Spring #14 — Moving On
Life, as it tends to do, continued.
I never really did figure out how to tell my parents about what really happened with Mary Jane, because how in the world do you explain something like that to your parents? So I told them that Mary Jane was having a really hard time over Kristine’s death, blaming herself for it because of the argument at the party, and she’d gone back up to Terrace Green to stay with some other relatives, because staying around Norton was too hard for her at the moment. At first, they asked a lot of questions and wanted to know how Mary Jane was doing, so I gave them vague updates now and again, subtly trying to insinuate that Mary Jane was going to stay up there and that we were losing interest in one another. As time passed, they stopped asking, and the whole thing just faded away, as relationships sometimes did. To keep things simple, I just told the guys and everybody else that asked the same thing. Except for Eddie.
I didn’t go to prom. There was no way in hell I was going to go. So that Saturday, instead of going to prom or even any of the parties, I went over to Eddie’s house, and he and I sat up and drank all night, since his parents were at another convention. We were conservative, though, and didn’t get stupid. But I had enough in me that when Eddie asked if Mary Jane was doing all right in Terrace Green, I asked him if he wanted to hear one hell of a story, probably one of the wildest ones he’d hear outside of a Jack Action movie. When he said that he did, I told him the whole story. He was the only one that I ever told the entire tale to, because I’d held back a lot of details from Kristine’s friends, simply not wanting to share them. But Eddie had always been different, and if I was going to tell him, I was going to go for broke.
We sat there for hours on his front porch, looking up at the moon and stars as I told him everything about what had happened between Mary Jane and I. When I told him about Chicago and the bat-pan, he went inside and brought the formidable weapon out, checking it over meticulously, finding only a few faint stress points where the damage had once been. He forgot all about it when he heard about the thing that had been lurking in the blizzard, and looked understandably unsettled at Blue Eyes’ first appearance. I damned near hugged the big bastard when he steadfastly refused to believe that Mary Jane had anything to do with Kristine’s death … he never doubted her for a second, even after everything he’d heard leading up to that.
When I finally wound down the story, we sat there on the porch in silence, listening to the night sounds of the country, and after he’d smoked a couple of cigarettes, he looked at me and said, “She was something, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah,” I said as I took a sip of my beer. “She was the best.”
Eddie held up his bottle, and I clinked mine against it as we toasted Mary Jane under the moon and stars, while a soft breeze rustled through the trees.
* * *
The sage wisdom my uncle had imparted upon me when I was a kid proved to be true, because while it did indeed take forever and a day to reach 18, everything else afterwards went by at dizzying speed.
After high school graduation, I went on to the community college for a couple of years, trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life, and when it came time to go away for further schooling, I ended up choosing Western Illinois, because it was closer to home than Illinois State. Or at least that’s what I told myself. But when I went away to school, it turned out that I didn’t go alone. In a move that surprised the hell out of everybody, Dusty ended up going to college, having saved up enough money working at Dink’s Auto to afford it with the help of a couple of scholarships and grants. He and I got an apartment together and had a hell of a good time, and to this day, I’m still surprised we didn’t go to jail a few times after all the shit we pulled. He got a degree in accounting and worked alongside his father for over a decade before his old man retired and left him the business. He married a really nice girl, a sharp contrast to all of the nasty whores he used to chase around, had several kids, and did really well for himself. Though he never stopped being a cantankerous old bastard.
Duane and Alicia had a couple of kids not long after high school, and Duane nearly killed himself working his ass off in factory jobs to support them for a few years until they were able to really get on their feet. Things were pretty tight for him for a while, though, and like everybody guessed he would, he did a couple of short stays in jail for fighting and other mayhem. But eventually, Duane got his shit together and was able to become a certified mechanic; he ended up working at Dink’s after Dusty had given him a great recommendation. True to his bragging, he was a master mechanic, and like Dusty taking over for his dad, Duane got the garage went Dink called it a day and retired. He never lost his mischievous streak, though, and at one point narrowly avoided a whole load of trouble when he used a tow truck he was servicing to pull down Slavedriver’s entire CB tower and somehow managed to rip down a portion of the house’s side wall along with it.
Lee and Tomomi were inseparable, and though she had to go back to Japan after the school year was up, she and Lee stayed in touch, and she came back for good a couple of years later to go to college over here. They both became architects and made a fortune for themselves designing buildings, homes, and just about anything else anybody wanted, as the designs they created together were both extremely sturdy but very beautiful, putting them in high demand. When they got married, they spared no expense, and even tried to track down Mary Jane, since she was the one that got them together in the first place, and they felt she belonged there. Though I’d told them I’d fallen out of touch with her and had no idea what had become of her, they were undaunted, and searched for her anyway. From the way they acted, I think they were hoping to reunite her with me, in addition to having her as a guest, and I thought it was very sweet of them to try as hard as they did. Of course, they were never able to find her, and couldn’t even locate her father. That didn’t surprise me, but it still made me sad nonetheless. At their wedding reception, they had a toast to Mary Jane, much more lavish than the one Eddie and I had given her, and I had to excuse myself so nobody saw me tearing up like a damned fool.
Eddie worked at various jobs after high school, bouncing around trying to find something he really liked, and it turned out that he had a real skill for politics. He ran for several different positions in both Norton itself and the county, got elected after a few tries, and did a lot of good. People loved him because he was a common man who got everything by working hard for it and never giving up, and I’m proud to say that it was me who gave him the nickname, “The Bulldog,” during his first mayoral campaign. He didn’t win that go-round, but like a bulldog, Eddie came back for another go, and handily won on his second attempt, becoming one of Norton’s most beloved and successful mayors. Not bad for a guy that everybody always wrote off, huh? They ended up renaming the fucking high school after him, for crying out loud, and just before my daughter started attending, too.
As for me, well, I did okay. I was aimless for a while after high school, going to college and covering all of the general stuff, but not really knowing what I wanted to do with myself. After fucking around with a couple of other majors, I wound up in journalism, and discovered I had quite a knack for it, especially when it came to editorials. I could stir shit up like you wouldn’t believe, and I had a great time doing it. I came back to Norton after graduating from college, giving serious thought to moving to Peoria or Chicago or somewhere else bigger, so I could get a job at a prestigious newspaper and really get going. But, as it turned out, I took a job working for Norton’s hometown paper instead, and it was Mr. Jameson, of all people, who went to bat for me, because even though he was retired, he still held a great deal of pull at the paper. I did well with the job and built a solid reputation with my editorials, and eventually turned enough heads that I got a nationally syndicated column, so I was able to make something of myself, but never had to leave home to do it.
I lived as a bachelor for quite a while, ending up as the last one of my friends to settle down, when everybody thought I was going to be the first. I dated around for a while, trying to find a girl that I could connect with even remotely like I could Mary Jane, but that was a quest doomed to failure. Shannon and I actually dated for a couple of years, but that eventually faded away, because I think in the end, we were doing it more for Kristine’s memory than for ourselves, so we softly broke it off and went our separate ways. The girl I married was a nice one, very smart, pretty, and completely normal. There were times she didn’t know what to do with me, especially when I was with my friends, but she hung in there, and gave me two great kids that loved going over to help Grandpa shovel snow and mow the lawn. Though they got paid a hell of a lot more than I did, and the fact their grandfather took great delight in telling them all sorts of zany, funny tales about me, while their grandmother spoiled them unmercifully, might have had something to do with it.
My kids grew up, did really well at Eddie Senior High, as I liked to call the school, and then went on to college, got good jobs, and did me proud, while I published several books of my columns and gently grew old with my wife. I still went out for beer with the same group of guys I’d been hanging with since before high school, even though Lee couldn’t always be there because he and Tomomi spent about half of their time in Japan with her family, and we still laughed it up and had a great time. Life turned out pretty damned good.
Mary Jane had been right: I did just fine without her.
But …
