A Reunion Story
By Christy Morrison
Copyright 2011 Christy Morrison
Smashwords Edition
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* * * * *
“You’re all set, Mr. Lancey,” Rhonda said, handing me a manila folder. “I’ve included directions with alternate routes in case of traffic.”
I thumbed through the pages. Rhonda winked at me and gave me a motherly smile.
“They’ll all be so impressed with you, I just know it. Ten years since high school, and who else will be able to say they are in charge of an entire division? Is there… anyone special that you’re looking forward to seeing at your reunion? A high school sweetheart, perhaps?”
I chuckled noncommittally, and saw Rhonda’s smile droop. “You know me, Rhonda. I’m sure I’ll find myself a dance partner or two.”
Rhonda raised her eyebrows. “Well, make sure you only talk to the nice girls.”
“I doubt I’ll find anyone as nice as you,” I said, and Rhonda’s smile returned.
I got on the elevator and pressed the button for the parking garage.
“Oh, Mr. Lancey,” Rhonda called as the elevator doors slid shut. “Call Mr. Cannizarro on your way.”
I nodded and the steel doors closed on the view of the office. My electric blue Corvette chirped as I walked toward it, and while I lowered the convertible top, I agreed with Rhonda: no one else will be able to lay claim to the success I’ve achieved. The job, the car and even the city were each the top in their class. I maneuvered through the city, and when I exited the Holland Tunnel and was finally on the Jersey side, I dialed Freddie Cannizarro.
“Sammy,” Freddie shouted. “So what is it this weekend? Some bars, some clubs? Some exclusive parties?”
“My reunion, Fred,” I reminded him.
“Oh yeah,” Freddie said. “Going to show off a bit?”
“That’s the plan, right?”
“Always, son,” Freddie droned. “You driving? You sound distracted.”
“I am.”
“This is what you need to do: you gotta find the most popular girl from high school. I mean, the one who would never give you the time of day, right? Then you pull up in your sweet ride and lower your sunglasses and say something hot and sexy to her. You get her back to your hotel room—”
“I’m staying at my parent’s house, I mean, my dad’s house,” I said.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you can still do the whole thing and then go back to her hotel room…”
I listened to Freddie plan out my reunion weekend the entire two hour drive back to the town where I grew up. When I pulled onto my street, he was trying to decide whether I’d have a better weekend with the popular cheerleader chick, or the nerdy but seductive ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ chick.
I slowed my car to look at the houses on my street, which I hadn’t seen in over five years. The new up-and-coming suburbs of New York City had nothing on this old neighborhood. My colleagues who moved out of the city were always showing off their brand new houses, which were packed tightly together with identical cookie-cutter frames. My street’s old age was made even more apparent by the mature trees whose tops skimmed the clouds, and the large yards that spread out from the homes in every direction. Each house sat on at least an acre of land, with a small wooded area sprawling across the property lines. Those woods were the source of many of my childhood adventures and explorations.
A neighbor, Ann Holmes was out watering some flowers, and she peered at my car trying to distinguish the driver. When she recognized me, she waved and dropped the hose, jogging to the edge of her yard. I pulled over.
“Hang on, Fred,” I said.
“Sam? Oh my goodness, Sam! Look at this fancy car! Your father said you’d be in town this weekend. If you have time at some point, I’d love to have you and Keri over for coffee,” Ann said.
“Thanks, Ann,” I said. “I’ll let you know. How is everything? How’s Tom?”
Ann beamed. She looked as happy at the mention of her husband’s name as she had when they got married almost fifteen years ago. “He’s great. Working like a mule, you know.”
“Well, the house looks amazing,” I said, putting the car into gear.
Ann backed away, calling, “Just trying to keep it as ship-shape as it was when my parents lived here.” She waved as I continued down the street.
“Who’s that, a desperate housewife?” Freddie shouted through the phone.
“Crap, Fred, no! It’s a neighbor. I was in her wedding, kind of, when I was in high school,” I said.
I rounded a curve and my house came into view. As soon as I saw my house, the front porch, the wooden rocking chair that looked so empty without a blanket draped across the arms, I felt a pressure come over my chest.
“Okay, okay. Well, tell me if you run into anyone exciting, alright? And have a good weekend,” Freddie said, hanging up.
I pulled into my driveway, and through the rearview mirror, I could already see the screen door of the house across the street opening and a figure crossing the lawn. I parked behind my dad’s old truck and could glimpse the doghouse in the backyard that my dad and I had built together for Buddy, our old beagle who died when I was fourteen. The pressure in my chest stretched, like the tightening and strumming of guitar strings. By the time I raised and latched the top, popped the trunk and got out of the car, Keri Free was already pulling my bag out of my car.
As neighbors, we were each others first and best friends. She had always just been Keri Free, the girl at the bus stop with me, or the girl who brought me my homework when I stayed home sick from school. In high school, she did the whole marching band thing and I went out for the football team. Neither of us was part of the popular crowd in high school, and it seemed like that was something she never even tried for. She always wore her long brown hair in a thick braid — every single day — and she had these huge glasses that seemed like a barrier between her and the rest of the world.
The last time I saw her was during winter break of our junior year of college. She’d let her hair out loose, in these thick, dark waves that clawed down her back. There were no glasses, and her body had gone from girlish gawkiness to a woman’s graceful frame. And now, six years later, she looked even better.
“Holy cow, Sam,” Keri grunted, letting my bag drop to the driveway and hugging me. “Were they out of Maseratis at the rental place? Oh my gosh, I haven’t seen you in a million years.”
Her hug was tight and it suddenly felt good to be home. She let go and heaved my bag onto her shoulders and started walking to the front door.
“I, uh, own the car.”
She laughed, like I’d made a joke and then stopped, staring at me. “You’re serious? You own a car – a Corvette – and you live in New York City? Isn’t that … cumbersome?”
“Well…” I started, but Keri was already dropping my bag on the front porch. She left it there and started to cross the lawn back to her house.
“Come over for dinner, if you want,” she said, opening her screen door, and then she disappeared as quickly as she’d appeared.
I stood alone on the front porch and took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure whether I should knock or just walk right into the house. It hadn’t been quite the million years that Keri said, but I hadn’t been home since I’d graduated from college, not even for holidays. I looked around at the porch. The bricks looked older, more cracked, and the front windows looked like they needed a good washing, but otherwise everything looked the same. I closed my eyes and imagined an alternate universe, in which my mother would be inside baking a cake, and maybe my older brother, Jim, would be over for the weekend watching baseball with my dad. My niece and nephew would be splashing and playing in the pool out back. And maybe we’d even have a new dog for that old doghouse.
I opened my eyes and turned the knob. The door opened and the front hallway was dark. I could hear the sound of a television in the back of the house.
“Dad?” I called into the darkness.
“Sammy?” My father appeared in the hallway. He was wearing an old college sweatshirt and jeans and drying his hands on a rag. “Hey, Sammy. Good to see you.”
He hugged me and took my bag. “I got your old room all set up for you.” He started up the stairs.
My father and I went to Keri’s parents’ house for dinner. It would have been a quiet dinner if we’d stayed at home, and I’m not even sure what we would have eaten, so we were both happy for the invitation. I got the feeling my father ate at their house a lot.
The Frees asked about Jim and his family and my father told them about a promotion Jim got at his job in Connecticut.
“How old are his kids now?” Keri asked me.
“Uh, five and six, I think?” I glanced at my father, who shook his head.
“No, Sarah is seven and Nathan is eight,” he said.
I shrugged. “They look younger in those Christmas pictures,” I muttered.
After dinner, my father checked the wooden mailbox he’d made when I was young. It was carved from a tree stump, and there was a hole near the ground in the back that I instinctively ran my hand over when my father got the mail. He caught me and chuckled.
“Oh, you and those letters,” he said, remembering. “You spent about three summers trying to figure out who sent you on those adventures.”
I laughed. “It was the great mystery of my youth. I thought I might have had a secret admirer, but some of the tasks were definitely a punishment of some sort.”
From the ages of thirteen to sixteen, a weekly letter appeared in the hole. The letter was never signed but it sent me on missions that I had to complete before I could get the next letter. Sometimes there were rewards in the hole instead of letters.
“You know, I thought it was Mom sending those letters at one point, because every few weeks one of the tasks would be to clean my room.”
My father quieted at the mention of my mother and rifled through the mail. “Well, whoever it was …” he trailed off, sounding old and tired.
My father went to bed early, a habit he must have picked up in recent years. I stayed in my room, flipping through channels on the tiny black and white television. The TV got about seven channels, so I watched the news on three different stations.
My eyes closed on the news and opened again on a late night talkshow host interviewing the new “it” girl from the summer’s projected blockbuster. I stumbled across my wood floor, turned off the television and grabbed at the tiny chain switch hanging from the lamp by my window.
When the light was off, a small flash of some movement, some flurry of activity drew my attention to my window, which overlooked the front yard. My eyes were still adjusting to the dark after turning off my lamp, so I couldn’t be sure, but I thought there might be something outside, near the driveway. I felt around my bag for some sneakers and pulled them on while I descended the stairs as quietly as I could. My father’s bedroom door was shut, no light shone from under his door, and I could hear his quiet snores breaking the silence in the sleepy house.
I went out the back door and found an old flashlight in the garage. I grabbed a metal baseball bat at the last minute, though what I would do with it, I had no idea. Once outside, I swung the flashlight back and forth, sweeping the front lawn with the beam of light. Nothing.
I walked to the end of the driveway, and let the light illuminate the street in either direction. The night was totally still. Unlike the endless noise of the city that never sleeps, the only sounds in this neighborhood were coming from my sneakers on the pavement.
I turned my gaze up to my bedroom window, dark and nondescript against the house. What did I even see earlier? I tried to picture it again. A shadow? A glimmer? Did something move, or was it my own reflection that I saw in the window?
I sat down on the curb in front of my house and leaned on my knees. I stared across the street at Keri’s house. It sat on a slight hill, and I remembered the feeling of running down that front hill, across the street, and up the lawn to the front door of my house.
As a last ditch effort, I grabbed a stick and walked down the road a bit, to the edge of our yard, closer to Ann’s house. There was a cluster of four tall evergreens at that edge of the lawn, and I poked the stick through the branches over and over, shining the flashlight into any spaces to see if there was something hiding in the thicket. Again, there was nothing.
From the house, this part of the curb was blocked from view by the trees, and because of the way the road curved, it was invisible from the other houses on the street as well. Standing in that concealed part of the street, I flashed back to when Ann first told Keri and me about the night she met her husband. Ann got married when Keri and I were fourteen, so we must have only been in elementary school the night she and Tom met. Her parents were away for the weekend, and like any normal, red-blooded teenager, she threw a party and invited all of her friends. Her friends invited their friends, and so on.
At some point, the tall, shy boy from the next town caught Ann’s eye, and they came outside to talk. They walked down the street until they reached the sheltered curb where I was now standing, jabbing at branches with a long stick. They stayed out here for hours, until the music from the party died down and most people left. They stayed until the sun started to rise and the sounds of morning snapped them out of their reverie.
They sat on this curb, talking all night, and then in the morning when Tom realized he needed to go before his parents reported him missing, they kissed. And they’ve been together ever since. Ann told Keri and me that story the week before she got married, and then she invited me and Keri to her house to help her get ready before the wedding. At the time, it didn’t feel odd to me that a fourteen year old boy would help his neighbor get ready to walk down the aisle. Ann babysat us for years, and it just seemed normal that since my yard had played a part in her romance, I should be involved in the wedding. So, there we were—Ann’s little helpers—chatting with her while she put on her make-up and bringing her water while she was photographed in her home.
Ann and Tom moved in with her parents to save money after they got married, but they never moved out. Ann’s father suffered a stroke shortly after they were married, and Ann helped her mother take care of him until both of her parents died, her father about ten years ago, and her mother several years later. Now Ann and Tom lived in the big house by themselves.
I dropped the stick and walked back to the driveway, suddenly exhausted. As was my habit, I reached down and felt at the back of the mailbox, just like I’d done after dinner. This time though, my fingers brushed against paper.
I grabbed the folded paper and straightened up, staring first at the surprise in my hand and then looking up and down the street again. Of course, whoever had left the paper was long gone, so I took the paper, the flashlight and the metal baseball bat back up to the house.
Once inside, I bounded the stairs to my room, stopping outside my father’s bedroom door again to make sure he was still inside, asleep. I went into my room, turned on the lamp, locked the door and unfolded the paper.
It was regular lined notebook paper, and the words written on the page were carefully printed in block letters in pencil. A weird feeling came over me, like a rush of nausea. The handwriting, the block letters, the pencil—it was all familiar to me. This note was from the same person, delivered the same way, as the tasks I received years ago.
I forced my eyes to focus in on the words. There were three phrases; short, like bullet points.
Breakfast with dad on porch
Lunch with neighbor in piano room
Dinner with girl next door on pier
These were my new tasks for the weekend. I lay back in my bed, and fell asleep considering who could have left the note.
In the morning while I showered and got dressed, I went over the possibilities for the author of the notes. First, the person would have to know I was in town for the weekend. Unfortunately, that didn’t narrow things down too much. Anyone who graduated with me would know about the ten year reunion. Plus, there was my father, the Frees, Ann, and anybody who had spoken to any of those people recently. Ann said she’d heard from my father that I would be in town, so he probably had told others, as well.
The tasks, however, pointed me to my father, Ann: the only neighbor I knew who had a piano room, and Keri. My father could not be the note-sender. Not only was he asleep when I received this note, but there was also no way that he could have kept it such a secret over the years. Plus, the task-giving thing was not really his style. It was too fun, too creative. It was something my mother would have done to make boring chores seem more exciting. My father just would have ordered us to get the job done.
I didn’t think Keri was really a possibility because she could not have kept the secret for so long, either. Also, though, the timeline just did not match up for the notes to be from her. I started receiving them when I was fourteen, when Keri and I were close friends. But then once high school began, we drifted apart and were in different crowds of friends. We did not really talk much, and there was a time when we even avoided each other. But I still received notes through all of that.
So that left Ann as my prime suspect.
I was downstairs by nine, and I hoped to get a jump on the whole “breakfast with dad” thing but when I entered the kitchen, he was sitting at the table, reading a newspaper and sipping coffee with an empty plate in front of him.
“Oh,” I said, slightly taken aback.
My father snapped shut the newspaper. “Morning, Sammy. What’s on the agenda today—errands for the big reunion tonight?”
The reunion began at 9pm at a bar down the shore. It was the kind of place that we scammed our way into with fake IDs when we were in high school, but now it seemed like a cheesy place for our reunion.
“Not really, no,” I said. I stood in the kitchen and stared at the empty plate in front of my father. There were a few crumbs littered on it, and I wondered if he might still be able to eat, just so I could check the task off the list.
“There’s coffee on the counter,” my father said, pointing. He had noticed my gaze.
“Yeah, thanks.” I poured myself a cup of coffee and then sat down across from my father, who had resumed reading his paper.
“Hey, Dad?”
“Hm?”
I cleared my throat and waited. He looked up from the paper.
“You think we can eat breakfast together on the porch?”
He glanced at the crumb-lined plate and quickly folded the newspaper over it. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Let me just, uh, put on some eggs. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds great,” I said. I got plates and utensils out of the cupboards and set the table on the porch.
Our screened-in porch was one of my mother’s favorite features of the house. She often said that she knew this was the house she wanted when she saw the porch. She and my father bought the house when they were pregnant with me and Jim was a toddler. At the first sign of spring, she insisted we eat dinner on the porch. She always made our last dinner on the porch for the summer into a special occasion, and we would talk about our memories of that summer over a candlelit meal.
My father came in with the eggs. We ate our breakfast and drank the coffee and talked about work and sports. When the food was gone, we sat silently. I looked out into the backyard. Buddy’s old doghouse was off to the left, and on the right side of the yard was the clothesline where my mother hung our clothes out to dry until she was too sick and my father finally bought a dryer.
“I’m glad you came home, Sam,” my father said, breaking through the quiet. “It’s been too long.”
I kept my eyes on the clothesline, and I thought back to pulling up in the driveway yesterday, seeing the rocking chair on the front porch. I thought about our summertime dinner traditions on the porch. I thought about checking the mailbox with my father and discussing the notes, and how my statement to him about thinking that Mom had written the notes seemed to slap him across the face.
“It’s too hard,” I said. “It’s too hard to come back here and see it all. She’s in everything.”
I felt my voice give in and I stopped speaking. My father lowered his head. The secondhand of a clock ticked off the silence.
“I know,” my father said.
I swallowed and spoke again.
“I can’t even walk around without thinking of something. I don’t know how you can stay here.”
My father looked at me, and I shifted my gaze.
“It’s okay to remember, Sammy,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Not for me.”
I stood up and picked up my plate. I walked toward the kitchen, and paused.
“Why didn’t you tell me? How could you let me go so long without knowing?” I couldn’t look at him as I said the words.
He did not respond.
I put my dishes in the dishwasher and went upstairs. I got my keys and wallet and returned to the porch where my father still sat.
“I’m going out. I’ll see you later.”
My father nodded, his eyebrows frayed with grief.
It was just after 10 and the morning air was refreshing. I lowered the top of the Corvette, and was pulling out of the driveway when I heard the familiar slam of the screen door next door. I stopped in front of Keri’s house just as she reached the edge of her lawn. She hopped over the side of the car, stepping on the passenger seat on the way.
“I hope that doesn’t leave a scuff mark,” I muttered.
“Oh, shoot,” she said. She leaned over to look at the bottom of her shoe. “I did just rub my feet around in some manure. Because I’m four years old.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Where are we going?” Keri said.
“Anywhere.”
I drove over to Ann’s house and Keri stayed in the car while I ran up to the front door.
Ann answered.
“Hey. Do you still want to have that coffee? I can come by for lunch today,” I said.
She nodded and peeked past me at Keri in the passenger seat of my car. “And have Keri come, too,” she said.
I nodded and waved goodbye.
I jogged back to the car and slid in the driver’s seat. Keri had found some classic rock radio station and was twisting her hair up into a ponytail.
“Hope you didn’t have lunch plans,” I said, pulling back out onto the street.
“I’m free as a bird,” Keri said.
I drove to the high school and parked in the empty parking lot. The reunion committee had planned a few things that weekend for everyone who was coming back into town, but none of the plans consisted of a tour of the old high school.
“School on Saturday?” Keri said. “You must really be trying to escape something.”
I tried a door and found it open. We walked in. The halls were dark and kind of creepy.
“Ugh, it looks the same,” I said.
“You sound disappointed.”
“It’s just weird. Nothing here has changed. But we have, you know? We could probably come back in twenty years and the only thing that will have changed is that the teachers are older.”
She walked in front of me and ran her hand along the lockers. Some of her wavy hairs had pulled loose from the ponytail from the ride in the convertible, and she brushed them off her neck. She pulled the hair tie out and let all of her hair fall loose down her back.
I remembered that last time I saw her, when we were both home from college. It was the college break when my mother died and took a part of all of us with her. At the memorial service, some college friends rode down to support me. We were in the sanctuary of my church, and Keri walked up, wearing a short, black skirt and a gray sweater. She wore high heels, and I don't know if it was the grief or what, but I just focused on those shoes. I had never thought Keri was a high heel kind of girl. She’d always worn sneakers and jeans in high school. She came over to me and hugged me. She whispered that she was sorry, and then she walked away, tears in her eyes.
“Who is that?” my friend Jason said at the time, as we all watched her find her parents and sit down.
“We grew up together,” I replied. I looked at her through his eyes, and I saw her differently from the girl I grew up with. She was not that girl anymore, just like I was trying not to be the boy I once was.
I didn’t see her again during that break from school because things were so hectic with relatives and friends coming over to pay their condolences. I avoided coming home after that, opting for summer internships away from home and planning vacations during the shorter breaks.
She stopped in front of a locker and turned to me, smiling. “My locker,” she said.
“Really?” I wondered vaguely if I’d even be able to locate my locker. It was on the second floor, near some science classrooms.
“I bet I can remember the combination,” she said.
“No way.”
She started spinning the built-in combination lock. “Hey, we had to remember this combination over every summer and somehow we did it.” She tugged at the locker door. It didn’t open.
“Take two.” She spun the lock around again, and tugged again. Nothing.
“Third time’s a charm,” she said.
I watched her and thought about that last time, at the memorial service, when she walked up to me and hugged me. I thought about my surprise at seeing her there. I don’t really know why I was so surprised; of course she’d be there for my mom. I looked at her now, concentrating on the numbers, and brushing her hair out of her eyes. Even now, standing in our old high school, dressed in jeans and t-shirt, I would be able to tell that she is a high heel kind of girl. Keri was the girl next door, complete with ponytail and sneakers, who could also turns heads in heels and a dress.
“Got it,” she said, and threw open the locker door. Some loose papers and pens fell to the ground. She picked the papers up. “Alonzo Lopez,” she read. She stuffed them back into the locker.
“I cannot believe you remember your locker combination after ten years.”
“I know! That should have been a game at the reunion, right? I should win something,” she said.
“Okay, let’s keep moving and leave Alonzo and his locker in peace,” I said.
Keri picked the pens up from the ground, and then pulled one of the loose pieces of paper out of the locker again. “Yeah, just a sec. I’m going to leave him a note.”
“You’re joking.”
“No.” She scribbled something down on the paper, and then positioned everything so that only the one paper would fall out when the locker door was opened again.
We walked down the hall to a stairwell.
“What did you write?” I said.
“Clean your locker and tell Mr. Loriczech that K. Free says hi.”
I laughed. “Nice.”
We went to the auditorium and sat in front row, directly in front of the stage.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been here when it was so empty,” I said. I stood and climbed the steps of the stage. I stood directly in the middle, facing Keri and the empty seats of the audience.
“Did you know that I wanted to go out for the school play when we were sophomores?” I said.
“Seriously?” Keri said. “Why didn’t you?”
I shrugged and walked around. I checked out the backstage area behind the curtains. I had never been back there. “I figured football was more of a guy-thing, and musicals were … not.”
“Ohhhh, what was the musical that year…” Keri said.
“Singin’ In The Rain,” I said.
Keri’s eyes were wide and shining. “Gene Kelly! He’s a man’s man. You totally could’ve pulled that off.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, like I would’ve gotten the lead.”
Keri skipped up the steps onto the stage with me. “I bet you could have.” She found some hats backstage and tossed one to me.
I put it on, and jumped up and clicked my heels. We both doubled over with laughter.
We heard a door slam somewhere in the huge auditorium, and we both froze.
“Someone in here?” a man’s voice called out. We both recognized it as Principal Porter’s voice.
Keri grabbed my arm and dragged me backstage and through a series of hallways. We shook with silent laughter the entire way. When I finally caught my breath, I whispered, “Where the hell are we going?”
“This goes to the band room,” Keri whispered back.
When we finally got to the band room, we fell into the small student desks, exhausted from running and stifling our laughter.
“Oh my gosh,” I said, looking around horrified. “Did it always look like this? I feel like I’m in some three-year-old’s nightmare.”
The walls were painted with cartoon characters playing instruments. Keri punched my arm.
“Yes.”
She tried to say something else, but we were already laughing too hard. I felt like a teenager again. My stomach muscles ached that old, good ache that I remember from when Keri and I were kids.
When we finally stopped I leaned over close to her.
“Listen, I have something to tell you,” I said.
She stared at me, her eyes flickering back and forth between mine. “What?”
“It might make you feel uncomfortable.”
She waited.
“Or, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the right time to tell you…”
Keri bit at her lip, an old nervous habit.
She put her hand on my arm, and leaned in toward me. “What is it?”
“Keri,” I said softly, and leaned in slightly closer. I reached my arm out and stretched it past her. “Mr. Loriczech retired two years ago.”
I pointed at a plaque on the wall with a picture of Mr. Loriczech and the dates of his employment. It hung next to a cartoon illustration of Popeye playing the flute. “Alonzo will have no idea what your note means.”
Somehow, through all of our laughter, we made our way out of the building. We still had about an hour to kill before coffee with Ann, so we drove around the town and pointed out places and talked about what had changed and what had stayed the same. There were some teenagers slung lazily over some chairs outside the ice cream parlor on the pier that was a big hang out when we were in high school. We parked, and one kid blew smoke at us as we walked by.
“We weren't like that, right?” I said. We got to the end of the pier and leaned on the railing, watching families get their boats ready to go out.
“I'm pretty sure I can remember some instances of your adolescent defiance,” Keri said. “Remember that time you and Matt Manfre set fire to Sharon Frost's lawn at her end of the year party?”
“Uh, that was him, not me, and I tried to get him to stop,” I said. “You were at that party? I don't remember you being there.”
“Ah, yes. Sometimes I did get invited to the cool kids' parties, you know,” she said. She found a fallen leaf and tossed it into the water. We watched it bob in the tiny waves. “There were probably a lot of times in high school that we were at the same party and didn't know it.”
“So you're saying that you followed me around a lot?” I said.
“Yep, your massive ego was irresistible to me. That's why I was at all of the football games. It had nothing to do with being in the band and everything to do with you.” Keri grinned.
The midday sunlight bounced on the water and blinded us. “You don't really think I had a massive ego in high school, do you?”
She pulled away from the railing a little and peered at me.
“I think you’ve changed a lot since high school.”
I wondered if that meant she thought I was better or worse, but I didn’t ask.
Keri leaned her chin in her hand and looked out at the boats. “I wonder who will be there tonight,” she said. “If there’s one person that you absolutely want to see again from high school, who would it be?”
I stared out at the boats and tried to mentally flip through our yearbook. “I have no idea,” I said. “I’ll have to think about that.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” I said. I looked over at her. “Why, who would be your person?” I tried to remember Keri’s friends from high school. She hung out with the band kids - that much I knew - but I couldn’t remember who her best friends were.
“Easy,” she said. “Ms. Stinson.”
“What?” I laughed.
“Yeah, why not?”
“Ms. Stinson, the math teacher?” I said.
Keri nodded. “She’s the reason I became an engineer.”
“Only you would want to see a teacher at our reunion,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re an engineer?”
Keri laughed. “Wow,” she said. “Okay, yeah. Now I think your massive ego from high school has doubled in size over the years.”
I felt awful, even though Keri was laughing about it. She was right, I barely knew anything about her, post-high school. But, it seemed, I hadn’t known much about her in the first place.
“I kind of can’t picture you as an engineer,” I said. “All figures and numbers. You’re too free-spirited for that type of job.”
“The job isn’t my life, though,” Keri said. “Maybe it keeps me grounded.”
She checked her watch. “Time for lunch. We’d better go.”
We got back in the Corvette – this time Keri opened the door instead of stepping over it onto the seat – and drove back to the neighborhood.
Ann had sandwiches set out for us on the deck.
“Um, could we…” I started. I looked back toward the piano room with its small coffee table. There would barely be enough room for our plates. “Do you think we could eat inside, near the piano?”
Ann and Keri stared at me. It was a gorgeous day, and the deck was shaded from the sun. I could hear birds singing off in the distance. It really was a nice place to sit and catch up.
“My allergies…” I said, letting the words make the explanation.
Ann nodded. “Of course,” she said, gathering the food and bringing everything inside.
Keri narrowed her eyes at me. “Allergies, huh?”
I shrugged and sniffed, as though my nose were clogged.
In the piano room, I stuffed myself between Keri and Ann on the couch. We were elbow to elbow eating our sandwiches. Keri caught Ann up on her job and apartment in a town about an hour away, close to the city, while I scanned the room to see if there was anything significant. Why would the lunch need to be in the piano room? Was Ann the designer of this scheme and a terrific actor, or was she clueless?
Tom, Ann's husband, came down the steps and poked his head into the room. “I thought I heard company,” he said, smiling.
I stood and shook his hand, then followed him into the kitchen to grab a beer while Keri and Ann talked.
“Ten years, huh?” Tom said, handing me a bottle and unscrewing the cap on his own.
“It doesn't feel like it's been that long, but I guess a lot has changed,” I said. I leaned against the counter and sipped the beer.
“Yeah, I saw your car,” Tom said. “I bet that's a nice ride.”
“You want to try it out?” I said.
“Yeah,” Tom said.
We peeked in once more to let Ann and Keri know we were taking the car for a spin around the block and we'd be back.
I tossed Tom the keys and he savored the feel of the leather seats, the purr of the engine revving, before he even pressed his foot against the accelerator.
While he navigated the winding, hilly circle of our neighborhood, I pulled the note of tasks out of my pocket.
“Hey,” I said to Tom. “Do you know anything about this list? I was thinking Ann might be behind it. I've been getting these tasks since I was a teenager.”
He glanced at the note in my hand with the three weekend objectives. “I've never seen Ann write a list like that,” Tom said. “But you never know. She's full of surprises. She still surprises me even though we've been together for, oh gosh, almost twenty years now.”
When we passed my house, I gazed at the yard, the meticulously groomed flower beds, the porch with its idle rocking chair. I thought about my first task that morning: breakfast with dad, and I felt bad about how we'd left it, but I said what I needed to say. I'd said what I'd been waiting to say for years, without knowing exactly how the words would tumble out. I was mad - mad at him and at Jim and at the world. But the hardest thing, the worst thing, was that I was also mad at my mom. They all made the decision to not tell me that she was sick. They all kept that secret from me. And I was mad at all of them.
I folded the note and put it back in my pocket.
We came around a curve and made our second trip through the neighborhood.
“Twenty years together,” I said. I remembered when I first felt met Tom, and I definitely didn't feel like I'd aged enough for that memory to be two decades old. “Wow.”
We drove by the cluster of evergreen trees at the edge of my property. “And that's where it all began,” I said, grinning at Tom.
“Oh yes,” Tom said. “The infamous kiss by the trees. The truth has become legend, I suppose.”
“Ann loves that story,” I said.
“Everyone does,” Tom said. He revved the engine and we shot down the straightaway. “But I've heard we're not the only couple that took advantage of the cover of those trees.”
I coughed to cover up my surprise. I didn't think anyone knew about that. “Well that was a long time ago,” I said. “I wouldn't remember anything about that.”
“Oh sure, sure,” Tom said, slowing the car down for the last curve. “Maybe you'll remember something about it when you get to the last item on that list of yours.”
He brought the Corvette into the driveway.
“Thanks for letting me drive,” Tom said, handing me the keys. “It was exhilarating.”
Inside, Ann and Keri had finished their sandwiches and were in the kitchen, cleaning up from our lunch.
I dropped Keri off at home and told her I’d pick her up for dinner at about 6, and then we could go to the reunion together. Her eyebrows furrowed.
“You mean, we’d drive over in your car?” Her eyes swept down the length of the Corvette.
“Too flashy?” I said.
She blushed. “Sorry, no, it’s fine and thanks for driving. I just … you know that commercial where the guy is going to his high school reunion, and his entire life kind of sucks, so he rents a nice car? I’d just kind of feel like that.” She looked sick as she said the words.
“Your life doesn’t suck,” I pointed out. I shrugged. “I’m just offering to drive. I wasn’t planning on leading a parade into the parking lot of the reunion.”
“I know. I’m a jerk. Sorry,” Keri said. She slammed the car door shut. “I’ll be ready at six. Thanks again for driving. Really.”
I watched her until she was in the house, front door closed. Yes, Tom was right. Fourteen years ago, after we’d helped Ann get ready for her wedding day, Keri and I had stopped outside the cluster of trees outside my house and had our first and only kiss. We were walking back to our houses to go to the ceremony with our families, and we’d stopped for a second to talk by the trees, hidden from view from every window of every house on our street. Keri wore a dark blue dress and I was in my old, itchy suit. She wore glasses then, and her hair, which was usually twisted into a long, thick braid, hung loose for once. She was talking about Jimmy Paige, a kid we graduated with, and how he sat behind her in biology and would tug on her braid all class period long. I remember being a little surprised, because the Keri Free I knew would turn around and slug him. But maybe that’s when we both started to change – at fourteen, there in front of our houses. Keri didn’t punch boys anymore and she let them tug her hair, and I heard about it and got mad, but would never do anything about it because Jimmy Paige was twice my size and captain of the JV lacrosse team. So Jimmy Paige would continue to pull her braid, day after day, in biology class. Of course—and I knew this at the time—him tugging her hair may have annoyed her, but he did it because he liked her, like when I used to run up to her in kindergarten and tag her with cooties. So that’s what it was: Jimmy Paige was doing the same thing I did, only ten years later, and Keri was telling me about it while we stood in the shade of the trees.
“He just yanks on my hair and Mr. Thompson already doesn’t like me, so I can’t even move or make a sound or else I’d get in trouble,” Keri had said to me back then.
“Jimmy Paige is an imbecile,” I’d said, even then realizing the hypocrisy of my statement.
“I think he wants me to turn around,” she’d said. “I think he wants to talk to me.”
And that’s what did it. That’s what made me kiss her, because she was figuring it out. She was figuring all of us imbeciles out, and I didn’t want her to. So I just leaned over and grabbed her arm and kissed her. She stared at me.
“So do you think I should?” she’d finally said.
I stared back at her, wondering if I’d imagined the kiss. “Huh?”
“Do you think I should just keep ignoring him?”
I shook my head and held out my hands. “Sure, or no. I don’t care.” And I’d walked away then.
After that, we did our own things. She mostly hung around her marching band friends, and I hung around the football team.
But I always hated Jimmy Paige.
I found my dad inside the house, watching television in his recliner. When he heard me enter the room, he sat up and turned off the TV.
“Sammy, come sit down for a second,” he said. In his lap was a binder. “I want to go over some things with you.”
I pulled a wooden chair next to the recliner. My father gave me the binder and I paged through it. It looked like medical bills, test results, stuff I didn’t understand.
“I want to talk to you about your mother,” my father said. “I want to tell you everything you didn’t hear from me all those years ago.”
I closed the binder and ran my hand over the cover. “Why now, Dad?”
He rubbed at his eyes. His hair was grayer than I remember. He’d aged in between my visits home. He looked like my grandfather did, and I had to remind myself that he was now a grandfather.
“I’m sorry that it’s taken this long to be completely honest with you, Sam,” my father said. “My excuses won’t erase or explain our actions, but I promise you that at the time, we thought we were doing you a favor by keeping her illness a secret.”
He reached over and flipped open the binder. He pointed to a date at the top of the page. It was the August before my freshman year of college.
“The first appointment where we heard the word cancer,” my father said. “Just days before you left for school. Of course, we hoped and prayed it was a fluke, that a second opinion would change everything.”
He turned to another page: two weeks later. “It didn’t. The prognosis was bad. She started chemo quickly.”
I remembered. I was busy navigating the campus, meeting new friends, going to parties, taking tests. But I knew that something was wrong at home. Every time I called she sounded sick. Every time she spoke into the phone, she sounded weaker. Things happened so quietly and slowly that when I came home, it just seemed normal for her to spend most of the time in bed, or for her and my dad to go out for hours and her to come back looking exhausted.
I sat there with my father for hours as we shuffled through the binder and he filled me in on everything. I heard more than a person should ever hear about chemo and losing hair and vomiting blood. But I’d asked for it, and he was finally giving it to me.
It took two and a half years for the cancer to eat away at my mother. They only told me right before my junior year, when it was impossible to hide it anymore. I knew there was something wrong – she was sick all the time and her skin and hair looked wrong. When they finally told me, I was so angry at the secrets they kept that I wanted nothing to do with either of my parents. I stayed away from them as long as I could.
My father put the binder away in a file cabinet when we finished and came back to where I sat.
“Part of the reason for not telling you was that we were in denial, I guess,” he said. “We thought we could handle it, cover it up and cure it before you ever needed to know.”
He shook his head and shrugged. “We were wrong.”
I sat anchored to my chair. Now I had the facts, but I still wasn’t happy. The weight of anger and resentment still fell on my shoulders.
“Okay,” I said, finally standing up. My father looked up at me, waiting for some sort of absolution.
“Okay,” was all I could muster. “Okay,” I repeated once more.
Then I went upstairs.
Keri knocked on my bedroom door at 6:15.
“Your dad let me in,” she said.
“Shit,” I said, sitting up in my bed. “I think I fell asleep.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I … I’ll be down in a second. I just need to change.” I took a good look at her. She had some shiny thing in her hair to pull it away from her face, but it still streamed around her shoulders. Her dress was blue and so was a tiny purse she carried. Her shoes were those heels that I never could imagine her wearing in high school. The look suited her.
Keri nodded once, but her eyes held concern. I probably looked like I was run over by a steamroller.
I put on a clean, pressed shirt and a nice tie. I changed my jeans to a less wrinkled pair. Casual but nice, not looking like I was trying too hard. I’d spent years crafting the “not trying too hard” look. I ran my fingers through my hair and splashed water on my face to chase the sleep away.
I checked the note again—my strange tasks for this weekend.
Breakfast with dad on porch
Lunch with neighbor in piano room
Dinner with girl next door on pier
“These dumb errands,” I said, crumbling it into a tiny wad. The tasks hadn’t given me any clue to the identity of the note-writer and it hadn’t done anything to improve my weekend. If anything, I had wasted my entire day leading up to the reunion performing the first two tasks. The final task was dinner with Keri on the pier. I would get it over with, leave town and never think about the notes or the note-writer ever again.
I went downstairs. Keri was sitting with my father at the kitchen table.
“Pizza sound good to you?” I asked her, avoiding my father’s eyes. She nodded and stood.
“Bye Mr. Lancey, we’ll see you later,” she said. My dad nodded without speaking. Keri glanced at me, but I turned away. She followed me out the front door and to my car. She said nothing while I started the car and lowered the convertible top. She was silent while I steered out of the neighborhood.
“Okay, what’s going on?” she finally said. I shrugged and shifted gears, picking up speed now that we were away from the residential roads. “You and your dad are normally pretty quiet, but you were both downright shifty tonight. You wouldn’t talk to or look at each other. You’re acting like you were conspirators in some heist or something.”
“Nope, no crime,” I muttered. “Where’s the best pizza?”
“Luigi’s,” Keri said. She folded her arms. “You’re not going to tell me what’s up?”
I focused on the road. “Not Villa Pizza?”
She shook her head. “Luigi’s,” she repeated. “Off Route 34. Okay, you don’t have to tell me now, but if you keep acting like we’re carrying WMDs in the trunk of your car, I’m going to bring it up again.”
I swung the car into a hard u-turn. “Villa is better,” I said. Keri shook her head and sighed.
“What?” I said. “Give it up. It’s none of your business.”
She swiveled in her seat and stared at me, her face a storm of anger. “Pull over,” she said.
Her voice was icy enough to make me follow her instructions immediately. I pulled the Corvette off to the side of the road. We were on a two-lane road, empty except for trees and more trees bordering either side of the lane.
“This is where you’re wrong, Sam,” Keri said. Her words were spiked and pointed. “You are my business. I’ve known you since we were born and maybe we weren’t the best of friends all the time, but we’re forever friends. We’re the type of people that can always rely on each other. I know your past. I know you ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch every day in elementary school, and I know how much it hurt you when your mom died. There are things that happen to us as kids that mold us into the adults we become, and not only do we know each other’s things but we were there when they happened. So don’t tell me that something is none of my business.”
She unbuckled herself and pulled herself up so she was sitting on passenger door. She swiveled herself around and stepped out onto the street. She turned around to face me once more, “And you’re also wrong about the pizza. Luigi’s is much better.”
She started to walk. There was a forest of trees behind her.
“Keri,” I said, tired of this day, this weekend. “Get back in the car.”
She shook her head. She took a few more steps in those crazy high heels. She wasn’t going to get very far.
“You’re being so stubborn.” I tapped the accelerator to pull beside her. She continued to walk without looking at me. “This is like that time in sixth grade that you refused to drink the milk in school because you wanted the Board of Education to invest in a cow farm. It’s ridiculous. You can’t walk to the reunion.”
She stopped and turned to me. “You’re proving my point. You know that I’m stubborn because of something that happened in sixth grade.”
My cellphone rang. It was Freddie. I sighed and picked it up, still staring at Keri. She rolled her eyes.
“What’s going on, Freddie?”
“You on your way to the reunion, bro?”
“Yeah, I’m working on it.”
“I cannot believe you,” Keri said. "I can't believe you're taking a call."
“Who’s that?” Freddie said.
“My neighbor,” I said. “We’re supposed to be getting dinner and then be on our way to the reunion.”
“Unbelievable,” Keri muttered. "It's like you always have something to prove." She began to walk again. I kept the Corvette at a steady, slow pace beside her.
“It she hot?” Freddie said.
I sighed. “This is not really the time, Freddie.”
Keri snorted.
“Is she mad or something?” Freddie said.
I paused long enough for my silence to give him the answer.
“Let me talk to her,” Freddie said.
“No way,” I said.
“No seriously, man. I’m extremely charming with the ladies. I can smooth things over with just a few simple sentences. Let me work my magic.”
I held the phone out to Keri. “My friend Freddie wants to talk to you.”
She stared at me for a second before grabbing the cellphone from my hand. “You are a piece of work, Sam,” she said. “When are you going to start living your own life? When will your flashy cars and moronic friends stop mattering to you?”
She looked at the phone in her hand. I could hear a tinny voice coming from the speaker. Freddie’s magical words.
She made a face and turned toward the forest of trees behind her.
"Keri, wait," I said. Too late.
She wound up and tossed the phone into the darkness.
“This is the crap that doesn’t matter, Sam. Get it?” she said. “It’s time to start focusing on the stuff that does.”
Fifteen minutes later, I was at the bar, two hours early for the reunion. I didn’t know where Keri was. Maybe she was walking along that empty road, holding her high heeled shoes in her hands, or maybe she was picking her way through the forest trying to find my cellphone that I reminded her I needed for my job, before I sped off.
“We’re not teenagers anymore,” I’d told her before I left her to find her own way to the reunion. The words seethed out of my mouth. “You can’t just throw away someone’s phone because you don’t like who they’re talking to.”
She’d said nothing and no look of remorse passed over her face, so I’d taken off, finding myself at the bar hours early and hungry. And, of course, this bar didn’t have the pizza I’d been dreaming about all weekend.
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