I finished my coffee and got to work. We set up long folding tables underneath the spreading branches of the ancient oak trees in back of the house, where the shade would protect us from the worst of the day’s heat. We shook out plastic tablecloths and set up folding chairs, giving me flashbacks to catering jobs I’d taken during cooking school. As we worked, I glanced at Jimmy and said, “You know of a bar down by the river? Right close to the water, just on the other side of the bridge?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “There used to be a pool hall down there, but I believe it burned down four, five years ago. Why?”
“Oh, I thought I saw a place when I was out driving last night, that’s all. So much has changed around here, I’m just trying to get my head around the way things are now.”
“Ha. Sure. I know the real reason. The reunion hasn’t even started yet, and you already need a drink. Ain’t that right?”
“You got me there,” I said.
“We’ll crack a couple beers after noon,” he said, and winked. “Any earlier and Emily gives me this look. You aren’t married, so you can’t understand, but ninety-nine percent of making it work is avoiding doing things that get you that look.” He suddenly took an intense interest in the mechanism of the folding chair in his hand. “Mom told me about your, ah, friend, that y’all broke up, and I just wanted to say, I’m real sorry to hear that.”
I don’t think I’ve ever been more touched by anything in my life. I knew better than to spoil the moment by showing him how much it meant to me, so I just waved it away and said, “Plenty of fish in the sea.”
“Just don’t let Aunt Helen hear you’re single. She knows every single girl in the nearest five counties, and she’ll start planning your wedding before you’ve finished saying hello to ’em.”
“If you need me later,” I said, “I’ll just be hiding under this table here.”
But I didn’t hide. My parents got there around noon, and Mom and I did the big hugs, the it’s-been-too-longs. Dad shook my hand solemnly. He’s always been a formal guy, and after a two-minute conversation we’d pretty much caught up as well as we were going to. More people started trickling in soon after that, and the trickle became a flood by around three p.m. By four, there were at least a hundred members of the Brydon family tree and associated branches milling inside and outside the big house. Several packs of feral children roamed wild among the fields, countless half-familiar faces grinned at me, and I got my cheeks kissed far more often than a man of twenty-three years ever should.
Oh, a few of the second cousins pointedly refused to talk to me—being openly queer and Californian was too much for them—but most of the relatives were willing to ignore my moral failings, and a few made a great show of being especially liberal-minded and asking after my boyfriend, which was a twist of the knife I could have done without, even though they meant well. Aunt Helen was one of those, much to my surprise. (She’s not really my aunt, technically—she’s something like my grandmother’s second cousin—but where I come from every female relative over a certain age is an aunt, and yes, you pronounce it “ant,” like the bugs that ruin picnics.)
When the memory-lane walking and inevitable sympathies over my failure to win on Stand the Heat got to be too much, I holed up in the kitchen for a while, helping Emily and a rotating cast of Brydon women handle the cooking. They were willing enough to accommodate my presence, giving me trivial tasks, though traditionally men do not pass the kitchen’s threshold during our family’s high holy days. I was able to lose myself, as always, in the rhythms of preparing food. Eventually, though, the pies were being taken outside, and the puddings, and the cakes, and the lemon squares, and the divinity fudge, and there were no more excuses to hide away.
I strolled outside with a can of beer in my hand, listening to the sound of a hundred separate conversations, the clang of horseshoes hitting a metal post, and the trash talk of some of the teenage boys playing basketball against a hoop set up beside the barn (which hadn’t held livestock in a generation, but was full of all manner of broken mechanical junk).
I ambled out under the tall trees, feeling nearly at peace. I was among my people. They ate what I liked to eat. They had the proper degree of reverence for college basketball. Their accents were the ones I heard spoken in my dreams; the one I still took on myself, after a few drinks. Sure, I wasn’t really one of them anymore, but they were a part of me—maybe even a bigger part than I liked to admit.
Clearly, I decided, seeing these doppelgangers—these other versions of myself—was indicative of some kind of identity crisis. I’d gone through a lot of upheavals and changes recently, and I hadn’t entirely figured out what it all meant. My brain was trying to make sense of all the changes I’d gone through, that was all. Coming home, remembering who I used to be, was just a little too much for my brain to bear, too many aspects of myself coming into conflict, so I’d gotten a little sleep-deprived and let my imagination get away from me.
Maybe I was done with California. I wasn’t necessarily ready to come back here—I couldn’t see myself taking over Willard’s and becoming a pitmaster, vision of myself doing exactly that notwithstanding—but it did occur to me that I’d spent five years desperately running away from my hometown. Trying to avoid the life I’d seen so many of my old friends fall into: knocking up a seventeen-year-old girlfriend, dropping out of high school, marrying too young, getting a job at the turkey plant—
I walked past a pecan tree, the air shimmered, and there I was: another me, sitting on a folding chair beside a woman with hair the color of fresh-mown hay, both of them cooing over a baby in my—in his—lap. I knew the girl, too. Kelly White. My senior prom date, still pretty enough to be the obvious date for a football star.
We’d made out, and more, in the back of the car I borrowed from Jimmy after the dance, and we’d dated on and off that last summer, but then I’d gone off to college on a football scholarship for a semester, before dropping out to go to culinary school, and we’d never even talked since—
This other me, this father me, wearing a polo shirt and steel-rimmed glasses (unlike my own contact lenses), looked up. He frowned. “You’re here?” he said, handing the baby to his wife. She didn’t appear to notice my existence at all. “We never thought we’d see you again.”
I closed my eyes. Without opening them, I said, “I do not understand what’s happening.”
“Huh.” His voice was closer—he must have walked toward me. I still didn’t open my eyes to look. “I guess it has been, what … over a dozen years, since you saw the rest of us?”
I had a flash of memory—vague and secondhand, like the memory of someone else’s account of a dream. Walking into a field, the air filled with heat shimmers, and other kids, ten-year-olds, standing in clumps and chatting, and apart from different clothes and haircuts they all looked exactly the same—
“Go to the bar,” the other me said kindly.
“What bar?” I whispered.
“Don’t do that. You pulled right up into the parking lot last night. We all saw you. Just go.”
I turned, eyes closed, and walked ten or fifteen steps before I opened my eyes and looked back. No me. No Kelly. No baby.
I didn’t say anything to anyone, just went to my car, navigated around the dozens of other vehicles parked on every available scrap of the property, and set off toward the river.
The air shimmered as I crossed the bridge, and there was TJ’s Place. The parking lot wasn’t as full as it had been last night, just a handful of cars. I parked on the gravel, far away from the front door, and approached the bar slowly, like I was stalking prey.
I pushed inside, and it was pure honky-tonk: board floor, beer signs on the walls, dust in the corners, a couple of pool tables, a bunch of mismatched chairs, and a scuffed-up bar along the back wall.
“They say you can’t go home again,” a voice slurred, and I looked to my right, where a version of me—except maybe thirty pounds lighter, skeleton-t
hin—sat gazing into a mug of beer next to an untouched basket of onion rings, shiny with grease. “But here you are.”
Two other Terrys were playing pool. One of them—he had an outlandish mustache—tipped the rim of his trucker hat with one finger in greeting. The other, leaner and dressed in a wife-beater, was focused on lining up a shot and didn’t pay me any mind at all.
I went toward the bar and slid onto a stool. The me behind the counter wore a black T-shirt, tight, that showed off his biceps. I had the brief and horrible thought, He’s pretty cute, and shook it off. I hope I’m not that narcissistic.
“Just tell me,” I said, when he sauntered over toward me. “Is this hell? Or purgatory, or something?”
“Nah. That’d be kind of a disappointment, wouldn’t it?” He shook his head. “You went far away. Clear to California. A couple of us went to Australia, New Zealand. One to Japan, teaching English as a second language, ended up staying over there. You’re the only one to go so far away and then come back.” The bartender drew a beer and slid it in front of me.
“The only one,” I repeated.
“Sure,” the bartender said. “You don’t remember? You were at the big gathering when we were ten years old, I’m sure of that. You missed the one when we were fifteen—a few of us missed that one, there was an away game that day, a lot of us played ball. And of course, by the time of the eighteen-year reunion, you were gone.”
“I used to pretend,” I said slowly. “That I had … a brother, an identical twin, I mean, except … wait, that’s not right—”
The bartender drew himself a beer too, and took a sip. “Aunt Helen used to say I was the only little boy who ever had himself for an imaginary friend.”
I remembered then. Being a little kid, pretending, and … “Playing with myself—shit, that sounds wrong—”
“We make that joke all the time,” the bartender said. “We’ve always been able to see each other, hear each other, and every once in a while, we get together. Some of us who went to college have theories about why, about how it works. Science and all that. The ones who got religion have theories, too, and their ideas are totally different.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if we’re ghosts or projections from alternate dimensions. Doesn’t much matter to me. What we are is family. Most of us—at least, a lot of us—stayed close to home, and so we run into each other a lot. We started having reunions every year when we turned eighteen, most of us living away from home, with a little more autonomy. We started comparing notes, using each other to test things out. What would happen if I dated that girl, or bought that truck. Eventually I thought, hell, I’ll open this bar, a place we can all get together, anytime. Guaranteed clientele. Best decision I ever made.”
“I’ve been wanting to open my own place for years,” I said. “How’d you afford it?”
He grinned. “I have investors. The fellas all clear out on weekends, when I open to the public. Officially, the bar is closed for private functions every other day of the week. My friends think I named the bar like I did because I’ve got a big ego—TJ’s Place. I never tell them, it’s just a description. It’s a place for TJ. All of us.”
“How many of us are there?” I asked.
He leaned on the bar and looked thoughtfully across the room. “About two dozen regulars.” He pointed to a row of photographs behind the bar, without turning to look. “Those are some who’ve died. Two in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. Oh, that one on the end, he’s not dead, he went into pro football. Rode the bench in Baltimore for a few seasons, only played in about three games when injuries took out the starters, but, hell, it’s something. Most of us who tried that path just blew out our knees in college. Those guys ran into each other sometimes, in college—a bunch of them got the same scholarships. We have to split them up when we all play flag football at our get-togethers, so they don’t form one team and crush the rest of us. Not many of us took your path, as far as I know. That’s probably why you never ran into any of the rest of us out in California.”
“I … I don’t understand what this means … ”
The bartender nodded. “Sure. None of us do. Doesn’t have to mean a lot, I guess. Except, you’re never alone. What’s that old saying? Home’s the place where they can’t turn you away?”
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” the drunk by the door slurred. I turned to look at him. He grinned, showing the gaps of lost teeth. “Robert Frost, ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’ 1915.”
“We might have a picture of that one up on the wall soon, too,” the bartender said, nodding toward the drunk. “If he goes on the way he’s been. He was a schoolteacher for a year, but being new he got laid off after the budget cuts, and nowadays … he’s a cook, too. But he cooks meth, and he snorts up a lot of his own profits. We’ve tried to help him out, but … ” He sighed. “Some of us don’t want help.”
I swiveled back on my stool, unwilling to see a vision of myself fallen so much farther than I’d ever feared possible. “But … does all this mean I’m not real, or that I’m the figment of somebody’s imagination, or … ”
“I think I’m the real original TJ, for what it’s worth,” the bartender said. “Of course, so do most of the rest of us. I think I’m definitely one of the most plausible ones. But you? Moving to California, telling everybody you like to sleep with men—I mean, most of us keep that to ourselves—getting on TV? Un-fucking-likely.” He took another sip of beer. “Still, here you are.”
“Are … any of us … happy?” Something like this, a miracle—no matter how prosaic the bartender found it—had to have some meaning, didn’t it? Had to provide some kind of revelation?
“Happy?” he said. “Sure. Off and on, anyway. And some of us are miserable. About like anybody, I guess. All our lives … it seems amazing, I know, to think of them all lined up next to each other, all those possible worlds, rubbing up together. But every one of our lives is just a life, man.”
I drank my beer. It was one of my favorite kinds, a pale ale. I wasn’t surprised.
The bartender tilted his head. “So, TJ—or, wait, you’re one of the ones who likes Terry, right? How long are you in town for?”
I blinked. “I don’t know. I told Jimmy I was just going to stay a couple of days, but … I don’t know what I’d go back to, really. I was hoping to start my own restaurant, but I didn’t win the big prize money, and the whole idea of trying to make my own way, it’s just exhausting.”
He chuckled. “Oh, we could probably work something out. Those investors I mentioned? They’re other versions of me. Some of us do all right, and we’re always willing to chip in to help each other out. The logistics get tricky—we have to convert our cash to gold or something, can’t risk bills from one world having the same serial numbers as bills in another, they’d think you were counterfeiting. But we’ve done it before.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. Silent partners? With myself?
“That’s … incredibly generous. But I’m not even sure opening a restuarant is what I want to do. It’s what I’m supposed to want … ” I shook my head, and was surprised by tears welling up in my eyes. I stared hard at the scarred wood of the bar before me. “I don’t even know who the hell I am anymore, you know?”
“Oh, yeah. I definitely know. But we’re here for you, brother. We missed you, too. And anything we can do to help … ”
“I don’t know what you could do. If I can’t figure out my shit on my own, I’m not sure how having even more of me around would help. If I had a little time, to get my head together, to figure out what I want to do, who I want to be … ”
The bartender grinned. “Tell you what. Sometimes, in extreme cases, we’ve been known to switch places. Strictly temporary—unless everybody agrees they want to make it permanent. You can step out of your own path, and walk on another’s for a while. Get a taste of another TJ’s life, or take a vacation from life entirely. Say one of us needs a break, and another one needs a
change … we help each other out. Like I said, you’re an outlier, you’ve got a pretty rare path. I’m sure we could find a TJ who’d want to take your life for a spin for a while. Give you some breathing room in the meantime. And lots of us know how to cook.”
I lifted my head. “Really? Would I have to, like, take someone else’s place, or … ”
A shake of the head. “Not necessarily. Unless you want to. One of us could just say he’s going camping, or taking a solo hike up the Appalachian Trail, or going on a fishing trip, and disappear into your life for a couple of weeks. Even if they act a little funny around your friends, that’s all right—you’re in a weird place right now, right?”
I frowned, thinking of horror stories, doubles and body snatchers, and the bartender must have seen something on my face, because he snorted.
“You think someone might steal your life? Really? Is it all that great?”
“No,” I admitted. “I fucked it up pretty good.”
“There you go. We wouldn’t put up with that kind of identity theft bullshit, anyway. We’ve had to cast some of us out before, for crimes against the self, though we hate to do it. We don’t put up with nonsense.”
“So you’d do that, one of you—one of me—just out of kindness?”
He nodded. “We’re family. What else is family for? And it doesn’t get much closer than this. Every one of us who makes bad decisions … hell, we all know it could have happened to any of us. There but for the grace of good luck. If you decide to step off your path, and want to hide away, you can stay here for a while. There’s a room in back with a cot, you can use the kitchen, there’s even a shower I got some of the guys who went into contracting to install.”
I looked around at the tables and chairs, the jukebox in the corner, vintage tin signs on the walls. Running a restaurant sounded pretty daunting. But I could work in one. I didn’t know much, but I sure knew my way around a kitchen. Maybe if I didn’t have to do anything for a while but pay attention to what I had in front of me on the grill or the chopping block, things would sort themselves out in my head. And if I got stuck, there were people around here I could ask for advice. People who knew me at least as well as I knew myself.