There were, of course, more speeches. Thomas sat glassy-eyed and dreamed of sand and ocean and stocking shelves.
Finally it was time for the Closing Ceremony, which was much like the Opening Ceremony, except drenched in ecstasy-sorrow over “our farewells, although I know each of you will cherish these memories forever.” Like everyone else, Thomas received a completion certificate written in stylized English and affixed with the ILTC’s Gold Seal. Then it was over. The same female staffer drove him to the airport, this time with a few others. He didn’t look at her ass, nor did he talk to the Young Leaders next to him in the van. He got on the plane, the plane lifted off and headed south, he stared out the window at the Atlantic Ocean and the coastline, and in no time at all he was back in Raleigh, and his beaming parents were waiting for him.
“How was it?” his mother trilled.
“Yes, how was it, son?” his father demanded.
“It was shitty,” Thomas snapped.
The ride home was tempestuous.
As Thomas stared at Roy, he wondered if he’d looked like that when he’d stepped off the plane: cold, jaded, impotently angry. He expected he had. But he didn’t want to commiserate with Roy. Roy would have to deal with his own wounds, as Thomas had.
“But have you ever thought about going to college? I mean, haven’t you felt that pull?” These questions would have to be answered, somehow.
“No,” Thomas said, “I haven’t.”
Roy seemed to sense that there was an entire story behind Thomas’s answer, and he waited for Thomas to tell it. When Thomas refused to say anything more, Roy just nodded in an odd sage-like fashion and turned the radio back on.
“Alright then,” he said in a distant voice. “Sorry to get all sorrowful on you.”
“Not a problem.”
“Take care of yourself, Thomas. And tell the others I enjoyed working there — and that I miss them all, sometimes.”
“Will do.”
Roy started up his car and rolled out of the parking lot. Thomas suddenly felt a strong urge to run after the car and stop him before he got out of sight. He imagined Roy driving off a cliff in his Lumina and falling contentedly to his doom — or, since there were no cliffs around here, driving off one of the high-rise bridges and plunging into the cold waters, never to emerge as a living man.
But then Thomas stopped himself. Hadn’t he just refused to commiserate with Roy? And what would he do if someone came rushing up to him and tried to convince him that life was worth living? He might drive off a bridge just to spite them. No, it was better to let Roy go. He would recover — or not, and if not, who was Thomas to tell him to reject sweet oblivion in favor of a life filled with gloom? The Lumina, which was heading west on the beach road, disappeared around a bend. Thomas grabbed hold of the shopping carts and slowly pushed them back inside. Vernon was standing by the door as he entered, watching him curiously.
“Who were you talking to?” he asked.
“Oh, uh,” Thomas stuttered, “no one. Just a customer with a question.”
“What’d they ask?”
Thomas’s mind was suddenly blank. He struggled, and came up with: “They wanted to know how long this store has been here.”
“I gotcha. So you were giving them a bit of a history lesson, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Alright,” Vernon said, rubbing his potbelly. “Oh, have you cleaned the bathroom yet?”
Thomas never told anyone what Roy said in that parking lot on that gray day, and he never saw the man again.
There had been others like Roy, ex-employees who found out that the next stage in their life, though it was supposed to be better, strangely lacked something. Perhaps they missed the camaraderie of Oxendine’s. Perhaps they realized their middle-class job required intelligence and fortitude they didn’t possess. Perhaps they found that college was an endless cycle of read, regurgitate, and forget. Perhaps they’d moved to another low-wage job, only to find themselves overworked and pining for the relative ease of Oxendine’s Grocery. Perhaps there were other reasons.
Roy, however, was the most memorable one. Sitting on the beach now, Thomas wondered what became of him. He supposed he could find him on Facebook or something; this was the Internet Age, after all. But he felt a great reluctance to pull this man out of his past. If he did contact Roy, their last encounter would hang over them like a black cloud, and no amount of cheerful chatter would sweep it away — and Roy might not even want to sweep it away. No, let him stay gone.
Thomas stood up, still pondering Roy, Orianna, and everything. A large part of him wanted Orianna to end up like Roy, wanted her to leave Oxendine’s, then realize her loss and come crawling back a miserable, self-hating wreck. A medium-sized part of him wanted to fuck her. And a very small part of him wanted to be done with her, as he could envision endless complications in the future if they continued to work together.
“To hell with it,” he muttered, finally deciding to continue on. His legs would be sore tomorrow, but he’d heal. He always did.
Chapter Seven
It was now mid-December, which meant Christmas was perilously close — at least, that’s how Thomas’s mother and sister saw it, and their emotions ruled the family in this matter. They didn’t consider that the Copeland/Dowling Family Christmas Get-Together had been the same for years, and that they didn’t need to worry about plans coming undone. They all met at Emily and Dan’s house in Raleigh on the 24th, where they drank eggnog and talked and watched little Dennis (now not so little) open his one allotted Christmas Eve present. Then they retired to the guest rooms, while Emily scuttled to and fro to make sure everyone had clean linens (though she’d made the beds herself two days ago), fresh towels (though she’d placed them on the dressers herself two days ago), and knew where the two bathrooms were (though their locations had not changed since the previous Christmas). Thomas’s mother would flit after her daughter like a butterfly (albeit one wearing furry reindeer horns, a red Rudolph nose, and a red and green Christmas sweater depicting a happy sledding scene) asking how she could help, and Emily would snarl that “this is my house and I’m in charge of hospitality,” to which Jean would reply, “Yes, dear, but you so overwork yourself. Let your mother help.”
This would continue far into the night. In his assigned room, Thomas’s father would be lying in bed in his pajamas, ready to go to sleep but knowing there would be many more minutes of mother-daughter nonsense. Thomas would likely be drunk and watching TV in his room. Dan would be puttering in the master bedroom, waiting for his wife to cease her marching and come to bed, where, if he was lucky, he could convince her to make out a little, though they’d have to be very, very quiet. Dennis would be getting in a few precious minutes on the Xbox. Finally, after many premature “goodnights,” the house was still, and Santa shot down the chimney and filled stockings and put presents beneath the Christmas tree.
The next day was Christmas, and it was such an orgy of present-opening that Thomas was tired by ten AM. Did he really need a pen that wrote in six different inks, as well as having an extendable toothpick and a nail file? Did Dennis really need a fanny pack equipped with GPS? Did Dan really need a digital rain gauge? After the frenzy, Thomas looked at the wrapping paper strewn across the floor and the shiny red and green ribbons scattered about like tripwires, and felt pity for the trash collectors of the world.