“I had to make some concessions to the modern age,” he said, grinning, and stepped up to the refrigerator, which was the old Fifties model, like the formica-and-steel dining table with its matching turquoise vinyl chairs. He had become chic, all chrome and sleek lines, like a ‘56 Chevy. Maybe the past was a finer combination of practicality and beauty, of innocence and design, and we were only now realizing its value. “Root beer or lemonade?”
I accepted a brown bottle of root beer from his outstretched hand and thought about how nice it would be if it were real beer, with all its inherent powers. Ben leaned back against the counter, and though one hand was loosely clasping his drink, I could see the other behind him, gripping the counter like he might possibly fly off the earth.
“Ben,” I said at last, getting to what we are both dreading: the reason for my visit, whatever he thought it to be, whatever it actually was. “I opened my father’s safe deposit box yesterday.”
He looked at me blankly, his face unchanging.
“You didn’t know what was in there? He never mentioned it?”
He shook his head and took a long sip of the root beer before setting the bottle on the counter behind him with a clink.
“The ’76 Series ring,” I said, and I could see that I was confirming his suspicions, “And receipts for a quarter-million dollar in bets someone placed in your name, sort of.”
For a moment, we were both silent. What was there to say in the face of such betrayal? Of course, I was betrayed by the sudden knowledge of my father’s duplicity and Ben... I couldn’t say what Ben was betrayed by, but it was there, settling on the lines of his face, bringing his age suddenly staggering forward.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last.
“I take it you knew about this.”
He was struggling with his desire to comfort me and his need to maintain distance. Besides, how did he know for sure that I wanted to be comforted? I searched my own emotions and found the anger hiding there, just beneath the surface of the grief, like a shadow beneath the ice. Was I angry at Ben? I didn’t know, and neither did he. “It doesn’t really matter anymore,” he said gently, pulling out a chair and sitting just across the corner of table. Close enough to touch, far enough to move out of the way.
“Bullshit,” I said, surprising us both with my vehemence. It seemed my anger had surfaced, looking for air. “And here I was vaguely hoping you’d tell me it was all a big mistake. That I’d just interpreted it wrong.” I scooted my chair away from the table, away from Ben, unsure where I was hoping to go.
“No,” he said, touching my hand. “I think you’ve probably interpreted it correctly.”
So there it was, finally. Blown up and larger than life in my face, like a cheap poster. I stood up.
“Fuck,” I said, everything welling up and threatening to spill. “I should go.” I realized I was shaking from the effort of holding back my own tears. Ben reached out and wrapped his hand around my wrist, pulling me back down into the chair like a child. And that’s what did it, sitting back down. I began to cry and quickly realized I wasn’t going to be able to stop. “I said I wasn’t going to cry about this,” I told him sheepishly.
“To who?” he said and squeezed my arm. “Look, this has got to be a shock. I’m only sorry he didn’t tell you sooner.”
So was I. In person might have been nice, you know? But hell, at that point I’d have taken a phone call in the middle of the night. A deathbed confession. Anything but the feeling that I had lost my father completely, not just physically, but emotionally as well.
“Hang on,” Ben said and stood up, disappearing into the hall. He returned a moment later and dropped an entire roll of toilet paper into my lap. When I looked up, he was smiling at me and I found that I was laughing, grimly.
“I’m so sorry, Ben,” I told him, after blowing my nose several times and dabbing at the soft skin beneath my eyes. They were going to sting, later, burned by days of sudden salt deposits. “I never meant to come over here and do this.”
He stooped, rooting around under the sink for a moment, then straightened and handed me a plastic garbage bag. “I’m glad you did,” he said. “All things considered.”
Ah, honesty. Stuffing wadded tissue into the sack he handed me, I looked anywhere but him. Certainly, I was not looking at my own tumbling emotions. In a few days I would be able to take them out, polished and colorful, like the faux gemstones Lee and I used to make from the rocks in our driveway.
“The rain’s passed,” he said, and it had. I could feel the change in pressure even in the interior of the old house. “Stay for dinner.” He looked like he felt reckless, his face twisted in anticipation of my refusal. I was caught with my hand hovering full of tissue half-way to my nose. I watched as he tried to regain control. “I make a mean hamburger.”
I took pity on him. Did I want to do this? I didn’t know. I only knew I didn’t want him to look at me with an obviously sinking sense of his inevitable rejection. Let someone else do the hurting today, Captain, I’m not up to it. “You don’t add onion soup mix, do you?”
“No.” He smiled back nervously. “Chef’s special recipe.”
“I’d need to call Lee. I didn’t tell her where I was going.” He nodded and pointed to the old phone, still nailed to the wall next to the back door. It was clear he couldn’t quite believe it, that he had gotten away with something. And what was I doing, exactly? Would it surprise anyone to know I could never put my dying goldfish out of their misery, either? I just let them sink to the bottom of the tank and die quietly. Sometimes I even turned out the light. “I feel like a teenager,” I told him, picking up the receiver.
I don’t need to go into any depth on the conversation with Lee. Anyone could imagine it, could conjure up her smug voice, cool like iced cappuccino. “Ben’s?” she said, syrupy. Oh, she looks smooth and soothing, but she’ll keep you awake for hours afterward.
Fifteen minutes later I was standing in front of a dull gray mirror in one of the house’s bathrooms, splashing cool water over my cracked and aching skin while trying valiantly to explain this whole thing to my racing mind. It was possible that I was mad with grief. In three days, or so, I would be getting on a plane and flying as far across the contiguous US as it was possible to go and Ben would still be here, using the same white towels with hand-crocheted borders his mother made when he was six. This was not Mark, the wonder boy of student baseball. This was someone who, for whatever strange and twisted reasons fate had assigned, I actually cared about.
You’re just having a burger, my prissy, Lee-like side said to the manic, red-eyed creature in the mirror. There’s nothing inherently wrong in that.
But of course there was, if the burger was a prelude to something more. Or worse, if that was how it felt but nothing came of it, like flashing a chocolate covered strawberry at your lover then eating it yourself. While moaning. I bathed my eyes in cool water from the cistern behind the house. The water was a valuable antique wine, aging in a great steel barrel until it reached my face, clear and pure and flat.
On the way back out, I stopped and retrieved two more bottles of root beer from the fridge. Ben had real food in there, I noted. Salad-like things, green and leafy and inviting. My father’s fridge probably contained two boxes of baking soda and a moldy jar of mustard. Safe behind the screen door, I could see Ben out in the back yard. He was supposed to be grilling our burgers, but instead he leaned against the porch railing, watching the slow progress of several cattle egrets through the weedy edge of the property. They raised their white heads and watched me as I stepped down to join him. Ben, on the other hand, had seen me before, so he nodded toward the birds.
“Did you know they’re native to Africa?” he said. “Imported. They love it here. We’ve got more of them now than anywhere in the world.”
I handed him a root beer, waving it in front of his chest until he took it from me. The egrets returned to wading in the mud. Just beyond Ben’s house was a small ranch wi
th a few cows, Brahmins. They watched the egrets too, their heavy gray heads sagging even as they paid very close, cow-attention.
“So,” I said, moving around to stand in front of him, “What happens now?”
Ben swallowed as if I was asking about us, which for once, I was not. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, now that Billy’s gone, what happens to you?”
Oh, that. He seemed relieved to be back on familiar territory. Flipping our dinners, he shrugged. “There’s a hearing. Then they give the job to someone else.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Why have the hearing then?”
“That,” he said, pointing at me with the spatula, “is the million dollar question.”
“Preserving the appearance of having considered you, am I right?”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“What a load of shit,” I told him, surprised by my own language. I had always talked more like a boy, the reasons for that being rather psychologically obvious. Men seemed to find it slightly shocking and therefore sexy, a cause-and-effect I was not inclined to investigate. “It’s not like my dad deserved the job any more than you do, considering.”
“Ah, but they didn’t know that,” he replied. “They can only act on the things they’ve actually heard about.”
All of this was monumentally unfair, I’d already decided. It was as if I’d managed to erase Ben’s own culpability in his life and replaced it with my father’s. How dare they insult this poor man, when great dragons of evil resided for twenty years in their midst! I realized I was being silly, as well, but when had realization ever led directly to the truth?
“Well then, if they do let you go, what will you do?” He was looking at me as if he would like to touch me, but contented himself with pressing my burger onto the rack with the spatula. “I mean, if you aren’t infinitely tired of being asked.”
“No. It’s not like everyone’s been coming ‘round to check on my welfare... Sorry, that sounded like whining, which is probably what it was,” he said and grinned at me. “I mean, I’m just a college coach. There are other colleges out there.”
“So you’d move?” We both looked around and took in the house, the field, the history.
He thought about this for a moment, then crossed his arms and shook his head, the spatula poking out from his armpit like an arrow.
“Did you know that I’ve never lived away from this house for more than six days since I came back?” He looked like he was confessing to still being a virgin. “It might do me good to try somewhere else for a while.”
I nodded and he just stood there, dripping hamburger grease into the grass behind him. I felt like a cattle egret, and he was waiting for me to say I’d stay and ride around with him, on him.
“I should probably confess something to you right now,” I said, sounding incredibly nervous.
Puzzled, he nodded.
“I suggested... um... I told Jake he ought to go out for Dad’s spot.”
There was a pause and then: “That’s ok,” he reassured me, though I was sure it wasn’t, with either of us. “He’d be a great coach.”
“I’m sorry,” I said anyway. “I wasn’t thinking when I said it. I was worried about him and Lee and it just didn’t occur to me... I mean, I hadn’t seen you in years.”
“Seventeen years,” he answered and looked away, back at the grill. The meat popped and bubbled and he pretended to look closely at it.
I was dumbstruck. Why? Because the obvious answers are always the most devastating. The unstoppable was welling up from inside my gut and I was about to say something I would regret. Not that that had ever, even for a moment, stopped me before.
“What?” he prompted. No doubt I was opening and closing my mouth like a fish.
Shrugging, I took the plunge. “There’s probably a spot open where I am.”
The yard was very quiet, and I was intensely aware of the sizzle of our food.
“Oh yeah?” he croaked out, and we were both surprised by his reluctant voice.
“I mean, the team stinks,” I began backpedaling quickly. “And they’ve just got the history Dean in there doing his best. So you might not want it. I mean, it’s only Community College. It’s not like they’d be much of a challenge. Not like here. And besides, there might not be a position. I haven’t even checked. I could be just blowing smoke up your...” I paused then, hair hanging over my cheeks, and I knew he knew I was blushing.
“No,” he said gently, “I appreciate it. I really do. If you want to, you could look into it for me.”
I could nod, but I was unable to look up. Had I really been talking to other human beings my whole life? Why, I asked myself angrily, hadn’t I learned anything? “Are those damn things done yet?”
“You said ‘well-done’,” he reminded me, humor in his voice. “I heard it myself.”
“Well, I’ve reconsidered. Let’s eat now.” Raising my head I looked him in the eye for what I was startled to know without question was the first time that day. He had dark gray eyes, and for a moment, I couldn’t think about anything else. Then he was slapping two open hamburger buns on the grill as if nothing had passed between us. And perhaps nothing had. Where was my proof?
“Let me toast these and we’re there,” he said.
We sat, companionable, on top of the picnic table in the back yard, our feet on the bench, and watched the yard creep into dusk.
“This is actually very good,” I informed him, gesturing to the burger.
“Thanks,” he said and smiled. He was making me crazy, as if someone was whipping my innards with a whisk. The meal was making me vaguely sick.
“So, what have you been up to, these last seventeen years? Dad told me a bit about you, but you know...” I drifted off and took another bite, passing the conversation to him before it became awkward. He did know, exactly.
“Um...” He leaned back. “I was married,” he said at last. “For a little while.”
“Really?” That I was so surprised seemed to offend him, mildly.
“Really, for two years. To an accountant from St. Pete named Claire.”
“Jesus.” I thought about that and I couldn’t picture it. An accountant named Claire. It seemed so unreal. I was, after all, the first person in human history to want this man, or at least that was the assumption I had been operating under. “An accountant. That’s wild.”
“That’s not the word I would have used to describe it,” he said, grinning. “But it was all right, for the first year, year-and-a-half. Then she started a new job and met someone else, someone more ‘career-oriented’, as she put it. And that was that.”
“Well, don’t expect me to top that.” He finished his burger and was nibbling at the potato chips he had set in a bowl between us. I felt bloated, and I’d barely eaten two-thirds of my sandwich. There was nothing wrong with the food, you understand.
“You haven’t been married?”
I realized he was just as surprised that I hadn’t been, as I was that he had. What did that say?
“Nope,” I told him, snarfing down the rest of the burger just to have it gone. I wiped my hands on my thighs and shrugged. “Got close once. But I called it off.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because he was an asshole,” I said, laughing. “I guess I’m glad now.”
“You guess?”
“Well, doesn’t everyone want to be married, at least once?” And it was true, I did want it. I just didn’t want to have to stick it out, through what was obviously going to be more sickness than health. How nice it would have been to say now, as I leaned back and felt the last of the burger settle like a rock in my churning stomach, that I had been married. Someone, somewhere, wanted me. “It’s like a seal of approval. You’re ok.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” he said, a bit morosely. “Look at me.”
“I didn’t say it was true,” I noted. “Just that it feels that way. So is that it? That’s everything you’ve done for s
eventeen years? You got married and divorced?”
He leaned forward and tossed our plates into the trash. The sun, an orange neon glow from behind the house, sent slanting, shifting rays into the dim light of the yard. I watched a single grain of pollen float slowly by, as if suspended by a string. I knew what he was thinking, because I had thought it too. What if the sum of all those years really was nothing more than that? Could he bear that? Could anyone? And yet we did bear it, nearly all of us. That was what made living with someone like Billy Wells so impossible.
“That about sums up what you wouldn’t know anyway. I coached, I got married, I coached, I divorced, I kept coaching...”
I laughed. “That’s pretty damn sad,” I said, coaxing him. “Surely you’ve had other relationships? Traveled? Done something.”
He had done those things, I knew, and others that he didn’t feel like talking about. None of it would tell me what he knew I was asking, what he was now probably constantly asking himself, unable to stop. What the hell was he going to do?
“Yeah, I suppose,” he said at last. “Nothing worth mentioning. How about you? I read your book.”
“You did?” I was apprehensive, as always. What did he think of it, I wondered, but was too proud to ask.
“Yeah,” he said and then chanced a glance over at me. He was such a sly thing, I thought, watching his dark eyes. He knew I was looking. “I nearly drove to Charleston once to get you to sign it. I kept wondering what you’d write in it. Then I decided I didn’t want to know.”
I was momentarily stunned. What would I have written? I remembered the tour for the book and thought: God only knows, but I’m so glad he didn’t come.
“I’m sure it would have been nice,” I said, smiling coyly to deflect where we were headed.
“I’m sure,” he agreed easily and we skipped right over the rough patches. “So, have you written anything else?”
“Yeah,” I said reluctantly. “A few stories and such. I haven’t written anything worth reading in ages, though.”
“Why not?”
“Guess I told my story...” I pulled out the usual line, “... and there’s nothing more to say.”
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