Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

He stopped. His notes were sparse and his text blocky, uneven, ugly compared to Eddie’s wild meandering journals with their colorful ink, doodles, erratic trains of thought. Utilitarian at best. He closed the notebook with the pen still uncapped inside and took his beer outside to sit in the pitch-dark lee side of the porch. He wasn’t cut out for the life he’d inherited. It should’ve been him, not Eddie, in the ground.

“Exams, or worse?” the barista said. Their hair was cotton-candy pink streaked with silver, complemented by a tiny silver nose ring and a light smattering of blond stubble on their upper lip. Signals crossed in his brain between pretty and handsome as Andrew struggled through a distracted pause to say, “Worse than that. Triple-shot iced chai, please.”

Andrew collapsed into the chair to stare at the clippings Eddie had assembled to chart the public narrative of their shared trauma. Faded photos of two tanned boys, summer sons, gazed into the family camera with hapless eagerness.

Ghosts lingered in the gaps of the house on Capitol, and in Andrew too. Maybe Sam could exorcise some of them without judgment.

The “open” sign lit above the door read N W S RVING. Dead vowels lay dormant.

The stillness of Eddie’s paused life decomposed with each passing week, eaten away as the reality settled in. No one was coming home. The basket of clothes would remain unwashed, the guitar silent, the beer cans moldering. That immensity was the force that drove dogs to waste to death on their masters’ graves.

Andrew shut his mouth. One of mine—that had a ring to it, and so did the promise of safety, of being taken in hand. If Riley had tried to slap a label on the thing budding between them, he’d have rejected it out of hand, because nothing encompassed the particular set of feelings he might sum up as owned. What did it mean that he found that comforting, still, now that Eddie was gone?