todd bartlett lives off the disability check the government cuts him for the car accident he was in when he was seventeen. Slammed by a semi and lucky to be alive. His back hasn’t been the same since. You wouldn’t know it just by looking at him.
People don’t trust what they can’t see, he says and that’s his burden to bear. Everyone acts like it’s his choice he can’t work how they think he should; nine-to-fiving it in an office somewhere or behind the counter of some store or outside in the sun. I’ve seen him overdo it, seen him end the day flat on his back on the floor, begging for God to put him out of his misery. He’s in so much pain in those moments, he tells me, he forgets how good it feels to be alive.
My mother, Alice Jane Thomson, was supposed to be in the car with him when it happened, but good ol’ Paul Grey sized her up in the halls of Grebe High the day before and asked her to spend that afternoon with him instead. She marveled with Todd over the wreckage later, their luck. There was no passenger’s side after the impact and if she’d been in the car with him, she would have died. And I guess I wouldn’t have been born.
Todd Bartlett lives on Chandler Street in the house he inherited from his mother, Mary, who had him at sixteen years old. Mary’s house is the kind that always needs a little something more but will probably never get around to having it. A cracked walkway—vines finger-stroked into the cement before it dried—leads up to a ramshackle two-story of worn white siding and red asphalt shingles with brown accents. A small, screened-in sun porch looks out at similar houses, all of them chipped and broken teeth. Todd sits inside on a lawn chair, next to a blue cooler. He gives me a lazy salute as I let myself in.
“How was school?” he asks.
“Prewitt wants me to try out for track.”
“Waste of time.” He opens the cooler, pulls a Heineken out of an ice bath. “You want one?” I do. I keep one arm across my chest and reach for a bottle with the other and he laughs, swatting my hand away. He shuts the lid before the delicious cold air wafting from it can so much as kiss my fingertips. “Get outta here.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t.”
He looks at me through a curtain of brown hair, long enough for a ponytail, but he likes it better in his hazel eyes. Todd is solid; gives the impression of a man with muscles despite the fact he can’t really do much without doing himself in. There’s a faded tattoo on his tanned right arm, an initial. M, for the woman who made him. He pops the cap off his beer, takes a swig.
“Where’s Mom?”
“Picking up dinner.”
“Kind of early.”
“We’ve been working all day. Check this out.”
He gets to his feet slowly and the melted ice pack he was resting against slides wetly down the back of the chair. I follow him in, past the kitchen with the black-and-white checkerboard floor and an old refrigerator that squeals if it’s been left open too long. There are boxes in the living room, I can see them from the hall. Seems like we’ve got more things than space to put them. I follow Todd up the stairs to the room at the very front of his house. Our house—so my room.
Mom unpacked all my things even though I told her she didn’t have to. My bed is beneath the window, looking out over the street below. The sun will rise on me. Shelves full of my books line all four walls, boxing the room in. She’s even alphabetized them by author. My desk sits in the corner, laptop resting atop it. Next to the closet, something that’s not mine: an antique bureau. Todd notices me notice it.
“My mother’s.” He moves to it and runs his hand over the top. “But we can move it, if you don’t want it.”
“No, it’s beautiful. Thank you.”
“This was her room. That okay with you?”
“It’s not like she died in here.”
Mary died on the main street, too many years before that kind of thing is supposed to happen to anyone, let alone someone sweet as her. A massive heart attack. It wasn’t the way she was supposed to go. A lifetime of generosity and warmth was to culminate with Todd at her bedside telling her she did everything right, but I don’t think he even remembers their last words to each other.
“Got time for a talk?” he asks me.
“There’s nowhere else I need to be.”
He digs his hands into his pocket and holds out two keys.
“One for the house, one for the New Yorker—but that one’s for emergencies only. It’s your place now too, kid. Short of burning it down, do what you like.”
I take the keys but before I can get any kind of thanks out, the screen door’s splintered whine and the sloppy racket of it falling back into place sounds from downstairs.
“Where are you guys? I got pizza.”
The greasy smell is in the air as soon as Mom says it. Gina’s Pizzeria, one of the last restaurants in Grebe still standing. There are three, altogether. Gina’s, the Lakeview Diner (five miles from the lake), and the bar. Other fine dining establishments have come and within six months, they’re gone. People from out of town—newlyweds, usually—end up here with the idea they can start something that gets the ball rolling on Grebe turning into one of those sweet-spot stops just before the city, Godwit—“The Big G”—but Grebe just isn’t meant to be that kind of somewhere. Even being the founding home of Grebe Auto Supplies, with its countless stores and service bays across the nation, couldn’t put us on the map. People think Grebe’s a bird, not a destination.
“Just showing the kid her room,” Todd calls.