The Year of Second Chances, page 19
“He wanted us to get matching tattoos to commemorate,” I recalled to Levi. “Like a skull and crossbones and the date, or something, right?”
“Exactly! Like it was his last day on earth. I was like, Chill, dude. You’re young, you’re healthy. You’ve got a great life, beautiful wife . . .” I felt my cheeks flush as Levi continued. “I was like, Don’t worry. You’re going to get through this. The chemo’s gonna work . . .” Levi’s voice faded.
And then the chemo hadn’t worked. That was the next part of the story. The cancer had spread, so the chemo had had to get more aggressive, and the following June, he would be too tired to venture outside for that long. I stared at the bottom of my empty cocktail.
“He got really depressed after that.” I could picture Gabe as I’d watched him in those weeks through the window above the sink, sitting in the backyard, his back to me, cross-legged on the grass, staring at the garden.
“Can’t blame him.” Levi let out a little bitter laugh. “That night, even. He got morose.”
“Oh, my god,” I said, putting a hand to my forehead. It was all coming back. “He put that ballad of yours on repeat on the way home. Remember? He was obsessed.” I imitated what I recalled of Gabe’s slurring entreaty from the back seat. “Robbie, put on ‘Bones,’ okay, Robbie? One more time. Just one more time. And finally you offered to play it for him live so I could have some frickin’ peace. Thank you for that, by the way.”
“Glad to help.”
As Levi laughed again, a tear ran down his cheek, but I couldn’t tell if it was from the mirth or the grief.
He lifted his shoulder to wipe his face, sniffing. “God, wouldn’t it be great if we could do that this year? If he were still here. Maybe every year. The three of us at the county fair headliner concert. Could have been a tradition.”
“That’s what you two could do,” I muttered to Levi. I thought back to Gabe’s pink-tinted face in the clouds of secondhand smoke, writhing in ecstasy to each song, all of which sounded the same to me. “I’m sure you guys would have had even more fun if I hadn’t been there putting in my earplugs, harassing you about sunscreen.”
“No, no way. It wouldn’t have been right without you. Gabe wanted you there. And I was so glad you came.”
“Really?”
“Really. You always . . .” He smiled, looking suddenly shy. “Come on, you remember. I was always trying to get you to come to things.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “And I never understood why.”
“I wanted you to relax.”
“Because I was annoying?”
“No. Because I saw you fall in love with my best friend,” Levi said. “And it seemed like you were only ever happy when he was happy. He was like this escape for you. Gabe and I used to talk about it.”
“What do you mean?” I felt myself getting angry, but I wasn’t sure if I was mad at the Levi in front of me now. More at the person then, who was apparently thinking all these things, talking about them with Gabe, never bothering to consult me. “Levi,” I snapped when he was slow to answer.
He sighed. “We always kind of wondered what you were like before your dad died. Because it seemed like—” he glanced over at me, cautious “—don’t get mad at me, but it seemed like you felt like you always had to be the adult. The responsible one. But that day at the fair—I don’t know. You let loose a little bit more. It was like we were all equal.”
A nervous knot formed in my throat, replacing the anger, though I wasn’t sure why. I wanted to stay angry, but I couldn’t. Perhaps because it was true. “Maybe I finally felt I could let loose because you stepped up.”
“Then, I wish I had done that more often.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Levi and I had been a team that day. When one needed a break, the other was ready to follow Gabe to the beer taps for a refill or cheer him on as he rode a mechanical bull or draw him away from some creepy stranger he’d befriended. We all got to lose ourselves in different ways. I felt Levi’s eyes on me, thoughtful. “That day was different. Too much Gabe for one person.”
“He succeeded in his quest, though,” Levi said. “It really was the best.”
I looked up at him and smiled. “The best.”
Suddenly, Levi had this look I recognized but had never understood. It was as if we were in college again. Gabe could have been in the other room, could have just gotten up to fetch something. The way Levi used to stare was so open, so raw, it made me feel like the sight of me was being recorded, preserved to be savored later. I would have questioned his intentions, but I wasn’t sure if he even knew what he was doing. He never said anything inappropriate, never did anything beyond look. He was doing it again now. He realized it just as I did, and he had to look away, almost confused by his own intensity.
I was confused, too. I might have been looking back.
Suddenly Harpo got up from his spot, leaping off to trot down the hall. I was conscious of the empty space the dog had left between us.
“Welp,” I said, slapping my hands on my knees. “I should really get going.”
“Yeah,” Levi said. “It’s late.”
I stood.
Levi stood beside me. He opened his arms. “Uh, can we . . . ? Is that okay?”
“Of course it’s okay,” I said, a pleasant tingling rising on my skin as I reached around him, resting my head against his chest. “It’s more than okay.”
But as we hugged, I braced for something. It was nothing, I told myself. Levi and I had been close to each other hundreds of times, on birthdays or holidays or other gatherings, sharing hospital love seats. But I’d never considered his body beside mine, the heft and strength of it, the intentions behind the ways his limbs moved or didn’t move, the thoughts that swirled under his curtain of hair.
After a few seconds, neither of us had let go, and the space between us was getting smaller. Small enough that I could feel his heartbeat. His middle rounded against my middle. The heaviness of his big arms around my shoulders, his hands and their slight pressure on my shoulder blades, the beginnings of my ribs.
He was looking down at me. I looked up at him. I could see little flecks of green and gold in his irises.
Finally, I pulled away from his gaze. “Thanks for the drink. I should get home.”
He nodded, pulling open his apartment door, gesturing for me to lead the way.
“I’ll be in touch soon,” I said. “About the memorial.”
“Sure,” he said, his eyes searching mine.
As I started the car, my breath fogging, I couldn’t ignore the pull of my own confusion. Why had I left like that? Because. Because of what? Because there was too much. Too much hug? Too much of him looking? Too much of me looking back? I could go on like that all night, I realized—beyond the night, into the morning, into territory I didn’t want to roam.
There had been a moment.
The moment meant nothing.
The end.
But as the streets led me back to Brokenridge, answers started to replace the nothing. And the answers disturbed me. Not just because I had been finding an odd comfort in the presence of my husband’s best friend. What I really didn’t care to examine was why I needed to seek comfort in the first place. I’d practically run straight into Levi’s arms from my own kitchen. From my own kitchen and the man standing in the center of it—a perfectly wonderful man, who wanted to be my boyfriend. Why was I afraid?
I shook my head, as if to shake off the thought, and sped into the night.
19
Two truths and a lie . . .
I’ve shaken hands with the governor of Minnesota.
I have a preternatural ability to know when everyone around me needs a snack.
I am legally a giant.
I returned home from Levi’s to find an empty house and a text from Jake. Feeling back to about 95% after our epic brunch lol. Hope the charity thing went well. He’d left the kitchen relatively clean—though he’d used the wrong rag on the counters, and there were now shiny circles of grease visible under the lights. Gabe’s mug, I noticed, was upside down on the drying rack.
Now on Monday morning, I was still haunted by the thoughts that had followed me home from Levi’s: that somehow our happy, tipsy wade into memories meant that I wasn’t ready for Jake. That at the first sign of permanence in the present, I’d run back to the past.
But the tasks of the week settled me. It was tax season at work, and spring-cleaning season at the Green River, and at night I practiced with my makeup to the peaceful hum of Jake’s mountain-climbing documentaries. Maybe I had gotten spooked because we skipped a few steps, I thought. I had gone too quickly from Storage Wars and Friday the 13th marathons in my pajamas to playing house. But that’s what one does in relationships in one’s thirties—at least that’s what the recoupled widows from Sisters in Grief told me. You fall into domestic routines. You go to bed together at nine. You make breakfast.
Soon, I put an extra toothbrush in Jake’s bathroom and bought cat toys for Tiger. I relaxed into his steady breathing next to me in bed, into the pleasure of rubbing my hand over the prickle of his scalp as we held each other, the minty smell of Icy Hot he put on after a run, and into our commutes, where I was teaching him Britney Spears lyrics, anticipating the moment when he turned down the radio before he was about to ask me a nonsense question. My panic began to recede, replaced by the steady rhythm of life, the life we were building together. One night, as we were picking up takeout, I referred to him as my boyfriend without a second thought. We were both smiling the whole way home.
My Shakespeare-makeup debut was approaching rapidly, and before the dress rehearsal in April, I needed to be ready to quickly transform seven actors into ghosts—Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius—all before Hamlet’s death in the final act. I convinced Theo to volunteer to be my practice model. My quickest turnaround was ten minutes, but I knew I could do better.
At the restaurant, I put the pinot on special and made a chalkboard sign we could put out on the front sidewalk. Already we’d doubled wine sales, which I was tracking on my phone. In my journal, under What’s My Problem, I wrote I did not die, yet I lost life’s breath. It was a quote from a packet of worksheets passed around at Sisters in Grief, attributed to Dante Alighieri, a name I recognized from school associated with suffering and transformation. I underlined the words I did not die.
Last week, I began to get the frizz out of my hair. I moisturized my face. I dusted the baseboards and beat the rugs. I cleared the receipts and Diet Coke bottles from the back of the Volvo.
By the following Sunday, I’d found the only corner of my house that wasn’t clean: the boxes of Gabe’s old things. They needed to be taken to the church, I decided, where they had a rummage sale that found good homes for old things. Things even Gabe’s parents hadn’t wanted. Decades-old T-shirts whose holes in the armpits I’d repaired. Bicycle accessories I’d never use. A stray order of thousands of promotional pins we’d misplaced during the first campaign.
At the church, I fielded the volunteer ladies’ questions as they dug for items to sell. They deemed the tools useful, the T-shirts rags. They were glad to see me looking better, they told me. How was my mother, they asked. They hadn’t seen her at a service in a while. She was surviving, I told them, and they should stop by the supper club sometime. And who was that man they saw me with at the St. Patrick’s Day party? He was a local boy, I informed the ladies with pride. They were delighted. They were impressed. They had received the Save the Date for Gabe’s memorial fundraiser and couldn’t wait to attend. They’d loved the pictures I’d chosen to feature in the message—especially the one of Gabe as a little baseball player. Levi had been the one to choose that one.
Levi. I hadn’t talked to him much since the night at his apartment beyond a few texts about the memorial.
After a minute, I found myself going back inside the church and retrieving the shirts. I couldn’t bear the thought of scissors slicing through Gabe’s faded Nirvana happy face, the purple one from Brokenridge Spring Fling, the black-gray cotton with a Metallica logo. There were some things that needed to be preserved. I pressed my face into the fabric, searching, finding only the smell of a damp old house.
An hour later I was sweeping barn stalls when I heard Levi come up the drive, guitars and bass thumping even through the Honda’s closed windows.
When he’d parked, he made his way across the side yard and paused to take in the sight of the barn, paint still bone-white and peeling, furniture and farm equipment under tarps and old blankets in hulking forms, towering behind me. His face looked heavier than I’d seen it in a while. His hair hung over his cheeks, bringing out the shadows under his eyes.
“What’s all this?” he called.
“Just doing some cleaning,” I called back. “Gabe never got around to getting rid of all his family’s old stuff, so I figured I would . . .” I focused my eyes on the folded stack of T-shirts I’d rescued from the church. “Anyway, I thought you might want one or two of these.”
Levi took the shirts without looking at me. As he sorted through them, the slightest intake of breath. Amusement or a sigh of nostalgia, I couldn’t tell. “Not gonna fit.”
“What about Nirvana?” I lifted up the black Nirvana shirt. It always hung baggy on Gabe. “Try it.”
Levi looked at the shirt for a moment, stepped forward to take it from my hands, and peeled off his own fisherman’s sweater. I turned my head from his bare chest and stomach, but his body was in my periphery, still winter pale, laced with colorful designs. When I looked back, he was pulling the clearly too-small shirt over his bulk. His wide, muscular stomach peeked out from the hem.
“Voilà,” he said. “Fits like a glove.”
I laughed. He smirked and pulled off the shirt, tossing it back to me. “Catch,” he said and slid his head back into his sweater.
I refolded the Nirvana T and returned it to the stack. I’d texted him to come out because I wanted to be proactive, to make sure everything was normal. But now that he was here, there was still something in the air between us, something strange and unformed and stubborn. Levi probably sensed it, too. I closed my eyes and saw his iridescent irises close to mine. A pang of awkwardness. So he didn’t want the shirt. Fine. That didn’t mean anything, either.
I tried to smile gamely. “You want to help?” I threw a hand behind me. “There’s lots to do back here.”
“Sure.” He strode past me, smelling like chicory coffee. I watched him maneuver through two long-rusted tractors toward a stack of old furniture. Soon, he had pulled back a tarp with a violent yank, revealing a dusty dresser. “I can dust this, I guess?”
“Sure,” I echoed.
He picked up a rag and began to wipe it down. “So give me the update,” he said.
“Just working on getting the house in order,” I replied. “Keeping things going at the restaurant, messing with my Hamlet looks . . .”
Levi nodded, thoughtful, watching me. “And Jake?”
“All good there,” I said, swallowing. I wasn’t going to give anything beyond that. I didn’t want to invite those unsettling feelings again.
Levi picked up the Nirvana shirt he had tossed aside earlier and smiled at me, traced with something like sadness. “All good. Okay. Great.”
“Yep! Anyway,” I said, “we can start moving forward with the charity, and I’m thinking Mom’s restaurant can do the food. I’ll just have to figure out how much we can spend to break even—”
Levi squinted at me, but he didn’t poke or prod. For the first time since I’d known him, he seemed to be holding something back.
“What?”
“You’re just gonna plow forward, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
He scoffed. “You’re just gonna give away one of Gabe’s favorite shirts like it’s nothing. You’re packing up like, no big deal. After everything we talked about.”
“What, are you talking about the freak-out with the mug?” I attempted a casual laugh.
“The mug. The new boyfriend. All this . . .” Levi glanced behind me at the barn. At Gabe’s parents’ and grandparents’ furniture. “Plus your family’s restaurant. Your job. Your play. The memorial. It’s a lot for any person. Let alone a person who’s still in mourning.”
“I’m not in mourning anymore,” I said automatically, but even if I were, I resented that Levi brought it up. That was my business, not his. “Even if I was, my mom and I had to take care of everything when Dad died . . .”
Memories suddenly trickled from the dark corner where I’d sequestered them. Mom and I buying him the cheapest headstone because we knew he’d chide us for getting ripped off by the Burke Brothers Funeral Home. Trying not to cry as we dug through shirts that smelled like Dad’s cigarettes, guessing what Theo might want someday, giving the rest to the church sale. Bringing life-insurance payout cash in an envelope to buy him a plaque on the bar at the VFW.
“I did it before, and I’ll do it again,” I told Levi. “Life has to move on.”
“Yeah, I know,” Levi said softly. “But the other night . . .” A catch in his voice. He continued, deliberate. “It seemed like you were still dealing with some stuff. Maybe we can put a pause on the memorial or something. It’s okay to take a step back.”
“No way,” I said. I wasn’t stepping back. Back to my cagey self, bitter and exhausted and alone. That was the opposite of what I wanted. “I see what you mean, but no,” I repeated. I wiped my forehead with my wrist, giving him my friendliest I’m-over-it smile. “Jake and I are great. The Green River’s gonna be fine. Memorial’s going to be great. All good things. Onward and upward.”
