When I was growing up, I lived in a small town called Coventry. We moved away when I was fifteen, but I always considered Coventry to be my hometown, and Mike Mattis was always my best friend. We moved to another state, so I only saw Mike a couple of times between the move and college, but we always stayed in touch and even wound up going to the same college the last two years when Mike transferred in from a junior college near Coventry.
After college, I went on to graduate school at Texas A&M for Architectural Design and Mike went back to Coventry where he started teaching at the local high school. Life went on, and we drifted apart some over the years, but when I got married, he was my best man. When we had our first child two years later, he was in the waiting room with me. We were best friends for life, regardless of how often we talked.
Maybe that’s why it didn’t seem strange when I stopped hearing from him for several months. Our communications had never been very regular—a text every few weeks, a phone call every couple of months, that kind of thing. And we tried to get together when we could, but in the two years since having our little girl, travel plans had slid to the backburner.
One day I was sitting in a meeting with a potential client, listening to him try to convince us that it should be possible for us to design his shopping center to be both a palatial shrine to wealth and comfort while still being buildable on a dismally low budget. I was about to tell him for the tenth time that he needed to get with his contractor to talk about the build costs when I heard my phone buzz. I picked it up and saw it was a text from Mike.
Up for coming back to Coventry for a long weekend?
I didn’t respond right away, but the more I thought about it throughout the day and on the way home, the more appealing the idea became. It occurred to me that I hadn’t actually been back to Coventry since we moved away over 14 years ago. More importantly, looking back through my call and text logs, I realized it had been nearly four months since I had talked to Mike. Feeling a stab of guilt and nostalgia, I talked to my wife Stacy about it and she was all for it. She’d stay back and take care of our little girl, and I’d talk to Mike about going and staying two or three days when it was good for him.
When I called Mike’s phone, no one answered and it said that the voicemail box had not been set up yet. I was going to wait and call again later in the evening, but then my phone lit up with a return phone call from Mike.
“Hey, Parker. Sorry I missed your call, man.”
“No problem. Just wanted to call after getting your text. How’ve you been doing?”
“Good, real good. Things have been real good here. Hey, you up for coming back to Coventry for a long weekend?” Mike’s voice was slightly strange, almost like he was distracted or stressed out about something. And his question struck me as oddly awkward, mimicking the text message word for word and sounding almost as though he was reading from a telemarketer script and was new at the job. It was the opposite of the way he normally was—if anything Mike normally took things too easy, and I had never known him to be awkward talking to anyone, let alone me.
Still, it had been a few months, and maybe he had something going on. I suddenly worried I’d caught him at a bad time. “Hey…yeah I am, but we can do it later if things are too busy right now. It’s up to you.” I was barely done with the last word before he was talking again, his tone more strident.
“No. You should come right away.” He paused and let out an uneven laugh. When he started back, he sounded like he was forcing himself to be slower and calmer, more laidback sounding. “It’s all good, man. Miss seeing you. I’d like to show you around the town some too. A lot has changed since you were here.”
Deciding I was overthinking it, I pushed on. “Cool, man. How’s next weekend sound? I could fly in Friday morning and fly out Sunday night. If you want to pick me up at the Glenville airport, that’s cool, if not I can rent a car. What do you think?”
“Sounds great. Just send me the flight information and I’ll pick you up.”
When I got off the phone, I told Stacy about the weirdness of the conversation, but she agreed that he was probably just preoccupied or just woke up or something else innocuous. He was my best friend, and I should go see him, and it would be cool to see how the town had changed. She had never seen my hometown, so she made me promise to take lots of pictures. An hour later I had booked a flight for the following Friday morning.
The Glenville airport was tiny and dingy, consisting of a single brown brick hallway with a rental car kiosk and metal detectors on one end and the waiting area for the single terminal on the other. The small connecting flight had consisted of me and only a handful of other travelers, so there weren’t but a couple of people waiting for the plane’s arrival when I entered the building. Still, it took me a few seconds to recognize Mike.
As I said, I hadn’t seen him since my daughter’s birth two years earlier, but in that time he must have lost close to a hundred pounds, about seventy of which he didn’t have to spare. He looked gaunt and sickly, and while I tried to not let it show in my expression, as I hugged his bony frame I felt a caustic mixture of fear and guilt curdling in my chest. My first thought was cancer or some immune disease. Clearly something was wrong. I had intended on waiting and broaching the topic more tactfully, but when I pulled back and saw his pale blue eyes in their dark and sunken sockets, watched his thin, cracked lips stretched over teeth that seemed too big in his now gaunt face, it just spilled out.
“Fuck man, are you sick? You’ve lost a ton of weight.” I could hear the worry in my voice, but there was some accusation and anger too. Why hadn’t he told me he was going through all this? I could have helped, or at least talked to him more. He was already shaking his head though, a deep laugh in his too pale throat.
“No, Park. Nothing like that. I have lost a lot of weight, that’s true. At first I was doing it on purpose. I was running a lot, trying to build up to do marathons. Then I got hit with this weird gastro thing for awhile. It fucked me up for about six weeks, and I only got over it last month. I had already lost about thirty pounds before I got sick, and I dropped another forty eating broth and crackers for so long.” He grinned. “I know I still look like shit, but I’m on the mend. Just got checked last week and the doc said I’ve gained back 12 pounds so far. Trying to do it slow and steady. The healthy way.”
I frowned, not sure I believed him, but desperately hoping that it was true. And I worried I’d hurt his feelings. “Look, you don’t look like shit. You’re just really skinny and it scared me for a second. If you say you’re over it though, that’s great. I just was worried.”
Mike laughed again and gave me a light shove. “I appreciate it. I’m so glad you’re here.”
We headed out to his car—the same beat-up SUV he’d had since he crashed his old car the last year of college—and headed out of town toward Coventry. He asked a few questions about Stacy and the baby, and there were times during the drive that he almost seemed like his old self. But then he would suddenly trail off and go silent in the middle of asking a question or telling a story like a weak radio signal fading out as you drive along. Then right when I’d be on the edge of asking if something was wrong, he’d pick back up with something else, talking about the little shits in the classes he taught or how he was so ready to be living on his own again.
He warned me that we were going to his parents’ house to stay, as he had been staying there since he was so sick and all his stuff was still there. He looked slightly embarrassed, but I told him I remembered that his mom was a great cook and I knew he couldn’t cook for shit, so it was an upgrade. He laughed and shrugged.
“We’ll see what you think of her cooking now. We’re all on kind of a health food kick since I got so sick—all organic stuff, no meat, no gluten. You get used to it, but it might be a bit of a shock to your system.”
I grinned, looking out at the countryside as we rode along. It really was good to be back. The country out here was beautiful, and I had a lot of good memories from growing up around here. “I’m sure I’ll manage. So what do you want to do while I’m out here? I’m up for whatever, or just hanging out with you eating kale.”
Mike snickered and glanced at me. Suddenly his face grew inexplicably sad. “You really are a good guy, Parker. A good friend. My best friend.”
I frowned. “Yeah man, of course. You’re my best friend too. Are you sure you’re okay? You can tell me if something else is going on.”
He just looked at me for several moments, his expression still stricken, his lips moving wordlessly as though caught between a whisper and a sigh. Then his eyes cut away and back to the road, and when he spoke, his voice sounded strange again like it had been on the phone. “No, everything is fine. Just glad you could come.”
We drove on in silence for several minutes, and I could see Mike’s hands flexing as he clenched the steering wheel. Finally, his grip relaxed, and when he spoke next it was in a more conversational tone. “So, about things to do. I can show you around the town, of course. A lot has changed since you were last here. It’s grown some, though its still small compared to something like Glenville. We can go bowling at the new alley that opened up a few years ago. It’s a nice place and they have a tendency to hire hot college girls to work the counters.”
I snorted. “Aren’t you getting a bit old for trolling for college girls at a bowling alley?”
He shrugged. “Coventry doesn’t have the largest dating pool, and while I admit this is a bit hypocritical since I live there myself, I find that women my age around here—that aren’t already married at least—tend to not be awesome. At least with the college girls, there’s a hope I can find a girl who is intelligent and ambitious enough to still get out while the getting’s good.”
Laughing, I shoved him in the arm. “Oh, so you’re going to find some hard-working girl with a bright future and ride her coattails out of town?”
He started to respond, and then stopped, his expression darkening. “No, though that’s a nice idea. But no, man. I’ll never go anywhere else. I’m going to die right here in Coventry.” I didn’t know what to say. I was still trying to come up with something that could be encouraging without sounding patronizing when his expression smoothed and he glanced at me again. “One thing you have to do while you’re here is go see the new tunnel.”
I raised an eyebrow. “The new tunnel? What new tunnel?”
His lips stretched back in a strange smile. “Oh, its really something. Out on the north side of town where they used to have the big horse ranch? It’s grown up out there a lot more now—they’re even putting in a new Wal-Mart close by. But that tunnel…well, you just have to wait and see.”
I was going to ask more questions but I realized we were slowing to a stop. Looking up, I saw why. We were at his parents’ house.
Mike’s parents lived in an older ranch-style house. They’d lived there since I was twelve, and I remember always being amazed at how clean and well-kept up it always was. Not that my family’s houses growing up were terrible, but between Mr. Mattis keeping up the yard and the exterior and Mrs. Mattis keeping the inside immaculate, I always felt a little like I was walking into an idealized version of what a family home should be.
This extended to Mike’s parents’ themselves. His father was a kind-hearted man who ran a local hunting supply store and was always quick with a funny story or joke. His mother had been like a second mom to me growing up. She ran her own accounting firm and was always running around, but she was also one of the few adults that seemed to actually care what was going on in Mike’s life and my own beyond the normal cursory check that we weren’t being abducted or hooked on drugs.
Seeing the house now was almost as big of a shock as seeing Mike himself. More than one shutter was partially fallen down, and a ragged blue tarp was draped like a sash around the chimney, presumably to try and stop a leak. The yard was a thick mess of weeds, and as we entered the house, the sense of clutter and disuse only multiplied. It wasn’t filthy, and I understood that people sometimes let their housekeeping slide as they get older, but it was such a sharp contrast from what I remembered.
Mike led me down the hall to the guest bedroom so I could put my stuff down, and as we passed the kitchen I saw his parents from behind. They were standing side by side, still and silent as statues, staring at the faded floral wallpaper on the far kitchen wall. I was going to say something, but there was something so unnatural about what I was seeing that an inner voice or instinct warned against it, and I wound up just moving on down the hall to where Mike was waiting.
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Credits
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