Start

Sleepless, I turn away from the undented expanse of your side of the bed. Your pillow, now an icy mound. The outward effects of your act. Your act won’t evolve or fade or grow relative and fathomable over time. Your act restates itself as blankly today as it did yesterday and as it will do tomorrow.

It’s 1978. Neither you nor your act will ever age. But time pecks away at me. Soon, I turn 25. Too old for running home to the nation of Mom and Dad, the twin beds of childhood, but surely, too young for this. You mentioned my birthday as though you planned to be here. Qwaahda of a century, you said, placing your hand on my cheek. Your voice. Your Boston to my corn belt. Oh, how the young lovers smiled at these funny differences and grew old together, some later story might have told, but for this ending. Let’s call this ending an unforced error of the brutal, game-changing variety since you liked sports so much. And by the way, don’t imagine I am going to look sweetly up to heaven every October and tell you who won the Pennant. Find it out for yourself. The Red Sox are dead to me now.

Here on the ground, no sports pages, no more coffee in bed, giggling and touching and making plans. Nobody’s someone now, I scare myself out the door at first light and make for Dunkin Donuts. I’m a regular, it doesn’t take long when your rooms are haunted. He’s a regular too, the old guy, seems like decades between us. Tall and thin, with bones that protrude in his wrists and hands. Flannel shirt and corduroy trousers on a hot day. He always hunches with cold, though his angular face with its crooked nose and grey stubble is pleasingly sun-browned and creased.

He likes to sit next to me on the swivel stools at the counter. With stained fingers, he shows me his Rizla cigarette-roller and homemade playing cards. I pay for his coffee. He picks up a penny change, likes pennies, and calls them ‘Ham Lincolns. So, I set out all my ‘Ham Lincolns for him, but he wants more. Can’t you spare a few bucks, he says impatiently, for tobacco, his voice hoarse with decades of smoke. I can. I do. I give it away. I don’t care.

One morning, there is a pinprick of curiosity. Where’re you from, I ask. Greenfield, he says. Worked at Ruggs Manufactory. I was in love with a girl but she got struck by lightning. She was 25 years old. Qwaahda of a century. Can you believe it? Qwaahda of a century. He takes a long drag on his cigarette. I start to cry. Salt streams move down my face and drop onto the Dunkin Donuts counter. He doesn’t notice and keeps rambling through the Greenfield years. Factory strikes, mean bosses, girlfriend-killing thunderstorms, a house fire. I stop crying and listen. I let his stories rumble like a train heading west. I board his memories to take leave of my own.

She (the dead girlfriend) lives here now, he says. He pats his stomach. Here, with my dad, my faathah. Pats his stomach again. They talk about me, they don’t even care I can hear ‘em. They say it’s my fault, I’m no good, not a man, and so I gotta purge regular to keep ‘em happy. I gotta cut up my clothes and playing cards and dollars. First of every month, I purge. So now the staff give me only charity clothes and coins. Fifty cents a day. No paper money. Two qwaahdas, can ya believe it? Two G. Washingtons.

I can believe it, but he’s not seeking an answer. I blink my eyes dry, scrape my wet cheeks with a Dunkin’s paper napkin, and say nothing. A purveyor of history and coins, the old guy grins without looking at me and pours more sugar into his coffee. We sit for a few minutes, then I push my empty cup away and stand up. Okay then, he says, still not looking, see ya tomorrow. Okay, I say. I have an urge to fold my arms around him and never leave Dunkin Donuts, but it passes without incident.

I walk home slowly, thinking about tomorrow. Me, him, Dunkin, tomorrow. I don’t think about you. It’s a start.

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Start is a short story prompted by the life and times of Robert Rhodes, one who made it out of Northampton, Massachusetts State Hospital in the 1970s and shared his wisdom with the ones he found on the outside.

For more about Bob, see Postcard #1 on Substack.