The Best Man

by Richard Peck

  “Natalie was like a mole for the media?”

  “Essentially,” Lynette said. “She actually is Gifted, the little—” The last bell rang. “And she won’t be back next fall.”

  People milled around now, saying, “See you in sixth.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Natalie’s not coming back next fall?”

  Everybody was fist-bumping everybody else. Little Josh Hunnicutt was fist-bumping over his head. But Lynette was out of there. That’s the end of school for you. You wait and wait. Then it’s over before you’re ready.

  Dad was outside, set for summer: ball cap on backward, T-shirt with the cutoff sleeves. He was in Grandma and Grandpa’s Lincoln. I slid in on the passenger side and buckled up.

  Four or five Mr. McLeods would fit under the glove box. It was an easy car to get Grandpa in and out of, except he wasn’t going anyplace now.

  “Good day?” Dad inquired.

  “I didn’t have a day, Dad. It was testing.”

  “What did they test you on?”

  “Dad, if I knew, I’d tell you.” We rumbled off, into summer. It was only last summer, but seems longer ago.

  • • •

  We had a Nash Rambler that needed major restoration and paint. Ugliest car ever built, but the Nash museum in Kenosha wanted one in mint condition. We worked on that and ordered parts.

  Dad and Grandma wouldn’t hire anybody to be with Grandpa at night, so we were always home by evening. We carried Grandpa into the guest room, where Dad could sleep in the other bed. They didn’t want him waking up to a stranger. Grandpa was like a leaf now, that thin and curling at the edges.

  • • •

  I woke up one night, about a month later, and the lamp was on. Mom was sitting on the edge of my bed in her robe.

  She told me that Grandpa had died in his sleep, at the hospice. It’s the last place you go, and Dad had been with him. I looked to see if Cleo was at the window. I looked back, and where my sheet had been was a blur. My eyes were wet.

  After a minute or two, Mom said, “You need to get dressed. Your grandma has to go to the hospice. I don’t want her driving herself.”

  Mom was in a little pool of light when I came out of my room. Holly was there, dressed, with something in her hand. She opened to show me. Car keys.

  “Mom, aren’t you coming?” I said. “Aren’t you driving?”

  “You go ahead,” she said. “You need to be there. You’ve moved up a step, Archer.”

  I didn’t even know what that meant. “Holly can drive,” Mom said, “and you can both look after your grandma. You’re Magills. Be there for each other.”

  “Mom, you’re a Magill.”

  “I’m half a Magill,” she said. “I’ll come later when it gets light.” You could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen, drifting up.

  She turned away, so we were supposed to go, but Holly said, “Mom?”

  And when Mom looked back, she was wiping tears away.

  Holly and I went out the back way past the swing. You couldn’t see where you were walking. Holly took my hand.

  • • •

  Then the three of us were on the Lincoln’s big slab front seat. Holly behind the wheel. Me in the middle. Grandma next to me. How Holly got the Lincoln out of the garage I don’t remember. I guess she found reverse.

  We were heading into gray daylight. Actually, Holly was doing okay: both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road.

  Grandma had been quiet, but now she kind of cried out. “Turn this car around! We have to go back. I’ve forgotten something.”

  I braced. There was no seat belt for the middle passenger, and I was scared Holly was going to U-turn. You don’t do that in a ’92 Lincoln. It’s an aircraft carrier. You’d take out a front porch, and I could end up as the hood ornament.

  But Holly kept going. “I didn’t bring his suit,” Grandma said. “I laid everything out and walked right past it. What’s the matter with me?” She made fists and shook them.

  “Listen, Grandma, it’s okay,” I said. “Dad took Grandpa’s things the day after we moved him into the hospice.”

  “Which suit did he pick?”

  “The seersucker.”

  “Oh, I’d have picked something darker,” she said.

  I didn’t mention the Cubs cap. “He’ll look nice in the seersucker, Grandma. He loved summer. Dad took care of it.”

  Then we were in the parking lot, being Magills. Holly got on Grandma’s other side.

  In the room Grandpa’s hands were folded over the sheet. You could almost see through them. His eyes were closed, but he was squinting into the sun of an August day. So the seersucker suit was going to be all right. With the Cubs cap tucked into the inside breast pocket, over his heart. And Dad was there.

  Later, when it was light, Mom came. Grandma went right over and took her hand. Then she reached for Holly. “I need my girls,” Grandma said, which was a new thing we hadn’t heard before.

  The sun was up now, and the birds were singing. And Grandma turned to me. “Open the window, Archer,” she said. “Let the birdsong in. Let Grandpa out.”

  So I did, and I think he breezed past me, out into the morning.

  15

  Grandpa was to be cremated. He left word about that. I didn’t want to think about it, but he liked to keep things neat and tidy. When Dad and I went to collect his ashes, they were in this urn inside a fitted cardboard box. Dad carried it out to the Lincoln.

  We were driving the Lincoln because it was all we had at the moment. The Rambler never was roadworthy.

  “Should I hold him?” I meant the ashes. “Or put him on the backseat?”

  I didn’t know. Dad didn’t know. He wore his mirror sunglasses, his shades. But I could see through them. His eyes were wet. I eased the box onto the backseat. “Remember how Grandpa liked the backseat of that Hudson Hornet convertible? He’d be back there in his Cubs cap with a bottle of Gatorade while we tooled around all over. He loved that.”

  Dad nodded and rubbed his stubbly chin with the back of his wrist. A thing he does. We were as quiet as we ever are, and that gave me time to think. “Do all his ashes have to go into the cemetery plot?”

  We were stopped at a light. “What do you have in mind?” Dad said.

  “I’m thinking, maybe you and I and Uncle Paul could take a little bit of Grandpa, maybe a handful, maybe not so much, and scatter him on Wrigley Field. He’d like being there. He always did.”

  The light changed. “It’s probably not legal,” Dad said.

  “No,” I said, “but we could probably get away with it.”

  Then we were in our driveway. Over on the swing where Cleo and Grandpa used to sit, the one-eyed cat from the corner, Sigmund Freud, was stretched out. He was making himself at home in a sunny patch, so Cleo was gone for good. Nobody ever saw her after the night Grandpa died.

  Down in the garage we shook about a tablespoonful of ashes into an envelope. They were white and gritty. I don’t know if they were Grandpa. How can you know? You can’t. Dad sealed the flap with Scotch tape and handed the envelope to me.

  “We—”

  “No,” he said. “You and your uncle Paul can take it from here. Have the time together. Anyway, I may have to raise bail money for you.”

  He screwed the lid back on the urn, and left a half-turn for me to do. “Are we going to tell Grandma that Grandpa’s not all here?”

  “You want to tell her?” Dad said.

  “Not really,” I said.

  • • •

  Uncle Paul picked an away day for the Cubs for our visit. The team was down in Arizona, closing a six-game road trip with another loss to the Diamondbacks. It was one of those days with the lake breeze rattling the ivy on the Wrigley Field walls, and summer slipping away.

  We came up out of the dar
k of the concession area, and there it was: blue sky, green infield, diamond opening like a fan. One of the perfect places of this world.

  It was pretty much all ours. A groundskeeping crew was working, and there were maintenance people and security. But they all knew Uncle Paul.

  So nobody especially noticed when I leaned out of the stands and poured an envelope of something onto the field.

  “Play ball, Grandpa,” I said, and we strolled on.

  Now we were up in the center-field bleachers, under the scoreboard. We had on sunscreen and our Cubs’ caps. Uncle Paul had taken a rare weekday off work. Holly was up at her camp, being a counselor for its second session. Janie Clarkson went with her. The world was at peace. We were waiting for it to be noon enough for a burger down on Sheffield.

  How cool was this? As cool as it gets.

  “It’s better without a game,” Uncle Paul said, half asleep with his cap pulled down.

  He was wearing deck shoes and a professionally faded golf shirt and white jeans.

  “You don’t wear shorts even on a day like this?”

  “I’m thirty-four,” he said. “That’s too old to wear shorts in public.”

  “Tell Dad,” I said.

  “You tell him,” he said.

  I was a little groggy with the sun, but I said, “Should we be sad about Grandpa?”

  “No, who wouldn’t want the life he had?” Uncle Paul said. “It fit him like a glove.”

  That was a good thought. What else was on my mind? Oh, I know. “Dad said he might have to bail us out of jail if they caught us pouring Grandpa on the field. But I think he wanted to give us a little time to talk.”

  “What about, do you suppose?” Uncle Paul said.

  “Search me,” I said. “It could be like the talk Mom tried to have with me. The one about finding me under a cabbage leaf and being in labor with Holly for thirty-six hours.”

  Uncle Paul’s eyes opened. “I don’t believe I’ve heard that one. She found you where?”

  “Uncle Paul, it’s not worth going into. I think she wanted to talk about Mr. McLeod being gay.”

  “Maybe she wanted to talk about me being gay,” Uncle Paul said.

  Whoa. The sun stopped at the top of the sky.

  “You knew I was gay, right?” Uncle Paul sat up, pushed his ball cap back.

  “Sure,” I said. “I guess. Not really. No.”

  “Should we have talked this over before? But your mom and dad are so not into pigeonholing people. Were we all being so liberal, we left you out?”

  I shrugged. “Lynette Stanley says you really have to spell things out for me.”

  “I don’t mean talking down to you,” Uncle Paul said. “I mean not talking past you. Not everybody in this world’s so open-minded.”

  “Mr. McLeod told the sixth graders about people who’ll write their fears on your face.”

  “That’s good,” Uncle Paul said. “You have to be ready for people like that.”

  My head was still kind of whirling.

  Grandpa

  Dad

  Uncle Paul

  Mr. McLeod

  Those were the four I wanted to be.

  “Uncle Paul, do you think I might be gay?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you moisturize?”

  “What—”

  “Where do you stand on exfoliation?”

  “What’s ex—”

  “And you didn’t pick that shirt yourself, did you? Tell me you didn’t.”

  “Uncle Paul, you’re kidding me, right?”

  “I’m half kidding,” he said.

  “One more thing then,” I said. “You love men, right?”

  “I love one man,” Uncle Paul said.

  16

  Then here came sixth grade, and bring it on. We’d learned double last semester from Mrs. Stanley and Mr. McLeod. Probably triple. So what was left? And we were going to be the biggest, oldest class at Westside. Perry Highsmith and that bunch would be out of there. We’d even have a new teacher to break in. Mrs. Bickle had retired because she was older than the school.

  These were my thoughts after Uncle Paul dropped me off at home that day. When I started upstairs, Mr. Stanley was coming down from Mom’s office. He wasn’t crying, so I asked him how Lynette was liking camp.

  He said she liked it now that she’d adjusted to it.

  “I suppose she met a lot of kids with bigger ones than hers.”

  “What?” Mr. Stanley stopped dead on a step.

  “Vocabularies?” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. Then he went on downstairs.

  Mom waved me into her office. “You can be my last customer.”

  I settled on the sofa.

  “Good day?” she asked.

  “The best,” I said. “We poured some of Grandpa out onto—”

  Mom’s hand slapped the desk. “Don’t tell me that,” she said. “I don’t want to be responsible for knowing that.”

  “It’s not like we’re out on bail,” I said.

  “Nevertheless,” Mom said. She might have been thinking about Grandma. “What else?”

  “We had a burger and Diet Coke at a place on Sheffield. Uncle Paul didn’t eat his bun, and I had all the fries. I think he’s dieting, and now he’s gone to work out. He may be turning into a gym rat.”

  “Hmmm. Possibly,” Mom said. “Anything else?”

  “We talked about . . . Excalibur?”

  Mom pondered. “Excalibur. Isn’t that a sword?”

  “I think it’s something you rub on your face.”

  “Exfoliant? You talked about exfoliant?”

  “We touched on it,” I said. “Uncle Paul likes to keep his skin in shape. Also, he’s gay.”

  “Ah. Well, yes,” Mom said. “We thought you’d know when you were ready to know.”

  “Mom, I know when somebody tells me.”

  Then Mom’s old MacBook Air pinged, and an email came in that changed everything.

  Mom put on her reading glasses. She went to a link and printed it out. Finally, she said, “Big news. You won’t be going back to Westside Elementary for sixth grade.”

  “What? Mom, what?”

  “I quote,” she said. “‘Due to demographic shifts in the student population, your sixth grader will transition into the former Memorial Junior High now formatted in a grades six-through-eight configuration, to be re-branded Memorial Middle School.’”

  “Mom, say it in English.”

  “They’re moving your class from elementary school to middle school,” Mom said. “Monday.”

  I keeled over on the sofa. “Noooo.”

  “Honey—”

  “They can’t do this.” I pounded a pillow. “We were going to be the oldest. Now we’ll be the youngest. There’ll be different teachers for different subjects. I won’t be able to find them. Lockers, Mom. With combination locks.”

  I sat up. “Mom, I’m not ready. This isn’t the body I wanted to take to middle school. Look at it. I need another year. I’m pre—what?”

  “Prepubescent?” Mom offered.

  “Probably. You’ll have to homeschool me.”

  She paled. “This shouldn’t come as such a shock to you,” she said. “The Board of Education’s been debating it all summer. It’s in the paper every day.”

  “Mom, this is another case of everybody talking around me and not to me. I don’t read the paper.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Maybe I would if I had my own computer with Internet ac—”

  “Or you could read the one that gets thrown on our porch every morning.”

  “Mom, I’m not ready,” I said again.

  “Archer, honey, change doesn’t care whether you’re ready or not. Change happens anyway.”<
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  • • •

  Then it’s the first day of school—middle school, just like that. Still August, of course. Labor Day’s still down the road. They’ve told us sixth graders to report to the auditorium, which smells of fear. Or is it just me? I looked to see if I had the wrong shoes. I probably had the wrong shoes.

  We milled around because the two homeroom teachers were up there poring over printouts. And another nightmare. It wasn’t just us Westside sixth graders. It was sixth graders from Eastside Elementary and Central Elementary. A sea of strangers. I saw nobody I knew. How could that even be? A lot of friendship bracelets. A lot of headphones. A lot of hoodies. Hoodies in August?

  Somebody came up to me out of the milling mob. Hoodie and shorts. Headphones and big gym shoes. Not quite my height, but his voice had changed.

  “Dude, how great is it that Natalie Schuster isn’t here?” he said. “She’s like on the North Shore. In the New Trier district. Someplace.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I heard she wasn’t coming back.”

  “Can you believe why?” this guy said.

  Probably not. “Why?”

  “Because her mother got married again, and they moved.”

  “I didn’t know her mother wasn’t married,” I said.

  “I guess we weren’t supposed to. But she’s married now. You know who she married?”

  Search me.

  “It was in the paper,” this kid said. “Mr. Showalter. Remember Jackson Showalter from first grade? Didn’t he pull a knife on you in the rest—”

  “Right,” I said. It was going to take me a while to figure this out. Natalie Schuster’s stepbrother was going to be Jackson Showalter?

  The guy with all the information turned away. He seemed to be working the room. He turned back. “Archer, you don’t know me, do you?”

  “Ah . . .”

  “I’m Josh Hunnicutt.”

  What? “Get out of here,” I said. But I looked again, and it was Josh Hunnicutt. The same kid, but longer.

  “I grew just under a foot this summer,” he said. “Eleven and three-eighths inches. Wore me out. I fainted six times. Once in the pool. They had to fish me out.”