After dinner, I washed my plate then walked into the living room to watch the news on the television. A storm was coming up and I wanted to see how bad it was going to be.
The cashier at the grocery store this afternoon said it was going to be real bad. I looked out the window then and saw the clouds: dark and grey like a herd of dirty sheep, grazing about all fidgety because they knew the wolf was going to come sooner than later. She said there was going to be hail pelting down on us hard: broken windows, shattered glass all over the ground, and possibly, if we’re not careful enough, bruised up and lacerated people. Natural vandalism and domestic violence on a communal scale.
“It’s going to be the real deal,” she said, as if nothing ever is the real deal by default. Then she asked, “Do you want the sardines in a different bag?”
Shaking the terrified sheep out of my mind I said, “No, just throw’em in with the rest of the stuff.” So she quite literally threw them in the first bag.
The weather man on the television carried an aura of urgency, such as it was when Lucy and I were trying to reach the hospital in time for Bret to be born. The weather man told us to board up our windows just in case, and to stay indoors. He said there was going to be rain too, and a lot of it. Also, wind.
Bret wasn’t born in a storm, but it felt like he was, as Lucy was screaming at the top of her lungs. She acted as if she might have been possessed when in fact, I know she was – by sheer pain as her muscles contracted when she dilated on the passenger seat. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I saw Bret’s small head, smeared with blood, popping out just under Lucy’s seat belt.
I myself nearly crashed our car, driving like crazy on the highway. But we made it in time.
Bret’s gone now though. Bret and Lucy are. Now it’s just me and this impending storm. It should be landing in an hour or so.
**********
I went down to the basement. There is where I have the furnace. It’s getting rusty and dusty, but it still gets the job done. Opposite the furnace are planks of wood that I’ve kept throughout the years in case of emergencies that would need it in any which way. The wood itself came from a junk yard three miles south of this house.
A good friend of mine, Mavis, worked at that junk yard. He was a man who loved what he was doing. He loved to get dirt on his hands, sweat on his forehead and grease on his overalls. You tell him about any project you’ll be doing at home and he’ll whip up a solution right there at the junk yard.
Oh how Bret loved Mavis. Mavis was like an uncle to him. Bret had spent many summer days before his teenage years at the junk yard with Mavis doing all kinds of shenanigans. By six or seven o’clock in the evening, Lucy and I would pick him up, invite Mavis for dinner, and they’d tell us about all the odd-ball projects they did together, even ones they did just to experiment with ideas and such.
He was quite the handy-man, Mavis was. With a strong and hardy laugh too.
For his funeral, me, Bret, and my buddies went to the junk yard and had a coffin custom-made for him. That way, even in death, he’d still feel like he was right here on earth, at his junk yard banging away with his tools, spare tires, metals, all of it. A personalized heaven.
Bret didn’t stop crying for a full month and a half.
I got five or so planks of wood, a box of nails and a hammer, and walked back upstairs.
**********
If Bret were still here and alive, I’d have him help me board up the windows. He would have been thirty-eight years old today. I imagine he would be as robust and husky as I was at that age. They say that sixteen is the weirdest age to be, but in my opinion I think it would be age thirty-eight. At that age, you’re still young, elastic, energetic and active; yet at the same time, you’re able to start imagining life just beyond the warmth of the setting sun on the horizon, the blackness and coldness of outer-space: the chilling vastness of arthritis, heart conditions and – even further out in the dark – dementia. You realize how fast your twenties whizzed by, and how your thirties are whizzing by at the same pace, and things would whiz by even faster in your forties, then fifties and so on. And what if you find yourself all alone like me? A withering man over-thinking life’s plentiful episodes of this and that and oh my! since the time he can remember, and then since the time he learned the manifold meanings of regret.
If Bret were here, I’d have him help me board up these windows. Then we’d weather the storm together in the living room, and he’d listen to my telling him all the stories I’ve accumulated throughout the years – stories of love, tribulations, humility and pride. And he’d tell me of his hopes and dreams; surely thirty-something-year-olds don’t give up the chase too soon – both the physical and metaphysical. I would tell him how I met his mother, how I saw her beautiful legs in the light of the window on the bus, and how she, in the corner of her eye, saw me looking at her, adoring her. I would tell Bret how we romanced throughout college after that day on the bus and later on, throughout the decades.
Who knows now what Bret would have told me? I never truly got to know his deepest desires, his life-long goals – he died at the whimsical age of seventeen. Fresh out of high school; his college years on the horizon and no major in mind. If only Lucy and I had been more careful with him. Stricter, perhaps.
There were only five main windows that needed to be boarded up. We also have a glass annex, which I intend on dismantling some time. It holds too many memories, both harsh and sweet, yet altogether too strong for my heart, as my psychiatrist says. So I didn’t bother boarding it up.
Boarding up the other windows elicited all of my strength plus tax – a bucketful of sweat. A man of my age sweats like a rain-forest. Lucy would have been having a fit, Oh dear, I’ll go get a towel; I knew this was going to be too much for you. You’ve got to rest. She was always thinking of my health before she had her accident, as if I really am as frail inside as I look on the outside.
After the windows were all done, I went back into the kitchen for a snack.
**********
The storm outside the kitchen window was getting loud. The hail was banging, scraping the wood; so intrusive it had become. I decided to cook fisherman’s eggs with the sardines.
As a child, I never was fond of sardines. It was only in my mid to late adulthood that I started to appreciate all its nourishments: the protein and omega-3 fatty acids, the health benefits of which doctors love to embellish, and their taste, which is one of a kind — the acquired kind.
Lucy and I used to go fishing together in my old boat, which I had named after Lucy herself, back when she was still my fiancée. (We had been engaged for quite a while.) After a day out in sea, we would prepare the fish we had caught and put it in the freezer for later days. Then we’d prepare fisherman’s eggs, more so as a joke because we always got a kick out of its nomenclature. It was fitting: fisherman’s eggs for fishermen. Well, fisherwomen, when you include Lucy. We used to eat it while we sat in the glass annex that overlooked the woods on the edge of the backyard.
The glass annex was also where Lucy and I had all of our fights while Bret was safe in his room, unknowingly. At the same time, the glass annex was where we held our family fun times, like Fourth of July luncheons and birthday parties. Once or twice Lucy and I more than enjoyed ourselves there when we were still young both before and after Bret was born. A lot happened in the glass annex that it now reminds me of past happiness, past sadness, past everything.
I pre-heated the oven to around 375 degrees Fahrenheit and placed a bowl inside it. As it was pre-heating, I got out the can of sardines from the pantry and opened it up. Then I chopped up some onions, parsley and garlic. For a little bit, I mistook the soft, subtle, staccato noise from the knife chopping on the board with the pelting of the hail outside. It was as if the storm were whispering something in my ear. Something I already knew. It was hauntingly intimate.
Stop it. What are you trying to say anyway? That I’m an old, lonely fart? That I need to stop these recollections as they’ll only make my life all the more miserable? Leave me alone. Leave me with my sardines.
The hail never stopped pelting down and it only grew more deafeningly. But still, it was not quite profanity to my ears.
After five minutes, I put the sardines in the bowl, together with the chopped onions, garlic and parsley. I added salt and pepper and the oil that came in the can with the sardines.
In the fridge, I had four eggs left, so I took those out, cracked them and put them in the bowl as well. Then I put the concoction in the oven and waited.
**********
It is an odd feeling, returning to something at a later time and finding that something has changed. It isn’t the same, though the full-length glass windows of the annex haven’t altered much over the years.
I sat down on a wicker bench that was padded with a deep red seat-cover Lucy and I had gotten from an antique shop when we were vacationing in New Mexico. It was during the hot summer before Bret was born. To be exact, the shade of color was Tuscan red, and it had light tan floral patterns on it and pictures of small maracas that Lucy absolutely adored. Oh, dear, we must get this one. This is what we’ve been searching for! It’s just perfect, isn’t it wonderful? Lucy had a way with expressing things she loved. Things she had to have because it was love at first sight. That was what drew me to her. And my being drawn to her only made her all the more aware that she was drawn to me.
Lucy, darling, if you could be here with me, now. Eat these fisherman eggs with me one more time.
And yet, I finished the bowl, alone and with a heavy heart. I sat down and stared out the windows, looking hard into the storm, watching the hail pelt the glass, and then eventually, marking it like meteors denting the earth, poking it too hard and making deep craters.
I watched and watched and kept watching.
After thirty minutes, most of the windows were shattered.
Although it was startling at first, I welcomed it.
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