~*~
He needs to email Linda again, and spend a few hours preparing himself for tomorrow’s continued interview with Will. He needs to wipe all of tonight’s conversation from his mind and worry about the job. Worry about writing the best story he can, and getting the hell out of this place, heading back home to his sad apartment and his sad caffeine and nicotine habits.
But instead he lingers in the shower, hot water pounding his head, his neck, his shoulders as he braces his hands on the tile and wonders if Hal stood like this just minutes before him. He imagines he can see the handprints, the outlines of Hal’s long fingers in humid relief.
He should never have come.
~*~
It started like this:
Two families sharing a duplex in Roanoke, Virginia. An old white clapboard house with ivy crawling up one side, and a staircase in back that led from the front door of the upstairs apartment, to the back porch of the downstairs apartment. A flat front yard perfect for impromptu whiffleball games; a backyard that overlooked a Texaco. A neighborhood frozen in the transitional stage.
Luke lived upstairs with his mother and sister.
Hal lived downstairs with his parents.
Their mothers, Rhonda and Lynn, had been college roommates once upon a time. And after marriages, and Rhonda’s divorce, and a handful of bad luck tossed like dice down a craps table, the friends found themselves in a position to lean on one another for help. And so they took it.
Luke and Hal were both four when the move took place.
Hal’s father, Henry Sr., schlepped boxes from the moving van. The women dusted, and scrubbed, and aired out rooms, flinging up window sashes like a scene in a musical.
And Luke and Hal sat on the back porch, melting popsicles in their small chubby hands.
The start.
~*~
Luke remembers that afternoon with aching clarity: the chemical cherry taste of his popsicle, the rough planks of the porch digging into the backs of his legs, the fireflies dancing in the twilight as the parents called back and forth to each other in the house behind them.
“I’m in Miss Donna’s class,”Hal said, legs kicking off the end of the porch.
“Me too,”Luke said, and his heart swelled with gladness.
Of course, their mothers had orchestrated that, working them into the same first grade class that fall in the hopes it would help them transition into their new school.
Luke hangs his head and lets the water run down his face, drip off his nose, swirl around the drain between his feet. It’s his fault, he knows. He’s the reason their relationship went to shit. From something pure and good to something twisted and complicated.
He’d thought, maybe, by some stroke of luck, that three years would have been enough time for the wounds to heal over.
But was wrong. Like always.
