Alice McDermott - After This

Jacob said, when they had reached the orderly streets where the houses, each nearly identical, began, “I called her once.”

“Who?” Michael said. He was thinking of how much money he’d lost today, not caddying. Giving in to his parent’s request that they all go to the first Mass at the new church.

“Lori Ballinger,” Jacob said.

Michael looked at him. He was about four inches taller than Jacob, and still growing, he was sure. He straightened his shoulders. “You asked her out?”

Jacob nodded, smiled a little crookedly, making fun of himself. Given the look, he didn’t have to say how it had turned out, but Michael asked him anyway.

“She turned you down?”

“Yeah,” Jacob said. “She said she was busy.”

Michael considered this. He considered saying, Well, that took courage. Instead he said, “When was this?”

“Last year,” Jacob said. “Junior prom.”

He stood still on the sidewalk. His brother kept going. “Holy shit,” he said. “You asked Lori Ballinger to your prom?”

Jacob shrugged, shaking off Michael’s astonishment. Michael caught up with him. “She was dating football jocks in grammar school, man.”

“Really?” Jacob said.

Michael fell into stride beside his brother. “You should have asked me,” he said. “I would have told you to forget about Lori Ballinger.”

Jacob shrugged again.

The route was all familiar-gray sidewalks and driveways, green rectangles of lawns, cars, bicycles, houses, and trees. The familiar streets. He and Jacob could name nearly every family as they passed. The O’Haras’ house, the Krafts’, the DeLucas’, Levines’, Persichettis’. They’d been in most of their kitchens or front hallways, they’d collected paper-route payments or candy on Halloween, gotten glasses of water or Kool-Aid from them on hot summer days. As he walked beside his brother, Michael’s recollection of those days made them all seem soft-focused and gentle, an easy roundness about things that had since given way to something thinner, something grown sharper in a threadbare sort of way. Maybe it was the clean-edged aluminum siding that had replaced the aging shingles on most of the homes, or the sleeker cars, or the sun catching the chrome on Tony Persichetti’s motorcycle in the driveway, where he once would have left his bike. Maybe it was just the sense of it coming to an end, his time in this place, his childhood. Maybe it was that the place had worn thin only for him, that he was already worn out with waiting to leave it and get on.

He said to his brother, “I can’t wait to get out of here. One more year.” He said, “I don’t know how you can stand it, not going away.”

Jacob shrugged again. His father had told him: “I can pay for private-school tuition, or I can pay your room and board. I can’t do both. There are four of you to put through college.”

“I don’t mind,” he said.

Michael looked at him again. Someone, some girl, had told him once, “Your brother’s nice.” And then added, as if it pained her, “Too nice, if you know what I mean.” He hadn’t, not exactly. He thought again of Lori Ballinger. Jacob had made a plan and worked up the courage and called her and asked her to the prom and she had shot him down and through it all, he’d never said a word. About any of it. Through it all, he’d pulled his blankets up over his shoulder and faced the wall. Michael would hear him sometimes, the mattress, the deep sighs. No doubt Jacob heard him, too, when his turn came. Tempting as it had been to say, across the short space between their beds-“Are you jacking off?” “Are you crying?”-Michael never had. Not out of any kindness, he knew, but in exchange for future consideration, when the agitation under the covers, the tears, would be his.

“I think the new church is bullshit,” Michael said. He had only the slightest hankering, like the first hint of hunger, to start a fight.

Jacob shrugged again. “The other one was falling down.”

“They could have fixed it,” Michael said. “Instead of spending all that money.”

Jacob said nothing. They were almost home. The Rosenbergs’ house, the Lavins’. “Putting the screws to guys like Dad,” Michael said. “Making them cough up the dough to make McShane look good. It’s bullshit.”

“You gotta have a church,” Jacob said.

“Why?” Michael asked. The MacLeod house, him with the musical aspirations and the Orange Crush hair. Michael was certain that if Jacob had told him what he was thinking, he would have said, There’s no way you can go with Lori Ballinger, give it up. He would have saved him from whatever it was he had felt when she said, No, I can’t. “Why do you have to have a church?” More belligerent than he’d intended.

Behind them, they could hear Clare calling, jokingly, “Oh, boys.” She was hanging out the window of the car. The car was slowing down, passing them. “Yoo-hoo,” she said, waving her headband toward them. In the front seat, their mother and father were laughing.

They both waved back. The car swung into the driveway ahead of them.

“People need a place to go,” Jacob said.

“Why?” Michael asked again. “What for?” And when Jacob shrugged, but smiling this time, as if he knew they both knew the answer, Michael said, once more, “It’s bullshit.”

John keane lay in bed and held a running argument with the pain. It was a terse, dismissive argument, the kind he might have with some idiot shop clerk or dishonest mechanic, the kind of hopeless, useless, beneath-your-dignity argument that you know you should walk away from but don’t. Can’t. Raising your eyebrows at any bystander or eavesdropper as if to say, Can you believe this idiot? Can you believe I’m bothering to talk to him?

The boys, before they left for their summer jobs-Jacob was cutting lawns again this summer, Michael caddying by day and pumping gas at night-had knocked together a number of two-by-fours and, following his instructions, had rigged it with a pulley and a rope. They had then wrapped the rope around one of his old, paint-spattered army boots, across the instep and up through the laces, and weighed the other end with a dictionary and half a dozen volumes of their grocery-store encyclopedia. Following his instructions (they were good kids, both of them), they had slipped the boot over his right sock, adjusting the whole contraption until his leg was pulled taut, nearly suspended over the damp mattress, and the pain that had woken him two nights ago, all unbidden and unaccountable, met its match with this new pain-a disciplined, intentional pain-intended to be the cure.

Michael had hesitated at the bedroom door. This was at about eight-fifteen this morning, Mary downstairs getting the rest of them out of the house. If anyone was going to say this two-bit attempt at traction was an eccentric, half-assed scheme, it would be Michael the wise guy. But Michael merely waved his arm-a long, thin arm, softened, nearly blurred by the fair hair that covered it-and said, “Take care.”

He had lifted his own arm, the mold from which the other had been formed, and said, “Sure I will.”

He had a bottle of aspirin by the bedside, a cold cup of tea, a tube of Ben-Gay, even, his wife’s idea, a tumbler of scotch, but he resisted resorting to any of them just yet. Yesterday, the boys had moved the portable TV into his room, close enough so he could reach the dial and the antenna (another jerry-rigged affair with rabbit ears and a coat hanger and aluminum foil), but he resisted that as well. The house was empty now-the boys at their jobs and his wife and the two girls off to a matinee in the city-and silent but for the whir of the fan on the dresser, which by now had become a part of the silence as well. This was the beginning of his second day of sick leave, the first two he had taken in more than twenty years, and he didn’t like the vertigo he felt at this sudden suspension of his routine any better today than he had yesterday. (He raised his chin at the army boot, at the pale blue pant leg of his pajamas: I don’t like it.)