending the reunion. He saw Danny and his wife often enough.

His brow furrowed. There was something else he had planned, but it seemed to have slipped his mind. Then, abruptly, it came to him.
Lebo!
He and Mike Lebo had exchanged e-mails the previous week. Mike was flying in from Arizona for the reunion and he and Will had made a plan to get together on Sunday afternoon.

What the hell's wrong with me?
Will thought, annoyed that he had let it slip his mind. Mike had been part of the group he'd hung out with all through high school, along with Danny and Eric, Ashleigh and Caitlyn, and a handful of others. They spoke a few times a year, but he had not seen Mike for ages.

For a long moment he stared at his computer screen, and then he chuckled softly to himself.
Why the hell not?

Will typed up a quick e-mail to let Mike know that he had changed his mind. Seeing everyone separately was all right, but the more he thought about it the more he realized that having the whole gang together would be really nice. He had to search his memory for Mike's e-mail address, since for some reason he couldn't find it in his computer address book, but it was fairly simple and his recall for that kind of thing had always been good.

He sent the e-mail, confirming that he would be there, but a few minutes later, as he was getting ready to head out to the first screening, he received notice in his Outlook in-box that his message had been rejected because the user name “lebomp01” was unknown to the system.

Will frowned and stared at the screen. It had taken him a moment to remember, but he was certain there was no mistake in the e-mail address he had used. There was nothing he could do at the moment, however. Not if he wanted to make the screening on time. And when he was wearing his critic's hat he was a stickler about promptness. Will James would never write a review about something he had not witnessed in its entirety.

He'd see Mike tomorrow night. Anything they had to say to one another would keep until then.

Sometime during the night it began to rain. Will woke, staggered into the bathroom, and forced his eyes open to slits only wide enough to guarantee his aim. When he returned to the mess of his bed and fumbled to wrap himself in the covers, he became aware of the patter of raindrops on the windows and the sound the water made sluicing down the drainpipes.

Barely awake, he settled his head back into the pillows and let the sound lull him back to sleep, just as he had always done as a child in the small bedroom of his family's home on Parmenter Road.

By morning the rain had stopped but the sky was still overcast, and the air that whispered in through the partially open windows was damp and cold. Will stretched and yawned and stared at the clock on his bureau. It was already a quarter to nine.

For several minutes he just lay there with his eyes closed, hands crossed over his chest as though in deathly repose, and wondered if he would fall back to sleep. He might have dozed a little, but soon enough his eyes fluttered open and he knew he was now up for the day. With the exception of the aftermath of the rare night of drunken debauchery, Will never managed to sleep very late, even if he wanted to.

He scraped his hand across the stubble on his chin and slipped from the bed in his T-shirt and underwear. He snatched up a pair of blue, mostly clean sweatpants from the cold hardwood floor. Balancing carefully, he slipped into the sweats and then ran both hands through his sleep-bedraggled hair. In the bathroom, he splashed some water on his face to help him wake up and tried to focus on the eyes staring back at him from the mirror.

“You're really gonna do this?” he asked himself. But he knew the answer, just as he knew that mostly he was just blowing smoke, even to himself. The truth was, he wanted to go to the reunion. He just wasn't sure what to expect.

His stomach rumbled and he thought about breakfast, but there was something else he had to do first. Will's feet were cold on the wood floor as he went through the living room, but the linoleum in the kitchen was even colder. The archaic radiator hissed and clanked on the other side of the room, but the heat that emanated from it never seemed to warm the floor. The apartment was in an old Victorian in Somerville, just outside of Davis Square, only a single T stop away from the office.

But Will wasn't going in to the office today. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it right, devote the day to the sort of rumination and reminiscence that he rarely indulged in.

He retrieved a glass from the cabinet and poured himself some Grovestand orange juice, the kind with extra pulp. Then he picked up the phone and called the
Trib,
dialing the main number for the newsroom. After three rings, the phone was answered by Ruth Kaplan, who doubled as receptionist and part-time copy editor for the paper.

“Boston Tribune.”

“Morning, Ruth, it's Will.”

“Hey, there,” Ruth said pleasantly. They'd been out a few times, slept together twice, and both knew it was not going to go any further. “I noticed you hadn't come in today. You on assignment?”

“Nope,” Will said happily. “Actually, I'm calling in sick.”

“You don't sound sick,” Ruth mused.

“Oh, but I am. So very. If anyone asks, I'm e-mailing the final drafts of the two features I've been working on to Tad and to Lara. Otherwise, I'm off the clock.”

There was a pause as Ruth took this in. When she spoke again he could hear the amusement in her voice.

“Whatever you say, Will. Feel better.”

“Absolutely.”

They said their good-byes and Will hung up the phone. He downed half the glass of OJ, then left it on the counter as he went back through the apartment to the second bedroom, which he used as a home office. A sense of quiet satisfaction filled him as he drew a deep breath and let it out. Was he disappointed about Lara Zahansky getting the promotion he had hoped for? Shit, yeah. Was he going to let it get in the way of his job? Not at all.

On the other hand, Tad Green probably would have given him the day off if he had asked the previous afternoon and explained why he wanted it. Will wasn't going to leave it up to Tad, though. He liked the man well enough, most of the time. But right about now, he figured Tad Green could go fuck himself.

Will chuckled.
Looks like you need this weekend more than you thought you did.

In the black leather chair he had picked up for next to nothing at Staples, he turned on his computer and logged on to the Net. More of the usual spam. He answered the few personal messages, but when the in-box was empty he stared at the computer screen for several seconds as though expecting something more. It was the same way he always double-checked the contents of his mailbox; the way Yukon Cornelius in the
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
TV special licked the end of his ice pick and said, “ah, nuthin'.”

But there weren't any other messages.

His friend Danny Plumer had been hugely into the music of the seventies back in high school and on countless nights Will had found himself trapped in the passenger seat while Danny drove his father's car, listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Eagles. A line from a Bob Seger song stuck in his head now—and though he could remember sitting in the Jetta, roaring down Route 495 with the windows down, hearing that song pumping from the speakers, he couldn't for the life of him remember the song the words were attached to.

The words, though, he recalled very well.
“See some old friends,”
Seger had sung.
“Good for the soul.”

Will had never really gotten into the old stuff. He was more interested in Nirvana and Soundgarden, and to a lesser extent in calmer bands like They Might Be Giants and Barenaked Ladies. But that didn't mean he couldn't appreciate the stuff Danny listened to. Or the words.

So this weekend he would see some old friends. And maybe, just maybe, it would be good for the soul.

B
Y THE TIME
Will had his Toyota rolling west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, the sky had begun to clear. The cloud cover was dark in places, but there were patches where the sun broke through, revealing blue sky beyond. There might be a few more showers, but Will believed the clouds were on the way out.

It felt good to be away from the city and he kept the window rolled down a few inches, WBCN cranked a little too loud on the radio. The woods that lined both sides of the turnpike were rich with the colors of autumn, the trees bright with reds and coppers and golds that shone despite the overcast sky. He drove on toward Natick and Framingham, and Eastborough beyond, and he could not help but think of Halloween, of trick-or-treating, and raking frosted leaves with his dad, who had always waited late in the season to do the job.

Danny and the guys would have ragged him for romanticizing the suburbs. Parts of Eastborough were rural, but it was not exactly the country. In a way, though, it was still a classic small New England town.

Will spent a lot of his free time hanging out with Zora and Kate, the lesbian couple who lived downstairs from him and who were always trying to fix him up with their straight girlfriends. They shared movie nights with him, went to the occasional club. There were a handful of people at work he would have a drink or a meal with now and again. And of course there was Danny. Then there was Carlos, his closest friend from college, who lived in Salem and worked in graphic design.

Not a lot of friends, perhaps, but his life was fairly busy just the same. And maybe that was all he had room for. All in all, the job and his handful of friends kept him busy enough that it had been well over a year, maybe closer to two, since he had done anything more than drive past exit 12 on the turnpike. Once his parents had moved, he had no real reason to go back to Eastborough.

It wasn't home anymore.

But as he paid the toll and drove the Toyota around the curved ramp onto Route 9, it sure felt like coming home.

Eastborough was part of a geographical diamond that also included Northborough, Southborough, and Westborough, but the easiest way to reach it was by slipping past Framingham and into Marlboro, then curving slightly west on Old Buffalo Farm Road. The name always made Will smile. The suburbs, sure, but that was the country right there. The scary thing was, there actually was a farm that had buffaloes in its pasture, and penny candy in the general store across the street. It was a little piece of quaint that stuck around mainly because nobody had the heart to let it go.

As he drove into Eastborough, images flashed through Will's mind. He was certain that the occasion of his visit had him feeling more nostalgic than normal, but the images kept coming despite that awareness. He passed Market Street, which would lead down to Kennedy Middle School and Robinson Field, where he and his friends had played baseball and football, making up their own rules.

He guided the Toyota past the strip mall that contained The Sampan, which had the best Chinese takeout in town, and Annie's Book Stop, where he had bought all of the used paperback mystery, horror, and fantasy novels that had intrigued him so much as a kid—right up until the point where he had stopped reading that sort of thing entirely. Still, the memory of the place—the smell of the old books, digging through the shelves—was a pleasant one. He had done the same kind of cultural archaeology in the used CD shop down on Knight Road, and he knew that those afternoons had contributed as much to his chosen career as the trips to the movies in Marlboro and Framingham.

In the center of town he passed the library, in whose study carrels he had first kissed Polly Creedon in the fifth grade. Athens Pizza had been replaced by Giovanni's Pizza & Subs, but other than the sign the place looked much the same. He had taken Sandy Weisman there on the first official date he had ever had with a girl, and he and the guys—Danny, Eric, Mike, Nick, and Brian—had hung out there a hundred times. A thousand times—or so it seemed.

He wondered if any of their graffiti was still legible on the bathroom walls.

Once his mother had driven away from Athens with the two pizzas she had just picked up still on the roof. Will still remembered the thump as the two boxes tumbled down to hit the trunk before flopping into the street. Diana James had sworn like a truck driver while her son Will was laughing his ass off.

Gone completely were Herbie's Ice Cream, where Will and Nick Acosta had worked summers all through high school, and the Comic Book Palace, where Mike had dragged them dozens of times. None of the other guys had been into comics but they'd all go along with Mike if they were out and happened to be passing by. Then, of course, they'd torture him for reading X-Men and Spider-Man, and never mind that they all thought Wolverine was cool.

What disturbed Will was that he could not even remember how long Herbie's and the Palace had been gone. It might have been years or only months. The last couple of times he had driven through Eastborough, he knew he would not have been paying enough attention to notice.

He turned west after the center, down Fordham Street. Video stores, gas stations, and liquor stores lined the road that led, eventually, back toward Route 9 and the pike. An ancient McDonald's stood at the intersection with Weldon Hill, and he had a sudden image of being hungover there after a sleepover at Tommy Berman's, pushing past the other guys to get to the bathroom so he could vomit up an Egg McMuffin.

Farther along Fordham Street there was Liam's, the Irish tavern where they had all tried to get served, and where Nick Acosta now tended bar. The reunion weekend would get under way there at seven o'clock—as good a place as any to kick things off. He wondered how many people would attend the party at Liam's or the football game tomorrow, and how many would just show up for the official reunion gathering on Saturday night.

He wondered which of his classmates wouldn't bother to show at all.

And, much as he tried to avoid it, he wondered if Caitlyn would be there. How she would look. Who she would be with.

They had been over for a long time and Will was not a fool. Not only was he sure there was no chance of reconciliation, he had no desire to attempt one. The woman had not bothered to make an appearance at the altar on what had been intended to be their wedding day. They were history, and Will James had a lot of future to look forward to. A full life to go back to on Sunday night when the reunion weekend was over.

But some of the best memories he had, some of the sweetest moments in his life, he had shared with Caitlyn. Even if there was nothing ahead for them, they were bonded forever by what lay behind. In a way, he supposed that was true of all of them, the entire crew with whom he had grown up. Whatever his life was now, they were part of its foundation. Their collective experiences were a part of him, and would always be, even if he never saw any of them again.

It was almost two o'clock when he turned the Toyota up Parmenter Road. The neighborhood had been built in the late fifties and early sixties, and looked it. Ranches and split-levels dominated, but still it was one of the nicer areas in Eastborough if you didn't count the upscale private developments that had sprung up in the decade since he'd graduated.