“Glow Mata Moon”
Wendy Balconi
Collage
It started the third time we took Max to rehab. His girlfriend Kelsey drove us in her beat-up Maxima and I sat shotgun while Max lay across the backseat and smoked cigarettes. On Route 3 before the Cape Cod Canal her car was pinned between two semis and I lost perspective on the road. As the trucks passed on either side, it felt like we were driving backwards and a jolt of panic surged through my chest.
After they searched Max’s bags and confiscated his skittles, they took him to his usual room and he reclined on his bed and kicked off his slip-on vans with too much ease. Then he pulled out a book from his bag, littered with pink and yellow sticky notes. Building a Micro-Business from the Ground Up. He ignored us as he murmured the words on the page.
When he wasn’t failing classes at Bunker Hill Community College and snorting Percocet, Max was designing tee shirts on Adobe Illustrator. They weren’t half bad. Nautical themes. Topless mermaids tanning on rocks. Poseidon and a lobster playing poker by the sea. He’d sell the shirts in the lot at Nauset Beach in Orleans. When the sales were up, he’d outfit an old school bus with a fridge and a propane grill and sell tacos. When the taco sales soared, he’d buy a store front and sell bluefin tuna caught on his cousin Rick’s dayboat. And another guy—maybe me—would man the truck. Who wouldn’t want a grilled sashimi taco and a cold beer coming off the beach? Max chuckled with a sly grin from in-patient room 431. He had it all figured out when he wasn’t snorting perk thirties.
After we got Max settled and patted him on the shoulder and told him how proud we were, we lingered in the lot and smoked in the shadow of the building.
“Hey,” Kelsey said. She took a deep shaky drag then blew a blue stream of smoke that twirled in the late afternoon sun. “Let’s salvage the day.”
We drove to The Sunken Ship overlooking the Cape Cod Canal and ordered shots of tequila and a couple beers. As we clinked the glasses in ceremony I scanned my mind for a toast and parted my lips but came up empty. The tequila burned my throat and we sloshed down our beers in silence before we dragged our feet to the lot and smoked cigarettes as the sun painted the sky pink over Buzzards Bay.
“The worst part is not drinking around him,” Kesley said as she took a long suck from her cigarette. “It’s like, because he’s a junky I have to wear these wings.” She reached around her back and scratched her shoulder blades, skin peeling from an old burn.
“What weights more,” I said, “a pound of bricks or a pound of feathers?”
“You’re an idiot,” she said and socked me in the arm. Then she bit her lip and hid a smile.
As she lit another cigarette a tan shirtless old man sang to himself as he swerved his bike on the path by the canal. I pictured his old wiry body in Max’s mermaid tee. Suddenly a school of bluefish splashed on the surface and the old man leapt off his bike, yanked his rod from the PVC pipe and cast into the frenzy.
“I have an idea,” Kelsey said while watching the water. The old man’s rod bent into a rainbow as he hollered and reeled and wrangled a thrashing blue fish onto the rocks. “Let’s get a lobster dinner. Champagne. The works. You know. Treat ourselves.”
Her voice quivered in the pink light and she chewed the ends of her blonde hair. I nodded my head as the old man slit the thrashing fish’s throat and fileted it right there on the rocks. Then he tossed the cuts in a Styrofoam cooler and strapped it in the milk crate on the back of his bike with a bungee. We hopped in Kelsey’s Maxima and drove to Larry’s Lobster Shack a mile down the road.
The champagne at Larry’s was good. Fizzy. Kelsey did her bib up right but I didn’t bother and squirted lobster juice all over my old Patriots tee when I cracked the claw. She squinted at the stain as she licked her napkin and leaned across the table and dabbed my chest.
“Isn’t that Max’s shirt?”
I shrugged as the wet cotton stuck to my skin. We ordered a second bottle of champagne as we mopped the green lobster guts with bread and the server brought us lemons and hot towels for our hands. The sun had set and the wind had a bite so we moved inside and capped the night with Irish coffees and a final bottle of fizz at the bar.
On the TV above the brown bottles of whiskey the Yankees were pounding the Red Sox and the bartender pumped his fist as Alex Rodriguez blasted another home run. I glared at the Yankees fan but couldn’t catch his eye. In the light of the screen, beads of sweat were budding on Kesley’s forehead. She looked utterly unaffected by baseball.
“I feel like we’re celebrating something,” I said as the bartender slapped the bottle on the bar and I filled our empty flutes. “I can’t put my finger on it.”
“We are.” She gulped half her glass then righted herself on the stool and giggled. “The last time we take Max to rehab.”
We finished the fizz, paid the bill, and stiffed the traitorous Yankees fan. Then Kelsey hooked her arm around mine as we trudged to the lot.
“I’m not driving over the bridge drunk,” she said as I struggled to light a cigarette in the wind. “It’s bad luck.” The moon was bright and nearly full and the strong gusts made white caps on the water. She stood close and shielded my mouth with her hand. As I finally lit my cigarette she grimaced a smile and her blue eyes looked wet in the light from the flame.
The motel before the bridge was called the Wishing Well and a cracked stone fountain towered over the gravel lot. A nasty storm blew in a few days prior and broken branches from oaks and white pines were scattered everywhere. Next to the dumpster a massive branch crushed a small blue car—the hood crumpled like foil.
“You’re lucky I found you kids a room,” the receptionist said when we stumbled into the office. “The tree guys are staying here after the storm.” She peered over the rim of her glasses. Hair covered a mole on her cheek like moss on a rock. “It’s a shame—when a healthy tree loses too many branches, you have to take it down. Never fun—felling a live tree.”
She shook her head like she took the storm personally. Like she had to sever the trees herself. I glanced at Kelsey. The beads of sweat bubbled on her forehead but never burst.
We nodded in condolence and took the rusty room key and walked outside to the fountain. Kelsey felt inside my pocket and plucked a lone penny from a mess of crumpled bills. Then she flicked the coin with her thumb and it caught a piece of moonlight and hovered in front of the starry sky then finally fell and splashed in the dark. We stepped over broken branches—leaves still green—and turned the knob to the room
The room smelled like stale cigarettes and bleach and the moonlight washed in through the cracked window. Kelsey collapsed on the bed belly up—legs and arms spread wide—and played a voicemail from Max on speakerphone.
The new menu, he said through wind or static. Tuna sashimi. Fried avocado. A coconut lime slaw.
Kelsey giggled then gulped like something caught in her throat.
Cajun swordfish. Charred corn and creole shrimp. What do you think?
She laughed again then sobbed and covered her mouth as the sweat finally poured down her face. She lay there on her back—arms spread wide and face wet with sweat and tears. Like some kind of sad baptism.
I lit a cigarette from her purse and the next voicemail was five minutes of wiring plans for solar to power the fridge. For a second I forgot he wasn’t dead. Then I remembered he was probably playing chess with some junkie in the common room five miles down the road—pausing to puke or shit from withdrawal.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and she pushed me onto my back and lay on top of me and there was barely any weight to her.
“Feathers,” she whispered in my ear.
“What?”
“What weighs more,” she said. Her breath felt hot on my face. “Let’s pretend it’s feathers.”
Our shirts stuck with sweat as she leaned on her elbows and scrolled her phone for a new voicemail. Then I heard Max’s nasally voice—rambling on about SAO hits on his WordPress site. I lifted my arms and she peeled his shirt off my body and she was wet while Max’s voice hovered around us like a ghost. I slid in deep like I owed her something and she gasped and I felt like him as I guided her hips and tried to fill the empty space.
Kelsey’s back muscles twitched and tightened as the wind beat the windows and Max’s voice described the yellow and pink paint for the truck—a perfect Cape Cod sunset. Then she closed her eyes and cried out and gripped my hair and I held her tight as she softly murmured his name in my ear.
We didn’t wake until the sun washed in at dawn and the tree guys were already at it. Through the cracked window we watched them pour from their rooms like a disease. They laughed and swore as they revved the engines of their saws. The window had no blinds and Kelsey covered her small breasts with her hands as she searched for her clothes on the floor. I just lay naked on the bed and stared at a sawn stump through the glass and quietly counted rings.
Pete Prokesch: “I’ve worked various day-jobs to support my writing, from carpenter to shellfish farmer, and I currently work in city government in green jobs. ‘Felling Trees’ is part of a collection that explores the various manifestations of grief in the opioid epidemic, and it’s based on personal experiences. Please feel free to read more of my work at peteprokesch.com.”