***
That spring didn’t get any better for Crystal. Just as things started to even out between me and my parents, everything went sideways between Crystal and hers.
“Mack?” her voice quavered over the phone line one night.
“What is it?” I was instantly alarmed.
“My dad,” Crystal began. “He’s not dead after all.”
I gasped. “You heard from him?”
“Yeah. He sent my mom a bunch of money. And he sent me a letter – and one for Wayne too.”
I waited. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I think I am.” Her voice was firming up, losing its quaver.
“Do you need me to come into the city – so we can talk about it properly?” I offered.
She cleared her throat on the other end of the line. “I guess not,” she said. “Not today, anyway. There isn’t much to say, really. It was just a letter. He didn’t ask to meet me or anything and he’s still gone and –”
“Gone is gone.” I finished her favourite adage for her.
“Exactly,” she yawned. I didn’t know at the time that yawning can be a sign of stress.
“Sure. But if you change your mind and want to talk about it, call me whenever you want,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Wait!” I yelled into the phone as she was hanging up. “Tell me how Wayne’s handling it.”
Crystal was yawning again. “I don’t know, Mack. He’s not here. He must be with Darren, I guess. I’m hanging up for real now. I feel like – I feel like I need to go to sleep.”
“You’re seriously tired enough to sleep?” I asked.
“I’m exhausted.”
“Well, you call me if you can’t get to sleep.” I used my mother’s stern voice to say it.
“Okay.”
“I mean it, Crystal. Call me.”
Ashley was chattering and pulling on my arm. I covered the telephone’s mouthpiece and waved her away.
“Okay, okay,” Crystal promised.
Ashley had clamped herself onto my arm again by the time I hung up the phone. “Somebody’s at the door for you,” she sang up at me.
I was the oldest person at home at the time so it was up to me to answer to the Boy Scouts selling popcorn or school kids gleaning sponsors for walk-a-thons or non-Mormon missionaries out looking for a fight in Upton. The last thing I expected to find when Ashley sent me to the door was a personal caller. But that’s exactly what I found. I found Wayne.
“Sorry to bug you,” he started, before I could say anything myself. “Did Crystal tell you what happened today?”
“You mean – the letters?”
Wayne nodded and looked down at Ashley where she swung on the end of my arm. She giggled up at him and he tried to smile in return. “Cute kid.”
“Yeah, don’t encourage her,” I said. “I just got off the phone with Crystal. She said she didn’t feel like talking about her letter right now. She wanted to sleep it off instead.”
He pressed his lips into a thin line and nodded at his feet. “Sounds like Crystal.”
I’d never seen him like this before – not even on the night Heather V. broke up with him. “But,” he continued, “I’d like to activate my status as your friend and – talk.”
“Ashley, honey, knock it off,” I told my sister. She let go of my hand and lay hooting on top of my feet. “I’ll get my coat,” I told Wayne.
I held my coat in one hand and with the other I nudged Wayne backward, out the front door. He started to walk toward his car. “Not there,” I called to him, beckoning as I moved through the fence to the backyard. “This way. You need to stay out in the fresh air to think clearly.”
He stopped and sighed. “Whatever you say, Mack.”
Wayne followed me to the grove of six apple trees my grandparents liked to refer to as “the orchard.” When we’d first arrived during the summer, it had been so full of bees and wasps that no one could stand to be near it. But in the springtime, before the blossoms appeared, it was a perfect place to sit and hide close to home. I pointed to a spot where a thick, low tree limb grew almost parallel to the ground.
“Have a seat,” I said.
Wayne sat down beside me on the limb. “I am not okay,” he said.
I shook my head. “I can’t even imagine what it must feel like.”
“Did Crystal tell you what he said to us?”
I shrugged. “Only that he didn’t offer to meet with you right away.”
Wayne tucked his hands under his legs to keep them warm. It was still cold once the sun went down at this time of year – especially on nights like this when there was no cloud cover overhead to hold down the air that had been warmed against the earth during the day. All the heat went flying right back into outer space.
“He wrote to us,” Wayne began again, “to apologize.”
“Apologize,” I echoed.
“Yeah. He’s in psychotherapy, or whatever, and his doctor thought it would be helpful if he told us he was sorry.”
“Sorry for not staying in contact with you?” I prompted.
Wayne shrugged. “He wrote this list of all the things he was sorry he missed. But some of it was weird stuff – like my ‘basketball games.’ As if. Why the – heck – does he think I play basketball? Does he have me confused with some other twin son he walked out on?”
“It was probably just a dumb guess,” I suggested. “Try to take it as a compliment. Maybe he just really likes basketball himself. Is he tall?”
“How the – heck – should I know?” Wayne mumbled. Then he was digging into the inside pocket of his coat. “He’s sitting down in the picture.” He handed a photograph to me. It was a department store portrait of a family: a man, a woman, and two little dark-haired girls. “Apparently,” Wayne explained, “I have two more sisters.”
I gaped at the picture. The little girls looked a lot like Crystal. And looking at the man was like seeing one of those artificially aged photos police artists make for posters of kidnapped kids – if one had been made of Wayne.
“Wow,” I said. “I can think of so many reasons why seeing this would have freaked you out.”
“Yeah, look at him. He’s got a great life now with his new family and everything. The only thing getting in the way of him being perfectly happy is the thought of me – and Crystal. So he’s in therapy, apologizing, and trying to get over us.” Wayne pulled the picture out of my hand and jammed it back into his pocket. “We were fine the way things were. Crystal had decided he was dead and I had decided that he was no good and we were better off without him. I was happy like that. I think Crystal was too.”
The pieces were starting to click together in my head. “So you’re thinking that if your dad isn’t messed up and he is a good guy then you –”
“– Might be the bad one in the relationship, yeah,” Wayne finished.
“Don’t think that,” I said, borrowing my mother’s firm voice again. “Families aren’t comic books. It’s hardly ever just straightforward good versus evil between family members.” I looked up at the lights in the windows of my grandparents’ house. “Believe me.”
Wayne looked at his knees. “We always had him lurking there in the background – like a boogie man or, like, a reason for everything that’s wrong with us, and with Mom. Now I’m faced with the possibility that maybe I can’t blame him for everything.”
“Hey, even good parents will eventually let their kids down,” I said. “Mine are as good as parents get. But look at the year they’ve put us through. Your dad let you down in a huge way. But that doesn’t mean it has to be because one of you is totally bad.”
Wayne scrubbed his face with his hands.
“And anyway,” I went on, “your family’s break-up wasn’t about you in the first place. Come on, isn’t that the ultimate child-of-divorce cliché?”
Wayne laughed quietly into his chest
. “Yeah, of course. This was all just easier to take when he was still a faceless monster.”
“Well, whatever he is, he was right to ask for your forgiveness. He was very silly to leave you on your own for so long.”
Wayne nodded. “He sure was.”
“Still, there must be some good things about you that have come from him. I mean, did you see that guy in the picture? He looks just like you, right down to this.” I touched the small scar above Wayne’s upper lip where his mole used to be – just like the mole I’d seen on his dad’s face in the photo. At the same time, Wayne raised his head to speak to me and the movement of his face brought his lips up beneath the pads of my fingers. My fingers curved slightly inward, and in the quickest of instants, I felt the smooth warmth of his mouth before I dropped my hand – blushing, heart pounding.
“Oops,” I mumbled. “Bad timing. Sorry.”
What had Bert tried to tell me out at his farm on the day the twins turned seventeen?
“Don’t worry about it.” Wayne raised his hand to where I had touched him. “Anyway, it would have been nice if my dad could have written earlier and said something about how he manages to safely shave around his mole every morning.”
I laughed – eager to relieve some tension.
“I don’t know about Crystal but I think I’ll write back to him,” he said through his fingers. “And maybe someday I’ll even meet him – again.”
I smiled. “I hope you do.”
“Me too. Oh,” Wayne seemed to interrupt himself, “I also wanted to tell you something while I was here.”
“What?”
“I’m quitting TacoTown.”
“What?”
“I found a better job. It’s in a store so I won’t have to get my hands dirty or work in an apron anymore.”
I sat sputtering a little, sitting on the tree limb beside him. The conversation had just taken a sudden, disorienting u-turn. Despite what Bert might have told me or how things might have looked during the first part of his visit, Wayne hadn’t come to Upton to try to get closer to me. As things turned out, he had come to tell me a bit of himself was moving on and we were moving farther apart.
“I didn’t even know you were looking for another job,” I said. “Why didn’t you mention it before?”
Wayne shrugged. “Until I actually found a new job, there was really nothing to tell, was there?”
I blew my bangs up off my forehead.
“It’s for the best. Sandy will probably promote Darren to my old supervisor job,” Wayne continued. “And Crystal can get used to being more independent from me. That needs to happen worse than she even understands. The fact is we’re not going to be living together forever.”
I shuddered.
“Well, congratulations,” I said. “And try not to be too much of a hostile jerk to your new co-workers. I seem to remember your first impression needs some work.”
Wayne laughed and punched me lightly on the arm. “My first impression? It’s always fine as long as no one gives me any attitude—“
“Attitude?” I scoffed.
“Yeah. I’m always a nice guy as long as I’m treated properly. That bad attitude – that’s where you went wrong when we first started working together.”
I shoved him on the shoulder with both my hands. “Where I went wrong?”
He swayed backward, laughing at me. “Come on, Mack. I know you remember the good old days when we first met – acting like we didn’t get along, don’t pretend you didn’t love it.”