Slide - Kyle Beachy [2]
“We just had a man here for bees. And now squirrels?”
When she retired, much of that teacherly vigor was diverted into her garden. In the fall she disposed of annuals and cut back perennials, covered soil with manure as one would ice a cake. She spent entire springs on her knees, dual wristbands to wipe away full days of sweat. It was her passion, basic and earthy in every way
“How are you for cash?”
“Me? Fine. I'm fine.”
She left the kitchen and returned a few minutes later in her sleeveless shirt and denim shorts. Her purse was under the phone. She pulled out her wallet and removed an uncreased bill. She laid the bill next to my orange juice, kissed my forehead, and stepped through the side door into her garden. I walked immediately to the phone and called Stuart Hurst.
“This is Stuart.”
“Stubes. So formal.”
“Potter Mays! Home again home again. Jiggedy jigg.”
“I'm working on two hours’ sleep and would like to get out of my house.”
“Makes sense. Incidentally, this was my last night in the pool house. I'm out: onward, forward. I'll come pick you up and we'll drive over to the new place. Sneak peek before tonight's welcoming event. You just wait right there.”
We'd become friends after my parents left the apartment complex and its pool behind, moving into the desirable Ladue public-school district. That first day of third grade, stepping onto a morning bus full of boys and girls I had never seen, and among all of the eyes sat Stuart the fourth grader, waving me over to his rubberized seat.
“Lookit,” he said, opening his palm to reveal a small brick of staples. He picked one off from the rest, put it onto his tongue, and swallowed. “One at a time, they go down easy. Try.”
I sat on the front porch and waited. The pool house in his parents’ backyard wasn't more than ten minutes’ drive, plus whatever time it took to overcome his immense personal inertia. I stood and walked circles through the grass of the front lawn, my head poring over the idea of distance: the mile, a single clean figure that broke down into a mess, those five thousand two eighty feet. I stopped circling and looked at the matting of grass beneath my shoes. Audrey deemed it a terrible waste to not go shoeless whenever she could, and her feet were callused and tough for it. Then one afternoon last spring, as I was packing the car for a camping trip with friends, mine, her right foot found a stray nail hiding in some grass, and I spent the afternoon wrapping her foot, touching her hair, driving to the emergency room, and waiting for a tetanus shot because she couldn't remember ever having one, placing lips to her hand as the needle entered, laughing as she limped back to the car. Saying of course. Saying you're welcome. All the while the resentment building, growing, this beady-eyed and sharp-toothed troll of resentment making home in my stomach. Delirious wonder if maybe she'd found the nail on purpose, that it was all secretly on purpose. Resentment as appalling as it was amazing, a sheer force I had no choice but to embrace. I moved from grass onto driveway. I had been saying I love you for the past four years and meaning it every time as far as I knew. Her flight went Portland to O'Hare to London Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle. Three weeks.
Finally I saw him. Despite limitless wealth, Stuart continued to drive the first car his parents bought him, a mid-nineties Ford Explorer variously dented and run-down. He viewed himself as the unique product of convergent psychocapitalist forces, so driving his big dumb American truck car until it died was a way to both honor these forces and assert his individuality When I opened the door, he was nodding and not smiling.
And so begins what might be the worst year of your life.”
“Start simple, please, and tell me how,” I said.
“Can't,” he said. “Your version won't be anything like mine. What do you know about Cambodia? Don't get me wrong, this is going to be difficult. I promise. But not Cambodia.”
After graduating from Brown the year before, Stuart went straight from the baggage