I’m trying to wake up. I’m trying, Mom. I wish something in me would snap, that I’d be closer. Closer to what HE was. Man, I still can hear his voice so clearly. Can you? I wish I could fix Betsy with my own hands, that you’d see me driving her and you’d feel proud, and somewhere, wherever he is, he’d feel good about me, too. It hurts. It hurts that I’m like this.
Maybe it’s better if you and I don’t see each other for a while. Maybe we should just write. I don’t want to fight with you. Maybe I can be better soon.
Love,
Luke
7. The Blue Bicycle
There are some things Alex Lionel can’t accept, and one of them is that St. Vincent’s switched to electric prayer candles a few years ago. As people shuffle out of five o’clock mass, he and Kay make their way to the front of the church. He rests his hand between Kay’s shoulder blades on the peacock-blue coat she’s had for years. She limps slightly from her broken ankle over the summer （she slipped on their wet deck steps） and his elbow has been bothering him （too much golf?）。 He wonders how they became an old couple all of a sudden, slowly making their way up the aisle.
He smiles at Theresa, the organist, who has just lit her own candle, and he nods to Will Garlin, who lost his wife last year. A boy in his twenties with longish dark hair and an old overcoat sits in a pew by himself in the middle of the sea of polished wood, looking up at the ceiling. He holds a book that Alex thinks for a second is a Bible, but then recognizes it as A Separate Peace, something Benny read once in school.
The priest is gone, the lights are dim. The electric candles flicker in their fake way, but there is still something touching and holy about the whole thing. The ceilings reach high, and in a few weeks, they will bring in the poinsettias stacked in a pyramid behind the altar, and place greenery along the aisle.
“Do you have money?” Kay asks, and Alex holds a ten-dollar bill in his hand and makes it dance for her.
“Silly.” She stands in front of the candles. Her face is still young in the glow, and he cannot believe they have been together for fifty years. They met in college. He remembers asking her to lunch that day, how she turned her head to the side. “Lunch?”
“Yeah, in case you don’t like me,” he said. “Soup and a grilled cheese at the diner, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
“I love diners,” she said.
He remembers the jukebox playing “Tracks of My Tears,” the way he felt grown-up all of a sudden when the waitress offered him coffee and he accepted, and then Kay accepted, and he whispered to her, “I hate coffee, by the way,” and she giggled and said, “Me, too,” and he knew, he knew he loved her. Right away. This girlish woman with her high ponytail and white blouse. The light pink polish on her bitten fingernails. The woman his friend Lawrence said looked like she could be Audrey Hepburn’s little sister the first time he saw her at the college library.
Now Alex looks at Kay, her hands resting on the shelf in front of the candles, and he wishes she would put her hair up in a ponytail again. She doesn’t look much different from that day at the diner—even with all that has happened. Lucky her. But he feels a hundred years older, even though he is healthy. Once in a while, he still thinks he gets a glance here and there from a hostess at the country club or one of the middle-aged females in his office. He tries to keep his weight down. He still does the treadmill four times a week, and golfing keeps color on his face.
He notices the three rows of flickering candles. Only about half are lit. He doesn’t remember the price per candle—how petty, he thinks, but shakes his head—maybe he will put in a twenty just to be safe. He has never minded giving the church a bit extra.
“How many are you doing?” Kay asks. She presses one button, and whispers something he can’t hear as the square flame snaps on. He wishes there were still the stick matches in their small glass jar. He loved holding the match briefly, watching the vigil candles come to life as he and Kay tried in their own tiny way to change things over the years.
“Four.” He knows she can only mentally account for three of these, and that’s why she gives him the sideways confused glance as she lights her own. He doesn’t offer any clues about his mystery candle. He wants to tell her about Iris. His stomach flips and he gets that crackling feeling in his neck.
The first he lights is for Lawrence, his good friend, the best man at their wedding. Alex can still see him in his tailcoat dancing with that bridesmaid, champagne in one hand, a cigarette in the other hand. Lawrence. Killed after only a week in Vietnam. Always with me, pal, he thinks. Kay will be lighting ones for their four dead parents, for her aunt Ginny who is ninety and in hospice now, and probably for their neighbor who just found out she has breast cancer. And then she will spend the most time on her last one.