Chapter 2
AFTER LENNY DIED, I MOVED home with my parents.
The transition happened so slowly that I almost didn’t see it coming.
First, I was just trying to make it through the funeral.
Then I was going to stay until I stopped having nightmares.
Before I knew it, it was July, and I hadn’t been over to my apartment in almost two months.
My roommates had come to the service, and even called the house a couple of times that summer, trying to convince me to go out with them. But I was a mess, and in early August, when they finally got around to asking if I wanted to stay on the lease, I told them it was probably a bad idea.
My parents acted like my presence was temporary.
“Just until you get things figured out,” my dad kept saying, but we all knew I wasn’t going anywhere.
I started doing all my old chores, plus I mowed the lawn and took out the trash because I couldn’t stand watching my dad doing the chores that used to belong to Lenny.
In the evenings, my mother fixed all the same meals she’d made my entire childhood—shepherd’s pie, meat loaf, beef bourguignon—but we ate on trays in front of the television because no one could bear to sit at the kitchen table, where Lenny’s empty chair might as well have had a spotlight shining on it.
That was the fall of my junior year, or what would have been my junior year if I’d stayed in school.
I had had good intentions going into the semester, but there I’d be in the Main Building, listening to some professor drone on about how Faulkner’s novels were formal tragedies—not dramatically tragic but narratively tragic—and I couldn’t write down a word, couldn’t even nod my head in mute agreement.
All I could think was that every last professor I had was full of shit.
That the real tragedy, the only tragedy worth talking about, was thirty thousand kids dying for a cause that none of us fully understood.
That winter I went full-time at Condon’s, where they eventually transferred me from cosmetics to the men’s department after I complained that the perfume was giving me headaches.
I’m fairly certain, looking back, that the perfume had nothing to do with it, and the headaches were a manifestation of grief or depression or God knows what else, but I guess it doesn’t matter because I wound up liking the men’s department fine.
Most guys wanted to get in and out of the store as fast as they could, so if you told them they looked good in something, they bought it in every color.
I made decent money, and before too long, I started grabbing drinks with the girls on the floor and saying yes to the guys who lingered at the cash register, working up the confidence to ask me out.
It wasn’t the life I’d envisioned for myself, but it was a life, and in the wake of Lenny’s death, it felt like I wasn’t entitled to ask for more.