As soon as the priest said, “The Mass is ended” (“Thanks be to God,” was the only response Michael joined in on, saying it loudly and sarcastically and always adding, just loudly enough for his siblings to hear, “Let’s cruise”), Michael was in the aisle, out the door, the first to grab a fresh Sunday News from the pile outside of Krause’s store.
He carried it and his ritual bottle of Sunday-morning root beer back to his parents’ car. They were delayed, touring the new church (his father testing the confessional’s sturdy doors, his mother with the girls on either side of her clucking her tongue at each white and nearly indiscernible depiction of Christ’s suffering). Sitting on the warm hood of his father’s car, Michael watched the people leaving the church, getting into their own cars, pulling out. He saw Lori Ballinger walking behind her parents, her legs tan, her hair glossy in the sun, and he raised the bottle of soda in a debonair salute. She waved back, smiling.
When Jacob joined him (“They’re talking to people,” was his only explanation for their parents’ further delay), Michael said that he had seen her. “She’s cute,” Jacob said.
“A nice girl, I hear,” Michael added, emphasizing nice so that Jacob would know he hadn’t said “good.”
Jacob knew, and showed that he knew with a slight smile. He put out his hand and his brother passed him the soda, although he said as he did, “Get your own.” Jacob took a drink and then passed it back. It was a taste that made him feel ten years old.
“Where the hell are they?” Michael said. He leaned back on the hood, his knees raised. “Why the hell didn’t you take your car?” The sky was clear blue above them, hardly a wisp of cloud. He felt sometimes that all he did anymore was wait. He put his hand in his pants pocket and found a stubby pencil from the golf course where he caddied. He sat up. “Let’s walk home,” he said. “I’ll leave a note.” He wrote across the clean border at the top of the Sunday comics. Propped the entire paper up on the windshield and secured it with a wiper, left the empty soda bottle beside it. His father’s car, a ’65 Ford, was, he told Jacob, a piece of junk.
Jacob shrugged. This summer, as a graduation present, his father had given him three hundred dollars toward his own car, a little Capri. The puzzle he had studied in high-school religion classes-why the rich were so ungenerous, why the suffering of the poor, the fixable suffering, was so seldom fixed-began to solve itself for him the first time he drove off alone, in his own car. There was want, as the Brothers at St. Sebastian’s had referred to it. But then there was, he suddenly understood-alone, unfettered, pressing the accelerator, palming the wheel-I want.
His brother leaped off the hood-the percussion of the metal bending in under his palm and then bending back again. “Let’s cruise,” he said again.
They walked together, down the alleyway that ran in front of what they still called the new gym, past the modern entryway. Saint Gabriel, with the shoulders of his folded wings rising up over his head, was mere shadow behind the plate glass. They emerged from the alleyway into the sun, passed Krause’s store, where there was still a crowd of customers inside, pressed against the door. They cut through the parking lot of the strip of stores beside the school, turned toward home. It was the route they had walked together for years, when they were students at St. Gabriel’s and then again when they had come to this corner to meet their high-school bus. That was over now. Jacob was starting St. John’s in the fall. Michael would be hitching a ride to St. Sebastian’s with some friends, his senior year.
Jacob said, when they had reached the orderly streets where the houses, each nearly identical, began, “I called her once.”
“Who?” Michael said. He was thinking of how much money he’d lost today, not caddying. Giving in to his parent’s request that they all go to the first Mass at the new church.
“Lori Ballinger,” Jacob said.
Michael looked at him. He was about four inches taller than Jacob, and still growing, he was sure. He straightened his shoulders. “You asked her out?”
Jacob nodded, smiled a little crookedly, making fun of himself. Given the look, he didn’t have to say how it had turned out, but Michael asked him anyway.
“She turned you down?”
“Yeah,” Jacob said. “She said she was busy.”
Michael considered this. He considered saying, Well, that took courage. Instead he said, “When was this?”
“Last year,” Jacob said. “Junior prom.”
He stood still on the sidewalk. His brother kept going. “Holy shit,” he said. “You asked Lori Ballinger to your prom?”
Jacob shrugged, shaking off Michael’s astonishment. Michael caught up with him. “She was dating football jocks in grammar school, man.”
“Really?” Jacob said.
Michael fell into stride beside his brother. “You should have asked me,” he said. “I would have told you to forget about Lori Ballinger.”
Jacob shrugged again.
The route was all familiar-gray sidewalks and driveways, green rectangles of lawns, cars, bicycles, houses, and trees. The familiar streets. He and Jacob could name nearly every family as they passed. The O’Haras’ house, the Krafts’, the DeLucas’, Levines’, Persichettis’. They’d been in most of their kitchens or front hallways, they’d collected paper-route payments or candy on Halloween, gotten glasses of water or Kool-Aid from them on hot summer days. As he walked beside his brother, Michael’s recollection of those days made them all seem soft-focused and gentle, an easy roundness about things that had since given way to something thinner, something grown sharper in a threadbare sort of way. Maybe it was the clean-edged aluminum siding that had replaced the aging shingles on most of the homes, or the sleeker cars, or the sun catching the chrome on Tony Persichetti’s motorcycle in the driveway, where he once would have left his bike. Maybe it was just the sense of it coming to an end, his time in this place, his childhood. Maybe it was that the place had worn thin only for him, that he was already worn out with waiting to leave it and get on.
He said to his brother, “I can’t wait to get out of here. One more year.” He said, “I don’t know how you can stand it, not going away.”
Jacob shrugged again. His father had told him: “I can pay for private-school tuition, or I can pay your room and board. I can’t do both. There are four of you to put through college.”
“I don’t mind,” he said.
Michael looked at him again. Someone, some girl, had told him once, “Your brother’s nice.” And then added, as if it pained her, “Too nice, if you know what I mean.” He hadn’t, not exactly. He thought again of Lori Ballinger. Jacob had made a plan and worked up the courage and called her and asked her to the prom and she had shot him down and through it all, he’d never said a word. About any of it. Through it all, he’d pulled his blankets up over his shoulder and faced the wall. Michael would hear him sometimes, the mattress, the deep sighs. No doubt Jacob heard him, too, when his turn came. Tempting as it had been to say, across the short space between their beds-“Are you jacking off?” “Are you crying?”-Michael never had. Not out of any kindness, he knew, but in exchange for future consideration, when the agitation under the covers, the tears, would be his.
“I think the new church is bullshit,” Michael said. He had only the slightest hankering, like the first hint of hunger, to start a fight.
Jacob shrugged again. “The other one was falling down.”
“They could have fixed it,” Michael said. “Instead of spending all that money.”
Jacob said nothing. They were almost home. The Rosenbergs’ house, the Lavins’. “Putting the screws to guys like Dad,” Michael said. “Making them cough up the dough to make McShane look good. It’s bullshit.”