“Really?”
“I don’t treat friends like that.” Rachel reached out for his hand, even though he remained crestfallen. She wasn’t sure if he was sad because the construction was over, or sad because she just wanted to be friends. “Besides,” she said. “Next summer, I want you to build me a back porch.”
He smiled at this, and Rachel continued to hold his hand.
Into Bloom
Jake, Krystal, and the baby were sitting in their usual place, in the parking lot of the IGA supermarket. Krystal brought lawn chairs and a sunhat for the baby. Bert stayed behind at their trailer house. He was doing the work, hanging eight rows of shelves on a wall in Jake’s bedroom. Jake really needed ten rows for his shoes but decided to say nothing. He remained wary of Bert looking through his drawers, but at least he was trying.
The townspeople gathered at eleven o’clock in the morning, in anticipation of the parade. They sat on curbs, leaned against the bent poles of stop signs. Their usual number was thinned by half—their sons and daughters and husbands and wives would be riding on the floats.
Buley and Rocky joined them, and Krystal made painful small talk with her brother, until eventually, she handed him the baby. It was not enough of a distraction.
“She looks like you,” he said.
“Thank God,” said Buley.
Krystal ignored this. Mrs. Matthis stumbled across the road, clutching her crossword puzzle book. Jake could tell she was wasted—the Dirty Shame had closed for the parade, and the morning regulars were forced out into the sunlight. Mrs. Matthis plopped down in the parking lot of the IGA, sought refuge in a row of cars. She leaned against a Pontiac Firebird, her lips moving as she faked solutions.
Buley fanned herself extravagantly, a red-and-yellow accordion, Chinese dragons. Jake coveted it, could not help himself, even though his mother shifted in her lawn chair uncomfortably. Buley took notice, and silenced him with a rosary from her purse, beads the color of the cloudless July sky. Jake took it gladly, even though the crucifix was cheap white plastic.
Krystal eyed Rocky and the baby nervously, reached over to adjust the sunhat. “So, Rocky? When are the two of you going to get hitched? Marriage is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“I refuse to be known as Buley Bailey,” Buley said, and folded her fan with one crisp movement. She looked at Krystal with disdain. “Sounds like a disease you catch in the Amazon.”
“Indeed,” said Jake. Across the street, Gene Runkle, another refugee from the Dirty Shame, waved an unlit sparkler in one hand, and a miniature American flag in the other. The people around him could tell this was not patriotism, just alcoholism. They moved away as fast as they could.
The parade began with a long line of logging trucks, strung with Christmas lights. This was how the parade always began, and it was stultifying.
“I’ve never understood that,” said Jake, shouting to be heard over the engines. “Why do they always get to go first?” Jake was a sucker for pageantry, and believed every parade should begin with a marching band and cheerleaders. In Quinn, the cheerleaders did not twirl batons, or do much of anything. They didn’t even hold pom-poms correctly—dropping their elbows and let them hang limply. Cruel-mouthed, slouchy, and disinterested, Jake could not wait to befriend them in high school. Alas, the bad-postured cheerleaders and the marching band in street clothes would come in the middle of the pack. Thirty logging trucks, creeping in their lowest gear, and Jake was already exhausted. To make matters worse, the logging trucks were completely loaded, reeking of pine sap and diesel fuel.
The people of Quinn loved their logging trucks, stuck fingers in their mouths to unleash whistles, drowned out by the big rigs.
Buley smiled at Jake wryly. “The people of Quinn do love a parade,” she said.
“The people of Quinn love ranch dressing,” added Jake. “That doesn’t make it right.”
The first float finally approached. It was Reverend Foote and New Life Evangelical, stuffed full of identically dressed parishioners Jake recognized from the wedding. The float wasn’t that special—a butcher-paper banner, children dressed like lambs. They sang, and Mrs. Reverend Foote banged on a tambourine. Krystal snatched the baby away from Rocky, and forced her tiny hand into a wave.
Buley was not aware of the new church in town; she was the type of woman who isolated herself out of disgust, another reason why Jake loved her. She stared at the float quizzically.
“Moonies,” she pronounced. “I bet they had a mass wedding in the football field.”