All the Old Haunts by Chris Lynch

Author:Chris Lynch [Lynch, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0458-8
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2013-02-19T15:29:00+00:00

HORROR VACUI

NOBODY EVER SAID IT was love. Nobody owes anybody any apologies.

I should have gotten a summer job. I should have done what I should have done. I should not have waited for last summer to come back, for the summer before that and the summer before that when we were all here, and here was just what it was supposed to be.

I should have gone to the seashore with my family. I should not be the big man minding the house. And the house knows it.

The little towel room, linen cupboard, closet. Why should a bathroom have its own closet? Does the kitchen have its own pool table? Does the living room have its own garage? True, it didn’t bother me last summer, or the one before that, but now it’s bothering me.

It’s a bi-fold door, with sneaky, downcast louvered eyes searching the floor, the toilet, your legs, as you try and go about your business in there. How can a person even go about his business, being watched like that? The answer is, sometimes he can’t.

Right. Check the closet five hundred thousand times and five hundred thousand times nothing out of the ordinary appears. Allowing that a forty-year-old fox stole is not out of the ordinary. Three foxes, each helpfully biting on the other’s tail. And some towels, of course. And a bathroom scale.

It could tear you apart some days, those little foxes biting each other’s tails.

God knows what they get up to when that bi-fold door closes again.

Shaving is a terrible, terrible, terrible thing.

The television in the kitchen has to be on, or I cannot shave. The occasional downy whisker winds up in my Special K—I am getting fat too, so I have to get serious about the Special K and grapefruit—but that is, I think, a small price to pay.

I probably shave too often this summer. Because I don’t have enough to do. Which I know is my own fault.

But at least it’s Wednesday. I have to cut the lawn on Wednesday.

When we were twelve, this is how much I trusted them. I laid myself out in the sand on Nantasket Beach, and when she told me to open my mouth and close my eyes, I actually did it.

Call it what you want. I call it trust.

I don’t regret it.

When we were twelve, this is how much I trusted them. When I was afraid I had only one nut and I was too afraid to search for the missing one, I let him root around for me.

He found it. It wasn’t much, but he found it.

I bought him a Creamsicle.

It is so hot around here in July you come out of the shower sweating. You towel off and then towel off again, then you race to dress before beading up again, like the reason you keep sweating is that you don’t have enough material covering your body. Then your underwear gets soaked through, then your shirt, then your pants even, and you feel so much more damp and hot and horrible than you did before your shower that you wonder why you even try.

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