Sour Notes, page 17
Maybe he’d understood we were drifting apart. Had he been trying to get my attention by putting a snake in my bed? Or by showing off his knowledge of the family? Or even coming to my defense when a group of bullies took my lunch money?
For all the times he’d had my back, let me hang out with his cooler friends, or even just pushed me in a tire swing, I hadn’t shown the least bit of gratitude. He had always been there for me, and I had never given him a simple thanks.
With a disgusted grunt at myself for wallowing in doubts, I pushed myself to my feet. Rather than crossing the hall to my room, though, I studied the photos on his wall. At the one of me in the tire swing, Russ and Dean laughing and pushing, I paused and ran my finger over the frame. I ached to remember how things were back then, what the air smelled like, how the wind felt across our faces.
Restless, I opened the desk drawer and flipped through the contents. Pencils. Pens. Paper clips. Rubber bands. A few old coins. I stood in his closet and stroked his high school letter jacket and the denim coat beside it. I leaned forward and sniffed the denim. Did it still contain a hint of his sweat? Or was that just my imagination? Did I even remember what he smelled like?
Slipping on that lined denim jacket, I realized the shoulders were too broad and the sleeves too long. Even all these years later, Dean’s hand-me-downs were too big for me. I couldn’t bear to take it off, though, despite the fact it was too much coat for even a cool mountain evening.
From the chest of drawers, I retrieved the small cardboard box. Flipping through it again, I handled the high school graduation tassel, the one I had seen hanging from his rearview mirror in the accident photos. I toyed with the key ring with a rabbit’s foot and keys to his truck and the house. I picked up the old wallet and extracted his driver’s license, a library card, school ID, and the seventeen dollars in cash. Through my teary eyes, I could barely read the truck’s registration and insurance card contained in an envelope. When I picked up the old white choker he used to wear around his neck, I couldn’t hold back any longer and let the tears flow.
The box, I realized with some horror, contained things recovered from the accident scene or out of the pockets of the clothes he had been wearing that morning. From the reports, I knew the police had carefully inventoried everything. Now I knew they had returned it all, even the seventeen dollars.
And my parents, in their grief or out of practicality, hadn’t buried the white choker with him. Or removed the cash. Or even trashed that ratty old rabbit’s foot. They had kept everything he had with him that day. Had they stood here like I was, fingering inconsequential trinkets while thinking of Dean?
The more I flipped through the box, the more I felt something was off. What didn’t belong? In a flash, I realized I had it backward. What bothered me wasn’t something in the box or something I’d seen in the photos.
Rather, it was what was missing.
I carried the box into my room and pulled out the copies I had made of the accident report. Extracting the inventory sheet, I compared the list with the box. The only things that were missing didn’t matter. The bloodied clothes he had been wearing. The truck’s instruction manual.
I flopped onto my bed, the police report to one side of me and Dean’s belongings on the other. Something was right there in my mind, right on the edge of my vision. Something important.
I sat up and looked at the pile of photos that had spilled out onto the covers. That awful graduation tassel twisting and turning in the wind…
A tingle ran along my arm, goose bumps racing across my skin. That’s what was missing. The thing he valued. The thing he wouldn’t have been without. He had scrimped and saved for it.
Dean had played baseball that spring, just like every year since he was a little kid. In a late-season game, a batter hammered a line drive. Reacting without thinking, Dean caught the ball with his bare hand rather than his glove. The impact broke two fingers, he proudly recounted that night at the dinner table, but he’d fielded the ball and stopped a base runner from advancing. Without that catch, they would have lost. Dean was, once again, the hero.
The trainer examined his injured hand. By the time they reached the hospital, he warned, the doctors would have to cut the class ring off his swollen fingers. Dean refused to let that happen. He gripped the ring, grimaced, and tugged.
When he came home from the doctor’s office, his hand was splinted and bandaged. His dented class ring dangled from a chain given to him by a nurse.
He never left home without it. That chain hung around his neck unless he was playing sports or working in the fields. Then, it was hooked over the rearview mirror of his truck. The day before high school graduation, I had sat at my window watching Dean and Dad work on the tractor. Dean was shirtless and grease covered. The glint of the ring in the sunlight caught my eye as it twisted from the rearview mirror.
That night as he drove out of the VFW, it hung there, sparkling in the streetlights. He hadn’t wanted to risk it falling off in the crowded party.
I scanned the police report again, but I knew I wouldn’t find it. It hadn’t been in his truck when the police arrived at the scene of the accident.
Had he left it at Blake’s? Or maybe the impact of the crash had thrown it from the mirror. A rescuer, in the chaos, might have stepped on it and trampled it into the ground. I vowed to search the next day.
Trampled? Someone had left those footprints around the truck. Would they have taken it? That made little sense. Unless…
I jumped to my feet. A few days earlier, I had seen a ring. It had bothered me because it was somewhere unexpected. The person who had it never expected me to see it.
For the second night in a row, I left my house in the dark.
33
With no traffic on the road, driving downtown didn’t take long. I parked at Sammy’s Pub and wondered if Blake was inside. But I wasn’t here to socialize. I hoped parking my garish SUV among the smattering of cars would hide it from anyone who might notice.
Eyeing the sidewalks devoid of any pedestrians at this time of night, I whispered a silent thanks that I still wore Dean’s bulky denim coat. If someone saw me during the block-and-a-half walk to Stewart’s Consignment, they would only remember a bigger guy in that coat. Without that camouflage, a skinny, tattooed rocker would be too memorable.
As I approached the store, I hoped Xander had never changed the locks. Because we spent so much time rehearsing in the building, Anna had given me a key to come and go as I pleased. I wasn’t sure Xander knew. I wouldn’t have hidden it from him back then, but I didn’t think we’d ever talked about it either. He lived only a few blocks away, so when I was meeting him at the store, he always beat me and had the door open. I’d kept the key as a reminder of my happy times playing with the Wicked Centipedes. On lonely nights on the road, it was small source of comfort to see it on my key ring, so I had kept it.
The key slipped easily into the lock on the front door and turned without hesitation. The click echoed in the empty street. A glance around assured me no one was watching. Holding my breath, I pulled open the door and waited for the shriek of a burglar alarm. None rang out.
Score another point for small town safety.
I slipped inside the dark store and flipped the lock closed behind me. I stumbled through the cluttered aisles as far back as I could before the faint glow from the streetlight outside faded to black. Thinking I was far enough away from the window to avoid being spotted, I turned on the flashlight on my cell phone. Its beam guided me through the curtain and into the rear of the store. I moved around the file cabinets to Xander’s desk and examined the contents on the wall. The photos. The high school diploma. But what I was looking for was no longer there.
On my first visit earlier in the week, a class ring had hung on a chain from the diploma. At the time, I’d thought nothing of it. Plenty of kids in our senior class had bought them. But I’d ridiculed it. And so had my best friend. Xander and I had sat alone at our lunch table, laughing at the absurdity of such a trinket. We were cooler than the cool kids. We didn’t need anything to remind us of high school.
If I’d thought about it then, I probably would have guessed someone had come into the store to sell their old ring. Maybe Blake, having drunk away his last paycheck. And maybe it was whoever had taken Dean’s ring.
But if that was true, why would Xander hide it? The second day, I’d sat back here with Xander but never noticed the ring was gone. He hadn’t sold it, because it hadn’t been out front in a display case. He’d had it on his memento wall. Then he’d removed it when I showed up.
Why display something he thought was ridiculous to own? Why would he hide it as soon as I returned?
The answer was painfully obvious now. The ring meant something to him that I wasn’t supposed to see.
I hoped he hadn’t thrown it away. Or taken it home to hide. I needed it to prove I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. And that it really was Dean’s and not just some random ring.
I only hoped it was still in the store, carefully hidden until I left town again. And I was sure if he had kept it all these years, it was important enough to him to keep now.
I turned my attention to the desk drawers. They were locked, but I had been prepared for that. From my many hours helping Anna, I knew a toolbox sat on the workbench in the corner for simple repairs for consigned items. A set of screwdrivers waited on the top. A flathead made quick work of the flimsy desk lock. I opened the thin top drawer and sorted through its contents. Pencils. Pens. Paper. The usual.
The side drawer held a stapler, tape dispenser, scissors, and rulers. That left the bottom file drawer. I had seen a coffee thermos, a bag lunch, and various snacks, so it was where he stored his food for the day. When I opened it, as I expected, those items were gone. He would take them home each night to clean and reuse the next day.
But with nothing else in the drawer, I had a clear view of the manila envelope lying on the bottom. I extracted it and shook the contents into my hand. A cheap chain with a Millerton High School class ring with a dent like a baseball would make if caught barehanded.
With trembling hands, I held the ring between my fingers and shined the flashlight. Engraved along the interior were three letters. DTM 2006.
Dean Thomas McDougal. Class of 2006.
Squeezing my hand around it, I collapsed into the chair and let the tears flow. Why would my best friend steal my brother’s most valuable keepsake?
Xander had gotten his hands on it between the time Dean left the VFW parking lot and the time the police inventoried the contents of the truck. The only logical answer was that he’d taken it from the accident site. The boot prints around Dean’s truck belonged to him.
But the logical answer wasn’t logical at all. Why would he stand there and watch my brother die? Why not help?
That left the worst question of all. What was Xander doing driving that road early on a Sunday morning, so far from his home?
He hadn’t happened upon the accident. Somehow, someway, he’d caused it. But why?
The sheriff’s department was a block away. I should deliver the ring to them right now. I didn’t know how to explain how I’d found it inside this store, though. I wasn’t a lawyer, but I was fairly sure having a years-old key wasn’t a defense against a breaking-and-entering charge. Even if I didn’t get charged, the ring might not be usable as evidence. I’d watched many an episode of Law and Order on lonely nights, and something told me a judge would toss it from court.
I couldn’t put it back and let them come get it the next day, though. Xander would know someone had broken into his desk. I couldn’t fix that. He would guess it was me. He would get rid of the ring.
Besides, I didn’t want someone else to confront Xander. With my newfound backbone, I wanted to look him in the eye and demand answers. But not tonight. Not where he lived. If I even knew where that was.
One more night wouldn’t matter. A seventeen-year-old secret could wait another day. So I slipped the ring and its chain into my pants pocket. I closed the desk drawer the best I could, but I didn’t really try to hide that it had been opened. With some perverse pleasure, I even imagined him sweating when he found the drawer had been jimmied.
I returned the screwdriver, slipped out the front door, and relocked it before walking back down the empty street to my waiting car.
34
The house was still dark when my mother shouted my name, her voice laced with panic. I’d been dreaming of confronting Xander with the ring and demanding an explanation, though I couldn’t recall any excuse he offered that made any sense. Or any excuse at all. Maybe I’d just blocked it out. Or maybe my mind hadn’t been able to come up with anything that made even dream logic.
When Mom called a second time, the dream vanished, and I sat up in bed. It was pitch-black outside the window. I couldn’t figure out if I was awake or still dreaming. Disoriented, I fumbled for my cell phone resting on the bedside table and checked the time: 4:18 a.m.
I sat up, rubbed sleep from my eyes, and turned on the lamp. Dean’s denim coat hung across the back of the chair. The chain and Dean’s ring lay on the desk where I had left them the night before. I had twisted it in my hands, slipped it on and off my finger, and studied those initials for hours before finally collapsing in exhaustion. I couldn’t help but reach out and touch it again. The cold metal sent a shiver up my spine.
Mom called again from the base of the steps, pushing me fully awake.
“Coming,” I shouted as I slipped on the jeans I had worn the night before. After pulling the sweatshirt over my head, I stumbled barefooted out of my room.
When I reached the top of the stairs, I froze at the sight of my mother’s tear-stained face staring up from the first floor. She wore a robe over her nightclothes and leaned against the wall.
I raced down the steps just in time to catch her in my arms as she sagged toward the floor. I feared I already knew the answer, but I begged her to tell me what was going on. She blubbered, the words confused and slurred.
I raised her to her feet and guided her to the couch, pushing the blanket she slept under to the corner of the cushions. Once I had her settled so she wouldn’t collapse to the floor, I asked her again, “What’s wrong?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She looked lost and alone, and I felt such pain for her. I gathered her into a hug and let her cry against my shoulder.
When her sobs subsided, I gently sat her back against the couch. She tried again to speak but couldn’t. Instead, with a shaking hand, she pointed toward the rear parlor.
I squeezed her hand and urged her to wait on the couch for me to return. With more dread than I had ever felt, I forced my feet forward and entered the darkened room. I reached for the light switch then decided against flipping it. The light coming from the lamp in the next room was enough to let me know what had happened. Dad was pale and still. His eyes were closed, but his chest no longer rose and fell. After his long battle, he had slipped away quietly in his sleep.
I felt a tear roll down my cheek. We never got to say goodbye. How fitting.
My father was as organized in death as he had been in life. A folder in a desk drawer contained everything we needed, including step-by-step instructions from hospice.
The first phone call set the machinery of death into motion. Fire department medics arrived with flashing red lights and confirmed the obvious. Dad had been a volunteer with the department for years. Both of the first responders knew him and his wishes. The do-not-resuscitate order in his file was perfunctory.
They radioed to cancel the ambulance and shut off their strobes as a sheriff’s deputy pulled into the drive. He asked a few questions and offered his condolences. By the time the medical examiner cleared the scene, the funeral home workers had arrived. The body was respectfully carried out of the house and driven away.
The driveway was again empty. The house fell silent. My tough, strong mother, who had always been the foundation of our family, wilted. I helped her dress. Made her eat some breakfast despite her protests that she couldn’t possibly. Bundled her into my rental car and carefully snapped the seat belt into place around her.
I drove her to the funeral home and sat with her as she nodded numbly in answer to questions, mostly confirming what she and Dad had already decided. He had even made all the payments. The obituary was prewritten and we only needed to add the date of death, but even that made her cry all over again.
She was, for the first time in over four decades, alone in the world without her partner. My heart ached for her through each step of the process.
The preacher, Reverend Jacob Brawley, a different one from when Dean had died, arrived and prayed with her. He assured her that everything would be handled as they had discussed. He introduced himself to me, his big hands engulfing mine in a firm handshake.
When we were finally done, I got her to stumble back to my car and drove her home. Russ’s pickup truck waited in the driveway. He and Sarah rose from their seats on the porch and came down the steps. She hugged my mother and helped her up the steps and inside, urging her the entire way to eat some lunch to keep up her strength.
Once they were inside, Russ said, “Sorry about your dad.”
He shook my hand, and I mumbled my thanks. We settled into the rocking chairs on the porch. The frenetic energy of the morning seeped out of my body, replaced by a deep tiredness. Not just the early start of the day or the lateness of the night before had zapped me. The awfulness of everything consumed me. A man I’d barely thought of a week earlier had died and left a gaping hole in me. Would I have felt this much pain if I hadn’t come home? Despite the agony, though, I was glad I had.
As I relaxed, my mind could think of the things I’d left undone.
