***
I opened my eyes in the bright light of late Saturday morning. Why could I smell French fries? I rolled over onto my side. The smell was coming from my own hair. I sniffed against the pillow. Then I remembered. I wasn’t quite me anymore. I lived on the prairies in a tiny Mormon town, I worked in a restaurant called TacoTown to help keep my parents’ family solvent, and Jeff and my little sisters were the only friends I had left – except maybe...
“Crystal,” I said to myself as I opened my eyes and looked around the room at the mess of clothes and books heaped all over the carpet. “Crystal is coming over today.”
I slid off the end of the bed. My grandparents’ house was strange. Its space was all cut up into small bedrooms – six of them – almost like little non-descript sleeping cubicles. It seemed like the family that built the house, long before my grandparents owned it, was full of children who couldn’t stand to share rooms with each other. I couldn’t think of any other reason why it would have been made all of bedrooms. It sometimes made me feel like we lived in a dormitory.
The bathroom was at the end of the hall where the bedrooms gave way to a family room furnished with nothing but a flagstone fireplace, an old vinyl-covered couch, and a huge wooden cabinet with a little radio and turntable hidden inside it.
I was halfway down the hall before I froze in mid-step. I could hear Jeff’s voice in the family room. I thought he must be talking on the phone. But then I heard another voice answering his. Someone was in the family room with him – someone who was not one of our sisters, someone with a deep, lively voice and a sophisticated vocabulary. It was a boy. And there was no way for me to get to the bathroom without Jeff’s guest having to look at me in my glorious, unaltered, morning state. I was trapped.
“Dang,” I almost cursed.
There was nothing for me to do but square my shoulders and float down the hall as if I wasn’t bothered at all when near-strangers saw me before I had a chance to shower after a greasy night’s work. At least, I assured myself, whoever Jeff was talking to probably didn’t know me and would never care about me anyway.
I clipped down the hallway on light feet and made sure my eyes didn’t stray into the family room – as if keeping my eyes off Jeff’s visitor would make me invisible to him.
I was just pushing the door of the bathroom open when the visitor called out, “Bonjour.”
“Oh, it’s just you,” I said, turning back into the hallway.
Ben Jones was sitting on the vinyl couch sketching trigonometric proofs on a clipboard in his lap. “Just me,” he repeated. “Nice.”
Even though he pretended his feelings were hurt, I wasn’t flustered. We both understood it was a game. “Come on, Jones. It’s my way of saying any friend of Jeff’s is a friend of mine.”
Jeff grunted into his calculator screen. He had a way of retreating whenever I spoke to his friends. Maybe it was because I had a history of choosing dates from among them. We’d never discussed it, but I assumed Jeff wanted no culpability if I ever got my heart broken by one of his friends – or vice versa. Maybe he was wiser than me. Despite the looming threat of future awkwardness, it was hard not to prefer Jeff’s friends to other boys. They were always the perfect age for me and they came pre-screened by Jeff’s low tolerance for bad character. We were close siblings, and it was hardly a surprise that we grew to have the same taste in human beings.
But it seemed unlikely that any of our unspoken understandings about dating would ever be relevant to Ben Jones. After all, he was known in Upton’s collective consciousness as a serious boy with serious goals who wasn’t interested in trifling with girls before he was in a position to marry one, years and years from now. Still, Jeff kept his head down while I chatted with his new friend.
“I can’t stick around,” I explained to the boys. “I need to get cleaned up before my guest arrives.”
Jeff looked up. “You’re having someone come over? Here?”
“Yup.”
“Tawny?”
I didn’t mean to grimace but I did. “No, not Tawny. Her name is Crystal. I work with her in the city.”
“Ah, the irresistible mystique of the out-of-towner,” Ben Jones mused over his triangles.
“It’s actually a work party. We’re going to be sewing together.” I smirked at the irony of being considered anyone’s sewing mentor. The only successful sewing projects I had to my credit were some sad little throw cushions we abandoned when we moved west, and a pair of baggy shorts that weren’t fit to be worn anywhere but to bed.
Jeff gave a low whistle. “Your guest’s not a member of the Church, is she?” he said, labouring under the bizarre but common assumption that sewing prowess is connected to going to church among girls. But since the assumption was correct in Crystal’s case, I didn’t bother to argue with him.
“Nope,” I answered.
“Sewing with publicans,” Ben Jones nodded. “Good for you. Do you realize that in all my life I’ve never had a close personal friend who wasn’t also a member of the Church?”
“What – never? Jeff, did you hear that? It’s crazy!” I raved. On the east coast, there were so few members of the Church we all would have been pretty lonely if we hadn’t made friends with kids from other churches – or from no church at all.
“Crazy but true,” Ben Jones confirmed. “It’s not really by choice. I just never get out of Upton long enough to meet anybody.”
“Well, typical non-member kids are usually far more similar to us than they are different,” I assured him. “Right, Jeff?”
My brother grunted somewhat affirmatively. I was delaying his math study session and it was starting to annoy him.
“It must get awkward eventually though – I mean – now that you’re dating age and – and I assume all your friends aren’t girls and – you know.” I’d never heard Ben Jones speak with so little eloquence.
I folded my arms and grinned at him. “I have no idea what you mean.”
He smirked at me. “I mean, don’t ‘friends’ get crushes on each other, just like us Mormon kids do?”
I laughed way too loudly. “Don’t worry. No one gets crushes on me, no matter where they go to church.”
Ben Jones raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”
I laughed one more time as I stepped over the bathroom’s threshold. “Yes, I’m sure,” I said as I was closing the door. “Trust me. I am not Crystal’s type.”
By the time I peeked my wet, towel-wrapped head out of the bathroom after my shower was over, Ben Jones and Jeff were gone. I dressed, made my bed, stuffed my laundry basket, and went to open the window to air out my solitary cell of a room. I stood in the window, trying to decide whether the stale air inside was better than the smell of the manure on the air outside.
I still hadn’t made up my mind when a noisy little car came careening around the corner of my street, blaring Guns ‘N Roses music out its windows. It came to a jolting stop in my grandparents’ driveway. Almost before the car had fully stopped moving, its back door was flung open and Crystal started stepping out onto the pavement. She turned back to shout something at the dark head behind the steering wheel, slammed the door, and waited until the car disappeared before approaching our front entrance. I bolted up the stairs, trying to make it to the door before my horde of little sisters materialized to spook her.
“Heya, Mack,” Crystal said when I wrenched open the sticky front door. “We better get sewing. Wayne says he’ll be back here in an hour.”
We pinned and pressed and sewed new, leaner seams into both pairs of Crystal’s work pants. I only had to get out the seam ripper – the sewing tool I used most frequently – one time.
“Yeesh,” my sister Carrie cringed as she moved past the heaps of brown fabric and thread on the dining room table. “All this brown – it hurts my tummy.”
Crystal held a finished pair of pants up in front of herself. “Wow. It’s
totally fantastic,” she said. “My job satisfaction just went up. Thanks!”
“It’s nothing,” I told her as I coiled the sewing machine cord around my hand.
“Well, that was just about an hour. I wonder where Wayne is.”
The telephone rang, as if on cue. It was Crystal’s mother. Wayne’s rickety little car was having mechanical trouble – again. He wouldn’t be able to come back to Upton tonight unless he pushed his car all the way there. Crystal would have to wait until her mom could get away from work to come pick her up herself. She was now stuck in Upton until at least ten o’clock that night. Crystal looked embarrassed as she explained the situation to me.
“It’s all right. You can just stay here and party with me – Upton style,” I told her, even though I wasn’t at all sure what I might mean by it.
“Where are we going now?” Crystal asked as we came out of Fast Freddie’s convenience store with slushy drinks in our hands. We’d already been to the playground and pretended we were competing in a new Olympic event called the swing set competition. I won the bronze medal, the imaginary Soviet competitor took the silver, and strong, fit Crystal won gold, of course. We’d eaten a dinner of potato chips and strawberry marshmallows and now we were ready for the grand finale of Crystal’s first day in Upton.
“We’re heading to the graveyard,” I answered.
Crystal laughed and shook her head. “Morbid.”
“What? It’s the most interesting park in the whole town,” I protested.
“Well, yeah, I guess it would be,” she allowed, “but doesn’t it freak you out?”
“You mean all the dead people,” I presumed. “Well, imagine if the place actually was full of the ghosts of everybody buried there. What do you think those ghosts would be like? They’d mostly be a bunch of old grandmas and grandpas – regular people – only dead.”
“And that takes away the scariness for you?” Crystal didn’t seem convinced.
“I’m not scared of the dead,” I explained confidently. “Maybe it’s a Mormon thing. We love the dead.” This was probably not my best missionary moment ever.
“Creepy,” Crystal said, dragging on the straw of her slushy.
We had reached the Texas Gate built into the surface of the cemetery driveway to keep stray livestock from grazing over the bones of the pioneers – not, I imagined, that those pragmatic pioneers would have minded particularly. I tugged at Crystal’s sleeve when she hesitated at the gate. “Come on.”
She leaned back, still resisting. “I – I’ve never actually been in a cemetery before.”
“So it’s high time you were,” I insisted.
We stepped over the round bars sunk into the roadway and we were inside the perimeter of tall caragana hedges cultivated around the Upton Municipal Cemetery. “I discovered this place our first weekend here. Isn’t it great?” I asked.
Crystal hummed uncomfortably.
“I know it’s kind of scant on really old graves,” I started, becoming her tour guide. “And there are no crypts in here at all, just earthen graves. That’s what you get in a town that’s not even a hundred years old yet. You should see the graveyards on the east coast. They’re ancient. Oh, and try not to step right on top of where the bodies are buried.”
Crystal gasped and hopped aside.
“There’s nothing exactly wrong with stepping on them,” I assured her, “it’s just more respectful to pay attention and make an effort not to stomp all over everybody.”
She shuddered. “Where do you learn manners like that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t remember. It’s mostly common sense, I guess. Look, you can usually tell the graves of children by these little white lambs sitting on the tops of most of their headstones.” I pointed to a child’s grave. “This one was only seven-years-old when he died.”
Crystal was starting to loosen up. “I like the headstones that stand up tall better than the ones that lie flat like pillows,” she ventured.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “But the pillow ones don’t take as much punishment over time. Like that one, for instance.” I gestured at a high, thin slab that had broken into two pieces and been cemented back together.
“It broke? That’s terrible,” she yelled over the crudely repaired headstone. “Who would go into a graveyard and smash a headstone to pieces like that?”
“You don’t need vandalism to get that kind of damage,” I said. “The ground shifts or something and it just happens. Oh, here’s my favourite.” I led Crystal to the headstone of Wilbur S. Jamieson. His was the only stone in the cemetery that named the cause of death of the person beneath it: “Wilbur S. Jamieson, shot on December 8, 1951.”
“I like this place,” Crystal conceded as we sat on a bench, finishing our slushies in the graveyard.
I grinned. “I knew you would.”
“And it’s not that I’m completely cured of being scared of it,” Crystal continued. “I just kind of learned how to enjoy that little bit of fear, or something.”
“Maybe it’s not normal fear,” I suggested. “Maybe it’s more like – a kind of awareness, some perspective on where we’re all heading, in the end.”
“Where are we heading?” Crystal asked quietly, into the end of her straw. She spoke the question as if the last thing she expected from me was an answer.
I squinted out through the headstones. I knew Crystal didn’t know anything about the life after death as I’d been taught it all my life. But did she understand anything about the greater universe? She never went to any church. Had she ever heard of resurrection?
“These graves are just resting places – waiting areas. The people’s spirits are gone from their bodies right now – but they’ll be back,” I began.
Crystal snorted. “Zombies?”
I laughed too. “No, silly. They won’t be zombies – just whole, perfect people who can never be sick or hurt, or die ever again. It’s called resurrection. It’s a miracle.”
“But just for good people, right?”
“No, for everybody.”
“Everybody,” she echoed.
“Yeah. God’s not mean.”
“Huh. Well, that’s good to know,” Crystal smiled. “You know what else?”
“What?”
“I think my dad might be dead.”
I startled. “Seriously?”
“Well, maybe. I mean, I haven’t seen him since I was six. I guess that was ten years ago, now. He came to visit us on our birthday, took us downtown to Woolworth’s, bought me a green hula hoop, and that was it,” she said, not sadly but just as a matter of fact.
“Your mom never hears anything from him?” I probed.
“Nope. No letters, no money, nothing. He’s probably not dead. But he could be, for all I know. It doesn’t matter to me much. Gone is gone, right?” she finished.
As someone who had just moved away from almost everyone I cared about, “gone is gone” was a hard thing for me to hear. But I tried not to turn our discussion to my own troubles. Whatever friends I’d lost, I still had a dad – a really good dad. He was alive and well and as devoted to me as any kid could hope for a parent to be.
“But maybe that’s why I didn’t want to come into your cemetery at first,” Crystal continued. “Maybe I was worried I might see a gravestone with my dad’s name on it – and then I’d know for sure.”
I reached out to put my arm around her shoulders. I squeezed her and said, “Thanks for coming with me.”
“Well, honestly,” she admitted as I pulled my arm away, “my dad’s probably not the kind of guy who’d end up buried in Upton with all these nice old Mormon grannies.” And we were laughing again.
But the cemetery grounds were shadowy and the sound of the wind in the hedges was starting to get scary even for me. Crystal was eying them, maybe looking for her long lost zombie-dad. Old ideas like that are hard to give up in one afternoon.
“Let’s go,” she said.
I didn’t argue.
Maybe we were retreating from the graveyard a little too quickly – or maybe I’m just clumsy – but as we stepped over the Texas Gate on our way out, I rolled my ankle. I sat down in the dirt with a yelp. “Dang it,” I said.
For an instant it looked like Crystal might run away and leave me there to the imaginary zombies. But then she stopped and stayed with me in the dark, cemetery roadway.
“Uh-oh. Can you get up?” Crystal asked, bending to look at my ankle.
I held onto her arm and she helped me stagger to standing. I looked back over my shoulder, into the darkening graveyard. Shadows were reaching out for the headstones from the edges of the tangled hedges. How could I have been so cavalier in the daylight about not being afraid? “I might have to lean on you in order to walk home,” I warned Crystal.
“Sure, whatever,” she consented. We hobbled along the driveway for a few steps before Crystal stopped us. “This is no good. There’s an easier way to do this,” she said. She turned her back to me and held out her arms. “Hop on my back.”
“What?”
“Seriously. I’m really strong and you’re not very big. I can still piggy-back Wayne, for cryin’ out loud. You’ll be easy,” she insisted.
She seemed so confident I took hold of her shoulders and sprung up as high as I could off my bad ankle. She caught my knees in the crooks of her arms and we set off down the street.
“See,” Crystal called back to me. “No problem.”
I laughed and waved over Crystal’s shoulder to cars full of people I didn’t know as they drove down the main street of Upton. They gawked at us as we moved down the road in what looked like a fragment of a cheerleading routine gone very, very wrong.
It was nearly ten o’clock, almost time for Crystal’s mom to arrive. We sat on the bench swing on my grandparents’ back porch, rocking back and forth while I iced my ankle.
“You know what you are?” Crystal asked me.
“A klutz,” I answered.
“Maybe, but that’s not what I meant. No. You are my new best friend.”
I was so happy I choked. “Seriously?”
“Yes. And if I ever get back to the city I’m going to tell everyone about my best friend, Heather ‘Mack’ MacLean – a Mormon from Upton who can sew and speak French and who’s going to be valedictorian of her crummy little high school next year.”
I laughed. “And I’ll stay here and tell everyone about my best friend in the west,” I said, quietly remembering to reserve the title of “best friend in the east” for my long lost fellow Heather. “Her name is Crystal. She’s a fearless graveyard patroller from the city who has the strength of ten men – and probably some eerie, latent twin powers too.”
A horn honked at the front of the house. Crystal sat upright. “It’s Mom,” she said, grabbing her bag and hopping to her feet. She turned and called back to me as she rounded the corner of the house. “See you Tuesday, Mack. And thanks for everything.”