I yank on the garage door handle but it doesn’t budge. I try again. Nothing.
“It’s stuck.” I yell through the wooden panel.
“No, it’s not.”
I kick it and heft it again. It’s stuck. But before I can yell again, the door glides upward and Mack is standing twelve inches from me. With one hand on my shoulder where it throbs, I step inside the fluorescent cube of the garage. He swings his arm down and the garage door closes behind us in one easy motion. I may feel better, but I’m losing ground here in the muscle department. I can’t even open a garage door on plastic slides. Mack doesn’t say a thing, just goes back to massaging the truck with the polishing rag.
“Nice truck. Is it true you totaled the other one?” I ask.
“Dad got this one from the dump. It needs a new transmission. But he says if I earn half, he’ll pay the other half.”
“Not so good for double dates.” I fix the smile on my face.
“You can borrow it. It’s Meredith’s favorite color.”
It takes all my control not to ask him how he knows that.
We sit in the cab and he fills me in on school stuff. Beverly got knocked up by one of the migrant workers’ sons. The motorcycle boyfriend is long gone. The word is the father of the baby is earning money to pay for an abortion, but Beverly’s not sure yet. Leonard’s in love with a girl from Heathsville who drives a silver BMW. Christie is ancient history. The quarterback for the football team was busted for cocaine possession.
“Who tells you all this junk?”
“You know, you just hear stuff.”
“We were never in the right place before to hear that kind of stuff. You must have new friends.”
“Maybe.” He jumps out.
The open hood blocks my view. I get out too and circle around to the front fender. His eyes are closed. One hand is tapping his thigh to the beat of the music when all of a sudden he spins and does this incredible drum riff on the workbench. His head’s lowered, his hair shakes, and his shoulders rock to the same rhythm.
“Whoa, where did you learn to drum?”
“Cal.”
“Cal Miles from seventh-grade band?”
Mack nods but keeps on drumming.
“Cal’s a pothead, Mack.”
“He’s an awesome drummer.” He shrugs and moves to the other side of the open-faced engine.
“You’re high now.”
“What do you care?”
When I start to edge around the front bumper to be able to see into his eyes, he slips into the cab and shuts the door.
“What the hell are you doing, Mack? This is crazy.”
“It helps me see things more clearly. I’ve got a lot to deal with right now.”
“Yeah, well, so do a lot of kids, including yours truly, but they don’t all go for broke with cocaine.”
“Cal had some leftover. I had a little extra money.” The words are muffled by the glass. “Like I said, I’m working for the truck.”
“He’s dealing now and you’re his ho?”
Mack punches at me, but stops just short of the window. He motions for me to go away.
“Jeez, Mack. You are such a lightweight. Juliann will never go for it. And Cal and his friends are limited brain-wise, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. You haven’t been around much.”
“What’s the matter with you? You’re smarter than this.”
But he’s out the other side. He flings up the garage door and stands there with his fucking arm extended like one of those miniature iron jockeys, his eyes half closed. The chickenshit.
No one’s home at the twins’ house. I leave a note on a scrap paper from my pocket for Meredith to call. Halfway home I have to sit down to catch my breath. It’s a mile from the creek to Mack’s and back, and I’ve come the long way around by Meredith’s for nothing. St. John’s graveyard wall is warm in the sun. When Yowell drives by in a shiny new convertible with a girl I don’t know in the passenger seat, I’m still cursing Mack and wondering if Joe has any good ideas on how to convince Mack to stop using. Yowell waves, but he doesn’t stop.
By my sneakers there are four little spikes of green poking out of the mud. Daffodils. I wonder if Bethany has noticed it’s spring where she is. Or Mr. Hovenfelt.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The idea is brilliant. So brilliant I can’t even sleep. My legs twitch and my back throbs and my eyes are gritty, but I pace on the deck in the dark starless night. This solves everything. No tubes and machines, no officious doctors barking “Stand back” or nurses snipping “Family only.” No histrionics from Mom, no piercing looks from Dad as if he’s afraid he’ll forget what I look like, no Nick scrunched into a lump on a hospital chair when he’s never been still in his life before, no last-minute brush of Joe’s hand on my arm, or Meredith’s mute tears. It’ll be Holden and me at the last in New York City, searching for whatever, hanging on to life like the first time you ride a Ferris wheel and realize how big the world really is.
After I pack a few things in Dad’s small rolling suitcase, I lock the cabin door from the inside and get out an old notebook from the desk drawer. Everyone knows that when you die you’re supposed to have a will. Not that I researched this stuff, but it can’t make any difference what kind of paper I use if I make it sound official enough. The point is to tie up all the loose ends. You want people to know you were prepared. That has to be comforting.
In movies they always read the will with the whole family in the room. I like that idea. A lot. Even if the will turns out not to be legal, what do I care? I won’t be around anyway, but Nick and Joe, my parents, and Meredith and Mack, they’ll know I was thinking about them.
To be honest just the idea of Meredith in some stuffy lawyer’s office listening to some poufy-ass lawyer like Henry Walker read my last words makes me want to puke. I almost don’t write the thing. But Holden keeps harping in my head, You can’t leave without saying something, to explain it. They’ll blame themselves and you don’t want that.
First I write the legal mumbo jumbo, those lines from the movies, after the date and my name, the whole thing in block letters so there can be no mistake. This is my last will and testament. I start with Joe. He’s the easiest. He was away for most of this last part while I was getting sicker. He won’t miss me but so much. I’ll be like a fingerprint on the edge of his glasses. Most of the time he’ll look through the memory of me and only notice me once in a while, in a vague, absentminded kind of way like you do when you clean your lenses. The memory of me won’t interfere with his career or his social life.
I’m not worried about Joe. Later on after he marries and makes a bunch of little Landons, he may tell them stories about his brother Daniel. At bedtime or on long car rides. It isn’t that he doesn’t love me. He just has a lot of other stuff on his mind. Perfectly understandable. I leave him my two-man tent. He can take a girl somewhere remote and memorable.
Nick is harder. The contents of our cabin. My bicycle. My rowboat, I write next to his name. Maybe the list isn’t enough. The law may require some kind of command. Clarity and all. So I insert between the list and his name a balloon and an arrow. Inside the balloon I add, to receive without condition or payment of any kind. For all I know people have to pay fees to the lawyer or the courts to get their share. Although I’ve left it too late to find out, I’m damned sure Henry Walker isn’t going to extract any more money from my family because of me.
I can almost hear Mack laughing, or trying not to so he doesn’t upset my parents, when he hears I left him my tackle box. He’ll get the joke big-time. I free the tackle box from the never-ending pile of Nick’s soccer equipment in the bottom of the closet and put it by the suitcase. Our Friday-night fishing trip with the twins seems so far away. I’ll have to store the box outside the cabin in case they take the will’s language about Nick and the cabin contents literally. Its being in the cabin would create a controversy and they might not let Mack have it. What I want most, more than Mack using my fishing gear so it doesn’t get rusted, is no more controversy.