Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

They were in the bathroom, and he could not look at Mrs. Bergstrom, not with the toilet right there, close enough to touch. She took a flashlight from a cupboard and knelt beside the toilet, putting her hand on the seat to steady herself, and then she looked up at him. “Come,” she said sternly. And so he knelt beside her. “What do you see?” she asked, shining the flashlight on the floor around the base of the toilet. She sounded hopeful, and he bent closer, noticing dirt and small bits of toilet paper as well as a few tightly coiled gray hairs. Pubic hairs! The sight of them made his throat constrict and he gasped for air.

“You see it?” Mrs. Bergstrom asked in an excited whisper, for she had heard it as the gasp of discovery.

“See what?” He felt miserable.

“The urine,” Mrs. Bergstrom said, her voice low and urgent. She leaned forward, her face hovering above the toilet bowl as if she were about to drink from it or bob for apples. “Every time Father comes in here, it’s all over the floor, and I have to come right in after him and clean.”

“Maybe he can’t help it,” Aaron said.

“I don’t mind cleaning it up.” She sounded angry. “It’s the way he acts, telling me I’m crazy, that I’m imagining things.” She tapped her finger on the seat. “Well, this afternoon I didn’t clean up after him. I knew you were coming, so I left it.”

Aaron looked away, studying the pattern that the linoleum made, trying to make sense of where the lines ended and began. “Yes,” he said. “I see it.”

Mrs. Bergstrom gave a low, growling laugh. “I knew it,” she said and then, “Help me up.” She extended her arm as though inviting him to admire a new watch, and Aaron stood and took her arm, supporting her as she struggled to her feet.

He wanted desperately to wash his hands, but he thought that doing so would be regarded somehow as impolite. “My mother needs me,” he said instead, and Mrs. Bergstrom unlocked the bathroom door, and they went back down the hallway and into the living room, where Mr. Bergstrom still sat beneath the afghan watching the news.

“Were you any help?” he asked Aaron, shouting over the television.

“Not much,” said Mrs. Bergstrom, answering for him, and the Bergstroms laughed together while he bent to put on his shoes.

“Good night then,” Aaron said.

“Yes,” said the Bergstroms.

Aaron switched off their porch light, which had been on this whole time, and stepped out into the darkness. Once again, he paused to peer through the picture window at the Bergstroms, who sat huddled beneath the afghan, collapsing in on each other like melting snowmen. He tried to assign a word to what he saw, to what he felt, but he did not know the word to describe the way that the Bergstroms sat on their sofa, an afghan and a dead son between them, or the soft ache of his own heart.

* * *

When Aaron returned to the café from the Bergstroms’ that evening, Jim Evarold was already there, sitting in his booth. Every Thursday night, while his wife was off at her weekly Weight Watchers meeting, Jim came, sat in the corner booth, and spent a long time staring at the menu. He assessed his options carefully, even though he always chose the special, meatballs, waiting until Aaron’s mother turned toward the kitchen to add, “And a large milk. And some of those Tater Tots.” He always seemed sheepish about his order, perhaps ashamed to be wanting Tater Tots while his wife was off discussing calories and the hollowness of desire, and Aaron’s mother always turned back to him and asked, “That all, Jim?” in a voice that Aaron found aggressive, almost bullying.

Jim Evarold pretended to consider the menu a bit longer then, before clearing his throat to make his usual plea: “Can’t you change the Thursday special to meatloaf?”

“Meatloaf is Friday night,” his mother replied, her voice sour from tending to people’s needs all day. “They’re the same, Jim. Just different shapes.”

Jim Evarold would look at his hands or touch the napkin dispenser and mumble, “But meatloaf doesn’t jump all over the plate when I cut it.”

Aaron supposed some form of this conversation had taken place before he arrived, for Jim Evarold sat with his food already before him. Later, when he picked up Jim’s plate, wiped clean, as usual, of the unwieldy meatballs and the ignominious Tater Tots, he found a scrap of tinfoil resting on the rim. Jim did not mention the tinfoil, which was about the size of a thumbnail, but Aaron knew that it had come from his food. He blew it to the floor, not wanting his mother to see it and be ashamed.

Over the next several weeks, more detritus washed up on the shores of Jim Evarold’s otherwise empty plates: a snippet of butcher string, a scrap of wax paper, rubber bands, twist ties. Still, Jim said nothing, though it was clear that he left them on the plate for Aaron to find. Aaron dispensed with each surreptitiously. Finally, after two months of this, Aaron picked up Jim Evarold’s empty plate one evening and discovered a bristle as delicate as a fish bone teetering on its edge. It was too small to have come from any of the brushes that his mother used in the kitchen to clean the grill or scrub potatoes. He held it on the tip of his finger, wanting to breathe it away with a wish. Instead, he brought it to his mother, who stared at it as though it were an object that had been missing for many years, something she had learned to live without so well that its reappearance now seemed a burden.

“Must be from the vegetable scrubber,” she said at last, turning to flip a hamburger.

Aaron went upstairs and into the bathroom, where their toothbrushes hung from a rack. He reached for his mother’s brush and held the bristle beside it. It matched. He had known it would. What it meant was this: his mother had extracted the bristle from her toothbrush and taken it downstairs, then had cooked Jim Evarold’s meatballs with the bristle inside. She had done this intentionally, and as he pictured the whole sequence of events, he was afraid, for he accepted — somehow only then — how deeply unhappy his mother was. Her despair was like a snowball rolling downhill, growing bigger, moving faster, while he stood at the top of the hill watching it go. He was powerless to stop it.

Yet she had put the bristle in Jim Evarold’s food, marking the world in this small way with her unhappiness, and he wanted to believe that there was something hopeful in her need to do so. He did not know why she had focused on Jim Evarold, whom everyone in town liked, including, as far as he knew, his mother. Jim was a quiet man. He was polite but never appeared to want company, and others accepted this. They greeted him as they passed his booth and moved on.

Just before he and his mother moved to town, Jim’s brother, Matthew Evarold, had killed himself. The skeleton of the story was this: one day after his wife had gone to Florence with the two youngest children, Matthew Evarold went into the barn, looped a rope over a rafter, stood on a feed bucket, and then kicked the bucket out from beneath him. Perhaps he had hoped for someone else to discover his body, but it was his children, returning from school, who found him. Aaron occasionally rode the bus, so he knew where the Evarold family lived, just one stop before his own. Their driveway was long and straight, a dirt path with grass growing down the middle, the house and barn at the end. Aaron imagined the four oldest children trudging up the path that afternoon, laughing and kicking at the grass running down the middle, even as their father was already dead, hanging in the barn directly ahead of them. What had continued to shock Aaron was the way that these two realities could exist side by side, could share the same moment: a man swinging from a rafter in a barn, and his children, laughing and teasing each other just outside.