Poor Sid, conclusion

Part 6

I slept for the remaining two hours that Diedre guided us in climate-controlled comfort through the countryside. We arrived at the first antique store, all a little groggy from the long car ride. My mother paused outside the car in the overbearing heat to powder her face with her little compact, while the humidity was already varnishing my hair to the sides of my face. But we returned to air conditioning as soon as we filed into the front of the store. Just inside the door, an item caught my eye, a heavy dark oak chair with a severe, straight back and thick arms. I touched it tenderly, like it was familiar to me, imagining it embellished with leather straps stained with years of nervous sweat, copper plates smeared with handprints, hand-tightened nuts and bolts. Aunt Cookie saw me and said, “I thought you’d like that. It’s a lot like that Mission style of furniture you saw so much of out in California, isn’t it?” I just smiled at her and nodded. She had no idea what she was talking about and even less what I was thinking.

I sat down in the chair and felt the leather straps tightening in swift jerks across my chest. In my own way, I’d killed a couple of people, too, avoiding eye contact with anyone who might have the smell of gas on his hands, or wear the scent of cheap musk cologne or the scent of my past. I thought of poor Sid, how for years until today I remembered him as nothing more than the stupidest kid in school, and how liberating it was to admit that by doing so, I had sort of helped the world to kill him. Back in high school, we were already examining the moist, hanging bits of bruised flesh of other people, trying to find someone else’s deformity, hopefully worse than our own.

Now Sid’s bones would be scraped clean, and he could simply be no one. A condemned man, once he is past his fear, most know that good feeling. I saw my aunt in the back of the store, talking to the owner, pointing my way and laughing. I heard her tell him about me in the chair, “Look, Wendell, I do believe she’ll take it.”

THE END