Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

They’d taken out the median to make room for more cars, and they’d parked cars diagonally all up and down either side of the street, like tugboats trying to nudge the businesses back—to make room for more cars.

Fair maiden, Everett thought, I have turned the handle of my nickelodeon for the last time.

“Thank Ida for not having a boy,” he said. “I love my daughter, but I always wanted a son.” He grinned. “Seems I got you instead.”

They disappeared into the task, shoveled themselves night and day into the furnace of their intention to keep Skip safe and healthy.

They think they’ve got all the brains, but if they did, they wouldn’t walk around sounding like idiots half the time. When you give Cal a hug, squeeze extra tight. That’s what I do with your father. He says I only know how to give bear hugs, and I want to say, ‘That’s because I’m trying to squeeze the stupid out of you, honey!’ ”

“You want me to lie to her.” Roman’s eyes dollied forward under his brow. “If it means living in peace? Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons we have lies.”

Calling this new weapon “a harnessing of the basic power of the universe” was, he knew, horseshit. It was a harnessing of the hubris of men.

And while she didn’t like the frustration she sometimes saw on their faces, she wasn’t about to play into the idea that God was taking care of all the “righteous” dead up there, when He didn’t seem very interested in taking care of the living down here.

In fact, it was as if all versions of Felix Salt had gone down with the Teague except for this one, this carapace of a guy with his eye set on nothing.

More than—herself? She didn’t want to waste this opportunity, wanted to get it right before she woke up. “More than Becky Jenkins?” she said. “Much more.” “More than somebody’s daughter, or mother? Or wife?” “Yes.” “More than a human being in a body.” “Don’t go off the rails, dear.

The heart knows where it wants to go.

Spirits didn’t linger in graveyards, she’d said. Why would they? There was nothing to do, nothing to observe. And it was true: Becky never felt the presence of any spirits when she was here. The place was like an abandoned motel.

Was he worried about her? Becky asked, and he said, yes, of course, but also no; if there was one thing Margaret was good at, it was prioritizing herself.

“I used to know him,” Everett said on their way back to the car, pointing a curled finger at one of the headstones. “He worked at the tannery out by the water tower. Played the violin.” Becky looped her arm through his. “Was he good?” “Better than me.” “You play the violin?” “Nope,” Everett said.

Sometimes, because he knew it would help him get back to sleep, he got up and looked into Tom’s room, to make sure he was safe and sleeping soundly.

A couple of times, though, Felix was in bed, having not fallen asleep yet, when a stirring made him lift his head from the pillow—only to find Tom silhouetted in the doorway, the nightlight in the hall glowing around him, checking to see if Felix was there.

Forgiveness, the way her mother had described it, wasn’t something that shot up out of the soil; it had to creep in over time, like a vine.

She now found it shocking how much the living asked of spirits. The presumption of it. And to think, she’d contributed to it for years. She felt protective of the dead in a way she never had before. She felt closer to them than ever. —

He’d had three girlfriends in college. The first one was a young woman named Amy. Light on romance, heavy on sex, and they burned out over the course of one semester like a box of sparklers.

They were, Felix thought, like a plant that could only get as big as its pot, no shaping or pruning allowed. Still, a healthy plant.

She’d had three marriage proposals in the last five years, and each one took her right back to Felix. She saw the road and the handsome man driving, and she saw herself in the passenger’s seat, unhappy, and grabbing the steering wheel—over and over. Unhappy, because she somehow never felt that she was where she was supposed to be, living the life she thought she would live, loved in the way she thought she should be loved.

No, no, no. He’d wanted to see his father and his mother in the same room together, to know that, by the time his father died, his parents would have had one more conversation, he didn’t even have to be there for it, didn’t care what it was about, he just had a picture of them spending a few calm minutes together, on the other side of all the trouble, and he wanted that picture to be real so that he could carry it around in his mental wallet for the rest of his life.

she knew with absolute certainty that she would be sending that message across the divide to him in one direction or another—so, as Everett had suggested, why not send it while they were both alive?

The wisdom that comes with age was needling, he found, because it brought the clarity of hindsight without the means to change anything.

This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren’t living in the past; the past is living in us. And it’s talking. We get old to be able to recalibrate everything we thought was going to be important. We get old just to hear it. It says, the days, the days, the days.