The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (2 page)

“How deep do you think this is?” I said.

“The snow? I don’t know. Fourteen inches? Fifteen?”

“My boss wanted me to go out and measure and I was like,
Screw that, Simon
, so I took a guess and
I said eighteen.”

“The drifts are probably eighteen.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told him.”

I stomped on the steps and smacked snow off my jeans with my
gloves. Billie Holiday’s voice grew louder when I pushed open the door. The
warm spicy smell of burning firewood greeted us.

“Oh, heat at last, thank god.” He yanked off his gloves and
held his hands in the air like a hobo at a trashcan fire.

“You can kick off your stuff here,” I said, stepping out of
my boots.

“Sounds good.” He wiggled out of his backpack and leaned it
against the wall. He shook off his vest and sweatshirt before stepping inside
and closing the door. “Nice place,” he said. He bent forward and rubbed the
small of his back. “
Ooof
.”

In the picture glass that hung beside him I caught a
reflection of me sporting a dumbfounded expression. No way was Griff really
here in my house. I turned around. “Let me give you the grand tour,” I said. “I
can pretty much do it right here, from the welcome mat. Ha.”

“Nah, it looks like a great house,” he said reassuringly as
he untied his boots. I hadn’t meant to seem embarrassed; I liked my house. I
appreciated its weird color schemes (the living room’s walls were burnt sienna,
the kitchen’s teal blue), its faux-wood–paneled cabinets and its drafty
windows. Rather than reflecting a mash of hand-me-downs and yard-sale items,
each one making its mark, the house looked carefully designed. It flirted in
places with dumpy or tacky but always pulled back into quaint. At least I
thought so.

Still, if I’d known he was coming I would’ve taken days,
maybe weeks, getting everything just-so.

“Well this is obviously the living room here,” I told him,
gesturing like a game show model. “I believe in the olden days it was called a
sitting room but I’m not quite that old-fashioned.”

“Corduroy, Vince? Really?” He smiled, pointing at my two
corduroy armchairs, one brown, one dark blue, both faded in the seats. A long
leather ottoman stood in front of them. In a cabinet in the corner, beside the glowing
fireplace, was the record player. There was the small television. There was the
picture window—dual-named, because on either side of it hung framed photos,
some black and white, some color.

He pulled off his boots, hopping on one foot then the other,
and followed me through the arched doorway into the kitchen. A half-wall capped
in a bar-like countertop and tiled on both sides with glossy sea-green squares
separated it from the living room.

“This is where I do my modest cooking,” I said. “Slightly
more advanced than the dorm-room hot-pot ramen, but only slightly.” I laughed,
but he didn’t seem to be hearing me; he was looking at the picture on the wall
above the table.

“You still have the blue dog,” he said, smiling. “Hey boy,
long time no see.” Yes, he was speaking to my art. It struck me as so cute I
almost started crying. And I imagined the perpetually expectant look in the
blue dog’s oil-on-canvas-on-posterboard eyes softened just a little at the
sound of Griff’s voice.

I cleared my throat. “Come on,” I told him. I led him out of
the kitchen and down the hall to the rest of my little house, wishing for the
first time that it was bigger. When the tour ended we’d have to talk about
something other than furnishings and blue dogs and snow, and I had no idea yet
what that would be. It was easier to continue stating the obvious. “Bathroom,”
I announced, pushing open the door and discreetly kicking a pair of underwear
into the corner against the hamper.

“Bathroom,” he repeated, nodding. “All the amenities.”

“And this is basically a junk room,” I said about the second
bedroom, which contained my desk, an overloaded bookcase and that box of Simon’s
old comics (I realized, for the first time, they smelled). “And my bedroom.“ I
didn’t take him in, but rather just walked past it, and then I tapped the two
remaining hallway doors. “Closet. Cellar. Cellar’s kind of gross, so we’ll
leave that alone.”

And then it was done. We returned to the kitchen, kind of
facing each other a few feet apart—on a map of us this space would be
labeled Awkwardland. I turned and began wiping off the counter, just something
to do, while he looked around taking in details. I wished again that I’d had a
chance to clean up more. “So that’s, uh, pretty much—”

“I like it,” he said with a smile. “This place is exactly
you.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks.”

“The fireplace smells good,” he said.

“That’s my favorite part.”

“Can I stoke it?” he said. “Is that a word? Stoke?”

“I think so.” I looked over the half-wall. The glowing coals
in the charred cradle were low and hungry. “Go for it. Stoke away.”

He went to the living room and moved a few pieces of split wood
from the bin onto the embers. They snapped at the weight and he leaned away and
touched his hair.

“You own this place?” he said. “Or rent?” He curled up in
the brown chair, tucking his feet underneath him. He looked at home. He used to
sit that way on his bed when he was doing homework, tapping his pen against the
spine of a textbook, humming, swearing, asking me to come look at something
real quick. Something about roommates, good roommates at least, is that once
you live with someone, you always feel like whatever place they’re in now is a
little bit yours. Same smell, same stuff—same trinkets and
furniture—that once intermixed with your own. He reached over to the
stereo and turned my music down, as he’d done so many times before. The
familiarity of the action quieted my buzzing nerves.

“My grandparents bought this place a few years ago when my
grandpa was sick,” I said. “They were planning some renovations and then they’d
move in after he got better—they loved the Cape. Something to look
forward to, I guess.” I went into the living room and sat down in the other
chair.

“Light at the end of the tunnel?” he said.

“Yeah, well he found the other light first. They never moved
in. My grandmother won’t sell it. So yours-truly took over as the official
custodian person guy.”

“Sweet.” He laughed. “So you’re squatting.”

“I’m not squatting. Come on. I’m paying the mortgage. It’s
fair.”

“Good deal,” he said. “Well not the grandfather part, but
you know.” Then I saw the photos on the wall catch his eye. “Hey—is that
me?” He got up and went over to them.

“There are a couple of you, yeah.” When I saw him coming up
the street I should’ve run inside and taken them all down. They made me feel like
some kind of stalker.

He stood with his arms crossed, eyes moving back and forth
across the photos. “This one’s fucking funny,” he said, tapping the frame. “Our
antics. I like that you have these. Hey, that reminds me—I brought you a
present.” He went to his backpack, unzipped a nylon pocket, rummaged around, took
out some t-shirts, a few sci-fi paperbacks. “I don’t mean to keep you in
suspense—there’s no drum roll necessary. You paid about a hundred and thirty
grand for this so I wanted to make sure you got it.” He managed to yank out
what he was looking for and held it out to me.

It was my Shuster College yearbook. I took it from him and his
fingerprints evaporated from the glossy cover. I traced my finger along the
raised gold letters of my name. Vincent J. Dandro. “How’d you get this?”

“You didn’t pick it up at gradua— Ow, fuck that’s
cold
!” He shook a socked foot out of the
puddle by the door. “You didn’t pick it up at graduation, I guess. Beth was on
the yearbook staff. She has a whole box of unclaimed books. I don’t know if
it’s really legit, but she has them. I guess she’s supposed to mail them out if
someone requests theirs, but it doesn’t seem like many people ever do. I was
looking through last fall and found yours. Got me thinking about you.”

“I beat it out of there pretty quick that day,” I said,
meaning graduation. I opened the yearbook—its spine creaked and it
smelled new, like paper, but like something else too. Was it Griff’s house? Their
house? I sat down on the ottoman.

“I looked for you after the ceremony,” he said softly, “but
yeah, you were gone. Anyway, there was a supplement thing they put out with grad
photos and stuff, but I don’t know what happened to that. I think you had to
order it or something.”

“It’s OK,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You’re a memory person. It’s good to have.” He gathered up
his scattered belongings, separating from them a change of clothes and a baggie
containing a toothbrush and a stick of Degree deodorant. “Would it be cool if I
grab a quick shower while you’re looking through that? I feel kind of rank.”

“Sure, of course. I think you remember the bathroom from the
tour?”

“Haha.”

“Water takes a while to heat up, but it gets really hot so
be careful. Towels are under the sink.”

“Thanks. I’ll try not to melt my flesh off.”

“Hey, are you hungry?”

“Starved.”

“I could make pancakes?”

“That would be awesome, thank you.” He went into the bathroom
and closed the door. I listened for the sound of the lock, wondering if he
would turn it, and then it came.
Tink
.

I flipped through several glossy pages of the yearbook, but
when I heard the shower turn on I closed it and set it on the arm of the chair.
It felt cold in my hands, and not just because it had been outside.

I pulled a dusty griddle out of the kitchen
cupboard and put it on the counter and cleaned it off. An icicle, thick and
clear enough to make the yard behind it wobbly, hung behind the frosty window
over the sink. I could see an orange snowblower against the white, spewing a snowy
fountain into the air above my neighbor’s yard.

I cracked eggs into a green plastic bowl, sniffed what was
left of the milk, was glad there was almost enough, added a little water to
compensate, poured, began to whisk it into pancake mix. I focused intently on
the batter, making sure to pop every pocket of powder.

There was a yelp in the bathroom.

“Told you it gets hot!”

When I heard the shower turn off I ladled raw pancakes onto
the griddle. Watching them bubble, listening to Griff putter in the
bathroom—the click of his toothbrush against the sink, the
fwap
of pants being unfolded—I
felt nervous, almost queasy. Before today I hadn’t spoken to the guy since graduation
two years ago, and even that brief conversation was just a blip in the span of
our silence. You really had to go back four years to get to the last time were
close. I noticed my hand was shaking. I started whisking what remained of the
batter.

The bathroom door opened and Griff emerged in a cloud of
steam, the grand entrance of every B-movie alien I’d ever seen. Maybe this wasn’t
Griff at all but some interstellar prankster setting me up. Forget about
abductions, anal probes and secret alien cookbooks—the real fun was in
poking at the Earthlings’ old heartaches.

“Feel better?”

“Much,” he said. “I hadn’t been warm in like—thirty-six
hours!”

He stopped at his backpack, carefully stepping around the
cold puddle this time, to pack away his dirty clothes. Then he took a seat at
the kitchen table.

“How’re those pancakes coming?” he said, flicking at a
bubble in the bottle of syrup I put on the table.

Griffin Dean at my kitchen table. He looked the same,
mostly. His blond hair hung past his jaw in damp waves. He’d worn it long in
college to hide the acne he’d been constantly at war with. His skin was clear
now but scars speckled his temples and jaw. His green eyes were framed by
eyebrows several shades darker than his hair. He was tall and lanky and apparently
still wore his shirts too big. On his right shoulder-blade, I knew, was a
tattoo of a knobby and twisted joshua tree. His white-socked toes curled around
the bottom rung of the chair.

“They’re getting there,” I told him. “They may be a little
bland—I didn’t have enough milk.”

“That’s OK, that’s what syrup is for.”

“I have this thing about going to the supermarket. I hate
it. So I like never have any food around here.”

“I hear ya.” He rocked the syrup bottle back and forth with
his thumb. “At Beth’s we’d have to carry all the groceries from the market to
the apartment. That was a bitch, let me tell you. The handles on those plastic
bags turn into razor-wire in about ten seconds.”

“What part of Boston do you live in?”

“What part
did
I
live in?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“Down by Fenway. One of those brownstone-type places. Cool
location, but yeah, buying groceries was the pits.”

“Perks of city life, huh?”

“It just forces you to be creative. We got stuff that could
do double, triple meal-duty. A lot of cereal. Kix, Cheerios—they’re good
for breakfast, lunch, snack. And they’re light.”

“I like cereal. Oh, grab a plate.” I gestured with my chin
to the cupboard and began to pry the pancakes off the griddle. They were a
little burned and I felt embarrassed.

He got up, reached for the cupboard door, showing dark dots
on his sleeve where he hadn’t dried thoroughly. He should’ve been gorgeous, really.
On paper he was. He had the blond hair, the bright eyes, the strong jaw with a
shadow of golden beard—all the elements, all the materials—but he
looked somehow more boy-next-door than runway model, and that was fine. It made
him seem more within reach, more attainable, even though as a straightboy he
was no more attainable for me than a runway model. He pulled out two plates,
put one on the counter and held out the other. I slapped a half-dozen pancakes
onto it.