American Fraternity Man by Nathan Holic Page A

nor even cheap squeeze bottles, but decadent serving bowls , ladles , the barbecue sauce glistening in the glass like refrigerated pudding. There would be no torn and discarded packets across the floor, no errant squirts of mustard to ruin some mother’s white shirt. We’d even arranged on the table—or rather, Jenn had arranged—stacks of napkins in alternating geometric designs, alternating colors. “And I just wanted to say it now,” she said, “before everyone gets here and this whole house gets crazy.”
    “ Talk to me,” I said.
    “I don’t ever want to tell you what to do,” she said. “The second that happens, a relationship—a friendship, even—is already over.” Her hand on my chest, and she closed her fingers around the bottom of my collar, pulled me closer, kissed me, and how long had we been together at that point?, a year and a half?, and so it should’ve just been an average mid-afternoon kiss, an action no different than a handshake or high-five or chest-bump with a fraternity brother, but it somehow seemed like something more. Yes, I’d be leaving her soon. I’d be leaving all of this. Starting over sounds exciting until you realize that you’re ending one life to begin the other. “But,” she said, “I know how you get about this fraternity. The hours you spend with it. The energy.”
    “That’s why it’s the perfect job,” I said.
    “I know,” she said. “But listen. You need to promise that you’re going to call me.”
    “Of course I ’ll—”
    “And you need to promise that you’ll visit. That’s the only way this will work. I’ve got experience with this sort of thing, someone I love hitting the road for weeks at a time.”
    “Plane tickets are expensive, gas is expensive,” I said, “so I’ve got to be strategic.”
    “I understand that,” she said. “But seriously, what else are you gonna spend your money on? A new TV? Can’t lug that around in the Explorer, can you?” She laughed.
    But I was thinking about engagement rings. My father had been right about how little money I’d pocket; already I’d done the math in my head and I knew I’d been too eager to believe Walter LaFaber when he told us that we’d save a ton of money on the road because our food and rent and electric and water was all covered by the National Headquarters. A thousand bucks a month in salary, and I was supposed to buy an engagement ring and plane tickets home? Already my head was caught in a loop of thought, but it was the night of my Senior Send-Off: I didn’t want reality.
    “Jenn ,” I said. “You know I’ll do it.”
    “For your good as much as mine,” she said. “Charles, I know how you get.”
    “How I get?”
    She stopped, fingers now curled around the back of my neck. Closed her eyes and shook her head. “I know how frustrated you get when things don’t work out the way you want them to. You try so hard.”
    And I said something, and then she said something else, and I know we kept talking, but damned if I r emember what either of us said because my head was a frozen computer with hourglass spinning, and then Jenn was gone so she could shower and attend some early-evening sorority function for her own Senior sisters; she’d be back in a couple hours with her camera, ready to be our official photographer and capture our event and make permanent every shining moment, but for a minute—the short stretch of time before any of the parents arrived, and before any of the brothers emerged from their bedrooms upstairs—it was just me and the house living room, an image so lonely it belonged in some end-of-the-world zombie-apocalypse movie, the man who wakes up to discover that the world has died off while he slept.
     

CHAPTER FOUR. The barbecue.
     
    By the time my parents arrived back at the fraternity house for the Senior Send-Off, most of the other parents had already filtered inside, fifty or sixty total. They came two at a time, husbands wearing polo shirts