1
come home
i’ll be waiting
Received 8/6 3:32 A.M.
The message sat unanswered. Andrew tapped from Eddie’s hanging text thread to the brief obituary that had run in the local paper: Edward Lee Fulton, recent graduate of Ohio State University, is survived by adoptive parents Lou and Jeanne Blur and sibling Andrew Blur as well as close friends and colleagues. Memorial services will be held at Streckler Funeral Parlor on Tuesday, August 10th at 11 A.M. Andrew dropped his skull against the headrest of the driver’s seat, free arm dangling out the open window. The impound office waited across a potholed blacktop parking lot, baked under dog-day sun to a shimmer. Sans air-conditioning, the interior of the Supra grew hot and hotter as he flicked through nothing on his phone. Del had left the I-65 rest stop right behind him, but she was late catching up.
He figured that might have something to do with the bitter exchange they’d traded over the hood of her sedan, when she’d said, “Come home with me after this, there’s no reason to stay down here,” and he’d replied, “There’s no reason for me to go back up there, either.” Her face had shuttered. The problem was he meant it. He was coming back to Tennessee, but there wasn’t going to be a homecoming. He’d buried home two weeks past.
Del’s trim red Focus crunched over the stray gravel scattered across the parking lot and jerked to a stop alongside him. He got out without rolling his windows up. If someone felt the pressing need to steal his trash bags full of clothes, or ransack a footwell crammed with books, they could help themselves. The estate letters in his back pocket were crumpled from the drive. He unfolded them as she joined him, sweat ringing the collar and armpits of her loose muscle tee, her mouth a rigid, bloodless line. Her crisp silence told him as much as he needed to know about the fallout of their sniping.
“Well, here we are,” he muttered, to a hum of assent from Del.
The impound office was a glorified double-wide with a narrow service counter and dense safety glass barricading off the clerk in his reflective vest. Andrew said, “I’m here to pick up a car. It’s been in impound a couple weeks, estate shit had to get sorted out first. I’ve got the paperwork.”
“Okay, sure,” the guy said without taking his eyes off his phone.
Andrew stuffed the letters and his license under the slot and stepped to the side with Del as the clerk heaved himself up to go searching. She said, “I’m serious, Andrew. I know your mom isn’t going to say it, so I will. I don’t think Nashville is where you need to be right now. Especially not alone.”
He’d spent the past six weeks chafing to come south, waiting for the all-clear while Eddie put him off, and put him off, and put him off—May stretching to June, June to July, while he sat amongst his packed boxes wondering what the fuck, man. The excuses were bullshit, but they kept coming. First Eddie had a short research trip to finish at the close of spring term, then he needed to prepare every last perfect detail of the house for Andrew, and finally there was some old family business he said Andrew wouldn’t want to be party to (he was right about that one). By the time Eddie drummed up a summer independent study that Andrew would “distract” him from if he showed before it was finished, Andrew figured he was being teased. After that interminable wait and the devastating payoff, he’d be fine if he never laid eyes on Columbus again.
He had to be in Nashville to find out what Eddie had done to get himself put in the ground. That wasn’t a fight worth rehashing again with Del, though. She was as secure in her conclusion that he needed to cut his losses and accept Eddie’s death as all the other people orbiting his life, watching and judging from the outside.
“I won’t be alone. I’ll be with what’s-his-name, Riley, and all those folks,” he said.
“Yeah, the friends he didn’t introduce you to and that your parents didn’t invite to his funeral, that sounds great. A super supportive system,” she countered, measured but fierce.
Andrew scraped the sweat-drenched hair off his forehead, then ran his fingers through it twice to slick the whole mess out of his face. Four weeks past due for a trim. He wiped his damp hand on his jeans and wrangled the urge to say something: you invited yourself, I didn’t ask for support.
The clerk interrupted: “I’ve got your keys, man, and there’s a hold fee.” He held out the twin red-and-black key fobs on a wire loop—one for valet, one for horsepower—and a thin sheaf of papers.
“How much?” Andrew asked.
“Looks like two hundred thirty-three, for the tow and storage.”
Andrew clenched his jaw as his frustration abruptly compounded. It didn’t matter that he’d summarily inherited the entire seven-point-five million dollars Eddie’s late parents had left him a decade ago, not right then.
“You’re telling me I have to give you two hundred bucks to pick up my dead best friend’s car,” he said.
“Hey, sorry, I don’t make the rules,” the clerk responded.
“Goddamn.” Andrew slapped his card onto the counter. “Fucking charge it, then.”
“Calm down,” Del said.
“Leave it,” he said through gritted teeth. The clerk passed him his card and the charge slip, along with the release forms and the key ring. He signed each dotted line with jagged, imprecise slashes of the pen. “Where’s the car?”
“Head to row eighteen and hang a right, it should be about three-quarters toward the end of the lot. Look for the sign at sixteen, though, the numbers fell off the rows after that. Just count your way.” He took the signature sheets and stuck them into an accordion file. “Sorry ’bout your loss.”
Andrew banged out the door; Del slipped through behind him. The pavement ended at the barbed-wire gate of the impound lot proper, giving way to gravel and, a handful of steps in, the crunch of pebbled glass. One fat grackle sat sentry atop the second numbered pole. Shreds of metal and plastic littered the ground underfoot.
Almost a third of the cars were mangled: doors crushed, paint scorch-ruined, windshields spiderwebbed with cracks. Those had permanent residence on the lot—or were interred there, he thought with a morbid humor. The sepulchral vibe ached in his molars, wreckage all around resting silent and still. The sign for row seven hung upside down from a single remaining screw. To his left at the head of row eleven, someone’s sticker-splattered banana-yellow tuner—a Civic, maybe a 2010. He sidestepped to tap the hood in solidarity. Del snorted, and he flinched. Her hand caught his elbow, thumb slipping on the sweat at the crook.
“Please just explain it to me, why you’re still going forward with this after he…” she paused. The sun forced her to squint, chin tilted as he turned to stare her straight in the face. “After he did what he did.”
“You aren’t going to say it?”
“Do you want me to?” she asked.
Without answering, he shook off her grip and kept walking. The pale tops of his feet in his sneakers and the bare length of his arms had begun to sting, unsuited as he’d been since childhood to the hot hand of summer in the South. A broiling tension pushed under his skin. The image of Eddie’s corpse, emptied out and dolled up, remained stuck to the inside of his eyelids, a non-negotiable, fragmented picture. Under the sleeves of his funeral suit, fat stitches had closed Eddie’s waxy forearms from wrist to elbow, black like tarred railroad ties.
No mistaking the ruined flesh and its bleak message, unless the obvious narrative wasn’t the whole story. Maybe instead it was a palimpsest, scrawled in haste over the original draft to cover—something else. He wasn’t sure what.
“I don’t believe he killed himself. He had no reason to,” he said against his better judgment to the sound of her footsteps crunching behind him, because he didn’t have the fortitude to turn and look her in the face. “I don’t know, Del. Does that sound like Eddie to you? He ever strike you as the type?”
“No, but that doesn’t change the fact that he did it. I hate seeing you grasping for straws like this,” she said.
Her pitying tone, the same he’d heard from the cops and his parents, pushed his temper over the edge.
“I wish you’d stayed the fuck home,” he said.
The scuff of her shoes paused as he continued on. “Jesus, Andrew.”
Copyright © 2021 by Lee Mandelo
