“But between you, me and the devil,” Meredith said, “were you thinking of going to bed with Brendan?”
“I’m thinking about going to bed with Brendan even now,” Kenny said.
He sat up and said, “I’m not entirely sure what I thought when I wrote him.”
“Did you think about getting him back?” Meredith said. “Cause there were a bunch of times I thought of getting Mathan back.”
“If you wanted me to give you a real answer I would have to think about it,” Kenny said, “and I’ve sort of made it a point to not think about it.
“It was so strange. He found Sheridan so quickly, and I never found anyone.”
Meredith had been part of Kenny’s world since she had come to Rossford over twenty years ago, but for years they had been on the peripheries of each others lives. It was the death of Robin Netteson that painted a black band over both of their lives and united them in sorrow. And this was because Robin Netteson’s death had been a suicide.
Robin had been the best friend of Meredith, but she had been Kenny’s younger cousin. In her seventeenth year she had been raped, and brutally so. The despair had led her to step out in front of a train. The rape was a little before Thanksgiving and she was dead by Christmas.
“I never faulted her,” Meredith told Kenny. “By then all the choice and all the power was gone from her life, and she just wanted a little control. If she couldn’t control her life…”
Yes, well the rest did not need to be said. Only now, years later, Meredith often wondered, what if she had taken the very hard road and eventually gotten through it? What life would there be for her now? Would they still be friends? Would she have turned out fabulous with four children, looking back on that horrible year, but not letting it drown her? Girlfriends were so few, especially of her age, and over and over again now she thought of a grown up Robin, and how that adult had been robbed from her.
When she got this way, Kenny said nothing. He was well grown, with Brendan for several years when the event had happened, and it was the day of Robin’s funeral that he was driving home from that cold winter time burial, the cars black, their coats black, the earth scratched open for the mangled body of a seventeen year old, that Kenny had stopped the car in front of an art store. The fluorescent light was glaring, and Brendan followed after him and Kenny thought, good, for once you should follow me and not the other way around. He had bought an easel and he had bought up oil paints and brushes and then loaded them into the back of the car. He didn’t talk to Brendan that whole night as he prepared to paint.
“I didn’t know you did that,” Brendan said.
“I used to paint as a kid all the time,” Kenny said. “I took a class in college. I wasn’t really good. I don’t really have to be good. I just want to do something right now.”
He wasn’t very good when he started, but he had a sort of hunger for it. So he always spent the money on paints thought what he wished he had was some sort of mentor or perhaps a decent class to help him be who he should be. But no matter, the painting and sculpting also, got him through. The collage making as well. By the time he was in Chicago, the only way he survived the intense loneliness of living there, making little money while Brendan pursued legal cases, was to immerse himself in art.
“I feel like I knew I was depressed when Robin died. But I wonder if I was depressed all along? I never thought about it, but the whole time I was in Chicago, I was barely alive. If only she had had something. If only she had had something to get her through that pit.”
Whatever gets you through the pit, use it! Morality be damned. After Robin died, Kenny saw his grandmother, stretched out on her sofa, done in by life with a heavy steel rosary in her hand, and isn’t that something? Years later, when she died, Kenny found that rosary and put it in his pocket, and he still had it, and if that got her through, fine. Mass had gotten him through sometimes. Prayers had gotten him through, but art had done it, sleeping all weekend, and sometimes sleeping with a man he didn’t know. Sometimes one could only survive. The time to thrive hadn’t come yet, and when voices whispered that Robin had the right of it, to resist those voices, to do anything to keep on living was what mattered.
A year ago he had painted his first Crucifixion. He had thought about it for years, but for some reason, more than anything else he had done, he had thought a crucifixion would wear him out. It took over a month and was strangely traditional, but as he painted it he began to think, “All of those phrases, Jesus is the answer, all of that business about Jesus dying for our sins, everything that said that Cross plus Something equaled some answer, some solution easily communicated in a sermon, may not have been true. When he finished that Crucifixion he painted another one, which he had given to Jonathan. It was not Robin per se, but it was a crucified girl and train tracks went across her body in an X. She was beaten and broken and there was a dark winter night behind her. The death of Robin had no answers. It was a scar that asked more questions and provided no salvation. It was a ruination and an abomination and maybe this is what the Crucifixion was supposed to be.
“It is a Mystery,” someone had once said to him. “A mystery as long as the world endures, and anything solved, is not a mystery.”
The phone rang and Meredith said, “Are you going to answer it?”
“That’s why God made voice mail.”
“Do you know,” Meredith said, “I have actually never managed to learn how to open my voice mail.”
“I can show you.”
The phone stopped ringing.
“I’m good,” Meredith said.
Kenny picked up his phone and touched the call log.
“It was Brendan.”
“You’d better call him back.”
Kenny nodded. It was good being with him last night, being with all their friends like old times and finding out they still had things to talk about.
“Sorry I missed your call.”
“That’s alright,” Brendan said. “You’re here now. Ey, you wanna get something to eat?”
“Sure, can I bring Meredith with me?”
Meredith raised an eyebrow, and even on the phone Kenny could tell that Brendan was taken aback.
“Sure. That’ll be great.”
When Kenny was off the phone he said, “When a married man asks his ex to lunch and the ex says yes that equals desperate. I didn’t want to seem desperate.”
“I totally understand you,” Meredith said. “And yet, I have to get back home.”
“It really doesn’t matter,” Kenny said. “I don’t mind eating alone with him. I just mind making plans to eat alone with him. If that means anything.”
Meredith nodded.
“It does. A little.”
They met at the new Mexican restaurant near the airport, the one on Blue Island. Brendan said, “I thought Meredith was coming.”
“She changed her mind.”
“Good,” Brendan said. “I thought about bringing Sheridan, but left him behind. It’ll be good for just us.”
“Yeah,” Kenny said.
“The fajita burrito is excellent,” Brendan said. “Because it’s just like fajitas without all the mess of having to make them and… Well, you should get it.”
“Alright. We could get two. Or split them.”
“Let’s not kid ourselves. Let’s get two.”
They went through the glass doors into the little vestibule before entering the restaurant, and Brendan turned back and said, “Sheridan told me it was alright if I wanted you. Alright if I wanted to sleep with you and I do, Kenny.”
Kenny blinked at him.
“You’d think that would take care of everything,” he said. “And yet…”
“I know,” Brendan said, and then turned around and pushed the glass door into the restaurant. When they sat down the waitress said, “Are you ready?”
“Just water,” Brendan said. “For now, we’re still thinking.”
“Still thinking,” Kenny echoed though both had decided on the fajita burrito before they’d ever come through the door.
