The Almost History
They went to the lake after dark because they were twenty-one and twenty-two and there was nowhere else to be that didn’t have a clock in it. Bell Lake at night was the same as every night of their lives—the water going green to black at the edge of the light, the float still chained out past the drop-off, the same families’ initials in the same dock posts gone soft with rot. They’d had every important conversation of their lives out here, and most of the unimportant ones, and the lake held them all, giving the day’s heat back slow long after the sun was down.
They swam to the float and lay on it on their backs and let the boards dry the water off them. The stars were stupid out there, more than a person had any use for.
“We almost died on this thing,” Merritt said.
“We did not almost die.”
“You jumped off the high side onto a beer cooler.”
“That was Tyler Honce.”
“That was you, Parker. I’ve got the photo. You’ve got the scar.” Without looking, Merritt reached over and found the place on Parker’s shin where the cooler had opened him up, and pressed it, two fingers, like testing a wall for the stud, and Parker went still as a held breath. The float rocked under them. Out past the light a fish took something off the surface. Merritt left his fingers there one beat past the joke and drew them back, and Parker breathed out at the dark and the stupid stars.
He was good at the things that were nothing. He’d had years to get good. They had one towel between them, because Parker only ever brought one, on purpose or not he’d never let himself decide, and swimming back in they used it as always, passing it hand to hand, and there came a moment with the cotton tented over both their heads, both of them ducked under it in the dark, faces a hand’s-width apart, that he’d have called nothing if anyone had asked. It was nothing. It was a towel.
They drove to the Bluebird after and parked nose-out in the empty lot, because the streetlight there built a box of orange in the dark and the dead diner asked nothing of anyone. They sat with the doors open and their wet feet up and drank the two warm beers Merritt had been hiding under the seat, and the thing that lived between them rose up near the surface, late, with the whole day behind them.
“Can I say something,” Merritt said, “and you don’t make it a joke.”
“No promises.”
“Parker.”
“All right. All right. No joke. Soldier’s honor.” Parker set his beer on the dash beside the stone and looked at the dead diner instead of at Merritt—the dark window where the counter used to be, where both their mothers had once, separately, in a different decade, in different lives, carried plates.
“The night before I left for school. The first year.” Merritt turned the can in his hands. “You drove me to the bus. We sat in this truck.”
And Parker was there again before Merritt finished the sentence, because he’d never once left it.
It had been August then too, the bus at 6:10 a.m. out of the Sunoco lot, and Parker had volunteered to drive because the alternative was Merritt’s mother crying at the wheel and Merritt arriving at college red-eyed. They’d sat in the truck in the dark with the duffel between them and the engine running for the heat, eighteen and nineteen and so far from saying anything true that the not-saying had its own weather in the cab. Merritt had his hand on the gearshift. Parker had been looking at that hand for what felt like the length of the night, the knuckles, the bitten thumbnail, and then the bus came around the corner with its headlights swinging across them both, and something in Parker that he’d never been able to name or explain or undo had reached over and put his hand down over Merritt’s on the shifter. Just covered it. Neither of them moved. The bus idled. The driver looked at his clipboard. And for a whole minute—a real minute, sixty actual seconds, Parker had counted them since a hundred times—they sat there with Parker’s hand on Merritt’s hand and the future running its engine ten feet away, and everything Parker would never have the nerve to say crowded up in his throat, and then the moment got so big it scared him, and he heard his own voice say something stupid about the bus being late, and he took his hand back, and Merritt got out, and that was that. They’d buried it the second it happened. Two summers of weather over the top of it, and never once the word for what it was.
“You put your hand on mine,” Merritt said now, in the orange dark, “and you didn’t move it. And I didn’t move mine. And then you cracked some joke about my bus and you pulled back, and we never—“ The laugh came out of him wrong, more breath than sound. “Two years, man. We never said it.”
Parker looked at the diner. He could feel Merritt looking at the side of his face. He knew the exact shape of what he could say—it was right there, whole, finished: I pulled back because if I hadn’t I’d have asked you to stay, and I didn’t have the right, I’ll never have the right, you don’t ask a person like you to stay in a town like this. What came out instead, quiet, aimed at the windshield, was, “It wasn’t nothing.”
The most he’d ever given it. Three words, fired at glass.
Merritt was quiet a long time. The streetlight buzzed overhead. Then, just as quiet: “No. It wasn’t.” And he didn’t reach across the seat, and Parker didn’t reach across the seat, and they sat in the orange light with the truth finally in the truck with them, taking up a seat, and neither of them had any idea what you were supposed to do with it now that it had a body. He could see the thing clear now, and still had no idea how to hold it.
“We should go,” Parker said, eventually. “I’ve got the early shift.”
“Yeah,” Merritt said. “Yeah. Okay.”
He drove Merritt home with the truth riding the seat between them the whole way and dropped him at the green car in the dark drive, and Merritt got out and leaned back in through the window, and there came a second—Parker felt it swing open like a door—where either of them could have, the streetlight dead on this block and the street asleep and nobody on earth ever to know.
“Night, Wold,” Merritt said, and rapped the doorframe twice with his knuckles, and went inside.
Parker drove home the long way, past the silos, too fast, alone.
The Deadline Moves Closer
For a few days after the Bluebird, they didn’t see each other, and neither of them called it that. Parker picked up an extra shift he didn’t need. Merritt had things to do for the program, forms, a doctor’s note for the move, and they texted, except the texts got shorter, lost their jokes, went to how’s the store and fine, you and the long silences in between that a phone makes feel like a held breath. The truth had been easier as a thing they didn’t say. Said, it sat between them and made everything formal, and Parker, who could keep any feeling in the world as long as nobody acknowledged it, found he had no idea how to be around a Merritt who knew. So he stayed at Hartley’s. He stayed where he was good.
The store was where Parker felt most like himself and least like a person with a future, both at once. Hartley’s was eighty years old and smelled of cut keys and fertilizer and the machine oil they sold by the quart, and old man Hartley had handed Parker more of the running of it every season since the spring everything fell apart, not with ceremony, just by being elsewhere more, trusting Parker to know which contractor was good for thirty days and which needed to pay cash. Parker knew the place in his hands. He could lay his palm on any bin in the dark and tell you the gauge of the screws inside it. He liked the work, was the embarrassing truth of it—liked solving a stranger’s leak in four sentences, liked the weight of competence, and hated that liking it felt like agreeing to something, like signing a thing he hadn’t read.
Merritt came by on the Tuesday near close and leaned on the counter and watched Parker cut a key for a woman who’d locked herself out of her late mother’s house, watched him talk her down easy while the machine screamed and threw bright filings, watched him not charge her, and when she’d gone Merritt said, “You’re good at this. Like—actually good. You know that?”
“It’s a key, Flynn.”
“It’s not the key.” But he let it go, because the bell over the door went and a man came in needing a propane fitting, and Parker handed it to him without looking, eleven o’clock to the bin’s two, and Merritt watched that too, and didn’t say the thing his face was saying, which was some version of you could run this. You could run anything. And nobody up where I’m going will ever know that about you.
Merritt started coming over after Parker’s shifts, and that was how he ended up inside the machinery of the Wold house on a Wednesday near eleven, when Parker was at the kitchen table with the shoebox of bills and the checkbook and the calculator app open on his phone, doing the part of his life nobody ever saw him do. Cole had gone down hard at nine and come back up at ten with a bad dream he wouldn’t describe, and Parker had sat on the edge of the boy’s bed in the dark until the breathing went even, and now he was awake with the gas bill and the water bill and the math of which one could wait, and Merritt sat across from him not talking, just there, the way you’d hold a flashlight for somebody working under a sink.
The door went a little after eleven and his mother came in off the late table, and Parker watched her come in—the careful way she took the step down into the kitchen, favoring the right knee that the doctor said was bone on bone and that she said was fine, the same word she used for everything that wasn’t. She had the diner on her, coffee and grease and the particular grey of a woman who’d been on her feet eight hours for people who tipped on the pre-tax total. She kissed the top of Cole’s empty chair out of habit, then laughed at herself, then saw Merritt and her face opened.
“They’re working you to the bone down there,” Parker said.
“It’s fine.” She got her shoes off standing at the counter, one hand on the fridge. “Dani won the two hundred. Did she tell you. Beat the Carlisle girl by a full second.” She said it proud and exhausted in equal measure, and Parker wrote the time down in the red pen on the calendar for her even though she’d already told him, because the writing-down was a thing he could give her, and she squeezed his shoulder on her way to bed the same as she’d squeeze Merritt’s three nights later over the lemon thing, and then it was just the two of them again under the kitchen light with the bills.
Merritt didn’t say anything for a while. Then, quiet: “How long have you been doing this?”
“Doing what.”
“This.” He meant the table, the shoebox, the kid upstairs, the woman down the hall, the red pen. He meant the hour. “Since your dad.”
“Somebody’s got to keep the lights on.” Parker capped the pen. “It’s not a tragedy, Merritt. It’s a Wednesday. People do this everywhere, all the time, it’s just—life, it’s just the bill being due.” But Merritt was looking at him across the table the way he’d looked at the careful bag of beans in the parking lot, and Parker understood that his friend was doing the same arithmetic Parker did every night, and arriving, for the first time, at the size of the number. Once Merritt saw it he couldn’t make it small, and Parker had spent two years making it small so he could lift it.
The boxes started that same week. Parker came in off a shift and they were just there in the Flynns’ front room, flat-packed and waiting, and Merritt was on the floor with the packing tape making the sound Parker would hate for the rest of his life, that shriek of tape off the roll, and Parker stood in the doorway and looked at the boxes and understood the leaving in a way the calendar had never made him.
“You’re packing already? You’ve got three weeks.”
“Two and a half. And you don’t pack a life in a weekend, Parker, you pack it in increments so you don’t notice you’re doing it.” Merritt didn’t look up. He was good at this, good at anything with a system in it. He labeled every box on two sides in block capitals—KITCHEN, BOOKS, WINTER—and WINTER got Parker right under the ribs, because there’d be a winter up there, a real one, with Merritt inside it, in a coat Parker would never see.
“You want help, or you want an audience?”
“Both. Mostly help. Hand me that.” So Parker got down on the floor and helped, because the only thing worse than helping would have been refusing, which would have told Merritt everything. They built boxes. They wrapped Mrs. Flynn’s good glasses, the ones she was sending up because she couldn’t stand the thought of her son drinking out of plastic in the cold. They argued about whether you needed a book once you’d read it, Merritt for keeping, Parker for letting go, and it was not about books.
It was the shirts that did it. Late, the room half-emptied, Merritt folding shirts into a box and Parker handing them off the bed, and Parker’s hands knew these shirts. The grey one from the lake trip the summer they were seventeen. The flannel they’d stolen back and forth so many times neither of them owned it anymore. The hoodie—
“That’s mine,” Parker said.
Merritt held it up. Faded grey, the cuffs gone to felt, the Hartley’s logo cracked across the chest from a thousand dryers. “I know. I keep meaning to give it back. I’ve had it since March.”
“Keep it.” Parker heard the words leave him and couldn’t catch them. “It’s cold up there. You’ll want it.”
Merritt looked at him then, really looked, the hoodie in both hands, and something moved behind his face that Parker couldn’t afford to watch, so he stood off the bed and said he had to call his mom about Cole, which was a lie, and went out onto the porch and stood in the dark with the phone in his hand calling no one.
The thing was, wanting had started to feel like something he ought to be ashamed of. Not the wanting itself—he’d carried that for years, it was an old weight, he had the calluses for it. It was that the wanting had gone loud, now, with the clock running down, and every honest thing he did, every shirt he handed over, every box he taped shut, was secretly an argument for Merritt to stay, and Parker couldn’t stand to be a man making that argument. Because Merritt had earned this. Merritt had done it all right—the grades, the test, the application Parker had watched him sweat at this same kitchen table—and the lowest thing a person could do, the most selfish, was to stand in the doorway of all that and say but me, though. What about me. So Parker did the opposite. He helped pack the boxes faster. He held the door of Merritt’s leaving open with both hands and his whole body, and the more it cost him the wider he held it, and somewhere in that week he started to go quiet.
It showed. With Merritt it always showed; there’d never been a version of Parker that Merritt couldn’t read across a room.
“You’ve gone weird,” he said, coming out onto the porch with two beers, handing one over.
“I’m tired. The store’s been slammed. It’s grilling season, the whole town needs a propane fitting at once, it’s a migration.”
“That’s not it.”
“It’s propane fittings, Merritt. You wouldn’t understand. You’ve never load-borne a propane fitting in your life.” The joke landed and Merritt let it land, because he was kind, and they stood on the porch and drank, and a storm was building off the west, an August storm, the air gone green and electric and close, and you could smell it coming before you could see it.
“My boxes are on the porch,” Merritt said.
“The covered part?”
“The not-covered part.” And then the sky let go all at once, and the two of them were off the steps and moving before they’d decided to, hauling the boxes Merritt had stacked by the railing in under the eave, and KITCHEN was already going dark at the corners and Parker put his body between the rain and the BOOKS box without thinking, his back to the weather, carrying Merritt’s whole packed-up future into the dry while the rain ran cold down his neck and soaked him through to the skin. They got them all in. They stood in the doorway after, both of them streaming, breathing hard, the rain roaring on the porch roof a foot above their heads, and Merritt looked at Parker—soaked to the bone for a box of books bound for Michigan—and his face did the thing again, and this time he didn’t put it away.
“Why are you like this,” Merritt said. Not a question. His voice had gone rough. “You’d stand in a hurricane for a box of my books and you won’t even—“
“Don’t,” Parker said.
“Parker.”
“I’ve got the early shift,” Parker said, which was becoming the truest lie in the world, and he went out into the rain to the truck and sat in it in the Flynns’ driveway with the wipers off and the windshield gone to water, and watched the smear of Merritt standing in the lit doorway watching him not leave, and he didn’t leave, and he didn’t go back in. He sat in the rain in the dark in the space between the two impossible things, and then he turned the key and drove home soaked to the skin with the heater roaring, shaking, not entirely from the cold.