After the Parade (33 page)

Aaron did not really know the Bergstroms because they rarely came into the café, and he trudged along, dreading the visit. Mrs. Bergstrom had been a teacher in a town nearby. They lived in Mortonville because Mr. Bergstrom owned the tire store, long closed because they were retired and their son—their only child—had no affinity for tires. Anyway, their son was dead, had gone through the ice the winter before. This son was the reason that Aaron dreaded the visit, for people in town said that the Bergstroms had not recovered, that having a dead son had made them odd.

They had turned on their porch light, and he stood on their front steps, watching them through the picture window, the two of them side by side on the sofa, an afghan tucked round their collective legs and rising partway up their chests. They were staring ahead, both of them focused on something that he could not see—the news, he thought, for they had about them the look of people distracted by problems that were not their own. From outside, they did not look like two people with a dead son. He knocked, and they beckoned him in. He opened the door and stepped in, anticipating warmth, as one did in Minnesota in December, but when he said hello, his breath hung in the air. The room was silent, the television off, and he glanced over to see what they had been staring at, but there was nothing there.

“My mother sent me? She said you needed help?” His voice rose at the end of both sentences, turning them into questions, and he wished that he could start over, could reenter the house making declarations.

“Come here and let us take a look at you,” said Mr. Bergstrom, gesturing vaguely toward the middle of the room.

Aaron bent to remove his sneakers, which were covered with snow, and Mrs. Bergstrom said, “What a polite young man.”

He came and stood in front of them, and they regarded him without speaking. Then they turned and looked at each other, thoughtfully, as though Aaron were an appliance that they were considering buying, an appliance that offered some but not all the features that they wanted in their appliance. The look that they gave each other seemed to say, “Well, shall we take him anyway? Can we make do?”

“How old are you, Aaron?” asked Mrs. Bergstrom.

“Twelve,” he said quietly. “Almost thirteen.”

They waited, perhaps expecting him to comment on his impending puberty—to describe his first whisker or the new muskiness beneath his arms—and when he did not, Mrs. Bergstrom said, “Well, it's time for the news, so why don't we let Father watch while we work on our letter.” She told Aaron to turn on the television, and he did, the newscaster's voice exploding into the room. She extricated herself from the afghan, and Aaron saw that she had on snow pants, as though she had just come in from an afternoon of sledding. She wiggled herself to the front of the sofa and concentrated, staring straight ahead before she hoisted herself to her feet with a small grunt that embarrassed him.

“Let's settle ourselves in the den,” Mrs. Bergstrom said. He followed her down the hallway, her snow pants making a
phit, phit
sound as she walked, and into the den, where she locked the door behind them. The room smelled of cedar, which he liked, and wet cardboard, which he did not. On the wall above the sofa were photos of their son, Tim, their dead son, one from each year of school, lined up chronologically. He was smiling in all of them, and the gap between his front teeth seemed bigger than it had in person. There were no photos of him as an adult, but Aaron remembered him as a sad-looking man who came into the café alone and took a cloth from his pocket to clean the cutlery before using it. He had never ordered anything but water to drink, which Aaron's mother said had to do with his inability to keep a job for long, which meant he could not afford to drink pop, and he always had a bacon cheeseburger, from which he would not take a bite until he had
uncrossed the two strips of bacon arranged in an X by Aaron's mother because he preferred his bacon parallel.

The morning after Tim fell through the ice, the café was exceptionally busy. Aaron came down late, so he did not know what was going on, only that something was, for the tables and booths were filled, the room buzzing.

“Something happened,” his mother told him later. She explained haltingly that this
something
involved the Bergstroms, who had called the police the night before because Tim had stopped by to visit them and was acting strange.

“Strange how?” Aaron asked.

“He kept telling them he loved them,” his mother said.

Aaron considered this: the fact that the Bergstroms had called the police because their son would not stop saying that he loved them. “They called the police because he wouldn't stop?” he said at last.

“Well,” his mother said. “There was more to it than that.”

The police had come, pulling up in front of the Bergstroms' house as Tim was driving away. They flashed their lights, but he did not stop, and like a parade of two, Tim and the police drove slowly through Mortonville and out of town. When Tim turned onto the dirt road that led to one of the lakes, the lake where people in Mortonville went to swim, the police sensed that something was wrong. They began running the siren and speaking to him over the loudspeaker, but he drove straight onto the frozen surface. The lakes had been tricky that year, with soft spots everywhere, which meant that even people who knew them well were staying off, so the police watched from the shore as Tim continued out toward the middle alone. Eventually, his headlights lurched upward, and within minutes he was gone. “You understand what I'm telling you, Aaron?” his mother said.

“Yes,” he said.

“They can't get to the car. It's too dangerous.” She tore open a packet of sugar and let it dissolve in her coffee. “Imagine how cold it must have been.”

*  *  *

He and Mrs. Bergstrom sat down at a card table, atop of which was a half-completed puzzle, the picture side facing down. He studied the gray backside of the puzzle for a moment, wanting to say, “This puzzle puzzles me,” but he was not the sort of boy who engaged in silliness with others. He used to say such things to his mother, who had been sincere in her reactions, laughing only when she truly found something funny, but it struck him one day that his mother was no longer listening.

“Why are you putting the puzzle together upside down?” he asked Mrs. Bergstrom. “Wouldn't it be easier if you could see the picture?”

“Why must everything be easy, young man?” She pushed the puzzle aside and drew a wooden box toward her, opening it to reveal stationery and pens. “How's your penmanship?” she asked, and he said that his penmanship was fine. “Good,” she said. “I'm not interested in faulty penmanship. And your spelling?”

“I have the best spelling in my class,” he reported.

“Well,” said Mrs. Bergstrom, “that only means something if the class is not made up of imbeciles.” She removed the top sheet of paper from the box and put it in front of him. “I assume your mother told you that I require assistance with my correspondence.”

“Yes,” he said. He glanced at her hands, which looked capable of holding a pen.

“Dear,” she began dictating, and then stopped as though she could not recall to whom she had planned to write. “Just leave it blank for now,” she instructed before resuming her dictation: “Winter has arrived in Mortonville.”

She picked up the paper and examined it. “You must work on your uppercase letters,” she told him severely, pointing to the
W
specifically. “The bottoms should be sharp, like two elbows resting on the line. You see how rounded yours are? You've made knees of them, as though they are kneeling. I do not approve of kneeling,” she said. “We are not Catholics in this house.” She laughed as though this were funny.

“Should I fix it?” he asked.

“That would just make it unsightly,” she said, “and the first line, in
particular, should not be unsightly. No, we'll leave it, but it's something to bear in mind.”

He held the pen above the paper, waiting for her to continue.

“You seem like a perspicacious young man,” she said, her tongue darting into the corners of her mouth as she studied him, slyly, wanting to know whether he would ask what
perspicacious
meant, wanting to know, that is, whether his curiosity would trump his timidity, for he understood that she saw him that way, as a timid boy who would put up with being bullied by an old lady in her den.

Of course, he knew what
perspicacious
meant, but he did not know how to convey this to her or whether she would make too much of his doing so. “I know what
perspicacious
means,” he blurted out finally.

She chuckled. “Good,” she said. “Because I want to show you something.”

They stood, and she unlocked and opened the door. The television in the living room was still loud, but she held a finger to her lips as they tiptoed down the hallway to the next door. She opened it, and he felt her hand on his arm, pushing him inside, into the darkness. The door shut. He heard it locking, her hand fluttering against the wall until she found the light switch.

They were in the bathroom, and he could not look at Mrs. Bergstrom, not with the toilet right there, close enough to touch. She took a flashlight from a cupboard and knelt beside the toilet, putting her hand on the seat to steady herself, and then she looked up at him. “Come,” she said sternly. And so he knelt beside her. “What do you see?” she asked, shining the flashlight on the floor around the base of the toilet. She sounded hopeful, and he bent closer, noticing dirt and small bits of toilet paper as well as a few tightly coiled gray hairs.
Pubic hairs!
The sight of them made his throat constrict and he gasped for air.

“You see it?” Mrs. Bergstrom asked in an excited whisper, for she had heard it as the gasp of discovery.

“See what?” He felt miserable.

“The urine,” Mrs. Bergstrom said, her voice low and urgent. She leaned forward, her face hovering above the toilet bowl as if she were
about to drink from it or bob for apples. “Every time Father comes in here, it's all over the floor, and I have to come right in after him and clean.”

“Maybe he can't help it,” Aaron said.

“I don't mind cleaning it up.” She sounded angry. “It's the way he acts, telling me I'm crazy, that I'm imagining things.” She tapped her finger on the seat. “Well, this afternoon I didn't clean up after him. I knew you were coming, so I left it.”

Aaron looked away, studying the pattern that the linoleum made, trying to make sense of where the lines ended and began. “Yes,” he said. “I see it.”

Mrs. Bergstrom gave a low, growling laugh. “I knew it,” she said and then, “Help me up.” She extended her arm as though inviting him to admire a new watch, and Aaron stood and took her arm, supporting her as she struggled to her feet.

He wanted desperately to wash his hands, but he thought that doing so would be regarded somehow as impolite. “My mother needs me,” he said instead, and Mrs. Bergstrom unlocked the bathroom door, and they went back down the hallway and into the living room, where Mr. Bergstrom still sat beneath the afghan watching the news.

“Were you any help?” he asked Aaron, shouting over the television.

“Not much,” said Mrs. Bergstrom, answering for him, and the Bergstroms laughed together while he bent to put on his shoes.

“Good night then,” Aaron said.

“Yes,” said the Bergstroms.

Aaron switched off their porch light, which had been on this whole time, and stepped out into the darkness. Once again, he paused to peer through the picture window at the Bergstroms, who sat huddled beneath the afghan, collapsing in on each other like melting snowmen. He tried to assign a word to what he saw, to what he felt, but he did not know the word to describe the way that the Bergstroms sat on their sofa, an afghan and a dead son between them, or the soft ache of his own heart.

*  *  *

When Aaron returned to the café from the Bergstroms' that evening, Jim Evarold was already there, sitting in his booth. Every Thursday night, while his wife was off at her weekly Weight Watchers meeting, Jim came, sat in the corner booth, and spent a long time staring at the menu. He assessed his options carefully, even though he always chose the special, meatballs, waiting until Aaron's mother turned toward the kitchen to add, “And a large milk. And some of those Tater Tots.” He always seemed sheepish about his order, perhaps ashamed to be wanting Tater Tots while his wife was off discussing calories and the hollowness of desire, and Aaron's mother always turned back to him and asked, “That all, Jim?” in a voice that Aaron found aggressive, almost bullying.

Jim Evarold pretended to consider the menu a bit longer then, before clearing his throat to make his usual plea: “Can't you change the Thursday special to meatloaf?”

“Meatloaf is Friday night,” his mother replied, her voice sour from tending to people's needs all day. “They're the same, Jim. Just different shapes.”

Jim Evarold would look at his hands or touch the napkin dispenser and mumble, “But meatloaf doesn't jump all over the plate when I cut it.”

Aaron supposed some form of this conversation had taken place before he arrived, for Jim Evarold sat with his food already before him. Later, when he picked up Jim's plate, wiped clean, as usual, of the unwieldy meatballs and the ignominious Tater Tots, he found a scrap of tinfoil resting on the rim. Jim did not mention the tinfoil, which was about the size of a thumbnail, but Aaron knew that it had come from his food. He blew it to the floor, not wanting his mother to see it and be ashamed.

Over the next several weeks, more detritus washed up on the shores of Jim Evarold's otherwise empty plates: a snippet of butcher string, a scrap of wax paper, rubber bands, twist ties. Still, Jim said nothing, though it was clear that he left them on the plate for Aaron to find. Aaron dispensed with each surreptitiously. Finally, after two months of this, Aaron picked up Jim Evarold's empty plate one
evening and discovered a bristle as delicate as a fish bone teetering on its edge. It was too small to have come from any of the brushes that his mother used in the kitchen to clean the grill or scrub potatoes. He held it on the tip of his finger, wanting to breathe it away with a wish. Instead, he brought it to his mother, who stared at it as though it were an object that had been missing for many years, something she had learned to live without so well that its reappearance now seemed a burden.