Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

Winnie listened.

Right before they hung up, he said, “I’m so sorry, Winnie,” as he had on his birthday, an apology meant to include everything, from the way he had left without telling her to the fact that he was calling, out of the blue and sobbing. He had taught his students that adding so in front of sorry made the apology stronger, more sincere, but as he listened to himself say these words to Winnie, now that he had treated apologizing as a matter of semantics, they sounded empty, disingenuous.

“I know,” Winnie said.

“I better get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.” He laughed.

“Wait,” Winnie said. After a long pause, she blurted out, “I love you, Aaron.” They did not usually say this to each other, and he tried to make the whinnying sound, but his voice broke, so he set the phone back on the hook without replying, then lay on the hotel bed and cried some more, sick with the realization of how long it had been since he’d said “I love you” to anyone.

For thirty minutes, he sat in his rental car outside Winnie’s house. It was a cool, clear day, not unusual for Minnesota in April. Just hours earlier, he had awakened to the smell of bacon and eggs and Gloria’s exaggerated cheerfulness, which meant that his mother was being difficult, for that was how couples worked, he knew, one always trying to offset the other’s behavior.

“Is she still in bed?” he asked as he and Gloria sat down to eat.

“Yes,” Gloria said. “But it’s not you, Aaron.”

He cocked his head to indicate that he knew better, and she said, “Well, of course it’s your visit that’s thrown her, but the way she is? That’s not about you.”

“Thank you, Gloria. I know that.” He supposed he did know it. “But it’s nice of you to say so.” He ate some bacon, drank his coffee. “You know, after we finally went to bed, I still couldn’t sleep. I started to think about the day we moved to Mortonville, how I woke up that first night in the Rehnquists’ house, and she was gone. I looked for her everywhere. You know where she was? In the closet. I’m sure she heard me calling, but she didn’t answer, yet when I finally opened the closet door, she seemed happy to see me. She invited me in. I sat on the floor, and we talked. She was in there almost every night that first year. I thought it was because she didn’t want me to hear her crying.”

“Maybe that was part of it,” said Gloria. “But knowing your mother, I’m pretty sure she sat in there because she wanted to keep reliving it, wanted to keep the pain fresh. She just couldn’t forgive herself, you know.”

“Forgive herself for what?” he said. “He was the one who locked us up, who kept us there all night and pretended he’d shot himself.”

“I know it doesn’t really make much sense, at least not to us, but she believes your father fell off the float because he was distracted and tired from being up all night. She blamed herself.”

Aaron had tried to explain the word blame to his students once, so he knew what a slippery word it was, that it reflected how a person perceived an event, not necessarily what was true. When his mother followed the causal chain backward, his father fell from the float and died because she had packed Aaron’s suitcase, intending to leave. Without the suitcase, there would have been no closet, and the parade would have been just a parade instead of the moment that their lives split in two: before the parade and after.

“I don’t understand it,” Aaron said. “I don’t understand how she could feel that way. You know, all those nights she and Pastor Gronseth sat in the booth talking, mainly they talked about forgiveness. They both felt it should be much harder to earn, that people get off too easily. I always thought it was a theoretical discussion, but I see now that they were talking about themselves.” He pierced the yolk of his other egg and thought about how this fork might be the same fork that Clarence had driven into Gloria’s hand all those years ago. He wondered whether Clarence had ever apologized, or whether he too had counted on easy forgiveness.

“Her closet was nothing like my closet in Moorhead,” he said. “It was big, the size of an office really. There was an overhead light, and she kept a chair in there. But still, I should have remembered something about that night. Right? It makes me feel like I’m crazy — because how could I not remember?”

“You were only five, and memory’s a strange thing. Sometimes it protects us from ourselves. Look at your mother. Look at what remembering did to her.”

He ate his last strip of bacon. “That was the best breakfast I’ve had in months,” he said. “I’m fortified for the road, so I guess I better get going.” He had put his bag in the car before he sat down, preparing for an efficient departure.

“Will you at least go in and say good-bye to her?” He did not want to. Gloria knew this. “Do it for me, Aaron? Because when you leave, I can tell you it will be that much worse if she has to face the fact that she didn’t even have it in her to say a proper good-bye. And I’m the one who’s going to have to deal with it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Yes, of course, I’ll say good-bye.”

“Thank you.” Gloria stood up and began removing their plates, and he stood to help her. “I’d like to give you something of Clary’s,” she said. “It would make me happy to think of something of his with you. Would that be all right?”

“I’d like that,” he said. “Very much.”

He knew what he wanted: the book Clarence had shown him that first afternoon. He did not recall the name of the photographer, but they went into Clarence’s room and looked for it together. Diane Arbus.

“I remember this book,” Gloria said. She laughed and put one of her big hands to her mouth. “I was horrified when Clary first showed it to me, but he loved the pictures.”

Aaron thought about the letter to Diane Arbus that Clarence had read to him. Clarence had written to a person he thought was alive, a person he believed would understand him and photograph him in a way that made him feel understood.

“Thank you for the book,” he said to Gloria. “And for taking care of her.”

“I guess you won’t be coming back?” Gloria said.

“No,” he said. “I guess I won’t.”

* * *

He knew that Winnie was at her store, but showing up unannounced seemed melodramatic, as though he expected her to stop earning a living in order to tend to him. Then he remembered the way she had said, “I love you,” the way she hesitated first because she was nervous, and he started his car. When he arrived, she was discussing a Madurese bed panel with a woman who was taking notes and snapping photos with her cell phone, so he pretended to examine a dowry chest. Winnie came up behind him and threw her arms around him. “Go wait in the backroom,” she whispered. “I’m almost done with her.”

“I’m sorry to just show up,” he said when she joined him. He sat contritely atop a teak daybed.

“Don’t be sorry. I’m happy you’re here. I was worried about you.”

“Still, I don’t want you losing sales over me.”

The front door buzzed. “We’ll talk tonight,” Winnie said. “You’re staying, right?”

“If you’ll have me.”

“You’ll need to earn your keep,” she said. She handed him a bottle of oil and a rag, and as she tended to customers, he oiled furniture, his preferred task when visiting Winnie at the store, finding comfort in the way the wood came back to life, in the ease of working beside her without speaking.

At six they closed up. He drove behind her in his rental car, back to her house, where they opened a bottle of wine and began making dinner. Soon Thomas and the boys arrived, all three of them excited to find him there. Thomas hugged him tightly, but even after all these years, Aaron found himself gauging the hug, wanting to be the one who pulled away first. He knew what Walter would say: this was just proof of the distrust that existed between gay and straight men. But maybe it was just proof of the distrust among human beings.