I got into the car where I had lost my virginity the night before and opened the envelope.
There was a single sheet of paper inside. Brevity is the soul of wit, according to Shakespeare.
If it’s true, then Carol’s letter was witty as hell.
Dear Pete,
I think we ought to let last night be our goodbye — how could we do any
better? I may write to you at school or I may not, right now I’m so confused
I just don’t know (hey, I may even change my mind and come back!). But
please let me be the one to get in touch, okay? You said you loved me. If you
do, let me be the one to get in touch. I will, I promise.
P.S. Last night was the sweetest thing that’s ever happened to me. If it gets
any better than that, I don’t see how people can live thru it.
P.P.S. Get out of that stupid card-game.
She said it was the sweetest thing that had ever happened to her, but she hadn’t put ‘love’ at the bottom of the note, only her signature. Still . . . if it gets any better than that, I don’t see how people can live thru it. I knew what she meant. I reached over and touched the side of the seat where she had lain. Where we had lain together.
Put on the radio, Pete, I like the oldies.
I looked at my watch. I had gotten to the dorm early (that half-conscious premonition at work, maybe), and it had just gone three now. I could easily get to the Trailways depot before she left for Connecticut . . . but I wasn’t going to do it. She was right, we had said a brilliant goodbye in my old station wagon; anything more would be a step down. At best we would find ourselves going over the same ground; at worst, we’d splash mud over last night with an argument.
We want information.
Yes. And we had gotten it. God knew we had.
I folded her letter, stuck it into the back pocket of my jeans, and drove home to Gates Falls.
At first my eyes kept blurring and I had to keep wiping at them. Then I turned on the radio and the music made things a little better. The music always does. I’m past fifty now, and the music still makes things better; it’s the fabled automatic.
27
I got back to Gates around five-thirty, slowed as I drove past Frank’s, then kept on going. By then I wanted to get home a lot more than I wanted a draft Hires and a gossip with Frank Parmeleau. Mom’s way of saying welcome home was to tell me I was too skinny, my hair was too long, and I hadn’t been ‘standing close enough to the razor.’ Then she sat in her rocking chair and had a little weep over the return of the prodigal son. My dad put a kiss on my cheek, hugged me with one arm, and then shuffled to the fridge for a glass of Mom’s red tea, his head poking forward out of the neck of his old brown sweater like the head of a curious turtle.
We — my mom and me, that is — thought he had twenty per cent of his eyesight left, maybe a bit more. It was hard to tell, because he so rarely talked. It was a bagging-room accident that did for him, a terrible two-story fall. He had scars on the left side of his face and his neck; there was a dented-in patch of skull where the hair never grew back. The accident pretty much blacked out his vision, and it did something to his mind, as well. But he was not a ‘total ijit,’ as I once heard some asshole down at Gendron’s Barber Shop say, nor was he mute, as some people seemed to think. He was in a coma for nineteen days. After he woke up he became mostly silent, that much is true, and he was often terribly confused in his mind, but sometimes he was still there, all present and accounted for. He was there enough when I came home to give me a kiss and that strong one-armed hug, his way of hugging for as long as I could remember. I loved my old man a lot … and after a semester of playing cards with Ronnie Malenfant, I had learned that talking is a wildly overrated skill.