“French fries.”
“Broccoli it is.”
Overhead there was the squeak of the shower faucet and then the sound of water running in the pipes in the wall. When they were growing up there’d been the hospitals. The specialists. The surgeries. These things came with being Marky, and the two of them, he and Marky, had never known any other kind of life. Then, when they were thirteen, she’d sat Danny down alone and told him about statistics. Genetic anomalies. Life expectancy. Their father had been dead for a year by then and Danny knew that a long life was not assured, but as for Marky, it was not even a safe bet.
Twenty-nine now, and there’d been advances, and no one was making predictions anymore, least of all their mother.
“How did he take it?” Danny said to her back. “With Wyatt, I mean.”
“He was heartbroken, of course. We both were. Are. You keep expecting to see him lying there, or under your feet.” She shook her head.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here, Ma. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to help with that. And with Marky.”
“Marky was so brave, Danny. He was much braver than me. Even before I could tell him he had his arms around me. ‘It’s OK, Momma,’ he said. ‘It was time for him to go.’”
She looked at Danny with wet eyes, smiled, and turned back to the stove, and he turned to the window again. Nothing to see there now but his own reflection, and beyond that the snow—big white flakes tumbling in the shallow light from the kitchen.
“It must have been a job, thawing out that ground,” he said.
“Yes, well, that was one of the strangest things,” she said, and she told him about the pickax, the ground under the snow like concrete, and Gordon Burke showing up, just—out of nowhere.
Danny had raised the mug halfway to his lips and stopped. Then he sipped and set the mug down again.
It was Gordon’s idea to build the fire, she said, to thaw the ground. She didn’t know what she’d have done otherwise.
He watched her at the stove, stirring a column of steam at its base so that it rose circling like a twister before her.
“But why was he here?” he said.
“Why was he here?”
“Why did he come out here in the first place?”
She shrugged. “He said he’d seen Marky at the garage that morning. At Wabash’s. He said it made him think of us. If we might need any help out here.”
Danny watched her. “And when was the last time he did something like that?”
She frowned. She shook her head. “Never. Not since your grandfather was alive and needed some work done on the septic.”
Danny stared into the last of the chocolate in the mug, the sludgy remains. Suddenly he could smell the Plumbing & Supply, the cab of Gordon Burke’s van. He remembered sweating copper in someone’s musty basement. Hauling an old sloshy toilet out to the van and hauling the new one in.
“Well, that’s just curious as hell if you ask me. After all this time.”
She looked at him, then turned back to the stove. “I suppose so,” she said. And said something more, but he wasn’t listening, he was staring at the floor. At the blankets there where the dog would lie. As if the dog were still there.
Then he got up and walked over and scooped up the blankets and said, “Do you mind if I get these out of here, Ma? I mean, why are they still lying here like this?”
She looked at him. “Oh, Danny. I just didn’t… I just didn’t want to clear everything out like he was never here.”
“It’s been over a week, Ma.”
“I know.”
“Is it OK now? Can I throw them out?”
“Don’t throw them out, I’ll wash them. Just toss them down the stairs for now.”
“You’re gonna wash them.”
“Yes.”
He went to the door and opened it and stood at the head of the stairs looking down. Smell of earth and damp concrete and musty old things passing over him like air from a tomb. Like stale ghosts escaping. The blankets stank of the old dog, but nothing like that stink from that night in the park—dumb-ass dog jerking free and taking off into the park and nothing to do but go after him on foot with the flashlight. The jingling of the tags. The eerie moons of his eyes in the beam of the flashlight. The stink of him when you finally got hold of his leash, some kind of animal shit all over him, Dumb-ass dog, I oughta just throw you in the river, you know that?
Danny standing there holding the dog’s blankets in his arms, his mother watching him, until finally he pitched them down the stairs like she’d asked him to, shut the door again, and went back to the table.
WHEN THEY PULLED into the lot the next morning the cars all lay under fresh coats of snow—all but one, and he knew this car right off. Once a Camaro man, always a Camaro man, Jeff Goss liked to say, and apparently it was true.
“That’s Jeff’s car Danny,” Marky said as they walked by the car. “That’s a nineteen ninety-four Chevy Camaro Z28 with a three-fifty pushrod V-8 engine and oh boy is it fast.”
They walked up to the glass door in the morning cold as they’d done when they were young, but the smell that hit them when they stepped inside was not the smell of the Plumbing & Supply at all but a trapped smell of grease and rubber and gasoline. No one around in the outer office and no lights showing in the glass door that opened onto the mechanic’s bays, but then they heard his whistling and the lights stuttered to life in there and the glass door swung open and Jeff Goss stepped through and saw them and stopped whistling. Stopped walking. Like he’d stepped into a room that was not the one he’d expected.
“Hey Jeff look who’s here,” Marky said, pumping his thumb over his shoulder. “It’s Danny.”
Goss’s eyes pinged back and forth between their two faces, then he shook his head in a cartoonish way and said, “Thank Christ. I thought I was seeing double.” And he stepped forward and Danny stepped forward and they clapped their hands together soul-shake style and half embraced and stepped away again, grinning, shaking their heads. Danny at the sight of a boy he’d known since they were both six, standing now in his mechanic’s blues, blond whiskers on his chin, and his blond hair, once so thick and shaggy, cut back and thinning on top, and his face the face of any nearly thirty-year-old man you’d see anywhere, including a mechanic’s garage.
Did anything bring home the meaning of time like the human face? And did Jeff see the same, looking at you? Or was he used to your older face because he saw it every day on your brother?
“You’ve upgraded the Camaro,” Danny said, and Jeff said, “Yeah, one piece of shit for a more expensive one. If I wasn’t a mechanic I’d be broke. You still got that Chevy?”
“He’s got a two thousand and one Ford F-150 XLT with a V-6 engine Jeff.”
“He does, does he?” said Jeff. “Well, that’ll get you here and there.”
“It has so far,” said Danny.
They all three stood looking at each other. Then Jeff said, “And so what the hell, Dan? You just visiting, or what?”
“Danny came home because Wyatt died Jeff and he came to see where Momma buried him in the backyard and say good-bye.”
Jeff watched Marky’s lips as he spoke, then looked to Danny.
“Old Wyatt died,” Danny said.
“I got that part. He already told me and I was sorry to hear it. He was a good old dog.”
“Yes, he was.”
“A good old dog,” said Marky.