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No one enjoyed the summer months more than Stan—he enjoyed the sun, yes, and the prospect of a trip to the lake was nice as well, but his favorite part was that it meant he had Wendy all to himself for three months. No late-night paper-grading, no more complaints about disruptive students, and most importantly, it meant they got to sleep in together on his day off. It was so nice to wake up with his knees still tucked behind hers and with his arm lazily cast over her instead of watching Wendy rush to slip on a pencil skirt and pin on her earrings before gracing him with a kiss to the top of his head before she rushed out the door.
And, in his opinion, ten in the morning was the optimal time for a bowl of cereal—though Wendy insisted both she and Stan were too old too still be eating cereal. “Stan, really, it’s nothing but sugar,” she said as she fixed herself a bowl of yogurt and granola. But it still didn’t stop her from snatching a marshmallow or two from his milk.
She floated the idea of going to the art museum later in the day; there was an ongoing exhibit about Georgia O’Keeffe she was excited about, and when Stan passively shrugged, she tried to entice him by explaining how many of her paintings were erotic in nature. “Some people find her flowers to be symbolic—that they’re full of yonic imagery,” she said. Stan didn’t bother to ask what ‘yonic’ meant, because he knew she would explain it to him regardless. “Yonic, as in they look like female genitalia. Vulvas, vaginas.”
“I don’t need to leave the house to look at a vagina.”
She playfully slapped his shoulder when her cell phone rattled on the counter, and Stan scrunched his nose as she leaned in for a kiss. Wendy grabbed her phone and mouthed It’s Bebe to him as she answered.
“Hey, Bebe, what’s up?”
She smiled as she leaned on the kitchen sink and fiddled with the hem of her camisole. “Did I hear about what?” she asked.
Stan couldn’t make out the sound of Bebe’s voice, but after a few seconds, Wendy’s face fell. Her eyes grew wide, eyebrows pinched, and she placed a hand over her mouth as she hunched forward. Stan stopped eating and straightened his back. He watched her curiously.
“Oh, my God…are you serious?”
Wendy was left in an odd silence, and Stan grew more and more uneasy. Her eyes flickered toward him at the table before she pressed the phone closer to her ear, pacing into the hallway. “My God, what happened?” she asked.
Stan twisted in his chair and stared. He was waiting for her to roll her eyes and wave her hand—it was what she usually did when it was something that didn’t concern him, and the fact that she had yet to do it made him nervous. In the hall, she turned her necklace over in her fingers and nodded slowly. There was a sad lilt in her eyes while she listened, and her muffling was indistinct. Stan couldn’t really hear her until a few minutes later.
“I just, I can’t believe…God…no, yeah, I’m uh—I’ll call you back in a little while…yeah, I’m going to tell him. Yeah, okay. You too.”
Wendy re-emerged in the kitchen with her phone clasped in both hands, pressed to her chest. “What was that all about?” he asked.
She looked away and pursed her lips. Stan could feel his heartbeat pulsing in his ears; whatever she was about to tell him certainly wouldn’t be good. It was unlike her to be so apprehensive, so quiet, and Wendy eased toward the empty chair and resumed her spot next to him. She delicately laid a hand over his. “I, uh…I really don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Tell me what?”
Wendy sucked in a large breath, and Stan resisted the urge to request he not be told whatever this news was. All this evasiveness was putting him over the edge—he could already feel the pinpricks of dread in his stomach. She tilted her head sadly. “It’s about Kyle.”
“What about him?”
“That was Bebe, and she told me that Kyle was…he was in a car accident yesterday,” she said reluctantly, touching a hand to her ear. “Some drunk driver on the freeway, apparently.”
“Is…is he okay?”
Wendy averted her eyes and shook her head. And before she said it, Stan had a pretty good idea of what she was about to say.
“He died earlier this morning.”
A static chill radiated through Stan’s body, and his throat snapped shut when he tried to swallow. Wendy searched his face for a reaction, for anger or tears, or even a little whimper of grief, but he sat still. The last time he saw Kyle was when he visited his parents before the divorce four Christmases ago, and the extent of their interaction was a stilted wave when they locked eyes at the grocery store four lines away. And Stan knew Kyle didn’t want to see him, so he didn’t follow him. He left with his mother’s turkey and a few bottles of wine and a deepening remorse for not having done so. Kyle’s hair was shorter then.
“I’m so sorry, Stan.”
She kindly stroked his hand and he kept his eyes planted on his bowl of cereal. And they sat like that for a few minutes—Wendy waiting, and Stan watching the milk discolor and the grain dissipate into mush.
“I talked to Bebe and she said the funeral is tomorrow,” she hushed.
Stan got up from the table and went into their room, inspected the closet to make sure his only good suit was clean, and went back to bed.
**
Stan had only been to two other funerals; first it was Chef’s, and later his grandfather. There was little he could remember from Chef’s funeral besides the wet faces of the entire town and the eloquent eulogy delivered by Kyle himself. His grandfather died when he was fourteen, and he was left out of most of the preparations by his parents. But there were flowers, and music, and an ornate casket that they certainly couldn’t afford at the time. He wore a stuffy suit his father bought that didn’t quite fit him yet. These were his only frame of reference outside of what he’d seen on TV or heard in passing. But Kyle’s funeral couldn’t have been more different. No flowers. No music. No pristine and polished casket—only what amounted to a simple pine box to be lowered into the ground by rope handles.
His mother was there, and though he didn’t get his hopes up, Stan was ashamed to see his father had neglected to show. His mother hissed that he was, “too busy with that bleach-blonde tramp down in Malibu,” before she apologized for her language—though he knew she meant exactly what she said. She cupped his head in her hands and kissed his forehead, and asked if he was all right, and he assured her he was fine. Several of their peers from high school were there; most of them were stoic, sorrowful. A handful cried. From what he surmised from the mumbled rumors, Kyle was fortunate enough to survive the crash—gashes and bruises, cracked ribs, a broken arm—given the fact that the accident itself should have killed him. If the waves of whispers were to be believed, Kyle died from an internal bleed that an entire team of doctors somehow overlooked. And that was just Kyle’s luck, Stan thought—live through the hard part, and die anyway.
He didn’t recognize any of the extended Broflovski family save for Kyle’s cousin and he found it difficult to watch as Sheila warbled in anguish between the two lines of mourners. Ike—who was much too grown-up now for Stan’s liking—gently guided her forward as Gerald followed behind. His hands were folded at his navel and he kept a steely eye toward the ground. He didn’t understand the Hebrew being spoken, but made sure his kippah was still straight on his head, because of all the times he wanted to be sensitive to Kyle’s Judaism, now was the most important.
And though he wanted nothing more than to be respectful, when it came his turn to shovel a mound of dirt onto the casket, he found himself more than a little frozen. The Rabbi had explained to the largely non-Jewish congregation that it was an important tradition; it symbolized the mourners’ participation in burying the deceased, providing closure and the opportunity to truly say goodbye. And Stan was grateful that no one seemed to mind that he took a few extra seconds to toss his share, because never in his life did he ever imagine a scenario wherein which he would be literally burying Kyle. The sound was the worst of it—he could hear the thud of his pile smack the top of the casket, and it took a strength he never knew himself to possess to pass the shovel off to the next person. He once saw a movie in which a woman threw herself onto her husband’s casket as he was buried, and all of Stan itched to do the same, to leap into the hole and swipe away the clods of dirt and climb inside and apologize for the mess. If they had to bury Kyle, they should bury him, too.
At the end of the service, everyone shuffled toward their cars with cast-down heads, and Stan approached Sheila alongside his mother in a cautious respect. Her pudgy face was stained with tears, and she grappled Stan into a hug and thanked him for coming. And Stan found himself unable to say anything, because she hugged like Kyle did; it was warm and loving and utterly suffocating. He assured Ike and Gerald that he would stop by soon after, and scanned the throes of mourners for Wendy because if he didn’t find her soon, he was bound for an anxiety attack.
Wendy was comforting Bebe near her car, and out of his periphery, he spotted Kenny near his smoking a cigarette. They glanced at each other, and Kenny tipped his head when Stan walked toward him. He was still wearing his kippah when Stan removed his, and he offered him a cigarette. Kenny made him slightly nervous now; he hadn’t seen him in maybe two or three years, and from what he gathered, had filled Stan’s role quite in Kyle’s life quite well. He accepted it both as a peace offering, and because he was desperate for relief of any kind.
“You all right?” Kenny asked.
“I just…it doesn’t feel real, y’know.”
“Yeah. I know.”
They stared at Wendy and Bebe, sucking down the smoke in silence. The barrel-rush of nicotine made Stan too dazed to stand, and he leaned against Kenny’s car with him. They were shielded from the morning sun by an array of feathery clouds, yet Stan still writhed to get out of his suit. He wasn’t sure if he could ever wear it again—it felt dirtied, and contaminated, like anywhere he went with it would carry the scent of death and dirt and decay.
“He called me, like, four hours before it happened,” Kenny said. His voice wavered with a tiny laugh as he shook his head, breathing out a line of smoke. “And he just got that fuckin’ internship, too. Fuck.”
Kenny flung his cigarette to the ground and squashed it with his foot, folding his arms. “And his birthday was less than a month ago,” he spat, his face contorting into a sneer. “He didn’t even get to be twenty-six for a full month. And that fuckin’ drunk asshole gets to just walk away.”
Stan inhaled deeper, and pretended not to notice the glare that Wendy shot him from a few feet away when she realized he was smoking. He wondered what Kyle was thinking just before the accident—where he was heading to, what was on the radio. It twisted his stomach in knots to think of the last possible thing Kyle may have felt being panic. Stan blinked away the well of tears that he managed to repress through the service, but Kenny took notice and put an arm around his shoulder, and it felt good to lean back into someone he long considered a friend. “Was he happy?” Stan asked.
“Who, Kyle?”
“Yeah. Like, just in general. With his life, was he happy?”
Kenny's face quickly pinched before it relaxed into a smile. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “He was.”
**
The hour-long showers he was still taking two months after the funeral were Wendy’s first evidence that Stan would benefit from seeing a therapist. They were his preferred place to have anxiety attacks; he’d emerge with red eyes and pruned skin, and she would gently seat him at their bed and prod him to seek professional help, and Stan would insist he didn’t need it. What good would therapy do if there didn’t exist a problem? She’d coo with that austere condescension about him being ‘stuck’ in the first stage of grief, of which Wendy informed him there were five as if he were living through acts in a play. “You’re still in denial, Stan,” she said as she massaged his shoulders. “I really think it would be good for you to talk to someone.”
And talking was the last thing he needed to do, because there was nothing to talk about, because he wasn’t in denial. Not even seeing Kyle buried, or his mother weeping, or reading his obituary a few days later seemed to make it real—there was no reality in which Kyle could possible die. Kyle is too stubborn to die. Kyle is the kind of person who could argue his way out of any and anything, including the infinite finality of death, and Stan spent the droning hours at work wondering what Kyle was doing that very second, what he did the day before, where he was going, before he remembered Kyle was trapped six feet beneath the earth wrapped in white cloth. And even then, surely, he was fine; he’d complain about the cramped space and how everyone was too stupid to realize he was fine. But he wasn’t fine—and Stan knew this in some capacity, in some microscopic vault within himself that he refused to open. Kyle was dead and decomposing beneath the dirt and Stan would need to pull over on the side of the road and vomit the bile that burned in his throat when he imagined the sight of Kyle’s deteriorating body as worms and ants and maggots burrowed their way into his casket and feasted on his flesh with no regard that Kyle was a human being with people who loved him. Kyle was a human being with people who would give their own life if it meant they could be with him for only an hour, to hug him and hold him and tell him they were sorry.
A year to the day, Kenny called for the first time in five months and invited him out. “I didn’t want to be alone today,” he said on the phone, “and I didn’t think you’d want to be, either.” And on the forty-five minute drive on the way to Skeeter’s, Stan fidgeted with an immense relief for an excuse to have anything stronger than the occasional beer Wendy would indulge him in; never in his life had he itched with unparalleled desperation to drink until he could no longer think, or feel, or suffer.
Kenny was seated by himself at the counter making conversation with the bartender. It was typical for a Wednesday—the regular alcoholics slouched over in their booths alongside a gaggle of younger yuppie-types giggling between an array of sugary cocktails. All of them had the virginal and carefree glow of being freshly twenty-one, and Stan envied the prospect that there were still people in this world who drank for fun, or anyone whose life allowed them to have fun, for that matter. Just the sight of others being happy made him seethe with resentment. Kenny gave him a friendly nudge of the shoulder when he sat down and flagged the bartender for two gin and tonics.
“You hate gin,” Stan said accusingly.
“Oh, trust me, I do,” Kenny chuckled, “shit tastes like liquid tree bark. But it was the only thing Kyle would drink.”
Just the mere mention of his name made them quiet until their glasses were set in front of them, and Stan powered through his first in a matter of minutes. Like Kenny, he hated gin as well. Tree bark was an apt comparison in his opinion; by the time he reached the bottom of his drink, it was as if an entire forest of pine needles nestling in his chest. It stung going down his throat in a different way than whiskey or vodka, and he thought that was aided by the realization of there being something about Kyle that Stan didn’t know.
They drank and talked on-and-off for about an hour, catching up with the other about the mundanity of their day-to-day lives—Kenny was still working in the mail room of that office he hated so much, he was still kind-of-sort-of dating Bebe, and his little sister just started her third year at college. Stan wanted to be happy for him, and he was, but the happiness was muddled by the circumstances under which he was invited here, because the conversation would inevitably turn to Kyle. Stan roused two more drinks out of the bartender before he was given a not-so-subtle glass of water instead, and he didn’t bother to argue. He wasn’t in a mood to debate whether he was drunk; he would be soon enough.
“It’s still weird, isn’t it?” Kenny asked after a minute.
Stan nodded his head as he swallowed the lump in his throat. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “It is.”
“It just doesn’t feel like it’s been a year. It still kind of feels like it happened yesterday.”
Kenny sighed and shook his head, sipping a long mouthful of gin with a tempered grimace. “I just…I can still see his face, y’know? When he was in the hospital, hooked up to all those machines and shit.”
And Stan went still. He could feel Kenny eyeing him up and down, waiting for him to say something in response, to say something equally repentant, to stew in shared lamentation together. The words he wanted to form, the What are you talking about? and What do you mean? bobbing in his throat like a fishing lure.
“You okay?” he asked.
“You saw him?” Stan muttered. “Like, you were at the hospital with him?”
Kenny avoided his eye in contrition, breathing a heavy sigh. In the past year, he neglected to mention this specific detail, and Stan’s blood curdled inside him with anger and devastation because he was suddenly sharing a drink with Judas. Kenny nodded his head. “Yeah, I uh…his brother called me when they got there,” he said. “I was alone with him for a couple minutes when he was conscious.”
“How…how was he?”
“He was really disoriented. He understood that he was in the hospital, but he didn’t remember anything about the wreck. He was in, uh…pretty rough shape.”
Between Kenny and the gin, Stan became too dizzy for words. He didn’t know Kenny was with him. He didn’t know Kyle was awake. It was easier to think Kyle had still been unconscious, in a coma—anything that didn’t involve him being cognizant of his impending death, whether he knew it as such or not. The tingle in his back morphed into something more sinister, like a spider crawling up his skin and inundating him with venom.
“He could talk?” he asked weakly. “Did—did he say anything?”
The brief flash of on Kenny’s face told Stan all he needed to know—yes, he could, and yes, he did. Somewhere in that bizarre and surreal stretch of life before death, Kyle had graced this ungrateful world he both loved and hated with something. He didn’t even care if it was merely a request for water, because Stan couldn’t live without knowing. He waited for Kenny to spit it out, but he sighed, “I shouldn’t even be telling you this,” as he straightened on his stool. “I doubt it’s gonna make you feel any better.”
“I don’t care if it makes me feel better,” Stan mumbled, “I just, I can’t…I can’t not know.”
Kenny drained the remainder of his drink with a huff, and folded his arms on the counter. “He asked about you,” he said.
And all at once the bar was too loud, too crowded, and Stan nodded his head and sucked his teeth. He asked about you. The inherent gravitas of the phrase slithered around his spine and crept across his neck. He asked about you was a knife, and a freshly-sharpened one at that, and he attempted to swallow it down with dignity, but that was a lost cause. Stan hid his eyes in his hand to keep Kenny from spotting the pitiful tears that teetered on his waterline. Though, he had a feeling Kenny knew anyway.
“He wanted to see you,” Kenny said quietly. “I didn’t know how to get a hold of you, I tried calling Bebe ‘cos I knew she could get in touch with Wendy, but it was almost one when I called, so…she didn’t answer.”
“I should’ve been there.”
“It’s not like you could have known, Stan.”
“It doesn’t fucking matter,” he warbled, “I still should’ve been there. I—I should’ve fucking been there with him, Kenny.”
Kenny squeezed his shoulder, and Stan was glad he didn’t say It’s all right or It’s okay because it wasn’t all right, and it wasn’t okay—it was the furthest thing from okay to know that Kyle had wanted Stan only hours before he died when he was fast asleep at home. Stan was asleep with his arm around Wendy with no inkling that Kyle was strapped in a hospital bed where he would be dead before Stan was even awake. It had been months since he even thought about Kyle.
He only let a couple hazardous tears drip from his face before he willed himself to close the floodgates—if he wasn’t in public, he’d shutdown and grieve this momentous loss with the acerbity it deserved, and the frantic flurry of suicidal ideation that followed. But he was in a bar full of laughing strangers, so that would be rescheduled for the shower that awaited him at home.
He wiped at his face with the napkin Kenny offered him and took a few deep breaths, sipping his untouched glass of water. “He asked me the same thing you did,” Kenny said.
“Asked you what?”
“He asked me if you were happy.”
Stan hung his heavy head and rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t sure there was anything left of the conversation that he cared to hear, but forced himself to ask, “What did you say?”
“I told him you were,” Kenny said thoughtfully. He scratched at his neck. “I mean, I have no fuckin’ idea if you’re happy or not, Stan, but I didn’t really see what good it would’ve done to tell him that. So, I said you were.”
“Did he say anything after that?”
“He just…said he was happy that you were happy.”
Stan nodded and took another sip of his water, feeling closer to fainting with each second that passed by. The group of yuppies behind them trilled and cheered at an excessive volume, and it made him reflect on all the trilling and cheering he missed out on with Kyle. And it was so many, many things he missed.
“After that, his parents wanted to be alone with him so I waited outside. He wasn’t awake much longer after that. And…well, you know the rest, I guess.”
Stan hunched on the counter and lazily blinked as he stared at the dilapidated shelf of booze. “Thank you for telling me that,” he said, and though he was grateful to have heard it, a ‘thank you’ still felt too polite considering he waited an entire year to mention such.
Kenny got up and gently touched his back. “I’m uh, gonna use the bathroom real quick, I’ll be right back, okay?”
He nodded, and once Kenny was out of sight, and with the bartender preoccupied with someone else down the line, Stan placed a twenty on the counter and slipped outside, got in his car, and drove off.
With nowhere in mind, he soon found himself driving on the same freeway Kyle’s accident occurred on, and between the faint blur of red taillights in front of him and the constant ringing of his cell phone—surely Kenny demanding to know where he was—he prayed for any kind of catharsis, the kind Wendy would whir about from various books about death and mourning. He wanted to be baptized in grief and emerge anew, and be done with the whole goddamn thing. Five stages and all.
He thought about the morning of the wedding, when he was alone with Kyle in a mild panic about whether his hair was neat enough, whether his tuxedo was presentable enough, if he was good enough for Wendy, if it was a mistake to marry straight out of high school even though he loved Wendy, and he was pretty sure she loved him, too—she wouldn’t have said yes if she didn’t, would she? And Kyle rolled his eyes and told him he looked fine, that he was fine, but made a minor adjustment to his bow-tie and laid his hands on the lapels and told him to relax. And it helped. And Stan smiled as he examined himself once more in the mirror and turned to see Kyle smiling, too, but it was different because it was slightly sad, and reserved, and his eyelids were heavy when he stepped away from Stan. And he remembered how tight and tiny Kyle’s voice sounded when he pleaded, “Please don’t marry her.” And Stan quirked his eyebrow and began to panic all over again when Kyle said it again, “Please don’t marry Wendy,” with even more sincerity. And Stan asked What? and Why? and What do you mean? And Kyle very gently toed toward him and kissed him. And he thought about those brief, few seconds where Stan kissed him back before he willed himself to feign shock and say, “Kyle, dude, I’m—I’m straight.” And Kyle swallowed his pride and nodded and still stood as his best man, but even as Stan glanced at him from the corner of his eye every few minutes as he waited for Wendy to stroll down the altar, Kyle kept his eyes on the door and refused to look at him.
He thought about it, and fixated on it, and obsessed over it because Stan wanted to love Kyle—and he could have. If only Kyle had given him the chance, Stan could have held and kissed and loved him in all the ways Kyle deserved, if only he hadn’t shut him out. Even if he was straight, even if Kyle was gay, Stan could have learned how, and it wouldn’t take much, because the vast magnitude of how deeply and utterly and truly he loved Kyle overwhelmed him when he spotted the roadside memorial in his headlights—a little white cross with flowers and ribbon, no doubt erected by a good Samaritan. And when he pulled over to bask in the simplicity of it all, the catharsis he wished for was underwhelming. He didn’t feel angry, or depressed, or absolved of any of the strangling guilt. He mostly felt numb, because that was it. Kyle had died, was dead, and will always be dead. And Stan knew he couldn’t live with this burden, but would have to.
Stan drove away with a new inebriation. It was foggy and slow like the gin, but hollowed inside his stomach like a starved snake in the dead of winter, burrowing in his blood for warmth. The wind was different. The night was different. His body felt heavier than before, his hands hanging on the steering wheel like a precariously-placed Christmas ornament on a less-than-sturdy branch.
He knew better than to ignore Wendy when she called fifteen minutes later.
“Stan, where are you?” she demanded. “Are you driving right now?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Bebe just called me, she said you were out with Kenny at the bar and you left—are you drunk?”
“No,” he said, uncertain of whether he was truly lying, “I’m not.”
“Stan, you know I don’t like you drinking in the first place, but driving? You need to—”
“Kyle asked if I was happy,” he muttered. His knuckles went white as they curled around the steering wheel, and he understood the regret that would later accompany telling Wendy this. “Before he died…he wanted to see me, and he asked if I was happy.”
Stan could hear her breathing on the other end, making that pitiful little tsk she was so fond of. And the wind was still different, and so was the night. His heart hung heavy in his chest. “Are you okay?” she asked quietly.
He glanced in the rear-view mirror, knowing he wouldn’t see the little white cross, but hoping he would anyway. “Yeah, I’m…I’m okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Wendy sighed on the other line, and he loved listening to her breathe—even if she was upset with him, even then, he wanted to listen to her breathe and hold her as close as he was holding the phone. And he wanted turn around, to pull over at the roadside and see if maybe he’d feel something different this time.
“Please come home, Stan.”
“I will,” he said. “I am.”
He let his eye drift to the stretch of land off the freeway where large swatches of Goldenrods and long grass swayed in the breeze, and he thought how nice it would be to crawl in bed next to Wendy and let her kiss his head. She’d kiss his head between stern admonishments for his behavior and Stan would mumble he was sorry into her cotton camisole and she would kiss his head again and turn out the light. And he could feel how much she loved him in the way Wendy played with his hair when she thought he was asleep. And for a minute, he let himself imagine what it might have been like to have Kyle be the one to kiss his head and turn out the light and play with his hair.
“I’ll be home in—”
“…Stan, what was that noise? …Stan? …Stan?”
Those Goldenrods were just so pretty.