Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

He bent and gathered the parts of the opener, snapped it back together, and was relieved to find that it worked. They did not speak during the nineteen seconds it took for the door to open. When they entered his studio, he showed her the bathroom and then banged around in the kitchen because he did not like to hear people urinating. She came out humming and thanked him. She had removed the scarf.

“I don’t suppose you have any tea handy,” she said.

“Handy?” he said. “No. I was actually on my way to work when you shot me.”

“Coffee?” she asked hopefully. “It’s a little hard on my stomach, but I’m usually fine if I mix it with lots of milk.”

He looked at his watch. Assuming he took the bus and there were no delays, he had forty-five minutes before he had to leave. He began grinding coffee. While it brewed he prepared a plate of toast because it was the only thing he had that felt breakfastlike, but when he turned back around, Agnes Nyquist was asleep on his bed. He sat down on his only chair and thought about how exhausted she must be to fall asleep in a stranger’s home. Then he thought about how he was forty-two years old, an age he had never seen his mother reach because she had left at forty-one. He did not even know whether she had reached forty-two, but he did not want to think about that on his birthday.

Instead, he called Marla to say that he would be late. He did not tell her why because he did not want her gossiping about it and because already the events in the driveway seemed absurd, almost slapstick, an effect that Agnes Nyquist’s snoring presence underscored. As they were hanging up, Marla called out, “Wait. Will you be here by lunch?” and he said he thought so. He knew what her question was about. Marla had all their birthdays on file and was planning a lunch “surprise” party, at which he would be given a melting ice cream cake with blue and yellow frosting. He disliked both ice cream and frosting and always passed on the cakes, though he doubted that Marla noticed. She was fulfilling her notion of being a good boss and her love of ice cream. She was having her cake and eating it too.

“We were worried,” said Katya when he finally arrived, which Aaron knew was their way of asking why he was late, but he said only, “No need to worry about me.” What had happened in his driveway was not the sort of thing one told students. The fact of him alive in front of them, the victim of nothing more than a shot of cold water, would not alter the more compelling revelation of there having been a gun. Already, they believed that Americans carried guns as casually as everyone else carried cell phones. A week earlier, Bolor had quit her cleaning job after she found a pistol lying on the foyer table next to a stack of outgoing mail. The students had been shocked by her story, but Aaron said nothing, not knowing how to explain that it struck him as at once startling and mundane.

In Mortonville, nearly everyone had owned a gun. The guns were mainly for hunting, which meant that the men at the café talked about gun legislation as though the government wished to control their very right to eat. Occasionally, one of the young couples from the Twin Cities who kept a summer lake cabin nearby would get involved in the discussion, inserting statistics about gun violence or gangs, these arguments laying bare the divide between urban and rural. Most of the farmers would stir their coffee and keep quiet because they did not like to argue, but Harold Bildt would turn to the city folks and say something about his right to protect himself from the dangers that they had created in the city. Harold sold rifles at the hardware store, and sometimes, when Aaron’s mother set his food in front of him, he would say, “I got new stock in. You should come over and pick one out.”

“I appreciate the concern, Harold,” his mother would reply, “but I wouldn’t know what to do with a gun.”

His mother always walked away when the conversation turned to guns because she said it made no sense to argue with Harold about them. “He’s not going to change his mind, and I’m not going to change mine. In the meantime, we’ve got to keep being neighbors.” Aaron knew his mother was right. There was a fine balance involved in living peacefully with people with whom you did not agree, and nothing changed the fact that Harold Bildt had been a good neighbor. If an appliance was acting up, he came over and fixed it right away. He let them run a tab, and early on when they could not make payments every month, he did not constantly bring it up as a way of keeping them grateful.

“You don’t need to do anything with it,” Harold called after her. “You just have it around in case someone gets funny ideas about how much money a place like this keeps in the till overnight.”

“If someone wants the little I’ve got in the till that bad that they’d break in here for it, then they can have it. I’m not coming down to stop them.”

* * *

That afternoon at the hippie café, Aaron told Bill what had happened in his driveway because he knew that Bill would not get so focused on the gun that he would be unable to listen to the rest of the story. When he got to the part about how he had turned around to find Agnes Nyquist asleep on his bed, Bill laughed. “What did you do?” he asked.

“I waited for her to wake up. What else could I do?”

Bill snorted. “Well, to state the obvious, you could have woken her up, maybe given her a squirt of ice water with her own gun.”

“I don’t know how to explain it, but she looked vulnerable lying there, like it was the first time she’d rested in days. Then, I went into the bathroom, and she’d made everything so neat, the towel folded perfectly, the bar of soap dried off.”

“At least you didn’t leave her there sleeping and go off to work,” said Bill.

“Actually, I thought about it.”

“Because she reminded you of your mother?” Bill said. Two days earlier, he had told Bill about his mother’s disappearance and Bill had simply nodded, accustomed to stories like this. Aaron thought that maybe he had told him precisely because he would regard it as ordinary. “I can find her,” Bill said. “Aren’t you at all curious about where she got to, what she’s doing, whether she’s even alive?”

“I am not,” Aaron said. He wondered whether this sounded like the truth. He wondered whether it was the truth. He knew that it was possible to push a thought so far away for so long that you did not even know whether you were lying to yourself. They drank in silence for a bit, and then Aaron said, “I have a picture.” He realized that this made it sound like he was agreeing, which was not his intention. He was just talking.

“A picture’s good,” Bill said. “I need her name, her full name, date and place of birth, even better a Social Security number, and anything else you’ve got.” Bill picked up his beer again, and just before he put it to his mouth, he said, “No charge, of course. Since we’re, you know, friends.” He drank loudly, as if embarrassed to have made this declaration, but they were friends, unlikely friends, but perhaps that was what friendship always was: two people met and, despite themselves, despite their own fears and oddness and bad traits, somehow liked each other.

“It’s my birthday,” Aaron announced. He meant to acknowledge the friendship also through this admission, but he realized that it sounded as though he were accepting the offer as his birthday due.

“Happy birthday,” said Bill. They knocked glasses and drank. Normally, Aaron drank two beers while Bill consumed twice as many, but that afternoon Aaron drank four also. It was his birthday.

The next morning, as Bill stood smoking on the doorless balcony, Aaron handed him a piece of paper with the information he had requested, everything but his mother’s Social Security number, which he did not know. During the night he had awakened with his stomach in knots and gone into the bathroom, where he stood over the toilet trying to vomit. When he lay back down, he finally acknowledged the truth: what he feared was learning that his mother had been living all these years in a town just like Mortonville, working at a place just like the Trout Café, which would prove what he had believed all along, that the reason she left was to be away from him.