the subtleties have yet to flesh themselves out

Jonny came marching home from Iraq, armed with a bottle of Chivas Regal and a gun, the same day Sally was released from rehab.

 

When Jonny arrived at Sally’s doorstep with a bouquet of flowers that badly needed watering, Sally kissed him on the cheek, anyway, without making him feel like a shrinking violet.

 

And when they sat on the couch later that night sipping scotch and parsing the importance of good personal hygiene, Sally looked into Jonny’s ears and said, “Do you ever clean them?”

 

And Jonny, always sheepish about such things, admitted, “I don’t.  I hope the water from the shower cleans them out.”

 

Sally laughed so hard she felt like she lacked oxygen, and the fatigue she’d been experiencing for several months began to affect her again in a way she couldn’t quite explain.  “It’s somewhere between heavy resignation and heavy lifting,” said Sally.

 

And Jonny, who’d been suffering from the difference between having fun and having none, just smiled as he wrote a check to Sally, instructing her not to cash it until his boat came in.  [His boat was currently bobbing somewhere out there on one of the better-known oceans, “like a burnt cork,” he liked to say, but it was on its way into shore, he was sure of that; he knew the captain personally and he was “a good man,” although he drank every other day, especially during high tide, Jonny insisted that Jesus was on his side, because “Jesus is like that sometimes.”]

 

And Sally, who was “so tired of taming her tongue,” could only stare into her tumbler of scotch and wonder how much longer she would have to wait before the alcohol made her feel like she could “feel her flesh again.”

 

As Jonny struggled to read some of the vocabulary in Sally’s body language, which was usually on about an eleventh-grade reading level, he asked Sally if she would provide him with some CliffsNotes before continuing their discussion; however, Sally politely explained to him that she had already dumbed-down her curriculum enough for Jonny and if he “wasn’t willing to put in the time to study more,” she would have to flunk him for the semester, which caused a sick feeling in Jonny’s throat, followed by the thought that his life had turned into a depraved nightmare of paranoia, excess drinking, disillusionment, and a rage that might one day land him jail for life.

 

And as Jonny recalled the tall tales of his childhood�"his early years in an orphanage, adoption, and a stint in military school, where he was expelled for writing a short play titled “What’s Yours is Mine,” a satire about Jesus’  life as a carpenter. In it, he portrayed Jesus and St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters, as con artists running a “home repair” scam on seniors, he drifted off to sleep.

 

Sally opened her journal and wrote the following entry: “I escaped the ghetto of my environment, but I didn’t escape the ghetto of my soul.”

 

And she walked out on Johnny forever, virtually untouched.