Afterlife by Paul Monette

Author:Paul Monette
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480473836
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

8

Hey, wake up and smell the coffee, guys. I’m alive.” The sandy-haired boy hunkered on the upper bench, elbows on his knees, his rangy frame like that of a cowboy sitting astride a fence. “This group is a fuckin’ downer,” said Andy, caustic with contempt. “Sometimes I think you guys wanna die.”

“Excuse us, Mary Sunshine,” said the thin gray man. “If your life’s such a dream, then why don’t you join a Tupperware group? We like a little reality here.”

“I, not we,” cautioned Tim with an upraised finger.

The planeload of refugees numbered about twelve tonight. Sometimes there were twenty-five or thirty, lined up body to body on the carpeted benches. But all the regulars were here. Charlene, philosophical and far too patient, knitting her cocoa hands quietly in her lap. Emmett from Tallahassee, who lost his heart twice in October, unrequited, and stood determined to be in love by Christmas. The bearded uncle, Fred, racked with certainty that his mom would be putting the star on the tree this year for the last time.

But please, they had Thanksgiving to get through first. November 11, and already the holidays yawned before them like a primal swamp, full of the bones of mastodons and the bodies of lost explorers. Nobody in the group had informed his blood family about his antibody status, except for the thin gray man, whose people had basically told him to make a reservation for one with a TV dinner. Several members of the group were planning to make the annual pilgrimage to home and hearth, and dread was thick. Not that they didn’t feel it every year, but now the stakes were dizzily raised by what could not be said.

“It’s bad enough they ask if I’m seeing someone,” said Marina, looking lost tonight in her big Italian sweater. “They knew Jim died, but they don’t know how. They keep waiting for me to get over it. My sisters’ll flaunt their kids, and I’ll want to die.”

“Uh-uh—don’t use the ‘D’ word,” Mark piped in, and a ripple of black laughter went around the little room.

“Sorry,” said Marina, wincing. “But how do I sit there smiling and passing the gravy, pretending I’m dating, when all I want to do is crawl in my mother’s bed and cry?”

No answer. The gay men looked at the floor and the ceiling, unable to imagine such a wish. Tim the facilitator licked his lips delicately and offered: “So maybe you should tell them?”

“And ruin Thanksgiving?” retorted Marina, bitter and comic at once. “You think they’ll care? We’re talking Chula Vista. My sisters’d have their kids out of there in five minutes. And Mother would spray me with Lysol.”

“Or Raid,” said Emmett, thick as Florida honey.

Steven was detached as ever, sitting beside the one narrow window looking down on Highland, but he’d also developed a certain idle affection for the Thursday group. After five weeks he found himself perking up at the next chapter—Emmett’s two-week fling with the dancer, Charlene’s mother and grandmother who shared a room and didn’t speak.

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