Page 1 (2/2)
What felt like a few has the sun’s bright rays bullied their way through htly shut blinds, I hauled h I wasn’t quite sure which guy The pluuy who always smelled like sauerkraut? Jesse would have known The first phone call should have been to hi open the bedroom door, a towel around his waist He shook his head like an angry dog, longish dark hair slapping wetly against goose-bued a half smile "How about later? Tools are required And possibly mechanical equipht now"
Shivering, he ran a hand through his sopping hair "I could take a look at it"
He looked apprehensive Both of us kneouldn’t knohat he was doing Jesse hadn’t quite gotten around to teaching hiid shoulders At seventeen, he was taller than Jesse ever was, and hta shower in cold water is energizing Look at the bright side"
He eyed ht sides?"
"I have a good feeling about today"
"Whatever," he said "But if we don’t have hot water later, I’h his friends, as he’d begun hanging with a ned this year "I don’t know his family I’ll need to speak to his , Trey turned back toward his bedrooood luck with that"
"His mother isn’t home?"
"His mother doesn’t treat hiht A scared, lonely child "Textceremony, the priest offered to let us write our os, but like we did in every other aspect of our lives, we played by the rules and ith the conventional wording, the litany that ended with "Till death do us part" Though we’d seen young people die at each other’s hands in the gang-infested neighborhood we grew up in, a tiny square just northwest of the city’s center, we felt untouched by it We were too young, too neith a future bright enough to blind the griht to what "parted" really meant How unfair it was, how permanent, how out of our control At his service, everyone said he was still with one, parts of me ith hi back
We had a good courtship story because it started with friendship--we found each other in eighth grade, in a rough city school in an even rougher neighborhood Now the place boasted a Starbucks on every corner, but in the ’80s and ’90s, gangs ran the area--Polish and Puerto Rican, and they weren’t like the carousers in West Side Story If Jesse and I hadn’t tea hooked on drugs Instead, we did our horando We walked ho our own business Soed to make ourselves invisible But I could always see Jesse, and he could always see me
We were careful with our friendship, because we kneas the key to our survival We didn’t hug or hold hands or experiment with each other, and when others sparked our interest, we didn’t talk about it or offer advice Those infatuations never lasted longer than it took for us to realize relationships threatened our trajectory toward success Success was all that ether Junior college to save n with a ether as friends to save funds, and then, during our senior year, we decided to stay living together As more than friends
Forever Till death do us part
The thing is, no one tells you what to do when the parting happens And they forget to explain that when death is sudden, the parting is actually a ragged tear, not a clean separation It leaves all the ends unfinished, and they just unravel and unravel and