Written in Stone

Chapter 1 Why can’t I start over? I don’t know. Why can’t you? Geoffrey Driscoll scratched his head with one hand as he fumbled with the chalk in his pocket with the other, the same chalk with which he had written the original question on the big rock down by the stream in the woods. Geoffrey’s grandmother had once told him it was tradition in her homeland to write wishes on rocks that would be granted by loved ones gone from Earth. Geoffrey didn’t know if that was true. His grandmother was born in Massachusetts just like he was, and he couldn’t find much about such a practice online. Geoffrey didn’t really believe in wishes anyway. Still, he jotted down the occasional musings and news of big events there, where he and Max had spent some of their best times; stuff like being approached to create the score for a Broadway bound musical called Starting Over. “Ironic, huh?” Geoffrey had said to the sky about that one. I don’t know. Why can’t you? It was a legitimate question, and Geoffrey wondered who had left it as he caught his fifty year old reflection in the water at his feet. “I look so old,” he told himself. The sun was bright, and though the water was rushing from a night of torrential rain, there was a still section—a pool—created by a jam of big limbs and a barrel-sized trunk brought down by a windstorm years back. It had already changed in shape and size over time, and would someday get unstuck, Geoffrey knew, as time and nature affected it. The metaphor wasn’t lost. Life went on. Geoffrey’s huge Bergamasco, Max, used to play in the water after a long walk around the meadow. Max had dreads like Whoopi Goldberg which took forever to dry, but the fun was well worth the effort. Their special place was open to the public yet eerily quiet most days, save for the chirping birds and buzzing bees. During fishing season, Geoffrey might see a dad and son with rod and reel setting out on their very first expedition or a group of teens more interested in the beer they’d snuck than whatever they might catch. Otherwise he might go weeks without running into another passerby, except for the young twenty-something couple with matching Min Pins who often appeared just as Geoffrey and Max were heading off. The rather attractive pair usually offered simultaneous nods, to which Geoffrey would mumble “Good morning,” while looking at the ground. They may have been lovers, but just as easily could have been siblings for all he knew. Maybe they were identical twins. That was how little attention somewhat introverted Geoffrey paid to anything but their shoes. Maybe he’d ask them some day. Maybe that day. But probably not. Why can’t I start over? Geoffrey was a 2014 Tony Award nominee for Fuzzy Yellow Socks, a musical about comfy transient footwear that drastically altered the lives and relationships of those who took possession. The bad news—Geoffrey didn’t win. The good news—John Travolta wasn’t the star selected to introduce the powerhouse leading lady who performed “Pamper Your Tootsies,” one of the more risqué tunes from the production. Geoffrey’s latest project had him thinking about new beginnings for himself, through characters like a middle-aged man who loses his job after forty years, a soldier just back from Afghanistan, a woman in recovery, and one trying to bounce back after a series of devastating losses. That one was Geoffrey. Geoffrey and a younger, handsome hunk Ryan had met at an animal shelter. They had both made a beeline for the same cage and somehow immediately clicked. Though Ryan had graciously stepped aside, Geoffrey, thirty-seven at the time, had agreed to let him visit Max anytime. They sort of raised the pup together, first as friends, then friends with benefits, then partners. Max even served as a witness—though not legally, of course—when Geoffrey and Ryan rushed to the courthouse the moment Massachusetts legalized same s*x unions. Good times—the three of them had enjoyed quite a few, some right where Geoffrey stood. “Remember when…?” Geoffrey brushed a tear from his eye, his back against the rock and its words, and did some quick math in his head. One walk in the morning and another at sunset, two times three-hundred-sixty-five totaled seven- hundred-thirty walks per year. Seven-hundred-thirty times thirteen equaled nearly ten thousand jaunts through wildflowers, crunching over autumn leaves, or trudging through winter snow, carefully navigating patches of ice with Big Max. One time, Geoffrey slipped and fell. Max showed his concern by plopping his one hundred-twelve pound body atop him and licking his face. Fortunately, Ryan had been there to help. The last time Geoffrey went down, on a warm, clear summer night, no one was, and when Geoffrey held Max in his arms as the beloved canine companion took his final breath, he was alone then too, because Ryan was already gone. Geoffrey had been somewhat of a late bloomer. Starting at thirty-seven was somewhat difficult, as Geoffrey worried about his lack of experience, at least when compared to “Randy Ryan Wright,” as Ryan’s sports buds called him. Now, with gray peppered throughout his hair, deep lines and creases on his face, his gut far less taught than it had been when he’d first hooked up with Ryan, a miserable failure at the only real relationship he’d ever had, Geoffrey found the notion of starting over at fifty damned well daunting. “I don’t know either.” Geoffrey spoke to the rock. “Why can’t I?” Was it a matter of time, Geoffrey wondered, the reason he was so stuck? More quick math revealed Ryan had been gone ten whole months. Or was it only ten months? It sort of depended on the day, Geoffrey decided. The grief over Max was fresher. He’d been gone only three, and Rafe and Vincent, the former soldier in the musical and his closeted, married empty nester love interest, were reopening the wounds. The quarrelsome fictional pair would meet the same way Ryan and Geoffrey had—while trying to adopt a dog. A few songs and one explicit s*x scene later that would probably be cut, they’d all live happily ever after. Why can’t you? “Because.” Geoffrey checked his watch. He’d been in the field half an hour, mostly just staring at himself in the water and six words on a rock. Maybe I’m scared, he wrote. “What do you think, Max?” Sometimes Geoffrey would see Max’s shape in the clouds, or that of one of his favorite toys. It comforted Geoffrey some to think he did, anyway, like he and Max still met up in the field some days. That day, all Geoffrey saw was blue. “f**k it.” Geoffrey obliterated his reflection by collecting a palm full of ice cold April water, then went at the words on the rock to do the same, words probably left by some goofy stoner or a horny teen banging his girlfriend against Geoffrey’s musings with no consideration or concern whatsoever for what they may have meant. How could he know? Why should he care, he or she? The r from over, the y from the second why, the a and the n from can’t…of all the letters to survive the swipe of Geoffrey’s wet hand, why those four? “Because you’re seeing what your mind wants you to, knucklehead.” The last time Geoffrey and Ryan had been to the field together, Ryan had suggested a romantic romp under the stars before heading home from a raucous night of bowling and drinking with friends. “Let’s get Max first,” Geoffrey had suggested. “He’ll stay out of the way.” But in the end, he was always grateful they hadn’t. They knew they were opposites going in. Geoffrey could sit for hours, right there in the open field, listening to nature, staring out at the horizon, while the tickle of the grass or the teasing of the water against the soles of his feet took precedence over a blank old fashioned notebook page he promised would be filled with lyrics by the end of a lazy Sunday. Ryan, on the other hand, was never happy with quiet time at all. “Let’s spend next May in Europe with my parents,” he’d suggested not long before that fateful night. Geoffrey could barely sit through a movie or a Broadway show without wondering what Max was up to, and the train home from NYC was torture. “I’d miss home too much,” Geoffrey had responded. “Besides, the Irises and Weigela only bloom once a year; if we leave, we’ll miss them. And what about Max?” Ryan didn’t much give a crap about flowering plants and shrubs, but he did love Max. “We should get another.” He’d supported his proposal with kisses and fondling, there against the rock Geoffrey now touched. “That way, Max won’t ever be alone, and we could go out more often. We could go to Europe,” Ryan suggested. “We’ll leave them both with Kent.” Though Geoffrey trusted Kent with is life, he knew he’d be far too miserable with Max so far away to enjoy the Louvre or the canals of Venice. “Hmm…Maybe.” Geoffrey hadn’t allowed anything more right then, and there hadn’t been a chance later on to discuss it any further. Kent would have been all too happy to oblige. He was a true friend—Geoffrey’s first, and then to the couple. Some would say he was Geoffrey’s only friend now, though Geoffrey liked to think he was somewhere on the spectrum of normal when it came to socializing. He’d been on a date just before Thanksgiving and spent New Year’s Eve with a group of actors from the playhouse in town. He’d left before eleven and was in bed before the ball dropped on TV, but two outings in two months, that was something, right? “Okay, so I’m a homebody,” Geoffrey said to the sky. Once he handed off a script, he left most of its production to the directors and producers down in Manhattan. They worked via email and text sometimes, but he rarely if ever saw them face to face until opening night. Locally, the executive manager at the theatre group was always after him to serve as musical director and pianist for their current show. Geoffrey had finally accepted the gig, for just one production, right after Max died. Though he was offered the position fulltime right after, he had graciously turned it down. His living room, his garden, his bed with a crossword book, the meadow, the grocery store once a week, and the plant nursery in fall and spring; that was as far as Geoffrey and Max had ventured since Ryan left them. Geoffrey mail ordered his seeds and plants for the 2016 season. He’d been shopping online a lot since Max had died, for books, Christmas decorations, dolls for his mom, and smiley face sponges. The hosts on QVC may not be real friends, but the hot UPS guy who delivered the packages was. His name was…Alan…or Adam…or Aidan…or Peter. “Fine!” Geoffrey raised both palms toward the sky. “I isolate,” he said to cloud shaped a bit like a dog’s ear. “But I was never lonely with you around.” He kissed his fingertip and put it to the stone. “Even when you weren’t here, I felt as if you were. “As out of it as Geoffrey had been by the end of the night of Ryan’s final kiss in the meadow, part of him remembered the tickle of Max’s dreads on his face. A hallucination due to trauma and shock, Geoffrey told himself for the hundredth time. “It had to be, huh, big guy? You were with Kent.” Kent had recently told Geoffrey it was time he find someone new to heal the scars in his heart. Geoffrey wasn’t sure if he’d meant someone human or canine. It was too soon for a dog. As for a man, “Unless he comes to the house or this field, Maximillian, I think the odds of meeting a kind, handsome stranger are pretty slim.”