“I need this, ” he said.
“Make no mistake,” said Stephanie. “So do I.”
Bernie Walters cracked open a can of Bud and took it downstairs to the rec room of his three-bedroom house in Wheaton, off Randolph Road. He had a seat in a leather recliner and hit the remote, which he had Velcroed to the chair.
When Vance was a teenager he was always misplacing the television’s remote. After carrying mailbags all day through Bethesda’s business district, Walters would come home with no more ambition than to put his feet up and watch a little tube. The remote always seemed to be missing when he got downstairs, and that drove him nuts.
“What’s the big deal with the remote, Dad?”
“I been on my dogs all day. The big deal is, once I get settled in my chair at night, I don’t want to get back up.”
Both Vance and Bernie got tired of that exchange. Bernie rigged up a kind of sheath for the remote and Velcroed it to the right arm of the chair.
Vance’s friends got a big charge out of it. Vance’s dad, the Vietnam vet and mail carrier – with that combo, he had to be some kind of wack job, right? – had gone and rigged a permanent remote control to his chair. Remote on the right arm, ashtray on the left. He even heard one of those friends call the recliner “the captain’s chair,” then hum a few bars of the Star Trek theme when he thought Walters wasn’t listening.
Yeah, Vance’s friends got a big laugh out of Bernie Walters. The captain’s chair, the ten-point buck’s head mounted on the wall of the rec room, the glass-doored gun case with the beautiful oiled shotguns aligned in a row, the bumper sticker on his truck that read, “Know Jesus, Know Peace; No Jesus, No Peace,” the prayers and psalms framed and hung throughout the house. It was okay by Walters for those kids to think whatever they wanted. And for the members of the group as well. He knew it made them uncomfortable to hear him talk about the Lord at the meetings. Well, they had their own way of getting through this and he had his. Because they had become his closest friends, he felt he owed it to them to talk about God’s plan. He knew that everything happened for a reason, even the bad.
As for Vance, he had never seemed to be embarrassed by his old man. Bernie had heard Vance describe him one time as a “blue-collar eccentric.”Whatever it meant, it didn’t sound bad, not the way Vance said it; by the tone of his voice, you’d almost get the impression that Vance was proud.
Vance’s friends stopped coming around when his mother, Walters’s wife, Lynne, got the cancer in both of her breasts. She’d found the lumps fairly early, but fear had made her wait too long to get herself checked. After the diagnosis she opted for the radical mastectomy, but it couldn’t save her and she went six months later, heavily doped on morphine, at home in their marriage bed.
Bernie Walters’s father died that same year, in a nursing home on East West Highway.
So it ended up just Bernie and Vance. By then Vance had entered Montgomery College, hoping to do a couple of years on the Takoma Park campus before heading for New York to attend one of the design schools in the city. At home he spent most of his time in his room, listening to CDs, studying, and talking on the phone with his friends. He worked three or four shifts a week waitering at the pizza parlor on Wisconsin, saving for his move to New York.
When Bernie wasn’t working, he liked to hang out in the rec room or the laundry room, where he had a workbench set up. During warm-weather months he would drive his pickup down to Southern Maryland and spend each weekend on his property, hunting, casting for perch and catfish, walking the woods, and drinking beer.
Walters hit the up-channel button on the remote and landed on a late-night talk show. The host with the gap-toothed grin said something, then stared unsmiling into the camera as the audience laughed. Walters shook a cigarette out of his pack and gave it a light.
Those last couple of years Vance and Bernie had pretty much led separate lives. Now he wished they’d talked more – he wished he’d said those things to Vance that he’d never said.
Vance talked to him now. In his early-morning dream time, Bernie could hear Vance’s voice as a child sometimes, calling his name. Often Vance would be shouting, and this would scare Bernie, and sadden him. But he couldn’t stop it. He knew it was Vance’s spirit that was talking to him in his dreams. He knew.
He would tell Vance those things that he had not told him before. These would be the very first things he’d tell him when they were reunited. If he was certain of anything, it was that he and Vance and Lynne would all be together again, someday soon, in the hands of the Lord.
Stephanie Maroulis draped an arm over the shoulder of Dimitri Karras and laid the flat of her palm on his chest. She’d go to sleep now, drawing on the warmth of his body, spooned against him in the bed.
Over the gray-haired head of Karras she could see the framed photograph of Steve set on the nightstand beside the bed. Steve was at the Preakness with his oldest friends grouped around, all of them on an afternoon beer drunk, happy, high in the sun and secure in the knowledge that it could not end. In the photo, Stephanie, smiling and smashed as the rest of them, stood behind Steve, her hand on his shoulder, her fingers brushing the base of his thick neck.
The photograph had been on the nightstand for seven years. It was Steve’s favorite snapshot of the two of them and his friends, and as long as she lived in this place, the one-bedroom condo they’d bought soon after they were married, she’d leave the picture where it had always been. Leaving it there after Steve’s death was an act of neither superstition nor sentiment. The photograph belonged there. She saw no reason to move it now.
“Doesn’t it make you sad?” asked Karras the week before. “I mean, to have to look at it every night before you go to sleep.”
“It makes me happy to know that Steve and I had one day as good as that one. Most people never even get that.”
“I couldn’t,” said Karras, his voice trailing off, and she’d hugged him then, the way she was hugging him now.
She stroked his chest. Karras had a decent build for a man in his late forties. Not like Steve, who’d always been on the heavy side. She used to call Steve “the Bear,” because he felt as big as one, sleeping next to her. She liked to be with a man who had some weight on him. Karras had a handsome face, a straight back, and a flat stomach. Even at his age, he was the kind women noticed, and wondered about, on the street. But Karras was always sad. He didn’t have Steve’s smile, the kind that said he appreciated the moment and the people he was sharing it with. No, Karras wasn’t Steve. But she was getting used to having him around.
Stephanie closed her eyes.
She enjoyed going to bed with Karras after the meetings and sleeping with him once a week. She needed the companionship, and she needed the sex. Their being together, it helped Dimitri, if only for the night, and she knew it helped her.
If she could have talked to Steve right then, she’d explain their relationship to him like that. And she believed he’d be happy for her, pleased that she was slowly finding her way out of the dark places she’d visited after his death.
She fell to sleep, knowing Steve would understand.
Thomas Wilson had a slow drink at the Hummingbird on Georgia Avenue and got into his Dodge Intrepid, parked out front. He turned the ignition, hit the preset button, brought up WHUR. Quiet Storm: Every city in the country with a sizable black population had the format now, but the original had been created on HUR. And here was Gladys Knight, singing “Where Peaceful Waters Flow.” You couldn’t get much more beautiful than that.
Wilson headed over to Underwood, where he lived alone in the small brick he’d grown up in. Momma had died suddenly when he was away, back in the ’80s. His uncle Lindo, who owned the hauling business, claimed it was from a broken heart.
None of the women in the bar had looked at him tonight. Seemed they never did. He wasn’t yet forty, but he looked ten years older, and he felt far away from what was hip and new. He favored the music that he had come up with. He dressed like 1989. He still wore his hair in that same tired fade.