Summer Sons(2)

“Head to row eighteen and hang a right, it should be about three-quarters toward the end of the lot. Look for the sign at sixteen, though, the numbers fell off the rows after that. Just count your way.” He took the signature sheets and stuck them into an accordion file. “Sorry ’bout your loss.”

Andrew banged out the door; Del slipped through behind him. The pavement ended at the barbed-wire gate of the impound lot proper, giving way to gravel and, a handful of steps in, the crunch of pebbled glass. One fat grackle sat sentry atop the second numbered pole. Shreds of metal and plastic littered the ground underfoot.

Almost a third of the cars were mangled: doors crushed, paint scorch-ruined, windshields spiderwebbed with cracks. Those had permanent residence on the lot—or were interred there, he thought with a morbid humor. The sepulchral vibe ached in his molars, wreckage all around resting silent and still. The sign for row seven hung upside down from a single remaining screw. To his left at the head of row eleven, someone’s sticker-splattered banana-yellow tuner—a Civic, maybe a 2010. He sidestepped to tap the hood in solidarity. Del snorted, and he flinched. Her hand caught his elbow, thumb slipping on the sweat at the crook.

“Please just explain it to me, why you’re still going forward with this after he…” she paused. The sun forced her to squint, chin tilted as he turned to stare her straight in the face. “After he did what he did.”

“You aren’t going to say it?”

“Do you want me to?” she asked.

Without answering, he shook off her grip and kept walking. The pale tops of his feet in his sneakers and the bare length of his arms had begun to sting, unsuited as he’d been since childhood to the hot hand of summer in the South. A broiling tension pushed under his skin. The image of Eddie’s corpse, emptied out and dolled up, remained stuck to the inside of his eyelids, a non-negotiable, fragmented picture. Under the sleeves of his funeral suit, fat stitches had closed Eddie’s waxy forearms from wrist to elbow, black like tarred railroad ties.

No mistaking the ruined flesh and its bleak message, unless the obvious narrative wasn’t the whole story. Maybe instead it was a palimpsest, scrawled in haste over the original draft to cover—something else. He wasn’t sure what.

“I don’t believe he killed himself. He had no reason to,” he said against his better judgment to the sound of her footsteps crunching behind him, because he didn’t have the fortitude to turn and look her in the face. “I don’t know, Del. Does that sound like Eddie to you? He ever strike you as the type?”

“No, but that doesn’t change the fact that he did it. I hate seeing you grasping for straws like this,” she said.

Her pitying tone, the same he’d heard from the cops and his parents, pushed his temper over the edge.

“I wish you’d stayed the fuck home,” he said.

The scuff of her shoes paused as he continued on. “Jesus, Andrew.”

Naked poles stuck out of the ground like dead trees. He hooked a turn into row eighteen past a grisly, caution-taped SUV that leered with a dank stench. The hair rose on the nape of his neck. A shade loitered on the wreck’s bones like a smear of night. The ghost reached toward him in the corner of his vision, but he resisted its gravitational force out of long habit, passing the wreck before the intrusive specter even had the chance to break his stride. Down the row he spotted a sleek and boxy black bumper. His heart tripped, squeezed.

“Look at me,” she said desperately from behind him. He twisted on one heel, paused halfway between Eddie’s car and Del standing with her hands at her sides, defeated already before she spoke again. “Why not defer a semester and come home, stay with me while you adjust? If you’re still interested in the program come spring, then do it after all. I’m worried about leaving you here, not knowing what happened with him.”

“Go home, Del,” he said.

“What?” She balked.

“I’ve said it enough, we’re done here. You didn’t know him how I did. I’m going to find out what happened, and I don’t give a fuck what you think about it, okay?” His shoulders heaved with the rising volume of his voice.

Deep red climbed across her olive-tan skin from collarbones to cheeks, a steel surety flashing as she spat back, “Don’t be such a dick—he was my friend too. And I care about you. I’m trying to help.”

Friends meant nothing in comparison to what he and Eddie were to each other.

He said, “You’re not listening to me and you’re not helping jack shit. The roommate said he’d meet me at the house at seven. I’m going to the executor’s office before then, and I don’t need an audience for any of that.”

“God, you selfish fuck. The pair of you are such a mess, I don’t even…” She trailed off as her words caught up: are, she’d said. Are. She jerked her head and pushed her hands out as if shoving the air between them apart.

The tiniest twinge of guilt flared in Andrew as tears spilled in a line across her cheek. The oozing specter from the crunched SUV lapped across her feet unbeknownst to her, clueless that she stood so close to old death. Under the high-noon sun, the alien shadow held his attention like a magnet; when her heels scuffed backward two steps, it retracted to the wreck once more, unable to reach her.

His distracted silence spoke for itself.