He tried imagining it with Rex, albeit a fantasy Rex who had a grown man’s body with a familiar teenager’s face. He tried saying, “Hey, I’m sorry I left like that,” but that wasn’t going to work. If he said he was sorry for anything, he was going to have to explain why. “I’m sorry I left like that, but the thing is, I had just seen your father carry a dead girl into Abby’s house, and then I saw her father…”
Yeah, right. He tried imagining what it might be like to run into the older men.
Immediately, rage welled up inside of him, so that all he could see himself saying was something like, “You goddamned sonsabitches…”
He couldn’t apologize. He couldn’t explain. He couldn’t defend.
He was damned if he was going to employ the defense his mother had used on his behalf. “When people ask why you left like that,” she had written him, “I tell them things were becoming too intense between you and Abby. I tell them we didn’t want you to feel pressured to get married so young, or, God forbid, start a family at your age. I say, we thought it best for you to go away where there are greater opportunities, and different girls to date.”
Upon reading that letter, he had scorched the telephone lines with a call to her, telling her to stop it, telling her not to do that to Abby, who was completely innocent in all this. “How could you?” he had yelled at his mother. “How can you say things that make people think of her like that?”
To which she had cooly replied, “Well, I have to tell them some- thing, Mitch.”
There had been a time, nearly nineteen years of time, when he would never have talked to his mother like that. Out of respect, and because he wouldn’t have dared; he would never have dreamed of raising his voice to her, much less speaking to her in such a harsh tone, with such peremptory, accusatory words. In his family, politeness had reigned. By the time of this phone call, he had lost the respect, if not entirely the fear.
“Not that!” he had yelled at her. “You don’t have to tell them anything. It’s none of their business. But don’t tell them that.”
He had no idea if she paid any attention to him.
Now he was going into a situation where he didn’t know what people thought, what lies had been spread, what stories had been made up to compensate for the truths that had never been told. He decided to take his cues from others, at least while he was still testing the waters, timing his moves. If they were friendly to him, that’s how he would be to them, up to a point that stopped short of reactivating friendships. That wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t happen. If they were cool, he would be, too. He decided his best bet was to be courteous but distant pleasant but unapproachable. That way, nobody could get hurt, or at least not as badly as the truth could hurt them.
He preferred not to think about how his other plans might hurt some of them.
As Mitch turned north on the highway, he had a feeling he had already lost his grip on all that rational planning. Where was it that morning when he had impulsively followed little green arrows to Abby’s place? And where was it now when he was following a tornado, for God’s sake, straight back to her?
“Courteous, aloof, neutrally pleasant,” he reminded himself, out loud. “I’ll be so goddamned pleasant my own ex-wife wouldn’t recognize me.”
He was more than halfway there when he saw something that made him pull over to the side of the road and park. Just ahead of him, there was a Muncie County sheriff’s car that was parked crooked on the shoulder, as if its driver had pulled over in a hurry and left it there. And off in the nearby culvert, a tall man in a uniform was getting to his feet and appearing to dust himself off, a sheriff’s deputy, maybe.
The storm had gone through here in a big way.
Mitch got out of his car, to make sure the deputy was all right.
Rex endured small hailstones pounding on his back, and drenching rain. Wind howled around him, picking up gravel and hurling it at him. He thought he even heard the metal in his car rattle. He wanted to raise his head and look, but didn’t want to take the chance of being blinded by debris.
It seemed to last forever, but when the worst of it was over, he realized he had only been a victim of the more ordinary part of the storm, and not the twister itself. When he did look up and scan the sky for it, he couldn’t even see it, but only spotted the dire black clouds from which it had emerged, receding toward the northeast. Where twisters were supposed to go. Rex looked due north, checking for damage and people and not seeing any. Then he turned to look south and spied one car, a black late-model Saab, parked on the same shoulder where he was.
He watched a tall man get out of the car, and walk toward him.
There was something about the way the man moved that struck a vaguely familiar chord in Rex. It was the aggressive tilt of the broad shoulders, the straightforward carriage of the head that made him think it might be somebody he knew. It brought back memories, for some reason, of playing in football games when he played left tackle, running ahead, making big blocks for their talented tight end…
I’ll be damned…
When the big man got close enough, Rex found himself looking into Mitch’s eyes.
Mitch saw it in Rex’s face, the exact same immediate impulse he felt in the first second when they recognized each other: a natural, almost irresistible impulse to grin. In that instant, the years between them didn’t exist. There was only the same old close friendship, the same chemistry and rapport. There was a flash of amnesia, a wiping out of old sins, a memory only of affection and great times. In that moment, there was only the day before yesterday; yesterday, itself, disappeared. In that moment, they could have slapped each other’s shoulders, they could have shouted, “Goddamn!” and laughed out loud. They could have said, “Where you been?” and laughed about it. They could have taken up right where they had left off.
And in the next instant, Mitch saw Rex cut it off, so he did, too.
Mitch had a sense of being in a twilight zone where he and Rex had seen an open door that they could have stepped through to a different, happier conclusion. Instead, given the choice, they both slammed that door shut. It left them standing in the rain on the shoulder of the highway, staring at each other in wary disbelief at what they couldn’t believe they were seeing with their own eyes, after all these years.
“Mitch,” Rex said, in a neutral tone.
“Yeah. I didn’t know it was you when I pulled up-”
“Or you might not have stopped?” Rex cracked a grin, after all, but a cynical one.
“No, I mean-” He stopped trying. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” Rex made a show of knocking mud off his clothes. Mitch sensed he was doing it just so he didn’t have to look him in the eye. “No harm done.” When Rex straightened up again, he said, in the same careful, neutral tone, “I never heard you were coming back-”
“Just for a visit-”
“Sure. Wouldn’t want to stick around.”
“Jesus.” It slipped out of Mitch. He hadn’t meant to react angrily to anything any of them said, but Rex’s sarcasm had poked him into a response. “It’s not that.”