by Stephen King
"Call me when you get back to Colorado."
"I'll do that, Swee' Pea. How's New York?"
"It's great!" The enthusiasm I heard in her voice made me feel a lot older than fifty-three.
We talked about her new life in the big city for awhile, then I put my car in drive and turned onto the highway, heading back to the airport. A few miles down the road I looked into my rearview and saw an orange moonlet in the backseat.
I'd forgotten to give Charlie his pumpkin.
X
Wedding Bells. How to Boil a Frog. The Homecoming Party. "You Will Want to Read This."
Although I talked to Bree many times over the next two years, I didn't actually see her again until June 19th of 2011, when, in a church on Long Island, she became Brianna Donlin-Hughes. Many of the calls were about Charles Jacobs and his troubling cures--we found half a dozen more who were suffering probable aftereffects--but as time passed, our conversations focused more and more on her job and George Hughes, whom she had met at a party and with whom she was soon sharing accommodations. He was a high-powered corporate lawyer, he was African American, and he had just turned thirty. I was sure Bree's mother was satisfied on all counts . . . or as satisfied as the single mother of an only child can be.
Meanwhile, Pastor Danny's website had gone dark and Internet chatter about him had thinned to a trickle. There were speculations that he was either dead or in a private institution somewhere, probably under an assumed name and suffering from Alzheimer's. By late 2010, I had gleaned only two pieces of hard intelligence, both interesting but neither illuminating. Al Stamper had released a gospel CD called Thank You Jesus (guest artists included Hugh Yates's idol, Mavis Staples), and The Latches was once more available for lease to "qualified individuals or organizations."
Charles Daniel Jacobs had dropped off the radar.
*
Hugh Yates chartered a Gulfstream for the nuptials, and packed everyone from the Wolfjaw Ranch on board. Mookie McDonald represented the sixties admirably at the wedding, turning up in a paisley shirt with billowy sleeves, pipestem trousers, suede Beatle boots, and a psychedelic headscarf. The mother of the bride was just short of eye-popping in a vintage Ann Lowe dress she'd gotten on consignment, and as the vows were exchanged, she watered her corsage with copious tears. The groom could have stepped out of a Nora Roberts novel: tall, dark, and handsome. He and I had a friendly conversation at the reception, before the party began its inevitable journey from tipsy conversation to drunk-ass dancing. I had no sense that Bree had told him I was the jalopy with the rusty rocker panels on which she had learned, although I was sure that someday she would--in bed after particularly good sex, likely as not. That was fine with me, because I wouldn't have to be there for the inevitable masculine eye-roll.
The Nederland group went back to Colorado via American Airlines, because Hugh's gift to the newlyweds was use of the Gulfstream, which would fly them to their Hawaiian honeymoon retreat. When he announced this during the toasts, Bree squealed like a nine-year-old, jumped up, and hugged him. I'm sure Charles Jacobs was the furthest thing from her mind at that moment, which was just as it should have been. But he never left mine, not completely.
As the hour grew late, I saw Mookie whispering to the leader of the band, a very decent rock-and-blues combo with a strong lead singer and a good backlog of oldies at their command. The bandleader nodded and asked if I'd like to come up and play guitar with the band for a set or two. I was tempted, but my better angels won the day and I begged off. You may never be too old to rock and roll, but skills fade as the years stack up, and the chances of making a fool of oneself in public grow better.
I didn't exactly consider myself retired, but I hadn't played in front of a live audience in over a year, and had only sat in on three or four recording sessions, all cases of dire emergency. I did not acquit myself well in any of them. During the playback of one, I caught the drummer grimacing, as if he'd bitten into something sour. He saw me looking at him and said the bass had fallen out of tune. It hadn't, and we both knew it. If it's ridiculous for a man in his fifties to be playing bedroom games with a woman young enough to be his daughter, it's just as ridiculous for him to be playing a Strat and high-stepping to "Dirty Water." Still, I watched those guys kick out the jams with some longing and quite a lot of nostalgia.
Someone took my hand and I looked around to see Georgia Donlin. "How much do you miss it, Jamie?"
"Not as much as I respect it," I said, "which is why I'm sitting here. Those guys are good."
"And you're not anymore?"
I found myself remembering the day I had walked into my brother Con's bedroom and heard his acoustic Gibson whispering to me. Telling me I could play "Cherry, Cherry."
"Jamie?" She snapped her fingers in front of my eyes. "Come back, Jamie."
"I'm good enough to amuse myself," I said, "but my days of getting up in front of a crowd with a guitar are over."
Turned out I was wrong about that.
*
In 2012, I turned fifty-six. Hugh and his longtime girlfriend took me out to dinner. On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore--probably you've heard it--about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don't know if it's true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old.
When I was a teenager, I looked at over-fifties with pity and unease: they walked too slow, they talked too slow, they watched TV instead of going out to movies and concerts, their idea of a great party was hotpot with the neighbors and tucked into bed after the eleven o'clock news. But--like most other fifty-, sixty-, and seventysomethings who are in relative good health--I didn't mind it so much when my turn came. Because the brain doesn't age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there's a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days. (I was spared that, at least, because most of my so-called good old days had been spent as a full-bore, straight-on-for-Texas drug addict.) I think for most people, life's deceptive deliriums begin to fall away after fifty. The days speed up, the aches multiply, and your gait slows down, but there are compensations. In calmness comes appreciation, and--in my case--a determination to be as much of a do-right-daddy as possible in the time I had left. That meant ladling out soup once a week at a homeless shelter in Boulder, and working for three or four political candidates with the radical idea that Colorado should not be paved over.
I still dated the occasional lady. I still played tennis twice a week and rode my bike at least six miles a day, which kept my stomach flat and my endorphins flowing. Sure, I saw a few more lines around my mouth and eyes when I shaved, but on the whole, I thought I looked about the same as ever. That, of course, is the benign illusion of one's later years. It took going back to Harlow in the summer of 2013 for me to understand the truth: I was just another frog in a pot. The good news was that so far the temperature had only been turned up to medium. The bad was that the process wouldn't be stopping anytime soon. The three true ages of man are youth, middle age, and how the fuck did I get old so soon?
*
On June 19th of 2013, two years to the day after Bree's marriage to George Hughes and a year after the birth of their first child, I arrived home from a less-than-stellar recording session to find an envelope gaily decorated with balloons in my mailbox. The return address was familiar: RFD #2, Methodist Road, Harlow, Maine. I opened it and found myself looking at a photograph of my brother Terry's family with this caption: TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE! PLEASE COME TO OUR PARTY!
I paused before opening it, noting Terry's white hair, Annabelle's expanding paunch, and the three young adults who were their children. The little girl who had once run giggling through the lawn sprinkler in nothing but a saggy pair of Smurfette underpants was now a good-looking young woman with a baby--my grand-niece, Cara Lynne--in her arms. One of my nephews, the skinny one, looked like Con. The husky one looked eerily
like our father . . . and a little like me, poor guy.
I flipped the invitation open.
HELP US CELEBRATE TWO BIG DAYS
ON AUGUST 31, 2013!
THE 35TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY OF
TERENCE AND ANNABELLE!
THE 1ST BIRTHDAY OF CARA LYNNE!
TIME: 12 NOON to ?
PLACE: OUR HOUSE TO START, THEN EUREKA GRANGE
FOOD: PLENTY!
BAND: THE CASTLE ROCK ALL-STARS
BYOB: DON'T YOU DARE! BEER & WINE WILL FLOW!
Below this was a note from my brother. Although only months from his sixtieth birthday, Terry wrote in the same grade-school scrawl that had caused one of his teachers to send him home with a note reading Terence MUST improve his penmanship! paperclipped to his rank card.
Hey Jamie! Please come to the party, okay? No excuses accepted when you've got 2 mos to arrange your schedule. If Connie can come from Hawaii you can manage the trip from Colo! We miss you, little bro!
I dropped the invitation into the wicker basket on the back of the kitchen door. I called this the Sometime Basket, because it was full of correspondence that I vaguely believed I'd answer sometime . . . which actually meant never, as you probably know. I told myself I had no desire to go back to Harlow, and this may have been true, but the pull of family was still there. Springsteen might have had something when he wrote that line about nothing feeling better than blood on blood.
I had a cleaning lady named Darlene who came by once a week to vacuum and dust and change the bed (a chore I still felt guilty about delegating, having been taught to do myself, back in the day). She was a morose old thing, and I made it my business to be out when she was in. On one of Darlene's days, I came back to find she had fished the invitation out of the Sometime Basket and propped it open on the kitchen table. She had never done such a thing before, and I took it as an omen. That night I sat down at my computer, sighed, and sent Terry a three-word email: Count me in.
*
That was quite a Labor Day weekend. I enjoyed the hell out of myself, and could hardly believe I'd come close to saying no . . . or saying nothing, which probably would have severed my already frayed family ties for good.
It was hot in New England, and the descent into Portland Jetport on Friday afternoon was unusually bumpy in the unstable air. The drive north to Castle County was slow, but not because of traffic. I had to look at every old landmark--the farms, the rock walls, Brownie's Store, now closed and dark--and marvel over them. It was as if my childhood were still here, barely visible under a piece of plastic that had become scratched and dusty and semi-opaque with the passage of time.
It was past six in the evening when I got to the home place, where an addition had been built on, nearly doubling its original size. There was a red Mazda in the driveway that screamed airport rental (like my Mitsubishi Eclipse), and a Morton Fuel Oil truck parked on the lawn. The truck was garlanded with enough crepe paper and flowers to make it look like a parade float. A big sign propped against the front wheels read THE SCORE IS TERRY AND ANNABELLE 35, CARA LYNNE 1! BOTH WINNERS!! YOU FOUND THE PARTY! COME ON IN! I parked, walked up the steps, raised my fist to knock, thought what the hell, I grew up here, and just strolled in.
For a moment I felt as if I had flipped back in time to the years when I could tell my age with a single number. My family was crowded around the dining room table just as they had been in the sixties, all talking at once, laughing and squabbling, passing pork chops, mashed potatoes, and a platter covered with a damp dishtowel: corn on the cob, kept warm just as my mother used to do it.
At first I didn't recognize the distinguished gray-haired man at the living room end of the table, and I certainly didn't know the dark-haired hunk of handsome sitting next to him. Then the professor-emeritus type caught sight of me and rose to his feet, his face lighting up, and I realized it was my brother Con.
"JAMIE!" he shouted, and buttonhooked around the table, almost knocking Annabelle out of her chair. He grabbed me in a bearhug and covered my face with kisses. I laughed and pounded him on the back. Then Terry was there as well, grabbing both of us, and the three brothers did a kind of clumsy mitzvah tantz, making the floor shake. I saw that Con was crying, and I felt a little bit like crying myself.
"Stop it, you guys!" Terry said, although he was still jumping himself. "We'll wind up in the basement!"
For awhile we went on jumping. It seemed to me that we had to. And that was all right. That was good.
*
Con introduced the hunk, who was probably twenty years his junior, as "my good friend from the University of Hawaii Botany Department." I shook hands with him, wondering if they had bothered to take two rooms at the Castle Rock Inn. In this day and age, probably not. I can't remember when I first realized that Con was gay; probably while he was in grad school and I was still playing "Land of 1000 Dances" with the Cumberlands at the University of Maine. I'm sure our parents knew much earlier. They didn't make a big deal of it, and so none of us did, either. Children learn much more by mute example than by spoken rules, or so it seems to me.
I only heard Dad allude to his second son's sexual orientation once, during the late eighties. It must have made a big impression on me, because those were my blackout years, and I called home as seldom as possible. I wanted my dad to know I was still alive, but I was always afraid he might hear my oncoming death, which I had pretty much accepted, in my voice.
"I pray for Connie every night," he said during that call. "This damn AIDS thing. It's like they're letting it spread on purpose."
Con had avoided that and looked awesomely healthy now, but there was no disguising the fact that he was getting on, especially sitting next to his friend from the Botany Department. I had a flash memory of Con and Ronnie Paquette sitting shoulder to shoulder on the living room couch, singing "House of the Rising Sun" and trying to harmonize . . . an exercise in futility if there ever was one.
Some of this must have shown on my face, because Con grinned as he wiped his eyes. "Been a long time since we were arguing over whose turn it was to bring in Ma's laundry off the line, huh?"
"Long time," I agreed, and thought again of a frog too dumb to realize the water in his stovetop pond was growing ever warmer.
Terry and Annabelle's daughter, Dawn, joined us with Cara Lynne in her arms. The baby's eyes were that shade our mother used to call Morton Blue. "Hi, Uncle Jamie. Here's your grand-niece. She's one tomorrow, and she's getting a new tooth to celebrate."
"She's beautiful. Can I hold her?"
Dawn smiled shyly at the stranger she'd last seen when she was still in braces. "You can try, but she usually bawls her head off when it's someone she doesn't know."
I took the baby, ready to hand her back the second the yowls started. Only they didn't. Cara Lynne examined me, reached out a hand, and tweaked my nose. Then she laughed. My family cheered and applauded. The baby looked around, startled, then looked back at me with what I could have sworn were my mother's eyes.
And laughed again.
*
The actual party the next day had much the same cast, only with more supporting characters. Some I recognized at once; others looked vaguely familiar, and I realized several were children of people who had worked for my father long ago and now worked for Terry, whose empire had grown: as well as the fuel oil business, he owned a New England-wide chain of convenience stores called Morton's Fast-Shops. Bad handwriting had been no bar to success.
A catering crew from Castle Rock presided over four grills, dealing out hamburgers and hotdogs to go with a mind-boggling array of salads and desserts. Beer flowed from steel kegs and wine from wooden ones. As I chowed down on a bacon-loaded calorie-bomb in the backyard, one of Terry's salesmen--drunk, cheerful, and voluble--told me Terry also owned Splash City in Fryeburg and Littleton Raceway in New Hampshire. "That track don't make a cent of money," the salesman said, "but you know Terry--he always loved the stocks and bombers."
I remembered him workin
g with my father on various incarnations of the Road Rocket in the garage, both of them dressed in greasy tee-shirts and saggy-butt coveralls, and suddenly realized that my hometown, country-mouse brother was well-to-do. Perhaps even rich.
Every time Dawn brought Cara Lynne near, the little girl held her arms out to me. I ended up toting her around for most of the afternoon, and she finally fell asleep on my shoulder. Seeing this, her dad relieved me of my burden. "I'm amazed," he said as he laid her on a blanket in the shade of the backyard's biggest tree. "She never takes to folks like that."
"I'm flattered," I said, and kissed the sleeping baby's teething-flushed cheek.
There was a lot of talk about old days and old times, the kind of chatter that's fabulously interesting to those who were there and stupendously boring to those who weren't. I steered clear of the beer and wine, so when the party moved four miles down the road to the Eureka Grange, I was one of the designated drivers, trying to find my way through the gears of a monster King Cab pickup that belonged to the oil company. I hadn't driven a standard in thirty years, and my inebriated passengers--there must have been a dozen, counting the seven or so in the truck bed--howled with laughter each time I popped the clutch and the truck lurched. It was a wonder none of them tumbled out the back.
The catering crew had arrived ahead of us, and there were already food tables set up along the sides of a dance floor that I remembered well. I stood there looking at that expanse of polished wood until Con squeezed my shoulder.
"Bring back memories, baby brother?"
I thought of walking onto the bandstand for the first time, scared to death and smelling the sweat that came roasting up from my armpits in waves. And later, Mom and Dad waltzing by as we played "Who'll Stop the Rain?"
"More than you'll ever know," I said.
"I think I do," he said, and hugged me. In my ear he whispered it again: "I think I do."
*
There were maybe seventy people at the home place for the noon meal; by seven o'clock, there were twice that many at Eureka Grange No. 7, and the place could have used some of Charlie Jacobs's magic air-conditioning to augment the lackadaisical ceiling fans. I grabbed the sort of dessert that was still a Harlow specialty--lime Jell-O with bits of canned fruit suspended in it--and took it outside. I walked around the corner of the building, nibbling away with a plastic spoon, and there was the fire escape beneath which I had kissed Astrid Soderberg for the first time. I remembered how the fur parka she had been wearing framed the perfect oval of her face. I remembered the taste of her strawberry lipstick.
