Emory

By Maggie Ewing

I spent a lot of time on the back deck of his house.

We would sit for hours, lit by the yellow porch light, surrounded by the wood fence that enclosed the little rectangle of his backyard, leaning back in adirondack chairs while his brown tabby cat sat on the railing, watching us. 

We talked about moving to upstate New York, to see the leaves in the Catskills in the fall, to become hermits in an old hunting cabin on the Hudson.

We talked about going to Washington, about starting a band and performing in the rain and opening a bookstore where we would sit on window seats and play pranks on our customers.

We talked about traveling to Montana. Neither of us had ever been but we both wanted to. We wanted to sleep in the bed of a pickup truck in the parking lots of national parks and get really good at rock climbing.

We never talked about what we would do without each other.

My best friend died on September 8th, and left me with all these half-finished plans and half-realized lives that were cut in two up the middle.

I stayed up a lot of nights. I would go over to that townhouse in Northwest DC and sit with his mother on the sagging mint green couch in their living room, drinking the pine needle tea that he had loved. She never slept either. I would walk that familiar mile from my apartment in the early morning just as I had done night after night for the past six years, but I carried a pocket knife on me now. I was afraid of more now. 

His mother had changed. She wore more sweaters now. I could see the sadness that she carried in her hands, where she gripped the teacup with pale knuckles, in her black hair that she tucked behind both of her big ears. She had sunken. Her shoulders sloped, her face had fallen around the corners of her eyes and the folds around her mouth were deeper.

His sister moved around a lot. She was always cooking, going on runs, doing housework, learning to play the guitar in their basement. 

I walked into their house last night. It was six o’clock, and Lucy was making dinner. I closed the door gently behind me. 

Lucy poked her head out of the kitchen. “Hey, Mallory!” she said cheerfully. She was wearing leggings and her gray University of Chicago sweatshirt. She was taking a semester off to look after her mother. “I’m making chicken, but I had a feeling you would come over, so I’m putting some tomato soup on, too.”

“Thank you so much, but I can’t stay for very long.” I said.

“That’s alright.” Lucy smiled brightly, then disappeared back into the kitchen.

I went into the living room, where his mother was sitting, holding a book in her lap open to the exact middle page. She wasn’t reading it, rather studying the pattern of the oriental carpet that they had laid on top of their hardwood floors. I had studied it for hours, too. I had memorized it. She was wearing his coat, even though it was seventy-five degrees in their house. She glanced up when I came in. “Hello, sweet girl.” She said. Her voice sounded as if she hadn’t used it all day. 

She extended her arms, and I bent to hug her. The coat smelled like him. I lingered, breathing in his scent of evergreen and vague body odor.

“Are you cold?” I asked her when I straightened.

She shrugged, pausing for a moment, until I watched a thought cross into her eyes. “I have something for you.” She said, and stood so abruptly that I fell back a step in surprise.

“You do?”

“Yes.” She went out into the entryway. I followed. “Here,” she picked up a shoe box that was sitting on the bench. “Lucy was cleaning downstairs and found these. I thought you might like to have them.”

She handed it to me, and I tentatively took the lid off. It was a pair of old yellow converse, all stained from dirty puddles and scribbled on with sharpie. I took one shoe out. There, in my seventh grade handwriting, was my name, and there next to it, in his seventh grade handwriting, was his name. He had worn them nearly every day in middle school, until he grew out of them when he underwent his growth spurt at the beginning of ninth grade.

“They’re a men’s size nine, and I’m pretty sure that translates to the size you wear. I think he would want you to go and have adventures in them.” She said, waving her hand in the noncommittal gestures she always made while talking. 

“Joanne, thank you.” I murmured, and hugged her again with one arm, feeling tears begin to rise up in my nose and eyes. 

“Of course, sweet girl.” She said.

“I’m going away for a little while, so I won’t be coming around for a bit, but I’ll be thinking of you all.” I said quietly.

She nodded. She didn’t ask where I was going, or why. 

“Oh, are those Emory’s shoes?” Lucy’s voice was sharp in the kitchen doorway through the quiet that was hanging over me and Joanne. 

We both inhaled sharply. I hadn’t heard his name in a long time. It didn’t sound right in my throat, to say it, and my parents would tiptoe around the topic of my friend in fear that it might set me off into uncontrollable tears and depression.

“Yes.” said Joanne, after taking a moment to gather herself.

“I’m glad you’re giving them to Mallory. Emory,” I cringed, “would have liked that.”

“I think he would have, too.” Said Joanne.

There was a moment of silence, then I said, “I have to go now. Thank you for this. I’ll be seeing you.”

Out on the street, the air was frigid. The November night bit at my nose and hands as I clutched the shoebox tightly. I bounded down the steps to the street, and hopped inside the sanctuary of my pickup, not quite completely cooled down from the heat I had been blasting on my way over here. I had bought it myself last month with the money that my distant relatives had thrown to me in condolence- the only means of comforting me that they could imagine.

I set the shoebox on the seat beside me and crossed my legs to pull off my boots. I tugged the converse on. They fit perfectly. My feet had always been a little big. I studied the way they looked on my foot, foreign and yet familiar. I put my feet back into the footwell, and started the car. My phone was on the dashboard in front of me, the GPS programmed. I pressed “start” on the little screen.

“Beginning navigation to Helena, Montana.” The GPS narrated.

I tucked my lips into my mouth as I shifted the car into drive. I didn’t have to live empty anymore. I knew where I could find Emory. I could find him in a hunting cabin in the Catskills. I could find him in a bookstore in Washington. I could find him in the bed of a pickup truck in Montana. 

But first, I could find him in a cup of pine needle tea and a pair of scuzzy yellow converse with his name written on the canvas of the heel as I pressed down on the gas pedal.