“We’re coming up right now,” Phillip said.
Frances went back to the kitchen. Louis could hear her footsteps above their heads, hear her humming again.
“I need to go to the cemetery,” Louis said.
“We can go first thing in the morning.” Phillip paused. “Thank you, Louis.”
His voice had changed, like he was relieved the hardest part was over. But the sadness did not leave his eyes. Phillip slid off the stool and started up the stairs. He looked back and for an instant Louis had the feeling that Phillip Lawrence was a stranger all over to him again. This was a man with shadows in his soul.
Louis picked up his beer and followed Phillip upstairs.
CHAPTER 3
Louis hadn’t been back to Plymouth in more than six years. After he graduated from University of Michigan in 1981, he had stayed in Ann Arbor to work on the police force there. He felt comfortable in the college town, comfortable in its rich stew of races, religions, and ways of thinking. Every time he had gone back to visit Phillip and Frances during the past few years, it had been while they were up North on vacation, sort of neutral territory. Never here, in Plymouth.
“So how’s the old hometown look to you?”
Louis glanced over at Phillip, who was driving. “About the same,” he answered.
Louis’s eyes drifted back out the cold-fogged window. The Lawrences lived out on the edge of town, and Phillip had to drive through the small downtown to get to the freeway. Louis’s eyes lingered on the square with its white band shell fully exposed by the bare trees. He could see the old columned bank and the marquee of the Penn Theater: FIELD OF DREAMS. And there, on the corner, the old hotel.
“They’ve remodeled the Mayflower,” Louis said absently.
“Yeah. But they kept that old wallpaper in the dining room.”
Louis had a sudden memory of a sixth grade field trip. It was a slate-gray November day, just like today, and he remembered feeling alone and small as the bus let him and the other kids off in front of the Mayflower Hotel for their lunch.
He knew now that the Mayflower wasn’t a fancy place. But it seemed like it then, with its dark green carpeting and shining wood desk and the sour-looking woman in a black uniform who handed them menus in the restaurant. The menu was huge in his hands and he didn’t know anything. What to order. What to do with the heavy white cloth napkin. Where to go if he had to pee.
The teacher was standing up and talking about the Pilgrims, pointing to the wallpaper with its pictures of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. She was saying that they should all be thankful for the sacrifices of their forefathers who came here in ships to make their lives here possible. He had sat there listening to her, thinking, well, they sure the heck weren’t my forefathers.
“The town is changing,” Phillip said.
Louis heard something in Phillip’s voice and turned.
“All these young folks moving out here, looking for some lost idea of a perfect small town,” Phillip said, his eyes steady on the road.
“Plymouth isn’t perfect,” Louis said carefully.
“They closed Cloverdale’s, you know. Some chain came in on Main Street.”
Phillip was shaking his head in disgust. But Louis was remembering soft Sunday evenings, walking to the old ice cream parlor, he and Phillip getting double-dip cones of lush black cherry ice cream and ignoring the stares of all the white faces.
Louis rubbed a sleeve over the fogged window. They were passing the high school now. The press of memories kept coming. Four years of being the only black kid in an all-white school. No one was mean, no one called him names. He was accepted, but almost like some weird mascot. Shared jokes in the john and always a seat in the cafeteria. But never an invitation to the parties at the white kids’ homes.
Phillip was looking at the high school as they waited for the light to change.
“You still run?” he asked.
“Not as much as I should,” Louis said. He was still back in high school, trying to bring a face into focus, the face of some asshole PE coach who told him he should go out for basketball. The man didn’t care that Louis hated basketball, just kept pushing him until Louis started cutting PE. Finally, Phillip had a talk with the coach and then with Louis. Eventually, Louis went out for track just to please Phillip. But to his surprise, he liked cross-country. He liked the rush of the cool air on his face and the sound of his pulse in his ears. He liked the brain-cleansing feel of running. He liked the aloneness of it.
“Frances found your letter sweater the other day in a box in the basement,” Phillip said. “She sent it to the cleaners so it would be ready when you came home.”
“I don’t want that old thing.”
“Take it anyway,” Phillip said. “Okay?”
The light turned green and they drove on in silence. Phillip reached down and jabbed the lighter, and with a gesture born of decades shook a cigarette from its pack and lit it with one hand, his eyes never leaving the road. He cracked his window and blew the stream out.
“What did you tell Frances about today?” Louis said.
“Just that you wanted to go for a drive.”
“Phillip, I need to know something. How much exactly does she know about this? Does she even know you visited this cemetery?”
Phillip nodded. “She thinks it’s an old army buddy.”
“That’s what you told her?”
Phillip nodded again. “I could never bring myself to tell her the truth.”
Louis let that go. The landscape changed as U.S. 12 stretched into the Michigan countryside. Flat, and tufted with yellow grass, the air swirling with crumbling rust-colored leaves.
“Where are we going?” Louis asked.
“The Irish Hills.”
Louis was trying to remember if Phillip had ever taken him to the Irish Hills. But he didn’t need to think long. Phillip answered for him.
“I never brought you out there,” he said. “I thought about it, but it would have meant taking Frances, too, and I just couldn’t do that.”
Louis formed the question, and then wasn’t sure he wanted to ask it. But he knew he needed to. “The Irish Hills was your place with her?” he asked.
Phillip glanced at him, then turned his gaze back to the road. “Only for one weekend.”
Phillip didn’t say anything else and Louis held the rest of his questions. This wasn’t some passing fling. It was something that had survived Phillip’s thirty-one-year marriage to Frances. Longer than Louis had been alive.
A first love.
It wasn’t something he knew much about. It sure as hell hadn’t happened for him in high school. In the midseventies, many parts of the country were beginning to tolerate interracial relationships, but he never had the sense Plymouth was one of them. He had never gone to a dance or any other school function with a white girl on his arm. His first real girlfriend had been in college, but even she didn’t come with those tender memories that should accompany a first love. Right now he couldn’t even remember her last name.
He settled back in the seat, watching the empty land, feeling the cold swirl of air from Phillip’s cracked window against the back of his neck.
There was no sign for the cemetery. Only a listing black iron gate stuck deep into the mud, as if it had been left open for quite some time. Two towering pines stood guard on each side of the entrance and the land beyond it was a flat expanse of