Red, White, and a New Beginning

Red, White, and a New Beginning By Thomas Grant Bruso July 4: Dave and I arrived at the annual fireworks event downtown by the water’s edge. We came in separate cars. I parked two blocks from the town hall monument on a narrow side street adjacent to the DMV building. Breaking out in a feverish sweat, I navigated ninety-degree temperatures and congested streets with people who were heading to the same destination. This year had been the hottest summer to date in upstate New York. I didn’t know if I could bear seeing Dave—it’s been a year since we separated and went our own ways, our lines of communication severed. He moved from Oakville to Albany seeking work as a paralegal. He believed in the law, but not in us. “We need a break from each other,” he had told me last year. “To think.” It was close to summer break when he asked for time to consider life without me. A year passed like a century. Our split would never have happened it if had been up to me. I didn’t want Dave to leave, but I agreed that we needed to reevaluate our relationship. I knuckled sweat off my brow with the back of my hand, thinking about Dave’s apple pie voice, sweet and homey, calling me at home last night to meet him tonight for fireworks. “I need to see you,” he had said. I smiled at his singsong voice, but it was short-lived. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into after being away from him for so long. The curiosity alone forced me out of my air-conditioned apartment to the sweltering streets to find out. As I waited at the crosswalk with a large crowd of people gathering around me, parents with their small children and young and old couples holding hands, I felt alone, and not the first time in a long year. The sticky heat of perspiration dripped down my neck, to my back, and pooled under my arms. When the light changed, a swarm of warm, sweaty bodies rushed past me, stepping out into the hot, crammed street. Nervous energy swelled inside me as I jammed my palms into my shorts pockets and joined the tail end of the crowd, walking unhurriedly, as if I were an out-of-towner, a tourist, seeing the sights for the first time. I didn’t know when it happened, but I heard a car horn blasting behind me, people yelling at me to get out of the middle of the street, and when I turned, there he was, flashing his textbook smile, his cavernous blue eyes hypnotizing me, putting me under his spell. Mid-thirties, almost forty, but he doesn’t look his age. His thatched head of blond hair, trimmed goatee, cut and coiffed effortlessly, glowed beneath the burning sun. His enthusiastic wave and the way he leaned against the driver’s side door of his parked BMW on the corner, waiting for me on the other side of the street, reminded me of the good old days, as if time had stood still. Nothing had changed. Yet everything was different.