"Ah, fuck," I said. "Gary, I'm so sorry."
The party didn't last long after that. They drifted out in ones and twos, citing other commitments. Most were going to an evening boat cruise around the Great South Bay the committee had chartered. No one asked if I was going. I endured a second round of hugs, kisses, and handshakes, but this time the kisses were cursory brushes on the cheek, the hugs hurried, the handshakes limp.
Randi stayed behind while Mike settled the bill up front.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"Yeah."
"Are you sure?"
I nodded, feeling terrible about what happened.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to happen. I just…." I lifted my hands, let them fall. "I don't know. I told you I wasn't ready."
She looked at me for a long time, and there was no anger on her face, just sadness. I would have preferred anger. After eighteen years living among men who were angry pretty much all the time, I could deal with anger.
"It's been twenty-five years," she said. "Don't you think it's time?"
Despite what I had done twenty-five years ago—and despite what I had done twenty-five minutes ago—she hugged me, and it was a real hug, a strong hug, and then she was gone. The waitress came in to begin the long process of cleaning up. She smiled at me. It was a nice smile. She probably wasn't born when I killed James LaValle.
"I hope everything was okay?" she said. Apparently, she wasn't in the room when I yelled at Gary.
"It was terrific. Thank you." I gestured at the mountain of dishes on the table. "Sorry about the mess."
"It's okay. I'm not the one who has to wash them." Glasses and silverware rattled as she piled them into a bin. "You've got nice friends," she said, and she hoisted the bin to her hip and carried it off to the kitchen.
* * *
We bought a six-pack and headed for the Booze Cruise, but age and responsibility had made cautious men of us, and driving up and down past a series of malls and shopping centers held little appeal for either of us. After a single lap we made our way to another old hangout, our old elementary school. The last little league game was just breaking up when we arrived. Kids high-fived each other while coaches stuffed bats and balls in oversized duffel bags. We carried the beer to the top of the bleachers along the third base line and watched everyone separate.
We drank and talked about easy things: the Mets and Rangers, the economy, his folks, my folks. Far beyond the centerfield fence, two boys threw a ball back and forth as a glorious summer day drew slowly down. They whipped the ball at each other as hard as they could. The smack of ball on glove floated across the grass, echoed off the wall of the school.
Mike said, "Are you pissed? Because if you are, it was all Randi's idea."
"No, I'm not pissed. It was a nice idea." I let out a long breath. "It was kind of nice to see everyone."
"In that case, I thought of it first."
I laughed and punched him on the shoulder.
"Before he left, Gary told me what he said to you." Mike stepped carefully, like a man in a minefield. "Prison is kind of…I don't know… it's kind of fascinating to people who haven't been there. I can't explain it. He didn't mean anything by it."
"Shit," I rubbed the corners of my eyes with my fingertips. "I'm sorry. You guys were trying to do something nice, and I screwed it up. I fucked up the prom, I fucked up graduation, and now I fucked up the reunion, too."
"Hey, at least you've given people something to talk about."
"Just what I wanted."
"You always were an attention whore." He sipped his beer. "It's not your fault. We should have known better. We thought you were ready."
"I guess not."
Chain link rattled. The two boys had scaled the centerfield fence and were heading in our direction. They took a sharp left at the pitcher's mound and headed for a gap in the backstop along the first base side. It was a well-executed change of direction, like they meant to do it all along, but I knew better. We were large shapes on the bleachers in the growing dark, not to be trusted. It stirred a memory of childhood, of a time when big kids hung out on these same bleachers, or in the back of the candy store, or in the parking lot behind the A&P. Kids who wore denim and leather and carried wallets on chains, kids who smoked and drank, kids who might let you pass—or not.
"You remember the kids who used to hang around here?" I said.
"Yeah, I remember." Mike popped the top off the last beer. It hissed like an angry cat. "Benny Griggs—remember him?—he told me once he was gonna put his cigarette out in my eye. I was maybe nine. He scared the piss out of me."
Benny Griggs was five or six years older than us, and as far as I could tell, he hated everyone and everything. If he said he was going to put a cigarette out in your eye, you believed him.
Mike handed me the beer.
"Funny thing," he said. "My brother Dennis is friends with him."
"With Benny?"
"Yeah. Get this: he's principal of a high school now. In Massachusetts. Can you believe that?"
I almost choked on the beer. Mike slammed me on the back two, three times until I stopped coughing.
"Wow," I said, when I had my breath back. "That was unexpected."
We talked about Benny Griggs and the kids he hung around with, the kids we inherited the bleachers from. The bottle went back and forth, growing lighter with each pass. The metal bench dug into my ass. I thought about Benny Griggs, who became a high school principal, and James LaValle, who didn't get to become anything.
Mike tapped my arm with the nearly-empty bottle. I took it. A streetlamp flickered to life at the edge of the parking lot.
"He was the one who was supposed to end up in jail, not me," I said, and Mike knew I wasn't talking about Benny Griggs anymore. "It wasn't supposed to be this way."
"I always thought he would end up dead," Mike said. "Car wreck. Drug deal gone bad. Barroom brawl."
"Yeah."
I drained the last of the beer and let the bottle slip through my fingers. It rattled through the bleachers like a pachinko ball and came to rest among the fragments of broken glass, and the discarded cigarettes that glowed like bits of broken chalk.
"I just didn't think I'd be the one to kill him, that's all."
"Who can figure a thing like that?" Mike said.
The last of the light bled out of the day. Stars appeared in the sky, one by one. At the edge of the parking lot, a moth battered itself against the streetlight.
The Rose by Amanda Hill
I didn't get to pick the color of the rose. And even if I had, I wouldn't have known what color to pick. A rose was a rose.
"Matt Paulson," the student council member called.
Sadie kicked me in the shins as I stood up. She pretended to be reading when I looked at her. "Don't be jealous," I whispered. The corner of her mouth ticked upward.
The student council member handed me a yellow rose. I nodded a 'thank you,' and took it back to my seat. Sadie's eyes strayed from her book. She clicked her tongue. "Yellow. Too bad for you."
"What's wrong with yellow?"
"Yellow roses mean friendship," Sadie explained.
"Rose colors mean something? You're kidding, right?"
She rolled her eyes and muttered, "Boys. Yes, Matt, rose colors have meaning. Like…white." She pointed to Amy Harper with a white rose on her desk. "White roses mean purity or innocence."
Amy must have felt our gaze. She slathered on some bright red lip gloss and winked at me.
Sadie grinned sheepishly as she whispered, "Obviously the student council handed them out at random."
"Obviously."
"So who's it from?" She carefully placed a bookmark in her torn copy of The Two Towers.
"Secret Admirer, I guess" I shrugged.
"Oh, Matt. You even keep yourself in the friend zone?"
Sadie wasn't fooled. She knew me better than that book, and that's saying something.
"Secret Admirer, huh?" Adam Rowan
leaned over his desk, the aisle, and my desk to grab my flower. "Mine too. I think it's from Kiley, though."
"Who?"
His eyes widened and he handed me back the yellow rose. "Dude, you know! Kiley! That one girl from the party I went to in Green River last month."
"Oh, was she the one with…"
He nodded and held his hands out in front of him like he was carrying a couple of watermelons.
"Oh yeah, I remember now. That one." I turned back toward Sadie and rolled my eyes.
"The fictional girl from the party?" she whispered. "I'm pretty sure almost everyone's rose in here is from the mysterious and busty Kiley."
I took an exaggerated sniff of the rose. "Sadie, just because you weren't smart enough to buy yourself a rose to save face doesn't mean you have to make fun of the rest of us."
"Pretending someone loves you on Valentine's Day is almost as pathetic as…" she looked around the classroom and pointed to two kids in the back staring into each other's eyes and playing footsie. "That. It's stupid to pretend that any of this romance stuff will last beyond graduation in a few months. Get me out of here with as few ties as possible, I say."
"Uh, Sadie, you love romance. I've watched Lord of the Rings with you. You made me replay every single love scene between Aragorn and Liv Tyler. Twice."
"Her name is Arwen."
"Whatever."
She shook the book at me. "And that's romance! That's a love story. They loved each other for decades!" Sadie's voice was getting louder and people were starting to stare. I motioned for her to quiet down as the bell rang. She dropped her voice to a violent whisper. "Give me a relationship like that any day. Not these stupid blips on the romantic radar that can't even make it a few months." And with a toss of her black hair, she stormed out.
I watched her leave before slowly gathering my things. As I loaded my back pack, something soft grazed my neck. I looked up to see Amy twirling her white rose in the air.
"You're going to give her that rose, right?"
I shook my head. "What? Who?"
She giggled and ruffled my hair. "Ah, Matt, you're so cute."
I tried to smooth my hair back into place. "Yeah, thanks."
"Oh," she said with a pout. "You really don't see it, do you?"
"See what?"
She tapped the rose on my shoulder. "That you love her."
"Who?"
"Sadie." Her smile faded. "Wow, you are really that dumb."
I couldn't help laughing. "Sadie? No way. We're just friends."
"Yeah, and I'm still a virgin." She sat down in Sadie's vacant desk. "I'm going to let you in on a little secret, Matt."
"This should be good."
"Valentine's Day is important. Like, really important. You and Sadie are totally in love. And if you're not, then you're both the stupidest people on the planet, because you should be."
"Why?"
Her jaw dropped open for a moment. "I can't believe this." She stood up and walked to the door. "If you don't give Sadie that rose, you've totally blown it. Like, maybe forever."
"Forever? That's a bit dramatic."
Amy growled and stomped out the door.
I slung my backpack over my shoulder and left the room. Sadie was at the end of the hall. As I walked toward her she smiled. Something about it made her whole face change. She looked like the sort of person they put into the pictures that come with the frames you buy at the store.
Just seeing her, I felt suddenly lighter. I'd never noticed it before, but somehow, being around Sadie, it felt safe, it felt good.
"My, we're slow today," she said when I was still a few yards away. "Valentine's Day got you down?" She bounced on the balls of her feet and clicked her heels together the way she always does when she's feeling impatient. "What were you doing in there?"
"What?" My brain suddenly felt like it had fifty gallons of maple syrup poured on it. "Where?"
"In Miss Harrington's room," Sadie said as we walked to the exit. "What were you doing?"
"Oh, I was, uh, talking with Amy."
"Amy? Amy Harper?"
"Yeah." Goosebumps raised on my arm. I tried to rub them away, but I was holding that rose. My stomach jumped. "Do you, uh…do you want this rose?"
Sadie laughed. "Excuse me?"
"This rose," I said, holding it out. "Do you want it?"
She smiled at first and reached for it, then stopped midway and frowned. "Why?"
"What do you mean, why?"
"Why are you offering?"
I scratched the back of my head. "Because I thought, maybe, you'd want it. You know, because you didn't get one."
Sadie sighed and started walking again. "So it's a pity rose."
"What? No!"
"And for the record, you didn't get a rose from anyone either."
"I know," I sputtered. "Look, do you want it or not?"
She pushed through the front doors and whirled around. The cold made her cheeks pink up. "I only want it for the right reasons, Matt."
"What the crap?" I stuffed the one hand not holding the rose in my jeans pocket. "What's the right reason?"
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. "Why do you want to give me the rose, Matt? Honestly?"
I tried to think of a reason, but nothing was coming. Instead, the truth poured out. "Uh, Amy… said… she said I should."
"Amy said you should. That's your answer?" I could tell by the look on her face it was the wrong one.
"Yeah, I told her she was crazy, and we were just friends, but then I thought…I don't know."
"Friends," Sadie whispered as she shook her head. She looked like I'd just punched her in the stomach.
"Look, whatever it is you want me to say…can we just pretend I've said it and be done with this?"
"This isn't a game. I can't just pretend."
I held the rose out one last time. "Just take the stupid rose! I can't believe you're going twelve levels of crazy on me just for trying to be nice!"
Sadie clenched the strap of her back pack so hard her knuckles went white. She leaned her head way back the way she does when she's trying not to cry and hoping gravity will help keep the tears in. "Go away, Matt," she whispered.
I didn't move.
"Go away, Matt," she said again, louder that time.
"Fine!" I stomped past her and toward the parking lot.
A thorn caught my already freezing-cold thumb. "Ouch!" I threw the rose to the ground and stared at that stupid flower for a moment. Then I walked away. From the rose, from Sadie, from us, from everything we had and could've had.
"Yellow's a stupid color anyway," I muttered to myself.
Los Sufridos by P.S. Carrillo
I received the assignment on short notice. The guy who usually handles human interest stories had taken a sudden leave of absence for personal reasons and I got stuck with the job. My area of journalistic expertise was in natural disasters, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the occasional mass shooting, so being sent to a desolate region of Mexico to cover a new tourist attraction was hardly of interest. But wanting to appease my unsympathetic, demanding boss and it being a good time for a diversion, I packed a bag and grabbed my passport. I hoped it would be a day trip and that I could make it back in time to enjoy what was left of the upcoming weekend.
The plane ride was uneventful. An old Toyota-turned-taxi cab met me at the isolated airstrip and drove me directly to the town where the story was unfolding. The region was surrounded by low-lying mountains, but the town itself was in a flat basin. When I'd looked at the area from above, the land had looked promising. Lots of green clumps and ridges looked like they might contain waterways, but as the cab approached the town, the ground became desolate and devoid of any signs of life.
As we stopped in front of a wide cluster of trash heaps, I realized we had arrived. The driver took my money and asked when he should return to take me back to the air strip. I looked at the hovels in what some would call a town and wrote down his phone number. "
I'll call you in an hour. Two at the most."
The video camera I brought with me negated the use of a camera operator. I would find four or five people to interview, get a few minutes of film, then call the driver for rescue. Although it was high noon, the heat of early spring was mild and quite tolerable. My baseball cap kept the glare from my eyes as I surveyed the encampment. For that is what I saw, not a town but a camp of pitiful shacks and piles of wreckage of bygone use.
I stood at the edge of the village unsure what to do next. There were no tourists present and no signs were posted indicating where the attractions began. All I saw were dilapidated wooden structures and an upturned portable toilet with an abundance of weeds alongside. The walkways were unpaved and covered with dry dirt while a few chickens and stray dogs lingered in the distance. Voices of playing children hung in the air. A smiling boy of about twelve approached me and asked in fairly good English if I was there with a travel group. He had a child's face and dark intelligent eyes. In English, I announced myself as a reporter and dropped the name of my news agency with the conceited belief that this child living in an isolated hamlet would immediately recognize my important status.
He smiled and said, "That's okay, I'll show you around anyway."
I asked what was attracting people from all over to this impoverished village. I could see nothing that would interest anyone but an aid worker.
"The people come to be with us for a while," he said. "We show them around, and at the end of the day they leave happy."
"Why is your village so poor?"
He waved his arms toward the distance. "We used to have farms when we had water, but then the rains stopped coming and the fields dried up, then our animals started to die. It's been very hard."
"But what do you have here that anyone wants to see?" I suspect my skepticism was obvious in my voice, though I tried to hide it.
"We have nothing, señor" he said.
"But I have heard that tourists pay large amounts of money to come here?"
"Sí, they do pay."
"But what could you possibly have to sell them?" My voice had taken the unfortunate tone of incredulity, and I saw the effect it had on the child.
Winter's Regret Page 5
