The summer came, and brought with it the opening of the various dairy bars that dotted the county, with names like Dari-Ripple and Dairy Prince and the outlier, Meggy Moo’s. It also brought the million or so Japanese beetles, which had laid their eggs in the mulch beneath the roses, and now, with their sinister metallic-green shells, squeezed themselves into the petals of each rose flower, eating and having bug sex and falling to the ground on windy days.
The beetles were responsible for a whole cottage industry based upon their removal. Teams of local boys would scour the roses, knocking the beetles into buckets of water, which the beetles couldn’t fly out of. After collecting several hundred, so the water was hidden by a squirming metallic sheet, they poured a splash of gasoline into the bucket, and watched with delight and maybe a little guilt as the beetles squirmed furiously and with increasing desperation, and then not at all.
These were the same local boys who mowed lawns and shoveled snow and threw rocks at ducks in the lake. The boys talked like the old women who sat on the sidewalk outside the Cherry Glen nursing home on sunny days. They discussed ever more gruesome ways to kill beetles, or who paid the least to mow lawns, or in hushed whispers about the things they saw when they looked through people’s windows. They speculated, too, about the lawn and roses surrounding the little blue house on State Line Road. The lawn had become shaggy with weeds and the roses had drooped and died from the incessant beetles. The house was far from the main town and the lake. This meant the boys could charge a premium price, but also that they had to compete with the lawn-mowing, beetle- gassing, duck-stoning boys of Illinois, who they imagined to be even more cruel than themselves.
A couple of them called the blue house to see if the lawn needed mowing, but got no answer. One of them who lived further out of town rode his bike down, and stood on the road in front of the house and shaggy yard, watching for something to happen, but nothing did. Eventually they forgot about the little house, and the tall grass turned brown and fell over, and the beetles retreated back to the earth to lay their eggs for next year.
//
It was supposed to only have been four nights and five days, but it had quietly and unceremoniously become three months and ten days. Andrew’s apartment just west of Wicker Park had a little balcony in back with two folding chairs and about a hundred potted plants. Initially, when Max had called and said I’m outside, after dragging himself from car to train to El to sidewalk, and Andrew had brought him in through the back because sometimes the front door to the building didn’t open properly, and he didn’t want to deal with all that, the many pots littering every flat part of the balcony (and even some steps on the wooden stairs) were filled with black dirt and tiny green seedlings. Now, they had to fight a looming tomato branch and an out of control pea vine just to get to the back door.
“I got you a present,” Max called out one evening, setting a hefty bag onto the kitchen counter with a thud.
“Oh yeah? What is it?” Andrew was cooking something on the stove, big billows of steam coming up around him, and he didn’t look over.
“Here,” Max pulled a foot-long pair of gardening shears out of the bag and held them up like a $100 bottle of wine.
“Those are too big!” Andrew grinned widely with feigned disappointment in his voice. This was the sort of thing he had come to love, and perhaps was why he didn’t ask Max why he was still staying in his apartment three months after he was supposed to leave. There was Max’s terrible—if endearing—sense of humor, but there were other things, little things, that captivated Andrew. The way Max had, over the past three months, invented names and biographies for each of the balcony plants, and how he would tell Andrew their life stories, as they sipped wine and listened to the city and plucked cherry tomatoes and basil leaves and popped them into their mouths. For one hour or two, or sometimes more, he would describe in detail the upbringing of Gilbert the cucumber plant (whose father had died while he was young, and so was subjected to a never-ending onslaught of men that smelled like whiskey, each one more desperate to win over poor Gilbert’s mother than the last, until he heard about a job delivering newspapers in Kenosha, so he left and never looked back, except maybe once).
Sometimes Max would talk for too long, and Andrew, sleepy with wine and lulled by the soothing hum of his voice, would fall quietly asleep on the plastic chair. Other times Max wouldn’t talk, seeming to be somewhere far off, his eyes unfocused and his wine unsipped.
//
For two years he paid the taxes and bills for the little blue house. Two years since his father died, gasping for air like roadkill, and the house became his. He had Lisa do all the work—get rid of the food and clean up the messes, while he boarded the next bus back to Kenosha.
“You have to sell it, before it falls apart,” Lisa had called and told him.
“If that house falls apart, the whole of Wisconsin should thank me for it.”
“Come on Max, don’t be so negative. You’re always being so negative!” Maybe he was negative. A negative electric charge perhaps—a circuit left uncompleted.
“You’re right, as always. Maybe I’ll do that.”
“No maybe, just get it over with,” Lisa sounded impatient—as always. “I have a few days off at the beginning of September, I can come and help get it sorted out.” Max hadn’t seen his step-sister since the funeral.
“Sure. It’s a date.”
//
Max and Andrew got a room for the week at the Bay Shore Motel. Partly because it was cheap, and partly because Max had always thought the blue and pink neon sign, with its cursive swirls and outline of a sailboat, was the best neon sign around—well, until you got to the Illinois border, where an enormous sign announced: “Harvard, Ill. Donuts—24 Hr.” in blue, green, and pink script, the whole text was wrapped around a neon donut, complete with sprinkles.
“We missed the turn,” Andrew called to Lisa, who was standing on the concrete porch of the little blue house. Max was traipsing through the yard, knee-deep in brown grass. “I accidentally put State Lime Road; it wanted to take us to Florida.” Lisa cracked a half-smile and stopped tapping her foot on the porch.
“Hey Andrew, hey Max. Long time no see.” She gave them both curt hugs and they stood silent on the little porch. Above them some birds chirped, and insects hummed and buzzed in the scraggly yard. Little black bugs with red stripes crawled up around where the porch met the house.
“This place looks kinda scary,” Max said, crushing one of the bugs with his shoe, “almost like someone died here.”
Lisa made a coughing sound and turned away from them, looking across the weedy yard to the empty road. “He might not have been your dad, but he was mine.”
“Sorry Lisa. Just trying to be funny.” Max sat down on the edge of the porch.
“Mhm.” Lisa unlocked the brown front door and went inside.
“Is it a good idea for me to be here?” Andrew said, playing with a blade of grass he had picked from the yard.
“Good question.” Max sighed and put his hands to his face, smelling the dry grass on them.
“Why didn’t you just stay here?” Andrew sat down next to Max and set about stripping the blade of grass into tiny strings. “It’s a nice house, it’s all paid for. Plus, you like it up here,” He looked across the road at the few houses on the Illinois side. One of them had a broken window on the second floor. “for some reason.”
Max got up and started walking around the house. The roses by the porch had lost their leaves, and faded petals were strewn across the grass.
“I was going to stay here. That was the plan. That’s what I did. After he died and I got the house, I figured why not. I still had friends here and I wasn’t happy at that stupid art store.” Andrew stood back while Max walked around the house, occasionally pulling on the blue siding or peering through a dusty window.
“And you weren’t happy here either.” Andrew followed him to the back porch.
“I guess you could say that.” Max pointed at a shrub next to the house. Its brown leaves had started to fall to the ground. “This was my favorite—it’s lilac.”
Andrew laughed a little, “I know what lilac looks like.”
“Yeah, I do too. I don’t know, though. When I was here, it wasn’t the same. I waited all winter, and all spring till May, and then it bloomed, huge purple blooms, and I could smell it from the other side of the house. But it wasn’t as good as I remembered it smelling.” He stepped up onto the cracked concrete porch, coming up alongside Max. Beyond the edge of the weedy yard was a cornfield, golden yellow and ripe for harvest.
Andrew watched as Max gently folded his own hand into Andrew’s, their fingers weaving together. Two hands that could come apart; two hands that could miss the feel of the other hand. Andrew pulled his hand away and stepped off the porch, his shoe sinking into the deep grass. One hand that could never look back again. Except maybe once.