Slide - Kyle Beachy [116]
Audrey's departure set into motion the household activities everyone saw coming. Cardboard boxes began accumulating in the sunroom, my mother's possessions ready to go even if she was not. There is a condo in Webster Groves, a renovated two-bedroom unit in an old six-flat building heavy on charm. She and I walked through it together. For now, my father has taken over the guest room. The snoring is nothing after the squirrels. While it hasn't been stated explicitly, it is clear that whatever ultimately happens, they need to abandon this house. At some point it will appear on the market and sell immediately to a family with truck-loads of strange furniture and flatware and abundance. There doesn't seem to be much of a rush; parents behaving like old friends, teammates in this grim but not crippling preparation. And at the same time unrestricted in their sadness, allowing it to spill into the open freely. Tears at all hours, my mother padding a box with crumpled newspaper, pausing to cough strange laughter into her hands. The curtains in the family room came down one afternoon, and the new levels of sunlight made us wonder why we'd needed them in the first place.
On the day of the grand reopening ceremony for the Union Rock Bridge, I stood in my bedroom, listening to the silence of the attic above me. Boxes up there and nothing more. I was to dress presentably and get to the site, ten minutes upriver from downtown. This was a project my father had been spearheading for several years, an old truss bridge that had once been part of Route 66, now a cornerstone of the new River's Edge Bike Path. A late-afternoon ribbon-cutting and dedication. Would my mother be there? Yes, she told me, of course she would. By the time I arrived, the refreshments tent was deserted, everyone already on the bridge aside from a few caterers and my old friend Stuart, who stood with both hands submerged in a tub full of ice. I approached and stood next to him for a few minutes, trying to organize the gratitude I knew I owed him, along with an apology for so gravely misunderstanding why he had given Edsel the Explorer.
In the swollen clarity of my hospital bed I had come painfully to suspect that Stuart's gift was not to the ogre, but to me: a car provided to settle half of the formal blackmail demands. Several days later, during my recovery at home, a postcard arrived from Harrisburg, PA, scrawled in stickish handwriting I knew without doubt was Edsel's. The photo was a young blond girl, a child in a yellow dress, standing on the front porch of an old home with a mansard roof. The message was two short lines: Game over. Thanks for playing. I tore the postcard into small pieces and understood. The car, a gift to take the ogre away from here, Harrisburg or anywhere else. A wonderful thing Stuart had done for me. But in the days that followed I had still not thanked him. Why? Other, subdermal bruises, perhaps; pride and ego.
But before I said anything, Stuart began detailing a fight he and Marianne had had during the night. He said that at one point their voices got so loud they became tangible. He'd been awake since. He shifted his hands in the ice and described taking the ad to a church parking lot at daybreak, dousing it with gasoline, and setting it on fire. An hour later he'd stumbled upon a newspaper with an article on today's event and decided to walk here. I had never seen him like this, skin hanging from his face, eyes the red of new brick, voice whispery and thin.
And would it be too much to say that my heart opened to my old friend and that I found myself forgiving him for everything? As he handed me a bottle of Evian from the tub, I tried again to thank him. I said I appreciated what he had done for me, the car the money the generosity and that I could never repay him. I spoke slowly and clearly and looked straight into his eyes. Before I finished, he grabbed me around the arm.
“My God, Potsky The blackmail. I'm sorry, man. I should have helped but I didn't really. When he came over and asked for the