Home At Last

The summer of 1989 smelled like hot asphalt and gin martinis. I was twenty-two, which is a weird age to be in Toledo, gleefully unemployed and, for some time, homeless-ish. I returned from college in my Chevy C/K, sweat perspiring from every part of me, staining the light grey of my t-shirt, all full on the boiling uncertainties of youth. It was like any other drive I had taken home, only this time the bed of my truck was loaded with garbage bags and boxes, stuffed haphazardly with the memories of my four years away. There was a milk crate packed with records, Talking Heads and Pink Floyd and America. There were sports jackets and a Miller Lite lamp, a near-life-sized poster of David Bowie from his 1973 album Aladdin Sane. It was a collection of things I had accumulated since I’d left home, a time capsule of underwhelming undergraduate accomplishments. I did mushrooms for the first time in that sports jacket, had my heart broken for the first time under the soft yellow light of that lamp, a lamp I had picked up with my roommates from the stoop of a fraternity house just off campus. When I graduated I sat on the floor of our apartment sorting through our collective things. Randy was headed back to St. Louis to work in his dad’s construction company, and Paul was headed off to Manhattan for medical school, a dedication which he hoped, we hoped, would cool his coke habit. Randy took the pool cues and the speaker set, Paul took nothing but the clothes on his back and the copy of Tommy I’d gotten him for Secret Santa our sophomore year. I was headed back home with the content of my truck and a bachelor’s degree in English, which qualified me to do almost nothing in Toledo, Ohio. I envied Paul, even if I got the Miller Lite lamp.

The neighborhood was the same as I remembered it, flushed with green sweetgums and sycamore trees. Children rode tricycles and parents chased them breathlessly down the sidewalk, all lit up under the streetlights. It was as if I had gotten older but somehow the streets remained the same, trapped in a snapshot of Midwestern life at its most average. I pulled down my block, a line of craftsman style homes and gravel driveways, mirroring each other in all ways but color. From up the road I could see the porch light shining onto my father’s old station wagon, its mint green even uglier under the muddled glow. As I got closer I noticed there were boxes all lined up on the front lawn, the garage open and my parents both standing in it. My father’s armed were crossed, my mother waving me in with hesitance. I pulled the car up to the front lawn and realized they were my belongings, my old bicycle, my winter clothes and dress shoes and suit jackets that probably didn’t fit anymore. I began to feel flushed. I pulled the truck into the driveway and hopped down, the gravel crackling beneath my feet.

“Hey mom, hey dad. What’s uh— what’s all this?”

My mother looked at me with grave sadness in her eyes, and before she could mutter a response, she bursted into tears. My father uncrossed his arms and wrapped my mother in tight to his chest.

“Your sister was in an accident last night, Charlie. She was driving home from the movies with her boyfriend when some drunk bastard ran a red light and t-boned them. She’s in the hospital now, and she’s stabilized, but—”

“Wait, this happened last night and you didn’t think to call? What the fuck?”

“I tried calling, but the phone was disconnected. We had no way of reaching you.”

I thought of the house phone, packed away in a box beneath mix-matched socks and my video cassettes. It had been off the line since I made my last call home on Tuesday, to tell them I’d be coming in on Thursday.

“Where is she? Can I see her? Is she going to be okay?”

“Well that’s the thing, Charlie. Right now we don’t know how she’s going to come out of this, but whether she’s going to be able to walk again is, at this point, not definite. All we know is that she’s gonna need a room in the house, and since Grandma’s been living in her room, we’re going to move her into your room.”

I nodded, mostly in disbelief. When I imagined my homecoming, and I had at least ten times on the car ride back, it was full of tears, but they were happy tears. There was a roast on the table and a cheersing of beers. To you, to us, they’d say, and Katie would reach over and punch my shoulder and the summer would go like this, slow and sweet and mellow, like sips of Cheerwine from the glass bottle. You can never anticipate tragedy, but in any imagining of the situation, it did not look like this.

“You can sleep on the couch, we’ll pack your stuff up in your truck tonight, and then tomorrow we’ll head to the hospital and you can see your sister, hopefully. And we called your Aunt Jackie, but Emmett and Jill also just got back from school, so we’ll have to see if you can stay with Uncle Jeff.”

I nodded again, and this time my mother pulled away from my father and wrapped me into a long hug, stifling sobs into my shoulder.

“We’re so sorry, honey, I wish, we wish—”

“Don’t apologize, mom,” I patted her back the way she had done to me so many times when I was little. We sat there for a little while, in quiet, the song of cicadas humming lullabies in the background. The whole night was still.

In the morning we drove to the hospital, and my mom came with me in my truck, my father’s passenger side occupied by a box piled high with old encyclopedias and comic books. We listened to the radio for a while, two women chatting about men and bathing suits and the upcoming election. Eventually my mom tried to tune it, but got frustrated with the static and then we just sat there, the hot Ohio summer pouring in from the windows, pulling my mother’s thick red hair back so that she looked like an Irish Bride of Frankenstein. Her eyes were watering, but I didn’t mention it.

At the hospital we met Katie’s boyfriend, Tyler, in the waiting room, where he sat all bandaged up across the forehead, arm in a baby blue sling. He hadn’t left the hospital, and his family was still out in Milwaukee. He was fine, he explained, which is the sort of thing you say when your girlfriend is in a coma and you don’t want to draw too much attention to yourself.

“You’re not fine, Tyler, your girlfriend is in a coma.”

His eyes were red and bruised, and had he not been punched in the face by an airbag forty-eight hours ago, I would have assumed it was from crying. My father came out from my sister’s room, waving towards me, wordless, as if he spoke too loud, he’d wake her. I stepped into the doorframe and came to see my mother, my sister’s hand in hers. She was attached to several machines, tubes coming out of her arm and her nose, her heartbeat monitor playing a familiar tune. She was barely recognizable, her head wrapped in thick white bandages, both eyes bruised, leg held up in a cast. The only sign it was her was the curly red hair that poked out from beneath her Jacob Marley-esque headwrap. I just stared at her, unsure of what to say.

“Did you want some time to talk to her?”

My mom barely looked up from the tight grip she had around my sister’s limp hand. At the side of her bed I saw urine dripping slowly into a plastic bag. I felt numb and uncomfortable.

“Not today. I’ll come back tomorrow, I shouldn’t keep Uncle Jeff waiting too long. Tomorrow, though. If that’s okay.”

“Of course, Charlie.”

I walked back out into the waiting room, where my father was force feeding Tyler a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich.

“You ready to go?” My dad stood slowly to meet me, running his fingers through what little hair he had left. I nodded, hands deep in my pockets, letting him lead the way to the parking lot.

Uncle Jeff was Mom’s oldest brother, a childless, wifeless bachelor who wrote novels and played the saxophone. In the seventies he had been a sort of Cincinnati socialite, a well-known frequenter to most of downtown’s jazz bars. He was tall and broad and classically handsome, the sort of man who could have easily been mistaken for a Kennedy if not for his slightly offbeat sense of style. His novels didn’t sell well, but nevertheless we had all of them lined up along the bookshelf in our den, a collection of romance-heavy Bondian fictions featuring a semi-autobiographical protagonist named Daniel Montazi. I enjoyed them, but I think it was mostly because I liked to imagine Uncle Jeff wearing a gun holster and picking fights at biker bars.

Uncle Jeff lived in my grandma’s old house, just north of my parents, and had since she decided to move in with my parents and give the house up to him. Uncle Jeff had since redone the outside, installed all new hardwood floors, and even got a roommate, an old college friend named Keith who sold pot and worked as a pet groomer. Keith came to holidays, we celebrated his 60th birthday at their house last spring. They were an odd couple, Keith was a rugged looking guy who kept the house spotless, and Uncle Jeff was charmingly his antithesis. They played together at a bar downtown on Thursdays, and once in a while my mom would take us out to see them, Uncle Jeff on the saxophone, Keith on the standing bass, their friend Jim on the drums. They were old, sure, but they played with the same youth that was distilled in Uncle Jeff’s lifestyle, in the chic hardwood flooring of his house, in the sweet intonation of his midwestern voice, not yet groveling with age.

We pulled up to the house, one after the other, and Uncle Jeff came out to greet us. He was wearing malfitted green slacks and a Members Only jacket, his thick strawberry hair tucked behind his ears.

“Well if it isn’t Charlie Horse! Like the great Odysseus, he returns from his journey away. You look more and more like your grandad everyday. Como estas, compadre?” He went in for the handshake and then swiftly converted it to a hard hug, the kind only a giant uncle could give his kid nephew.

“Hanging in there, Uncle Jeff. You excited to have a new roommate?”

“Only if you promise to put the seat down.” He ruffled my hair and then went over to greet my dad, a firm handshake shared between two proud and aging men. We carried my stuff into the back room of the house, where a futon couch was made up with old floral quilts and a crocheted blanket. The drawers had been opened and cleared, and on the wall hung a Fender four-string bass, a relic from a cooler time in music, complete with a slick white lacquer and a rosewood fretboard. Next to it was a framed polaroid of him and Keith and some little guy at a bar, bubbling with the effervescence of youth and alcohol and red hot stage lights. This was Uncle Jeff’s house, no doubt.

“So you’ll be chilling in my ‘office’. Keith lives across the hall. He has a parakeet named Sandy— like Sandy Williams from that movie, Blue Velvet? Anyways, if you hear a bird screaming at three in the morning don’t be disturbed. Also, Harold and Maude like to nap in here, so I hope you don’t mind a little cat hair on your things.”

“No, this is perfect, thanks so much.” I placed my big suitcase down on the bed, and met my dad out on the lawn where he was standing with my bike.

“We’ll check in with you tonight when your mom gets home from the hospital. I have to head back to the house and do some yard work, but uh, we’ll call, yeah? Try to make a plan for you to go see your sister tomorrow?”

“Yeah, of course. We’ll be in touch.”

Uncle Jeff and I waved goodbye from the driveway, and my dad pulled out in the station wagon, down the road back home. Uncle Jeff placed a hand on my shoulder and turned to face me.

“You want a drink? Keith should be home soon from his afternoon run.”

“Yes, please.”

I sat at the kitchen barstools at the large wrap-around island on the side of the kitchen, rocking back and forth as I talked about my last semester, my trip back home, my roommates.

“I mean, you did it, Charlie. You got a big fat college degree. And in English, for that matter. You’re a young man after my own heart, I’ll tell ya.” He laughed as he set a cocktail napkin and a decorative coup glass down on top of it. He poured the glass tall with gin from the freezer, and then threw a cocktail olive in it. We cheersed and then I took a small sip, my face scrunching at the cold, brutally underdressed alcohol. I tried my best to smile.

“Gin martini, Charlie. The drink of champions.”

“This is just cold gin with an olive. Isn’t there supposed to be, like, bitters or something in here?”

“Charlie, I’ve been drinking since before you were even a thought in your parents’ brain. At this point, it just all tastes the same. If you want to throw some Diet Cheerwine in there, I think Keith has a few cans in the fridge.”

“No, it’s fine. I can do this. To growing up.” I lifted my glass and took another sip, my lips pursed so that only a small amount could come through. It was like a menthol cigarette, burning and cold at the same time. It made my head feel light.

“So Charlie, not to pressure you, but what’s the plan?”

“You mean, for tomorrow or for the summer or for work or for life in general?”

“Whichever one you feel comfortable answering.”

I took an unsteady swig.

“Well, tomorrow I’m going to go see Katie, and then I’m gonna go apply to The Blade downtown and hope they’ll give me a little editing ditty. I have some money saved from my job on campus, but I need something. I don’t know. Uncle Jeff, I literally don’t know what I am supposed to do and I feel selfish even thinking about it. I mean Katie might not wake up, let alone ever walk again, and here I am with an English degree? In Toledo? And nothing to my name but a Miller Lite lamp and some warped records? I don’t even have a record player for Christ’s sake, Liam took it with him back to St. Louis.”

“That lamp is pretty rad though,” he laughed, his face unflinching as he took a long swig from his drink and pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket.

“You wanna take a break from all that thinking you’re doing in there and put on some records?”

I nodded. The more sips of this drink I took, the less painful it felt.

We took a seat in the den, the late afternoon sun giving the whole room a sweet yellow glow. Uncle Jeff sat in a chrome rolling stool, cigarette in his mouth, and wheeled over to a wall of records. It was an incredible collection, alphabetized, dust-free. He must have had four hundred records, and with his glasses perched at his nose, he began flicking through the collection like a librarian. He put my two milk crates of vinyl to shame.

“What do you like to listen to? New Order? Nirvana?”

“I mean, sometimes? I like most anything, really.”

“You ever listen to Steely Dan?”

“You mean like ‘Reelin’ In The Years’, Steely Dan?”

“Christ, Charlie, get your head out of your ass. ‘Reelin’ In The Years’ is made-for-radio bullshit, come on.”

He scooted over to the opposite end of the shelf and then dragged his fingers along the sleeves, cigarette still dangling from his mouth as he pulled out a sleek black sheath.

“Original issue, 1977. This album’s called Aja. It’s a fucking masterpiece, Charlie.”

Uncle Jeff slid the record out and passed me the cover. It was in impeccable condition. I rubbed my finger along the raised design on the cover, smiling to myself. He placed the record on the turntable, and took a long draw from his cigarette as the warm crackling came over the speakers.

We sat, unspeaking, through the whole first side, and for a moment things felt peaceful. It was brilliant. It made the gin taste good. It made the cigarette smell sweet.

“How you liking it so far?”

“It’s, like, amazing.”

“For a guy with a word degree, you seem pretty speechless.”

“I am, honestly. Like, it sounds so, clean?”

“Fagen is a genius. It’s impeccable. You wanna keep going?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He flipped the record, and about halfway through the first track, we heard the door unlatch. Keith came in through the front, dawned in a purple tracksuit, pants tucked into his thick white socks.

“Oh nice, we listening to Aja?” Keith walked over and shook my hand, and then took a seat on the blue leather ottoman beside me. The record continued while Uncle Jeff walked into the kitchen for a moment, returning with a bottle of gin in one hand and a can of Diet Cheerwine in the other, topping off my drink and then placing the bottle down on the coffee table.

When the record ended, filling the room with that same fizzy cracking, the needle lifted, and we were left in silence.

“So what’s the deal with this guy? This Steely Dan?”

Both men laughed, the joke floating far above my head.

“Steely Dan is a band, Charlie. It’s these two guys, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. And they use a whole slew of the best studio musicians for the rest of the band. Like, literally, new ones almost every time, until they get that sound.”

“That sound!” Keith repeated after him. “And the lyrics are older, sure. But they really capture that adult melancholy we all have inside of us. Oh man, ‘Deacon Blues’? Brings tears to my damn eyes. That’s the third track on the first side, Charlie.”

I thought back to the first side, to the despondent saxophone solos and easy chorus. I knew exactly what he meant. It was charming and catchy but also intensely sad. It resonated.

“Can we listen again?”

“Here Charlie, I’ll tell you what,” said Uncle Jeff, “since you don’t have anything else to do—”

He wheeled back over to the collection and traced his fingers along the skinny bindings, gracefully pulling record after record off the shelf. He turned and handed me a stack of albums.

“Here’s all seven of their albums. I also put their greatest hits collection in there, but don’t cheat, kid. Give them the time they deserve. There’s a turntable in the guest room and some headphones, you can use that while you sit and journal or jerk off or whatever you do before bed.”

I looked at the collection of albums in my hand, pristine condition, nothing like the ones I had. I felt like I was holding a holy relic.

“Go unpack your stuff and then we’ll reconvene for pizza in what, say, an hour or two?”

I smiled, holding the stack tight to my chest. Keith raised his can in the air and gave me a two finger salute. “Onward, young gaucho.”

That night we ate pizza and drank straight gin out on the back patio, the warm Ohio currents retreated, casting a shadow of cool Eerie air over the city. The smell was fresh and dewey, indescribably familiar. Keith rolled a joint as he talked about his sister and mother who recently visited from Texas, about a run-in he had with an old college friend at a bar called Spaghetti Western downtown, next to his favorite movie theater.

“It’s weird, you know,” he said, teeth clenched around a tightly wound joint, “You think you make it all the way out to UCLA, you’d never come back. But here we were, drinking amaretto sours next to each other in the world’s cheesiest bar.”

“I wonder why that is,” I said.

“I think people like what they like. Big cities are intimidating. I spent fifteen years in LA and every second of it that I didn’t hate, I was smoking cocaine. Honest to God. Out there you feel so small. Everything, everyone, is so god damn cool. Here? Sure, the bars have giant plastic meatballs on the wall, and everyone’s got cheese fingers from the Party Mix, but at least the bartenders listen to you. There’s no time to listen to anyone in LA, you move so fast you miss making actual connections with people.”

“I thought about moving to New York,” I shrugged. “My one roommate went out there for med school, and I sort of wished I had done that. Not med school, of course, but it seems like anybody who’s anybody spent time in New York before they made it.”

“Hey, follow your heart man,” he took a long drag from his joint. “But if you end up back here, don’t say I didn’t warn you. You’ll miss that Lake Eerie breeze. The air in New York smells like hot trash.”

I shrugged, and Keith passed along the joint to me. I hesitated at first, and then he raised his brows at me and I took a hit, passing it along to Uncle Jeff, who was sitting leaned back, feet on the table, looking up at the night sky.

“You’ll miss the stars, too. I always missed the stars, any time I was away.”

I looked up at the freckled sky, clear as always. I didn’t ever imagine Uncle Jeff anywhere else. He was nearly forty by the time I was born, which meant there were forty years of Uncle Jeff that I never got to meet, never had the pleasure of watching as crowds of locals gathered to see him play the saxophone or take a solo on that bass that now hung on the wall, an artifact of an Uncle Jeff before he was an uncle, when he was just Jeff. He had such a youth about him, it was hard to imagine him any younger. I wondered if they could see me thinking about young Uncle Jeff. I looked at the two men and suddenly felt self-conscious. I giggled to myself.

“Good stuff, right?”

I looked to Uncle Jeff, who was smiling with his bottle cap glasses perched on the tip of his nose. I didn’t answer, I just laughed and coughed and nodded.

That night as I laid in bed, the long coiled headphone cord pulled taut across the room, I listened to Can’t Buy A Thrill, which, upon examination, must have been Steely Dan’s first album. I didn’t quite understand the lyrics, but they were pleasantly wound together in such a way that I didn’t need to quite understand them. I just fell into the rhythm of everything, careening along through the songs, only every moving to flip it to the B-side. I wasn’t sure I got it, but I loved it, it was the way it felt to watch French films with no subtitles. I didn’t speak French, but I could feel for it. I didn’t speak Steely Dan, but I felt it.

In the morning I called my mother, who sounded frantic as she instructed me on how to get to the hospital, a place I already knew how to get to and drove past nearly everyday when I worked at the Italian restaurant down the road. I let her continue to explain it to me, knowing that it gave her comfort to parent me or at least believe she was parenting me. Uncle Jeff sent me off with a spam, egg, and cheese on toasted Wonder Bread, complete with a taunting little heart drawn onto its aluminum wrapping. I drove with the windows down and no music on, humming snippets of Can’t Buy A Thrill from memory. I tried to focus on the words, the ones I could remember, but the intrusive thoughts of what words I would have to share with my comatose sister were troublingly at the front of my mind. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to want to go, but I certainly didn’t. Hot cheese dripped onto my lap, and I struggled to wipe it off as I pulled into the hospital parking lot.

In the lobby my mother and father waited to sign me in, and I smiled at the nurse who handed me a VISITOR name tag, my name scrawled in purple ink across the middle. My mother urged me towards my sister’s room.

“Do you want me to go in with you?” she asked, her hand gripped tight on my arm.

“No, I think I can go in alone.”

And so it was just us, my sister and I, her heart rate monitor beeping as the only acknowledgment that she was still alive. The taste of dread was the same, the sound of my shoes against the linoleum heightened as I walked to sit in the chair beside her.

“Hey, Katie, it’s me, Charlie. You know, your baby brother? Emphasis on baby?”

This was stupid. This felt so incredibly stupid.

“Anyways, I am staying with Uncle Jeff right now, which isn’t as weird as you might think. He’s cool as always, and Keith came down this morning in the most absurd outfit. He was wearing this red bowling shirt tucked into the world’s most ridiculous pair of khaki pants. I can’t even describe it. And his belt? It had the Bengals insignia on the buckle. Can you even imagine? I don’t even think that man watches football. But anyways, I am here, and I miss you, and I wish you would wake up. We all do. I know it’s probably nice up there in your brain, you’re probably on vacation or at Aunt Pattie’s lakehouse or something, but, I don’t know. It’s all so weird Katie. You would know what I should do, where to go. I’ve been thinking of moving to New York these days. I was gonna tell you when I got home, but uh, well I guess I’m telling you now. I think it’d be good for me. I’ve been listening to Steely Dan at Uncle Jeff’s house. You probably know who they are because you like old weird shit like that. You’ll probably wake up from this and hit me in the head for not knowing who they are. But they’re so good, Kate, like, so good. Maybe I can bring a record player here and we can listen together. Well, sort of together. I think you’d like that, yeah.”

I was crying then, though I didn’t realize it was happening until there were tears on my lap, camouflaging the cheese stain. I sat for a little while longer, gripping tight on her hand as it limply sat in mine. I didn’t want to leave, but I couldn’t stand looking at her anymore. I stood up and waved a weak goodbye before signaling my mom to come back in.

“How was it?” the nurse watched me as I filled out the time on the sign-out sheet.

“Kind of awful? But, uh, definitely necessary.”

“You know, even if they don’t exactly remember it, the things patients hear in there really do make a difference.”

I nodded, handing her back the clipboard.

“They say the same thing about plants, you know? Katie has a record that she plays when she’s not home that’s supposed to make the plants grow. I always thought it was sort of B.S., to be honest, though I guess that would be very pessimistic to say right now.”

I drove downtown and stood with a copy of my resume in hand outside of the The Blade, a tall-ish brick building with a few windows in the front and a dense, monochromatically beige lobby. I paced around for a bit and then stepped inside, hit immediately with a wall of cool air. It smelled like wintergreen alcohol and pine trees and left me feeling unwelcome. A woman in a starchy looking powersuit sat at the front desk, her hair tall and poofy, the way my sister had hers done for her senior prom. She chewed and snapped on bubblegum, face aglow with the blue light of the computer screen in front of her.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Hi, yes, my name is Charlie Applegate. I saw your posting for an internship position in the editorial room a little while back, and I wanted to hand over my resume. There’s also a writing sample attached.”

“Are you in college?”

“Just graduated from Iowa State, go Hawkeyes!”

My palms were sweating into my resume.

“Oh nice, I had a cousin that graduated from there last year. She studied anthropology. She works at a Bob Evans now, poor thing.”

“Ah, well, at least you know she’s eating okay.”

“I think she still has to pay to eat there. Discounted, sure, but— anyways, I’ll take a copy of your resume and bring it up to the editorial room. They’ll call you for an interview sometime within the next week or so. Just keep your eyes peeled.”

“Great, thanks, yeah whenever is fine I will be waiting by the phone.”

“Haha, right. Well, good luck out there. Go Hawkeyes!”

“Yep, go Hawkeyes.”

I stumbled out of the room and unbuttoned my shirt slightly. I wondered if she had noticed the cheese stain on my pants, or if she could feel the cold sweaty fingerprints that had melted into the corner of the papers. I ran to the car and sped home. I wasn’t even sure what number was on the resume, if it was my parent’s house or Uncle Jeff’s, and while I didn’t want to miss the call, part of me so desperately never wanted to have it.

At Uncle Jeff’s I sat at the desk in my room and studied the wall, listening to the second and third album, eventually catching up to Aja. Uncle Jeff wasn’t home, but from the other room I could hear Keith chattering on the phone, his bird occasionally chattering back at him. It must have been weird having an adult roommate, and it was probably weirder having your adult roommate’s nephew sleeping across the hall, listening to Steely Dan when he’s not busy venting his concerns for adulthood. I figure being married was sort of the same thing, and wondered if my parents thought of me as a weird stranger in their house when I came back from holidays, this sort of half-vacant sleepy eyed twenty-something who ate too much and slept too late. I was probably more welcome here, or, at least my habits were.

Uncle Dan helped me bring the record player to the hospital and set it up on the side table. It became a routine for the week to come, Katie laying mostly lifeless in her hospital bed, me sitting at her side telling her about the album as we went through it. I didn’t know much, but I knew the songs I liked so sometimes we would skip some and I would tell her why I liked them, what they reminded me of. Sometimes they reminded me of summertime, sometimes they reminded me of something sad. “Hey Nineteen” reminded me of when this thirty-year-old guy tried to pick up Katie at her eighteenth birthday party, and “Pearl of the Quarter” made me think of our Aunt Shannon, who left her fiance for a French navy dude and booked it to Europe without so much as a goodbye. Sometimes I’d bring two sodas, one for her and one for me, and I’d pretend we were out on the back porch, where we should have been. Sometimes Tyler would join us, and he’d drink Katie’s soda for her. It was weird, but with time the routine felt normal, even when nothing else did. The gin martinis helped, too.

Thursday of that week, Uncle Jeff and I went to my parent’s for dinner, and he brought a bottle of Spanish wine and we ate chinese takeout from the cartons. My mother had cleared out my room and replaced it with all my sister’s furniture, even hung up the old color pinups, all pulled from Tiger Beat magazines. She hadn’t lived at home since she moved out for college, so all of her things remained embered in 1982. I felt sad for my mom, who might have imagined she’d never see her daughter running down Cherry Street while she was driving home from the grocery store, never see her play Thanksgiving football or even walk down the aisle with Tyler or anyone for that matter— just walking. I tended to think she would be fine, that one day we would look back on this as a hard time but a temporary thing. It was easier to think with less permanence, it made the days go by faster, more anticipation of an after rather than as a result of.

I was picking the beef pieces out of my lomein when the phone rang. And I wasn’t sure why I answered the phone, perhaps it was instinctual, but I darted to the telephone that hung on the wall in the kitchen and put the receiver up to my ear.

“Hello, Applegate residence.”

“Hi yes, this is Claire Tensen, from The Blade, I was wondering if I could speak to Charlie?”

I nearly gasped, pulling the phone into the doorframe of the bathroom.

“This is Charlie.”

“Hi, Charlie. So, I hope this isn’t a bad time—”

“Not a bad time! A great time, even.”

“Right, great. So, I just got a hold of your resume and I am really impressed. I was wondering if I could hold you on the line for a little bit, something like a phone interview? Nothing crazy, just a casual back and forth so I could get a feel for what you’re doing and what you see yourself doing.”

“Sure, I mean, do you want to do it now?”

“Now is great, yeah.”

“Yeah, now is great, right, yes. Definitely.”

“Right. So, I just wanted to get a feel for the work you did with your school’s newspaper? And what you did in terms of writing at Iowa State?”

I rattled through a quick list of very well memorized tasks, editing and writing and working with the other editors to curate issues. I told her about my senior thesis, about the award I won for an essay on “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.” I spoke quickly and took intermittent pauses to sip handfuls of tap water from the bathroom faucet, but I spoke with more enthusiasm than I knew I had for the position. I felt well-prepared despite, up until this moment, feeling woefully underprepared. She asked if I would consider an opening in the editorial department, a segment on local arts and music, brief but “critically important to the Toledo arts community.”

“Do you think that’s something you’d be interested in?”

“Yes, I mean, absolutely. I only applied for the intern position because I thought it was safe.”

She laughed. “And you were totally not wrong to do so, but the guy who does the music and arts column right now is roughly seventy years old, and unfortunately his content hasn’t remained as relevant as we need it to be. We’re thinking of moving him to stories about the weather and local agriculture, and then filling that column with the freshest face we can find.”

“My face is fresh, definitely.”

“Great, and do you have an interest in music? Actually, let me rephrase that, what are you listening to right now?”

I smiled, “To be honest, it’s been a lot of Steely Dan.”

She laughed again. “Ah, I love Steely Dan. I saw them with my uncle last summer.”

“Sounds like a dream.”

“It was. So Charlie, I’ll tell you what. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, and I would love to have you in the office for at least a walk-through and some coffee with the other editors. Does Monday work? Let’s say nine to one or so?”

“Monday works amazing. Thank you so much.”

“Thank you Charlie, have a good night.”

“You too.”

I wove the phone cord back around the doorframe and placed it on the mount, walking into the kitchen with a wide grin. “Guess who’s going to possibly be an editor for Toledo’s only actual newspaper, The Blade?”

My mother put her hands over her mouth, tears welling in her eyes.

“Oh Charlie, that’s great news.”

Uncle Jeff raised his glass of wine in the air, mouth full of fried rice.

“We are in the presence of a professional writer. Charlie! My boy, I knew you had it in you but I didn’t know you had that in you!”

“I didn’t either, Uncle Jeff.”

We cheersed egg rolls, and I told them about how I was going to write about local music, about how she wanted someone new for the role, someone with a new perspective. We went out onto the back porch, and Dad lit the kerosene lamps and Mom made us all gin and tonics and cut thick slices of strawberry rhubarb pie. Uncle Jeff told me about all his favorite venues, where he thought I could be of assistance in catalyzing a renaissance, about how he expected a shoutout if I ever wrote a piece about Steely Dan. I nodded, assuring him that if I didn’t do a piece about him and Keith’s group in the first year of being there, he had full permission to kick my ass. For a moment, it felt like, not everything, but some things, might fall in place. I wondered if Katie felt it too. I looked up at the sky, and the stars winked at me. They seemed so small from down here, though I knew wherever they were, they were massive, and for a moment, I felt so big.