Marie Sexton - Promises

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He was your friend. You should have stood by him.”

“You don’t know what it’s like in the Marines. You took the sucker’s way out. Don’t try to talk to me about what I should or shouldn’t have done. You don’t know a goddamn thing about it.” He picked up his wine glass and frowned at it blurrily when he saw that it was empty. He picked up Lucy’s and drained it. Then he grabbed the open bottle off of the table and went back into the house, leaving the rest of us in uncomfortable silence on the patio.

After a minute, Lucy stood up too. Her hands were shaking, and I could tell she was close to tears. “Matt, I think you should take us back to the motel now. We’ve intruded on your friends enough for one evening.” She straightened her shirt and her skirt, smoothed her hair, and put herself back together before turning to Lizzy. “It was very nice meeting you all. Thank you for a lovely dinner.” I think she would have said more, but her chin had started to quiver, and she quickly retreated to the house.

Nobody else moved. Brian looked stunned. Mom looked pissed. Lizzy looked like she was replaying the whole dinner in her mind, trying to figure out where things went wrong.

Matt was just sitting there, staring at his plate. Finally he raised his eyes to Lizzy. “Lizzy, I’m sorry.”

She looked over at him and gave him a sad smile. She held her hand out to him, palm up on the table. He obligingly put his large hand over hers. She put her other hand on top and patted it. “You warned me. Next time you tell me something is a bad idea, I’ll listen.”

He relaxed a little at that and nodded. “Thanks, Lizzy.” He turned to me, opened his mouth to say something, then glanced at everybody else still sitting around the table, and seemed to change his mind. Instead, he just clapped me on the back and said, “I’ll see you later.”

After he left, we all sat there in silence. I felt miserable. If I hadn’t been such an idiot, none of it would have happened. Why did I have to open my big mouth? “Lizzy, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“No!” Her eyes were fierce. “Don’t apologize! Don’t you dare apologize for that bigoted asshole.” She got up, came around the table and hugged my shoulders from behind my chair. “He’s a jerk, and you have nothing to be sorry about.”

“JARED!” Ringo crashed through the door of the shop at top speed, knocking over a display of car air fresheners. He didn’t stop but ran back to where I stood at the back.

“Jared, I passed! I got a ninety-seven on the test!” He flew at me and threw his skinny arms around my neck.

“That’s great!” I patted him awkwardly on the back, and he seemed to realize what he was doing and stepped back. His face was glowing triumphantly, and he was grinning ear to ear.

“You’re a genius!” he told me.

I couldn’t help catching a little of his good mood. “You did the work, not me. Come on! I’ll take you out for a beer to celebrate.”

“I’m not twenty-one.”

“I didn’t say the beer would be for you! Let’s go.”

I took him to our local pizza joint, Tony’s. We ordered our pizza, and the waitress had just dropped off my beer and a root beer for Ringo when Matt appeared at our table.

“Hey Jared!” He looked genuinely pleased to see me but a little wary. “How have you been?”

“Great. Ringo here just aced his algebra final, and we’re celebrating.” Ringo still hadn’t stopped smiling.

“That’s great,” Matt told him but then turned back to me. “Mind if I sit down for a minute?”

“Of course I don’t mind.”

He slid into the booth next to me. “Jared, I owe you an apology for what happened at dinner—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“My dad—”

“I don’t really care what your dad thinks of me, Matt. You were right. He’s an angry, belligerent, antagonistic asshole.”

“Eventually you’ll learn that I’m usually right.” His eyes crinkled, like he was almost laughing, so I knew that was a joke. “No hard feelings then?”

“None at all.”

“Thanks, Jared.” He sounded enormously relieved and clapped me on the back hard enough to knock the wind out of me. “You know, we’ve got a table over there. Why don’t you boys come and join us?”

I looked in the direction he was pointing. Two cops and three women. In other words, complete hell. One look at Ringo’s face told me he wasn’t any more excited about the idea than I was.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Sure it is! Come on! Save me, please. I’m not sure how I got sucked into this dinner. I thought I was having drinks with the guys, and now I find out I’m on a blind date.”

“Jesus!” I laughed at him. “Then I’m really not going over there!”

“Can I stay here then?” He gave me the look I was starting to think of as the pseudosmile: one eyebrow cocked, the corner of his mouth twitching up.

“You’re joking, right?”

He rubbed a hand over his close-cropped dark hair and said tiredly, “Only partially.”

“Is she that bad?” I looked over at the table. One of the women was definitely keeping her eye on him. She was decent looking, with red hair that was obviously dyed.

“I’m sure she’s very nice,” he said quietly, “but we have absolutely nothing to say to one another. I’ve just sat through the most awkward forty minutes of small talk ever. I’ll have more fun if you’re there. Just come over, and we can talk football until they get bored and leave.”

“Matt, there’s no way those guys are going to accept me sitting with them.”

“Sure they will.” But he didn’t sound sure.

“They won’t. Are you going to tell me that they haven’t already given you a hard time for hanging out with me?”

I could tell by the flush in his cheeks that I was right, but he didn’t give up. “That’s part of the point, Jared. Maybe if you spent some time with them, they would realize—”

“Trust me. It’s a bad idea. Anyway, I owe Ringo here a celebration pizza.”

He glanced over at Ringo in surprise, as if he had forgotten he was there, but then conceded with a dramatic sigh. “Fine. Send me to my doom. They won’t leave me alone until I’m engaged. I’ll send you an invitation to the wedding.”

“I would offer to host your bachelor party, but I don’t think you’d like my choice of strippers.”

He actually laughed at that. I had never heard him laugh before, and I foolishly found myself thinking that it was the most wondrous sound in the world. “See? I told you. You’re more fun.”

A WEEK later, Matt showed up on my doorstep just after five o’clock. He still had his uniform on. I was glad to see him.

“Let’s go,” he said as soon as I opened the door. “I’ll buy you dinner.”

Once we were in the Jeep, he said, “I need to stop by my place on the way. I want to change.” I hadn’t been to his house yet and was curious to see how he lived.

It turned out that he didn’t live in a house at all. He pulled up in front of a strip of apartments. Had it been bigger, it might have been called a condo. It was a long narrow rectangle of white brick, containing four claustrophobic one-bedroom flats.

We walked in the door, and I was stunned by the sterile emptiness of the place. Most of the tiny living room was taken up by one of those giant strength-building home gyms you see on TV. In addition to that, there was one metal folding chair, an old wooden end table (being used as a coffee table, in front of the one chair), and a TV sitting on a milk crate. And it was the cleanest bachelor pad I had ever seen.

“Wow. Nice place. The prison cell motif is really working for you. Very feng shui.”

He gave me the pseudo-smile: cocked eyebrow and one side of his mouth twitching up. “Here I’ve been thinking you weren’t really gay, and then you go and use words like ‘motif’ and ‘feng shui.’” I had to laugh at that. “Make yourself at home,” he called over his shoulder as he went into the bedroom to change.

The cliché sentiment sounded ridiculous; nothing had ever felt less like a home.

Behind the living room, next to what passed for a kitchen, was a nook that couldn’t quite be called a dining room. It held a rickety card table and another metal folding chair. But I was surprised to see that the entire back wall was taken up by a large book case stuffed full to bursting. I walked over to browse the titles. They were crammed in every which way, but I soon realized that they were sorted by genre and were roughly alphabetical by author. Talk about neat and tidy. One shelf was law-related, police procedurals, and criminal justice textbooks. Then more non-fiction, mostly related to war and the military, but also a few biographies and a huge assortment of fiction—mystery, horror, sci-fi, Westerns, and even a few graphic novels.

Matt emerged from the bedroom, dressed in his usual jeans and T-shirt. He stood beside me, tall and straight with his hands behind his back, looking at those books. I felt like I had found a tiny window into his heart. Or a shrine, but I didn’t know to what.

“You never struck me as much of a reader.”

He was silent for a moment and then said quietly, “I’m alone a lot. Sometimes it’s hard to fill the hours.”

Those words and the hint of tired resignation in his voice, struck a chord inside me—they echoed my own loneliness so completely. “I know exactly what you mean.”

And in that moment, something passed between us. We didn’t speak, but I knew we both felt it. It wasn’t anything as trite or romantic as finding one’s soul mate. It was simply a silent recognition that we truly were kindred spirits. That we had both been alone for a long time and maybe we didn’t need to be anymore.