by Kelly Harms
Then I go home to tell Janey the news. She is upstairs, lying in bed, her eyes rimmed with pink from all the crying. She looks like hell, and I can see that things are hitting her very hard today, so I sit down on the side of her bed and tell her everything is going to be okay. She squints at me like I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have. I know the grief is going to catch up to me, just as it has with her, but right now I feel a strange buoyancy, the lightness of confession, I guess. Just for now, for this brief moment in time, I have no secrets, from anybody. Aunt Midge would be damn proud.
When I come downstairs I find J.J. leaning over the dishwasher, pulling out clean dishes and trying to figure out where they go. I take the stack of plates he’s clutching and put them away. “You don’t have to stay here, you know. You can go home whenever.”
“I’m just trying to make sure you’re all right,” he says, sounding a little hurt.
“I’m going to be fine,” I tell him. “It just takes time,” I tell myself.
“Well, I have time,” he says stubbornly, taking a wad of silverware out of the dishwasher baskets and opening first one wrong drawer, then another.
Not really, I think, but instead I ask what I’ve been dying to know since the moment I told him about my horrible lie to Janey. “How come you’re being so nice to me?” I point him toward the flatware drawer. “How come you aren’t telling me where to go?”
J.J. tilts his head at me confused. “Why would I do that?”
I look at him aghast. “Have you been unconscious over the last few days?”
He shakes his head and clangs a pile of forks into their drawer. “No. Have you?”
I stop unloading dishes. “What do you mean by that?”
“Have you somehow not noticed in all the time we’ve spent together that I am a good guy? That I am not the sort of man who will just abandon someone he cares about because she’s done some stupid—some very stupid—things?” He slams the drawer closed hard enough to rattle all the cutlery within. “That when the chips are down, I’m the sort of person you can count on?”
I stand mute for a moment, duly admonished. “Of course,” I say. “Of course I know that.”
“Do you really? Are you sure you don’t think I’m going to dump you the moment Aunt Midge is in the ground and go find some Dartmouth girl to replace you?”
I am dumbstruck. That is exactly what I think. “Well, maybe…”
J.J. groans. “See?” he cries. “Nean, you drive me crazy. Is it so hard to believe that I’m going to forgive you for all your bullshit?”
I bite my lip, unsure if I am in trouble, or what.
“You have to start believing it, you know,” he tells me, as forcefully as I’ve ever heard him. “If we are going to make this work long distance, you have to believe in me.”
“But,” I begin, trying to think how to tell him that it’s okay, that he doesn’t have to stick with me after next week, when school starts. That maybe that’s not even what’s best. “But I’m not sure that I—”
“Don’t even start with that,” he growls angrily. “Don’t try to give me an out I don’t want.”
I grab his hand. “It’s just that…” I go hunting for the right way to explain, something that will show him how I do appreciate him, do see how special he is. “It’s just not possible that you are as good as you seem,” I say at last. “And if you are, you deserve better.”
J.J. shakes his head. “If that’s what you think, Nean, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to talk you out of it. But if you think you might be worthy of a decent guy, that it might just be your turn to be treated well, that someone good might actually be out there waiting to be with you, you know where to find me, okay?”
Then he faces me and puts his hands on my shoulders. He kisses the top of my head and repeats himself a little more quietly. “You know where to find me?” The way he says it, I only hear good-bye.
I nod, a little dazed, a little unsure of the right thing to say. “I’ll find you,” I choose at last, but I am saying it to his back; he has already headed out of the kitchen and is opening the front door to leave.
JANEY
“Cooking, preparing food, involves far more than just creating a meal for family or friends: it has to do with keeping yourself intact.”
—ALICE WATERS, Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook
The funeral, or wake, or whatever this thing is that Nean has arranged, is as grand a success as it can be without the dead actually coming back to life. It starts officially at 5:00 p.m., but by 4:45 the seashore is crowded with people—all the bartenders at every bar in Little Pond (and there are more than you’d think) apparently had a chance to form a close attachment to Aunt Midge, and so did the folks at the farmer’s market and the local shops. J.J.’s parents are there shaking hands with Nean, and I see Nancy the Geoduck Perpetrator blowing her nose into a tissue. The neighbors on the cove, most of whom I’ve never met, all seem to have known her somehow, and of course all the staff members of the shelter are there with bright tears hovering in their eyes. The shelter director, a graying man named Rupert who is much, much more bereaved than seems proper, points out people from the amassing crowd who met Aunt Midge during their stays at the shelter, but have since moved on to more permanent housing situations. I am impressed with just how many people passed through Aunt Midge’s life in search of help during the last few months. To think that all this time, I thought I was the only one.
Five minutes before the service starts, a rental van full of the shelter’s current patrons arrive, a mixed bag of men whom I now see, with clearer eyes, are from all walks of life. I find myself looking desperately for one particular face, but of course he isn’t there. I know how badly I reacted to his situation, how incredibly cold and bitter I was to him, and how I’ve said things that there just aren’t take-backs for. But I can’t help hoping he might remember the other things about me that he praised so often and so earnestly and forget the meanness I showed him one day in a freezer. And I tell myself over and over again that my bad behavior shouldn’t taint his memory of Aunt Midge. But it doesn’t matter what I tell myself. He isn’t there. He isn’t coming.
The service is short. I’ve made Nean promise to do all the public speaking for both of us today—I tell her that even though, thanks to Noah’s “immersion therapy,” I am feeling just fine in this large crowd of people, having them all stare at me at once is still more than I can handle. I’ve given her the large yellow envelope Aunt Midge kept in her underwear drawer and reminded me about every now and then; there’s no mistaking it for anything else. In her shaky old-lady cursive it is marked in blue ink: “Read to my fans when I croak.” And I’ve suggested some appropriate songs to play on the iPod Nean has connected to a tinny indoor/outdoor speaker that shouldn’t offend Aunt Midge’s ghost too terribly much. Nean tells me she’ll take it from there. I nearly cry with gratitude for all she’s done to make this easier on me.
At 5:35, when we’ve finally managed to stop the milling and gotten everyone to stand quietly on the grassy part of the beach, facing Nean where she stands with her back to the ocean and a gaudy plastic urn next to her on a table, she begins.
“Everybody,” she starts, “we are gathered here to say good-bye to the living incarnation of Janine Brown’s Great-Aunt Midge,” she says. “Janey and I want to thank you all for coming to support us today. We know wherever Aunt Midge is now, she is smiling down on us.” I shake my head. Nean has no idea.
“Aunt Midge prepared a few words to guide us today as we mourn our loss and celebrate her life at the same time.”
She stops to open the envelope and reads a few sentences to herself before she launches in. I see in her face just a hint of surprise, and I smirk.
Nean clears her throat. “Maureen ‘Midge’ Richardson was a fashion icon and a pillar of society,” she reads with a straight face but just the slightest cough at the end of the sentence. She presses on. “She was the inspiration to many, and beloved by all. In her t
oo brief life here on earth, her accomplishments are almost too many to name, but let us attempt to highlight a few of the most momentous achievements of this remarkable woman.” I watch Nean’s eyes bug out as she reads this. She has no idea what’s coming.
“Who can forget how, in September of her nineteenth year, she ate seventeen corn dogs at the Hog Wild Daze Festival in Hiawatha, Iowa, to win the eating contest and be crowned the Hog Wild Daze Pork Princess? But that was simply a foreshadowing of future accomplishments. Just a few short years later she had the distinction of being prohibited from reentering no fewer than eight of New York City’s finest drinking establishments and spent a total of three nights in the tank, each on separate occasions. In her middle, more moderate years, she was known for experimenting with life as a vegetarian, a communist, a macramé artisan, and, most memorably, a student of transcendental meditation. She could roller skate, dress a deer, and shoot a gun. For her fiftieth birthday she went bungee jumping and did not pee her pants on the bounce. She was married once, to the late Albert Richardson, who was a great man and a better lover.” Nean swallows hard at this last bit, and I look around taking in the slightly confused—or dare I hope amused?—faces of her mourners.
“Over her lifetime she amassed more than twenty-five traffic tickets, was tattooed three times, accidentally stole two husbands, and was featured once in an adult video. She fell in love seven times, twice with astronauts.” Nean stops, looks up at me as if to ask if she has to read the rest. I give her a solemn nod. “Also, she cured cancer, swine flu, and feminine itching.”
Now the audience is tittering, in, at last, on the joke. Nean looks up, helpless, and raises her voice to be heard. “She will be greatly missed, and is survived by her two favorite girls, Janey and Nean Brown.”
She drops the letter to her side and looks right at me, shaking her head and smiling just a little. Then she mimes putting a gun to her head and firing and I smile back and shrug. What can you do? I ask her with my eyes. She shrugs back.
“So everyone,” she calls over the murmurs of surprise and laughter, “That’s it. Please join us for punch and chow at the house.” Then she goes to the iPod and hits play, and “November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses starts playing softly as the guests begin to mill again in earnest.
I make my way across the throngs to Nean. “Really? ‘November Rain’?” I ask.
“Really?” she mimics. “You didn’t see fit to tell me to read the letter first?”
I smile. “I knew you could handle it. Besides, I think it sounded better with the element of surprise. Gave it that certain spontaneous quality Aunt Midge was always so good at.”
“Damn straight,” she says. She puts her hand on my arm and gives me a tug. “Let’s go slice up the ham,” she says, and the two of us start up the path to the house together.
* * *
Five hours later we are crowbar-ing the last of the masses out of our house. Though I have cooked more than I’ve slept in the last few days, digging for solace with wooden spoons and silicone spatulas, I find that we’ve been picked clean of every last bite—all that remains in the fridge are three kinds of mustard and some ginger ale. The kitchen is a train wreck, and there are plastic cups on every surface that’s not already covered by wadded-up paper napkins. In all, the place looks like it’s been crammed full of drunken coeds, not somber mourners, and I figure that would have pleased Aunt Midge to no end.
Just as I’m taking stock of the mess, I hear steps in the hall. “It doesn’t exactly scream ‘funeral’ in here,” calls a voice from the front door, which has been standing wide open for hours. It’s a voice I would know anywhere. A voice that makes me vibrate through like the Jell-O dessert that Nancy brought. I drop the Bundt pan I’m rinsing and grab for a towel to dry my hands.
But Nean beats me to the door. “What are you doing here?” I hear her ask snappishly. “Janey’s not here.”
“I’m right here,” I call, trying not to sing the words. Noah is here! “Let him in.”
I rush to the archway of the kitchen just in time to see Nean staring Noah down dangerously. She has a hand on each hip and the readied stance of a lioness, and Noah looks cowed, but still achingly handsome, with his floppy hair tucked back behind his ears and a tie knotted clumsily at his neck. He’s dressed up for the funeral, I realize, as I watch him try to scooch past Nean without starting some sort of brawl.
“It’s okay, Nean,” I say, waving Noah into the kitchen, onto my home turf, and holding out a hand for the foil-wrapped paper plate he’s brought along.
She sneers disgustedly as he hands it to me but still follows us into the kitchen. Of course she’s protective—she only knows what she must have inferred the night after our ill-fated date. I’ll have to fill her in later. But now, I need to apologize to Noah, and so I give her my very best bug-eyed, eyebrows-lifted “go away” look.
She ignores me. “He’s a little late if he wanted to pay his respects to Aunt Midge,” she says, as if he’s not standing right there next to us. “The service was at five.”
“I know,” he says, hands open to both of us in apology. “I just didn’t know if … I mean, Janey already had her hands full, I figured. So I waited, parked down by the water, in my car. I didn’t want to upset her.”
I feel light when he says this—he’s been here, waiting nearby all this time—but Nean snorts. “So you come over as soon as the last person leaves to try to make a hard day even harder?” she demands. “What is wrong with you?”
“I’m sorry,” he tells Nean, “but I had to apologize.” He looks helpless, but he has just uttered the magic words, the words I needed for all the world to hear. I inhale and close my eyes just for a moment, basking in this tiny moment when we might have another chance. “I couldn’t just leave things the way they were.”
Before I can apologize in return, Nean snaps back. “You could, actually, but maybe you’re just too selfish.”
I put my arm out in front of her, like a crossing guard at a stoplight. “Nean, let’s just hear him out, okay?” I say. I know I should rescue him from Nean’s interrogation altogether, but it just feels so good to have her looking out for me. She’s a security blanket. Who would have thought I would ever say that about her?
“Fine,” she says, not disguising any of the bitterness in her voice. “But let’s talk about this outside, where it won’t make a mess if I have to knock out a few of his teeth.”
Noah gives a stilted chuckle at this, like he’s not sure if she’s serious or not.
“Nobody is knocking out any teeth,” I say, surprisingly evenly, considering how dizzy I feel. “Not yet. Noah, I’m so sorry about the way I reacted yesterday,” I recite, repeating the words I’ve practiced over and over again in my head in the hopes that I would get this chance. “I was overwhelmed and I didn’t handle the information well. It seems like I had been getting a lot of bad news in just a few days and yours…” I drift off. What’s the nice way to say shocked the shit out of me? I know I had it figured out last night.
“You don’t have to apologize,” he says, though of course I do. “My news was a big surprise, to say the least.”
“Wait,” interjects Nean. “You saw him yesterday?”
I turn to her a little impatiently. “At the shelter. Where he’s living right now.”
Nean’s eyes widen. “Seriously? You’re homeless?” she asks Noah.
Noah looks down and I fill up with regret. I should have kept Nean out of this, so he could be spared this embarrassment, but before I can get a chance to remedy this he looks her right in the eyes and says, “Yes, it’s true that I don’t have a place of my own to live right now.”
“No kidding?” asks Nean. “Well, well, well. I guess there had to be something wrong with you eventually.” She turns to me. “It could be a lot worse, Janey. What’s the big deal?” Bless her heart, she’s more adaptable than evolution. I wish I could have reacted that way when he told me.
“The big deal,” he
goes on, “is that I lied to Janey about it, because I was too ashamed to admit the truth. Then, when she went to all the trouble to have me over to dinner, I panicked. I was embarrassed. And jealous, too, of this beautiful place. Most of all, I was sure I would be caught out in the lie, and I ran for it rather than let that happen.” He sighs. “But she found out eventually anyway, and it was a big mess.”
Nean nods her head. “I can relate,” she says, sympathetically. “I lied to Janey too, so I’d have a place to live.”
Noah looks at me, one eyebrow arched. “Really?” he says, taking just a tiny step closer to me. I nod, not trusting myself to make any human sounds. “Poor Janey. No wonder you were so upset.” Gently, he takes the paper plate out of my hands—I’ve been clenching it all this time—and sets it down on the countertop beside us. Then he puts his hand over mine, and I follow the movement with my eyes, loving the sensation that it sends up my arm.
“Yeah, yeah, poor Janey,” Nean interjects. “You’d think people would be glad I didn’t kill anybody.” Noah looks at her quizzically, and I mentally thank her for once again putting my life in some kind of perspective. “So,” she says. “Spill. What happened to you that you ended up homeless?” I’m glad she asks this, because I’m wondering too, but of course I don’t want him to know that I want to know. I try not to look at him too curiously while I wait for a reply.
Noah smiles wanly, seeming not at all put off to be explaining this not only to me but also to my somewhat lunatic friend. “Nothing exciting, I’m afraid. I got in over my head in the farm,” he begins, and then turns to Nean, “I used to own a small farm, Nean.” She nods. “It was supposed to be a fancy organic boutique sort of farm, salad greens for four-star restaurants and spas, but the yield I got wasn’t good enough, and oh, God, the bugs. I had borrowed to the hilt to buy the property in the first place, and within a year I was losing money hand over foot, but instead of giving up and getting out while I still had something to get with, I kept pushing it, borrowing more and more money, spending down all my savings and racking up my credit cards in the hopes that the enterprise would one day work out. When I finally accepted that I needed to sell the property, it was too late, it had lost too much value and I had borrowed way too much on its equity. I couldn’t sell it fast enough and got into more and more trouble with my mortgage, but instead of facing down my problems, I did everything I could to avoid them.” He sighs, and I find myself a little dazzled at the ease with which he is recounting this sad story. He’s over it, I realize. He’s already forgiven himself. Realizing he can do that makes me love him even more.
