Chapter 19
THE CLOSET
For two days, I slept, played on my phone, and trundled back and forth to the kitchen.
There was no juice in my muscles, no heart in my actions.
I felt forsaken by everyone I knew, and even worse, I couldn’t blame them.
I felt ugly and ashamed and irredeemable.
Dad’s point that I hadn’t cared about Uncle George’s death until it involved me kept playing over and over in my head, cutting me to the quick of my soul, breaking me open to bleed.
I knew he was right. And how was I supposed to live with that about myself?
I stayed away from the bar. Hatch wouldn’t want me there, and even more painfully, Hannah wouldn’t want me there. No doubt Midas shared their perspective.
The other worst part was how my outburst—my outing, if I was honest with myself—became the talk of the town. Everyone had something to say about it.
“It’s one of the things I dislike about this generation,” said the radio host for the local oldies station. “They want to rewrite history and tell us their heroes were outside the norm. It’s a pathetic attempt to—”
I punched the radio off, but the voices were everywhere.
“It’s all noise,” Coach Calhoun said on the evening news. “Just a means of distracting us from the upcoming season. But we’re not gonna pay attention to that. We know what we have to do, and we’re gonna keep doin’ it.”
Finally, on the third day of my self-imposed exile, I took a shower, slipped into the Caddy, and drove to Uncle George’s house.
It was startlingly quiet inside. Sunlight fell through the slatted blinds, creating golden rectangles on the hardwood floor. Dust motes floated through the air, the one moving thing in this otherwise static tomb.
I moved slowly from room to room. My dad and grandparents had definitely returned since that day a few weeks ago, judging by how many more boxes were laid up against the walls.
The vast oriental rug was rolled up in the living room, revealing a polished patch of floor.
The clock had been taken off the wall like a visual reminder that Uncle George’s time was up.
I lingered at the foot of the stairs, remembering Grandpa’s resistance to cleaning Uncle George’s bedroom. Did I want to see his bedroom? What if I didn’t find proof of him there? And equally as scary: What if I did?
The door was slightly ajar, as if someone had entered just recently.
Had my dad been back to tackle this room on his own, or had Uncle George himself left this door open that day he’d gone to the post office and collapsed outside his car?
I knew from Dad that once he’d checked into the hospital, he had never come back.
He’d died in the hospice ward, away from home.
There on the bed was a thin pile of shirts, laid out like someone had started to sort through them but given up.
So Dad had been here. I smoothed a hand down a worn navy polo shirt, then picked it up and breathed in its scent.
Immediately, it was like Uncle George was there, ready for a conversation, his aftershave swirling all around us.
I closed my eyes and pretended he was standing there next to me.
Amazing how it was impossible to be angry with him when he no longer felt far away.
I roamed the room, stopping to absorb every detail.
A small wooden cross hung next to the bed.
A watercolor painting of a beach hung opposite the window.
Tellingly, there was no football memorabilia anywhere; the only hint of his Rustin legacy was a bold, glinting class ring gathering dust on top of the dresser.
A pair of foam earplugs lay haphazardly on the nightstand.
Next to them, on a corkboard coaster, was a forgotten glass of water.
It was still half full. I picked it up and held the glass up to the sunlight, revealing the imprint of a person’s mouth right there along the rim. He had been alive so, so recently.
His pill cutter and toothbrush were laid out on the bathroom counter. Several prescription bottles were cluttered against the mirror. A threadbare green towel hung forgotten on a hook. The shower was riddled with soap scum, but the sight of a yellow loofah made me laugh.
I went to the closet last. The pile of shirts on the bed had been just a small selection of his wardrobe.
I began to pull the hangers off one by one and categorized each item into a donation pile or a keep pile.
There were a few great T-shirts that my friends at the Cricket might want for sentimental value—especially a vintage cream Rustin Homecoming 1993 T-shirt, with holes in the underarms from wear and tear, that I knew Midas would cherish.
I had just pushed aside the dress shirts when something caught my eye.
It was a hidden set of shelves in the back of the closet—a vestige from years past when many people had a personal safe. I pushed the dress shirts farther along the rack and stepped closer to the wooden shelves.
My heart lodged in my throat.
There, in the center of three shelves, was an old framed photograph of Hatch.
He was standing on a city sidewalk, leaning with one hand against a pole, grinning into the camera.
His hair was russet brown, almost spiky in the style of the early 2000s, and his jean shorts and ruddy skin hinted to summertime.
The piercing blue eyes were the same, but they were crinkled with something I had never seen before: unbridled happiness.
“Hatch,” I whispered longingly, taking the picture frame off the shelf.
I brushed my fingertips across his young, beaming face.
It was a face that had the unmistakable shine of new love.
Grief ripped through my body like a flash in the pan, realizing this version of him had been lost. Just like with Uncle George, I had never gotten to know the real him.
I set the picture frame back on the shelf, and that was when I noticed the ring box. Every hair on my arm stood up.
“No way,” I said aloud.
I reached for it, rubbing my fingertips over the velvet coat. Then I snapped the cover open and gasped.
It was a ring. A thick, silver band for a finger much larger than mine, inlaid with tiny diamonds that wrapped like a belt. This wasn’t something Uncle George had bought for his own vanity. This was an engagement ring.
I plucked the ring carefully from the case and examined it closely—and sure enough, engraved on the inside of the band, was all the proof in the world:
MH + GW
For close to an hour, I sat in the Caddy outside the Cricket, sweating in the nighttime heat.
I watched people come and go. A group of friends smoked cigarettes near the front door, their laughter crackling on the sweltering air.
Two men lingered by a truck, one of them pulling on the other’s belt straps until he leaned forward for the inevitable kiss.
A rowdy group of college girls flocked from their cars, two of them holding hands in a shy, nascent way.
All the while, the blinking Frisky Cricket sign kept watch over me.
I stared at it long enough to count the dozens of tiny light bulbs that made up its magic.
Grief was a strange phenomenon. I hadn’t felt it for my uncle himself, but I felt it now for the dingy old building he’d left to me.
It was the grief of something never fully realized, a yearning, choking thing, nostalgia for an ideal that never existed.
I sucked in a breath like maybe I could swallow everything whole: the bar, the parking lot, the vast overgrown yard and tree line.
I understood on some deep, unconscious level that I was here to say goodbye to this place.
And what was this place, really? It was the dirt and the pavement, the delineated parcel on the map, the GPS coordinates that brought your Uber driver to the exact drop-off spot.
It was the pothole that never got fixed, the county road that whisked people past as they craned their necks, the beer can tabs that told stories of nights with friends and lovers and chosen family.
I was here to say goodbye to a meeting of lives, a sacred waterfall, an Eden for people who were never supposed to see Eden in the first place.
And I was here with the feeling of surrender, of giving up the fight, because I realized, finally, that it was beyond my control, and all I could do was pay my respects and my gratitude.
At last, I got out of the car. RuPaw met me at the front step, sniffing around my legs.
Where would she go when this place was sold?
I couldn’t picture her in some hoity-toity house somewhere, laid up with catnip and string toys.
She needed the freedom of the Cricket, the chance to come and go as she pleased, the ear scratches not from one devoted person, but from a parade of people who whispered nonsensical things while they slipped her treats from their pockets.
By the time I walked inside, it was closing time. Hatch looked up from the bar with a watchful, wary eye. He clearly expected me to throw another tantrum, to accuse him of a betrayal that he never had a choice in. I took a deep breath and stepped toward him.
“Can I speak with you?”
He leveled me with that intense, searching gaze. I let him.
“Wait in my office. I’m nearly finished closing up,” he said finally.
RuPaw followed me into the back room. When I sat down in the chair across from Hatch’s, the cat settled in my lap and purred happily.
The smell of coffee wafted from the main room.
Hatch must have made a pot. I wanted to pour myself a cup, but I no longer felt it was my place to help myself.
I scratched my fingernail into a groove in the old, worn wood of Hatch’s desk.