“Hey!”
And again:
“Hey!” I called, and I nearly called Dad but said Michael instead, and he’d looked at me, down in the riverbed. “We need you to even the teams.”
And strangely, he’d looked to Clay.
This was Clay’s riverbed, Clay’s bridge; and hence it was also his football field, and he’d nodded and Michael soon came.
Did we have a good talk then, about uniting more strongly than ever, especially at times like these?
Of course not, we were Dunbar boys.
It was Henry who spoke to him next.
He gave him the list of instructions:
“You can run right through the arches, okay? And kick the ball over the top. You got it?”
“Got it”—and the Murderer smiled from years ago, if for only a split-second moment.
“And,” said Henry, to finish things, “tell Rory to stop fucking cheating—”
“I’m not cheating!”
We played in the blood of the sun.
The clock hit two years gracefully.
Then awfully, two and a half.
She went back to work as a substitute.
She said, “This dying shit is easy.”
(She’d just thrown up in the sink.)
When she did make it out to work, sometimes she wouldn’t come back, and we’d find her halfway home, or the last in her car, in the car park. Once she was out by the railway line, laid back in her seat near the station, and trains passed through on one side, and traffic went by on the other. We knocked on the window to wake her.
“Oh,” she’d said, “still alive, huh?”
Some mornings, she’d start to lecture us. “If any of you boys see death today, just send him over to me.” We knew she was flaunting her courage.
On days she was too sick to leave, she’d call us toward the piano.
“Come on, boys, put one here.”
We lined up to kiss her cheek.
Each time might have been the last.
Whenever there was lightness or buoyancy, you knew drowning wasn’t far.
* * *
—
As it turned out, the third Christmas was her last.