I shouted: “One, two, you-know-what-to-do!”
We kicked it in.
Key of E.
All that shit starts in E.
In the seventies, we might have played until one-o’clock curfew, but this was no longer the seventies, and by eleven o’clock we were dripping sweat and exhausted. That was okay; on Terry’s orders, the beer and wine had been whisked away at ten, and with no more firewater, the crowd thinned out fast. Most of those remaining had resumed their seats, content to listen but too exhausted to dance.
“You’re a hell of a lot better than you used to be, freshie,” Norm said as we racked our instruments.
“So are you.” Which was as much a lie as you look great. At fourteen I never would have believed the day would come when I’d be a better rock guitarist than Norman Irving, but that day had come. He gave me a smile to say he knew what was better left unspoken. Kenny joined us, and the three remaining members of Chrome Roses huddled in a hug we would have called “faggot stuff” when we were in high school.
Terry joined us, along with Terry Jr., his eldest son. My brother looked tired, but he also looked supremely happy. “Listen, Con and his friend took a bunch of folks who were too loaded to drive back to Castle Rock. Will you haul a bunch of Harlow folks in the King Cab, if I lend you Terry Jr. to copilot?”
I said I’d be happy to, and after a final so-long to Norm and Kenny (accompanied by those weird limp-fish handshakes peculiar to musicians), I gathered up my load of drunkies and set off. For awhile my nephew gave me instructions I hardly needed, even in the dark, but by the time I offloaded the last two or three couples out on Stackpole Road, he had ceased. I looked over and saw the kid was leaning against the passenger window, fast asleep. I woke him when we got back to the home place on Methodist Road. He kissed my cheek (which touched me more deeply than he could know), and stumbled into the house, where he would probably sleep until noon on Sunday, as adolescents are prone to do. I wondered if he would do so in my old room, and decided probably not; he’d be quartered in the new addition. Time changes everything, and maybe that’s okay.
I hung the King Cab’s keys on the rack in the hall, headed out to my rental car, and spied lights in the barn. I walked over, peeped in, and there was Terry. He had changed out of his party duds and into a coverall. His newest toy, a Chevy SS from the late sixties or early seventies, gleamed under the hanging lights like a blue jewel. He was Simonizing it.
He looked up when I came in. “Can’t sleep just yet. Too much excitement. I’ll buff on this baby for awhile, then toddle off to bed.”
I ran my hand up the hood. “It’s beautiful.”
“Now it is, but you should have seen it when I picked it up at auction down in Portsmouth. Looked like junk to most of the buyers there, but I thought I could bring it back.”
“Revive it,” I said. Not really talking to Terry.
He gave me a thoughtful look, then shrugged. “You could call it that, I guess, and once I drop a new tranny in er, it’ll be most of the way there. Not much like the old Road Rockets, is it?”
I laughed. “You remember when the first one went ass over teapot at the Speedway?”
Terry rolled his eyes. “First lap. Fucking Duane Robichaud. I think he got his license at Sears and Roebuck.”
“Is he still around?”
“Nah, dead ten years. Ten at least. Brain cancer. By the time they found it, poor bastard never had a chance.”
Suppose I were a neurosurgeon, Jacobs had said that day at The Latches. Suppose I told you your chances of dying were twenty-five percent. Wouldn’t you still go ahead?
“That’s tough.”
He nodded. “Remember what we used to say when we were kids? ‘What’s tough? Life. What’s Life? A magazine. How much does it cost? Fifteen cents. I only got a dime. That’s tough. What’s tough? Life.’ Around and around it went.”
“I remember. Back then we thought it was a joke.” I hesitated. “Do you think of Claire very much, Terry?”
He tossed his polishing rag into a bucket and went to the sink to wash his hands. There had been nothing but one faucet back in the day—just cold—but now there were two. He turned them on, grabbed a cake of Lava, and began to soap up. All the way to the elbows, just as Dad had taught us.
“Every damn day. I think of Andy, too, but less often. That was what you call the natural order of things, I guess, although he might have lived a little longer if he hadn’t been so fond of his knife and fork. What happened to Claire, though… that was just fucking wrong. You know?”
“Yes.”
He leaned against the hood of the SS, looking at nothing in particular. “Remember how beautiful she was?” He shook his head slowly. “Our beautiful sister. That bastard—that beast—cheated her out of all the years she still had coming, then took the coward’s way out.” He swiped a hand across his face. “We shouldn’t talk about Claire. It makes me emotional.”
It made me emotional, too. Claire, who had been just enough older for me to see her as a kind of backup Mom. Claire, our beautiful sister, who never hurt anyone.
We walked across the dooryard, listening to the crickets sing in the high grass. They always sing the loudest in late August and early September, as if they know summer is ending.
Terry stopped at the foot of the steps, and I saw his eyes were still wet. He’d had a good day, but a long and stressful one, just the same. I had been wrong to bring up Claire at the end of it.
“Stay the night, little bro. The couch is a pullout.”
“No,” I said. “I promised Connie I’d have breakfast with him and his partner at the Inn in the morning.”
“Partner,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “Right.”
“Now, now, Terence. Don’t go all twentieth century on me. These days they could get married in a dozen states, if they wanted. Including this one.”
“Oh, I don’t mind that, who marries who ain’t none of mine, but partner ain’t what that guy is, no matter what Connie may think. I know a freeloader when I see one. Christ, he’s half Con’s age.”
That made me think of Brianna, who was less than half my age.
I gave Terry a hug and a peck on the cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Lunch, before I head back to the airport.”
“You got it. And Jamie? You played the spots off that guitar tonight.”
I thanked him and walked to my car. I was opening the door when he spoke my name. I turned back.
“Do you remember Reverend Jacobs’s last Sunday in the pulpit? When he gave what we used to call the Terrible Sermon?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very well.”
“We were all so shocked at the time, and we chalked it up to the grief he was feeling over the loss of his wife and son. But you know what? When I think of Claire, I think I’d like to find him and shake his hand.” Terry’s arms—brawny, like our father’s—were folded over his coverall. “Because what I think now is that he was brave to say those things. What I think now is that every word was right.”
Terry might have gotten rich, but he was still thrifty, and we ate catered leftovers for Sunday lunch. For most of it, I held Cara Lynne on my lap, feeding her tiny bits of things. When it was time for me to go and I handed her back to Dawn, the baby held her arms out to me.