Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Thanks,” Will said.

“You like it?” he asked.

“It’s good,” Will said, though he wasn’t sure that he really knew how to judge whether it was good or not. Pot tasted the same to him regardless of how people exclaimed or apologized over the quality, and it all made him feel the same: quiet and sad and detached. They sat without speaking for a while, passing Sean’s pipe back and forth. Will tapped his toe at the edge of the water, which seemed to be coming farther up the sand, tiny wave by tiny wave. “Do lakes have tides?” he asked.

“Sure,” Sean said. “A glass of water has a tide. How are you doing?”

“What, with the pot?”

“With everything. How are you doing? How have you been?”

“I’m okay,” Will said.

“Just okay?”

“Okay does fine,” Will said. “How are you ?”

“I totally suck,” Sean said. “It’s complicated. But we don’t have to talk about that. I didn’t come here to shit all over you, little brother. I came here to take you away from all that.”

“From what?”

Sean opened his mouth as if to answer, but then he just shook his head. “From all the shit,” he said finally. “You don’t see it yet, and that’s the whole point. You should get away from it before you do.”

“Where would I go?” Will asked, already feeling quiet and sad and detached from Sean’s mounting agitation.

“Do you remember when you were like three and I read you this Richard Scarry book?”

“Who’s Richard Scarry?”

“You know. Busy world. Cats and worms and badgers. Except the badgers are anesthesiologists and lawyers.”

“Sounds awesome,” Will said, closing his eyes.

“There was this one story. The cat makes fudge and it gets completely out of hand. The fudge comes out of the oven like it’s alive . Like it’s the blob. It comes out of the windows and the doors and the cat is stuck on the roof with fudge seeping through the shingles around his paws and then the worm comes by in a little helicopter and saves him. You remember that?”

“No,” Will said, but then he thought he could remember the tiny helicopter at least, a one-seater that held the slim body of the worm, and he remembered that the worm wore a single shoe.

“It’s like that,” Sean said. “But you’re the cat, and I’m the worm, and it’s not fudge. ”

Will burst out laughing and couldn’t stop, thinking of cats smeared with shit, and worms in boots, and of Sean in that one-seater helicopter swooping around their house with his knees shoved up against his chest.

“It’s not funny!” Sean said. “It’s not funny at all!” But he was laughing so hard he was crying.

“I didn’t give it to you to waste on your college fund ,” the lady said. She paid for the cone with a twenty and held out her hand for the change. “I don’t make the same mistake twice,” she said. That made him laugh, partly because he was still pretty stoned, but partly because he thought she must be kidding. “I should make you give it back,” she said, and then he thought she was genuinely angry at him, and for the next twelve customers or so he imagined the conversation he would have with Lauren as they closed about how crazy the lady was. But then she was there again in line. “I want another one,” she said.

“Sure,” he said. “That last one wasn’t very big.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” he said. “You got a kiddy scoop. Those are small. That’s not enough for me. That’s not really enough for anybody.”

“I want a tub,” she said.

“Really?”

“Why would I joke?” She pointed at the chalkboard behind him advertising the price for the take-home tub. It was twenty-three dollars and ninety-five cents with tax. She put the nickel in the tip jar and stared at him when he heaved the tub on top of the counter. “I think I’m going to need a little help with that,” she said. He lifted it by the flared plastic handles near the lid, but still his hands were chilled and aching by the time he got to her car, a red Mercedes convertible. He dropped it in the back and a bit of frost fell off the side to land on the leather seat. He stared at it, not sure if he should try to pick it up, and when he turned to apologize to her she had moved much closer to where he was standing. He was sure she was going to try to kiss him, and while he didn’t pucker up, he got ready for it, lifting his head back and narrowing his eyes and doing something that felt necessary with his tongue, like getting it primed. She reached out swiftly, but only touched his ear, measuring the distance from his earlobe to the hole in his head with her forefinger and thumb. “Such big ears,” she said. “We should talk sometime.” Before she got in her car and drove away, she handed him a card and said, “You can call me whenever you want.”

Will stood outside his house, home from work but not ready to go inside yet. It was lit up as if a holiday were being celebrated inside, but Will figured that was probably just because everyone was home, and they had spread out to every corner of the house, each of them trying to put a maximum distance between himself and the other two. He cocked his head and squinted at the house, imagining fudgy shit pouring from the windows and spouting from the chimney, but it wasn’t funny anymore. He still felt a little slow and sad from the pot, and he sat outside for a while in the backyard, turning the lady’s card over in his pocket, waiting for some of the window lights to go out, but they never did go out. He went inside.

“ There you are,” his mother said, patting the chair next to her. She had a story for him that was partly about his father and partly about her own father and partly about Sean, how all three of them had let her down in the same way. She kept saying how clear it was, like crystal or the water in the pool just after it had been cleaned, or like her vodka, which she held up for him, flat and still in the heavy round tumbler she drank from — like this , she said, but Will couldn’t make much sense of it. He nodded and drifted a little, wondering what the lady had for dinner instead of asking his mother if she had eaten. When she finally mentioned that she was hungry, he poured her a glass of milk.

“I’m not hungry like that,” she said, so Will drank the milk while she explained that people needed more than food to thrive, and that what she was missing would be more nourishing than milk, when she finally got it. She was a very particular sort of drunk that night, one that Will was usually grateful for, because instead of complaining about how her husband didn’t love her or how he didn’t deserve her love, she talked brightly about her new plan for happiness, which was the same as her old plan for happiness, the one she conceived in hopeful tears on nights like this but then forgot in the following days. It involved travel and divorce. She would move away from Florida, back to Washington, D.C., which was a much more civilized place than Orlando or Winter Park, and was where her family abided. She would learn to be a sign language interpreter, or she would go back to being a real estate agent, or she would open a flower shop. And Will would live with her, in a room that she still described to him in the same terms she had used when he was five, but now the idea of having an observatory bubble in the roof, or a horse post at the end of his closet, or a hot tub in his bathroom, was only remotely appealing. She was being easy and happy, but it was harder for him to sit there tonight, for some reason, than when she raged in tears. When the milk was done Will put her to bed.

He passed by the living room on the way to the stairs up to the second floor, and his father called out to him from the couch. “Hey, buddy.” He didn’t pat the couch next to him, but Will sat down next to him anyway. “I feel like I haven’t seen you for days,” he said.