25
“I still can’t believe you brought them on the plane,” Iris hisses at her brother.
“I wasn’t going to leave them in San Juan,” Hector says.
“You should have left them here. ”
“Hey, you two,” Patrick says when he sees them. “How was your trip?”
“It’s good to be back,” Mrs. Valdez says, entering the store behind her children. She looks harried. She looks like someone who’s spent two weeks with bickering teenagers. She looks like a woman who will be thrilled to go back to work tomorrow.
“There’s wine in the fridge,” Patrick says, because Susan’s mother sent her back with three bottles of sweet white wine. “No wine glasses, but if you can put up with coffee mugs, help yourself.”
She heads back to the kitchen like she doesn’t need to be told twice.
Sometimes, when Patrick watches Hector and Iris, he wonders if he and Michael were ever like that.
He doubts it. They’d been less than a year apart, but Patrick felt every day of those extra eleven and a half months.
Protecting Micheal had been his job—not just protecting him from bullies or their family, but from the knowledge that they were all alone.
Maybe everyone feels a sense of guilty failure when they lose a younger sibling, or maybe this is something his brain cooked up special just for him.
Maybe if they’d been on better terms, Michael would have figured out some way not to go to Vietnam.
But it’s been seven months since he died, and Patrick is pretty sure that what he’s really tearing himself up over is that he didn’t make it right between them.
He doesn’t know what it would have taken, or what words he should have said, just that he’ll never get a chance to say them.
Mrs. Valdez puts a mug of wine on his desk. It has the logo for Shell gas on it. Her mug says something in faded black, with WAFFLES the only word still legible.
“You looked like you needed it,” she says. “Also it’s only four o’clock and I’m not drinking alone.”
He holds up his mug in a silent toast.
“How was your vacation?” he asks.
“About a week too long.”
“Your kids are a lucky to have you.”
She gives him a look. “You aren’t wrong, but what’s this about?”
Patrick just wanted to say something nice to a person who’s been more than kind to him for the nearly three years they’ve known one another. They’re friends, right? They’re sort of friends. She’s forty-five and he’s never called her by her first name, but he thinks they’re friends.
“I don’t think I ever thanked you for taking care of Susan and the baby when they got here.”
“You thanked me. You also paid me. Thanks for helping the kids with their homework and feeding them, if we’re spending the afternoon thanking one another for things we’d have done anyway.”
The zines are inches away, in the top drawer of Patrick’s desk.
Iris and Hector are only sixteen. It’s probably his responsibility to tell their parents what they’re up to.
But all he can think about is that phone call he made from the police station ten years ago.
The Valdezes are better parents than his aunt and uncle ever tried to be.
They wouldn’t hurt their kids. But he still can’t bring himself to open that drawer.
The next morning, Iris comes into the shop to work a shift. “Hey,” he says. “Welcome back.” He opens the drawer. “Are these yours?”
She draws in a breath and looks ready to lie her head off.
“I liked them,” Patrick says. “So did Nathaniel and Susan. Did you write it all yourself?”
She shakes her head. “Hector assembled the Gestetner. When we found it in the basement it was in pieces. My cousin did the Spanish translations and our friend Raul wrote one of the articles.”
“Why did you put them in the shop?”
“We told some friends they could grab a copy if they wanted one. Sorry.”
“Just be careful.”
“Sure,” she says, not even bothering to make it sound like a convincing lie.
“You know, people have gone to jail for encouraging draft evasion.”
“There are dozens of papers like ours. They can’t go after all of us.”
Patrick might think this is the optimism of youth, except for how Susan has said the same thing.
“They’ve slowed down the bombing,” Iris says.
“Only because of the election,” Patrick says. “Johnson is worried the Democrats won’t have a chance otherwise.”
“Which is because Johnson knows people hate the war, which he knows because tens of thousands of people have protested.”
“The point is that they don’t need to arrest the publisher of every radical newspaper. They only need to make an example out of a couple of kids.”
That night at the Times Square diner, Patrick described that New York Times article on deviants as a gay Bat Signal.
That had been a bunch of men seeing a chance for casual sex and seizing the opportunity; it’s not the same thing as writing a radical newspaper.
But change can only happen if individual people know how to find one another and become a collective, a movement.
Patrick feels a swell of—not hope, exactly, but something like a contact high with someone else’s hope.
Hector and Iris’s entire conscious life has been a period of time that Patrick can only think of as a steady downhill slide, but they still believe they can change things.
Hell, maybe the reason they think they can change things is that it is a mess: nothing’s solid anymore, so they can shape it the way they want.
“I want you to be safe,” he tells Iris.
“Who do you think gets to be safe? You think this war will be over when Hector turns eighteen?”
Whitman said that he liked agitation but disliked agitators; Patrick likes agitation and he loves agitators but, at heart, wants everyone to be safe and warm and fed.
“Also,” Iris says, “I’m not the only person here”—she gestures between herself and Patrick—“risking jail time and a criminal record in order to do something they know isn’t wrong.”
Mr. and Mrs. Valdez have to know that Patrick’s gay, but somehow he hadn’t thought the twins would pick up on it. You can usually count on teenagers to be oblivious about adults’ personal lives.
When Nathaniel asked why Patrick doesn’t keep it a secret, Patrick told him that hiding makes it too easy for people to pretend there’s nothing wrong. That’s what Iris is talking about: taking what they stand for and bringing it out into the streets.
“The problem with you is that you’re too smart. Do your parents know about this?” He holds up the zine.
She puts a hand on her hip. “Are you kidding me?”
“What happens if they find out?”
“They won’t like it.”
“Would they stop you?”
Iris is quiet for a minute. “I don’t think so.”
“Would you get in trouble? I’m in a rough position here, kid. I don’t want to get you or Hector in trouble, but I’m friends with your mother.”
“We don’t really get in trouble. We get lectured.” Iris sighs, but trudges upstairs. Half an hour later she comes back down. “They don’t like it, but they say it’s better than going out and getting pregnant like my cousin did when she was my age.”
That’s almost exactly what Susan’s parents said when she dropped out of college to play the guitar in coffeehouses.
Patrick looks at the cover, the spiky flower, the hand-lettered title, the modest little “25c” in the top right corner. “I’ll pay you twenty cents each, wholesale,” he says.
“Do you mean it?”
“It’s good business,” he says, thinking of the rack of zines at Gem Spa and at the other places he’s glimpsed them.
But mostly, he remembers how annoyed Nathaniel said John was to see the zines. Other people will be annoyed, too. And other people won’t be. There’s some value in letting people know what kind of place this is.
* * *
By the end of September, Nathaniel is down to working ten hours a week in the shop, less than even Iris. He and Susan have played two more gigs and they spend half their time hammering out the details of the record.
They’re acting in a way that feels, to Patrick, about eighty percent of the way to normal.
If Patrick hadn’t seen the way they were that spring and summer, he wouldn’t have guessed that something was off.
It doesn’t even look like Susan is upset—Susan’s never been able to hide that.
She usually doesn’t even bother. It’s more like a mutual uneasiness.
Tonight, Nathaniel and Susan are fiddling with matchsticks, sliding them under the violin strings to change the sound.
Eleanor is on the floor next to Patrick, trying to crawl.
She’s rocking herself back and forth on her hands and knees, occasionally looking angrily at the floor and then her hands, like they must be defective.
Before Eleanor, he never understood what people were going on about when they said that babies looked like a parent or some other relation. Babies mostly look like babies. But when Eleanor gets that expression, she looks just like Susan. The rest of the time, she’s all Michael.
Looking at Eleanor and seeing Micheal isn’t desperately sad anymore—or, it is sad, and it probably always will be, but it’s also something else.
She’s all he has of Michael, and he might be all she’ll ever have of her father, and at some point those two truths solidified into something good. They’re family.
“Another couple of days,” Nathaniel says from the sofa.
“She’ll be all over the shop,” Susan agrees. They all grin at one another, like they’ve personally accomplished something here.
Eleanor starts to cry, a sign that it’s bedtime. Patrick changes her and gets her a bottle, then puts her in her crib, fast asleep. Six months ago, he couldn’t have guessed it would ever be so simple to get this child to sleep.
Back in the living room, Nathaniel moves to the edge of the couch closest to Susan, and Patrick takes the invitation to sit. He takes the joint Susan passes him and lets their conversation wash over him.
“I think we should try drums on this track,” Nathaniel says.
“I can’t play the drums,” Susan says.
“Neither can I. But we can get a session musician.”
Susan’s quiet for a while. “I prefer that it’s only you and me.”
“Okay,” Nathaniel says, and starts to talk about something else. Fifths or eighths or some other fraction that matters in music, Patrick doesn’t know.
“Go back to the drums,” Susan says a few minutes later. “Tell me why you want them.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“If it wasn’t important, you wouldn’t have mentioned it. And now I’m curious.”
“I think drums—or really any percussion—would lay down the rhythm in a way that makes it less…pretty. Right now it’s beautiful. And that’s good, obviously. Nobody’s complaining about a beautiful song. But I think the anger is getting lost in the prettiness.”
Susan’s quiet again.
“You wrote the lyrics,” Nathaniel goes on.
“You know they’re angry. I’d want people to hear that.
If they walked away from that song thinking it was nice I’d be annoyed.
Remember Guernica ?” They’d been to the Museum of Modern Art that summer.
At the time Patrick thought it was a pretty questionable choice for Susan to want to sit on a bench in front of a twenty-five-foot-wide painting full of dismembered bodies, even if it is a Picasso and the bodies are basically just distressing shapes.
“ Guernica has drums. Do you see what I mean?”
Patrick is just high enough for Guernica has drums to be the most profound thing he’s heard in his life, even if he doesn’t understand what it means. “ Guernica has drums,” he whispers, amazed.
“But it’ll be a good song either way,” Nathaniel says.
“Why are you folding like that?” Susan asks. “You obviously want the drums.”
Nathaniel laughs. “Wait, are you serious? Because you matter to me more than any music we’re ever going to make. Come on, Susan.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to give in whenever I’m pushy. We can talk things out. And, for the record, you matter to me more than the music, too, so implying that caring about one another is something only you can do is rude. No offense.”
Patrick opens his eyes just enough to see that Susan doesn’t look mad. Neither does Nathaniel.
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” says Nathaniel. “Sorry.”
“Also, you can’t let me have my way because you’re afraid I’m going to be mad at you about your reactionary phase.”
“You can’t call it that!”
“I can call it whatever I want. I, apparently, am the only one here being spied on by the actual CIA, so I feel like that gives me some rights. Anyway, I said we’re going to be fine and so we’re going to be fine.”
“I don’t think that’s how this works.”
“Okay, too bad, I think it is. We decide we want this”—she gestures at their instruments—“and we want this”—she gestures around the room. “We decide it’s worth it.”
Nathaniel fiddles with one of the pegs on his violin. “All right. Then, I really want those drums.”
“I’ll want to hear both versions. Drums and no drums. We can record both versions. Hell, we can release both versions. Just something to keep in mind. Also, if we’re hiring session musicians, I want to talk about a mandolin.”
“Your white whale,” Patrick says, sounding very far away. Nathaniel pinches his leg.
“An autoharp wouldn’t kill you,” Nathaniel says.
“So much for ‘this is your music, Susan, I’m just doing what you tell me to do.’”
“It is your music.”
“You made something good, Nathaniel. Nobody’s letting you wriggle out of responsibility for it.”
“Harridan,” Nathaniel says. “Here, listen to this.” On Susan’s spare guitar, he picks out a tune they’ve played before, but he’s done something to it, made it less mellow, a little jangly.
Maybe whatever new dynamic exists between Susan and Nathaniel, it isn’t worse than what they had before. Maybe it’s just in a different key.
Patrick shuts his eyes again, and he must fall asleep, because the next thing he knows, they’re listening to the Beatles’ new single.
Susan has the record, of course, but so does Patrick—he bought it as soon as he heard it on the radio, like the kind of overenthusiastic teenager he never was.
He’s played it probably a hundred times now.
It’s a good song. It’s catchy. Patrick isn’t going to dwell on why he needs a seven-minute-long reassurance that things are going to get better. Maybe everybody needs that.
“That bridge,” Susan says.
“Micheal would have loved it,” Patrick mumbles.
“Never met a bridge he didn’t like,” Susan agrees, and starts singing along.
Patrick’s spent his whole life listening to Susan sing along—she can’t help herself, really—but he didn’t need to hear her sing “Hey Jude.” That’s for strangers on the record player to sing to him.
He turns his face into the couch cushion so nobody can see what his eyes are doing.