The Kids in the Car

We stood outside in the wind and the cold in our pea coats, waiting for Vinny to come out and not talking.  Finally, the priest came out and told us to go home.

“I think it could be a while,” he said, “and I don’t want you all waiting around long in the cold.”  But we were all dressed up in our black suits and everyone was hungry, so instead we went to a small local Italian restaurant, where we ordered stromboli and gnocchis and chicken parmesan.  Every now and then someone remarked on a familiar face they’d seen at the funeral, some kid we’d known in high school and hadn’t seen in a while, or an old teacher or parent that we’d forgotten about, and we each silently remembered whatever there was to remember about them and wondered how they’d found out that Vinny’s dad had died.

After we said our goodbyes, I got in my car and began driving around the town without direction, making lefts and rights on impulse, the warmth of the sun through the glass feeling good under the bright, cloudless winter sky.  I couldn’t remember the first time I’d met Mr. Fanelli.  It could have been at our first t-ball practice, since Vinny and I had been on the same t-ball team and Mr. Fanelli was the coach.  Or perhaps it had been on the first day of kindergarten.

But I did have a distinct memory of one time when he’d driven us back from an out of town soccer game, when Vinny and I were around seven or eight.  We were in a good mood because we had won, and he’d taken us to lunch at an A&W in a rest stop off the side of the highway, where we ate hot dogs and drank root beer.  After we’d got back to town he swung by the dry cleaners to pick up his suits, and he told us to wait in the car.

“My mom never leaves me in the car here,” I said.  “She says this is a dangerous area.”

“Tell you what,” Mr. Fanelli replied, opening the door to the driver’s side door.  “Any guy comes over and tries anything funny with you, and I’ll kick his fucking ass.”  And then he winked at us and got out and Vinny and I laughed like crazy in the back seat.  We’d never heard an adult swear so cavalierly, and with so much pleasure.

Another time, in ninth grade, Mr. Fanelli picked me Vinny up from the bowling alley, along with two girls from our class.  We never ended up dating or even hooking up with either of them, but at the time there was still an obvious sensitivity to the arrangement, and Mr. Fanelli stayed silent while the four of us made jokes about our teachers and Vinny controlled the radio.  He dropped the two girls off first, then after they’d got out of the car and walked up to the house, he turned again to look at us from the driver’s seat and said, “Now I’m only gonna tell you boys this once; never go into battle without wearing a helmet.  Use.  Protection.”  And Vinny and I couldn’t stifle our laughter while Mr. Fanelli smugly and ever so leisurely drove back through the town to my house, as we were caught in between the kids sipping giant root beers in the back seat of the car parked at the dry cleaners and some mystical first romantic experience that felt infinitely further away than it really was, and for the moment we preferred to be the kids in the car.

I ended up passing back by the church, which was on the same street as my house, and thought that maybe I’d sit in the pews for a while and try to remember some more memories of Mr. Fanelli.  I parked and walked up to the back door, but froze when I saw Vinny sitting alone on the swing set in the playground.  He was swinging minutely across a diagonal plane, the movement almost imperceptible, kicking mulch with the tip of his shiny black shoe.

I leaned on the fence and watched him from behind.  We hadn’t spoken much since high school.  I’d gone west for college and he’d gone to a nearby private school.  I knew he’d joined a frat, and from Facebook I saw that he’d most certainly put on the freshman fifteen and more.  At some point someone I was talking with at a party drunkenly told me that Vinny had dropped out and was working in town with a landscaping company.

The last time we had seen each other was on my way out of a convenience store, when I was home for Thanksgiving.  He had become broad shouldered, muscular and strong, wearing work boots and the bright orange t-shirt of the landscaping company.  We spoke for only a minute, and he told me that he was living at home, trying to save up some money to start his own side business specializing in gravel and stone work.  And I told him that he looked good and he said that I looked good and that his dad had told him I was out in Seattle and how they were all real proud of me for doing so good out there, and I told him thank you and to give his parents my regards, and we shook hands and said “see ya later” and went our separate ways.

He’d grown to look much like Mr. Fanelli.  This was never more apparent than when I saw him at the funeral, sitting in the first row with a very serious expression, in a well-tailored black suit and purple dress shirt, his hair slicked back and shining and his beard finely groomed, looking not like the ghost of the kid in the back seat but like the man behind the wheel.

But then watching him there on the swing, his head down, his toe kicking the mulch, one hand on the chain and the other over his eyes and his coat laying in a bundle on the ground behind him, I realized that I had never once seen Mr. Fanelli so sad.