Revival

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Although I talked to Bree many times over the next two years, I didn’t actually see her again until June 19th of 2011, when, in a church on Long Island, she became Brianna Donlin-Hughes. Many of the calls were about Charles Jacobs and his troubling cures—we found half a dozen more who were suffering probable aftereffects—but as time passed, our conversations focused more and more on her job and George Hughes, whom she had met at a party and with whom she was soon sharing accommodations. He was a high-powered corporate lawyer, he was African American, and he had just turned thirty. I was sure Bree’s mother was satisfied on all counts… or as satisfied as the single mother of an only child can be.

Meanwhile, Pastor Danny’s website had gone dark and Internet chatter about him had thinned to a trickle. There were speculations that he was either dead or in a private institution somewhere, probably under an assumed name and suffering from Alzheimer’s. By late 2010, I had gleaned only two pieces of hard intelligence, both interesting but neither illuminating. Al Stamper had released a gospel CD called Thank You Jesus (guest artists included Hugh Yates’s idol, Mavis Staples), and The Latches was once more available for lease to “qualified individuals or organizations.”

Charles Daniel Jacobs had dropped off the radar.

Hugh Yates chartered a Gulfstream for the nuptials, and packed everyone from the Wolfjaw Ranch on board. Mookie McDonald represented the sixties admirably at the wedding, turning up in a paisley shirt with billowy sleeves, pipestem trousers, suede Beatle boots, and a psychedelic headscarf. The mother of the bride was just short of eye-popping in a vintage Ann Lowe dress she’d gotten on consignment, and as the vows were exchanged, she watered her corsage with copious tears. The groom could have stepped out of a Nora Roberts novel: tall, dark, and handsome. He and I had a friendly conversation at the reception, before the party began its inevitable journey from tipsy conversation to drunk-ass dancing. I had no sense that Bree had told him I was the jalopy with the rusty rocker panels on which she had learned, although I was sure that someday she would—in bed after particularly good sex, likely as not. That was fine with me, because I wouldn’t have to be there for the inevitable masculine eye-roll.

The Nederland group went back to Colorado via American Airlines, because Hugh’s gift to the newlyweds was use of the Gulfstream, which would fly them to their Hawaiian honeymoon retreat. When he announced this during the toasts, Bree squealed like a nine-year-old, jumped up, and hugged him. I’m sure Charles Jacobs was the furthest thing from her mind at that moment, which was just as it should have been. But he never left mine, not completely.

As the hour grew late, I saw Mookie whispering to the leader of the band, a very decent rock-and-blues combo with a strong lead singer and a good backlog of oldies at their command. The bandleader nodded and asked if I’d like to come up and play guitar with the band for a set or two. I was tempted, but my better angels won the day and I begged off. You may never be too old to rock and roll, but skills fade as the years stack up, and the chances of making a fool of oneself in public grow better.

I didn’t exactly consider myself retired, but I hadn’t played in front of a live audience in over a year, and had only sat in on three or four recording sessions, all cases of dire emergency. I did not acquit myself well in any of them. During the playback of one, I caught the drummer grimacing, as if he’d bitten into something sour. He saw me looking at him and said the bass had fallen out of tune. It hadn’t, and we both knew it. If it’s ridiculous for a man in his fifties to be playing bedroom games with a woman young enough to be his daughter, it’s just as ridiculous for him to be playing a Strat and high-stepping to “Dirty Water.” Still, I watched those guys kick out the jams with some longing and quite a lot of nostalgia.

Someone took my hand and I looked around to see Georgia Donlin. “How much do you miss it, Jamie?”

“Not as much as I respect it,” I said, “which is why I’m sitting here. Those guys are good.”

“And you’re not anymore?”

I found myself remembering the day I had walked into my brother Con’s bedroom and heard his acoustic Gibson whispering to me. Telling me I could play “Cherry, Cherry.”

“Jamie?” She snapped her fingers in front of my eyes. “Come back, Jamie.”

“I’m good enough to amuse myself,” I said, “but my days of getting up in front of a crowd with a guitar are over.”

Turned out I was wrong about that.

In 2012, I turned fifty-six. Hugh and his longtime girlfriend took me out to dinner. On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore—probably you’ve heard it—about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old.

When I was a teenager, I looked at over-fifties with pity and unease: they walked too slow, they talked too slow, they watched TV instead of going out to movies and concerts, their idea of a great party was hotpot with the neighbors and tucked into bed after the eleven o’clock news. But—like most other fifty-, sixty-, and seventysomethings who are in relative good health—I didn’t mind it so much when my turn came. Because the brain doesn’t age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there’s a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days. (I was spared that, at least, because most of my so-called good old days had been spent as a full-bore, straight-on-for-Texas drug addict.) I think for most people, life’s deceptive deliriums begin to fall away after fifty. The days speed up, the aches multiply, and your gait slows down, but there are compensations. In calmness comes appreciation, and—in my case—a determination to be as much of a do-right-daddy as possible in the time I had left. That meant ladling out soup once a week at a homeless shelter in Boulder, and working for three or four political candidates with the radical idea that Colorado should not be paved over.

I still dated the occasional lady. I still played tennis twice a week and rode my bike at least six miles a day, which kept my stomach flat and my endorphins flowing. Sure, I saw a few more lines around my mouth and eyes when I shaved, but on the whole, I thought I looked about the same as ever. That, of course, is the benign illusion of one’s later years. It took going back to Harlow in the summer of 2013 for me to understand the truth: I was just another frog in a pot. The good news was that so far the temperature had only been turned up to medium. The bad was that the process wouldn’t be stopping anytime soon. The three true ages of man are youth, middle age, and how the fuck did I get old so soon?

On June 19th of 2013, two years to the day after Bree’s marriage to George Hughes and a year after the birth of their first child, I arrived home from a less-than-stellar recording session to find an envelope gaily decorated with balloons in my mailbox. The return address was familiar: RFD #2, Methodist Road, Harlow, Maine. I opened it and found myself looking at a photograph of my brother Terry’s family with this caption: TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE! PLEASE COME TO OUR PARTY!

I paused before opening it, noting Terry’s white hair, Annabelle’s expanding paunch, and the three young adults who were their children. The little girl who had once run giggling through the lawn sprinkler in nothing but a saggy pair of Smurfette underpants was now a good-looking young woman with a baby—my grand-niece, Cara Lynne—in her arms. One of my nephews, the skinny one, looked like Con. The husky one looked eerily like our father… and a little like me, poor guy.

I flipped the invitation open.

Below this was a note from my brother. Although only months from his sixtieth birthday, Terry wrote in the same grade-school scrawl that had caused one of his teachers to send him home with a note reading Terence MUST improve his penmanship! paperclipped to his rank card.

I dropped the invitation into the wicker basket on the back of the kitchen door. I called this the Sometime Basket, because it was full of correspondence that I vaguely believed I’d answer sometime… which actually meant never, as you probably know. I told myself I had no desire to go back to Harlow, and this may have been true, but the pull of family was still there. Springsteen might have had something when he wrote that line about nothing feeling better than blood on blood.

I had a cleaning lady named Darlene who came by once a week to vacuum and dust and change the bed (a chore I still felt guilty about delegating, having been taught to do myself, back in the day). She was a morose old thing, and I made it my business to be out when she was in. On one of Darlene’s days, I came back to find she had fished the invitation out of the Sometime Basket and propped it open on the kitchen table. She had never done such a thing before, and I took it as an omen. That night I sat down at my computer, sighed, and sent Terry a three-word email: Count me in.

That was quite a Labor Day weekend. I enjoyed the hell out of myself, and could hardly believe I’d come close to saying no… or saying nothing, which probably would have severed my already frayed family ties for good.

It was hot in New England, and the descent into Portland Jetport on Friday afternoon was unusually bumpy in the unstable air. The drive north to Castle County was slow, but not because of traffic. I had to look at every old landmark—the farms, the rock walls, Brownie’s Store, now closed and dark—and marvel over them. It was as if my childhood were still here, barely visible under a piece of plastic that had become scratched and dusty and semi-opaque with the passage of time.

It was past six in the evening when I got to the home place, where an addition had been built on, nearly doubling its original size. There was a red Mazda in the driveway that screamed airport rental (like my Mitsubishi Eclipse), and a Morton Fuel Oil truck parked on the lawn. The truck was garlanded with enough crepe paper and flowers to make it look like a parade float. A big sign propped against the front wheels read THE SCORE IS TERRY AND ANNABELLE 35, CARA LYNNE 1! BOTH WINNERS!! YOU FOUND THE PARTY! COME ON IN! I parked, walked up the steps, raised my fist to knock, thought what the hell, I grew up here, and just strolled in.

For a moment I felt as if I had flipped back in time to the years when I could tell my age with a single number. My family was crowded around the dining room table just as they had been in the sixties, all talking at once, laughing and squabbling, passing pork chops, mashed potatoes, and a platter covered with a damp dishtowel: corn on the cob, kept warm just as my mother used to do it.

At first I didn’t recognize the distinguished gray-haired man at the living room end of the table, and I certainly didn’t know the dark-haired hunk of handsome sitting next to him. Then the professor-emeritus type caught sight of me and rose to his feet, his face lighting up, and I realized it was my brother Con.

“JAMIE!” he shouted, and buttonhooked around the table, almost knocking Annabelle out of her chair. He grabbed me in a bearhug and covered my face with kisses. I laughed and pounded him on the back. Then Terry was there as well, grabbing both of us, and the three brothers did a kind of clumsy mitzvah tantz, making the floor shake. I saw that Con was crying, and I felt a little bit like crying myself.

“Stop it, you guys!” Terry said, although he was still jumping himself. “We’ll wind up in the basement!”

For awhile we went on jumping. It seemed to me that we had to. And that was all right. That was good.

Con introduced the hunk, who was probably twenty years his junior, as “my good friend from the University of Hawaii Botany Department.” I shook hands with him, wondering if they had bothered to take two rooms at the Castle Rock Inn. In this day and age, probably not. I can’t remember when I first realized that Con was gay; probably while he was in grad school and I was still playing “Land of 1000 Dances” with the Cumberlands at the University of Maine. I’m sure our parents knew much earlier. They didn’t make a big deal of it, and so none of us did, either. Children learn much more by mute example than by spoken rules, or so it seems to me.

I only heard Dad allude to his second son’s sexual orientation once, during the late eighties. It must have made a big impression on me, because those were my blackout years, and I called home as seldom as possible. I wanted my dad to know I was still alive, but I was always afraid he might hear my oncoming death, which I had pretty much accepted, in my voice.

“I pray for Connie every night,” he said during that call. “This damn AIDS thing. It’s like they’re letting it spread on purpose.”

Con had avoided that and looked awesomely healthy now, but there was no disguising the fact that he was getting on, especially sitting next to his friend from the Botany Department. I had a flash memory of Con and Ronnie Paquette sitting shoulder to shoulder on the living room couch, singing “House of the Rising Sun” and trying to harmonize… an exercise in futility if there ever was one.

Some of this must have shown on my face, because Con grinned as he wiped his eyes. “Been a long time since we were arguing over whose turn it was to bring in Ma’s laundry off the line, huh?”

“Long time,” I agreed, and thought again of a frog too dumb to realize the water in his stovetop pond was growing ever warmer.

Terry and Annabelle’s daughter, Dawn, joined us with Cara Lynne in her arms. The baby’s eyes were that shade our mother used to call Morton Blue. “Hi, Uncle Jamie. Here’s your grand-niece. She’s one tomorrow, and she’s getting a new tooth to celebrate.”

“She’s beautiful. Can I hold her?”

Dawn smiled shyly at the stranger she’d last seen when she was still in braces. “You can try, but she usually bawls her head off when it’s someone she doesn’t know.”

I took the baby, ready to hand her back the second the yowls started. Only they didn’t. Cara Lynne examined me, reached out a hand, and tweaked my nose. Then she laughed. My family cheered and applauded. The baby looked around, startled, then looked back at me with what I could have sworn were my mother’s eyes.

And laughed again.

The actual party the next day had much the same cast, only with more supporting characters. Some I recognized at once; others looked vaguely familiar, and I realized several were children of people who had worked for my father long ago and now worked for Terry, whose empire had grown: as well as the fuel oil business, he owned a New England–wide chain of convenience stores called Morton’s Fast-Shops. Bad handwriting had been no bar to success.

A catering crew from Castle Rock presided over four grills, dealing out hamburgers and hotdogs to go with a mind-boggling array of salads and desserts. Beer flowed from steel kegs and wine from wooden ones. As I chowed down on a bacon-loaded calorie-bomb in the backyard, one of Terry’s salesmen—drunk, cheerful, and voluble—told me Terry also owned Splash City in Fryeburg and Littleton Raceway in New Hampshire. “That track don’t make a cent of money,” the salesman said, “but you know Terry—he always loved the stocks and bombers.”

I remembered him working with my father on various incarnations of the Road Rocket in the garage, both of them dressed in greasy tee-shirts and saggy-butt coveralls, and suddenly realized that my hometown, country-mouse brother was well-to-do. Perhaps even rich.

Every time Dawn brought Cara Lynne near, the little girl held her arms out to me. I ended up toting her around for most of the afternoon, and she finally fell asleep on my shoulder. Seeing this, her dad relieved me of my burden. “I’m amazed,” he said as he laid her on a blanket in the shade of the backyard’s biggest tree. “She never takes to folks like that.”

“I’m flattered,” I said, and kissed the sleeping baby’s teething-flushed cheek.

There was a lot of talk about old days and old times, the kind of chatter that’s fabulously interesting to those who were there and stupendously boring to those who weren’t. I steered clear of the beer and wine, so when the party moved four miles down the road to the Eureka Grange, I was one of the designated drivers, trying to find my way through the gears of a monster King Cab pickup that belonged to the oil company. I hadn’t driven a standard in thirty years, and my inebriated passengers—there must have been a dozen, counting the seven or so in the truck bed—howled with laughter each time I popped the clutch and the truck lurched. It was a wonder none of them tumbled out the back.

The catering crew had arrived ahead of us, and there were already food tables set up along the sides of a dance floor that I remembered well. I stood there looking at that expanse of polished wood until Con squeezed my shoulder.

“Bring back memories, baby brother?”

I thought of walking onto the bandstand for the first time, scared to death and smelling the sweat that came roasting up from my armpits in waves. And later, Mom and Dad waltzing by as we played “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”

“More than you’ll ever know,” I said.

“I think I do,” he said, and hugged me. In my ear he whispered it again: “I think I do.”

There were maybe seventy people at the home place for the noon meal; by seven o’clock, there were twice that many at Eureka Grange No. 7, and the place could have used some of Charlie Jacobs’s magic air-conditioning to augment the lackadaisical ceiling fans. I grabbed the sort of dessert that was still a Harlow specialty—lime Jell-O with bits of canned fruit suspended in it—and took it outside. I walked around the corner of the building, nibbling away with a plastic spoon, and there was the fire escape beneath which I had kissed Astrid Soderberg for the first time. I remembered how the fur parka she had been wearing framed the perfect oval of her face. I remembered the taste of her strawberry lipstick.

Was it all right? I had asked. And she had replied, Do it again and I’ll tell you.

“Hey, freshie.” From right behind me, making me jump. “Want to play some music tonight?”

At first I didn’t recognize him. The lanky, long-haired teenager who had recruited me to play rhythm guitar in Chrome Roses was now bald on top, gray on the sides, and sporting a gut that hung over his tight-cinched trousers. I stared at him, my little paper bowl of Jell-O drooping in one hand.

“Norm? Norm Irving?”

He grinned widely enough to flash gold teeth at the back of his mouth. I dropped my Jell-O and hugged him. He laughed and hugged me back. We told each other that we looked great. We told each other it had been too long. And of course we talked about the old days. Norm said he’d gotten Hattie Greer pregnant and married her. It only lasted a few years, but after a period of post-divorce acrimony, they had decided to put the past aside and be friends. Their daughter, Denise, was now pushing forty, and owned her own hair salon in Westbrook.

“Free and clear, too, bank all paid off. I got two boys by my second wife, but between you and me, Deenie’s my darlin. Hattie’s got one by her second husband.” He leaned closer, smiling grimly. “In and out of jail. Kid’s not worth the powder to blow him to hell.”

“What about Kenny and Paul?”

Kenny Laughlin, our bass player, had also married his Chrome Roses sweetie, and they were still married. “He owns an insurance agency in Lewiston. Doin good. He’s here tonight. You didn’t see him?”

“No.” Although maybe I had, and just hadn’t recognized him. And maybe he hadn’t recognized me.

“As for Paul Bouchard…” Norm shook his head. “He was climbing in Acadia State Park and took a fall. Lived two days, then passed away. 1990, that was. Probably a mercy. Docs said he would have been paralyzed from the neck down, if he’d lived. What they call a quad.”

For a moment I imagined our old drummer pulling through. Lying in bed with a machine to help him breathe and watching Pastor Danny on TV. I shook the thought away. “What about Astrid? Do you know where she is?”

“Downeast somewhere. Castine? Rockland?” He shook his head. “Don’t remember. I know she dropped out of college to get married, and her folks were pissed at her. Probably double pissed when she got divorced. I think she runs a restaurant, one of those lobster shack things, but don’t quote me. You guys had it bad, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “We sure did.”

He nodded. “Young love. Nothin on earth like it. Not sure I’d want to see her these days, because the old Soda Burger was steppin dynamite back then. Steppin nitro. Wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of the ruined cabin next to Skytop. And the iron rod. How it glowed red when the lightning struck it. “Yes, she was.”

For a moment we said nothing, then he clapped me on the shoulder. “Anyway, what do you think? Gonna gig with us? You better say yes, because the band’s gonna be fuckin lame if you say no.”

“You’re in the band? The Castle Rock All-Stars? Kenny too?”

“Sure. We don’t play much anymore—not like the old days—but no way we could turn this one down.”

“Did my brother Terry put you up to this?”

“He might’ve thought you’d come up for a tune or two, but no. He just wanted a band from the old days, and me and Kenny are about the only ones from back then who are still alive, still hanging around this shit-all neck of the woods, and still playing. Our rhythm guy’s a carpenter from Lisbon Falls, and last Wednesday he fell off a roof and broke both legs.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“His ouch is my gain,” Norm Irving said. “We were gonna play as a trio, which, as you know, sucks the bird. Three out of four Chrome Roses ain’t bad, considering we played our last gig at the PAL hop up-the-city over thirty-five years ago. So come on. Reunion tour, and all that.”

“Norm, I don’t have a guitar.”

“I got three in the truck,” he said. “You can take your pick. Just remember, we still start with ‘Hang On Sloopy.’”

We trooped onstage to enthusiastic, alcohol-fueled applause. Kenny Laughlin, as thin as ever but now sporting several less than lovely moles on his face, looked up from adjusting the strap on his Fender P-Bass and dapped me. I wasn’t nervous, as I had been the first time I stood on this stage with a guitar in my hands, but I did feel as if I were having a particularly vivid dream.

Norm adjusted his mike one-handed, just as he always had, and addressed the audience waiting to bust a few of their old-time rock-and-roll moves. “It says Castle Rock All-Stars on the drumkit, folks, but tonight we’ve got a special guest on rhythm, and for the next couple of hours, we’re Chrome Roses again. Kick it in, Jamie.”

I thought of kissing Astrid under the fire escape. I thought of Norm’s rusty microbus and of his father, Cicero, sitting on the busted-down sofa in his old trailer, rolling dope in Zig-Zag papers and telling me if I wanted to get my license first crack out of the basket, I’d better cut my fucking hair. I thought of playing teen dances at the Auburn RolloDrome, and how we never stopped when the inevitable fights broke out between the kids from Edward Little and Lisbon High, or those from Lewiston High and St. Dom’s; we just turned it up louder. I thought of how life had been before I realized I was a frog in a pot.

I shouted: “One, two, you-know-what-to-do!”

We kicked it in.

Key of E.

All that shit starts in E.

In the seventies, we might have played until one-o’clock curfew, but this was no longer the seventies, and by eleven o’clock we were dripping sweat and exhausted. That was okay; on Terry’s orders, the beer and wine had been whisked away at ten, and with no more firewater, the crowd thinned out fast. Most of those remaining had resumed their seats, content to listen but too exhausted to dance.

“You’re a hell of a lot better than you used to be, freshie,” Norm said as we racked our instruments.

“So are you.” Which was as much a lie as you look great. At fourteen I never would have believed the day would come when I’d be a better rock guitarist than Norman Irving, but that day had come. He gave me a smile to say he knew what was better left unspoken. Kenny joined us, and the three remaining members of Chrome Roses huddled in a hug we would have called “faggot stuff” when we were in high school.

Terry joined us, along with Terry Jr., his eldest son. My brother looked tired, but he also looked supremely happy. “Listen, Con and his friend took a bunch of folks who were too loaded to drive back to Castle Rock. Will you haul a bunch of Harlow folks in the King Cab, if I lend you Terry Jr. to copilot?”

I said I’d be happy to, and after a final so-long to Norm and Kenny (accompanied by those weird limp-fish handshakes peculiar to musicians), I gathered up my load of drunkies and set off. For awhile my nephew gave me instructions I hardly needed, even in the dark, but by the time I offloaded the last two or three couples out on Stackpole Road, he had ceased. I looked over and saw the kid was leaning against the passenger window, fast asleep. I woke him when we got back to the home place on Methodist Road. He kissed my cheek (which touched me more deeply than he could know), and stumbled into the house, where he would probably sleep until noon on Sunday, as adolescents are prone to do. I wondered if he would do so in my old room, and decided probably not; he’d be quartered in the new addition. Time changes everything, and maybe that’s okay.

I hung the King Cab’s keys on the rack in the hall, headed out to my rental car, and spied lights in the barn. I walked over, peeped in, and there was Terry. He had changed out of his party duds and into a coverall. His newest toy, a Chevy SS from the late sixties or early seventies, gleamed under the hanging lights like a blue jewel. He was Simonizing it.

He looked up when I came in. “Can’t sleep just yet. Too much excitement. I’ll buff on this baby for awhile, then toddle off to bed.”

I ran my hand up the hood. “It’s beautiful.”

“Now it is, but you should have seen it when I picked it up at auction down in Portsmouth. Looked like junk to most of the buyers there, but I thought I could bring it back.”

“Revive it,” I said. Not really talking to Terry.

He gave me a thoughtful look, then shrugged. “You could call it that, I guess, and once I drop a new tranny in er, it’ll be most of the way there. Not much like the old Road Rockets, is it?”

I laughed. “You remember when the first one went ass over teapot at the Speedway?”

Terry rolled his eyes. “First lap. Fucking Duane Robichaud. I think he got his license at Sears and Roebuck.”

“Is he still around?”

“Nah, dead ten years. Ten at least. Brain cancer. By the time they found it, poor bastard never had a chance.”

Suppose I were a neurosurgeon, Jacobs had said that day at The Latches. Suppose I told you your chances of dying were twenty-five percent. Wouldn’t you still go ahead?

“That’s tough.”

He nodded. “Remember what we used to say when we were kids? ‘What’s tough? Life. What’s Life? A magazine. How much does it cost? Fifteen cents. I only got a dime. That’s tough. What’s tough? Life.’ Around and around it went.”

“I remember. Back then we thought it was a joke.” I hesitated. “Do you think of Claire very much, Terry?”

He tossed his polishing rag into a bucket and went to the sink to wash his hands. There had been nothing but one faucet back in the day—just cold—but now there were two. He turned them on, grabbed a cake of Lava, and began to soap up. All the way to the elbows, just as Dad had taught us.

“Every damn day. I think of Andy, too, but less often. That was what you call the natural order of things, I guess, although he might have lived a little longer if he hadn’t been so fond of his knife and fork. What happened to Claire, though… that was just fucking wrong. You know?”

“Yes.”

He leaned against the hood of the SS, looking at nothing in particular. “Remember how beautiful she was?” He shook his head slowly. “Our beautiful sister. That bastard—that beast—cheated her out of all the years she still had coming, then took the coward’s way out.” He swiped a hand across his face. “We shouldn’t talk about Claire. It makes me emotional.”

It made me emotional, too. Claire, who had been just enough older for me to see her as a kind of backup Mom. Claire, our beautiful sister, who never hurt anyone.

We walked across the dooryard, listening to the crickets sing in the high grass. They always sing the loudest in late August and early September, as if they know summer is ending.

Terry stopped at the foot of the steps, and I saw his eyes were still wet. He’d had a good day, but a long and stressful one, just the same. I had been wrong to bring up Claire at the end of it.

“Stay the night, little bro. The couch is a pullout.”

“No,” I said. “I promised Connie I’d have breakfast with him and his partner at the Inn in the morning.”

“Partner,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “Right.”

“Now, now, Terence. Don’t go all twentieth century on me. These days they could get married in a dozen states, if they wanted. Including this one.”

“Oh, I don’t mind that, who marries who ain’t none of mine, but partner ain’t what that guy is, no matter what Connie may think. I know a freeloader when I see one. Christ, he’s half Con’s age.”

That made me think of Brianna, who was less than half my age.

I gave Terry a hug and a peck on the cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Lunch, before I head back to the airport.”

“You got it. And Jamie? You played the spots off that guitar tonight.”

I thanked him and walked to my car. I was opening the door when he spoke my name. I turned back.

“Do you remember Reverend Jacobs’s last Sunday in the pulpit? When he gave what we used to call the Terrible Sermon?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very well.”

“We were all so shocked at the time, and we chalked it up to the grief he was feeling over the loss of his wife and son. But you know what? When I think of Claire, I think I’d like to find him and shake his hand.” Terry’s arms—brawny, like our father’s—were folded over his coverall. “Because what I think now is that he was brave to say those things. What I think now is that every word was right.”

Terry might have gotten rich, but he was still thrifty, and we ate catered leftovers for Sunday lunch. For most of it, I held Cara Lynne on my lap, feeding her tiny bits of things. When it was time for me to go and I handed her back to Dawn, the baby held her arms out to me.

“No, honey,” I said, kissing that incredibly smooth forehead. “I have to go.”

She only had a dozen words or so—one of them was now my name—but I’ve read that their understanding is much greater, and she knew what I was telling her. The little face wrinkled up, she held her arms out again, and tears filled those blue eyes that were the same shade as my mother’s and my dead sister’s.

“Go quick,” Con said, “or you’ll have to adopt her.”

So I went. Back to my rental car, back to Portland Jetport, back to Denver International, back to Nederland. But I kept thinking of those chubby outstretched arms, and those tear-filled Morton Blue eyes. She was just a year old, but she had wanted me to stay longer. That’s how you know you’re home, I think, no matter how far you’ve gone from it or how long you’ve been in some other place.

Home is where they want you to stay longer.

During March of 2014, after most of the ski-bunnies had left Vail, Aspen, Steamboat Springs, and our own Eldora Mountain—came news of a monster blizzard approaching. Our piece of the famed Polar Vortex had dropped four feet on Greeley already.

I hung in at Wolfjaw for most of the day, helping Hugh and Mookie batten down the studios and the big house. I stayed until the wind began to pick up and the first flurries started to scatter down from the leaden skies. Then Georgia came out, dressed in a barncoat, earmuffs, and a Wolfjaw Ranch gimme cap. She was in full scold-mode.

“You send those guys home,” she told Hugh. “Unless you want them stuck side o’ the road somewhere until June.”

“Like the Donner Party,” I said. “But I’d never eat Mookie. Too tough.”

“Go on, you two, scat,” Hugh said. “Just double-check the studio doors on your way down to the road.”

We did so, and checked the barn for good measure. I even took the time to dole out apple slices, although Bartleby, my favorite, had died three years ago. By the time I dropped Mookie off at his rooming house, it was snowing hard and the wind was blowing thirty or more. Downtown Nederland was deserted, the traffic lights swinging and drifts already piling up in the doorways of shops that had closed early for the day.

“Get home fast!” Mookie shouted to be heard over the wind. He had knotted his bandanna over his mouth and nose, making him look like an elderly outlaw.

I did as he said, the wind shouldering at my car like a bad-tempered bully the whole way. It pushed me even harder as I made my way up the walk, clutching my collar to my face, which was clean-shaven and unprepared for what Colorado winter felt like when it decided to get serious. I had to use both hands to yank the foyer door shut once I was inside.

I checked my mailbox and saw a single letter. I pulled it out, and one glance was enough to tell me who it was from. Jacobs’s handwriting had grown shaky and spidery, but was still recognizable. The only surprise was the return address: General Delivery, Motton, Maine. Not quite my hometown, but right next door. Too close for comfort, in my opinion.

I tapped the envelope against my palm and almost obeyed my first impulse, which was to rip it to pieces, open the door, and scatter the shreds to the wind. I still imagine doing that—every day, sometimes every hour—and wonder what might have changed if I’d done so. Instead, I turned it over. There, written in the same unsteady hand, was a single sentence: You will want to read this.

I didn’t, but tore it open, anyway. I pulled out a single sheet of paper wrapped around a smaller envelope. Written on the face of this second envelope was Read my letter before opening this one. So I did.

God help me, so I did.

An emissary. I didn’t like the sound of that.

The wind howled; the sound of snow hitting the panes of the door was like fine sand. The road to Boulder would be closed soon, if it wasn’t already. I held the smaller envelope, thinking something happened. I didn’t want to know what, but it felt too late to turn back now. I sat on the stairs leading to my apartment and opened the enclosure as a particularly savage gust of wind shook the building. The handwriting was as shaky as Jacobs’s, sloping down the page, but I knew it at once. Of course I did; I had received love letters, some of them quite hot, in this same hand. My stomach went soft, and for a moment I thought I might pass out. I lowered my head, the hand not holding the letter covering my eyes and squeezing my temples. When the faintness passed, I was almost sorry.

I read the letter.

I turned the paper over, my head thudding. For the first time in years, I wished I were high. Being high would make it possible to look at the signature waiting for me below without wanting to scream.

Astrid. Dear God.

Astrid again, after all these years. I closed my eyes and saw her standing beneath the fire escape, her face young and beautiful, framed in the hood of her parka.

I opened my eyes and read the note Jacobs had added below her address.

If it’s so goddam short, I wondered, why didn’t you call, or at least send your devil’s bargain by Express Mail?

But I knew. He wanted time to be short, because it wasn’t Astrid he cared about. Astrid was a pawn. I, on the other hand, was one of the pieces in the back row. I had no idea why, but I knew it was so.

The letter shook in my hand as I read the last lines.

I sat on the stairs for two minutes, taking deep breaths and willing my heart to slow. I kept thinking of her hips tilted against mine, my cock throbbing and as hard as a length of rebar, one of her hands caressing the nape of my neck as she blew cigarette smoke into my mouth.

At last I got up and climbed to my apartment, the two letters dangling from my hand. The stairs weren’t long or steep, and I was in good shape from all the bike-riding, but I still had to stop and rest twice to catch my breath before I got to the top, and my hand was shaking so badly I had to steady it with the other before I could get my key into the slot.

The day was dark and my apartment was full of shadows, but I didn’t bother to turn on any lights. What I had to do was best done quickly. I took my phone off my belt, dropped onto the couch, and dialed Jacobs’s cell. It rang a single time.

“Hello, Jamie,” he said.

“You bastard,” I said. “You fucking bastard.”

“Glad to hear from you, too. What’s your decision?”

How much did he know about us? Had I ever told him anything? Had Astrid? If not, how much had he dug up? I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was only asking for form’s sake.

I told him I’d be there ASAP.

“If you want to come, of course. Delighted to have you, although I don’t actually need you until July. If you’d rather not see her… as she is now, I mean—”

“I’ll be on a plane as soon as the weather clears. If you can do your thing before I get there… fix her… heal her… then go ahead. But you will not let her leave wherever you are until I see her. No matter what.”

“You don’t trust me, do you?” He sounded as if this made him terribly sad, but I didn’t put much stock in that. He was a master at projecting emotion.

“Why would I, Charlie? I’ve seen you in operation.”

He sighed. The wind gusted, shaking the building and howling along the eaves.

“Where in Motton are you?” I asked… but, like Jacobs, only for form’s sake. Life is a wheel, and it always comes back around to where it started.