Chapter 2

But other than a jar of bread-and-butter pickles and a few condiments in the door, the fridge was empty.

Todd shrugged. What else could he do? Walk the two miles or so to Fawcettville’s tiny downtown and see if the Elite Diner was still there? He grabbed the pickles from the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table with them. “Breakfast of champions,” he said to himself. He was just about to lift one to his lips when there was a knock at the front door.

Briefly Todd wondered if it would be the woman from the hallway the night before and shivered, letting loose a snippet of giddy laughter.

He got up from the table and moved through the dining room into the living room, with its floral-pattered couch, matching love seat, and chair. His mom called it a “living room suit.”

The knock sounded again.

He opened the door to see maybe one of the most beautiful men he had ever laid eyes on. And Todd had laid eyes on more than a few. This guy, smiling shyly at him, was a paradoxical mix of vulnerability and toughness. The outer stuff—his bristly red hair and matching beard, his short but muscular build (like a fireplug, Todd thought), and the aviator sunglasses—made Todd think of the leather guys he used to encounter out at bars like Touché back in Chicago. But when he spoke, there was a velvety quality to his voice that put Todd at ease, that intrigued him.

Who was this guy?

“Hey, sorry to bother you, man. Hope I didn’t get you out of bed, but I’m your next-door neighbor, Cal Hughes.”

Somewhere, a bell rang in the back of Todd’s mind.

“I was a friend of your mom’s.”

Todd closed his eyes. It came back. Cal—her Sunday-night bingo buddy. Cal—the bachelor next-door neighbor. Cal took care of her when she came home from the hospital to wait out what time she had left.

“You should meet this guy.” He could hear his mother’s raspy voice over the phone, making him feel guilty that he wasn’t the one back in Ohio taking care of her. “He’s amazing. He comes by every night at supper with a covered dish for me. Tonight it was mac and cheese and fish sticks. Nothing fancy, you know, but good—homemade. And he even made sure I had some spinach to go with it. Iron, so I can be strong like Popeye.” Iron, or any other mineral, was too late for Mom, but Todd didn’t say that, of course. Instead he pictured Cal, a middle-aged bachelor with a potbelly and too much time on his hands. Balding, with a nose that was red-veined from too much tippling. Boy, had Todd ever been off base!

“You’re Cal?” Todd asked in surprise.

“The one and only.” Cal smiled, and Todd felt his heart melt and his knees go a little weak. “Just thought I’d pop over and see if you were getting settled okay, if there was anything you needed. I saw the U-Haul yesterday. Did your mom mention me?”

“Only all the time.” Todd stepped back. “You wanna come in? I was just about to have a pickle.”

Cal cocked his head and brushed by him. He smelled, to Todd, of fresh-cut grass and—putting him in mind of his late dad—Old Spice. Oh Lord, Todd thought, this is so what I do not need. His mother had told him that Cal was, like her son, a fancy man, as she put it. “Maybe you’ll come home and find true love,” she had teased him one night toward the end.

“Maybe,” Todd had said then, thinking how he needed to get back to his mother. What was there for him in Chicago, anyway? Besides the three Ds: disco, drugs, and dick?

“A pickle?” Cal asked.

“Yeah, it’s all I could find.”

“I think we can do better than that.” And Cal headed off to the kitchen, as if he was the person who lived there and not Todd. Todd stood at the doorway, watching Cal rifle through his mother’s cabinets, withdrawing boxes and bags Todd was unaware of, and a pan. In just a minute or two, the homey smell of simmering oatmeal filled the kitchen.

Todd wanted to cry.

After Cal left and Todd stood staring at the two bowls, two spoons, little syrup pitcher, and crusted saucepan in the kitchen sink, he thought about his mom. Cal had made him feel many things—lust, wonder, admiration, but most of all, guilt. This last emotion Cal had forced easily out of Todd with a single question:

“Why did you wait to come home?”

He referred, of course, to Todd missing his mother’s last moments, when she lay on her deathbed with, Todd supposed, only the angelic Cal to keep her company. He had intended to get home before she passed, so he could hold her tight and whisper in her ear how much he loved her, but he put it off until it was too late.

It was self-pity that made him delay, causing him to miss a moment he could never get back.

But in facing his own mother’s mortality, he was recently facing his own. At least Mom was approaching eighty. Todd was only thirty-four.

He recalled being in Dr. Shapiro’s office, down on Wabash Avenue in the Loop, after his annual physical the week prior. This latest appointment—to get his results—was something of a blessing, a distraction from the horror of his mom expiring. They had done all the usual stuff—the prostate check, the weighing and measuring, the blood draws—and Todd had left the week before certain fate would not be so cruel as to visit anything too terrible on him, not with his mother dying.

But Dr. Shapiro was saying something odd, something about his HIV antibody test coming back “abnormal.”