She’d sit with them by the window.
She brought a metronome in from home.
The kid would stare, incredulous, saying, “What the fuck is that?”
To which Penny would answer flatly:
“Read in time with this.”
* * *
—
But then, it had to happen.
After four years of teaching, she came home one evening with a pregnancy kit, and this time they did go out to celebrate, but would wait out the week for Saturday.
In the meantime, next day, they were at work again:
Michael was pouring concrete.
He told a few of his friends there—they stopped and shook his hand.
Penelope was at Hyperno, with a belligerent yet beautiful boy.
She read with him at the window.
The metronome went click.
On Saturday, they ate in that fancy place in the Opera House, they stood at the top, on the steps. The great old bridge, it hung there, and the ferries pulled in at the Quay. By midafternoon, when they came back out, a ship had arrived to dock. There were crowds of people on the esplanade, and cameras and smilers in flocks. At the building and glasswork were them—Michael and Penny Dunbar—and at the bottom of the Opera House stairway, five boys had appeared, and stood standing…and soon they came down to meet us.
And we walked back out together—through the crowds and words of people, and a city all swollen with sun.
And death came walking with us.
Of course, Henry had to make an entrance that night of fists and feathers and brothers.
When I think of it now, I see it as the last wave of our collective adolescence. Just like Clay, individually, when he walked out the Bernborough Park tunnel that last time, so it was tonight for this, and Henry, and us. In the next few days, on and off, there’d be a kind of holding-on; a final nod to the last vestiges of youngness and dumbness.
We’d never see it or be it again.
* * *
—
It wasn’t long after. The TV was on.
There’d been much arguing, and Rain Man was replaced by a movie I got from Rory one year for Christmas. Bachelor Party. In Rory’s words, if we had to watch bullshit from the ’80s, it might as well be the good stuff. In Henry’s, it was Tom Hanks in his heyday, before he started getting crap and winning Golden Globes and shit; he’d researched it.
All four of us, we sat there:
I was icing my hands.
Rory and Tommy were laughing.
Hector was sprawled like a steel-striped blanket, purring on Tommy’s lap.
Clay was on the couch, quietly watching; quietly bleeding away.