The Wishbones (5 page)

“Eat me,” said Artie.

They were Still standing on the lawn ten minutes later when Alan Zelack pulled up in front of the funeral home in his red Mitsubishi Eclipse, which Artie liked to mock as a “poor man's Porsche.” In a soft voice, Ian began singing “Stairway to Heaven” as Zelack climbed out of the car, pausing in the street to straighten his tie and run his fingers through his expensive haircut. Dave remembered him breathing into Phil's mouth, pressing on his chest.

“Hey, guys.” Zelack seemed delighted by the opportunity to stop and chat. “It's a shame about Phil, huh?”

“You did a good thing the other night,” Dave told him. “The mouth-to-mouth and all.”

Zelack shrugged. “My father died of a heart attack a couple years ago. Shoveling snow. He died right there on the sidewalk. Nobody in the whole neighborhood knew CPR.”

“Shit,” said Buzzy.

“What can you do?” said Zelack.

The conversation dropped off a cliff. Zelack's glance strayed to the front door of the funeral home. He didn't look all that eager to go inside.

“Hey, Alan,” Artie said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Who was that fox you were with the other night?”

“Oh.” Zelack grinned like a guy who'd just hit the lottery. “That's Monica. I met her at a gig a couple weeks ago. She was the maid of honor.”

“Monica.” Artie shook his head at the injustice of it all. “Figures she'd have a name like that.”

Zelack rubbed his chin with the tip of his thumb. “I'm in love, man. I'm so fucking in love I can't believe it.”

Dave looked at the ground. He felt a hollowness in his abdomen, a sensation something like a hunger pang. He forgot about it when Buzzy slapped him on the back.

“Speaking of the L-word,” he said, “our man Dave here has an important announcement.”

“No way,” said Ian.

“No fucking
way,” said Artie.

“It's true,” Buzzy insisted. “Little Daverino's getting married.”

Dave nodded to confirm this information, a little uncomfortable about suddenly being made the center of attention. Smiling as graciously as he could, he stood on the plush lawn of the funeral
home and accepted the congratulations of his friends and colleagues.

The first funeral home Stan visited was full of grief-stricken uniformed cops. In the second one, all the mourners spoke Spanish. The third happened to be located just a few blocks from Feeney's, a corner bar in Cranwood with one of the best jukeboxes around.

It was early, and the place was nearly empty. He dropped a couple dollars’ worth of quarters on Merle Haggard and George Jones, then pulled up a stool and called for a Jim Beam on the rocks. He could only tolerate country music under certain circumstances, and this was one of them.

Since joining the Wishbones, Stan had grown accustomed to drawing stares in public places. This time they came from an older gentleman a few stools down, a dapper, pickled-looking guy in a mustard-colored suit.

“What happened?” he asked, eyeing Stan's tux with sympathetic curiosity. “She leave you at the altar?”

Stan wanted to laugh, but the sound never quite made it out of his throat.

“She should've,” he said, tossing back his drink in a single gulp. “It would've saved a shitload of time.”

He pulled Up in front of Warneck's Funeral Home at a few minutes past nine. Except for a lone figure sitting on the front steps, the place looked empty, closed for the night.

Squinting into the darkness, he recognized the guy on the steps as one of the old farts from Phil Hart's band. Walter, the piano player, the one he privately thought of as “Shaky.”

He got out of the car and headed up the front walk. The old man watched him from the steps, a shock of white hair framing the vague outline of his face.

“Hey,” said Stan. “Am I late?”

“Depends for what.”

“The wake.”

“You missed it. Viewing hours are from six to eight.”

“Were the Wishbones here?”

The old man cleared his throat with a violence that made Stan cringe. “The who?”

“The Wishbones. The band that plays after you at the showcase. I'm the drummer.”

“You guys really call yourselves the Wishbones?”

“Yeah.”

Walter whistled through his teeth, as though a pretty girl had just walked by. “Where'd you find a stupid name like that?”

Stan didn't answer. He'd always thought the Wishbones was a perfectly good name for a band. Walter reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. It was painful to watch him extract one and guide it to his lips. Stan had to look away when Walter brought out his lighter. He didn't turn back until he smelled the smoke.

“Your friends left about an hour ago,” Walter reported.

“Figures.” Stan shook his head. “I'm having one of those days, I'd forget my dick if it wasn't screwed on.”

Walter coughed out a dry chuckle. “My age, I'd be grateful for a day like that.”

A sudden image struck Stan like a wave of nausea. Susie drinking champagne in a fancy restaurant. Black dress, bare shoulders. Happy Birthday. He made a noise.

“You okay?” Walter asked.

“Not really. Mind if I sit down?”

He felt a little better once he unhooked his cummerbund. He hated the frigging thing, the way it squeezed all the air out of him. Walter sat beside him, thoughtfully gumming his cigarette.

“This must be a tough time for you,” Stan observed.

“How so?”

“You know.” He pulled the cummerbund out from under his jacket and laid it on the steps. “This thing with Phil. It must have been awful for you.”

Walter worked his cigarette like a baby sucking a bottle. “Phil was an old man. Everybody's got to go sometime.”

“Still, watching a friend die in front of you like that …”

“We had our differences,” Walter said curtly.

“What kind of differences?”

“Creative.” Walter ejected the cigarette from between his lips. It landed on the sidewalk in a small shower of sparks. “I thought the band was starting to get a little stale.”

“How long were you together?”

“Too fucking long. Thirty-three years I took orders from that sonofabitch. I finally feel like I can breathe again.”

Stan didn't bother to pretend he was shocked. He'd been a musician long enough to know how it could come to this. There were nights when he'd lain awake writing Artie's obituary in loving detail, nights when he'd imagined committing murder.

“Can you do me a favor?” Walter asked.

“What's that?”

“Help me find my car.”

“Whaddaya mean, find your car?”

Walter gestured at the world spread out in front of them. His voice was small now, a little bit frightened.

“It's around here somewhere,” he said.

IT'S YOUR WEDDING

 

“I think I'm going to ask
Tammi to be my Maid of Honor,” Julie told him on their way to the mall on Saturday morning. “I'm just worried that Margaret's going to be upset.”

“She'll still be in the wedding, right?”

“Of course. But you know how she is. Any little thing could set her off. And the last thing we need is a disgruntled bridesmaid.”

She shook her head as though exasperated, but Dave wasn't fooled. He could see how happy she was to be talking about the wedding. Her face glowed with it; she spoke in a bright girlish voice he hadn't heard for a long time. It was gratifying to know that he could be responsible for such a major improvement in her mood, though it made him wonder if he hadn't been equally responsible for the mild depression that had plagued her for the past couple of years. He'd blamed it on the fact that she'd been unable to find a public school teaching job, despite her degree in Elementary Ed, and instead seemed resigned to a career in customer service.
But maybe that was only part of her problem, and maybe not even the most important part.

“Do what you want,” he told her. “It's your wedding.”

She pulled down the sun visor and studied her face in the little mirror, puckering her lips as though preparing to kiss the glass.

“Ever since she got married, all she wants to do when we get together is complain about Paul. I mean, sometimes I just want to say, ‘Look, Margaret, if the guy's such a jerk, why don't you just divorce him?’ “

Dave punched on the radio and began fiddling with the tuner to dramatize his lack of interest in Margaret and Paul. Julie pretended not to notice.

“He's like from another era. She works longer hours and makes more money than he does, but it never even occurs to him to pitch in around the house.”

The radio was a Saturday-morning wasteland. The best song Dave could find was “Movin’
On”
by Bad Company, a band about whom he had profoundly mixed feelings. As stale and mediocre as they seemed now, he could never forget what it had meant to hear them for the first time in Glenn Stella's bedroom in 1975—like being struck by lightning, visited by some rock ‘n roll version of the holy spirit. He'd walked home in a daze and announced to his parents at the supper table that he
needed
a guitar.

“You know what he does? He just sits in front of the TV playing his stupid computer games while she vacuums around his feet.”

“You think she should divorce him because of that?”

“That's as good a reason as any, considering that he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.”

“He's not so bad,” Dave said, defending the guy out of some vague sense of gender loyalty, even though he despised him even more than Julie did. “He probably does a lot of chores around the house. Mowing the lawn and whatnot. Taking out the garbage.”

“That's not the worst of it.” Julie lowered her voice, in case people in passing cars might be trying to eavesdrop. “He insists on having sex with her every night, right after the weather report on the eleven o'clock news.”

“Every night?”

“That's what she says.”

“Even when she's sick?”

“I'm sure there are exceptions,” she conceded. “But the basic pattern is every night.”

Dave gave a small shiver of disgust that was only partly for Julie's benefit. Paul was a 240-pound furniture salesman who collected baseball cards and believed that
Hotel California
was one of the high points in the history of human civilization. Margaret was a formerly pleasant person whose personality had been ruined by constant dieting; Dave couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her when she wasn't carrying around a plastic baggie full of carrot slivers. The thought of the two of them having sex was almost as difficult to get his mind around as the thought of his parents getting it on in a motel room while vacationing at Colonial Williamsburg.

Julie pulled down her bottom lip and inspected her gum line in the mirror. Then she pulled up her top lip and did the same.

“He claims he can't get to sleep without it. If she says no he whimpers and thrashes around until she finally gives in just to get it over with.”

“Aren't there laws against that?”

“Every night,” Julie said, her voice touched by wonderment. “Imagine watching the news with that hanging over your head.”

A life-sized Cardboard cutout of Mr. Spock greeted them as they entered the mall, the normally expressionless Vulcan smiling enigmatically as he extended the live-long-and-prosper salute to the earthlings who drifted past,
“MEET SCOTTY!”
said a cardboard
poster attached to Leonard Nimoy's cardboard shirt. “2
P.M. TODAY.”

It wasn't yet eleven-thirty, but a large contingent of
Star Trek
buffs had already begun forming a line in front of an empty table in the mall's central plaza. The table was surrounded by cardboard cutouts of Captain Kirk, Bones, and Lieutenant Uhura, who looked as sexy as ever in her skintight, probably somewhat itchy polyester uniform.

They had to cut through the line on their way to the escalator, drawing a surprisingly huffy response from a man in a plaid short-sleeved shirt who must have thought they were trying to usurp his position. Most of the people in line were nerdy-looking men, though Dave did notice a sprinkling of obese women and a number of people in wheelchairs, some of them severely disabled. It made sense, now that he thought about it, that
Star Trek
, and especially Scotty, might hold a special appeal for people who found themselves at odds with their own bodies.

They stepped onto the escalator and began their slow, effortless ascent. Julie gazed down at the Trekkies and shook her head.

“It's sad,” she whispered.

“What?”

“That,” she said, gesturing at the lower level. “All of it.”

Dave didn't answer. He had never cared for
Star Trek
and wouldn't have wanted to spend the better part of a beautiful Saturday stuck inside the mall, but he'd stood on enough lines for concert tickets in all kinds of weather—sometimes even camping out for really important shows—to feel an instinctive sympathy for the people below. They didn't seem particularly sad or strange to him. They were just waiting for Scotty.

“With diamonds,” Kevin explained, “you got four basic variables to consider. You got size, you got cut, you got color, and you got
clarity. Within each of these categories, you got separate variables to consider.”

Kevin was a pixieish man in a brown suit, maybe forty years old, with curly gray hair slicked back behind his ears and an orangey tan whose origins could probably be traced to somewhere other than New Jersey. Dave made an effort to look fascinated as he droned on about point size, empire cuts, and the alphabetical grading scale for color, but his mind had already begun to wander. He almost wished he were downstairs, standing in line. At least then he'd have something to look at besides pale pink walls, diamond rings, and Kevin's tropical explosion of a necktie.

“The range is enormous,” Kevin said, in response to a question from Julie. “The vast majority of diamonds aren't even precious stones per se. They're used for industrial purposes.”

Kevin paused for a reaction, so Dave dutifully pretended to be impressed by this information, though he really didn't give a shit about it one way or the other. The whole concept of engagement rings struck him as an enormous scam perpetrated by the jewelry industry to force you into making the single most expensive useless purchase of your entire lifetime just to avoid looking like a cheapskate to your future wife, her family, friends, and co-workers.

“But let's face it,” Kevin said, finally bringing his filibuster to a close, “unless you have a lot of money to spend, most of what I just told you isn't going to be directly relevant to your purchase. You're not going to be in the market for some flawless oval-cut diamond of exceptional luster. You'll be looking for a decent-quality round-cut stone, maybe in the H-I-J range.”

“What do you mean by a lot of money?” Julie asked.

This question appeared to cause Kevin a certain amount of difficulty. His face cycled through a number of contortions before settling into its default mode of enthusiastic sincerity.

“It's all relative, you know what I'm saying? I mean, you can get a ring like these here for four, five, maybe six hundred bucks.”
He caressed the air above the left side of the display case; the rings below were sad-looking specimens with stones that resembled pumped-up grains of salt. His hand drifted to the other end of the case, where rocks the size of molars glittered smugly in elaborate settings. “Or you could spend upwards of five grand on one of these.”

“We're somewhere in the middle,” Julie told him.

Dave paid closer attention as Kevin removed individual rings from the case—insurance regulations didn't permit him to exhibit more than one at a time—and quoted prices in the range of fifteen hundred dollars. They had entered the store committed to paying no more than a thousand, but their threshold seemed to have risen in the meantime.

“I really like this one,” Julie said, referring to a round-cut sixty-pointer that would run in the neighborhood of sixteen hundred transferred to a plainer setting. “There's something about it.”

“That's a quality stone,” Kevin said quickly. “You have a really good eye.”

Julie spun her swivel chair to face Dave, the ring cupped like an offering in the palm of her hand, her expression a complicated blend of excitement and apology.

“What do you think?”

Dave took the ring and held it up to the light. The diamond was small but radiant, shooting off pinprick flares of brilliance.

“I know it's expensive,” she said. “Maybe we shouldn't rush into anything.”

He could've told her to hold off, to shop around and compare prices, but that would've just been prolonging the ordeal. She had found a ring she would be proud to show off to her friends, a ring that would reflect well on him as part of the union it symbolized. Compared to that, a few hundred dollars didn't seem worth quibbling over, even if it meant he'd have to kiss good-bye any hope of
buying the vintage Telecaster he'd been eyeing over at Riccio's Music.

“Get it,” he told her.

“Really?” She seemed almost disappointed by the ease of his surrender. “You mean it?”

She started to smile, but something happened to her face before she got there. She made a sudden gulping noise, and the next thing he knew she was sobbing against his face, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. Pinned against his chair, Dave realized he was choked up as well. If making her happy were so easy, why had he gone out of his way to disappoint her for so long? Why had they wasted all those years?

“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “It's so beautiful.”

“Jules.” His fist closed around the ring as he rubbed his knuckles up and down the back of her neck.

“Congratulations.” Kevin reached across the display case to give him a friendly squeeze on the shoulder. “You made an excellent choice.”

“So tell me,” Kevin said, making salesman's small talk as he wrote up their order, “how long have you two been going out?”

Dave groaned to himself. This wasn't a subject he felt comfortable discussing with strangers.

“A long time,” he said.

“How long is long?”

He shot a quick warning glance at Julie, but it was too late.

“Fifteen years,” she said.

Kevin looked up from the paperwork, smirking like a guy who appreciated a little good-natured kidding around.

“Come on,” he said.

“It's true,” Julie insisted. “We've been going out since our sophomore year of high school.”

Kevin turned to Dave for confirmation, looking at him for the first time as though he were an actual human being, rather than a Visa card with legs.

“On and off,” Dave told him. “Fifteen years on and off.”

“That's amazing,” said Kevin.

Julie put her arm around Dave's waist and planted a quick kiss on his cheek.

“We didn't want to rush into anything,” she explained.

Dave took Julie's hand as they stepped off the escalator, something he almost never did in public, especially since they'd had a fight about it a few years earlier. (“Would it kill you to hold my hand once in a while?” she'd asked. “Yes,” he'd replied, after devoting some serious consideration to the matter. “I think it would.”) She seemed so grateful for the gesture that she passed up the opportunity to comment upon his courage in the face of near-certain death.

“I'm really happy about the ring,” she told him. “I know you think it's silly, but it means a lot to me.”

“I'm happy too,” he said, and was pretty sure that he meant it. “You deserve something nice after putting up with me for fifteen years.”

“On and off,” she said, cheerfully supplying his favorite disclaimer. “Fifteen years on and off.”

He never meant for the phrase to sound as grudging and nitpicky as it apparently did; it just seemed important to remind people that they hadn't actually been seeing each other for fifteen years without interruption. Some of the gaps in their relationship were minor and forgettable, but others were of a different order of magnitude—-Julie's last two years of college, for example, which she'd spent practically living with this jerk who dumped her when he got accepted to law school, and the
ten-month affair Dave had had a few years back with a married woman whose husband traveled a lot. In Dave's mind, these two episodes divided up his history with Julie into three separate eras —in effect, three separate relationships: Young Love, The Post-Brendan Reconciliation, and Everything after Maryanne. That was what he meant by on and off.

They were halfway to the exit when someone called his name. He turned toward the line of Trekkies—it had nearly doubled in size during their time in the jewelry store—unsuccessfully scanning the crowd for a familiar face.

“Over here.” A hand waved through the air. “Dave.”

Once he spotted Ian, Dave wondered how he'd missed him. Surrounded by people not particularly distinguished by their good looks or the care they'd devoted to choosing their clothes that morning, he stood out like a swan among the pigeons. Tall and always well dressed, Ian had the kind of physical presence that often led strangers to mistake him for some kind of minor celebrity—a bit player on soap operas, or maybe a second-string professional athlete.