by Shawn Inmon
There was $720 on the bed, plus another $115 in the nightstand drawer. I had never before seen that much money in one place. The day before, I was worried about buying socks and underwear. Now I was once again dreaming of a car.
As custom demanded, I bought breakfast for everyone still in the apartment.
I got on the plane home the next day with an even $800. The flight home felt surreal. I hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since my all-nighter at the dice table, and my head was spinning. As I flew out of Anchorage, I looked down at the snow-capped mountains and smiled inwardly. Throughout the flight, my right hand would drift down to my jeans pocket, verifying that the bankroll was still there.
The first person I saw when I stepped off the plane was Mom. Her hair had been dyed and set at the beauty parlor for her trip to the city.
“Oh, my God, you’re still shooting up. You must have grown another two inches while you were gone.” She looked appraisingly at my now high-water jeans. “I hope you saved enough money to at least buy yourself some new jeans for school.”
“I told you, Mom. I had a job painting apartments.” That was true, as far as it went. I pulled out the wad of bills, mostly because I wanted to see her eyes widen.
They did.
“Shawn! Did you make all that money just painting apartments?”
I smiled.
Some stories are best left untold, at least until a few decades have passed.
Author’s Note for My Matanuska Summer
I intended this story to be a bookend to My Monarch Summer, exploring the differences in perspective, concerns, and problems a sixteen year old has compared to a ten year old. I had to change a few of the names in this story, not to protect the innocent or guilty, but just because I couldn’t recall the names of all the people who hung around my brother’s apartment in Seward, Alaska, in 1976.
I also wanted to include my brother’s cat, who had an amazing way of relaying his unhappiness with people. If something set him off, he would pee on the stove burners, which you wouldn’t notice until you went to cook dinner. If you think cat urine smells bad, you should try burning cat urine. There’s also a story that he defecated inside my brother’s stereo headphones, but I think that is apocryphal. In any case, I couldn’t find an effective way to work him into the story, so I mention him now, for posterity.
That summer I spent in the Matanuska Valley of Alaska remains my favorite summertime memory. I wish I could take the picture of the meadow that we camped in out of my head and download it straight into yours. Even as a sixteen year old, whose perspective didn’t extend much past the end of his nose, I recognized how perfect that place, and that summer was.
One Last Cup of Tea
John put the teakettle on the stove, clicked the knob a notch to the right and the flame bloomed with a small whoosh. The coffee pot to the left of the stove sat cold and unused, but stained with the residue of a hundred uses. He supposed he should have cleaned it up and donated it, but he hadn’t managed to get around to it. There were so many things he hadn’t gotten around to. After three months, her clothes still hung in the master bedroom and he had continued to dress in the guest room like he had for the last 20 years.
The kettle rattled and threatened to whistle. He hated that sound, that piercing, headache-inducing sound, so he picked it up before it reached its full voice and poured the steaming water over his teabag. In the not-so-long-ago, he poured hot water in to heat the cup, poured it down the sink and refilled it from the teapot so the cup and the water would be as hot as possible. He didn’t bother with that today. There was no need.
The tea steeped and he looked out the kitchen window. It had snowed overnight and stray flakes still settled in here and there, looking for a home. The back yard was filled with gently rolling drifts, covering the trees, the bench where he and Mary had sat on so many summer evenings, the birdfeeders, everything. If there was anything alive out there, it was hidden. He threw the teabag away in the trash can under the sink and stared at the barren back yard, seeing nothing but remembering everything.
In the middle of winter, it was so hard to remember that spring would come.
“Mary…” he started to say, but his voice broke, his throat thickened, and nothing else would come. He shook his head gently from side to side and tears spilled over and ran down his unshaven cheeks. Instead of finishing whatever thought ended that sentence, he carried his tea into the dining room, blowing on it to make it cool enough to drink. He sat in the same place he always had and looked at the framed pictures hanging on the wall. They had three children, and there were dozens of pictures that memorialized the graduations, the weddings, the new families. They made him smile, but when he did, more tears spilled over.
He reached out thoughtfully and poked at Mary’s prescription bottles. They were contained in the little carrier he had used to sort out her pills each week. He plucked his reading glasses from his shirt pocket. He wanted to make sure he found the right bottle. When he did, he emptied it onto the table in front of him and separated the pills into piles of three. He methodically swallowed one little pile with each sip of tea until they were all gone. He put the lid back on the empty pill bottle and replaced it in the little carrier. A place for everything…
He made one last trip through the house, checking to make sure he had unlocked the front door. He was ready to say good-bye to everything, but he couldn’t bear the thought of the front door being kicked in. He stopped in front of the bookcase he had built many years before and ran his hands along the spines of the books that were like old friends. He thought about sitting down and reading a few pages of the bible his father had given him, but he was already feeling light-headed and wasn’t sure he would be able to get back up. Once he had double-checked that the burner on the stove was off and everything was in order, he walked down the long hallway to the master bedroom.
He sat a little gingerly on the side of the bed. He had made the bed when he had woken up that morning and he didn’t want to mess it up, so he lay down on top of the floral bedspread. He turned his head to look at the picture on the bedside table. It was the two of them on their wedding day, captured in the sharp black and white of the 1956. They were young and sure of where they were heading. And, they had been right. They had gotten there. The young couple smiling with serene happiness and not a care in the world never had a thought for what came after.
John reached out for the picture and saw that his hand was shaking. Still, he managed to pick the frame up without dropping it. He held it against his chest, a lover’s embrace. He closed his eyes and thought of Mary as he fell softly into sleep.
Author’s Note for One Last Cup of Tea
I’ve noticed that suicide plays into a number of my stories – Lucky Man, One Last Cup of Tea, and my novel The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver. I hope no one thinks I take suicide lightly. My own life has been touched by people close to me who have chosen that way out of the problems that plague them. There are simply times that it is integral to the story, and I haven’t found a way to avoid it.
This is another story that came about because of a simple question – where would I be if my wife passed first? How would I feel, how would I live? I’m not saying I would immediately drive off a cliff, but after building our life together, after making each other the most vital part of our lives, what would life look like without her? I hope a bit of the sterile loneliness I see when I asked myself these questions comes through in this very short little story. I returned to the same basic theme again with a later entry in this book – The Short Goodbye.
Chad Stinson Goes for a Walk
Chad Stinson was fat.
Oh, he wasn’t so fat that the manager of the Royal Fork, the local buffet that Chad always called The Royal Pork, locked the door and hid in the kitchen when he pulled into the parking lot, but still.
Fat.
Fat enough that he couldn’t wear corduroy pants for fear of starting a fire when his thighs rubbed tog
ether. Fat enough that his belly drooped over his belt loops, which allowed him to buy pants several sizes smaller, and helped him fool himself into thinking he wasn’t as fat as he really was.
Fat enough that Chad avoided looking at himself in the bathroom mirror when he got out of the shower, believing that if he didn’t acknowledge the sixty extra pounds of blubber that had crept onto his 5’7” frame, it wasn’t really there.
He hadn’t always been fat. Chad had been a pleasantly chubby baby, but he had lost any trace of baby fat by adolescence. Genetics had predestined him to be a mathlete rather than an athlete, but he was in fair shape through college. Fair enough, at least, to capture the eye and the heart of one Sarah Chalkson, whom he dated, wooed and—shortly after receiving his teaching degree from Washington State University in Pullman—married.
As poor young newlyweds subsisting on two teachers’ salaries, their meals were not especially healthy, but they found reasons to exercise enough to keep the extra pounds away. In the second year of their marriage, 'they' had gotten pregnant, in the prevailing usage of the day. During 'their' pregnancy, Sarah gained forty-five pounds. Matching craving for craving in what he told himself was his husbandly duty, Chad packed on thirty pounds of his own.
Within a year of Ashley's birth, Sarah had shed those excess pounds, but Chad…well, Chad didn’t. In fact, he added a few more every year. He reached a dubious milestone when, during a regular checkup, he noticed that the nurse had added an extra weight to the bar of the scale in order to discern his weight. This now exceeded 250 pounds. It had been his moment of alarm.
That’s not good. And: I’ve got to do something about that.
He did, though not what a dietitian would have recommended. Chad stopped at a McDonald's drive-thru for a second breakfast on the way back to the office.
You never know, though, when a life-changing moment will arrive, a suspicious epiphany. Sometimes, at first, those moments arrive in unrecognized disguise. For Chad, one such moment occurred on his 49th birthday.
To celebrate his near half-century, Ashley had driven home from college for the weekend. His parents had come across town for cake and ice cream. His mother, Norma, had just bought a new digital camera, and she snapped pictures as if she were commemorating the signing of a peace treaty. When a camera came out, Chad normally tended to go into hiding, but the birthday boy and reason for the celebration couldn’t escape.
Norma’s new camera had a Facebook Share button that automatically posted pictures to Facebook. Norma might not have been hip enough for Instagram or even Pinterest, but she had Facebook down cold. Norma was also convinced in her heart of hearts that every event in her family's world was a source of fascination to everyone she knew. By the party's end, she had shared over forty pictures to her wall, including more than a dozen of Chad.
When the party died a natural death and his parents were gone, Ashley retreated to her childhood bedroom while Sarah went to the kitchen to straighten up. Chad plopped down in his comfortable desk chair in the den and fired up his laptop. Signing in to Facebook, he saw that his ever–efficient mother had tagged him in the photos.
When Chad clicked the notification, his heart sank.
He could avert his eyes from his bathroom mirror each morning, but he could not evade the evidence that waved a pudgy paw back at him in millions of pixels: the plump jowls tracing a curved line from what had once been his chin to an unknown spot beneath his shirt, the ham hock arms, the rounded taurine shoulders. In several of the shots, his piggy eyes almost seemed to disappear into the small rolls of fat in his face.
It occurred to Chad that, while he was intellectually aware of his genitalia, he had forgotten exactly what they looked like. They could have turned purple with pink polka dots, and he would not have known.
Fat, fat, fat.
Crap. I’ve really got to do something about this.
For Chad Stinson, seeing those unflattering pictures on his birthday was enough. There were no flattering angles left to him.
For his birthday, and with an apologetic shrug, his parents had given him a $100 Amazon gift card. It was the way of his and their time of life, when adult children and parents silently acknowledge that the ritual has become silly, yet cannot give it up in some form. Chad had smiled and hugged them both, then slipped the gift card into his pocket and forgotten about it until he saw the pictures. They were enough of a burr under his saddle that he pointed his browser to Amazon.com. Just to see what would come up, he typed “weight loss” into the search bar.
The search brought back over 12,000 matches. Apparently Amazon's inventory had no shortage of ways to lose weight.
I wonder if any of them actually work.
Amazon's first suggestion sounded like the snake oil sold by the traveling salesmen of the old West: a diet supplement that promised he would “Lose TEN POUNDS the very first week! No change in diet necessary! Just take the little green pill three times a day and watch the pounds melt away!” While Chad was proficient at self-delusion, he met the rest of the world with a skeptical, educated eye. The more exclamation points a vendor used to market a product, the less legitimate Chad considered it. He kept scrolling.
There were hundreds of diet books, but he knew that his dieting willpower rarely survived his first trip past a Burger King. He scrolled past home gyms, treadmills, and stationary bikes, but the gift card would not have come close to paying for them. Sarah often pointed out that he was a great starter of projects but a horrible finisher.
The back deck—half painted since June—and the samurai sword that hung above the desk testified to her realism. He had started painting the deck one sunny summer afternoon, but got distracted by a Seattle Mariners game and never returned. After watching Kill Bill, Vols. I and II, Chad had been so enamored with Japanese culture that he decided to redecorate the den in an Asian theme, but never got past the single sword hanging above his desk. For those reasons and many others that Sarah could and would be happy to trot out, he did not see her reacting very well to a proposal that he take five hundred dollars out of savings for another new undertaking.
On the fourth page of results, he saw an item called the Azuul ExerTracker. It looked like a handsome silver and black wrist band. Unlike many of the items, it didn’t make outlandish claims.
The advertising copy was intriguingly common sense: "Let’s face it, losing weight really comes down to an ancient principle that can be summed up in four words: move more, eat less. The Azuul ExerTracker measures your heart rate, blood pressure, calories burned, steps walked and stairs climbed. Seeing your daily activity will help you set proper and attainable goals – one step at a time. As a free bonus, get a download of our proprietary audio track you can download right to your iPhone or Android that will inspire and relax you. Direct from Hollywood, California, the fitness capital of the world, and California Daemon, the company you can trust."
He looked through the reviews. The “Most Helpful” review was a Five–Star paean that read: "I only got my Azuul ExerTracker a few days ago, but all I can say is “Wow!” I’ve always had a tough time sticking to any diet and exercise program, but with my Azuul ExerTracker, I’m already down twelve pounds!"
Most of the other reviews were equally positive, but Chad knew that game. Glowing reviews could emanate from employees of the company, or sock puppet accounts created by the marketing department, or even paid 'reputation management' services. There were three One-Star reviews. Chad clicked on one of them.
"In the name of all that is holy, do not order this. This has taken over my husband’s life. I don’t even know him anymore. Yes, he’s losing weight, but at what price?"
Crackpot, Chad thought, or a comedian. He read through a few more of the laudatory reviews. The ExerTracker cost $99.99, with free shipping and handling for Prime members. On an impulse, he clicked the 'One–Click Ordering' button. Thirty seconds later, an email arrived from Amazon telling him that his Azuul ExerTracker would arrive on Tuesday.
> Satisfied with this important first step toward fitness, Chad wandered back into the kitchen in search of leftover birthday cake.
By the time Chad got home from work on Tuesday, he had forgotten all about the bad photos, the fit of inspiration, and the good intentions that had prompted him to order the ExerTracker. Mr. Stinson had brought home a briefcase full of sophomores' essay tests to correct. Just as he laid the briefcase on his desk, Sarah hailed him. “Honey? You got a package from UPS a few hours ago. Did you order something?”
That was stupid. I should have sent it to the school, so I wouldn't have had to tell her about it right away. Now she's going to ask me about it every few days. If it doesn't work, it will become Exhibit J or K on her Chad’s Unfinished Business list.
“Uhhh, yeah. It’s just something I got with the gift card Mom and Dad got me.”
“Oh? How nice. What did you get?” She handed him a small brown cardboard box embossed with the caricature of a smile.
“It’s called an Azuul ExerTracker. It’s one of those activity trackers that’s supposed to help you keep track of everything you do during the day. I was hoping…well, honestly, I was hoping it would help me get into a little better shape.”
Sarah smiled and put her arms around his neck. “Well, good for you, honey. If you like it, maybe I’ll get one too and we can help keep each other accountable.”
Chad flushed a little and smiled. “What’s that I smell? Pot roast?”
“And mashed potatoes and gravy and a green bean casserole. I guess we’ll have to start your new regimen tomorrow.”
“Sounds good to me.” He pulled her close and kissed her. “Tonight we dine, for tomorrow we starve.”
After two helpings of Sarah’s slow-cooker pot roast and mashed potatoes, Chad waddled to his study. He sat down, flicked on the desk lamp, and picked up his letter opener. He was fond of the letter opener, a gift from the senior class of 2004 for being their class advisor. The kids had gotten it engraved with “Mr. S. – You Rock.” Chad slipped the tip under a box flap and began to cut through the packing tape.
