The Front Porch Club
Title: Front Porch Club
Genre: Fiction
Size: 11 pages/3,939 words
During our childhood, my little sister liked to sit on the living room floor and play with her toy dolls which had old photographs of our mother rubber banded to their heads. As a seven year old, she forgot to do a lot of things: to brush her teeth at night, to finish her vegetables, to say please and to pick up her toys. Nothing infuriated my father more than coming home from work and stumbling over a bunch of Barbies and crinkled photographs of his wife.
I, on the other hand, had to remember to pick up after my father, take out the garbage, keep my sister quiet and make sure we stayed out of his way when he came home. More often than not, neither of us remembered our chores. When this happened the same scenario played out in our house like clockwork: Dad stumbled home (fresh from the bar), punished my sister by dragging her out of her bedroom by her long blonde hair and forced her to watch him behead a doll or two, all the while telling her how horrible of a daughter she was. Next, he would punish me in some equally horrifying manner after I tried to save my sister. We were then thrown out of the front door (if we hadn't run through it already) until we learned "some responsibility". I took my sister's hand and we ran down the block to the place we felt safest: Aunt Neda's house.
It was one of the oldest houses in our town which stood on the far corner of our block. It was large and weather beaten at every angle. The porch wrapped itself half way around the house and the ghosts of dead flowers and withered vines tightly choked it. Long ago, during its debut, I'm sure people slowed down their horse drawn carriages or walked a little slower passing that house, just so they could marvel at its beauty and workmanship, and wonder what it would be like to live inside.
Now it sat lifeless on a lot with snarled, overgrown grass and dead plants trapping its forgotten beauty. The shutters that still remain attached to the windows are struggling to hang on and the paint is peeling like bad sunburn. The dying willow tree in the front yard cast such a depressing shadow that it made the house look tired and defeated; you could almost hear it sigh in exhaustion when a breeze floated by, threatening its stability. "It's a pity," I've heard people whisper as they passed by on their mid afternoon walks, "that they just let it sit there to rot."
The negligent person who was letting this historical house die was Mr. Jimmy Devorac, third rate mechanic at Wilson's Repair Shop down on Third Street, and equally talented father to my sister Joyce and me.
The house wasn't always so barren though, in fact for the majority of its existence it was full of life, and only those past five years had been what determined its present state.
When I was younger, my great aunt Neda lived in the house; it had been passed down for generations by my Bulgarian ancestors. My mother would drop Joyce and me off at the house before she left for her classes at the college. She was determined to get a bachelor's degree in English Literature (her favorite author was James Joyce and the person whom my sister and I were named after) and Aunt Neda helped by baby-sitting. For much of my young life, I remember Aunt Neda sitting in her rocking chair, swaying Joyce to sleep in a yellow fleece blanket while I ran back and forth on that porch, burning off energy and occasionally pausing to color a picture in my Power Ranger's coloring book or to build a goblin's castle with Legos.
After two more years of hard work, Mom finally graduated from college. Grandma and Grandpa Kubrat migrated to our tiny town of Godric from upstate New York to see their daughter graduate. Two days later, Aunt Neda and Mom drove my grandparents back to the train station.
After hours of Joyce and I impatiently sitting at the window waiting for their return, two stern looking police men rang the door bell to tell us that all four of our relatives died when a the driver of a semi truck fell asleep and crushed our old, rusted Oldsmobile.
The last time we used Aunt Neda's keys (that hung from the Ormond Beach key chain she loved so much) to open the front door of her house, was only to move Mom's belongings out of our house shortly after the funeral. Dad never stepped inside again and gave Joyce and me implicit instructions to do the same. He left it to drown in dust and slowly transform into the town's fabled haunted house that children stand outside of and whisper about on Halloween.
Joyce and I spent a lot of our time sitting on Aunt Neda's porch long after she died. It was the place we retreated to when Dad was drunk and looking for a fight. We'd spend hours on that rickety old swing, making up stories about how we would treat the house if it was ours. Sometimes we'd close our eyes and the smell of lilacs that would have blossomed in the backyard and the sight of bright red roses climbing up the pillars would seem so real that my chest ached with grief when I opened my eyes to see the bleak and dreary reality.
On one hot summer day Joyce was lying on the tousled lawn, gazing at the clouds while I was trying to read Lois Lowry's Number the Stars so I could cross it off my fifth grade summer reading list. "James, I think I saw an angel flying from the Mickey Mouse cloud to the dolphin shaped one!" Joyce jumped up excitedly and pointed to the sky.
"They do that sometimes," I said distractedly.
"Do you think it was Mommy?" Joyce got up and walked towards me, still not taking her eyes off of the sky.
"Could be," I turned the page and sighed knowing that Joyce could never ask just one question.
"Or Aunt Neda?"
"Sure," I shrugged and bent the corner of the page knowing I was in for a seven year old's endless line of questioning. Instead of opening a floodgate of inquiries, Joyce froze for a few moments and asked, "Do you hear that?" She raced into the backyard before I could answer.
When I caught up to her, she was hunched over in the corner and her ear was pressed against the wooden fence. I was about to speak when I heard it too; someone was crying.
Joyce climbed onto a dented, long forgotten trash can and was tall enough to just barely look over the top of the fence. I saw the slightest hint of a sympathetic smile on her face and she asked the source of sobs, "What's the matter?"
The wonderful thing about my little sister is that she has the gift to make any situation more bearable. No matter whom it was or what the circumstances were, Joyce suddenly aged ten years and could sooth the wrinkles out of any problem and had the ability to comfort any tears.
I stood back and watched her work her magic. Ten minutes later, a brown haired girl in wire rimmed glasses appeared at the back gate. Being a typical twelve year old boy I showed the emotional range of a teaspoon and blurted out, "You're Jungle Gym Sandy!" as soon as she entered the yard.
Sandy was a quiet girl who reigned over the playground at school. She was the first second grader to climb to the top of the jungle gym and in order to keep her title she ate her lunch everyday at the very peak, for the next two years.
Joyce gave me the identical look Mom used to give me whenever I got in trouble: she tilted her head down towards the ground, boring her green eyes into mine squeezed her lips to the right side of her face in a disapproving gesture. She turned her attention to Sandy and they talked animatedly until long after the moon rose.
That was how we met Sandy. Her dad had cancer and he took a turn for the worse. The doctors couldn't do anything more to help him. Sandy was crushed knowing that her father could die on any given day. After school she spent an hour or two at the hospital with her father and then came home to visit us on Aunt Neda's porch. Sandy's sympathetic ear and shoulder to cry on, combined with my zany games and magical stories was just what Sandy needed to make it through another day.
In the meantime we met Matt. On that particular day it was early in the evening and we couldn't get Sandy to stop crying. She had a tough day at the hospital so we sat on Aunt Neda's porch steps and made up stories from what we saw in the stars in the sky to help her forget her troubles. In the middle of Joyce's explanation of her Buffalo-Eating Fish constellation, a loud crash of broken glass echoed from behind the house. Quietly, the three of us walked to the end of the porch when we heard a car door slam and a woman yelling profanities into the night air. A car pulled out of the driveway from the house behind Aunt Neda's and the sound of screeching tires echoed down the empty streets.
Following the sound was a boy about Joyce's age sobbing and running after the car. He stopped in the middle of the street at the corner in front of Aunt Neda's house. The three of us watched him, wondering what to do next. Joyce nudged me and shifted her eyes from me to the boy, repeatedly.
Reluctantly, I walked up to the boy who was staring at the darkness in the street ahead. He was a whole head shorter than me and I leaned down to make sure he wasn't hurt, "Hey kid, you alright?" I asked, bent over, hands on my knees.
That little ankle biter turned and punched me square in the nose. I stood straight up and covered my face that was surging in pain. The little brat didn't stop there. He kicked my shin and punched my stomach until he fell on his knees in exhaustion. "You finished?" I snapped sharply, rubbing my sore stomach.
He nodded and in between his tiny gasps of air he replied, "Thanks." I looked up at Joyce who was gripping her stomach with one hand and covering her mouth with the other. Sandy, in contrast, was doubled over, trying to control a fit of giggles. I shook my head from side to side not believing what I just endured for her.
Matt completed our little circle. His mother was truly certifiable and the night he took all his anger out on me was the night his father left. Since then his mother fell into a lot of bad relationships and when he didn't want to be at home, he came to Aunt Neda's front porch where we initiated ourselves into the Front Porch Club. As a member we promised to help each other out in life and to keep our hidden lives secret at school. Nothing was going to stomp on us and nothing was going to bring us down. We promised to always be there for one another.
In October of that year, the Front Porch Club survived its first tragedy: Sandy missed a whole week of school and she never came to Aunt Neda's porch either. Two days before Halloween, Joyce and I were walking home from school when we saw Sandy on Aunt Neda's porch swing, staring at the floor and wrapped in a green flannel blanket. Her dad died that morning in the hospital. We called an emergency Front Porch Club meeting and sat together, under that blanket, and comforted Sandy until her mom came outside looking for her.
Throughout the years we stayed friends and spent our afternoons on that porch. We drew pictures on the sidewalk with rocks, told ghost stories in the evening and made up numerous games from our imagination. Soon, playing tag and make believe changed into homework assignments and college applications. We helped each other through the downfalls of high school hierarchy and end of the year exams. We each had separate strong points when it came to school assignments: I enjoyed the sciences while Joyce inherited Mom's love of literature; Sandy adored history and Matt was talented with numbers. We pulled together many study sessions and tutoring lessons there in high school.
After graduation I went away to college but came home every weekend to see Joyce, whom I always found on Aunt Neda's porch. Sandy went to a local college and kept Joyce's company (since she was still only in high school) while Matt joined the army only to die fighting in Iraq, shortly after his deployment (the Front Porch Club's second tragedy).
When I became a college graduate Dad went around town, to every bar, and boasted about how his son graduated with a physics degree from a "bona fide, stick up their ass, real school" in the city. He bought at least one round at every one of the nine bars Godric had and told any one who listened, about how many cars he would have to repair if he wanted to pay for his own schooling and, eventually, his theory on how a diploma was a $100,000 piece of toilet paper.
Joyce, Sandy and I, on the other hand, went out for a fancy dinner at Les Frères to celebrate the two job offers I received after graduating summa cum laude. We spent the entire evening laughing, reminiscing and dreaming. We hopped on the last train to Godric that night and Gus O'Hara, the local cab driver, was there to meet us.
"Congratulations ol' boy," was the first thing he said, "The whole town's proud of you." He patted me on the back and forced a smile. He held the door open for Sandy and Joyce but closed it before I could climb in. He fiddled with the keys on his large key ring and stuttered a few times before spitting out another coherent sentence.
"There's been an accident, lad," he was such a short man that when he looked up at me, it was like he was looking up into the heavens, "it's your father."
I heard Joyce laugh from inside the car and I could see her shove Sandy's shoulder in a playful gesture, they clearly couldn't hear our conversation. "What do you mean? Is he alright?"
Gus picked at his rusty brown beard and sighed, obviously not pleased that he was the one who had to tell me this news. "Hop inside; I'll drive you to the hospital."
As soon as I took my seat on the passenger side, the wave of alarm that held me tightly began to seep its sticky limbs into the backseat and clench onto Sandy and Joyce when I explained the situation. Sandy gasped and then put a supportive hand on my shoulder while Joyce sat back, crossed her arms and stared out the window, "It figures. It's just like him to steal your thunder," she mumbled.
Despite my plea for Joyce to go home with Sandy, she followed me to the hospital. Once there, we found two policemen conversing with a doctor outside Dad's hospital room. "Sergeant Veliki, how is he?" I immediately questioned the only one of the three men whom I knew.
Veliki just shook his head and looked down at the black and white tiled floor. The significant thing I remembered about the doctor standing next to him was that he had a head full of hair that was just beginning to go gray. The doctor put his hand on my shoulder and took me aside from the others, "We don't expect him to make it through the night. I'm sorry, son."
Emptiness. That was all I felt. There were no tears welling up or a lump in my throat I tried to swallow. I concentrated on thinking about what I should do next when I suddenly became very aware of my breathing. Lungs fill up, lungs empty out. It became faster. A breath in. A breath out. Then my heart began to thump loudly in my ears. Thump, thump, thump.
I had never felt that way before. Was it shock? Nerves? A heart attack? I needed to find Joyce. I needed to see her. The thought of her made sense. She could make anything alright again. I blinked; the split second of darkness behind my eyelids and the instant return to the bright hallway felt like a lifetime. My eyes slowly shifted towards the other end of the bright white hallway until I found her. She was safely listening to Veliki as he read a number of notes from his tiny black notebook. His hands moved up and down, side to side, with every word. Joyce slowly nodded, holding a pale purple sweater in between her arms that crossed her chest.
Suddenly time moved faster until it caught up with reality. I had to put my arm against the wall to balance myself from its intensity. The doctor lifted his left arm towards the hospital door and his words slowly made their way into my ears, "You can go on in, if you like. There's nothing more we can do for him."
As the doctor walked away, Joyce turned her attention to me with that same disapproving look my mother used to give and walked in my direction. "He was drinking, James," she retorted, completely livid at the situation. "That ass drove his truck right into the telephone pole on End Street! Veliki said that when they brought him in, his blood alcohol level was 0.38!" Her hands flew up wildly in the air as she tried to explain everything to me. "He missed hitting Mrs. Evanston by this much," she held her fore finger and thumb an inch apart to emphasize her point, "this much, James!" she repeated louder, bringing her hand closer to my face.
Big brother mode kicked in and all my senses rushed back to me. I pinned Joyce's wildly flaying arms to her side as she shifted her weight to one leg, shut her mouth and put that disapproving look back onto her face. "It's going to be alright, Joyce. Trust me." I attempted to calm her down.
Slowly her lips melted into a half smile and she sighed, "Alright then, what are we going to do?"
"Let's go and say good bye to our father." I took Joyce's hand and led her into the dimly lit room. A dozen or so machines blipped and beeped to the beat of the respirator pushing air in and out of Dad's lungs. As we got closer to him we saw that a number of the bandages that covered his body were already starting to soak through with the unmistakable color of blood.
"Hello Dad," my voice cracked for the first time since I was sixteen. As if on cue, like in some horribly made Hollywood movie, Dad's eyes shot open.
The machines played their tune as I waited for Joyce to say something-anything to our father. I really have no idea how long those moments lasted; it could have been five minutes or an hour. The rhythm of the medical equipment held my attention as I tapped along to the beat in my head: beep, beep, swoosh, blip, beep, beep, swoosh, blip.
Then Joyce let go of my hand and took a step closer to the hospital bed. She locked her eyes with Dad's and I watched, still not missing a beat to the instruments in my head. Finally, in a cold, hurtful tone Joyce said firmly, "Good bye, Father."
The music stopped playing then. One long beep played from one of the contraptions as Joyce turned to me and with a soft and unperturbed look she asked, "Can we go home now?"
Gus drove us home that night in the quiet, uncomfortable atmosphere of his tiny cab. When Gus tried to break the silence he asked about the graduation ceremony. Was that this morning? It felt like decades ago. I replied with a shrug, worried at how calm Joyce seemed to be.
The moment we walked in the front door of our old, mangy house I wanted nothing more than to fall into bed and sleep until I couldn't sleep anymore. Joyce, however, had other plans.
She marched straight into Dad's room and took the set of dusty keys that hung from an Ormond Beach keychain and walked right back out the front door.
I followed her, calling her name a number of times in an attempt to get her to stop and talk to me but she broke into a run and kept her eyes fixed on Aunt Neda's house. I jogged as fast as my tired feet could carry me and followed her down the dimly lit street.
She stopped long enough for me to catch up to her at the front door of Aunt Neda's house. "Joyce, what are you doing?" I was panting, clearly out of shape.
Joyce stuck the large bronze key into the lock on the heavy wooden door and looked at me. "I obeyed him as long as he was alive, but now this is our house."
It was evident in her face that she was looking forward to this day her whole life. Opening this door meant opening a window to the world of the mother she never knew-the family that she never knew. It meant stepping into her childhood imaginings and believing in wishes and dreams. On the other side of that door was the knowledge of another world that she was dying to enter.
I bit my bottom lip and held my breath as Joyce smiled and turned the key.
Everything was the way I remembered it, except for the piles of brown boxes that were stacked in the living room that held Mom's clothes, books, high heels-everything she owned. Joyce plunged right in, first studying the two dusty picture frames that sat on top of the pile of cardboard homes: a college degree in the name of Mary Jane Devorac and a picture of our younger selves with Mom in her black graduation robe.
We spent all night going through the boxes, immersed in conversation about our mother.
Immediately, Joyce and I moved into Aunt Neda's house and put Dad's house up for sale (which was eventually bought, bulldozed to the ground, and was replaced with a town home). Joyce finished high school and attended the same college Mom graduated from, hoping to one day see her degree framed and the underneath her mother's and mine.
Time heals all wounds. That's an English proverb that Aunt Neda stitched in needlepoint and hung in her living room. It's a good lesson life has to offer, if you're patient enough to wait. Joyce and I did our share of waiting and after I married Sandy and Joyce became a mother, our children played on Aunt Neda's front porch, surrounded by the sweetest flowers, the brightest sunshine, and the strongest love a family can offer, keeping the traditions of the Front Porch Club alive.
Genre: Fiction
Size: 11 pages/3,939 words
During our childhood, my little sister liked to sit on the living room floor and play with her toy dolls which had old photographs of our mother rubber banded to their heads. As a seven year old, she forgot to do a lot of things: to brush her teeth at night, to finish her vegetables, to say please and to pick up her toys. Nothing infuriated my father more than coming home from work and stumbling over a bunch of Barbies and crinkled photographs of his wife.
I, on the other hand, had to remember to pick up after my father, take out the garbage, keep my sister quiet and make sure we stayed out of his way when he came home. More often than not, neither of us remembered our chores. When this happened the same scenario played out in our house like clockwork: Dad stumbled home (fresh from the bar), punished my sister by dragging her out of her bedroom by her long blonde hair and forced her to watch him behead a doll or two, all the while telling her how horrible of a daughter she was. Next, he would punish me in some equally horrifying manner after I tried to save my sister. We were then thrown out of the front door (if we hadn't run through it already) until we learned "some responsibility". I took my sister's hand and we ran down the block to the place we felt safest: Aunt Neda's house.
It was one of the oldest houses in our town which stood on the far corner of our block. It was large and weather beaten at every angle. The porch wrapped itself half way around the house and the ghosts of dead flowers and withered vines tightly choked it. Long ago, during its debut, I'm sure people slowed down their horse drawn carriages or walked a little slower passing that house, just so they could marvel at its beauty and workmanship, and wonder what it would be like to live inside.
Now it sat lifeless on a lot with snarled, overgrown grass and dead plants trapping its forgotten beauty. The shutters that still remain attached to the windows are struggling to hang on and the paint is peeling like bad sunburn. The dying willow tree in the front yard cast such a depressing shadow that it made the house look tired and defeated; you could almost hear it sigh in exhaustion when a breeze floated by, threatening its stability. "It's a pity," I've heard people whisper as they passed by on their mid afternoon walks, "that they just let it sit there to rot."
The negligent person who was letting this historical house die was Mr. Jimmy Devorac, third rate mechanic at Wilson's Repair Shop down on Third Street, and equally talented father to my sister Joyce and me.
The house wasn't always so barren though, in fact for the majority of its existence it was full of life, and only those past five years had been what determined its present state.
When I was younger, my great aunt Neda lived in the house; it had been passed down for generations by my Bulgarian ancestors. My mother would drop Joyce and me off at the house before she left for her classes at the college. She was determined to get a bachelor's degree in English Literature (her favorite author was James Joyce and the person whom my sister and I were named after) and Aunt Neda helped by baby-sitting. For much of my young life, I remember Aunt Neda sitting in her rocking chair, swaying Joyce to sleep in a yellow fleece blanket while I ran back and forth on that porch, burning off energy and occasionally pausing to color a picture in my Power Ranger's coloring book or to build a goblin's castle with Legos.
After two more years of hard work, Mom finally graduated from college. Grandma and Grandpa Kubrat migrated to our tiny town of Godric from upstate New York to see their daughter graduate. Two days later, Aunt Neda and Mom drove my grandparents back to the train station.
After hours of Joyce and I impatiently sitting at the window waiting for their return, two stern looking police men rang the door bell to tell us that all four of our relatives died when a the driver of a semi truck fell asleep and crushed our old, rusted Oldsmobile.
The last time we used Aunt Neda's keys (that hung from the Ormond Beach key chain she loved so much) to open the front door of her house, was only to move Mom's belongings out of our house shortly after the funeral. Dad never stepped inside again and gave Joyce and me implicit instructions to do the same. He left it to drown in dust and slowly transform into the town's fabled haunted house that children stand outside of and whisper about on Halloween.
Joyce and I spent a lot of our time sitting on Aunt Neda's porch long after she died. It was the place we retreated to when Dad was drunk and looking for a fight. We'd spend hours on that rickety old swing, making up stories about how we would treat the house if it was ours. Sometimes we'd close our eyes and the smell of lilacs that would have blossomed in the backyard and the sight of bright red roses climbing up the pillars would seem so real that my chest ached with grief when I opened my eyes to see the bleak and dreary reality.
On one hot summer day Joyce was lying on the tousled lawn, gazing at the clouds while I was trying to read Lois Lowry's Number the Stars so I could cross it off my fifth grade summer reading list. "James, I think I saw an angel flying from the Mickey Mouse cloud to the dolphin shaped one!" Joyce jumped up excitedly and pointed to the sky.
"They do that sometimes," I said distractedly.
"Do you think it was Mommy?" Joyce got up and walked towards me, still not taking her eyes off of the sky.
"Could be," I turned the page and sighed knowing that Joyce could never ask just one question.
"Or Aunt Neda?"
"Sure," I shrugged and bent the corner of the page knowing I was in for a seven year old's endless line of questioning. Instead of opening a floodgate of inquiries, Joyce froze for a few moments and asked, "Do you hear that?" She raced into the backyard before I could answer.
When I caught up to her, she was hunched over in the corner and her ear was pressed against the wooden fence. I was about to speak when I heard it too; someone was crying.
Joyce climbed onto a dented, long forgotten trash can and was tall enough to just barely look over the top of the fence. I saw the slightest hint of a sympathetic smile on her face and she asked the source of sobs, "What's the matter?"
The wonderful thing about my little sister is that she has the gift to make any situation more bearable. No matter whom it was or what the circumstances were, Joyce suddenly aged ten years and could sooth the wrinkles out of any problem and had the ability to comfort any tears.
I stood back and watched her work her magic. Ten minutes later, a brown haired girl in wire rimmed glasses appeared at the back gate. Being a typical twelve year old boy I showed the emotional range of a teaspoon and blurted out, "You're Jungle Gym Sandy!" as soon as she entered the yard.
Sandy was a quiet girl who reigned over the playground at school. She was the first second grader to climb to the top of the jungle gym and in order to keep her title she ate her lunch everyday at the very peak, for the next two years.
Joyce gave me the identical look Mom used to give me whenever I got in trouble: she tilted her head down towards the ground, boring her green eyes into mine squeezed her lips to the right side of her face in a disapproving gesture. She turned her attention to Sandy and they talked animatedly until long after the moon rose.
That was how we met Sandy. Her dad had cancer and he took a turn for the worse. The doctors couldn't do anything more to help him. Sandy was crushed knowing that her father could die on any given day. After school she spent an hour or two at the hospital with her father and then came home to visit us on Aunt Neda's porch. Sandy's sympathetic ear and shoulder to cry on, combined with my zany games and magical stories was just what Sandy needed to make it through another day.
In the meantime we met Matt. On that particular day it was early in the evening and we couldn't get Sandy to stop crying. She had a tough day at the hospital so we sat on Aunt Neda's porch steps and made up stories from what we saw in the stars in the sky to help her forget her troubles. In the middle of Joyce's explanation of her Buffalo-Eating Fish constellation, a loud crash of broken glass echoed from behind the house. Quietly, the three of us walked to the end of the porch when we heard a car door slam and a woman yelling profanities into the night air. A car pulled out of the driveway from the house behind Aunt Neda's and the sound of screeching tires echoed down the empty streets.
Following the sound was a boy about Joyce's age sobbing and running after the car. He stopped in the middle of the street at the corner in front of Aunt Neda's house. The three of us watched him, wondering what to do next. Joyce nudged me and shifted her eyes from me to the boy, repeatedly.
Reluctantly, I walked up to the boy who was staring at the darkness in the street ahead. He was a whole head shorter than me and I leaned down to make sure he wasn't hurt, "Hey kid, you alright?" I asked, bent over, hands on my knees.
That little ankle biter turned and punched me square in the nose. I stood straight up and covered my face that was surging in pain. The little brat didn't stop there. He kicked my shin and punched my stomach until he fell on his knees in exhaustion. "You finished?" I snapped sharply, rubbing my sore stomach.
He nodded and in between his tiny gasps of air he replied, "Thanks." I looked up at Joyce who was gripping her stomach with one hand and covering her mouth with the other. Sandy, in contrast, was doubled over, trying to control a fit of giggles. I shook my head from side to side not believing what I just endured for her.
Matt completed our little circle. His mother was truly certifiable and the night he took all his anger out on me was the night his father left. Since then his mother fell into a lot of bad relationships and when he didn't want to be at home, he came to Aunt Neda's front porch where we initiated ourselves into the Front Porch Club. As a member we promised to help each other out in life and to keep our hidden lives secret at school. Nothing was going to stomp on us and nothing was going to bring us down. We promised to always be there for one another.
In October of that year, the Front Porch Club survived its first tragedy: Sandy missed a whole week of school and she never came to Aunt Neda's porch either. Two days before Halloween, Joyce and I were walking home from school when we saw Sandy on Aunt Neda's porch swing, staring at the floor and wrapped in a green flannel blanket. Her dad died that morning in the hospital. We called an emergency Front Porch Club meeting and sat together, under that blanket, and comforted Sandy until her mom came outside looking for her.
Throughout the years we stayed friends and spent our afternoons on that porch. We drew pictures on the sidewalk with rocks, told ghost stories in the evening and made up numerous games from our imagination. Soon, playing tag and make believe changed into homework assignments and college applications. We helped each other through the downfalls of high school hierarchy and end of the year exams. We each had separate strong points when it came to school assignments: I enjoyed the sciences while Joyce inherited Mom's love of literature; Sandy adored history and Matt was talented with numbers. We pulled together many study sessions and tutoring lessons there in high school.
After graduation I went away to college but came home every weekend to see Joyce, whom I always found on Aunt Neda's porch. Sandy went to a local college and kept Joyce's company (since she was still only in high school) while Matt joined the army only to die fighting in Iraq, shortly after his deployment (the Front Porch Club's second tragedy).
When I became a college graduate Dad went around town, to every bar, and boasted about how his son graduated with a physics degree from a "bona fide, stick up their ass, real school" in the city. He bought at least one round at every one of the nine bars Godric had and told any one who listened, about how many cars he would have to repair if he wanted to pay for his own schooling and, eventually, his theory on how a diploma was a $100,000 piece of toilet paper.
Joyce, Sandy and I, on the other hand, went out for a fancy dinner at Les Frères to celebrate the two job offers I received after graduating summa cum laude. We spent the entire evening laughing, reminiscing and dreaming. We hopped on the last train to Godric that night and Gus O'Hara, the local cab driver, was there to meet us.
"Congratulations ol' boy," was the first thing he said, "The whole town's proud of you." He patted me on the back and forced a smile. He held the door open for Sandy and Joyce but closed it before I could climb in. He fiddled with the keys on his large key ring and stuttered a few times before spitting out another coherent sentence.
"There's been an accident, lad," he was such a short man that when he looked up at me, it was like he was looking up into the heavens, "it's your father."
I heard Joyce laugh from inside the car and I could see her shove Sandy's shoulder in a playful gesture, they clearly couldn't hear our conversation. "What do you mean? Is he alright?"
Gus picked at his rusty brown beard and sighed, obviously not pleased that he was the one who had to tell me this news. "Hop inside; I'll drive you to the hospital."
As soon as I took my seat on the passenger side, the wave of alarm that held me tightly began to seep its sticky limbs into the backseat and clench onto Sandy and Joyce when I explained the situation. Sandy gasped and then put a supportive hand on my shoulder while Joyce sat back, crossed her arms and stared out the window, "It figures. It's just like him to steal your thunder," she mumbled.
Despite my plea for Joyce to go home with Sandy, she followed me to the hospital. Once there, we found two policemen conversing with a doctor outside Dad's hospital room. "Sergeant Veliki, how is he?" I immediately questioned the only one of the three men whom I knew.
Veliki just shook his head and looked down at the black and white tiled floor. The significant thing I remembered about the doctor standing next to him was that he had a head full of hair that was just beginning to go gray. The doctor put his hand on my shoulder and took me aside from the others, "We don't expect him to make it through the night. I'm sorry, son."
Emptiness. That was all I felt. There were no tears welling up or a lump in my throat I tried to swallow. I concentrated on thinking about what I should do next when I suddenly became very aware of my breathing. Lungs fill up, lungs empty out. It became faster. A breath in. A breath out. Then my heart began to thump loudly in my ears. Thump, thump, thump.
I had never felt that way before. Was it shock? Nerves? A heart attack? I needed to find Joyce. I needed to see her. The thought of her made sense. She could make anything alright again. I blinked; the split second of darkness behind my eyelids and the instant return to the bright hallway felt like a lifetime. My eyes slowly shifted towards the other end of the bright white hallway until I found her. She was safely listening to Veliki as he read a number of notes from his tiny black notebook. His hands moved up and down, side to side, with every word. Joyce slowly nodded, holding a pale purple sweater in between her arms that crossed her chest.
Suddenly time moved faster until it caught up with reality. I had to put my arm against the wall to balance myself from its intensity. The doctor lifted his left arm towards the hospital door and his words slowly made their way into my ears, "You can go on in, if you like. There's nothing more we can do for him."
As the doctor walked away, Joyce turned her attention to me with that same disapproving look my mother used to give and walked in my direction. "He was drinking, James," she retorted, completely livid at the situation. "That ass drove his truck right into the telephone pole on End Street! Veliki said that when they brought him in, his blood alcohol level was 0.38!" Her hands flew up wildly in the air as she tried to explain everything to me. "He missed hitting Mrs. Evanston by this much," she held her fore finger and thumb an inch apart to emphasize her point, "this much, James!" she repeated louder, bringing her hand closer to my face.
Big brother mode kicked in and all my senses rushed back to me. I pinned Joyce's wildly flaying arms to her side as she shifted her weight to one leg, shut her mouth and put that disapproving look back onto her face. "It's going to be alright, Joyce. Trust me." I attempted to calm her down.
Slowly her lips melted into a half smile and she sighed, "Alright then, what are we going to do?"
"Let's go and say good bye to our father." I took Joyce's hand and led her into the dimly lit room. A dozen or so machines blipped and beeped to the beat of the respirator pushing air in and out of Dad's lungs. As we got closer to him we saw that a number of the bandages that covered his body were already starting to soak through with the unmistakable color of blood.
"Hello Dad," my voice cracked for the first time since I was sixteen. As if on cue, like in some horribly made Hollywood movie, Dad's eyes shot open.
The machines played their tune as I waited for Joyce to say something-anything to our father. I really have no idea how long those moments lasted; it could have been five minutes or an hour. The rhythm of the medical equipment held my attention as I tapped along to the beat in my head: beep, beep, swoosh, blip, beep, beep, swoosh, blip.
Then Joyce let go of my hand and took a step closer to the hospital bed. She locked her eyes with Dad's and I watched, still not missing a beat to the instruments in my head. Finally, in a cold, hurtful tone Joyce said firmly, "Good bye, Father."
The music stopped playing then. One long beep played from one of the contraptions as Joyce turned to me and with a soft and unperturbed look she asked, "Can we go home now?"
Gus drove us home that night in the quiet, uncomfortable atmosphere of his tiny cab. When Gus tried to break the silence he asked about the graduation ceremony. Was that this morning? It felt like decades ago. I replied with a shrug, worried at how calm Joyce seemed to be.
The moment we walked in the front door of our old, mangy house I wanted nothing more than to fall into bed and sleep until I couldn't sleep anymore. Joyce, however, had other plans.
She marched straight into Dad's room and took the set of dusty keys that hung from an Ormond Beach keychain and walked right back out the front door.
I followed her, calling her name a number of times in an attempt to get her to stop and talk to me but she broke into a run and kept her eyes fixed on Aunt Neda's house. I jogged as fast as my tired feet could carry me and followed her down the dimly lit street.
She stopped long enough for me to catch up to her at the front door of Aunt Neda's house. "Joyce, what are you doing?" I was panting, clearly out of shape.
Joyce stuck the large bronze key into the lock on the heavy wooden door and looked at me. "I obeyed him as long as he was alive, but now this is our house."
It was evident in her face that she was looking forward to this day her whole life. Opening this door meant opening a window to the world of the mother she never knew-the family that she never knew. It meant stepping into her childhood imaginings and believing in wishes and dreams. On the other side of that door was the knowledge of another world that she was dying to enter.
I bit my bottom lip and held my breath as Joyce smiled and turned the key.
Everything was the way I remembered it, except for the piles of brown boxes that were stacked in the living room that held Mom's clothes, books, high heels-everything she owned. Joyce plunged right in, first studying the two dusty picture frames that sat on top of the pile of cardboard homes: a college degree in the name of Mary Jane Devorac and a picture of our younger selves with Mom in her black graduation robe.
We spent all night going through the boxes, immersed in conversation about our mother.
Immediately, Joyce and I moved into Aunt Neda's house and put Dad's house up for sale (which was eventually bought, bulldozed to the ground, and was replaced with a town home). Joyce finished high school and attended the same college Mom graduated from, hoping to one day see her degree framed and the underneath her mother's and mine.
Time heals all wounds. That's an English proverb that Aunt Neda stitched in needlepoint and hung in her living room. It's a good lesson life has to offer, if you're patient enough to wait. Joyce and I did our share of waiting and after I married Sandy and Joyce became a mother, our children played on Aunt Neda's front porch, surrounded by the sweetest flowers, the brightest sunshine, and the strongest love a family can offer, keeping the traditions of the Front Porch Club alive.