Pon-Pon

by Cronk, LN

  “No, really . . . it’s fine. Please don’t worry about it.”

  “So,” I said. “Tell me about ol’ what’s-his-name over there.” I nodded my head toward her husband.

  “Mark?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s an engineer.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah . . . why?”

  “I’m an engineer.”

  “Really? What kind?”

  “Structural . . .”

  “Oh,” she said. “Mark’s a computer engineer. So am I. That’s how we met.”

  “You’re an engineer?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Why do you think I took so many math classes?”

  “I don’t remember you wanting to be an engineer.”

  “I don’t remember you wanting to be an engineer either.”

  “Well,” I admitted, “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I was in high school, but Greg was going to be an engineer and he got me interested in it.”

  “Oh,” she said, and then she was quiet so we just danced for a while.

  Finally she looked at me. She opened her mouth and then closed it . . . as if she’d wanted to say something, but had thought better of it.

  “What?” I asked her.

  “Nothing,” she said, shaking her head.

  “What?”

  She hesitated again, but then finally spoke.

  “How come Greg hated me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” she said, “that Greg hated me and I’ve always wondered why.”

  “Greg didn’t hate you,” I said, laughing and shaking my head, but she nodded her head at me.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Sam,” I assured her. “Trust me . . . he didn’t hate you.”

  “Okay . . . he greatly disliked me. Is that better?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  She rolled her eyes at me.

  “I’m not blind!” she said. “He’d be standing there talking and laughing with you and then if I came along he couldn’t get away from me fast enough!”

  I couldn’t deny that there was some truth in what she was saying.

  “I think what bothers me so much,” she went on, “is that after he and his dad got killed all I ever heard about was what a strong Christian he was and how nice he was to everybody . . . but he wasn’t nice to me. I always wondered why somebody who was such a strong Christian would treat someone like that.”

  She stopped dancing. The song was ending, but I had a feeling that she would have stopped anyway and I suddenly realized that I didn’t know if she’d been saved or not; we’d never talked about it.

  She’d been my girlfriend . . . how could I not know? Tanner had been one of my best friends . . . how could I not know?

  What was wrong with me?

  A fast song was starting up and a new wave of people flooded the dance floor.

  “Do you want to go out there and talk for a minute?” I asked, pointing toward the lobby.

  She nodded at me.

  “Do you want to tell Mark first?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “He’s fine. Do you want to tell Laci?”

  “No,” I said, because even though I was upset about what she’d just said, in the back of my mind I was thinking that it wouldn’t hurt one bit to give Laci a little something to worry about.

  I took her arm and guided her to the lobby. We found a vacant pair of chairs and sat down.

  “Look, Sam,” I said, trying to decide how to word what I needed to say.

  “Greg didn’t hate you . . . he didn’t even dislike you. He just . . . he just thought that Laci and I should be together. That’s all. He just thought I should be dating her, not you . . . or anyone else for that matter.”

  “No,” Sam said, shaking her head. “He never liked me . . . never! Even before you and I started dating.”

  “Well,” I shrugged, “He knew that I liked you before we ever started dating . . .”

  “David,” she said, tilting her head at me. “He acted like that when we were in junior high school.”

  “Uh-huh . . .” I said, trying not to smile. I bit my lip and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Right,” she said, looking at me skeptically. “You liked me ever since junior high . . .”

  “Maybe . . .” I said, not trying to hide my smile this time.

  She looked at me for a second to see if I was serious (which I was), laughed, and shook her head.

  “You really liked me in junior high?”

  I nodded.

  “And that’s really all it was?” she asked.

  “I promise,” I said. “I’m really sorry that Greg made you feel like he didn’t like you. If he’d realized how he was making you feel, he wouldn’t have acted that way and if he were here now I know he’d apologize. He never would have intentionally done anything that might have kept you from . . .”

  “From what?” she asked when I hesitated.

  “He was a strong Christian,” I finally said. “That was the most important thing to him . . .”

  “And you think I’m not a Christian?” she asked in a surprised voice.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “I’m a Christian, David,” she assured me. “I mean, I’m not saying I was where I needed to be back then or that I was where I am now, but trust me . . . I’m a Christian.”

  I smiled at her as she went on.

  “I know I should just be able to forgive him without talking to you about it and without knowing why he acted that way, but I feel a lot better about it now. I’m glad we talked about it.”

  “Good. I am too.”

  “A Christian and an engineer,” she said, grinning as she stood up. “I bet you’re sorry that you dumped me now, aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t dump you!” I protested, standing up also. “You dumped me!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You did!”

  “No,” she corrected me. “I asked you if you thought we should start seeing other people and you did want to start seeing other people, didn’t you? If you’d said ‘no’ or acted like you were the least bit upset then maybe we wouldn’t have broken up . . . but it was pretty obvious that you had your mind on someone else.”

  “Maybe . . .”

  “There’s no maybe about it,” she smiled. “As a matter of fact, here comes ‘someone else’ right now.”

  I turned around and saw Laci walking toward us.

  “Quick,” I said. “Hug me like you mean it!”

  “No problem.”

  She gave me a big hug.

  “Thanks again,” she said. “I really am glad that we talked.”

  “Me too.”

  She took a few steps toward the ballroom and then turned back to me.

  “Don’t forget, David,” she said very loudly so Laci’d be able to hear her. “If you ever want to give it another try . . .”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” I grinned. She walked away and I turned to face Laci.

  “You two are very funny,” she said as I smiled at her.

  “I know,” I said, reaching my hand out to take hers. I sank back down into my chair and pulled her down onto my lap. “Can we go home now?”

  “We’ve only been here for forty-five minutes!” she protested.

  “Are you serious?” I looked at my watch. It seemed like it had been a lot longer. I sighed and wrapped my arms around her and she laid her head on my shoulder. I picked up one of her hands, kissed it, and started rubbing it with my thumb. “Well, I’m ready to go home whenever you are.”

  I didn’t really have any hopes of going home this early, but I thought that maybe if she felt sorry enough for me she’d at least sit there a little while and let me hold her.

  She did.

  After a while I told her about my talks with Calen and with Sam.

  “It really bothered me to think that Greg might have done something to keep Sam from being saved,�
�� I said after telling her about meaningful conversation number two.

  “Sometimes people make mistakes,” Laci said.

  “I suppose . . .”

  “And I know it’s easy to remember him like he was a saint or something,” she went on, “but he wasn’t.”

  “I suppose,” I said again.

  “He was close, though.” She looked up at me and smiled and I smiled back at her; then she rested her head on my shoulder again. I put my cheek on top of her head and closed my eyes.

  We sat there quietly for a few minutes until I felt her squeeze my hand. I squeezed it back, but she jabbed her elbow into my ribs so I opened my eyes.

  Tanner was there, standing about ten yards away, looking at us.

  Laci stood up and then I did too.

  “I’m going back in,” she said quietly and I nodded at her. I took a deep breath and started walking toward Tanner, thinking that if he decided to punch me it was probably really going to hurt.

  “Hi,” he said when I got to him.

  “Hi.”

  “You wanna step outside and get some fresh air?”

  Fewer witnesses . . .

  “Sure.”

  We walked out the front doors toward the fountain. It seemed as if there were a hundred people out there smoking.

  So much for getting fresh air . . .

  We headed for a bench some distance away that was a pick-up/drop-off spot for city bus riders and when we reached it we sat down. Tanner leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands together in front of him, and looked down at the sidewalk.

  He didn’t say anything for a long time and for some reason (I don’t know why), my mind turned to a time one fall when we were about nine years old and his mom had taken us to an orchard. We’d quickly gotten bored with picking apples so Tanner had taken his baseball bat from the back of their minivan and pretty soon we were pitching wormy apples to each other and making a huge mess.

  Sitting next to him now, remembering that day, somehow I suddenly felt very sad.

  “After I went to college,” he finally said, breaking the silence, “my dad started changing. I mean really changing.”

  He glanced at me to make sure I was listening before he went on.

  “I had summer classes and training and stuff, so I wasn’t there a lot, but I knew just from talking to Mom that something was wrong. It was like . . . it was like he just withdrew from life. He didn’t want to do anything, he wouldn’t talk to my mom, he started missing a lot of work, sometimes he wouldn’t get out of bed in the mornings . . .”

  He paused and shook his head before going on.

  “So anyway, by the time I finished my sophomore year, things were pretty bad. I felt really sorry for my mom. I mean Chase was getting into trouble all the time and she was so sick of the way Dad was acting that she was just about ready to leave him . . . it was pretty bad.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said because he glanced at me again and paused. “I didn’t know all that.”

  He nodded and looked away again.

  “And then one day,” he went on, “Dad just disappeared. No note, no goodbye, no nothing. Considering how he’d been behaving we weren’t really all that surprised . . . I mean, it had been pretty obvious that something was wrong, but we just kind of figured he was having a mid-life crisis or something. I kept expecting him to come back or at least to call, but he didn’t and . . . I don’t know . . . my mom almost seemed relieved. Chase kind of settled down and quit causing problems. Somehow, things actually seemed – better – with him gone.”

  He looked at me.

  “I know that probably sounds terrible . . .”

  “No, it doesn’t” I answered, shaking my head. “Go on.”

  “Well, everything’s going along pretty good and we were just about used to having Dad gone. I came home for about a week at the end of the summer . . .”

  He stood up and began pacing back and forth.

  “So a day or two before I have to go back to school, Chase comes up to me and he just breaks down. I mean he’s sobbing and crying . . . he was practically hysterical . . . I could hardly understand what he was saying . . .”

  He stopped pacing and looked at me.

  “You can’t tell anyone this,” he said, looking down at me.

  “Okay.”

  He sat back down and looked at the ground again before he went on.

  “My mom had worked it out with Coach Williams to have Chase help the football team out during the summer because she thought it might help keep him out of trouble, but the day my dad disappeared, Chase had told her he wasn’t feeling good . . . so she’d let him stay home.”

  “But,” I interjected, “Jordan said that Chase and your mom were helping your grandmother paint her house . . .”

  “No,” Tanner said, shaking his head. “That’s what Jordan thought, but they were both home.”

  “But why did Jordan think that then?”

  “Chase was really messed up back then . . . getting in trouble all the time and stuff. There’s no way my mom was going to let him go to an out-of-state to a baseball camp with Jordan. Plus, I think he actually had a court date that week . . .”

  “A court date? For what?”

  “Oh, who knows,” Tanner said. “He was in so much trouble I don’t even remember what it was for, but my mom really tried to keep all that from Jordan as much as she could. Jordan wanted Chase to go to baseball camp with him like he always did, but my mom made up some story about how they were going to my grandmother’s . . .”

  He paused for a long moment.

  “So, anyway, that morning, Chase was upstairs sleeping. Mom was at work. Chase heard something that woke him up – he said it sounded like a gunshot. He ran downstairs and didn’t find anything. Then he went into the basement . . .

  “Chase said that he found my dad dead . . . that he’d shot himself. Chase ran up to him and grabbed the gun and he grabbed at my dad. He was already freaked out and then he realized that his fingerprints were on the gun and he had blood all over himself and he . . . he just panicked.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he figured he was going to get in trouble . . . that the police were going to think he’d done it. He was already on probation for something and he just . . . he panicked.”

  “So then what?”

  “He spent the rest of the day cleaning everything up and he put my dad’s body in the trunk of his car and drove it up to the lake and then he hitched a ride home.”

  “But the police could have looked at gun powder residue and stuff,” I said. “It would have been easy for them to figure out if Chase was telling the truth.”

  “I know,” Tanner said, nodding his head. “But he was sixteen years old . . . he didn’t really think it through very good.”

  “But now that your dad’s been found, why not just go to the police and tell them the truth?”

  “It’s too late,” Tanner said. “They can’t prove anything now . . . all that’s going to happen is that everybody’ll always question whether Chase did it or not. He doesn’t need to spend the rest of his life with everybody wondering if that’s what really happened . . .”

  “Aren’t you wondering if that’s what really happened?”

  Tanner was quiet for a moment.

  “I’ve wondered,” he finally admitted. “Do you have any idea what it feels like to wonder if somebody you love could have done something like that?”

  He glanced at me.

  “Uh . . . yeah,” I said, raising an eyebrow at him. “I’ve got some idea . . .”

  He smiled faintly as a knowing look came over his face.

  “But I really don’t think he did it, David,” Tanner said, shaking his head. “I mean, I’ve known him for his whole life. I know we never really know what somebody else is capable of and I know he’s made a lot of mistakes, but I really don’t think he killed my dad. Maybe one day Chase’ll decide to go to the police and tell them wha
t happened, but I just . . . I just don’t think that any good’s going to come out of me doing it.

  “Besides that,” he went on. “Danica said it sounds like my dad was suffering from depression. She said everything I told her about the way he’d been acting and stuff was consistent with severe depression . . . right down to him committing suicide.”

  “When did you talk to Danica?”

  “I drove up there to see Mike yesterday,” he explained.

  I wondered briefly if anyone ever went to see poor Mike just for a friendly visit.

  “So he knows?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “He knows.”

  “But what if Chase did do it, Tanner?”

  “On the slim chance that he did,” Tanner said in a quiet voice, “Don’t you think that God’ll take care of it?”

  I looked at him for a moment and then nodded.

  “But, Tanner?” I said. “Listen. You really need to tell Jordan. He’s pretty torn up about this. Can you imagine what he’s going through? I mean I really think he needs to know . . .”

  “Okay,” he finally agreed. “I’ll tell him.”

  We were quiet for a long moment as my mind tried to process everything. I thought about us hitting apples with a baseball bat again, but this time I didn’t feel so sad.

  “You wanna go in?” I asked. “I’ll bet Laci’s got a spot all saved for you right next to Natalie.”

  “She still hasn’t given up on that idea, huh?” he smiled at me.

  “Nope.”

  “Then let’s go,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint Laci.”

  I counted my talk with Tanner as meaningful conversation number three and didn’t worry about having any more for the rest of the night.

  ~ ~ ~

  I’D NEVER SEEN Jordan in such a good mood as when he came over to see me two days later.

  “So I gather Tanner talked to you?” I asked, looking at the smile on his face.

  “Yeah,” he grinned.

  “And?” I opened the door so he could step in.

  “I talked to Chase too,” he nodded, heading toward the couch. “I think he’s telling the truth . . . it makes perfect sense . . . and I think I’ve just about got him convinced to go to the cops and tell them everything . . .”