except Christmas, New Year’s and Easter. Seriously. No excuses, okay?”
He smiled. “Scout’s honor.”
“You dropped out of the Scouts!” she shouted as he pulled away.
Wow. Marion had a kid. Marion was still singing. The band was still together.
His old house, a museum of his seventeen-year-old life. And his old girlfriend, still playing with their band. He might as well make this trip back in time complete. He turned toward the Spit and headed out to see Rex. Since Kache had arrived, he’d already done more socializing than he had in years. Janie would be shocked.
Only two days before, he’d lain wedged in the permanent indent he’d caused in his and Janie’s sofa, the TV cradling him in its familiar steel-colored light. On his chest the cat Charlotte had purred and slept. He’d turned down the volume for the commercial, the warm Austin air carrying aching guitar riffs in D minor along with aromas of barbeque from the restaurant across the street. Another Do-it-Yourself show was about to start. He should get up—Arise! Go forth!—and turn off the TV, but he didn’t. He let Charlotte sleep.
Each step of each project, vivid in his mind’s eye: A version of his own hands performing every task, but calloused, surer, moving with the certainty of the experienced. Not the boy’s hands his father had made fun of. “Explain to me, son,” he’d said, “how the same fingers that spin gold on that silly guitar of yours turn into flippers when you pick up a hammer?”
But some of what his father tried to teach him was at long last finding its way in, if only from a type of televised-osmosis.
Janie was upstairs in the loft of their apartment, spreading on lotion, dusting on makeup, curling her hair. He must have once felt something more for her than he did now, which if he had to classify, fell in the vicinity of a fond affection. They had traveled some, had good sex. He’d moved into her place. They’d cooked, laughed, watched movies, shared a few secrets. And yet he experienced those times as if they’d occurred in a hazy, disjointed dream.
Her footsteps clicked down the stairs and stopped in the kitchen behind him.
“Sure you don’t want to join us?” she asked again.
Gently he lifted Charlotte off his chest and propped up on his elbow so he could see Janie in the shadows, the jutted hip and crossed-arms stance of late. Charlotte leapt down and began winding herself through and around Janie’s ankles. “No thanks.”
He sat up and twisted around to face her in the kitchen, his back sore with stiffness, his arm now slung along the top of the sofa in order to show her he was making an effort, paying attention. She flicked on the light. She had her hair up loose the way he liked it best and she wore a dress he hadn’t seen before. “You look nice,” he said. “Really pretty.”
Without a smile she shifted her weight, unfolded her arms so they hung by her sides, her pale palms facing him. “You might surprise yourself and have fun.”
How to explain the impossibility? “Not really up to it tonight.”
She kept her eyes on him. She was gracious enough not to ask: Did you apply for any jobs today? Did you make any follow-up calls? Did you even return your aunt’s call? It’s ironic, you know. Watching the Do-it-Yourself Network all day long and never doing a damn thing.
She spun away, the air barely lifting the edge of her dress, said, “I’ll be home late,” and closed the door with force, but not quite a slam. They didn’t slam doors. They didn’t shout. They’d been together over three years and never had more than a low-heated discussion, where nothing ever boiled over, just simmered on and on until they had reached this state of bone-dry evaporation.
Kache got up to find something to eat. He stretched, muscles tight from lying down so long, his vertebrae a series of hooks and sinkers.
Janie blamed this funk he’d been in for the last six months on the fact that he’d been let go from his job. A buyout. He’d received a generous enough severance package. They called it the Golden Parachute, but he was too young for that. Maybe the silver? Not even. Brass. The Brass-Can’t-Save-Your-Ass Parachute.
It wasn’t that he needed the money. He’d invested well, lived far below his means. There was just nothing he could bring himself to do. In the quiet of their kitchen he spread peanut butter on wheat bread. He could do that much.
The job had provided a masquerade that kept Janie from seeing the obvious: He’d been asleep for the last two decades. A relentless fog descended upon him that god-awful day and it remained, through his college education (with the help of a fair amount of weed) and then through his job in accounting at a small hi-tech company. He’d quit the weed by then but hid in the numbers for years without anyone realizing that he wasn’t quite … there. They shrugged it off, thinking, he supposed, that he was merely distant, quiet. They, including Janie, chalked it off as personality traits of a numbers geek.
But no one in Austin had known him before the plane crash. Way back when he wrote songs and played the guitar, when he talked too much and argued with passion and was “too touchy feely for his own good.” While at work, he’d lost himself in the black and white of the numbers; their rigid columns and graphs had held him in a tight cocoon of space. Math became his new music, but without the emotions, which was a welcome relief. He had not turned out to be a “lazy-no-good rock and roller,” after all. Unlike Kache’s father, Rex would find that disappointing.
The Spit Tune was one of the oldest buildings on the Spit. It had survived the fire in 1918 and the Good Friday earthquake of 1964. Peanut shells and sawdust covered the floor. Signed dollar bills from every corner of the world hung from the ceiling and walls, and when Kache was a high school kid, he figured there was enough money there to fund their first album. Now he knew just how naïve that had been. First of all, there wasn’t nearly that much money, even twenty years later. And secondly, Rex, who’d owned the place forever, was fond of saying he’d shoot anyone who even tried to take one dollar down. “I won’t hurt you real bad,” he’d say. “Maybe just take off a finger or two to remind you to follow the rules.”
Rex, himself, wasn’t one to follow many rules. Kache and Marion, Chris, Dan, and Mike were all well underage when they started playing at the bar. Sometimes Rex even let them drink a few beers if they promised not to tell.
But Rex wasn’t around. Kache didn’t recognize the bartender, a young bearded guy who told him Rex was vacationing in Phoenix. Kache sat down anyway and nursed his coffee.
“Can I get you something stronger?”
“Not yet. Mind if I change the channel?”
The bartender handed him the remote. “A friend of Rex’s can do anything he wants.” Kache found the DIY network. His favorite show was about to start: it was the father and son show called The House that Jack and Jack Jr. Built. The hosts wore their tool belts low on their hips just like Kache’s father and Denny once had, sharing a similar comradeship, and when the hosts patiently began showing Kache How to Build a Fire Pit, he felt the smallest hint of a burning in the pit between his heart and his stomach.
The hosts acted like they believed in Kache, even the father, Jack Sr. From the screen, they spoke with reassuring confidence, as if Kachemak Winkel could, in fact, do it himself; he could do any goddamn
