Cooperstown

The walk to the store is peppered with bouts of occasional conversation, but mostly we walk in silence, and inside the air con is running full pelt and she spends ten minutes deliberating between flavours while I drag my feet at the freezer section because I don’t want to have to decide whether to wait for her or head off without her after I’m done paying.

I feel like a dumbass, standing around with one hand on my hip and pretending I don’t know whether I should go for Lone Star or branch out and get something new, so I pick up a few other things. Things I’m entitled to. Milk, bread, butter, ham. I walk past her on the way to the counter, ask her if she’s almost done. She’s holding a grab bag of Cheetos in one hand and another packet I can’t see in the other, and she says, “Which one, Mr Keyes?”

I say, “Both. And call me Ed. Mr Keyes is my dad.”


I get back with enough time to shower, to change my clothes. I’m moving slowly, carefully, and the muscles in my stomach feel like they don’t want to play ball, so I stretch out until everything hurts, until my joints pop. I open a can of beer.

I’m thinking about this for a while, mostly avoiding the answers. Thinking about the last time I was at a barbecue. Disappointing weather. Sky opening up, clouds dyed a faded grey. We all ran inside, and the rain put out the coals, and we ordered a pizza and got drunk and didn’t try again. Mrs Close invites her mom-friends and their husbands and their kids, and if I go in my back yard I can hear them over the hedge chatting and sipping at glasses of wine and the occasional “Tat-yah-na!” floating over the leaves and stinging my teeth.


At the barbecue I can hear Mrs Close talking about me from across the garden. She’s talking to one of her mom-friends, and she makes this inane comment about how I don’t eat meat, and I’m staring at her trying to work out how she could have come to that conclusion when I remember that I was the one who told her, and I’m standing across the garden chewing on half a sausage (it’s crispy and almost black on one end, but it tastes okay).

I tip the other half of the sausage into a flowerbed just as she squeezes over to me and while she introduces me to her mom-friend (“Edward, honey, this is Moira, and Moira, this is Edward”) I try to rearrange the iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes on my plate to cover the grease stain the sausage left behind.

Moira is saying something, and she keeps making this big show of touching her face with her hand, probably so that I’ll realise there’s no wedding ring on her finger. She’s asking me what I do for a living, and I bite into a tomato and say, “I worked narco for a couple years, on and off. Unemployed right now.”

Moira and Mrs Close are both nodding as if they know what I’m talking about, and a while after Moira’s lengthy explanation about why she moved all the way from Florida to this bumfuck bayou shithole (she doesn’t call it that, but that’s what it is), they both drift off to talk to someone else, and Tatiana appears suddenly in front of me with a plate piled high with tuna pasta.

She says, “Did you really work narco? That’s, like, narcotics, right? Drugs?”

I crunch on a lettuce leaf, squinting at her a little. The sun is right behind her, and maybe if I stood right she’d look like she was glowing but right where I am I can barely see her at all. I say, “Yeah, narcotics. Up in New Orleans.”

“So you were a cop?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“What does kinda mean? C’mon, Mr Keyes. Ed. Don’t leave me hangin’.” She moves out of the sun a little, and she’s smiling with all her teeth. “Were you undercover? Or were you, like, bustin’ drug cartels and stuff?”

I blink at her, and her hair is shifting in the breeze, and there’s this ringing noise in my ears, and the sky is pink and rippling like water, and I say, “Spent a lot of time in. In a HIDTA. High Intensity, uh, Drug Trafficking Area. But you don’t wanna hear. Um. About that. Uh.”

I squeeze my eyes shut tight, and I can hear her saying, “Mr Keyes, are you okay?” but it’s like she’s half a mile away, talking through a megaphone with bad reverb.

I force my lips to move, force myself to assemble a sentence and spit it out. “’M fine.”

When I can see straight, when the scream in my ears bubbles down to a soft radar blip in my peripheral hearing, I take the last burger on the barbecue and eat it in two clean bites, and I leave.

I don’t see it, but there’s a car parked at the end of the street. I don’t see him, but the driver is watching me.