A Friend in Need

In the shed, Darryn holds up his flashlight with his left hand and with his right lifts the hammer by its handle from the long nail that had been acting as its hook. Mitchell stands at the threshold and watches him from a slight distance of a few feet, continuing the conversation about the Mazda that had recently exploded into flames on the highway three days prior. Darryn can just about hear him over the buzz of conversations and laughter from the backyard. He cannot quite make out the tune that the radio is blaring from the gazebo.

“And traffic was backed up for miles, they said! It was insane!”

The hammerhead swings down next to Darryn’s jeans pocket as he exits the shed. After pressing in the doorknob to make sure that the door closes, he turns around to see Mitchell’s arms coming down from his stance of amazement, and his eyelids beginning to relax. Then Darryn quips, “Were the police involved?” He smirks, showing his teeth a little, and chuckles at his remark. He flicks off the flashlight. The sky is still a bright shade of blue and the underbellies of the clouds have not yet darkened.

Mitchell probably doesn’t hear Darryn’s question because he waves at Brenton who has just arrived. Still, both of them meander through the crowd to get to the wooden table. In front of the gazebo, it spreads across its unsanded surface a party platter of various deli meats and cheeses, messy bowls of dip, a bowl of yellow popcorn, a larger bowl of tortilla chips, white beverage cups, and finally dispensers for lemonade and water. Between the water dispenser and the cooler on the grass containing cans of sodas and glass bottles of both light and regular beers protrudes a nail from the surface of the table that is a bent eyesore. Darryn’s sister-in-law finishes filling her cup with lemonade and walks away back toward Anne, Darryn’s wife. In that area, voices escalate. Mitchell decides to pull another light beer from the ice. Brenton shifts toward Mitchell, and they shake hands and catch up on things. Squatting, Darryn drops the flashlight attempting to straighten the nail with the claw of the hammer and the rusting nail barely budges enough for him to fix it. He slams it down with a few bangs.

Around the third or fourth bang, Emmett, one of Anne’s cousins, manages to stumble over toward the cooler and faint. The radio skips and returns to some song by The Talking Heads. His obese body makes the beers tremble and the ice shatter while his head smacks the edge of the table, landing inches from Mitchell, who jumps, startled. Some of the guests stop whatever they are doing to gasp and react to this, while others don’t pay much attention to Emmett. Overall, the guests are mostly from Anne’s side, since it’s her birthday after all, although many of Anne’s friends have also excitedly attended. This is not to say that there are not people from Darryn’s side of the family there too, yet his friends and mutual friends outnumber his cousins and brother, Mitchell. Anne’s relatives are more familiar with Emmett’s history of overdrinking at parties and at home than those of Darryn, who lean more toward a sort of envy for Emmett’s brave pursuit of drunkenness and absurdity. Of course this hasn’t benefitted Emmett socially, but it is never too late for him to change his ways. What an opportune time it is for him to start thinking about it when his sister insists that someone must drive him home, since she “can’t deal with the hospital!”

Except from Darryn, Mitchell, Emmett, and Emmett’s sister, and Will, a mutual friend through Brenton, chatter begins to arise again concerning other subjects. She panics and Will double-dips a tortilla chip into the salsa, crunching on it loudly afterward. Darryn sets the hammer down on the table and kneels by Emmett’s head, which is surprisingly not bleeding. Brenton had gone inside to use Darryn’s bathroom so, sipping from his beer, Mitchell surveys Emmett’s sad body as it is sprawled on the grass with limp appendages. Arching forward, he comments over the music, “He’s gonna be heavy, Darryn.”

Darryn looks at the bridge of Mitchell’s nose. He grips in his fist his empty thin glass bottle by the top where the cap is. “Why? You plan on taking him?”

Mitchell wipes his mouth, almost interrupting Darryn to reply, “We are.” He looks toward the front yard adding, “He’s not even that far from here.”

“I can’t just leave, Mitch.”

“Brent’s a good guy,” Mitchell devises. “He can watch the place right?”

“Mitch, it’s my wife’s birthday party. I can’t just up and leave.” Darryn stands upright slowly to mask his thigh pain.

Anne is in the midst of a riveting chat with her friends when Darryn gazes at her. They are across the yard, but he can tell that Anne has never looked better. With her radiating smile exposing her dimples and accentuating her slightly chubby cheeks, she rocks back a little bit in laughter and extends her arm to touch her friend’s shoulder. The group stands in a circle as if surrounding something. Her brown curly hair stands out among the blonde and brunette.

Mitchell aims at a trashcan far removed from the table and arches the bottle’s trajectory toward it. As soon as the bottle taps the inner edge and sinks into the black garbage bag, he responds, “Anne’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

Darryn doesn’t quite know what Mitchell means by “fine.” Does it mean that Anne will be okay with him abandoning her on her thirtieth birthday? Or does it mean that she will prosper without any worries? At that, Darryn reluctantly agrees and squats again.

Will says, “Hey, while you’re out, you should get some not-stale popcorn while you’re at it, man.” He scoops out a few pieces and a couple kernels and shoves them into his mouth, his attention focused on an impending text message.

Darryn glares at Emmett’s thick shoulders, not anticipating this at all. Mitchell, the pleasure of the freethrow waning, proceeds to curl his palms and heave Emmett’s bulbous shins off the grass suddenly. Darryn is caught off guard but helps anyway by frantically searching for a grip in Emmett’s wet armpits. They hoist. Darryn’s thigh throbs but he tries to follow through. Awkwardly they warn the crowd and bulldoze through it and around the side of the house toward Darryn’s small car as if they are carrying Emmett on a hospital stretcher. Before escaping the earshot of his guests, Darryn yells over a Foreigner song, “Everybody, put your hands together for Nate!” Nate is the fiancé of Anne’s sister who had decided to bring his guitar for the evening and improvise a few songs, but now he is the focus of a haphazard selection of guests. He stares for a moment before cracking open his guitar case and immediately jamming “Gloria” by the band Them.

Finally at his car, Darryn deftly opens the back passenger door so that he and Mitchell can push Emmett’s body into the seat. Emmett ends up lying down across the seats because they conclude that it will be easier to just drop him on his couch in that same position than to make him sit up.

Darryn walks around the car to sit in the driver’s seat while Mitchell had already been lounging comfortably in the passenger’s seat for the last few seconds. Huffing, he fumbles through his keys trying to find the one that will fit into the ignition slot. Once the engine begins to purr, Mitchell turns toward Darryn and says, “Told you.” Darryn ignores this, clipping his seatbelt. He reverses out of the driveway, running over a pinecone. Stopped at the stop sign, he looks both ways and turns the car left. Mitchell declares as he clips in his seatbelt, “Uh, you were supposed to go right.”

Darryn maneuvers around a couple of turns before registering what Mitchell has told him. He sighs. “Oh, well, I didn’t know to go that way.”

“You can turn around at the supermarket, right?”

Passing the supermarket, Darryn is silent for a brief moment before he acknowledges the question. “I think I can still follow this road to get to his house.” He tiredly watches the road coiling toward him, which is relatively empty of cars on Saturdays. He himself should see a doctor too, but he decides that it’s too much of an ordeal. He had strained his thigh when he was running a couple days ago, and it hurt when he was sleeping next to Anne. But Anne would always soothe him with bedtime banter and those questions that you only ask when you’re wrapped in a warm blanket, this time enough to distract him from the pain for a while. From a short four-hour shift, he came home early from ShopRite on Friday because he had just had to fill in for an absent coworker. He was not hired to work on Fridays usually, but Ramiro called him in, citing that he’s a good employee and customers like his charming personality. “You can help Nina do some deep cleaning. Scrubbing the sides of the rotisserie oven, really scrubbing the cooler floor, sweeping and mopping under every appliance… you can do that stuff. But do it well; health inspectors are coming by soon.” His thigh yielded to his efforts that day, and when he got home, he walked straight past the fridge and napped on the couch. Nevertheless, Darryn noticed something peculiar. Driving home that evening, his thigh started to pull at him worse than it had earlier. When he started to fantasize about taking a nap, a vision of the road flashed rapidly in his mind, and at that same instant his thigh nerve throbbed. He realized how much he had been driving: work, home, work, home, sometimes a restaurant with Anne, but mostly work, home, and at the age of twenty-seven.

Mitchell replies, “I guess.” He flops around in his seat to check on Emmett. He laughs. “I heard that people in comas can hear everything you say.”

“That might not be completely accurate, Mitchell,” Darryn replies.

“What if I just start screaming fucked up shit in his ear and he remembers all of it? Would he kill me, Darryn?” He works as a golf cart attendant.

Darryn taps his fingers on the steering wheel to a dissonant tempo. “I dunno, maybe if he can stop dying in my car and being fat as hell.”

A few miles later, they arrive at Emmett’s house. Darryn parks by the curb. With initiative, Mitchell bursts out of the car to start pulling out Emmett. Darryn soon follows his lead. While his hands grip Emmett’s ankles, Mitchell gasps. “His keys! We need his keys to put him in the house.”

“Search his pockets then, Mitch,” he says, standing behind Mitchell who looks ridiculous stuffing himself into his car pickpocketing his sister-in-law’s cousin.

“No! His keys are at the party,” he almost screams.

Keenly, Darryn retorts, “Put him in the front yard. That looks like a good spot.” He refers to the stone birdbath in the middle of the yard.

“Whatever you say,” Mitchell grunts as he hauls Emmett’s legs. When Emmett is pulled out enough, Darryn begins to help. Both of them groaning, they gently lay his body next to the birdbath. Mitchell flicks a beer cap which he had been storing in his pocket somewhere in the vicinity of Emmett’s face. “We should drop some popcorn there too so it’s realistic, you know? So it’s convincing.”

Abruptly Darryn remembers, “Mitch, we have to get to the supermarket for the popcorn. Thanks for reminding me.”

They sit in the car again. “Anytime.”

When they reach ShopRite, they exchange a brief dialogue at the parking lot until they walk in. Darryn makes a beeline for the aisle where the same brand of yellow popcorn from the party is found and Mitchell trails behind, texting. Darryn puts on a front to make it look like he is deciding among many brands because he notices Ramiro speedwalking across the store toward the deli. He doesn’t distinguish him there; fortunately, Mitchell had blocked his view and then asked, “You high or something?”

Darryn clutches a large bag. “Just tired.”

“It’s 6 PM.”

Darryn hears a muffled “Love” by Matt White on the loudspeaker. That song annoys him along with the monotonous brown floor tiles leading to the point of sale. Before the cashier can have a chance to possibly recognize him, Darryn tosses the bag of popcorn into Mitchell’s unprepared hands and mutters, “I’ll be right back, Mitch. That’s only $2.00.”

He heads for the deli section, all the way in the back part of the store. From the distance he sees Nina and another, less familiar coworker, Zachary, in their green aprons moving around frantically at Ramiro’s words. He doesn’t recognize Zachary all that much, but he can infer that he will never match his own standards, according to Ramiro that is. Ramiro isn’t his real first name. Darryn doesn’t know his boss’ real first name, but just that Ramiro is a nickname developed by him and his coworkers over five years ago. On his way, he tries to justify his suddenly evident decision to quit working at the deli of ShopRite. For some reason, it doesn’t feel like enough of an excuse to specify leg pain, let alone any kind of stress. He deals with Ramiro for his security, for Anne, but she’s a bank teller. This decision would only jeopardize his own place in life, not hers. Anne would always be fine. He thought he had been too, for years even. He had it set in his mind that he was working toward something significant in his life, but all he had ever received was an associate’s degree in graphic design. He did not feel motivated or confident enough to find a job in the field so he settled on finding a steady job, at ShopRite. He would sometimes try to convince himself that graphic design is the way to go, but he had only received the degree to satisfy his short-lived hobby that originated from boredom one night.

Meanwhile, Mitchell has awkwardly been loitering by a bench situated near the exit, debating whether to delve into the popcorn. He leans more on one leg than on the other and clasps the bag by the top. He is like this for a moment until his phone vibrates. Sitting on the bench, he peers at the screen and becomes alarmed at a text message from Brenton. Mitchell realizes that they had not formally bestowed upon Brenton the authority over the party. Nevertheless, Mitchell reads that something has been going awry at the party and Brenton is wondering where they are because they have to see it right away. Brenton recalls that he had been watching Nate’s impromptu acoustic performance, which had continued for at least half an hour, when he happened to catch a pretty woman in his peripheral vision standing in the audience. She was off to one side standing alone looking sad, so he heroically steered himself in her direction. Her name was Maya and she had been crying over something. He considered things to say to Maya to cheer her up, but by the time he actually got to her, one of her friends magnetized to her and hugged her. Disappointed, he turned toward the gazebo to indulge on more tortilla chips. That’s when he saw a moderate crowd emerging from Darryn’s house, carrying various bags, large and small, of chips, popcorn, and other junk foods. Apparently they had gotten word from Chan that there was food hidden in the house in an extra closet which he had mistaken for the bathroom door in a drunken stupor. Confused, he asked his friend Will about the situation, who had heard that it all belonged to Anne. Mitchell is on the verge of calling Darryn’s cell phone when Darryn returns already in a rush. He pants, “Let’s go.”

“Darryn! We gotta hurry!”

“Why?”

Bound for the car, Mitchell tells Darryn the news, and Darryn is dumbfounded. “I don’t understand… what the hell?”

The trip back is a speedy blur to Darryn. He mulls over the possibilities behind this situation before he and Mitchell return to the party. He cannot think of any coherent reason, perplexing him even more. They get out of the car, and in the backyard, Anne is hysterical. She locates Darryn in the crowd, less full than earlier, and screams at him, jutting her index finger toward his face, “Where were you?!” Mitchell had gravitated toward Brenton and Will to learn more.

He feels like he is sweating. “Helping a friend! Now what the fuck is going on?”

She blatantly utters, “I don’t know!”

Darryn nods his head trying to find physical evidence. His eyes latch upon Chan, a mutual friend, munching on yellow popcorn. He decides to test her. “Look at that guy! We didn’t have any popcorn when I left, did we?”

Her face is red with bewilderment due to the general situation. She sniffles. “I thought you might have bought some yesterday at ShopRite.”

Of course. She works late shifts at the bank, as did Darryn at ShopRite occasionally. She has a few minutes to stock up before both of them are home together at the same time; it’s hard to see customers trailing through the popcorn aisle from the deli. The bank is about as far from home as ShopRite is. “No, honey, I didn’t,” he remarks almost calmly and apologetically to her, “you know I’m not a fan of popcorn.” He moves to grasp her shoulder kindly, but she shoves his arm away. She doesn’t say anything.

“Why all the popcorn, Anne? Tell me.”

“Stress,” she blurts out. “It’s stress, that’s why.” Her face is gaining its regular color slowly.

He takes this opportunity to try to rub her shoulder again, and she accepts his offer. “Anne, what’s wrong?”

“Well,” she recounts hesitantly, “a coworker was having a party and I wanted to be nice and bring popcorn. She was a new employee at the bank so I wanted to get to know her.” She sniffles. This is when Darryn becomes cognizant of how the radio had been off. “But lo and behold she had to postpone because of the rain. So I kept the popcorn, and I really liked it. The newspaper said that that brand of popcorn was going to be discontinued at your ShopRite soon, so I went there and bought it in bulk, because they say that it’s more cost-efficient to do that. I must’ve looked stupid, but I can’t change the past, can I? Turns out that it was addicting, and it started to make me feel good.”

He interrupts, “When?”

She whispers, “Um, only about three days ago.”

Darryn breathes for a second before going on, stroking her cheek to comfort her, “Honey, getting yourself fat is only gonna make things worse…”

Anne is exasperated by this and gasps audibly. “Fuck you!”

He stands back with his hands up in surrender.

“Fuck you, Darryn.” She controls her voice so as to not cause another scene. “I don’t want to be mad at you right now, Darryn. This is my party… just…” she drifts toward her group of friends, still in the same circle as before, “...just, if you don’t want it, then sell it or something! If you don’t want a fat wife, then sell it!” She is soon gone in her friend circle again.

Unsure of what has just occurred, Darryn is startled by Brenton telling him, “Hey, I can help you out.”

Darryn pauses. His hands are in his pockets. “What do you mean?”

As he gazes toward Maya, he clarifies, “I wanna help out a friend in need.”

At this moment, Darryn cannot help but imagine how Ramiro would have reacted to seeing Emmett sprawled out in his front yard. Ramiro probably would have said something along the lines of, “Break’s over, buddy. Now scrub those floors.” He would have laughed along with Darryn. Ramiro has an enviable control over his life, and Darryn suddenly understands this. Ramiro is probably hiding sponges in his closet. As far as both of them know, ShopRite was never planning to discontinue that brand of popcorn.

Darryn slowly walks next to Brenton, passing in front of Maya who appears attracted to Brenton in the same way that health inspectors are attracted to delis. Brenton intelligibly asserts toward Darryn as they walk toward the driveway, “Don’t worry, old buddy old pal, everything will be just fine.”