The Calendar on the Fridge
The calendar on the fridge ran in two colors. Black for Parker’s shifts at Hartley’s, red for everything that belonged to the rest of them—Dani’s swim meets, Cole’s appointments, the gas bill, the nights his mother worked the late table at the Lamplight. He filled in July with the black pen, and the month closed over him the way water closes over a dropped wrench. Quiet. Total. Already done.
He’d worked it so the black and the red almost never touched. That was the trick of the thing. If he took the early shifts he could get Cole to swim practice and still be home when his mother came in at midnight smelling of coffee and fryer grease and the particular tiredness she’d carried since their father stopped being a name they said out loud. Parker had gotten good at the arithmetic of other people’s lives. He could look at a week and tell you down to the hour how much of himself it would cost.
Cole was at the kitchen table not doing his summer reading, the book open and face-down over his phone like a tent he was hiding under. He was eleven and built entirely out of elbows and grievance.
“You’re supposed to read the actual book,” Parker said. “Not the four-sentence version a fourteen-year-old wrote on the internet.”
“The four-sentence version is more efficient.”
“That’s going on your tombstone. Here lies Cole Wold. He was efficient.” Parker took the phone, and Cole made the sound of a kettle, and Parker set it on top of the fridge where the boy couldn’t reach it yet and pointed at the book. “Twenty pages. Then I’ll drive you to the pool. Real pages, the kind with the words.”
Dani came down the stairs in a wet braid and a town-meet shirt two sizes too big and ate a banana standing up at the counter, which was the only way she ever ate anything. “He spent the knife money,” she told Parker, conversational, the family’s wire service.
“I know about the knife.”
“He told Mom it was for a science project.”
“There’s no knife in a science project, Cole.”
“There could be,” Cole said, with dignity, to the book.
This was the whole house, and Parker stood at the center of it—who needed driving, who’d eaten, whose shirt was clean for tomorrow—and most nights he didn’t mind, or he’d stopped letting himself check whether he minded, which from a certain angle was the same thing.
His phone went off on the counter. He knew before he flipped it over. There were maybe four people in the world who texted him after ten, and three of them lived in this house.
back in town. for real this time. you working tomorrow
He looked at it longer than the words deserved. Eleven of them, the question mark filed off, which was how Merritt had always asked for a thing—as though scrubbing the punctuation scrubbed the asking. Parker typed who is this and watched the dots rise and vanish and rise again.
the love of your life. you forgot already
ah. the tall one. owes me twelve dollars
i owe you eleven
see how you remember the math when it’s yours
He set the phone face-down and stood there with the marker still uncapped, and he didn’t move for a while. Through the window over the sink the backyard had gone blue-dark, the swing set Cole had outgrown rusting out there in the weeds, and Parker had the feeling he got too often lately—that he was watching his own life from a few feet behind himself, near enough to touch it, not near enough to change it. Merritt was back. Merritt was back for the last time he’d ever be back like this, with a whole summer ahead of him and nothing yet decided, and in eight weeks he’d be gone to a university up in Michigan where the dark came at four in the afternoon and the lake was the size of a sea. After that the summers would stop being summers. They’d be visits. They’d come with edges.
Parker capped the marker. In the box for tomorrow he wrote off, in black, where a shift should have gone, and then he traded a Saturday for it so the week still balanced, because some stubborn part of him refused to let wanting cost the family one thing it could measure.
“Who was that,” Dani said, watching him over the banana with the unbearable radar of a sixteen-year-old.
“Nobody. Hartley’s.”
“Hartley’s texts you the love of your life?”
“Read your phone less,” Parker said, and she grinned, because she’d seen it upside down, because there were no secrets in a house this size, only things everyone agreed not to say.
Mrs. Flynn’s car was the kind of green nobody made anymore, and it sat in the driveway when Parker pulled up, which meant Merritt had driven the eleven hours from school in one shot again, the same as always, the same that made his mother furious and proud in the same breath. Parker let the engine tick a second before he killed it. He’d known this house his whole life. He’d learned to ride a bike falling off it into the Flynns’ hedge. He’d spent the worst week of his life in their guest room the spring his father left, because his mother couldn’t let the kids see her face yet and the Flynns had simply made up a bed and asked nothing. He knew this house down to the give of its third porch step, and his stomach still did its old stupid thing.
Then the screen door banged and Merritt came down the steps two at a time, taller than ten months ago, which couldn’t be true and was, and Parker’s whole chest reorganized itself around the sight of him.
“You look like a man who drives a truck now,” Merritt said.
“I’ve driven a truck for three years.”
“Yeah, but now you’ve got the squint. The hardware-store squint. You’re one flannel off giving a stranger advice about grout.”
“I give strangers advice about grout. It’s my entire personality.” Parker climbed out, and then came the half second where neither of them knew what to do with their hands, which there always was, which neither of them had ever named, and then Merritt caught him by the back of the neck and hauled him in and it was a hug and it wasn’t, never quite had been, Merritt’s mouth at his ear, low, hey, like a thing they were keeping from the street.
“Hey.” Parker said it into his shoulder. Merritt smelled of the inside of a car after eleven hours and under that of himself, and Parker held on exactly as long as he was allowed and let go one beat before he wanted to, which he’d had years of practice at.
They stepped back. Merritt was grinning, and his eyes ran their old inventory, fast, head to feet and back, the once-over Parker had never decided whether Merritt knew he did.
“You eat?” Parker said. “There’s a new place. Well. It’s the old place. They redid the sign.”
“The Bluebird?”
“The Bluebird’s been shut two years, man. Where’ve you been.”
“Michigan,” Merritt said. “Briefly. Theoretically.” He came around to the passenger door and got in like he’d never once stopped getting in, and put his feet on the dash, and Merritt could be gone ten months and then fold himself straight back into the shape of your life, and you didn’t know how carefully you’d been holding the space until he filled it and you could breathe again.
Parker backed out of the Flynns’ drive. On the dash, in the dust by the vents, sat the flat grey stone he’d kept up there since spring, the good kind, the kind that skipped. Merritt picked it up and turned it over once and put it back without a word, and Parker watched him do it and said nothing either, and that was the entire language between them, right there—two people not saying things in a moving truck.
“Eight weeks,” Merritt said, out of nowhere, to the window.
“I know how long a summer is, Flynn.”
“I’m saying it out loud. So it’s real.” His elbow rode the door, his head tipped back. “Everybody keeps telling me how exciting it is. My mom cries about it about once a day. Happy crying, she says. I can’t tell the difference anymore.”
“It is exciting,” Parker said, and meant it, and hated that he meant it. “You got the funded one. You know how many people get the funded one?”
“You looked it up.”
“I did not look it up.” He had looked it up. The night Merritt called about the acceptance, one in the morning, Parker had read everything the program’s website would give him about exactly where Merritt would be standing for the next two years—the buildings, the inland sea, the snow that started in October and didn’t quit. “Congratulations. You’ll design a bridge that falls down and they’ll name it after you.”
“That’s not what civil engineers do.”
“You don’t know what you do yet. That’s the whole point of going.”
Merritt laughed, and it filled the cab, and Parker drove with both hands on the wheel and the windows down and the warm dust of the town coming in, and he thought, clear and from a few feet behind himself, this is the part you’ll want back, and then he turned the radio up so he’d stop thinking it.
Familiar Roads
The roads past the reservoir hadn’t been paved in Parker’s lifetime and never would be, and they drove them too fast like always, the truck shuddering over the washboard while Merritt held a gas-station coffee dead level out of long habit. There was no reason to be out there. That was the reason. It was the driving you did at nineteen, bored and broke, the driving that turned nothing into something with the simple addition of speed and a person you liked, and they’d never grown out of it because they’d never had a summer that made them.
“Pull over by the silos,” Merritt said. “I want to see if it’s still there.”
It was still there—the barn the lightning took the summer they were sixteen, half of it caved and silvered, the other half just standing there, refusing. They leaned on the hood and looked and didn’t go closer, because the magic of the place had always been in the looking.
“My dad used to swear they’d tear it down,” Parker said. “Every year. For ten years. It’ll outlive all of us.”
“How is he?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Parker said it easy, a fact with the heat scrubbed off, the voice he’d built for exactly this. “He’s in Reno. Or he was. He sent Cole a birthday card in May with forty bucks in it, which Cole spent on a knife, which I had to take away, so. Net negative.”
Merritt didn’t say I’m sorry, which Parker loved him for. He’d had two years of people saying I’m sorry, and the words had worn to nothing, two coins rubbed blank in a pocket. Merritt only looked at the barn a while longer and then knocked his shoulder into Parker’s and said, “Cole bought a knife. That kid’s going to be fine,” and somehow it was the most useful thing anyone had said to Parker about his family in a year.
They drove. They did errands, because Parker always had errands now, that was the grain of his life, and Merritt rode along for all of them and made each one worse and better.
Petras had the garage on Route 9 and he’d coached them both in Little League and he called them by the wrong names on purpose, had for fifteen years, the joke so old it had gone soft and dear. “Flannery,” he said to Merritt, wiping his hands, “and the Wold boy. You break it or you bring it?”
“Oil change,” Parker said. “And it’s pulling left.”
“It’s an old truck. It’s allowed to want things.” Petras put it up on the lift, and they stood in the open bay in the smell of rubber and cut metal while he worked, and he asked Merritt about the program in the way the town asked, which was to make it bigger than it was. “Michigan. Engineer. Look at you.” He pointed a wrench at Parker without turning his head. “This one keeping the place running while you’re gone?”
“He keeps everything running,” Merritt said, and there was no joke in it, and Petras grunted as though that were obvious, as though it weren’t the whole thing Parker spent his life not being thanked for, and Parker looked at the oil draining black into the pan and didn’t say anything at all.
Cole was waiting outside the pool at four, dripping on the curb with his towel around his neck like a cape, and his face did a complicated thing when he saw Merritt fold out of the passenger side—half delight, half the wariness of an eleven-year-old who’d learned that good things didn’t always stay. Merritt had been gone most of two years of Cole’s short memory.
“You got taller,” Cole accused.
“You got meaner. It suits you.” Merritt took the wet towel off him and snapped it at his legs, and Cole shrieked and dodged and was a kid again, just like that, and Parker stood by the truck with the door open and watched his brother and the boy he loved chase each other around a parked car in the pool lot, and the want in him turned over and showed its other face, which was this: not only don’t go, but look how easy you make us. Look what you do to this house just by walking back into it. Cole climbed into the middle seat between them on the bench and smelled of chlorine and asked Merritt forty questions about Michigan, did it really snow in October, were there wolves, and Merritt answered every one like it mattered, and Parker drove his family home through the four-o’clock light and didn’t say a word, because there wasn’t a word for it, and because his throat wouldn’t have held one.
The grocery store killed the warmth dead with its flat overhead light. Merritt pushed the cart and read the list off Parker’s phone in the voice of a nature documentary—and here we observe the North American male selecting the most economical ground beef, a behavior handed down through the generations—and a woman from the church gave them the look, two grown men laughing in the meat aisle, and Parker felt the town cinch a notch tighter around him and for once didn’t care, because Merritt was inside the notch with him. They argued about cereal. Merritt put back the brand Parker grabbed and got the one Cole actually ate, because Merritt remembered things like that, what an eleven-year-old who wasn’t his would eat, and Parker had to look at the freezer case a second until his face was his own again.
That was the trouble. Everything was easy. Everything dropped back into its old worn groove the second Merritt touched it, and the ease was a lie, because in eight weeks—seven, now—the groove would be empty, and Parker would be standing in this aisle alone reading the list in his own flat voice, and he made himself think it on purpose, standing there, the way you press a bruise to learn if it’s still a bruise. It was still a bruise.
In the lot Merritt loaded the bags into the bed and stood a second with his hands on the sun-hot tailgate, watching Parker dig for the keys.
“You do a lot,” Merritt said.
“It’s groceries.”
“No. I mean—“ He stopped. He had a habit of stopping in the middle of a sentence the second it got truer than he’d planned, and pulling back, and Parker knew the move because he owned it too. “You hold a lot of it together. Your mom. The kids. The whole—“ His chin tilted at the truck, the bags, the town. “You’re load-bearing, man.”
“That’s an engineering insult.”
“It’s an engineering compliment. The load-bearing wall’s the one you can’t take out.” He said it light, and then it sat in the parking lot not light at all, because they both heard the rest of it, the half neither of them said—and I’m the one who gets to leave. Merritt looked off first. He lifted the last bag off the asphalt and set it in the bed careful, like it was something that could break, and the careful told Parker that Merritt had just understood, maybe for the first time standing there, that leaving was a luxury. The understanding crossed his face, and he folded it away, and Parker let him, and they got in the truck and drove the groceries home before the cold stuff turned.