The TV went on. Ed and Grant started laughing, which made us laugh. A navy blue light was coming through the small high windows in the hallways. I’m not sure I was ever so happy.
“You smell like a wet dog,” she said.
“You smell like a wet mongoose.” And we laughed and kissed, feeling like we were doing something dirty by talking while we were kissing, talking of wet things.
And then we went downstairs and ate popcorn and her cheeks were flushed and her lips bright red and it was raining hard now outside and I knew Ed and Grant knew everything, and everything—everything—made me happy.
I imagined—more than once, more than a few times that summer—my parents killed in a car crash in France. I imagined Grant and Ed moving in permanently; I wondered if my parents had a will and in whose care they’d planned to leave me. I imagined long courtroom scenes with my mother’s brother or my father’s aunt, both of whom seemed likely candidates for guardian, versus me and Ed and Grant. I imagined us winning the lawsuit, taking a big road trip like the ones we were always talking about: to Louisiana, to Acapulco.
To wish your parents ill, to wish that they would never return, seems heavy from an adult perspective but it sat lightly on me that summer. A frivolous, whimsical wish that I knew would never come true.
And it didn’t. My parents returned on August 16 as they had said they would, at six in the evening as they had also predicted. My father seemed stronger, full of a loud bluster I remembered from years earlier. My mother hugged me several times, each time telling me, like a grandmother, how tall I’d gotten. And then she looked me directly in the eye—I saw it was true that I had grown; I had to look down at an even steeper angle to meet her eye—and told me she was so surprised by how terribly she had missed me. On the word “terribly,” her lips crumpled out of their usual fixed position and she could not seem to right them. I held her gaze and said I was surprised by how little I missed her. And then we laughed. What else could we do?
“Let’s get you boys settled up,” said my father, and he led Ed and Grant up the stairs swiftly, without the torpor of the past few years. He opened the door to his study and I followed them in. From the bottom drawer of the desk he pulled out a three-ring binder that held his checks. He wrote slowly, one check for Ed, another for Grant. Behind him the hole was gone. I raked my eyes over the white surface until I detected a small, slightly darker area where it had been patched up and painted. I tried to catch Ed’s eye, but my father was asking them which professors they’d had, to see if he knew any of them.
“How was the Dordogne?” Grant asked.
They were awkward and stiff, strangers in a house that was once their own.
My father slid the binder back inside his desk and shut the drawer. “The Dordogne was the Dordogne.”
I knew it was a line Ed would savor, that it would become part of his lexicon with Grant. My father shook both their hands firmly and thanked them for taking good care of the house.
I walked with Ed and Grant down the porch steps, across the lawn to the Pontiac.
“We never drove to Mexico,” Ed said.
“Or to New Orleans,” Grant said.
“Maybe they’ll go back to Europe next summer,” I said.
“Start leaving brochures around the house.” Ed spread out his palms, marquee-style. “Capri in July!”
Grant dropped his bag beside the car and hugged me hard.
“I love you.”
It was as if his big arms had squeezed the words out of me. I was embarrassed and I was also surprised, because I’d always thought I’d loved Ed more.
“Aw, we don’t like to leave our boy,” Ed said and came in on the hug. I breathed in his smell of cigarettes and hot asphalt.
I think we all felt certain we would see each other again, that this was not a real goodbye. In a week, after they’d gone home to see their families, they’d be back in their dorm a few miles from this road. They had pointed it out to me from the car, a big high-rise in the midst of squat brick buildings, and I imagined our life together would resume there in a few weeks. I could see the beanbag chairs, the box of pizza, the newspaper spread out with the movie listings. But when the school year began, I could never summon the confidence to step on campus, let alone go into a dorm and up to the eighth floor. Becca urged me to at least call or drop them a line but the summer closed up and there seemed no way back in.
I can look back on that time now as if rereading a book I was too young for the first time around. I see now how in love Grant was with Ed, how Ed knew it and needed it even if he couldn’t return it, how Ed was nursing a badly broken heart, and how well they understood what had gone on in my house before they arrived. I will carry that summer with me until I am, as Ed used to say, “passé composé.” I have never seen either of them since, though I have read all three of Ed’s novels and liked each one. I confess that I have hoped for some reference to that summer in them, a large gray house, a college town, a lonely boy whose parents have left the country, but there has been no sign of me yet, nor of Grant. It is strange to think that they both still walk this earth somewhere, that they have also had several decades more of life, that right now they are each lying down or standing up or reading a book or on an airplane or in a hospital room or a taxi or sitting in an office.