Cody did not know Wade played the harp. It was not the sort of thing one soldier shared with another—not in boot camp, and not even during the long hot afternoons spent lying on cots beneath heavy-duty tents in the Iraqi desert—a soft spot for classical music, a love for the sound of plucked strings. So, when Wade’s mother called to invite Cody to the funeral, he was surprised when she also asked if he had a truck with a flatbed big enough to haul Wade’s harp. “I’m giving it to his ex-girlfriend,” she said. “I can’t bear to look at the thing.” Cody did, and on the morning of the funeral, he drove his truck south from Dallas to Hillsboro, where Wade’s mother lived and where she planned to bury Wade in the cemetery beneath a grove of live oak trees.
It was late August and sweltering. Cody took I-35 with the windows down, the heavy heat blowing off the dry land. He smoked while he drove, one hand with the cigarette out the window, the other resting loosely on the bottom of the steering wheel. He’d meant to quit after leaving the Army, but the nicotine eased the pain in his back, pain from where he’d strained a muscle lifting boxes for his uncle’s moving company. He’d planned to find a different job, too, but he never could find the time to rewrite his resume. There was always something more pressing, like getting a beer after work at the old place or helping his father around the house. And then he got the news about Wade. After that, he didn’t have the will for much of anything.
Wade died on a Sunday. He woke in the morning a seemingly all right twenty-six-year-old man. He kissed his mother on the cheek as she walked out the front door carrying a double batch of potato soup in a yellow crockpot for the Baptist church’s potluck luncheon. Then, he hung himself in her garage.
He left a note on a sheet of paper torn from a legal pad, held down on his childhood dresser by a coffee mug with a thin layer of watery grounds still lining the bottom. Wade’s mother offered to read Cody the note over the phone, but he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t tell her this, but his first thought after the shock of realizing he would never see Wade again was gratitude that his friend was finally free. It seemed like the wrong thing to feel, but Cody felt it all the same.
*
Wade’s mother lived in a modest, one-story red-brick ranch house a few blocks from the interstate. A Texas flag hung beside the front door. Two pecan trees extended their tangled branches over the roof. A black cat with a white spot on its chest sat on the front steps, licking its paws. When Cody approached, the cat leaped into the scraggly hedges.
The ex-girlfriend answered the door. Cody recognized her from the Facebook photos Wade had shown him in Iraq. He could tell she’d gained some weight since taking the photos. She wore tight jean shorts that cut into her thighs and a hot pink tank top that revealed the worn straps of a black bra. Her dirty blonde hair almost reached her waist. Cody tried to remember her name and wished he’d asked Wade’s mother to remind him. He remembered unhelpful things that Wade had told him about her: how she hated cigarettes because her grandfather had died of lung cancer; how she only drank Shiner; how she cried after the first time she and Wade had sex because she was a Christian and what they’d done was a sin.
She didn’t say hello to Cody but peered around him to look at his truck.
“Looks big enough,” she said. Then, staring up at him, “It’s Cody, right? You wanna come in?”
She looked down the dark hallway behind her and rubbed her arms as if comforting herself.
“It’s just family right now,” she said. “Kinda awkward.”
“I’ll smoke first,” Cody said.
He retrieved a cigarette pack from the back pocket of his jeans. He figured she wouldn’t want to join him, given her grandfather, and was surprised when she said, “I’ll keep you company.”
When he gave her a look she said, “Wade’s mom doesn’t like me much, even if she is giving me the harp.”
Cody sat down on the porch where the cat had been. The ex-girlfriend sat next to him and crossed her arms tight.
“Why’s that?” he asked, huffing smoke.
She shrugged. “Who likes the ex?”
Across the street, an old man in a grey polo and worn khakis waved at them while watering his brown lawn. Cody lifted his hand with the cigarette and waved in return.
“It’s quiet down here,” he said.
“You come from Dallas?”
“That’s right,” he said, and he thought about the suburb he’d left behind, the McMansions in his parents’ neighborhood, the continuous rumble from I-75, the SUVs and the moms walking around the block pushing thousand-dollar strollers. He was glad for the peace and quiet of sitting underneath a pecan tree in the country in the sun.
Plus, the ex-girlfriend was all right to look at, and the more he thought about her, the better-looking she got. She was the kind of girl he would have hit on if she weren’t his dead friend’s ex. He wondered what Wade would think if he hit on her anyway and grinned around his cigarette. He could hear Wade laughing that loud, obnoxious laugh. “Fuck yeah, man, play the field!” he’d say. “I’m out of the game. No use wasting a good pussy.”
But Cody wasn’t like Wade, not when it came to women and not really when it came to much else. He never had been able to fuck a girl and forget about her. He wished he could; it would make things easier, wouldn’t leave him with so much longing, so much guilt. As it was, he felt bad for thinking about the round shape of the ex-girlfriend’s thigh pressed against the concrete step, how much it looked like a smooth, white egg. He ought to be thinking of Wade, ought to be fondly remembering his dead Army friend, feeling sad and lonely and wishing he’d done something to stop Wade from doing what he did.
Cody scrubbed the cigarette out on the step, brushing the ashes into the dry shrubs. The ex-girlfriend coughed into her armpit.
“I guess you miss him like hell,” she said.
Cody tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look at him straight on. She just stared across the street at the old man watering his dirt. She wrapped her legs snug around themselves like a corkscrew, tucking the top of her left foot underneath her right heel. Cody noticed the redness on her cheeks, the puffed skin around her eyes. She’d been crying not long ago.
“I guess I do miss him,” he agreed.
“Was Wade your best friend?” she asked.
Cody plucked a piece of dead grass from beside the steps, rolled it between his fingers where it crumbled in brown flakes.
“He was a close one,” he admitted.
That much was true. When they were in Iraq, Cody would have called Wade his best friend. But they didn’t have much in common when they got back to Texas.
“I miss him so much,” the ex-girlfriend said.
She rubbed her eyes with the hard palms of her hands. Cody wondered what it would be like to drape his arm around her sun-warmed shoulders, comfort her with a long, damp kiss. He shouldn’t think about such things, it seemed wrong, disrespectful, but he thought about them anyway. He couldn’t help it, and he didn’t try too hard to stop.
Behind him, the screen door opened, and Wade’s mother appeared. Cody stood and wondered what to say, wondered if it was all right to smile. Wade’s mother had been crying, too, and made no attempt to hide it. She was short and stout, with thin brown hair and a wide, shiny forehead. She sniffed when she saw them, ignored the ex-girlfriend, and clutched Cody’s arm. Her nails were painted red with polish chipped along the edges.
“Honey,” she said. “You made it. I’m so glad. And you brought the truck. Thank Jesus. I have got to get rid of that Goddamn harp.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Cody.
“The harp’s on back, in the garage,” she said. “Molly will show you.”
So that was the ex-girlfriend’s name.
Molly stood, brushed flecks of gravel off the backs of her legs and recrossed her arms. She rocked back and forth on the soles of her little white Keds. The Keds reminded Cody of a child’s shoes.
“I’ve got to see to the food,” said Wade’s mother. “Can’t have a funeral without feeding the whole Goddamn neighborhood.”
She squeezed Cody’s arm again. He felt her long nails digging into his skin, knew they’d leave half-moon cuts if she ever released him.
“I am glad to see you,” she said, looking at him through watery eyes as if he were Jesus himself come down to comfort her. “You’re the only one Wade would have wanted to see. None of these other folks ever mattered to him.”
She seemed to stagger a little then, and Cody thought she might be drunk. Wade liked a good drink, but maybe his mother was different. Maybe it was just the grieving.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” he said, patting her arm. She smiled gratefully. He said, “I’ll just load up the harp and take it over to Molly’s. We’ll be back in a jiff.”
*
In Iraq, Cody and Wade used to sit up late in the night at the foldout table, listening to a sandstorm raging a canvas tent flap away, flipping through photos on their phones of women they thought were beautiful. “Look here,” Cody would say. “Julie Andrews, most beautiful woman to ever live.” “Fuck,” Wade answered, “you motherfucker you would go for the most wholesome woman. And she’s a cougar. Everyone knows it’s Natalie Portman.” “That’s so unoriginal,” Cody said, but he felt his cock tense when Wade held up her photo.
It wasn’t posttraumatic stress that killed Wade, though maybe he did suffer from it. Certainly, they both had a hard time after Iraq, drifting aimlessly from unemployed to employed to unemployed again, finding themselves living back at home with their parents. Their squad leader warned them of this. “Life after the military can be the most challenging part of your service,” Staff Sgt. Allen said. “You must practice constant vigilance against the malaise of modern society.” “What the fuck does that mean, malaise of modern society,” Wade said after they were discharged. But Cody often thought about Staff Sgt. Allen the first year he was out, working for his uncle packing boxes of dishes and linens and old VCRs for nuclear families moving from one nice neighborhood to the next.
What was the malaise the sergeant warned them about? Cody had come to think of it as indifference, a sense that in the grand scheme of things, nothing really mattered, no one cared about anything except buying a new car or fucking his wife in bed on a Friday, so what the hell was he supposed to do? Even worse was the sense that his indifference was cliché; wasn’t it just like every other Army veteran to come home and complain about the meaninglessness of affluent middle-class America? Couldn’t he come up with something more original? But he couldn’t, and he didn’t care enough to try. In some way, he envied Wade’s pain. At least Wade felt something, at least he was affected by misery, even if it affected him in a horrible way.
Sometimes, Cody would watch the news, see images of ISIS terrorists retaking parts of Mosul, then Kurdish freedom fighters taking it right back, and think, shouldn’t this matter? But then his uncle would call him for a job, and he’d spend the afternoon sweating in some fat lady’s apartment, wrapping her delicate glass figurines in white paper and stacking her china plates in a cardboard box. At the end of the day, all he wanted was a hard night’s sleep, maybe a joint, maybe a beer, like he was living in some Goddamn bro-country song. He’d come home to find his mother and father sitting on the couch, watching Fox News, and they’d smile at him in a way that showed they were proud, if worried. It was enough to make him ill, but mostly it just made him tired.
There were plenty of things he could do with his future. He could go to college, get a pre-law degree, study accounting or even something impractical like philosophy or art history. He could take a year off and road-trip around the West; some of the guys were doing that. Or he could backpack across Europe or Southeast Asia, hook up with some fine college girls on summer break, get high with a pretty Thai lady in Bangkok—wasn’t that what you did over there? But none of it held much appeal. Cody wasn’t depressed, he just didn’t give a fuck. Life was easy the way it was, moving boxes and helping his father and calling Wade on the weekends to reminisce back when Wade was still alive. Lately, he’d think to himself, no matter what I do with my life, if I make a million bucks or if I live at home with my parents forever, in the end I’ll still be dead. So why bother? It was the sort of thought the sergeant meant to warn him against.
*
Molly led Cody around the corner of the house to the garage, which was open. He stared up at the ceiling, wondering where Wade had hung the rope. Cody didn’t think the flimsy garage door conveyer belt was strong enough to hold the weight of a man, but what else was there? The ceiling was smooth as butter.
Besides a few half-packed cardboard boxes, a rusted bike with no back wheel, and Wade’s mother’s grey Buick, there was only the harp. The sight of it struck Cody like a hammer. It was so out of place, standing there huge and fancy in the garage.
“You can play this thing?” he asked Molly, running his fingers along the dusty frame.
“Sure,” she said. “We took lessons from my aunt in Waco. She plays with the symphony down there.” Molly tugged at a strand of her dirty blonde hair. “It’s not as nice as the one in Dallas, but it’s still pretty good.”
There was a disheveled stack of music sticking out of an open box, and Cody picked up a discolored sheet and turned it over. He could just read Wade’s name scrawled in childish handwriting at the top right corner. There were some small pencil marks on a few of the notes.
“You play an instrument?” Molly asked.
Cody shook his head and put back the music.
“I started when I was eight,” said Molly. “Wade, too. My mom used to drive us, and then Wade after he got his license. Haven’t played lately, though.”
Cody scratched the back of his neck. He still couldn’t picture Wade choosing to play the harp, even as a kid and definitely not as a teenager. Maybe the drums or maybe the guitar, but not the harp.
Maybe Wade’s mother had made him do it. Or maybe he’d done it because he wanted to get with Molly. Or maybe Molly’s aunt had been young and hot. Cody wondered what it would have been like to hear Wade play, to watch Wade straddle the harp and pluck, eyes closed. He couldn’t.
“Why don’t you play me something?” he said to Molly.
“What, here?” she said.
“Sure. We’ve got music.” He tapped the side of the box.
“I don’t think so,” she said, though he noticed her fingers gently plucking at her bare arms.
“Why not?” he asked.
Molly glanced at the door that led from the garage to the house. She said, “I’m out of practice.”
Cody figured she wasn’t going to play for him, so he went back out to his truck and drove it down the alley behind the house, backing it up to the garage. Getting the harp into the truck wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be; as it turned out, Wade had a dolly for rolling the thing, and between him and Molly, they heaved it into the flatbed with a loud twang and strapped it down with bungee cords. The base of the harp stuck out the back, which meant he would have to drive with the tailgate open, but he was sure it would be all right. They’d tied her in secure.
“Where to, then?” he asked.
“My place, I guess,” said Molly, and she climbed into the passenger seat beside him. They drove with the windows down, Molly’s long hair whipping around her like a dervish.
*
Cody only saw combat once in Iraq. He might have seen more if he had joined a few years earlier, but by the time he and Wade went overseas, the surge was over, and President Obama was preparing orders for the withdrawal of all combat troops. The two of them spent most of six months sleeping in a dusty tent and practicing drills in the desert before catching a plane back to Fort Bragg.
Wade was pissed. “Fuck is this about,” he said the day they got the news they were headed home. “I didn’t join the Army to sit around watching fucking cartoons. I want to shoot a Goddamn terrorist.” But Cody was relieved. He’d listened to the soldiers on redeployment talking about what it had been like before. He could still hear the pop of machine gun fire that one, hot, sandy afternoon they’d taken to the alien streets, could still smell his own sweat and feel the rushing heat of his blood as he ran, feet like lead. He didn’t kill anyone, and he didn’t see anyone get killed, but the fear in his mouth that day was the only real thing he’d ever known, steely biting metal. Cody didn’t need any more of that shit. He didn’t need to prove himself to anyone. He was happy to go home.
For Wade, it was different. He was a firebrand, the kind of man who needed an outlet for all that violent energy. Cody guessed he probably did have a mental illness, bipolar disorder, maybe, or depression. When Wade came home, it was to his mother’s open arms and his high school buddies who’d never left Hillsboro, who smoked weed at night and slept all day. It was the worst sort of place for a man like Wade. It would have been better if he’d died in combat, gone down a hero like those sons of bitches in Hollywood war movies who jump on grenades or run straight into enemy fire, sacrificing themselves but taking down a dozen Nazis.
Instead, Wade holed up in his kid bedroom, watching porn and getting high and growing thinner. The last time Cody saw him was three months ago when they met at a strip club in Waxahachie. He was pale as paper and almost emaciated. “I plan on getting me some ass tonight,” he boasted, throwing a twenty on the stage, but before midnight Cody had to half drag, half carry him back to a hotel.
“My life is fucking over,” Wade cried, drooling on the pillow, curling into the fetal position with tears on his face. “Pull yourself together, man,” said Cody. The thought of suicide did cross Cody’s mind that night, and he made sure Wade was sober enough in the morning to drive home, checked in on him through a text later that week. But if he was honest, he figured Wade would snap out of it after a while, get all that shit out of his system and then move up to Dallas, find himself a real job, just like Cody would too, eventually. He didn’t blame himself for Wade’s suicide; what use was a thought like that? But he wondered how the hell a guy like Wade could go down that way when he ought to have had the rest of a long life ahead of him.
*
“There’s the cemetery,” said Molly, pointing out the window.
It was a peaceful place, kind of run-down, with crumbling grey tombstones, some gothic monstrosities, others flat on the ground. Live oak trees spread gnarled old branches over the brown grass. The sun flickered gently through the leaves that moved in the wind.
“They’re burying him in there?” Cody asked.
“That’s right,” she said.
“He’d hate that.”
Molly said nothing. Cody wondered what the Wade she knew was like. The Wade who played the harp, who took her on dates, who bought her flowers—maybe that Wade would like to be buried in an old country cemetery with his ancestors from a hundred years ago? The Wade Cody knew would have scoffed at the place. But there were hidden parts to a person, hidden places of loneliness and love. Cody had them, which meant Wade must have had them too. Wade owned a harp, after all, even if Cody couldn’t believe he’d ever played it.
The entrance to the cemetery was open, just a rusted metal gate held to one side of the road by a large boulder. Cody wondered if anyone ever closed it. He turned the truck onto the gravel road.
“You know where it is?” he asked.
“Where they’re putting him?” she said.
“What else?” said Cody.
“Turn right. I’ll show you.”
He took the road through the cemetery slow because of the potholes and the harp jostling and twanging in the truck bed. The cemetery was empty except for the two of them. Cody thought it was rather romantic, he and his dead friend’s grieving ex-girlfriend going to visit the grave for the first time. He imagined what it would be like to press her against one of the live oak trees, feel her warm breath against his ear, let her release all that pent-up misery in long, hot kisses. He knew she was a spring ready to pop, had sensed it ever since she answered the door—those hands running all over herself as if comforting a small child, the way she curled against the door of his truck, ready to flee on a moment’s notice. What was she scared of? Not that he would act on any thought of kissing her, because he wouldn’t. But just picturing it made him feel more real. It was the sort of thing Wade would have actually done, which Cody decided was permission enough to go on imagining it.
“There,” said Molly, pointing at a long rectangular hole dug out of the hard ground, a pile of red clay beside it. Someone—the gravedigger?—had left a crumpled paper bag and two empty Shiners on a smooth rock beside the gaping hole. Cody parked the truck beside it, thought about how quiet it was, and wished he could stop thinking about kissing Molly for one minute and mourn the loss of his friend.
“You been out here before?” he asked just to say something.
“Yeah,” said Molly. “Couple of times.”
She was tugging at a strand of her long hair, fingers going mad all through it.
“When was the last time you saw Wade?” he asked.
“Last weekend,” she said.
He wanted to ask her about the last time they dated—or better yet, the last time they fucked—but he didn’t.
“Hey, why don’t you play me something out here?” he said.
She turned to him, expressionless. He knew she wasn’t naturally pretty, but in that moment with the sun in her hair and her brown eyes shining, she was beautiful.
“What, get the harp out?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not? There’s nobody but me to listen. It would be for Wade. Sort of our own funeral.”
Did he want to memorialize his dead friend? Or watch Molly fondle the harp between her legs?
“It’s heavy,” she said. “It’ll be a pain to get out.”
But there again he saw her fingers spread against her thigh.
“Come on,” he said and climbed out of the truck.
They got the harp out of the bed with some difficulty, using the dolly to leverage it up and out, and easing it down on the parched grass where it sunk into the ground, cutting the earth away with its wide base. Molly used the tailgate as a stool, the harp on one shoulder, her white Keds on the pedals, her fingers perched above the strings.
“What should I play?” she asked him.
“Oh, anything,” he said, finding a spot to sit on the rock.
“It won’t sound good,” she said. “I haven’t practiced in forever.”
He shrugged. “Go on.”
Molly played, and he found out she was a liar. He knew she would be, could tell by the way she was nervous but eager that she was secretly good. Sunlight flashed against the harp’s metal hardware she placed her fingers again and again on the strings. The music was beautiful, Cody could tell that. But he found he did not want to hear it, wished he had not asked her to play at all. Each note struck him. And when he touched his face, there were tears on his stubble. Wade was gone, had tied a rope around his neck and let it squeeze. When Cody closed his eyes, he saw Wade’s small bare feet dangling above the oil-stained floor.
The solid fact of it hit him hard in the chest—bang—constricting his throat until he thought he might not be able to breathe himself. And still the low, sweet notes came at him. Still, Molly plucked at the strings. A breeze rustled the leaves of the live oak trees. A brown spider crawled from a long blade of grass onto Cody’s knee. His head landed heavy in his palms, a hefty weight that rolled from his shoulders, pulling the dull strain in his back. “Fuck,” he said and wept so bad his head ached, until he couldn’t weep anymore.
This story received honorable mention in the recent Short Fiction Contest.