DEAD BOYFRIENDS by Karen Brown

In the lot behind Junior’s garage, buried in tall summer grass, are the hulls of cars in which Nan once had sex. Above her the elms wave and whine with insects. She treads the grass down in her sandals. Her hair sticks to her forehead, the back of her neck. Junior saunters along ahead of her with his same slanting shoulders and slouch, his black stringy hair threaded with gray now. They aren’t looking for anything in particular yet. She had gone to the garage and knocked on the scarred wooden door in back, and he had opened it and stood there, nodding at her, his large dark eyes blank.
“You don’t really remember me, do you?” she asks him now.
He stops and looks back over his shoulder. He holds a cigarette in his blackened fingers, and points. “That,” he says. “That was Matt Olander’s classic Buick.”
Nan feels a little saddened lurch. The car seems hunched over in the grass. Nan sees that the front end is crushed, shoved in up to the dashboard. The paint still holds its glimmer of metal flake. Queen Anne’s lace grows up around the back bumper.
“What happened to it?” she asks.
Junior says nothing for a long moment. He has always been quiet. He brings his cigarette to his mouth and takes a drag. His hair still falls over his eyes, Nan notices, so you can’t read his face. “Run into a tree,” he says.
Not Matt, she thinks. Matt Olander worked on cars in the Mobil station’s bay. Later, they surmised it was the asbestos in the brakes that gave him the lung cancer that killed him. She used to ride with him in the ’56 Buick convertible to the Berlin Turnpike motel. The red vinyl seats smelled of years of men’s hair pomade. Matt’s hands smelled of the soap he used to take off the grease. Nan doesn’t feel anything about his death. It happened years after she knew him, when he had married and even had children. These things, even more than his death, surprise her. As if once she left him, he should have persisted in the same manner, like Junior, found easily this afternoon in the same place she last saw him.
She had come home to visit her old high school friend, Betty Barnard, who, like Nan, had recently divorced. Betty had moved back into her mother’s house, a place Nan spent a lot of time as a teenager. On an impulse, without calling first, Nan packed a bag for herself and one for Clemmy, while he watched, quiet and wide-eyed from the center of the unmade king-sized bed. She told him, as she packed, all about her friend Betty from school, making her seem like one of his own from his preschool class, friends he missed with a perceptible sorrow since the initiation of summer. She realized the words tumbled from her mouth, that her movements had become frantic, but, too late. As she closed the flap of the small suitcase Clemmy flinched.
“Oh, stop it,” she said, riddled with guilt. She held out her arms and he climbed into them. He smelled of buttered breakfast toast. The traffic was thick from Boston, and the drive to Connecticut took nearly three hours. Clemmy sat, as he always did, a perfect child in his car seat, his little books spread out within reach. After only an hour of driving, he fell asleep. Nan had heard horrors from other mothers, of children throwing things, or shrieking, or twisting out from under their straps, and she had not understood any of it. She drove into town and went to Betty’s mother’s house, a split-level ranch in a subdivision off Terry Plains Road. The neighborhood seemed shadowy and deteriorated, the trashcans rolling on the sidewalks, the lawns full of crabgrass. She realized then that the trees had grown. The maples and elms, once new saplings braced with wires, were lofty, canopying the street. Nan remembered the times she ran away, and went to Betty’s, whose divorced mother smoked long Benson & Hedges menthols, and went out ballroom dancing. Nan would hear her keys fumbling in the lock at night, her giddy laughter. She would kick off her pumps, one at a time, into the closet of the next bedroom. Sometimes, she would come into Betty’s room and flip on the light and look at them on the twin beds. She’d pause there, as if she wanted to say something and thought better of it, her earrings dangling a kind of music. Nan feigned sleep, feeling the bright overhead light against her lids, wondering when she might be loved enough. Betty had a rec room and a stereo, and Betty and Nan began having boys over, Betty upstairs in her own bedroom, and Nan downstairs on the rec room carpeting. Nan’s father would eventually search her out, pulling into the driveway on a day she had not shown up at school. He would come to the door, his gaunt face mask-like. Nan remembered hiding up in Betty’s pink painted room, peering at him from the upstairs window.
“I know you’re up there,” he would say, stepping back and looking up at the window.
Nan would feel a certain sadness, staring at his shoes planted on the cement porch. They were his dress shoes, the ones he buffed with a soft cloth on Sundays before church. She would think of her own room at home, its dormer window looking out over the apple orchard in spring, the blossoms white and pink on the uneven ground, the smell of her mother’s clothes left hanging in her parents’ bedroom closet. Yet, she would not relent. She watched him, and let him leave, the part of her that had torn healed over in the boys’ clumsy arms, a hastily seamed scar.
On the day she arrived in town, neither Betty nor her mother was home. Nan sat in her car in their driveway and did not know what to do. Clemmy still slept, his little hands in fists on his lap. She left a note on the screen door and considered driving to a motel, rather than face her father just yet. Nan did not often come home to visit. She was the youngest, the one everyone considered the most selfish. Her two sisters lived within proximity, and cooked and cleaned and cared for their father as if he were infirm. Nan had moved far enough away, first to college in Rhode Island, then to Boston, so that she did not have to participate in any of the daily tending. Her father, when she saw him on holidays, always seemed perfectly capable and robust. She sat in Betty’s mother’s driveway a while longer. It was noon, and neither she nor Clemmy had eaten since early that morning. The air was still and heavy with humidity. She smelled the stink of the trashcans, mixed with the scent of cut grass and gasoline. And then she had the feeling that Betty was up in her old pink bedroom, peeking out at her, waiting for her to leave. It was an odd feeling of reversal. Nan saw herself as the one with nothing to offer.
She decided to drive to her father’s. He lived in the house she grew up in, an older farmhouse set back from the narrow road, with a screened front porch, and two gables, and beds full of flowers – daisy and black-eyed Susan, delphinium and larkspur. Around the side of the house grew hydrangea, heavy with blooms. The country club had purchased the back pastures years ago, tamed and groomed the wild grass into golf course greens. The barn had burned the year after Nan’s mother died. It was a relic of the days when the farm was operating, a high, empty space filled with molding hay, and the fire was cited as accidental, unknown teenagers playing with matches. But after the fire her father gave up hope. It happened quickly, a kind of deflating. His face sagged around his cheeks. His eyes dulled. Most people said it had to do with the inexplicable nature of events, one after the other, but Nan always believed her father thought she had burned down the barn. Her tires crunched the gravel drive, past the orchard, the trees gnarled and old. Her father came right away at her knock, and let her in, propping the screen door with a look of genuine surprise.
“You’re here,” he said.
He held her in a stiff embrace. His shirtfront smelled the same, like loam and soap flakes.
“Where’s the boy?” he asked, stepping back. She saw his face brighten.
“Asleep still, in the car,” she said.
Her father bounded down the steps and across the yard. Nan watched him extricate Clemmy from his car seat, and carry him, still groggy, up onto the porch. Her father set him on his feet in the kitchen, and Nan saw that Clemmy had wet his pants. The front of her father’s shirt was dampened from carrying him. “A little accident I see,” her father said. He knelt by Clemmy, grinning, his sharp chin jutting out.
“We’re still working on that,” Nan said. Her son’s hair was rumpled from the long drive. He was small for his age, but sturdy and smart. He had been potty-trained at two and a half, and this was new, one of a number of reversions that she witnessed with a sinking sense of irreversibility, as if they would accumulate until he had returned to his infancy, a time she found herself the most incompetent. Nan opened Clemmy’s bag, and pulled out some dry clothes to change him, and then her father offered to do it, and Nan gratefully sank down into her old spot at the pine table in the kitchen. She could hear her father and Clemmy in the bathroom, her father’s boisterous encouragements, and Clemmy’s soft and higher pitched replies. After, Clemmy colored at the table, and her father stood at the counter and made him a sandwich. He set out the old plaid beanbag ashtray, and she told him she had quit. “I’m impressed,” he said. His face beamed. Perhaps he was, she thought. This was all it took. She assumed he would not mention her husband, who had met another woman, and asked for the divorce, but then he did, anyway.
“Richard stopped in last week,” he said.
Nan said nothing, and her father turned back to the counter.
“Well, he was in town,” he said, carefully.
“What for?” Nan asked, her voice a little shrill.
Her father put his hand on the refrigerator handle.
“We went fishing,” he said. “Like we always do.”
The air in the kitchen was heavy, laden with the smell of that morning’s cooked bacon. The windows were open, and her mother’s lace curtains puffed out into the room, and then pulled back against the old screens. The sills were filled with the dry wings of bees. Flies landed on the tabletop, on the old aqua Formica counter. There was the cracked porcelain sugar bowl with its glued lid. On one end of the long table where her father’s chair was pushed back a game of solitaire spread like a map of his loneliness. He offered her a sandwich, or something to drink, but she refused. He stood there, unable to find anything to do or say.
“Will you stay the night?” he asked her. Clemmy pulled apart his sandwich and poked at the peanut butter with his finger. Nan said she might, that she would take their things upstairs, and she rose from the table and went up to her old room. She sat on the edge of the bed and tried to remember someone she might call, but she could not. She stared at her little bookshelf lined with Nancy Drews, all in numerical order, their yellow spines faded. The room was still decorated the way her mother had planned it – with porcelain cats, and white painted furniture, a room for a twelve-year-old girl. From the window she saw her father outside with Clemmy, busying himself in the flowerbeds. He had given the boy a watering can and she watched him fill it from the hose. Nan unpacked Clemmy’s things. She pulled open the bureau drawers and placed the folded clothes inside, on top of the curling shelf paper. Her sisters would be around soon enough to discover her. There would be Rose’s calm gaze, and her crossed arms, May’s endless questions. They would arrive with their own children, suntanned and noisy and barefoot, to swim in the pool her father had put in out back – an aboveground structure that resembled a barrel.
Nan went out onto the porch and asked her father if he would watch Clemmy while she drove into town for something at the store.
“What do you need?” he asked her. He stood among the phlox. She found him changed – his eyes searching, difficult to face. “I might have it.”
Nan shrugged. “I feel like a drive,” she said.
His shoulders fell, resigned. He nodded. She watched him take Clemmy by the hand and wave as she backed out of the driveway. Clemmy’s small hand flipped brightly in imitation of his grandfather.
She drove down Tunxis Avenue with no place to go. The row of shaggy hickories shadowing the road parted, and Junior’s was there, the first garage before Filley Pond and the center of town. She remembered when she and Matt Olander would stop in to visit Junior, usually on a Saturday night before they went out. Matt would have beer in a cooler, and she would follow him through the wooden door with its jangling bell, into the garage’s sticky heat. Junior and Matt would chain smoke and drink. Nan would sit, ignored, on a swivel chair with a ripped vinyl cushion. She’d worn pale-colored summer clothes, and worried about getting grease on them. Her mother had been dead for nearly two years. She was in high school, and Matt was the first boy she slept with.
Now, Junior stands amidst the cicada noise, in the late summer haze. Nan drops down onto the front seat of a car that is only a rusted frame. She tucks her silk skirt under her legs. The upholstery is sun-faded and its stuffing comes out in tufts. She imagines the seat is a bed for mice. She is light-headed, her limbs loose. Earlier, inside the garage he offered her a beer, and she took it, and then another, and perhaps another after that. She doesn’t remember. She found the same torn vinyl swivel chair, and that prompted her to talk about the past, recounting the stories she overheard Matt and Junior tell twenty years before, when all of their friends could be identified by the cars they worshipped and drove in rings around town, or raced between the tobacco tents on Dudley Town Road. She did not tell him how she knew the stories, or who she was. Junior didn’t ask. He leaned up against an old Chevy truck, and listened, every so often tossing his hair back, or smiling, but saying nothing. Somehow, she revealed to him that she’d had sex in most of her boyfriends’ cars, and he tipped his chin up at that and laughed out loud. He said he saw to it that most of his friends’ cars ended up in his back lot, and that took them out the wooden door with its tinkling bell, around the side of the garage on a dirt path under the elms.
Junior pulls out a beer from the back pocket of his baggy jeans. He takes a long sip, and brings it over to Nan. She crosses her legs and kicks her sandaled foot. Her feet are dusty, she notices. She takes the beer, still cool from the garage refrigerator, and drinks.
“Most of them are dead,” she says now. She says it lightly, carelessly.
Junior doesn’t ask for the beer back. He lights another cigarette and watches her drink, his dark eyes like black pools. “Which ones?” he asks.
Nan remembers that Junior’s reticence was not from shyness. It was purposeful, premeditated. In her memory he is back against a wall, or leaning up against a car, or a doorframe. There are groups of boys and girls, all paired up, teasing and playful, the boys’ hands free, the girls leaning in with their mouths. Junior never had a girlfriend, she recalls. He watched them all from under his hair, and made his occasional dry comments. A lean, lonely man, wreathed in his silence. She thinks for a moment.
“Stevie Ash,” she says. “With the chainsaw scar from here, to here.” She points with her index finger from her neck, down across her chest.
Junior nods and exhales. “His family cut trees for firewood.”
Nan remembers Stevie telling her the story, how the chain broke and flew up, a slick, clean swipe he didn’t feel at first. It was a fall day, he said, and the wet leaves on the ground were splattered with what he realized was his own blood. The chain missed the carotid artery and he lived, but only a handful of years before his car rolled, and rolled, broke the guardrail and fell from the Tariffville Bridge.
“A Barracuda,” she says. Silvery blue, like the real fish.
Junior motions for her to follow him, and he finds the car in the shade near the back of the lot, most of its paint seared off. Moths flutter up and around the lower tree branches.
“We would drive up to Highland Lake and park,” she says. She remembers the brownish mud shore, and the shine of the water on the dashboard. She’d slid her mouth along his scar, down to his waist. “Don’t you want to see how far it goes?” he’d asked. Her pearl-colored fingernails played with his pants clasp. Sometimes families drove by and saw, but he would have his hands in her hair, and say it didn’t matter. He had blond, soft curls she tried now, looking at the car’s charred body, not to imagine up in flames.
“That was in June, ’79,” Junior says. He puts his foot up on the car’s rusty bumper and it falls into the grass with a splintery crunch. He gives her a slit-eyed, assessing look, as if he is trying to place her.
“What?” Nan asks, and tips the beer back and finishes it. Junior doesn’t seem to mind. He moves along again, down the rows of cars and stops.
“And this one,” he says. He looks up, expecting she has followed him, but she has not. “Another of your beaus?” He says the word with a lilting, sarcastic edge. Nan does not want to acknowledge if it is, or isn’t. The sun slips behind clouds.
“Broder’s Nova,” he says.
John Broder, she thinks, who once held her down on the carpet in his father’s apartment when she had been too drunk on blackberry brandy to protest. He died, like his father, of a bullet to the brain. He parked the Nova behind the old Grand Union. It was summer and two days before they found him, the car humming with flies. From her distance, Nan can see the car, not so deteriorated, its paint simply faded. Perhaps the inside is messy, and hard to look at. Nan stays where she is. Junior watches her from behind his stringy hair.
“There’s more,” he says, like a game show emcee. She thinks she hears laughter in his voice.
Nan tries to smile. “I’ll bet,” she says. She holds the empty bottle out and Junior comes over to her and takes it from her hand. His boots flatten the dry grass. Small gnats flit around their ankles. It is late afternoon. Maybe early evening, she does not know. Through the ring of elms is someone’s backyard, and she smells the burning of charcoal briquettes, hears children splashing in a pool. She imagines Clemmy with his cousins in her father’s yard. They gather the cut grass and arrange it in circles to make nests. They outline paths from one nest to the other, a whole interconnecting world made of her father’s grass. She doesn’t know how Clemmy will be with them, if he will play, like the other children, or sit quietly, morose, waiting for her to return. She asks Junior if she may use the restroom, and he leads her back into the garage to a small door. In the bathroom is a weak bulb with a dangling cord that Junior reaches past her to pull. Nan steps inside and closes the door. The plumbing is rusted, the toilet without a seat. She hovers over the bowl to relieve herself, gripping the rim. She rinses her hands in a grimy sink. There is no mirror for Nan to see what she looks like, but she feels her flushed cheeks, her hair flattened and damp. She remembers when, as a teenager, she experienced this same rushing feeling, as if each moment precipitated some culminating event.
When she emerges, Junior is waiting in front of the door. Beyond him the afternoon light shifts in waving patterns around the trunks of the elms. She and Junior look at each other. Nan wants to ask him what good it is to keep the cars here. But then he reaches out and takes her hand in his. It is warm and chalky, and surprisingly strong. He pulls her outside, along the first row to a Firebird convertible – the canvas top folded down, the seats in fairly good shape. Junior opens the passenger door and she hesitates.
“You’ve never done it in this one,” he says. His voice is low, and laughing.
Nan sits down on the seat and pulls her legs up to avoid the mildewed floorboard carpet. There is a new pine tree air freshener dangling from the radio dial. Junior leaves the door open, and goes back to the garage. He returns with more beer in its cardboard holder, and sets it on the console between the bucket seats. He climbs into the driver’s side and pushes in the car’s lighter. It pops out, glowing, and he lights his cigarette. The radio works, too, and he ejects an old eight-track tape from the player – Canned Heat – and holds it up for her to see, grinning. Nan can’t imagine what she is doing there. She thinks that now, at her father’s house, the children are organizing games of freeze tag or Mother-May-I? on the front lawn. Her father and sisters sit around their pine kitchen table, wondering what has become of her. Rose tapping her cigarette ash into the beanbag ashtray, assuring her father that Nan has gone to the mall in Farmington, or to an old friend’s. May more uncertain, declaring Nan knows no one in town anymore. The talk will shift to the trouble Nan had always gotten into, the way she left home, the barn. She imagines her sisters sharing a secret look.
Nan thinks she will stay with Junior as long as he will let her. It will grow dark, the fireflies emerging like burning batting, the stars bedding down overhead. They’ll listen to the frogs in Filley Pond, a rolling sound, like a die in a tumbler. He might put his arm around her, and she will lean into his chest, into the smell of his T-shirt – a scent she identifies with the boys of her youth, mechanic’s grease and sweat and cheap cologne, or his mother’s detergent, or the meal she cooked for him that night, seasoned with celery or rosemary. Junior tries to play the tape, but it only works for a few minutes before it becomes garbled and breaks in the player. The sun sets with a vivid spray behind the trees, and they drink the beer.
“I’ve been working on this one,” Junior tells her. He runs his fingers around the steering wheel.
“Why this one?” Nan asks.
“It’s a good year,” he says. “A ’76.”
Nan shrugs. She stares through the windshield as if they are heading somewhere.
“A lot happened that year,” Junior says. He makes a humming noise under his breath. He leans against the driver’s-side door and looks over at her. His face is lined, she sees. Years have passed since he was a teenager. “Do you remember when the old Henley barn burned? Wasn’t that in ’76?”
The cicadas whine, long, and high-pitched. Nan sighs.
“Do you know the story of the barn?” she asks.
“I think I’ve heard it,” he says. The smoke from his cigarette spirals in the twilight.
Nan didn’t think anyone else knew the story. But of course, Matt was Junior’s friend, and he told him. And who else, she wonders. Most likely everyone, she realizes. She had been foolish, assuming boys would care for her, and keep her secrets. As if sex was a pact, a sealed envelope. She and Matt had lain in the moldy straw, and she had seen bats dart in and out of the eaves on their leathery wings. She had taken Matt’s lighter from his jeans pocket to light her cigarette, and it had burned her thumb, and she dropped it. Matt scooped it up, but not before the flame caught. They got out, stumbling, laughing, in awe of the blaze, running back through the field to the safety of the tall pinewoods. Pieces of ash floated down around them. She watched the fire department put it out, and imagined her sisters gathering with her father, and her absence felt. Rose said their father cried with his face in his hands. May said they all cried, each hiding it from the other.
Nan had thought the fire beautiful. She watched with Matt, her mouth sore and reddened, her shirt open and her hair singed. Once, she told him, they had a swing from the rafters, and their mother would push them. They stored the apple crates in the barn, and the ladders the hired men used to harvest the orchard. Back then, the hay was mown and sold to local farmers, fresh bales of it stacked in sweet-smelling corded piles. Nan loved the barn with a childish, whimsical heart. But she knew it was all gone long before it burned. She had given up listening for her mother’s footsteps on the landing outside her bedroom. She stopped believing she might catch sight of her at the kitchen counter. How silly, she thinks now, to imagine there might have been some mistake. Her mother died in a hospital, under a light the color of yellowed Scotch tape. Nan was there to see her mother’s pale face slacken, her lips drop open. She watched her father pack her mother’s nightgowns in a suitcase, and take them home.
“Story goes you were great in the hay, but careless with the lighter,” Junior says.
She nods, thoughtfully. She never understood, until now, Matt’s honest refusal to say he loved her.
“You remember me,” she says. She pulls on the rearview mirror and looks at herself. “I’m the age of my mother when she died.”
But she looks nothing like that face on the hospital pillow. She has her father’s features – sharp nose and chin, confused, searching eyes. Now, in her childhood bedroom Clemmy will be put to bed with her father’s dry kiss on his forehead. The cut grass smell clings to his damp skin. The beetles beat at the metal screen. The light is soft and precious. Nan knows that warm lurch of lucky love. She cannot understand why it has never been good enough. Junior reaches out and puts a hand on her ankle. She feels his fingers encircle it, closes her eyes and hears the car upholstery crunch, feels his breath on her cheek as he leans in. This is how it was, with boys. She tasted the beer on their lips, the aftershave on their roughened necks. There were others she’d been with who died, tragically, before their time. Paul Gerardi, of a long illness unnamed in the newspaper. They slept in the blue television glow of his basement room, while outside snow fell and buried her car. He hid her keys so she wouldn’t leave, or spiked her drink with Demerol. Joseph Reynolds fell from the bow of his boat. His body tangled in the seaweed off Block Island. His hands were always busy, his voice cajoling. She let him carve his initials with his penknife on her shoulder.
Nan thinks Junior will kiss her, but he does not, so she kisses him instead. Her mouth blooms under his. She presses herself against him, bones, skin, clothing fabric. Her hands slip down to undo his pants. The places on her body wait for his hands to find them. Then, he takes her shoulders and pushes her back. Nan hears herself make a sharp little noise of protest.
Junior gazes at her. His eyes are pools deeper and darker than that afternoon in the hazy sunlight. “I don’t want anything from you,” he says, matter-of-fact.
And it is true. She discovers him, small and soft as a baby’s hand. The air stills, flattened by their defeated breath. Around them the old hulls ease themselves into the dirt. The elm leaves shiver. The car lighter pops out, and Junior raises its glowing end to his cigarette. Nan sees his eyes, absent of trickery. His silence settles around them, patient, and absolving. There is nothing left but to drive back to her father’s house, warily, up and down the narrow roads, past the tall corn crowded in the fields like spectators, and the shadows of barns that had yet to burn. It is their deaths, she thinks, that make them alive. There is the silver lighter flicking open again, a smell of butane. A hand on a stick shift, the knuckles’ ridge. The smooth seams of workpants, the stubborn zippered fly of old jeans. She sees narrow hipbones under her own hands, the way her hair falls to cover his face. There are no lights, and the stars are out; the night air on bare limbs, or worn sheets and the hum of motel air conditioning. Nan is the only repository of these memories. She drives and imagines that with lungs full of seawater, at the moment of the gun’s report, engulfed in heat, on the last exhale, in a synapse spark she occurred to them: her skin, her long arms encircling them, her body surrendered, abject, something they never could forget.

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Karen Brown’s short stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, Epoch, StoryQuarterly, The Graywolf Annual, American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Stories by Emerging Writers, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, 2006.