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“And where did you drink the illicit rum and Cokes of your youth?” she asked. “Not here, surely.”
“Over at Ben’s. His mom worked swing shift at the window plant, so there was never anybody around to keep Ben and me out of trouble.”
The bartender set down their drinks, and Judah flashed her a smile straight off a magazine cover. “Thanks, Patty.”
The woman gave him a kiss-my-grits sort of smirk and said, “Don’t mention it.”
“Wow,” Katie said after she’d gone. “The charm doesn’t work on Patty.”
Judah laughed. “The charm doesn’t work in Pella. Pella is unimpressed with Judah Pratt. Always has been.”
“I want to hear more about your glory days. Who was the instigator in all this trouble you got up to, you or Ben?”
“Me. Definitely me. Ben was a straight shooter. I told you he was going to go to West Point, right? Had the grades for it, the crew cut and everything. I was wilder. Stupider. I didn’t know anything, but I thought I knew everything.” Judah picked up his drink and knocked down two-thirds of it in several deep swallows.
“I can picture that.” Ben had that air of discipline, the set expression of a man who liked things to be done a certain way and no other. “You must have tempted him off the path of virtue.”
“Poor Ben,” Judah said with a sigh. “I was the worst thing that could’ve happened to him. At first, I just liked making him laugh. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he has such a great laugh. But then we got to be friends, and I wanted more, and I made him want it, too. I talked him into moving to Louisville that summer to live with me. Melissa had a place there, and I’d heard about the High Hat and wanted to play it. I sent them a demo tape, and after they invited me out, I spent two weeks talking Ben into it.”
“You dragged him along on your adventure.”
Katie’s fingers found her thumb as she thought of Levi. How his hand gestures used to get big and expansive whenever he spoke of Alaska. The way he’d spun out his dreams and made them hers. It hadn’t even taken much convincing. She’d wanted to go with him, because she’d been so infatuated with his confidence. She’d wanted to be married to him, too, even though she’d always known she took the whole thing more seriously than he did. She’d bought the silver wedding bands at the mall and worn hers on her thumb, as if three fingers’ distance could turn it into an ironic gesture.
“He loved you, I bet,” she said. Judah would have been easy to love once.
He wiped his hand over his mouth and looked pointedly at her glass. “Drink up.”
She took a sip and made a face. “Rum, ugh. I’ve had some memorable nights with rum.”
A faint smile. “You know, I had good intentions taking Ben to Louisville,” he said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was mostly about me, but he missed his sister. She’d just gone to Louisville a year earlier, and they were close. We were all close, that summer.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, flipping it open and handing it to her so she could see the photograph where his license ought to have been.
Three teenagers clumped together, all of them young and beautiful. Judah in the middle, his smile as large as ever in a face she remembered from the checkout-aisle magazines of her early adolescence. His arms around Ben and Melissa Abrams, one on each side. Ben looking at the camera with that crooked half-smile. Melissa looking at Judah and putting devil horns behind his head.
He kept talking as she studied the evidence of his lost happiness.
“I’d had this idea for the tour, that we’d buy a van and go play all these places, and we’d go through Iowa City. His dad lived there. He and Ben were practically strangers. I’d met him once, after graduation. He was this very straitlaced military guy, and the way I understood it, Ben wanted his approval more than anything, and that was why he was dead set on West Point. So I thought if we went to Iowa City, I could bring them together. Mend all their broken fences and whatnot.
“Everything was going really well. We were out of Pella, which was a huge step, and even though Ben didn’t want us to be out out, we were together twenty-four/seven. I’d lined up some shows, and Paul had been to see me play and suggested I come out to L.A. with him. Ben thought I should do it, but we decided to go through with our tour first. Neither of us were in a hurry for the summer to end. We didn’t want to think about what happened next, with him going to New York to learn how to be an officer and me heading all the way to the other end of the country.”
He polished off the drink and stared at his hand on the glass. The ice made a faint settling sound. His hand was shaking. “I’m not an alcoholic,” he said pensively. “I don’t think. There are a lot of days I don’t drink. In the past few years, though, I don’t know … Sometimes I can’t think of anything but every wrong thing I’ve ever done. Every woman I slept with when I shouldn’t have, and every person I lied to, and … and Ben. I think about Ben all the time.”
Katie took several large swallows of the cold, sweet drink, fortifying herself for the bitterness on its way.
“I mentioned him in an interview,” Judah said. “The woman who interviewed me reminded me a little bit of Mel, and I found myself telling this story of something funny Ben had said once. Reminiscing. I’d never let myself do that before, and it was a bad idea, because any time I say something friendly about
a guy, the gay rumor mill starts up again, and Paul gets pissed off at me.”
“Why don’t you just, you know, get it over with?”
“Come out?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to,” he said. “Soon. I talked to Paul about it. I can’t help feeling it’s his decision, too. After all these years of putting up with my shit. I want him to come around, to be ready for it.”
He rattled the ice cubes in his glass, deliberately this time.
“That makes sense,” she said.
