possible, that Teddy was secretly pleased Grady Vetters hadn’t become the big shot artist he had always hoped to be, and the women he screwed in those faraway cities remained the stuff of stories and were not there in the flesh to stoke the secret fires of Teddy’s envy.
Now here they were, Grady and Teddy, together once more, smoking cigarettes out back of Lester’s, sitting at the bench tables placed there for precisely that purpose, and the starlight flickering through pinpricks in the night sky. Grady had told Teddy that you couldn’t see the stars in some cities, so bright were their own lights, and Teddy had shuddered. He loved these cloudless nights, loved to pick out the constellations, loved to navigate his way through the woods by their position in the heavens. He saw no contradiction in his fear of the immensity of cities and his comfort with the vastness of the universe. He watched a shooting star cross the sky, burning itself out in the atmosphere, and he looked at his best friend and thought that Grady Vetters was the closest thing to a shooting star he had ever encountered close up, and just like one of those stars he was destined to burn out to nothing.
The barest of breezes stirred the fairy lights that adorned the back of the bar but not, strangely, the front, a circumstance dictated by a town ordinance that Teddy did not understand, since it wasn’t as if Falls End was so pretty that it couldn’t do with a little more color along its main street. On the other hand, it lent the back of Lester’s a vaguely magical air. Sometimes when Teddy was returning to town from one of his trips into the forest, whether as a guide or as a solitary hunter, or simply because he wanted to be away from people for a time, he would glimpse the lights of Lester’s twinkling through the branches, and it was a sight that he always associated with comfort, and warmth, and belonging. For Teddy, the lights of Lester’s meant home.
Grady didn’t like Lester’s as much as Teddy did. Oh, he’d always have a good time there on his first night back in town, shooting the breeze with familiar faces and joshing with old Lester, who had a fondness for Grady because Lester was something of a frustrated artist himself whose godawful watercolors hung on the walls of the bar and were always for sale, although Teddy couldn’t recall anyone ever taking Lester up on that offer, no matter how low he priced them. The paintings changed a couple of times a year, mostly to give the impression that somebody, somewhere was cornering the market in the primitive, unique vision of Lester LeForge, instead of the reality, which was that Lester’s paintings now took up so much space in his garage that he had to park his car in the drive. To Lester, Grady Vetters was a success: he’d exhibited his work in minor galleries, and had even been reviewed in a Friday edition of the New York Times back in 2003 as part of an ‘emerging artists’ show somewhere in SoHo. Lester had carefully cut out the review, plasticized it, then stuck it behind the bar beneath a hand-lettered sign that read ‘Local Boy Makes It in the Big Apple!’
That was as good as it had ever got for Grady Vetters, and now it seemed to Teddy that his friend was less an emerging artist than a submerging one, gradually sinking beneath the weight of his own failed expectations, his inability to hold down a job of any kind, his ongoing love affairs with booze, pot, and inappropriate women, and his hatred for his father, which hadn’t eased any despite the old man apparently making Grady’s fondest wish come true by dying at last.
Everybody believed that Grady Vetters was smarter than Teddy Gattle, even Teddy himself, but he knew that for all Grady’s talk about old Harlan and how much of a hard-ass he was, and how he had meant nothing to his only son, and vice versa, Grady was worse off than ever now that his old man was gone. Despite everything, Grady had wanted to impress his father, and any success he had made of his life was largely down to that desire. Without him, Grady had nothing to aim for because he didn’t have enough self-respect and self-motivation to pursue his painting and drawing for the love of the