Merle Drown

Epiphany

Today he calls, out of the blue. Dustin.

“Epiphany,” he says, but neither of us celebrate that.

“I’m sixty years old, Dustin,” I tell him. “I’m too old for this.”

“Let’s make another reason to celebrate,” he says.

I tell him I’ll phone him back, and maybe I mean it.

This fall I was calling numbers at the Auxiliary when I felt a tap on my shoulder. “That’s me,” he says. “That’s my ticket.” And I turn around and look my Ralph right in the face.

Course, it’s not Ralph—he’s been dead two years—but it’s Ralph’s face, all right, big ears, broad forehead, and sweet blue eyes. I count out his money, and he stops me because I go past his fifty bucks. He winks and says, “Better save it in case I win something else.” Joking like my Ralph would, then he walks back to his table, and I tell myself to quit dreaming.

Gloria takes about five minutes before she says for me to go over there. “He wants to buy you a beer,” she says. “I told him your name.”

“With friends like you,” I say and stroll over to the table, where he’s sitting with a couple of guys from town. It’s his first time here, and they brought him out for a good time. He tells me he’s a rep for communication equipment, and I nearly spill my beer because that was my Ralph’s job. Take a wild chance and ask if he ever had another profession.

“In my younger days,” he says, “I was a finish carpenter.”

Just like—but I don’t say it. When the music starts, we slow dance. He could wear Ralph’s jacket, Ralph’s pants, Ralph’s pajamas.

The next week Dustin takes me to dinner, and I tell him about how Ralph and I pulled into the driveway and he turned off the motor and fell on the steering wheel, dead.

“Great way to go,” he says. “Hell of a way to leave.”

Dustin’s been separated for ten years, no kids, wife living in Indiana, where they’re from. He says the way he was raised, divorce was disrespectful, and he didn’t like disrespecting a woman. When I tell her, Gloria says it makes sense, but her son’s with the sheriff’s department, and he checks him out. Before he tells me Dustin’s okay, he says how much he looks like Ralph, even in a picture.

Before Christmas Dustin calls me from the road. On the 26th, he comes to the house. First time he’s inside, he’s tying my grandson’s shoes, and the boy says, “Poppy,” which he called Ralph. And Dustin looks up, and behind me is a picture of Ralph. “Jesus,” he says, “he’s got big ears, just like me.”

I want to tease and say, Maybe that’s not all. And I’m thinking it’s two years since I could tease a man, and maybe I can again. So today is Epiphany, and spooked as I am, scared as I am, I’m not sad.  So I call Dustin back, and I say, “How do you want to celebrate?”

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Merle Drown is a freelance writer and editor. He has published the novels Plowing Up a Snake (The Dial Press) and The Suburbs of Heaven (Soho Press), as well as over 40 short pieces of fiction. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Hampshire Arts Council.