Hey Jamie! Please come to the party, okay? No excuses accepted when you’ve got 2 mos to arrange your schedule. If Connie can come from Hawaii you can manage the trip from Colo! We miss you, little bro!
I dropped the invitation into the wicker basket on the back of the kitchen door. I called this the Sometime Basket, because it was full of correspondence that I vaguely believed I’d answer sometime… which actually meant never, as you probably know. I told myself I had no desire to go back to Harlow, and this may have been true, but the pull of family was still there. Springsteen might have had something when he wrote that line about nothing feeling better than blood on blood.
I had a cleaning lady named Darlene who came by once a week to vacuum and dust and change the bed (a chore I still felt guilty about delegating, having been taught to do myself, back in the day). She was a morose old thing, and I made it my business to be out when she was in. On one of Darlene’s days, I came back to find she had fished the invitation out of the Sometime Basket and propped it open on the kitchen table. She had never done such a thing before, and I took it as an omen. That night I sat down at my computer, sighed, and sent Terry a three-word emaiclass="underline" Count me in.
That was quite a Labor Day weekend. I enjoyed the hell out of myself, and could hardly believe I’d come close to saying no… or saying nothing, which probably would have severed my already frayed family ties for good.
It was hot in New England, and the descent into Portland Jetport on Friday afternoon was unusually bumpy in the unstable air. The drive north to Castle County was slow, but not because of traffic. I had to look at every old landmark—the farms, the rock walls, Brownie’s Store, now closed and dark—and marvel over them. It was as if my childhood were still here, barely visible under a piece of plastic that had become scratched and dusty and semi-opaque with the passage of time.
It was past six in the evening when I got to the home place, where an addition had been built on, nearly doubling its original size. There was a red Mazda in the driveway that screamed airport rental (like my Mitsubishi Eclipse), and a Morton Fuel Oil truck parked on the lawn. The truck was garlanded with enough crepe paper and flowers to make it look like a parade float. A big sign propped against the front wheels read THE SCORE IS TERRY AND ANNABELLE 35, CARA LYNNE 1! BOTH WINNERS!! YOU FOUND THE PARTY! COME ON IN! I parked, walked up the steps, raised my fist to knock, thought what the hell, I grew up here, and just strolled in.
For a moment I felt as if I had flipped back in time to the years when I could tell my age with a single number. My family was crowded around the dining room table just as they had been in the sixties, all talking at once, laughing and squabbling, passing pork chops, mashed potatoes, and a platter covered with a damp dishtoweclass="underline" corn on the cob, kept warm just as my mother used to do it.
At first I didn’t recognize the distinguished gray-haired man at the living room end of the table, and I certainly didn’t know the dark-haired hunk of handsome sitting next to him. Then the professor-emeritus type caught sight of me and rose to his feet, his face lighting up, and I realized it was my brother Con.
“JAMIE!” he shouted, and buttonhooked around the table, almost knocking Annabelle out of her chair. He grabbed me in a bearhug and covered my face with kisses. I laughed and pounded him on the back. Then Terry was there as well, grabbing both of us, and the three brothers did a kind of clumsy mitzvah tantz, making the floor shake. I saw that Con was crying, and I felt a little bit like crying myself.
“Stop it, you guys!” Terry said, although he was still jumping himself. “We’ll wind up in the basement!”
For awhile we went on jumping. It seemed to me that we had to. And that was all right. That was good.
Con introduced the hunk, who was probably twenty years his junior, as “my good friend from the University of Hawaii Botany Department.” I shook hands with him, wondering if they had bothered to take two rooms at the Castle Rock Inn. In this day and age, probably not. I can’t remember when I first realized that Con was gay; probably while he was in grad school and I was still playing “Land of 1000 Dances” with the Cumberlands at the University of Maine. I’m sure our parents knew much earlier. They didn’t make a big deal of it, and so none of us did, either. Children learn much more by mute example than by spoken rules, or so it seems to me.
I only heard Dad allude to his second son’s sexual orientation once, during the late eighties. It must have made a big impression on me, because those were my blackout years, and I called home as seldom as possible. I wanted my dad to know I was still alive, but I was always afraid he might hear my oncoming death, which I had pretty much accepted, in my voice.
“I pray for Connie every night,” he said during that call. “This damn AIDS thing. It’s like they’re letting it spread on purpose.”
Con had avoided that and looked awesomely healthy now, but there was no disguising the fact that he was getting on, especially sitting next to his friend from the Botany Department. I had a flash memory of Con and Ronnie Paquette sitting shoulder to shoulder on the living room couch, singing “House of the Rising Sun” and trying to harmonize… an exercise in futility if there ever was one.
Some of this must have shown on my face, because Con grinned as he wiped his eyes. “Been a long time since we were arguing over whose turn it was to bring in Ma’s laundry off the line, huh?”
“Long time,” I agreed, and thought again of a frog too dumb to realize the water in his stovetop pond was growing ever warmer.
Terry and Annabelle’s daughter, Dawn, joined us with Cara Lynne in her arms. The baby’s eyes were that shade our mother used to call Morton Blue. “Hi, Uncle Jamie. Here’s your grand-niece. She’s one tomorrow, and she’s getting a new tooth to celebrate.”
“She’s beautiful. Can I hold her?”
Dawn smiled shyly at the stranger she’d last seen when she was still in braces. “You can try, but she usually bawls her head off when it’s someone she doesn’t know.”
I took the baby, ready to hand her back the second the yowls started. Only they didn’t. Cara Lynne examined me, reached out a hand, and tweaked my nose. Then she laughed. My family cheered and applauded. The baby looked around, startled, then looked back at me with what I could have sworn were my mother’s eyes.
And laughed again.
The actual party the next day had much the same cast, only with more supporting characters. Some I recognized at once; others looked vaguely familiar, and I realized several were children of people who had worked for my father long ago and now worked for Terry, whose empire had grown: as well as the fuel oil business, he owned a New England–wide chain of convenience stores called Morton’s Fast-Shops. Bad handwriting had been no bar to success.
A catering crew from Castle Rock presided over four grills, dealing out hamburgers and hotdogs to go with a mind-boggling array of salads and desserts. Beer flowed from steel kegs and wine from wooden ones. As I chowed down on a bacon-loaded calorie-bomb in the backyard, one of Terry’s salesmen—drunk, cheerful, and voluble—told me Terry also owned Splash City in Fryeburg and Littleton Raceway in New Hampshire. “That track don’t make a cent of money,” the salesman said, “but you know Terry—he always loved the stocks and bombers.”
I remembered him working with my father on various incarnations of the Road Rocket in the garage, both of them dressed in greasy tee-shirts and saggy-butt coveralls, and suddenly realized that my hometown, country-mouse brother was well-to-do. Perhaps even rich.