The Book of Joe

knew?” I smile back and nod. He pats my back and we sit there staring at our shoes, two brothers on our dead parents’ stairs in the gathering dusk, a little lost, a little found, looking toward the future and wondering which it will ultimately be.

Thirty-Nine
    The next day, Carly and I drive up to Noank to pick up Wayne’s ashes, which are waiting for us at the receptionist’s desk in a typical brass urn. We spend the drive home trying to figure out what to do with them. “We could spread them over the falls,” Carly suggests.
    “Maybe,” I say. “But as someone who recently took that plunge, I don’t exactly recommend it. What about the lake at the Porter’s campus?”
    She shakes her head. “There’s been talk around town that they’re going to put up a new mall. Your lake is probably the future site of an Old Navy.”
    “Since when do news editors listen to rumors?”
    “We’re the ones who start them.”
    “So much for Porter’s, then. Wayne can’t spend eternity in Old Navy.”
    “What about the high school gym?” Carly says. “He loved playing ball so much.”
    I nod, but the practicalities of spreading ashes indoors troubles me. I picture them landing in undignified piles on the wooden floor, only to end up in the murky depths of a custodian’s mop bucket. Besides, I suspect there are laws about this sort of thing. “I think it needs to be outdoors. Remember in Terms of Endearment, how they flew out behind Jack Nicholson’s convertible? It was like they were flying up to the sky and out into the ocean, being dispersed into everywhere at once. I think that’s what appealed to Wayne.”
    “Well.” Carly lifts the urn and sets it carefully on her lap, her fingers tracing the bends in the brass as she speaks.
    “You’ve got the convertible, so we’re halfway there.”
    “I guess so. We’re an act in search of a venue.”
    We drive in silence for a few minutes, and Carly leans her head against my shoulder and lets her hand fall lazily into my lap, softly stroking my thigh. “I’m tired,” she says softly, her lips just inches from my ear. Despite the sadness of the day and the morbid nature of our current expedition, the combination of her breath in my ear and her hand on my thigh doesn’t take very long to stir my anatomy.
    “You keep doing that, and sleep won’t be an option.”
    She smiles and slides her hand slowly upward, pressing down as she brings her lips to my ear. “Home, Jeeves,” she whispers.
    We leave the urn in the car and hurry inside, groping each other like a couple of teenagers.
    We have sex repeatedly, loud, reckless, passionate, dirty sex, with a violent urgency that was absent in our earlier reunion. Wayne is gone and, with him, my last excuse for staying in the Falls, and it’s as if we’re trying to push past all of the questions and doubts that have been attending us up until now and somehow fuck our way into a new understanding of our situation. It doesn’t work, sex being more of a question than an answer to people in our position, but we go at it with great industry nonetheless. If we’re going to remain clueless, I can’t think of a better way to do it.
    After our third go-round, Carly collapses into a deep sleep, and I throw on some jeans and a T-shirt and go downstairs to watch the rain, my body still delightfully sore from our prior exertions. I’m exhausted but at the same time strangely invigorated. The thing in me that had been cracking ever since I got to the Falls finally shattered when Wayne died, and now I can feel the first, vague stirrings of something new being configured in its place, equally breakable but as yet untouched. I pull a folding chair out onto the front porch and watch as the rain finally tapers off into a thick wet mist that hangs in thick curtains around the porch lights. The obscured moon lends the night a spooky timbre, and I imagine Wayne’s ghost hovering somewhere in the mist in front of me, invisible and light as air. “Hey, man,” I say, “how are things on the other side?” The lone cry of a neighboring dog is the only reply I get, but it feels good to be speaking to Wayne anyway.
    A short while later the front door swings open and Carly emerges, dressed in some old sweats she must have found by rummaging through my drawers. She has pillow hair and sleepy eyes, but she still looks radiant in the soft glow of the porch light. “Hey,” she says.
    “Hey.”
    She grabs another folding chair off