The Long Wait for Tomorrow Page 18

At the nearest pool table, Kelly and Casper were shooting some stick. Mixing liquor, fresh smoke trailing from Kelly’s cigarette. Throwing money down left and right, gambling the night away.

  “Patrick?” Jenna put her feet up on the edge of the bench. She wrapped her arms around her knees, chin cradled between them. “That was a good thing you did tonight.”

  Hearing it from Jenna gave him a momentary lapse in memory. “What do you mean?”

  “Helping Edmund like that …”

  “Oh.” Patrick reached for his drink. “Well, it wasn’t much.”

  “It was quite a bit much. Illegal, dangerous, and … I want to say, stupid, but … still, it was good.”

  “It was Kelly, really.”

  “Maybe. Partly, sure. But Kelly’s had twenty years to change. You’ve done it in less than three days….” Jenna scooted toward him. Shoulder to shoulder, turning her head to look at him directly. “I’m proud to be with you tonight, Patrick.”

  He looked over, elated to find how close her face was to his. Even his imagination had never allowed for being this close, so close he could actually see the fragmented color of her eyes. It was never supposed to happen, being this close, and yet, there was her breath, close enough to brush his lips.

  “Do you actually think this might all be real?” he asked.

  She smiled, glanced over to the pool table. “Up until now, it’s always sort of … been about Kelly, hasn’t it? Our lives, everything, bonded to Kelly.”

  “That’s not so strange, is it?” Patrick followed her gaze with lazy ease, carrying the memory of her face with him. “Lot of people like you, me, and Kelly, lot of friends with the same … thing.”

  “Before today, I couldn’t have told anyone who Kelly McDermott is. I’d always say boyfriend, that’s who he was. Even with Kelly, it might have been the same. Together for four years, and I’m starting to think that the only reason was … Kelly wanted someone to stay with. That if he wasn’t with me, he knew he’d have to … party hard, screw around with anything on two legs, do all those things expected of him. With me, he was allowed to play the part without all that. The football star and the cheerleader, can’t ask for a better way to keep up appearances.” Jenna sighed, the sound of acceptance. “We all use each other, I suppose, to keep from having to … be anybody.”

  “It’s hard to argue otherwise.”

  “Maybe that’s why there was never really any you or me. I mean, it was Kelly and me. It was you and Kelly …”

  “There was you and me long before there was ever Kelly,” Patrick informed her.

  Out of the corner of his left eye, he could see Jenna looking at him. Awaiting an elaboration he was now going to have to make good on. Patrick never doubted it would come. Watching Kelly take down a shot of bourbon, he sensed that there was no more Jenna and Kelly. Not the way it had been before. And although he wasn’t ready to believe that Patrick and Kelly was a thing of the past, he knew that he and Jenna had only just found each other.

  Whatever comes next, his angels counseled, there are no guarantees.

  “I saw you in second grade,” Patrick said, refusing to accompany his confession with anything other than a fixed stare, straight ahead. “And here I’ll bet you didn’t know I used to go to Jefferson Elementary.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Caught sight of you from my seat in the cafeteria. I was at the end of one of those long rectangles, right next to where each class would line up for the kitchen.” Memories were tricky, and as the years went by, Patrick never put much stock into what he had seen that first time. A younger Jenna than the one he would eventually get to know, that’s all Patrick had to go on. Standing in line, a body free of curves, face unwilling to let go of those remaining traces of baby fat; a thumbnail of what she would eventually grow into.

  Patrick opened his mouth and let his angels speak for him. “Saw you standing in line that first time, and that was it for me. Every day, I’d sit at the same table. The same seat, good as behind home plate. I’d watch you stand in line. You’d stand in line, and that pretty much sums up my knowledge of you back then. Though I also knew, somewhere, that this would be as close as I would ever get to you. A girl standing in line. All that mattered reduced to a daily helping of indoor sunshine. A girl standing in line, trapped behind the half hour between twelve and twelve-thirty.”

  Patrick had a sip of his root beer, set the bottle down next to him. “I always thought that would be as lonely as it would ever get.”

  “If that was second grade,” Jenna said quietly, “that means I was gone the next year.”

  “Children vanish at that age. Transfer to new schools. Parents get new jobs. They lose jobs, move across the country, out of the country. Sometimes they get in car accidents…. There was no telling where you had gone. In the years that followed, I just allowed acceptance to be my guiding light.”

  “And then, years later …”

  “That’s the part I think is really funny….” Patrick wasn’t about to laugh, but he was somehow able to let a quiet smile creep into the narrative. “You and Kelly met outside of school, right before it started. My parents ran into you two at the mall, and …”

  “They didn’t like what they saw,” Jenna finished.

  “They’re cheap,” Patrick told her grimly. “My parents are cheap people.”

  “Don’t say that—”

  “How could they possibly not like you?” Patrick aired his dirty laundry, shaking his head as he would a sheet in the wind. “You’re kind, smart. Unaware of your own beauty, which I think only adds to the overall surplus you’ve got.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is … But no matter, my parents didn’t see it and … they just figured this girl from a working-class home, whose family split up, has no place in Kelly’s heart. You do know, my parents introduced us to get you away from Kelly.”

  Jenna’s feet hit the floor and she leaped back a little. Her eyes were wide, mouth open in a disturbingly accurate impression of a blow-up doll Patrick had seen at a party once. “That’s what that was about?”

  “That’s wight, wabbit.”

  “You mean …” Jenna went back to drawing flies with her mouth, neck straining forward. “When they called me up and said, ‘Oh, why don’t you come over to our house for dinner with Kelly and our son, Patrick,’ that was all—”

  “A trick,” Patrick said. “It was a trick to get you over to meet me.”

  “So I wasn’t good enough for Kelly, but they had no problem foisting me on their biological son?”

  “Not everybody’s born with biological imperatives,” Patrick sighed. “Someone today told me that you can rationalize just about anything. Kelly is their son. No DNA test on the planet’s going to make them feel otherwise.”

  “So that dinner that was supposed to happen with you, me, and Kelly … Your parents said that Kelly, at the last minute, couldn’t make it.”

  “They never invited him.” Patrick was actually beginning to enjoy the bloodshot memories. “But could you put yourself in my shoes? There I was, years divorced from second grade. In my own house, when you come special delivery to my front door. You step in, my world goes head over heels. Before we can even be introduced, the first words out of your mouth—”

  “Oh no!” Jenna cried, wrapping her arms around her head.

  “That’s right, were Is Kelly here yet?”

  “No!”

  “And my world quickly fell back into step,” Patrick concluded with a smile and a sad shake of his head. “The instant I heard you say that, I already knew, it was you and Kelly for keeps.”

  “Baarg!”

  “And all we talked about over dinner …”

  “Much to your parents’ dismay …”

  “Was Kelly.”

  “Kelly!” Jenna screeched, jumping on the bench. “Everything you touch you destroy!”

  Kelly swaggered over with the bottle of Knob Creek, two-thirds empty. He took a few steps
back and forth to the Tom Waits song playing: “I’m a pool-shooting-shimmy-shyster, shaking my head. When I should be living clean instead.”

  “Where’s Casper?” Patrick stood up, looking around. The two pool players had retired to the bar, beers clutched in chalky hands. Eyes glued to the close-captioned highlights on ESPN2.

  “It’s a surprise.” Kelly winked, resting his ass against the bench’s back.

  The side door popped open, and Casper strode in with Kelly’s car keys in one hand, Patrick’s saxophone case in the other. He held it aloft, cutting behind the bar. The surface was wiped clean with a sweep of Casper’s arm, the case set on top. He flipped it over, brass latches aimed in Patrick’s direction.

  Casper reached back and disconnected the iPod.

  “Get on over here and get your horn set up,” Casper told Patrick, voice echoing in the newfound silence. “You and I are gonna jam.”

  “All right!” Kelly raised his fist in the air.

  “I don’t know …” Patrick approached the bar with the hesitant hands of someone asked to hold a newborn for the first time. “I’ve never really played for people before.”

  “You’re in the school band,” Jenna said witheringly. “First chair since sophomore year, you’ve played every basketball game since we were freshmen.”

  “Yeah, but not for … real.”

  “He means he’s never played for us,” Jenna specified.

  “This is as real as it gets, tonight,” Kelly proclaimed, ambling across the room and leaning against the shuffleboard table. “I didn’t travel twenty years into the past just to hear your sorry excuses.”

  “That’s right,” Casper said, heading for the back. “He didn’t travel twenty years into the past just to hear your sorry excuses.”

  “I’ll even put it together for you,” Kelly offered, shuffling toward the case.

  “OK, fine,” Patrick relented, snapping the latches. “Just don’t, Kelly, come near my saxophone. Stay right where you are and have another drink.”

  Kelly was happy to do as he was told.

  Patrick opened the case and pulled out the strap, hung it around his neck. With his back turned, he went about assembling his saxophone with the same concentration that an aspiring student might read sheet music. He snapped the instrument onto the strap. Putting his lips to the mouthpiece, Patrick licked the wooden reed a few times, reveling in the familiar taste of tongue depressor.

  Folding his bottom lip over his teeth and biting down on the mouthpiece, Patrick blew a few test notes. He winced, at sounds that seemed unwelcome in On The Rail’s empty acoustics. He found himself projecting back to twelve years old, awkwardly cradling a heavy chunk of brass, wondering how the hell he could ever get this thing to actually make music.

  By the time he’d turned around, Casper was already back. He’d dragged a chair over to table one, was seated with an electric guitar in his lap. Hooking it up to a small beige amplifier beside him, Casper began to tune up. Plucking at strings, twisting the keys. All kidding aside now, his rambunctious energy converted to solemn concentration.

  “Nice horn,” he said offhandedly.

  Stringing a few more notes together that bordered on melody, Patrick made his way over to Casper’s side. Casper adjusted a few dials and began playing. With his head tilted to the side, he settled into a bluesy groove.

  Patrick stood by, waiting for him to finish warming up.

  Looked up and saw Jenna and Kelly, both leaning against the bench.

  “Don’t just stand there, man,” Casper prompted him. His head rocked to the rhythm, tending to the business of strings and frets. “Come on, let’s hear it.”

  Patrick closed his eyes and slid his lips over the mouthpiece.

  He went backward in time, slowly sifting through memories. The past four years cruising along with a disaffected ease. His story thus far, in rewind. Nothing but a collection of events, time spent at football games, dimly lit parties at whoever’s house happened to be suffering from parental neglect on that particular weekend. Those rare dinners with his parents, Kelly’s parents, the repetitive motions of silverware, repetitive topics of discussion about what the day had brought them all. A slew of repetitive days, no discerning difference between what preceded what. The classes, school meetings, band practices, the same hyperactive fight songs at every basketball game. Girls that floated in and out of focus, never close enough to kiss or even date, discomfiting thoughts of having to see them every day, interrupting the effortless poetry of his unchanging life. All that self-sabotage, insisting on maintaining such empty comforts. Patrick alone in his room, hostage to his brother’s books, decorations, dresser drawers still half-filled with the clothes of a seven-year-old.

  And these memories picked up speed, each one a yawning smear of nothing. Filled with nothing, just isolated symbols. Punctuated with ghostlike figures that took on temporary forms. His parents, his teachers, even Kelly and Jenna, a void that widened even as he remembered the music that filled it. Growing louder, brass wails sent out to replace all that which should have been there, culminating with the stark figure of his little brother.

  Standing outside their school, tossing a football to himself.

  Eyelashes batting away clumps of thick black hair, courtesy of his mother.

  The last real memory of the days before music.

  And without the applause from Kelly, Jenna, and two strangers at the bar, he might have kept on playing, without ever realizing he had already begun.

  Raising his lids, Patrick peered through the dark veil before his eyes.

  Casper playing along, really swinging his head now. Kelly with the bottle of Knob Creek perched on his thigh, head resting against Jenna’s. Their arms linked, side by side, but that was OK, too. The house lights were off, the clock was keeping to its own rules. Even the indistinct, muted figure of Coach Redwood up on the television screen was just one more piece of a new night on earth.

  Nobody bothering to read the choppy, misspelled black-and-white captions beneath his pleased, yet stern face.

  WE DON’T KNOW … EVERYONE HAS BEEN WORRIED ABOUT HIM. WE HAVE … SUSPICIONS

  JUST WANT TO WAIT AND SEE … CHANCE TO TALKK TO KELLY MCDERMOTT …

  Patrick didn’t think twice about closing his eyes and returning to the music.

  is eyes opened, and for a moment, Patrick didn’t know where he was.

  A sky-blue mattress floated just above his head, pressing down on thin wire mesh. Turning his head to the side, he got a worm’s-eye view of a dark wooden floor. Beneath him was a green sleeping bag, gutted and spread out. From somewhere nearby, 1970s funk played at low volume.

  Saturdays on 90.7 WNCU, Patrick’s angels prompted.

  It all came back to him then.

  Patrick slid from under Jenna’s bed, certain he’d fallen asleep next to it.

  He stood up, stretched.

  The blinds were drawn, gray light emanating from the edges of its vinyl borders.

  Patrick got his bearings, eyes going from the empty bed to his coat draped over the stereo. He picked it up, slipped his arms into the sleeves. Realized that, sooner or later, he was going to have to replace the components of his new suit with something a bit less wrinkled. He walked over to Jenna’s night table, took a close look at the clock.

  One p.m.

  He opened the door, thought he heard voices.

  With uneven steps, Patrick headed down the truncated hallway, through the small living room, and into the kitchen.

  Kelly McDermott was at the sink, washing dishes.

  Face calm as a domestic servant with no name or birthday.

  Jenna was pouring a cup of coffee, and upon seeing Patrick, her eyes lit up. Barely able to contain herself, she set down the mug and thrust an open envelope under his nose. Patrick took it from her hands, glanced down at the insignia in the top left corner. He looked up.

  Jenna stood with her hands behind her back, a child awaiting the final assessment of the glitter
-soaked drawing she’d made in art class.

  Patrick removed the letter, several pages in length, and unfolded it.

  There wasn’t a high school student alive who ever needed to look past the first three words.

  Patrick grinned. “You’re off the wait list.”

  “They let me into Ohio State!” Jenna cried, leaping into Patrick’s unprepared arms.

  Well, swing her around a little, dummy, his angels insisted, and Patrick did so, wrapping his arms around her waist and lifting. She held on tightly, laughing. Uneven breaths escaping along the back of his neck.

  “That’s my girl” came the proud voice of Jenna’s father.

  Patrick hadn’t even noticed him sitting at the small table crammed into the corner between the counter and the entrance to the kitchen.

  “Good morning, Mr. Garamen,” Patrick said, setting Jenna down.

  “Good afternoon to you, too, Patrick….” He lifted his coffee to thin lips, hawkish nose dipping into the mug as he drank. His fine sandpaper hair was in full weekend mode, thistles sprouting at all ends. “Forgive my appearance,” he added, tugging at his sweatpants and black Rolling Stones T-shirt. “And please, you can call me Al. Like the Paul Simon song. I know you don’t come around that often, but it’s going to have to stick one of these days.”

  “Right, sorry.” Patrick reached out to shake his hand, as though meeting him for the first time. “Congratulations, Al.”

  “Oh fiddlesticks,” he said with a humble turn of the cheek. “All I did was write the essay for her and slip the dean a couple hundred bucks.”

  “Dad.” Jenna laughed, going back to her cup of coffee. She set it next to Kelly, who paused to take a sip then continued to wash with a dreamy smile. “Bribing the dean. What will the neighbors say?”

  “They’ll say please stop walking around the yard in your underwear, Al.”

  From the sink, Kelly let out a low chuckle. Placed a glass on the rack to dry.

  “So have we got a trifecta yet?” Al asked, rubbing a light snowfall of stubble. He kicked at the chair opposite him, bringing it out from under the table. “Patrick, you heard anything yet?”