by Kaela Coble
As if reading my mind, she stops in her path to look at me warily. “I guess I should stop doing that,” she says. “Pushin’. You know, now that there’s nothin’ to push.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just shake my head with a sad smile and follow her into the kitchen. Charlene deposits me on one of the red-leather-and-chrome chairs she tells me she picked up at the Margie’s Pub remodeling sale for five bucks a pop. I thought they looked familiar, although technically I shouldn’t know what they look like, since I was well under the drinking age before I left town. She pulls out the same pitcher from her fridge that she served us from fifteen summers ago and pours the iced tea into a glass I distinctly remember Danny serving us vodka and orange sodas in a few years later. Next, she offers me vegetables from a platter she produces from the fridge, and I wonder how she’s still standing, let alone serving me like I’m on a social call and her son will be home to join us any minute.
In keeping with this charade, Charlene insists I tell her about my “life in the big city.” There isn’t much to tell, so I talk about work. On the plane, I contemplated telling people who asked that I work at the New York Times and leaving it at that, letting them assume I’ve been away from Vermont for so long because I was busy achieving the ambition I listed in my high school yearbook: to be a journalist. But now, at my first opportunity, I hasten to add that it’s in the advertising department, because I don’t want her to think I’m putting on airs. Who was I kidding, anyway? For one, I’m sure she and my mother have talked about me and my career at least once since I’ve been gone. And even if by some miracle Nancy has let me fade into the sordid history of this town, it is Chatwick. Despite the fact that I shy away from social media, I bet you could walk out on this street and ask anyone what Ruby St. James is up to, and they would reply, “Oh, the St. James girl? Reddish hair? Oh yeah, she’s living in New York, working at that big paper of theirs. I hear she’s single as always and pays more in rent than this whole neighborhood spends on mortgages combined!”
My friends and I always called it “the Chat,” this rapid-fire circulation of the unprinted news of Chatwick. The Chat is an intangible presence that cloaks the town in intrigue and fear. The houses are so close together that every argument even one notch above normal speaking level is overheard by the little old ladies rocking the afternoon away on their screened-in porches. Their gossip filters down through whispered conversations at post–church service receptions to parents who repeat it at home in earshot of their kids, who bring it to the playground. The other (and significantly more powerful) origin is Margie’s Pub, which trickles news down to the Quik Stop clientele the next day, who bring it back to the below-the-tracks families. Subjects run the gamut from legal troubles to marital stress and right on down to who’s dating whom at Chatwick High. No one is immune. I remember Ally once having to defend herself to a neighbor who heard that Ally had broken up with her friend’s grandson over the phone. We were in fifth grade.
Danny’s family and mine were like gas pumps, fueling the Chat for years on end. From our home, the neighbors would occasionally hear Nancy crashing around the house trying to get from room to room and, shortly after, a shouting match between my parents. At the Deusos’ they heard much worse.
The doorbell rings, and Charlene escorts Ally and Aaron in. Ally carries a freshly baked pie, and the gap in time between now and the last time I saw her feels wide as a canyon. Her face—voted Prettiest in junior high and high school—is the face of the girl I stole my mother’s car with before I even had a license, driving it all over town smoking cigarettes. It’s the face of the girl who told the crew what sex was, her giddy face lit by flashlight in the field behind her house, using the same hand motions she had seen her brother use when he explained it to his friend earlier that day.
In that same field, the night before we started high school, she would gather us together—me, Emmett, Danny, and Murphy, the original crew—to tell us her father had left. After a summer of her parents arguing over the rubbers her mom had found in her dad’s pockets while doing the laundry, this came as a shock to no one but Ally, whose fierce belief in true love left her unprepared. That was the night, on the brink of becoming high school students, that she made us promise to always be friends. To be loyal to one another above all else. To never lie to each other. She needed something to cling to, and I could understand that, so I promised, like Ally promised and Emmett promised. Like Danny and Murphy promised, even though the three of us were already breaking it. Even though we’ve done nothing but break it since that night.
And now Ally’s a grown woman. From the clippings my mother periodically sends me from the Chatwick Gazette, I know Ally has recently been promoted to manager at the Cutting Edge, the salon where she’s worked since she graduated from cosmetology school. I picture her ruling the roost from her position behind her chair, affectionately clucking directions to her junior hairdressers without taking her eyes off the clump of hair she’s expertly snipping away at, gathering bits of gossip from her clients like bits of feed.
As we listened to the memorialization of our friend, I noticed Ally scanning my hair, and I know she was contemplating whether she wants to give me highlights or lowlights. She won’t get the opportunity. I don’t care how much practice she’s had; I remember all too well the time in eighth grade when she convinced me to darken my strawberry-blond hair to a deeper auburn hue. She dyed it out of a box we got at Brooks Pharmacy, and I cried for a week until the black streaks came out.
Since we’ve last seen each other, she’s married the man beside her, the man we all knew she would marry since the moment he rescued her from a scum-of-the-earth date at Dunphy’s field after homecoming. I’ve become the girl who didn’t even attend their wedding, and she’s become a person I don’t know. A person who knows that you’re expected to bring food to a bereaved person. I imagine this knowledge was passed down to her in some handbook women receive on their wedding day that tells them how to handle uncomfortable life events.
Next in the door are Emmett and Steph, Emmett looking impossibly mature in a suit and tie that he moves in as comfortably as if he wears it every day. I get a flash of our eighth-grade formal dance and me straightening his tie for him every ten minutes. He was so obsessed with keeping it straight, but so uncomfortable in it that he couldn’t stop tugging at it, ruining my efforts. He blamed me for tying it wrong so I told him to screw off, which set off the usual splitting of alliances between the girls and the boys of the crew.
Oh, the drama of those days, over a tie and a few harsh words. Over absolutely nothing at all. How I long for that now.
Nancy tells me Emmett works in finance, in the loans department. Apparently, he golfs with my father on the Sundays Dad’s in town. The WASPiness of it all turns my stomach. I half expected him to walk in with a cable-knit sweater tied around his shoulders. There is something different about the way Emmett moves now, and it takes me a minute to pinpoint it. He used to bound into a room, filling every molecule of air with nervous energy, constantly in motion. Now he moves slowly, cautiously, and only his eyes dart around the room anxiously. I attribute it to the situation; it must be difficult to attend the funeral of the boy you once treated like a fly to be swatted.
Steph—whom Ally had pointedly introduced to me at the funeral as Emmett’s girlfriend of three years (in case I didn’t already understand how ludicrous it was that I hadn’t even known she existed)—is tiny in comparison to Emmett but just as smartly dressed. She has warm brown eyes, and when I hugged her at the service, I felt instant comfort with her. Perhaps this is because our embrace wasn’t impregnated with ten years of absence, resentment, and disappointment. She carries a fruit basket, thus debunking my wedding-day uncomfortable-situation-handbook theory. I am feeling more and more inadequate with the arrival of each guest.
Everyone takes turns hugging, even though we already went through this at the church and then again before
leaving the cemetery. But it’s something to do, I guess. When the ritual is over, there is nothing but uncomfortable shifting until Charlene decides to dole out the letters she mentioned at the cemetery.
“Must be weird for you to be back here,” Emmett says, his talent for adding more tension to a room already humid with it still unfortunately intact. I feel my face instantly begin to burn as I search for an appropriate response. Am I to apologize for being gone so long? I know that’s what they’re all expecting. At the very least, it’s what they deserve.
“At least she is here,” Ally cuts in. “More than I can say for Murphy.”
Even as it softens to Ally’s defense of me, my heart jumps at the name. After all the anxiety at just the thought of seeing him, he wasn’t at the funeral. When Charlene told us about the closed reception, she had asked me where Murphy was, as if no time had passed and I was still his best friend, the keeper of his whereabouts. Ally had jumped in and offered to make sure he came. I had overheard her on her cell phone before I closed the door to my car: “Murphy Leblanc, if you don’t put aside your stupid pride and get your ass over to Charlene’s house…” In that moment, despite my leftover resentment, I felt sorry for him. He and I were in the same boat, helpless against Ally’s authority, even if we were rowing in opposite directions.
We hear a vehicle pull up in the driveway, but when minutes pass without a knock on the door, Ally goes over to the window and peers through the curtains. “Speak of the devil,” she says.
My stomach drops. He’s here. Like a ghost conjured by speaking its name, the person I’ve been simultaneously dreading and looking forward to seeing since I returned to Chatwick is now parked not fifty feet from where I stand, separated only by a rotting porch and a bright-teal wall.
• • •
I can’t help but join Ally at the window. There Murphy is, sitting in a truck I’ve never seen before. The side is emblazoned with the logo for Leblanc Johnson Construction, the contracting company Nancy tells me he has owned with Aaron for some time. His arms are stretched out straight with the same death grip on his steering wheel as I had moments earlier. “What’s he doing?” I ask.
Ally rolls her eyes and snaps her tongue. “Who knows? Aaron, can you go see if he’s coming in for a landing anytime soon?”
“What am I supposed to say?” Aaron asks, a deer caught in the headlights. Business partner or no, he wants as little to do with the emotional turmoil today is bringing up. He’s a dude. The old-school kind. The Chatwick kind.
Everyone is quiet. I lock eyes with Emmett, each silently battling to relinquish this task to the other. I surrender more easily than I should. “I’ll go,” I say, and I head through the door before there can be any more discussion. The first time Murphy and I see each other should be just the two of us anyway, even if Ally has her nose pressed up against the windowpane the whole time.
I step out onto the porch, my breath catching in my throat as our eyes meet. I feel the pull. I’m circling the drain. Even though his window is rolled down, I can’t hear the four-letter word his mouth forms as he breaks eye contact, but it puts an abrupt halt to the centrifugal force anyway. Thank God.
“That happy to see me, huh?” I ask as I approach the driver’s side. Up close, I see that his jet-black hair is now peppered with gray that’s too mature for his twenty-eight years, and his rolled-up shirtsleeve reveals a tattoo encircling his forearm, which is thicker, tanner, and more muscular than I remember. Otherwise, he looks exactly the same.
He exhales an unsmiling laugh but doesn’t make eye contact. “Didn’t think I’d see you here.” His voice makes it more real. The voice I talked to every night on the phone until one of us fell asleep.
“Ally didn’t tell you I was coming home for the funeral?” Funny, Ally tells everyone everything, especially if she has a part in making it happen.
He ignores me. “Kinda forgot you even existed,” he says, staring straight ahead.
Even though I know he can’t possibly mean it, hearing the words and the icy tone of his voice feels like a bullet to the chest. A bullet I quite possibly deserve, although perhaps not fired by Murphy.
“Why weren’t you there?” My voice falters, and I realize that I had wanted him to be there more than I wanted him not to be there. In fact, I had needed him to be there. Suddenly I wish he would jerk his head in the direction of the passenger side, indicating he wants me to get in. To ride around the back roads of Chatwick, head down to the bay. As dirty as this section of town is, if you stick with the road for another mile, the below-the-tracks section where Danny grew up suddenly breaks open to beautiful green, rolling pastures of farmland. I can smell the cow manure from here; it’s a sweeter smell than I remember. Past the farmland is Chatwick Bay, where we used to escape on the boiling-hot summer nights—skipping rocks, talking about life, skinny-dipping. I suddenly ache to be sitting in Murphy’s passenger seat, my legs stretched out, my toes cold in the wind, headed away from the center of town and into our own little world.
Murphy still stares straight ahead, so I risk putting my hand on his arm. “Hey. Look at me.”
When he finally does, I see the anger and hurt burning in his eyes. I wonder if he can see the same in mine. “You’re not the only one I haven’t seen in a while,” he says, breaking our gaze almost immediately. “Dan and I…”
“You fought?” I ask, knowing the answer is yes before he nods, but not wanting him to know I know. It works in my favor that Murphy and Danny stopped being friends just two weeks before Danny and I did. If they had continued to be as close as brothers, Murphy and I would be having a very different conversation right now. “What was it about?” And this I have truly never known, have tried not to want to know.
His face finally twists into a smile, although not the warm, easy one I remember. “It wasn’t about you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
My mouth drops open in feigned shock, because that’s exactly what I was thinking. “That’s not what I was thinking!”
He snorts out an infuriating laugh.
“Excuse me for trying to figure out what could make the best of friends completely cut off communication for ten—” I stop, realizing what I’m saying. I am a huge pile of hypocritical crap.
Murphy doesn’t say anything. He just continues to smile that scary, un-Murphy-like smile.
I raise my hands against the gun I imagine he’s about to reload. “Okay. You’re right. I’m no master communicator myself. It’s just…I know what happened between the two of us”—I wave my finger between him and myself—“and I know what happened between me and Danny. What I don’t know is what happened between the two of you.”
“Ruby, not everything is some dramatic thing. I told you it wasn’t about you. So just mind your own damn business!” he says.
I spin to go back inside, anger and hurt stinging my eyes. I hear him curse and then the door of his truck opening and closing. He grabs at my elbow and I shrug him off, turning back to face him with my arms crossed.
“Tuesday.”
The nickname makes me stiffen. Only he and Danny call me that. Now, I guess, it’s only Murphy. It used to drive me crazy, the way they would walk behind me in the halls in elementary school, singing that song over and over again until I shouted at them to stop. Now, I would give anything to hear Danny sing just one horribly out-of-tune chorus of “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday.”
“Listen, I’m sorry,” Murphy says. “I’m a little shook up. It was a long time ago, and neither of us got over it…in time. I don’t want to talk about it because it seems stupid now. Everything seems kinda stupid.”
I know this is as much as I’m going to get from him. “Well, I tell you what’s stupid—us standing out here fighting while everyone else is inside ready to hear what Danny has to say for himself. No one is looking forward to it, Murphy, but maybe…it will…help.” When the tears come to my eyes, hi
s face finally softens. He takes a step forward, opening his arms to hug me, and I get a whiff of his cologne, the same stuff he’s always worn. I step back, shaking my head. I can’t be hugged by him. It will kill me; I’m sure of it. When I turn to climb the steps, I feel him hesitating, but eventually he follows.
Charlene makes even more of a fuss over Murphy than she did over me. He looks sheepish, undoubtedly feeling the full weight of the rift between him and Danny now that he’s in Charlene’s house with Danny’s school pictures lining the walls. Neither Murphy nor I will resolve our final fight with Danny, and both of us should have been fighting to keep him with us.
Charlene leads us into the basement, which is different from the last time I saw it. There’s a futon, a bed, and a mini fridge. Danny must have adapted this room into an apartment of sorts, giving him the illusion of independence and the privacy to numb himself against the world. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and suddenly I know—Danny died in this room. I picture Charlene coming down with a basket of laundry, calling out in forced cheeriness, “Get up, lazybones!” only to find…
I shudder. I can’t even go there. God help me from ever going there.
Aaron hands out the folding chairs we used to use for poker nights. He offers Charlene a chair, but she shakes her head. She stands in front of the old television we once screened porn on—the girls curious to see what all the fuss was about, the boys simply horny teenagers. We arrange ourselves in a semicircle to face her, reluctant pupils in a class we never elected to take. The couples sit together, holding hands, while Murphy and I are lumped together off to the side. As always, the single ones.
