Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

The boys hugged him also and then went to their rooms to change. “We’ll be right back, Uncle Aaron,” they said. They had always called him that, Uncle Aaron, but after dinner, as he and Winnie talked quietly in the living room, he asked, “Do they know about me and Walter? You know, that we’re not together?”

“Of course they know.” Then, because Winnie had always sensed what he was thinking, she said, “You’re still their uncle. You’ve been their uncle their whole lives. That’s not going to change.”

“Okay,” he said.

“You know, he called every day that first month. Once he called at two in the morning.”

“Walter did?” This shocked him. Walter had always adhered to proper telephone etiquette. He said it was unfair to send people to bed or welcome them to the day with the feeling of unease that a call at an inappropriate hour triggered.

“Just once. He’d been drinking,” Winnie said. “He told me he was calling because he finally got what you’d been saying all these years about king-size beds.”

“We won’t be getting back together,” Aaron said. “You know that, right?”

She held up the bottle of wine they had started before dinner, and he nodded.

“I do,” she said, “but you have to give me time to get used to it, to keep getting used to it. The two of you were together more than twenty years. And now it’s been what? Four months?” She stopped talking and took a sip of wine. “When you left, he waited until Christmas to call, three whole days, and then he acted like it was our usual holiday telephone call, him calling to wish ‘the gentile’ a merry Christmas. He and Thomas talked for a couple of minutes, and then he talked to the boys and wished them ‘half a merry Christmas.’ Finally, I asked him to put you on the line, and he said you weren’t there. I said, ‘What do you mean not there ? Where is he?’ And he said, ‘Well, I imagine that by now he’s settled in his new home in San Francisco.’ ” Winnie looked at him. “And that’s how I found out you were gone.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, because she sounded angry.

“So that’s it?” Winnie said. She held up her wineglass as if making a toast. “To the end of a twenty-year friendship.” She was definitely angry.

“Okay, you’re right,” he said. “I should have told you I was leaving. You’re the closest thing I’ve got to family. Still, you’re Walter’s sister, not mine, and we have to think about his feelings.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Winnie said. “He won’t tell me what those feelings are. Even back in January when he was calling every day, he’d spend the whole conversation complaining about some mix-up with the room scheduling for his Advanced Spanish class. Once, he did note that he’d switched to buying quarts of milk instead of gallons, which was the closest he came to talking about it, about you. So I was actually thankful when he called like that in the middle of the night, drunk.”

“I guess you know I haven’t called him?” he said, and Winnie nodded. “Every day I think about it, but then I just, I don’t know. I can’t bring myself to do it.”

“Do you miss him?” Winnie asked.

“Of course I miss him. I miss him all the time.”

“Then why haven’t you called?”

“At first I was afraid I’d hear his voice and want to go back. Now I’m afraid I’ll hear his voice and feel nothing. Lately, it’s like I’ve reverted to childhood, when everything made me cry, yet I feel oddly removed from emotion also. When I say it out loud to you like this, I can hear it doesn’t make sense.” He paused. “Maybe I just don’t think I deserve his understanding right now.”

Winnie looked away from him. “What do you think Walter deserves?” she asked.

* * *

They set out on Saturday, at dawn. Winnie did not like dawn, was no good at mornings. She sat beside him, not speaking, and he considered turning around, worried that she had changed her mind, though it had been her idea to go. The whole thing started when he told her about Jacob. “I don’t know why,” he’d said after he finished the story, “but lately I can’t stop thinking about him, wondering what happened. It’s strange. The more my own life seems to be closing in on me, the more obsessed I’ve become with knowing what happened to some kid I’ve never even really met.”

“Once, years ago, when Thomas and I were in southern Spain, we crossed over into Gibraltar for the afternoon. We were walking along in the park, enjoying ourselves, when this young Moroccan man came up to us. He looked awful, feverish. He was sick, he told us, and didn’t know what to do. Go to the hospital, we said, but he said the hospital wouldn’t help him. He had no money and was there illegally. We gave him aspirin and ten dollars. There was nothing else we could do. We were tourists. That’s what we told ourselves. For years I wondered about that young man, whether he was okay. It weighed on me. He’d singled us out to ask for help, us out of all those people strolling by. We’d looked like the ones who would help, and we got rid of him with some aspirin and ten dollars.”

“So what you’re saying is that this is not about Jacob. It’s about me.”

She laughed. “I thought I was being more subtle.”

“You might not be skilled at subtlety, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

“So why not call the motel and talk to that receptionist? She probably kept up with things.”

“I’ve thought about calling her, but it feels strange, especially now that so many months have passed.”

“Well, what if we go there?” Winnie said at last.

“Go there?” he said. “To the motel?”

“Yes, to the motel.” She sounded excited. “A road trip with just the two of us.”

They both knew that there were other ways to find out what had happened to Jacob, more practical and efficient ways that did not involve driving for days, except the driving was the point. Aaron had always been most comfortable talking in cars, staring ahead with the knowledge that he did not have to rush through the conversation because there were miles to go.

They spent the first night in North Platte, Nebraska, at a motel that evoked the artificial peacefulness of a funeral parlor. When Aaron told the man behind the counter that they would like two rooms, the man said, “Well, at least she’s not making you sleep in the doghouse,” engaging in one of those jokes that husbands make to other husbands. The man winked at Winnie to let her know that he was just having fun, which meant there were two things to be annoyed by: the comment and the winking. Winnie rolled her eyes but did not respond to the man. She knew how Aaron hated confrontations.

After they were settled in their rooms, they decided they might as well take a walk, see a bit of North Platte, Nebraska, since neither of them imagined coming back here. Winnie wanted to see the grain elevator up close, which meant crossing a small bridge. As they paused halfway across it, she asked, “Is this what Mortonville was like?”

“Sort of,” he said, “though Mortonville was much smaller.”

“Smaller?” she said, as if it were not possible to imagine a place smaller than North Platte, Nebraska.

“Didn’t you see the sign when we came in? The population’s twenty-four thousand. That means North Platte”—he paused to do the math—“is sixty times the size of Mortonville. But if you’re asking whether it feels familiar, the answer’s yes, though bear in mind that familiar doesn’t necessarily mean comfortable.”

“What makes you uncomfortable?” she asked, but before he could formulate a response, she said, “Did what the motel guy said bother you?”