Before I left Champaign for good, I saw Wheatyard one last time.
"I have some news for you," I said over the phone, intentionally echoing his last call. Even though that afternoon in Tillsburg finally revealed so much about Wheatyard, if not everything, part of me wanted to pay him back for dragging me all the way out there. Big news, he said, which turned out to be nothing more than him finally calling that editor. No book deal, no promising commitment—just that he called. All the other revelations were rewarding, of course, but they weren't why he summoned me out there. So in turn I summoned him.
That final visit was brief—just a few minutes over coffee at The Grind. As I entered I noticed that Emily wasn’t there, which meant one less distraction for my mission, a mission of my own big news but also one last chance to get inside Wheatyard's mind.
But he spoke little, never looking me straight in the eye, as if embarrassed about what he had said that afternoon, as little as it was. Though he showed a flash or two of his old spirit, his mood was unlike anything I had seen during our three months of friendship—muted, subdued, detached. He mumbled a few stray comments about his manuscript and the publisher, but nothing more definite or decisive than anything I had already heard before.
"I'm feeling better about working with that editor—" he began, before I impatiently interrupted.
"Uh huh, great. So about my big news."
He sat, slumped and silenced and—I realized only later—with a hurt look on his face as I told everything. The new job at Preston Jeffers, the good starting salary and bonus potential, the sunny apartment high above the Mississippi. He had no response, and immediately I regretted my haste, realizing I might have preempted another verbal avalanche from him—about the group homes, literature, anything—that I knew I would never again have the chance to experience. After several wordless seconds he abruptly stood up, uttered "So long" over his shoulder as he brushed past, and was gone.
I wondered if he resented my good fortune, while his own life went on mostly as before. As he retreated, the tails of his trenchcoat flapping side to side, that Morrissey lyric—"We hate it when our friends become successful"—came back to me, and I realized it was indeed resentment. And I had no doubt we had been good friends.
But I couldn't imagine how he could be jealous, because to him my good fortune—gaining entry into the corporate world—wasn't success at all, but instead defeat. Or maybe any recognition for others, while he was ignored by everyone other than a few curiosity-seekers—me, Emily, Hanratty, Don Eastman—was cause for resentment.
Other than the long drive north, when I had little else to occupy my mind, Wheatyard had barely entered my thoughts in the eight months after. I might have continued to puzzle over his existence had my crushing workload at Preston Jeffers not numbed my consciousness and obliterated most of my spare time. I might have filled the remaining gaps in Wheatyard's story, for even if I didn't have him completely pegged, I did know many of the milestones of his life. As for the mundane highways and byways between, I could guess the rest. Or interpolate, as Wheatyard would undoubtedly have corrected me.
But the long hours of pondering Wheatyard were long past. My life had become, almost exclusively, about work.