You Can Say You Knew Me When Read Online Free Page B

its handle worn smooth, its blade gouged in two places. Each push left behind snaky parallel trails of powder on the black driveway, a sight that had the force of déjà vu: the teenage me clearing this same path with this same faulty shovel, my father examining the work and scolding me for not scooping it all up: Everything you leave behind will be ice by tonight.
    I drove Nana to St. Bartholomew’s in Dad’s boxy Chrysler K-Car. Before she got out, she asked, “Will you come to mass, then?”
    “I don’t go to church, Nana.”
    “This is a time for prayer.”
    “Say one for me while you’re at it.”
    “Well, then,” she sighed, lifting herself from the car.
    I drove through the slushy streets of Greenlawn, to the Athenaeum, the Greek diner where I’d spent a lot of time as a teenager. I took a seat at the counter, read the New York Times and slowly came to life over bottomless cups of strong coffee and single-serving boxes of cornflakes. Amid the red vinyl booths and faux-marble tabletops, a memory ignited from fifteen years earlier: sitting here, across from Eric Sanchez, deliberately pressing our knees together under the table, while around us our friends complained about how life majorly sucked , how totally stupid teachers and parents were, how so fucking boring it all was. Eric and I passed a cigarette back and forth, his dark bangs rising upward with the force of each exhale, our eyes stealing time with one another’s, sending wordless messages.
    I returned to find Nana already waiting for me on the sidewalk, complaining about the cold. She presented me with a list of places she needed to go: a rotation of doctors, then the pharmacy, then Coiffures by Diane, where she had a standing appointment with Diane Jernigan, the older sister of a girl I went to high school with. Nana was very proud about her hair, still thick and full, and though she rarely left the house for anyone to see it, she kept it dyed a deep brown, like stout, like wet earth. It took years off her looks.
    “Jimmy Garner!” Diane exclaimed when she saw me . Through Nana, Diane already knew about my father, and her sympathy commingled with reports of other dead parents, dead siblings, dead spouses, the accumulated losses of our high school peers as we left our youth behind. While Diane went to work on Nana, I listened to updates on people I hadn’t thought about in years, their marriages and divorces, the births of children, descriptions of the houses they’d bought. A remarkable number of my former classmates still lived in the area, their lives still knowable, without the mystery of departure. I thought of Deirdre among them, caught in this grind, an item of gossip for the Dianes of the world.
    “Do you know what happened to Eric Sanchez?” I asked.
    Diane paused above Nana’s dye-slick head. “Barbara’s brother?” she asked. “The one who went into the Navy?”
    “Yeah, yeah, that’s right.”
    “I think he’s married and living in Maryland or something.”
    “Really? Married?”
    “Barbara was living in Paramus for a while, but she moved a few years ago…”
    As Diane continued on, I tried to imagine Eric at thirty-three, a husband, probably a father. The head of a household. Eric, who taught me how to kiss—slowly, with anticipation, with all the right pauses—in the backseat of Barbara’s Galaxie 500. Eric, who told me he loved me so fucking much a week before high school graduation, punching his fist into a wall until the skin broke, until I pulled him by the wrist into an embrace, promising him, You know I totally feel the same , asking him, How can I prove it to you (as he had to me, in blood)? Eric, who whispered, If we love each other we should try more stuff . Eric, whose swollen cock was in my mouth at the moment my father, home early from work for some unremembered, fateful reason, entered my bedroom to find me on my knees, in the midst of worship, surrender, proving it —the kind of moment, explosive and