Boys Life

He’s out back right now. Said he wants to make sure about somethin’, but he won’t tell us what.”
    “Cory’s in the bathroom,” my mother said, as if that, too, was a piece of the puzzle. She cast her voice lower, in case I could hear over my waterfall. “He does act a little funny. You think somethin’ happened between ’em at the movies?”
    “I thought of it. Maybe they had a fallin’-out.”
    “Well, they’ve been friends for a long time, but it does happen.”
    “Happened with me and Amy Lynn McGraw. We were fast friends for six years and then we didn’t speak for a whole year over a lost packet of sewin’ needles. But I was thinkin’, maybe the boys ought to get together. If they’ve had an argument, maybe they ought to work it out right off.”
    “Makes sense.”
    “I was gonna ask Ben if he’d like Cory to spend the night. Would that be all right with you?”
    “I don’t mind, but I’ll have to ask Tom and Cory.”
    “Wait a minute,” Mrs. Sears said, “Ben’s comin’ in.” My mother heard a screen door slam. “Ben? I’ve got Cory’s mother on the phone. Would you like Cory to spend the night here tonight?” My mother listened, but she couldn’t make out what Ben was saying over the flush of our toilet. “He says he’d like that,” Mrs. Sears told her.
    I emerged from the bathroom, into the well-meaning complicity. “Cory, would you like to spend the night at Ben’s house?”
    I thought about it. “I don’t know,” I said, but I couldn’t tell her why. The last time I’d spent the night over there, back in February, Mr. Sears hadn’t come home all night and Mrs. Sears had walked the floor fretting about where he might be. Ben told me his father took a lot of overnight trips and he asked me not to say anything.
    “Ben wants you to come,” Mom prodded, mistaking my reluctance.
    I shrugged. “Okay. I guess.”
    “Go make sure it’s all right with your father.” While I went to the front room to ask, my mother said to Mrs. Sears, “I know how important friendship is. We’ll get ’em patched up if there’s any problem.”
    “Dad says okay,” I told her when I returned. If my father was watching a baseball game, he would be agreeable to flossing his teeth with barbed wire.
    “Lizbeth? He’ll be there. ’Round six o’clock?” She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said to me, “They’re havin’ fried chicken for dinner.”
    I nodded and tried to summon a smile, but my thoughts were in the tunnels where the Martians plotted the destruction of the human race, town by town.
    “Rebecca? How’re things goin’?” Mrs. Sears asked. “You know what I mean.”
    “Run on, Cory,” she told me, and I did even though I knew important things were about to be discussed. “Well,” she said to Lizbeth Sears, “Tom’s sleepin’ a little better now, but he still has the nightmares. I wish I could do somethin’ to help, but I think he just has to work it out for himself.”
    “I hear the sheriff’s about given it up.”
    “It’s been three weeks without any kind of lead. J.T. told Tom on Friday that he sent word out all over the state, Georgia and Mississippi, too, but he hasn’t come up with a thing. It’s like the man in that car came from another planet.”
    “Now, there’s a chilly thought.”
    “Somethin’ else,” my mother said, and she sighed heavily. “Tom’s… changed. It’s more than the nightmares, Lizbeth.” She turned toward the kitchen pantry and stretched the cord as far as it would go so there was no chance of Dad hearing. “He’s careful to lock all the doors and windows, where before he didn’t care about locks. Up until it happened, we left our doors unlocked most of the time, like everybody else does. Now Tom gets up two or three times in the night to check the bolts. And last week he came home from his route with red mud on his shoes, when it hadn’t rained. I think he went back to the lake.”
    “What on earth for?”
    “I don’t know. To walk and think, I suppose. I remember when I was nine years old I had a yellow cat that got run over by a truck in front of our house. Calico’s blood stayed on the pavement for a long time. That place pulled me. I hated it, but I had to go there and see where Calico died. I always thought that there was somethin’ I could’ve done to keep him alive. Or maybe up until it happened, I thought everythin’ lived forever.” She paused, staring at pencil marks on the back