Peaceable Kingdom Read Free Page B

laughed. On the table lay a pile of tools. He wasn’t stabbing them between his fingers. He must have gotten that out of his system, dying and coming back.
    Even though it was Jimmy’s house, we felt we couldn’t go in. Every inch of space was taken up by what my mother and sister were saying. Where was Jimmy’s Malibu? We walked to a cafeteria and stood in a line of elderly couples deciding between the baked fish and the chicken. Jimmy couldn’t be served there, he wasn’t wearing a shirt. The manager was sorry, it was a Florida law. Jimmy had gone to Vietnam and been lost in a computer and now couldn’t even get a cup of cafeteria coffee. But I couldn’t say that, my head was ringing with things I couldn’t say—for example, that I had waited for him, and my sister hadn’t.
    Haifa block from Jimmy’s house, we saw an upsetting sight—my mother and sister in Mother’s car with the engine running.
    “Going for lunch?” Jimmy said. But we all knew they weren’t.
    Mother told me to get in back. Jimmy looked in and I saw him notice my sister’s suitcase. He did nothing to stop us—that was the strangest part. He let me get in and let us take off and stood there and watched us go.
    I never knew, I never found out what Mother said to my sister. Or maybe it wasn’t what Mother said, perhaps it was all about Jimmy. Once again I thought of Reynaldo and my sister’s giving him up. If I never knew what had happened with that, how could I ask about Jimmy? You assume you will ask the important questions, you will get to them sooner or later, an idea that ignores two things: the power of shyness, the fact of death.
    That should have been the last time I saw Jimmy Kowalchuk—a wounded young god glowing with sun in a firmament of grapefruit. But there was one more time, nearer home, in the dead of winter.
    Before that, Greg took my sister back. They went on as if nothing had happened. Greg got a promotion. They moved to a nicer house. I saw my sister sometimes. Jimmy was not a subject. I never asked about him, his name never came up. I would talk about school sometimes, but she never seemed to be listening. Once she said, out of nowhere, “I guess people want different things at different times in their lives.”
    I was a senior in high school when my sister was killed. Her car jumped a divider on the Sunrise Highway. It was a new car Greg kept well maintained, so it was nobody’s fault.
    On the way to the funeral Mother sat between me and Greg. When my sister went back to Greg, Mother had gone back to him, too. But that day, in the funeral car, she was talking to me.
    “What was I doing?” Mother said. “I knew I couldn’t make you girls happy. I was just trying to give you the chance to be happy if you wanted. I thought that life was a corridor with doors that opened and shut as you passed, and I was just trying to keep them from slamming on you.”
    The reality of my sister’s death hadn’t come home to me yet, and though my father’s dying had taught me that death was final, perhaps Jimmy’s reappearance had put that in some doubt. Guiltily I wondered if Jimmy would be at my sister’s funeral, as if it were a party at which he might show up.
    Jimmy came with his mother, a tiny woman in black. He was gritty, unshaven, tragically handsome in a wrinkled suit and dark glasses. He looked as if he’d hitchhiked or rode up on the Greyhound.
    I went and stood beside Jimmy. No one expected that. After the service I left with him. Not even I could believe it. All the relatives watched me leave, Mother and Greg and my sister’s friend Marcy. I wondered if this was how Jimmy felt, driving out onto the ice.
    Jimmy was driving a cousin’s rusted Chevy Nova. We dropped his mother at her house. Jimmy and I kept going. I could tell he’d been drinking. He must have given up on his rule about endangering other people. Finally I was alone with him, but it wasn’t what I’d pictured. I wondered which friend I could