Laugh Read online

  PJ unbuckled his seat belt and turned toward him. “Slow down, doc. You’ll break something feeding me all those compliments.”

  Sam looked at his hands gripping the steering wheel. “I’m proud to be your brother, PJ. Just because I’m a dick and you’re crazy doesn’t make that untrue.”

  PJ folded his hands over one of his knees. “Des wrote me to tell me to be nice to you. That you’re going through some stuff.”

  Sam laughed. “She wrote me the same thing about you.”

  “You pissed me off in the diner that day. She’s happy, Sam. She loves her guy Hefin. She loves traveling, doing new things, running her internet business. She’d been stuck in the neighborhood her whole life, and, dude, she was never like you.”

  “What do you mean?” Sam wanted to know. He wanted to know what this alien, self-assured guy thought of his family. PJ had always been so sensitive, always seemed to sit back and watch everything with his big blue eyes. Never wanted to just go along with everything, and always, somehow, found a way to be apart from a family of six in a tiny house in a crowded south downtown neighborhood.

  It was like he was a foundling. A prince left on the doorstep of a bunch of peasants.

  When he was seven, he wanted to play the fucking cello, and the kid had been playing the piano like he was born to it since he was three.

  “Look, I know you always depended on Des, like you and her had this deal to take care of everyone all the time. But the thing is, and it’s not like she doesn’t care, but she has all this love and it feeds her to see the world, to have a bunch of experiences. It makes her more able to love. You’re different.”

  “How?” Sam felt like his heart stopped, like his mind got slow.

  “You’ve gotta find your place here, right where you’re at. You’ve always just pinballed around, hitting the same stuff in your way, over and over, but if you slow it down, you’ll find your place, and I don’t know. You’ll be Dad.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I know. Beats the hell outta me but, yeah. I mean, I know Sarah always talks about you and Mom, how close you were, but that’s because you loved Mom so much. I think you’re kind of like Dad, man. You just want to find your lady and make a house in the neighborhood, and sit on the stoop all evening waving at people like an asshole.”

  Sam looked at PJ, shook his head back and forth. He didn’t know if he was denying what PJ said or trying to clear his brain out.

  “It’s true, Sam. Why do you think you get so bent about what we’re all doing all the time? About Des moving overseas? Sarah not talking to you? Which is your fucking fault, by the way. You want us all to stick around and behave and eat pot roast together on Sundays after mass. You’re opening a clinic in the neighborhood, and, dude, after you do that you’ll never have any privacy ever again. People’ll be knocking on your door every A.M. talkin’ to you about their prostates ’n’ shit. Just like Dad. Driving all over Lakefield in his limo, everyone knowin’ him.”

  “This is the kind of thing you think about? When you’re sitting all quiet in the corner?”

  “I don’t think about this stuff. I think about music and I think about Lacey. This is all just stuff I know and no one ever bothers to ask me about.”

  “Lacey was your babysitter, PJ.”

  “I fuckin’ know that, Sam.” PJ slid his sunglasses back down on his face. Looked out the windshield.

  “Look—”

  PJ turned back and looked at Sam, and Sam looked at himself reflected back in the lenses of PJ’s sunglasses. Sam realized, surprised, that he looked angry, gunning for a fight.

  He wasn’t. He really wasn’t. Maybe PJ was right and he just wanted this life that seemed goddamned impossible to actually get, but he didn’t want to fight because he didn’t want to lose.

  He just wanted to, well, win.

  But maybe you didn’t win just by thinking your own way was the best way in the moment. Frankly, most of the time, his way in the moment completely sucked, but he went after it anyway.

  What was he fighting about all the time, exactly? To avoid the inevitable shame that came from when he inevitably discovered he was wrong?

  Probably.

  This was something to think about.

  “No, you look.” PJ leaned forward. “Just like you can’t help that you’re an asshole, I can’t help who I love. And yeah, I love Lacey. I do. I’ve known that since I was a kid, and because I was once a kid and Lacey happened to be older and knew how to run a stove to make mac and cheese without burning the house down, she was my babysitter. Big deal. It doesn’t make me less of a man to love a woman, to know I’ve loved the same woman practically my whole life, and it doesn’t make me less of a man that I’ve backed off rounding the bases until I can be absolutely goddamned positive I won’t be able to round them with her. I’d like to think, actually, that my honest and forthright confrontation of my own heart makes me more of a man, as well as the fact that I could just give a fuck what the rest of you think about it.”

  Sam leaned back in the car seat and let out a breath. “Shit.”

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “Does Lacey know all this?” There was a way that Lacey drove Sam kind of crazy. She’d been Sarah’s best friend when they were girls, and then, for some unknown girl reason, Lacey and Des had ended up best friends and still were today. Lacey’d had a rough home life, and because he was older and wrapped up in his own stuff, he’d never known what all went on at the Radcliffes’, but he gathered it wasn’t good, and it was why Lacey was always at the Burnsides’ place.

  Lacey was always kind of that perfect good girl, a little annoying because of it. Kind of a pleaser. It had shocked everyone when she’d turned up pregnant in college, especially with that southie loser Mark Lockwood.

  But she’d just kept her chin up, where it always was, and went on like it was totally normal to get straight A’s, go on to grad school, and do everything in the whole world as a single mom.

  Maybe it was.

  “Lacey knows,” PJ said. “Mostly.”

  “Can’t be easy.” Sam felt like he was talking around rocks in his mouth, getting all personal with PJ like this.

  “Well, you know what? It’s why I miss Des. Because I can talk to her. Except, what’s nice is that I’ve been having a lot of fun with Sarah.”

  Sam felt his heart go still again. “Yeah?”

  “When I can, I’ve been eating dinner with her and Betty, now that Sarah’s at her place.”

  Betty’d been his mom’s best friend and now spent her time driving his Dad’s old limo for people at the church.

  Sarah’s rough recovery from shattering the head of her femur in her bike racing accident in the winter had led to her boarding with Betty.

  Sarah had almost died from a terrifying pulmonary embolism in the spring and she spent nearly three months in the rehab hospital getting strong for a revision surgery on her hip, scheduled for late in the summer.

  Des had almost missed out on her chance to see the world helping Sam look out for Sarah, and before Des left, he and Sarah had gotten into it, a bad fight, while she was in the hospital.

  She stopped talking to him. He stopped talking to her.

  The sibling he’d been the closest to his whole life, the only sibling he’d had for four years, before Des came along. They’d always understood each other.

  He was so mad at her, but he missed her. He was starting to miss her so much, he forgot why he was mad at her and just kept thinking about how he’d failed her.

  Like he had failed everyone else.

  “Just—” PJ stopped.

  “What?”

  “Just go over there, Sam. Just go over there for dinner. Betty’ll feed you, she’s been feeding the whole neighborhood, especially since she married that guy. Just go over there and eat until one of you says something. Get it over with.”

  “Probably that’d be the way to handle it.”

  “It’s getting hot, sitting in the car lik
e this. Is this place close?”

  “Yeah, I figured out, sitting here, remembering Nina’s map, that it’s just, I don’t even know what to call it, five blocks? Down this little trail thing through the field.”

  PJ laughed. “Five blocks, huh? You realize we’re next to a fucking cornfield, right? I don’t think distances are measured in blocks out here.”

  “What’d you call it? Furloughs? What? I don’t even know. Also, I don’t think that’s corn, Peej.”

  “It’s green. It’s in a field. I play the cello. Speaking of, is this bonding activity gonna mess up my hands?”

  Sam and PJ got out of the car and starting heading down the muddy trail. PJ was stepping carefully, trying to keep his fancy boots clean.

  It was hot. The field smelled good and bad at the same time. There were a lot of insects, and this bothered Sam more than he thought it should. He still didn’t understand PJ’s pants, which looked so worn he was surprised they had enough fabric left to hang on his skinny ass, but the sun kept hitting sparkling red thread in the pair of embroidered phoenixes on the pockets, which looked new, so he supposed the pants were supposed to look like that.

  Sam would look like an idiot in those pants, and the clownishly small shirt PJ was wearing with them, and though he’d rather fucking die than admit it, PJ looked like a rock star. Like an actual fucking rock star, standing in front of an arena full of people.

  Even completely out his element, bugs flying around, the sun hot, the shitty smell of the dirt, PJ looked like he belonged.

  Sam wondered what that was like. He also wondered if the pants would help.

  As they came up over a little rise, he saw a tractor with a large, wide trailer, and about fifteen people, most of them in jeans, high boots, and tank tops, bending over rows of what Sam realized were onions, still actually in the ground, before they turned into something recognizable, like onion rings.

  Sam put his hand up, and as he did, he saw Nina jump down from the tractor.

  She sighted him immediately; she had on a ball cap over her braids, and aviator sunglasses hiding half her face, and she was dirty, so dirty, black mud from the straps of her heavy tan overalls to her knee-high boots.

  She put her arm up, and she looked so beautiful, her sleek, muscled arm bare, shining with sweat, her grin big. He kept walking toward her, ignoring the mud squishing in over the tops of his running shoes, ignoring how the back of his neck already felt burned.

  He realized, suddenly, that PJ wasn’t beside him, and he looked back to where he was standing, a few paces behind, a hand on his hip, laughing.

  “What?” Sam walked back to him.

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Actually, nothing’s funny. I like it, that’s all.” PJ slid his sunglasses off his face again to squint at Sam. “What’s that?”

  “I don’t want to get all mushy or whatever, but I like that you brought me out here so I could see you with this woman.”

  “That’s not why I brought you out here.”

  “That’s not why you think you brought me out here, big brother, but it is why. You’re bonding with me by showing me your girl, not by picking onions. It’s just your girl happens to pick onions for a living. And I like it. I like how you both smiled at each other. I like this, way fucking better than I like fighting with you in some diner.”

  Sam looked at his feet, which were already blocks of mud. “She’s not my girl. I don’t think. Not officially, I don’t think. Almost my girl. As soon as she says she is.”

  PJ laughed again. “Yeah. You totally have the look, man.”

  “What look?”

  “I don’t know. The way you look at all of us, except on us, you use the mean version. It’s just that look like you’re pinning us where we are in space so you can keep track of us. It’s like you’re a sheepdog and your whole job in life is nipping our heels until we’re gathered up all around you.”

  “That doesn’t making any fuckin’ sense. How can someone look at someone like that?”

  PJ let his face go serious and then looked at Sam with an unrelenting stare that seemed to hit his face and the entire world around him at the same time.

  He looked exactly like a sheepdog staring at his flock.

  “Woof,” PJ said, and let his sunglasses fall to his nose.

  “Her name’s Nina,” Sam said.

  “Alright, then, let me meet the woman I’m about to ruin a perfectly good pair of shoes for.”

  “How much you pay for those shoes?”

  “I got a guy.”

  “A shoe guy? Who the fuck has a shoe guy?”

  “I do, asshole. You should get a shoe guy. What are those, nonskid walking shoes? What the fuck, Grandpa?”

  “I’m on my feet all day.”

  “So’s Lacey, and she’s got those sweet Stand With Wendy shoes.”

  Sam hesitated, his chest hot, and not just from the heat, but then went for it. Put his arm around his little brother and started walking with him to where Nina stood, her hands on her hips.

  PJ didn’t hesitate at all; his long arm came around Sam’s shoulder, and Sam felt the burn in the corners of his eyes right away, wished he had sunglasses so he could let the tears well up.

  PJ was strong, as tall as he was, ridiculously cool, and all of that came from the little kid he used to lift into the top bunk.

  “You finally bring me a real set of muscles, Opie?” Nina leaned against the side of the trailer and let her dimples fly.

  “Strongest guy I know,” Sam said.

  Chapter Ten

  Sam Burnside stood outside Betty Lynch’s house with Daniel Fray, who was Betty’s new husband.

  Sam sneaked a look at Daniel, because Daniel was a neighborhood curiosity. Formally a priest, he had moved to their southside neighborhood in the spring and somehow gotten through Betty Lynch’s defenses after she’d been a widow for twenty years.

  A fucking priest.

  Sam supposed only a holy man was going to be good enough for Betty, self-appointed neighborhood watchdog, babysitter, judge, and jury. She’d been his mom’s best friend, and he never could understand what was always so funny, or so interesting, that it kept them at their kitchen tables or their back stoops for hours—talking or laughing, mostly laughing.

  “So,” said the priest. “Are we going in?”

  “She’s in there? She said that she’d talk to me?”

  “I don’t recall that she said she’d talk, but she’s eating with us, yes.”

  Sam stared at the house some more. Des used to live next door to Betty, but a big tree had fallen on the small house during a storm. Betty had what was left of the house removed and had installed a community garden, which at the time Sam had thought was kind of nutty, but now, because of Nina, he found a little interesting. Maybe Betty’d show him around after dinner if things went well.

  With Sarah. His sister who he hadn’t talked to in almost three months.

  “You’re a priest, right?” Sam put his hands in his pockets.

  “Former.”

  Sam looked at Daniel, who wasn’t laughing or smiling but had a look of extreme satisfaction on his face that almost seemed liked amusement. He was a good-looking guy, Sam thought, nothing like the parish priests growing up who were just, well, old people—but maybe they were never that old and were something more like Daniel’s age, which he guessed to be around twenty years older than himself. He had just thought they were old because he was young and bored, crawling out of his skin trying to stay still in mass.

  “Right, that’s what Betty said, but you still know priestly kinds of things, right?”

  Daniel did laugh, then, and Sam felt a little dumb. “What are you worried about, Sam?”

  “Well, I’m not looking forward to dinner, that’s for fucking sure, pardon my French, Father.”

  Daniel turned and looked at Sam, squinting against the light, but still with something like a smile around his mouth. “Your sister
misses you.”

  “She hasn’t called. I haven’t heard from her at all. The most information I get about her is actually from Des, who’s thousands of miles away. So how can you know that?”

  “She talks about you.”

  “I bet.”

  Daniel smiled, a full one, and there was something in that smile that put Sam at ease, probably some kind of secret priest power that would never go away. “It’s not all bad. You two are close.”

  “In a way. From being closest in age, maybe.”

  “I think it’s more than that, though I can’t say that with much authority, only knowing Sarah a little, and you by reputation.”

  Sam looked at the flower boxes in Betty’s community garden. “Do you like being married?”

  “I like being married to Betty. Have you been married, Sam?”

  “No. I’ve always wanted to be.”

  “Have you gotten close?”

  “I’ve thought so, but it never turned out as close as I thought.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “I screw up.”

  “What do you screw up, exactly?”

  Sam stared at Betty’s garden for a while.

  “It’s like, I think, how it seemed like my dad loved my mom more after she died.”

  Daniel was quiet for a long time, and Sam was worried what he said hadn’t made sense, or somehow wasn’t right. Then Daniel looked at him.

  “Did he?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. He had this luxury, I think, to dwell on all the things he loved most about her. His favorite pictures and stories, things she said to him that made him feel the best. I think he spent days like that, looking at pictures, just missing her like crazy. If she was really around, then she’d be more likely to do something to drive him nuts than to do something that made him feel like that.”

  “Why do you think of that?”

  “I think, maybe, I idealize the woman. Idealize even when she’s right in front of me and don’t give her any room to just be human.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “Nothing has to; both of us just live, and are human, which is frustrating when what you think you have is some kind of perfect love, built up in your head. I mean, it’s why I have this problem, here.” Sam nodded toward the house.