Chapter Text
Book I: Hell is a Headspace, Part I
"'You have a bad heart, too?'"
'Heavens, no. Knock wood." He rapped the arm of his chair twice. 'I have the constitution of—' — Just Before the War with the Eskimos, from J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories
Chapter I: Patrick Stumph’s Blue Period
Then
In the white shoebox diner, a short ten minute drive from the funeral home, Patrick pushes his eggs and ketchup around his plate. The flaking linoleum tables are sticky to the touch with syrup, and Patrick peels the skin of his elbow from the surface, frowning. When he looks across the table, his mother is doing the same. She separates the whites from the yolk of a hastily scrambled egg, unearths a fragment of the shell, and shakes her head.
“We should have just gone home,” she says under her breath, though still loud enough that the passing waitress is sure to hear. “I don’t know what I expected.”
Patrick swallows and gives the waitress a tight smile, one he hopes is reassuring. He asks his mother, “Did you ever really Love him?”
His mother’s fork stills against the plate, but she doesn’t look surprised, or worse, insulted. Her face lacks its familiar edge. “Yes,” she says. “Do you?”
Do, not did, as if he hadn’t spent the better part of the morning sitting with his hands tucked underneath his thighs on a folding chair, blinking back tears, and bearing the half-hearted condolences of old women who pretend to know him and who he is forced to pretend he knows in return. Patrick forces a short nod, feeling embarrassed, and answers, “Yeah.” He shovels another forkful of cold eggs into his mouth, turns the fork over on his plate, and leaves it lying there and intersecting his neglected breakfast. He chews slowly, still watching his mother, and waits for the inevitable caveat that comes with Love.
His mother’s eyes meet his. “Like you Love me?”
“No.”
His concession is interrupted by the rolling laughter of an incredibly large man, who has managed to squeeze into the booth nearest to the door. He sits alone. The man’s knife scrapes against the plate, emitting the usual ear-splitting din of metal against ceramic, the man slams his coffee mug on the table, and Patrick watches his mother bristle from the waist up and is no longer hungry. She rolls her eyes and flings the paper napkin from her lap onto the table. It lands in a perfect tent and sticks, the edges fastened to the surface with syrup residue. She clears her throat and informs the table, as if there’s anyone other than Patrick now, “We’re leaving.”
Patrick abandons the rest of his breakfast to be thrown out and can’t help but watch the man eat as his mother pays the bill at the counter. The man catches his eye and Patrick blushes, flustered by having been caught being impolite, but the man makes a spectacle of eating a double order of blueberry pancakes and sausage. Napkins litter the table alongside a collection of soiled dishes and forgotten silverware. He laughs again, a sharp noise that bounces off the windows at the front of the restaurant, and multiple patrons turn to gawk.
He shouldn’t stare, or make assumptions, and he’ll curse himself for it later, but an hour out from the funeral of a man dead of the consequences of a heart condition at fifty— Patrick tears his eyes from the scene and instead watches his mother pocket her change without tipping. Patrick steps to the door, desperate to leave the morning’s events behind him, and as he breaches the entryway, his mother approaches the laughing man.
She slaps her flat hand against the table across from the man and leans halfway across the booth. Patrick wishes they had never been seen together, knowing his mother will only add to the tense ambiance inside. The door doesn’t close in time for Patrick to miss his mother ask, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
1989
The desolate and dying town of Daphne, Minnesota is home to Francis College, an exclusive Franciscan liberal arts college with a total enrollment of under one thousand students. The students of Francis College constitute the overwhelming majority of the population of Daphne; during school breaks, the total number of permanent residents barely breaches one-fifty. Daphne is nothing to the rest of the world: a dismal collection of elderly who refuse to move and their unfortunate kin, an odd number of Francis College professors, and a few dysfunctional families. The only notable mention of Daphne outside of the town itself is in a college physics textbook. The problem reads as follows;
The Christmas tree outside of the Daphne, Minnesota post office is topped with a squirrel dressed in a monk’s robe. Each light in the squirrel draws 5.00 Watts of power.
a. If the circuit operates at 1.20 10 pwr(2) Volts and provides 17.7 Amperes of electric current, how many lights can be run to illuminate the squirrel?
b. Find the cost to illuminate the squirrel from 6 PM to 8 a.m. every night during the Christmas season (two weeks), using the rate $0.15/kWh.
Parts of this problem are true. The Christmas tree outside of the two-room post office shared between Daphne and four nearby towns is adorned with Frankie, a brown squirrel sporting a friar’s robe. Frankie, however, is not exclusively illuminated during the Christmas season, because Frankie holds the title of Daphne, Minnesota’s North Star the whole year round.
Frankie is an appropriate mascot for a university as unsuspecting and unsustainable as Francis College, which boasts a steadfast conservative undercurrent, a complete lack of sports teams, a budget that relies exclusively on the donations of a select number of wealthy legacy families, and ten acres of grey brick buildings and statues depicting religious in-memoriams. Francis is the manifestation of midwestern winters, bitter cold and overwhelming in its grayness, but Patrick lives in Daphne, so Patrick goes to Francis College, and hates every second of it.
🂡
The night before Patrick’s first day of his final year at Francis, Patrick stands in front of the mirror on the back of the door to he and Brendon’s shared dormitory and checks himself out. There is a party tonight —a real party with booze and strangers, far from the parties Brendon had thrown in high school with pop and his friends from summer camp— to celebrate the occasion, the final day of freedom, and Patrick has agreed to attend for one reason and with one condition: the band playing the basement show is supposedly good and Patrick wants their frontman on the radio show he hosts with Brendon on Thursday nights, and Brendon is not to get sloppy drunk.
Brendon is unusually confident that the night will end in a big win, a third person on the show at long last. Landing guests for the show has become notoriously difficult. They had quickly exhausted the list of qualified people in Daphne and then resorted to reading off numbers in the big yellow phonebook next to the dish drainer on Brendon’s mother’s counter and calling every bar or club in a hundred mile radius, then asking for the phone numbers of their regular musicians. Most club owners hang up the phone immediately, but others are curious, until Brendon proudly says the words Francis College and the owner laughs them off the phone. Patrick has asked Brendon to stop telling them the home base of the show, to no avail.
The party is a Hail Mary attempt at finding guests and increasing listenership, and Patrick is unenthused with the prospect. Parties are not his scene; the few he had attended with his friends’ older siblings in school were filled with jocks and girls in light pink and baby blue sweaters with tennis skirts, and Patrick did not possess the will to speak to them or the desire to spend the night drinking only to feel ill later. He’d grown up too fast, a lasting consequence of a dead father and his older siblings moving out too young, and as a result, acquired a disinterest in drunk girls, a mild case of germophobia, and a fear of sugary drinks.
“Chuck said she can’t drive us home because her car’s in the shop.”
They exchange a glance through the mirror. Brendon is untying his shoelaces just to retie them on his desk chair. He seems concerned about his appearance but hadn’t mentioned a dress code, so Patrick had assumed casual at best. He peers at his beaten sneakers and his corduroy jacket in the mirror and considers himself presentable. Patrick asks, “Where is this again?”
“Manning Vines Road,” Brendon answers. “It’ll be behind the bottom of campus and my mom’s place.”
“Near the big field?”
“Not our usual big field, but a big field, yeah.” Brendon catches Patrick’s uncertain look in his reflection and continues, “He told me how to get there. We’re biking.”
Minutes later, Patrick unlocks the supply closet in the lobby of Charity Hall with the key the dormitory proctor had given him in secret two years prior and extricates his bicycle from Brendon’s inside. Its chipping paint and rust look insulting against Brendon’s bicycle, which had been purchased by Brendon’s parents as a Christmas gift last year. The gift had been a half-hearted attempt to make up for some discrepancy in their marriage— one that Brendon had been oblivious to and heartbroken when it was exposed to him.
Patrick follows Brendon through the dormitory lobby and onto the lawn. It is nearing dusk, and while watching the sun disappear behind the tops of the trees along the campus boundaries, Patrick is glad to have layered his crewneck with his corduroy jacket. Brendon mounts his bicycle and leans down to brush mud from the toe of his stained white Chucks, then reaches into the smallest pocket of his backpack, locating it by luck and feel alone, and produces a crude map, his wind-up radio, and a single dirty unlit cigarette. He cranks the radio and returns it to his backpack, and as the nearest soft rock station begins to sound through the speakers, Brendon takes off down the sloping lawn of Francis College with Patrick close behind.
The ride from campus to the house on Manning Vines Road is longer than their usual nighttime excursions to the convenience store at the bottom of campus or the hayfield across US 53, especially as summer draws to a close and the sun sets earlier with each passing day. During the peak of June, they stayed out late every night, bicycling or skateboarding home from friends’ houses in nearby towns and the nearest lake and the movie theater in the next town over, and Patrick hadn’t complained once, but now, he is tired of the school year already. Bicycling to his mother’s house most nights and his job at Red Owl (it’s SuperValu now, Patrick reminds himself for the thousandth time) is enough. Still, Patrick wordlessly trails after Brendon past the convenience store, the campus library, and Brendon’s mother’s road until Brendon slams on the brakes of his bicycle and points down a dark paved street, the street sign partially obscured by overgrowth.
A few mailboxes down the road, the bass of a cheap speaker is making the floorboards of an old house pulse. A warm, halo-like glow seems to emanate from the peripheral windows, whose white trim is peeling off in strips into the moat of bushes abutting the front and back porch. A zoo of cars is parked in the driveway, spilling into a dead-end road across from the drive, and the street is as much of a neighborhood as can be found in Daphne, a secluded arrangement of identical houses separated on all sides by dense forest. Almost every house in town looks the same from the end of the driveway: his mother’s house, Brendon’s mother’s house, and every house he passes between them.
Brendon drops his bicycle to the grass beside the mailbox, chains it to his backpack, and offers to do the same with Patrick’s. Patrick gives up his bicycle without an argument.
“We’re just here to talk to the guy, right?” Patrick asks.
Brendon flicks his cigarette into the middle of the yard. “Yeah,” he answers, and Patrick does not feel reassured. He hesitates a moment, eyeing Brendon’s contribution to the collection of litter already on the lawn, sighs, and follows Brendon into the party. Brendon slides into the back of the house from the side yard as if he has frequented the same party many times before, but by the time Patrick makes it to the basement, intercepted by a number of friendly strangers bearing alcohol, a full hour has passed, and Brendon stands in the bullseye of a circular rainbow rug in the center of the basement with a second cigarette and a booze-filled expression.
Brendon’s drinking habit is genetic, but the cigarettes are not, and though he tries to be subtle, Patrick despises the vice. It was fine, amusing even, when Brendon had first produced a teeth-pocked cigarette in front of the television at his parents’ house, a disturbing caricature of Patrick’s father, and Patrick had even tolerated it when it made an appearance on their bicycle rides after school and their make-believe radio show in Patrick’s bedroom. The habit is less respectable in public. Trying to look cool is not cool, a brutal truth that Brendon should have learned at some point in high school but apparently missed.
Patrick grabs him by the shoulder. “I thought we agreed not to drink.”
Brendon swivels to stare at Patrick over his shoulder. “Chill,” he says. “You said you weren’t drinking. No one said anything about me.”
Patrick is certain there had been a verbal agreement. “Five minutes.”
“Half an hour.”
The basement smells of grime and alcohol, and Patrick peers at his watch, glowing green in the dark. He informs Brendon, “I’m going to get some air. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.” Brendon nods, and Patrick climbs the steep basement stairs and resigns himself to dragging Brendon out of the basement as soon as his eyebrow stops twitching. He steps onto the back porch of the house, nearly out of breath, and crumples to the steps to pull his knees to his chest and stare at the grass beneath his shoes. The party drones on behind him, someone’s whining guitar and improper use of a foot pedal, and Patrick rests his hands behind his neck and longs to go home.
He thinks of abandoning Brendon at the party, leaving his bicycle on the mailbox because he doesn’t have a key to the lock, and walking home. He’s too good of a friend, though, doesn’t trust Brendon to make it home himself, and thinks he can make it through the next half-hour before insisting they’ve been at the party long enough. Patrick checks his watch again. Not even ten minutes have passed. Patrick isn’t sure who he was supposed to be talking to or who he was supposed to be meeting here. He hasn’t met them yet, of this he is certain.
A pair of stained white Chucks appears next to him on the step. Patrick drops his face into his hands and scrubs at his eyebrow. “Are you ready to go?”
The Chucks laugh, and then Patrick is seated next to a dark-haired stranger on a stranger’s porch. Somehow Patrick knows they are not the same stranger.“Sure,” he says. “My place or yours?”
Patrick pulls a face he hopes conveys how uninterested he is in the proposition. He covers his mouth and explains, “Sorry, I thought you were my friend.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Brendon. Do you know where he is?”
“I don’t even know who that is,” the stranger counters. “I’m Pete, though. I don’t think I got your name.”
It is rare that Patrick meets anyone new in the confines of his hometown, and momentarily flustered, Patrick finally manages, “Oh, uh, Patrick.”
“Patrick. That’s, like, my favorite name.”
Patrick replies, “No, it isn’t.”
Pete seems to find this immensely funny. He asks three questions at once, “How would you know? Are your parents Church people? Is that why you’re not in there getting trashed?” Pete motions to his drink and his face twitches. “I don’t really do that stuff either,” he continues, and Patrick catches the hint of a stifled smile and knows Pete is lying to make friends. “Someone just gave me a beer.”
Patrick laughs, entertained but unamused. “I don’t care if you do that stuff. I—“ Patrick pauses; saying he only drinks with close friends is too inviting. “I just don’t.”
He expects Pete to pull from a secret pocket on his person a tiny bag of mushrooms, a rolled bill and a single line of cocaine on a tray, or at least a home-rolled cigarette, but instead, Pete slips his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt, leans against the porch column, and raises an eyebrow. He throws one leg over the other. “Well, in that case, I’m a little high right now.”
Patrick smiles against his will, a tiny smile that only exposes one of his incisors. He asks, genuinely curious, “Why?”
The laugh that comes from the depths of Pete’s stomach makes Patrick clap a hand over his mouth, hiding a startled grin. Pete explains, “There’s nothing else to do around here.”
Patrick has been intoxicated only a few times in his short life, be it drugs or alcohol. It wasn’t fun he remembers from the occasion, but fear— an unwavering feeling of being out of control, a complete loss of autonomy, a strong pull towards the unreasonable. He had surpassed tipsy, playfully out of mind, and too nervous to be delighted with the feeling, Patrick had sat in silence in a state of delusion and shuffled through a series of anxious fanatical consequences. The most potent: swerving over the double yellow lines of Daphne’s roads, not the back roads but the roads that connect the back roads to the main road out of town, and into a tree or the guardrail on the other side. He makes it out of the mangled pile of metal alive every time, if for no other reason than Patrick can’t know what it feels like to die. He can’t imagine that it feels good or bad, and it is because of this that Patrick understands the reasoning behind the intoxicants: there’s nothing else to do in Daphne, and worse, Death promises nothing— no guarantee of an extravagant head-high or relief from anything people drink to forget. The only certainty is that it happens eventually, and this is enough for Patrick. It doesn’t seem to be enough for anyone else.
Pete calls him back to their exchange. He asks, “Do I get to ask you a question now?” Patrick shrugs. “Why do you keep hiding your mouth?”
Patrick doesn’t know why he tells Pete the truth. “I’m missing a tooth.”
“Let me see.”
With reluctance, embarrassed, Patrick peels back his lower lip to expose the space where his tooth had once been. Pete slides across the step to inspect it, brows furrowed, and nods. Patrick quickly hides it again.
“It’s cute.”
Patrick says again, “No, it isn’t,” and Pete grins. “How’d you know my mom was Catholic?” He realizes after sharing that it is common knowledge that every adult over the age of forty in Daphne is Catholic. The two are mutually inclusive categories. The small church east of campus is full every Sunday, his mother a regular attendee, and it is then that Patrick also realizes he had effectively singled out his mother, leaving the question, Not your dad? hanging in the air.
Pete doesn’t seem to notice. “My parents used to live here.” He seems to think this answers the question, and Patrick wonders if Pete’s parents have passed on or moved away. “Do you go to Francis?”
Patrick nods. “Yeah.”
“Do I get another question?” Patrick nods again, and Pete asks, “Have you ever kissed a boy before?”
Patrick swallows the protest forming in his throat. He doesn’t provide a yes or no but flushes an invisible red under the warm golden glow of the back porch light and sneaks a glance at Pete’s mouth, more obvious than he thinks that he is. Pete has soft-looking skin and a fat upper lip, and before Patrick can think to close his eyes, Pete places his hand over Patrick’s on the step and leans in to press said fat upper lip to Patrick’s, softly. His other hand finds the hem of Patrick’s t-shirt.
It’s not a world-altering kiss, or Patrick assumes it isn’t; his general lack of experience must become more apparent with each passing second. He pulls away slightly, more out of surprise than disgust, and only succeeds in allowing his mouth to fall open. Pete twists his hand further into Patrick’s shirt, and the small noise Patrick gives is involuntary. Patrick sits against his palms, elbows locked, and lets Pete kiss him. He lets his eyes fall closed, pulls in a breath through his nose instead of ending the whole scene too soon, and startles when someone says from the other side of the screen door behind him, “Pete. What are you doing?”
The door handle clicks, and Patrick snatches his hand from under Pete’s palm and knows he doesn’t miss the hurt and glassy-eyed look Pete gives him as Patrick launches himself backward, out of arm’s reach. The voice doesn’t sound angry, but like finding Pete kissing boys on the back porch of a house party is a habit yet to be curbed, and Patrick already feels thoroughly dirty. The space between his shoulder blades is sweaty, his stomach is tight, and the hem of his jeans is stiff with drying mud and lawn clippings.
Patrick wipes his mouth on his sleeve and glances at the man in the doorway. He towers over the both of them, a mess of curly hair over tattooed shoulders. The weather is too cold for the sleeveless shirt, but he seems unaffected.
Pete looks between Patrick and the man in the doorway and gives Patrick a disappointed look. Patrick frowns. “Just give me a minute. I’ll be right there, Travie,” Pete mutters, sounding suddenly humbled, and tells Patrick, “Sorry, I’ve got a— never mind. It was nice to meet you.” Pete clears his throat and stands to leave, bounding on the toes of his Chucks, and he reaches over to straighten the collar of Patrick’s corduroy jacket before he disappears through the screen door after the man inside, leaving Patrick alone on the porch with his half-finished beer and a fresh crisis.
Patrick stares at the steps below him for a moment before he climbs to his feet. He places Pete’s beer bottle in the garbage inside, careful that no one sees him with it even in his stupor, and steadies himself for the forthcoming conversation with Brendon at the top of the stairs. He feels buzzed, as if he’s absorbed the rest of Pete’s beer through the glass and paper wrapper, and Patrick descends the stairs without incident and finds Brendon in a corner of the basement with a man holding a pair of drumsticks and a can of Hamm’s. Patrick taps Brendon on the shoulder.
“Excuse me,” Patrick says to Brendon’s company, and then to Brendon, “B, it’s time to go.”
“Five minutes,” Brendon says.
“No, B. Come on.”
Brendon’s company informs Patrick, “Brendon’s trying to get me on your show.”
Brendon grins, and the wafting smell of cheap cigarettes and alcohol stuck to Brendon’s purple sweatshirt reaches Patrick’s nose. Patrick manages a polite smile. “Yeah, it’s on Thursday nights. We’re trying to get people from local bands on as guests, if you’re interested. We play mostly rock but we take requests.” He hesitates. “Sometimes Oldies, too.”
The man releases a garish laugh. “Not much of a pitch, is it?”
Patrick blinks, his arm now wrapped around the small of Brendon’s back. “Okay, well— thanks for keeping an eye on my friend for the evening. Can we go?”
“He’s going to be on the show,” Brendon slurs.
“No, he isn’t,” Patrick says quietly. He scopes out the basement, every large, drunk, and hairy Minnesotan creating an obstacle between the corner and the door, and Patrick thanks the man once more and begins the stumble toward the door with Brendon attached to his hip. “Come on, Brendon,” Patrick bemoans. “We’re supposed to bike home.”
On the lawn, Patrick helps Brendon shuffle through his pockets and the compartments of his bag for the key to the bike lock. He finds it eventually, obscured by pencils and someone’s phone number on a piece of paper scrap on the bottom of Brendon’s backpack, and Patrick unlocks the bicycles, watches Brendon trip over the edge of the street, and considers throwing a tantrum in a stranger’s driveway.
“I told you drinking was a bad idea,” Patrick whines, and knows he is being unreasonable, tired and hungry and making a small attempt at processing everything that has occurred since he arrived at the party earlier that night. “It’s going to take so long to walk home.”
“Hey,” someone calls from the street, and Patrick’s heart drops through the pit of his stomach. It’s Travie, from earlier, and Patrick blushes prematurely. Travie jogs across the street. “Do you need a ride? Does your friend need a ride home?”
The knot in Patrick’s stomach tightens, still embarrassed, and Patrick sways as he catches Brendon from stumbling into the path of headlights creeping down the long driveway. His options are few, and Patrick admits, “Yes. Thank you.” Travie’s truck is parked on the street opposite the house. He takes Brendon’s bicycle, watching Patrick struggle with Brendon, and Patrick considers his bicycle still lying next to the mailbox and mutters, “I’ll come and get it tomorrow.”
“I’ll grab it,” Travie tells him, “But put your friend in the car first.”
Patrick piles Brendon into the backseat of Travie’s pick-up, cursing Brendon and his father under his breath, and helps Travie throw the bikes into the flat bed of the truck. Travie gestures to the passenger side door, and Patrick drops into the front seat and tries to swallow himself into his coat, ever glad he had decided to bring it along. He clears his throat and says if only to break the silence, “Thank you again. I thought you’d have left with Pete.”
Travie shakes his head. “No, he has a—“ He gives a dismissive wave with his large hand and lets the sentence trail off into the air.
“Did he get home?”
Travie nods. “Yeah, he lives right down the street.”
Patrick is suddenly glad not to have left his bicycle on the street. Brendon leans over the front seat of the truck. “Do you think we got him on the show?”
“No, B,” Patrick says quietly. He touches his mouth with the pads of his fingers and shakes his head. “I don’t think we did.”
🂱
Minutes past midnight, Pete sits on the hood of his car in the driveway of his house, the house he’d purchased with some help after his parents sold their Daphne house to move into their lake house even further upstate permanently. It was cheap and unaffected by the last stock market crash and is starting to feel like home, a year later.
Beside him, Travie sucks on a cigarette in silence, and Pete wishes he had grabbed the beer he left on the porch with Patrick after Travie’s interruption. It would be warm by now, but it’s still a waste of beer, and Pete is searching for a reason to feel sorry for himself. Pete folds his legs under himself and feels the car shift under his bodyweight.
“Careful,” Travie warns. It is the same admonitory inflection Travie has been administering all night, the undertone of disappointment and false responsibility, and Pete has been wallowing in Travie’s latest disquisition since leaving the party. Travie had sent him home, a five minute walk down the street, with a promise to meet up later, and Pete knows this means listening to Travie’s review of everything he has done and should regret since the previous weekend, when similar events had come to pass. Travie’s lectures now include notes for improvement, and Pete is tired of being babysat.
Travie takes a long inhale from his cigarette and offers it to Pete, who refuses with a shake of his head. “It’s, like, she’s way too good for you and you just don’t get it. Do you know how much of your bullshit she puts up with? You ditched her to move to the City and then dragged your ass back to her when you got your fucking heart broken.” Travie laughs. “I Love you, but do that again and I’ll break your heart myself.”
Pete stares at the asphalt below him through the spaces between his fingers, his face in his hands. Travie often refers to Valerie and his mother interchangeably, but this time, it is obvious that the subject of the lecture is Valerie. Val, his high school and once again girlfriend, who wears bright lipstick and ice skates like Dorothy Hamil and is a whiz with a flat iron and a can of hairspray. Valerie, who insists they spend every Friday night together, babies him like every boy in his late twenties wants to be babied, and has become a personal friend of his mother.
Travie continues, “She Loves you like your own mother.”
“I Love you, too,” Pete tells Travie.
Travie smacks him in the back of the head with his free hand. “You Love her?”
Pete Loves her because she’s a girl, because she Likes him, because she’d taken him back; he hates her because she’s Daphne, because she’d waited for him, because she’s more like his mother every day. “Yeah.”
“You think about her while you jerk off?”
It’s a joke, but it hits where it hurts. Pete forces a laugh. “No.”
“You still think about him?”
Pete shoves at him, and Travie jumps from the hood of the car to avoid the mild assault, cigarette held between his index and middle finger. The end glows in the dark, Travie’s eyes flash with a reflection of the light on Pete’s front step, and Pete cracks, “Fuck, won’t you just shut up?”
This marks the end of the night, when Travie’s soapbox speeches descend into jokes in poor taste, and Pete watches Travie walk the length of his driveway and blow a kiss over his shoulder. From the other side of Pete’s mailbox, Travie calls, “I Love you.”
“I Love you,” Pete yells in return, grabs his beer from the hood of the car, and retreats inside. He eats an unassuming dinner because he knows not to take his pills on an empty stomach, reads an eighth of a Dorothy Sayers mystery from the bathroom floor, and already feeling heavy in the head, pours the remainder of his beer down the shower drain.