#redbeardbluesky

Amid sniffles he rubs his eyes and nose with one hand as the other carefully traces the seams on the sewn-on letters that adorn the sweater: Goodbye Stan.

In a flash of panic he recalls the years before the twins arrived, and the steady, grueling waves of depression that marked his days and nights.  That weight had dissipated during the past few months, but now, with the kids gone, he feels laid bare and alone, just like before, just like he’d been for four decades.

But then Ford drapes his arm across his shoulders and, with a look, wordlessly tells Stan all he needs to know: from here on out, they’ll never be apart, they’ll always look after each other, and maybe — maybe as soon as tonight — they’ll let their hearts and hands and bodies take them back to the love they’d once known.

“Well, Sixer?  Ready for the rest of our lives together?”

Ford smiles awkwardly, “Let’s get back to the Shack.  I started a few experiments downstairs I need to check.  It’ll be good to have the place to ourselves.”

Hearing him say those words makes Stan’s heart leap.  The urge to throw himself into Ford’s arms is almost too much to resist, but he manages somehow.  A vision comes to him about the next few hours, and as they get in the car he floats the plan.

“How about I make us something really nice for dinner?  You know how the kids only eat four or five different things — what do you think of me making you something fancy.  I’ve gotten to be a pretty good cook while you’ve been away.”

“Watch the road, Stanley.  There’ll be no dinner if we get in an accident.”

Stan obeys without hesitation but he keeps talking, planning the menu for the evening, explaining to Ford which ingredients are best to buy at the grocery store and which are best to buy at the farm stands along the highway.  When he asks Ford about dessert, he lets his mind run free a bit, testing the waters to ensure he hasn’t misread anything about the possibility of spending the night — their first night alone together — in each other’s arms.

“So, I’m not much of a pastry chef, but Lazy Susan’s apple pies are almost as good as Ma’s.  You loved those, right?  We can stop and get one on our way to the market.”

“Actually, Stanley … I —“

“And remember how we’d eat dessert in front of the television?  We can do that too, after dinner.  I know I don’t have a couch in the TV room, but hey, we could roll it into my bedroom and we could eat our pie and ice cream there, huh?  That would be fun, right?”

Ford clears his throat and checks the time.  “Sure, Stanley.  Great.  But are you willing to do the shopping on your own?  I need to check these experiments.”

“Oh!  Oh right!  Ha ha ha.  See what a scatterbrain I am, Sixer?  Some things never change I suppose.  Sure, I’ll drop you off.  Not a problem.”

It all feels fine as long as Ford rides shotgun in the El Diablo, but once he exits the car and trots up the steps to the house Stan feels the twinges of sadness creeping back.

As he goes from stall to store, collecting his groceries, Stan darkest thoughts begin getting the worst of him.

Sixer talks a good talk about a Stan-O-War 2, but he’s more interested in his books and science than he is in his dumb lunk of a brother.  Now that the kids are gone he’ll get more and more into his experiments and forget all about adventures on the high seas.  The damned brainiac will probably forget he has a brother at all.  And the kids … they’re growing up.  They’re right at that age when everything changes.  They’ll forget about me too.  It’s going to be just like before this summer started.  I’m going to be ALL ALONE!

“Mister Pines?  Did you hear me?  That’ll be fifteen dollars, even.”

Stan fumbles for his wallet and fishes out a ten and a five.  As he hands it over, the cashier edges forward to make eye contact.  “You okay, Mister Pines?  You usually haggle down the price.”

“What?”  To be honest, Stan forgot where he was for a moment.  “What are you talking about?”

“You always try haggling down the price, so I, well, I had increased the total by a couple bucks.  It’s really only thirteen.”

As the cashier tries handing him two dollars in change Stan waves him off and hefts the groceries back to the car.  Driving back to the Shack he tries his old relaxation techniques: counting his breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth.  He imagines sunlight pouring down in a stream into the top of his head and down through his body, down to his toes and starting to fill him up.  But really, his toes seem to be at war with him, pushing harder on the accelerator when in his heart he begins imagining a detour, a last minute trip to Portland, maybe a stop-off at that bar he likes where every so often a young stud will buy him a drink.

“No,” he says out loud to himself.  “I’m letting my depression take over.  I’m going to get home, and Ford will be on the porch waiting.  Or he’ll be in the kitchen mixing something for us to drink.  Or maybe he’ll already be stretched out on the bed.”  And with that, an aching throb begins in his lap.   His mind drifts quickly to imagining what Ford’s body will look like after all this time.  Stan thinks of how much better at sex he himself has become is in the forty years since their teenage fumbling after dark and behind school bleachers.  And Ford’s certainly learned some crazy things in his time away.  Tonight, he thinks, will be some of the wildest lovemaking the world has ever seen!  “To boldly go!” he shouts, as he hops from the car and brings the groceries to the Shack, “Where no man has gone before!”

The Shack is silent.  Everything is as they left it – no drinks or snacks or any indication of a night together.  Stan glances into the bedroom, hoping he’s wrong, but he’s not.  No one.

The place sure is quiet without the twins around.

“Fuck it,” he says.  “I’m gonna make this happen.”

What ensues is a whirlwind of domestic wizardry.  Stan preps dinner and puts it in the oven, arranges flowers, liberates the best table linens from a high cupboard for a thorough steam-ironing, and within two hours the place looks ready for a camera crew to show up and put him on the Home and Garden channel.

With a bit of trepidation he taps in the code on the vending machine, lets the candy machine swing open, and calls down the steps.  “Sixer?  Ready for dinner in an hour or so?”

“Uhh, yes Stanley.  I mean, I think I should be finished by then.  You don’t need help do you?”

How am I supposed to answer that, Stan wonders.  “No,” he lies.  “Everything’s under control.”

But as he looks around, he realizes that YES, he does have it all under control.  “I can do this,” he says.  “It all starts tonight.”

He starts peeling off his clothes, heading to the bathroom for a shower and shave and a general sprucing up.  Ford loved that aftershave Stan used when they were teenagers, and the stuff he’d found at the drugstore seemed pretty close in smell.  Stan undresses to his t-shirt and boxers when he realizes he should probably do a quick spin through the kids’ bedroom before starting his ablutions.  He grabs a clothes hamper and heads up the stairs two at a time, feeling better than he has in years, but he takes a deep breath when he sees the room.

So empty.

He shakes off the sadness and gets to work.  He pulls the cases off the pillows, folds the blankets, pulls off the sheets, and that’s when he sees it.  Dipper’s missing sock, lost for two weeks, the subject of an all-family “Sock Hunt,” falls to the floor as Stan yanks the flat sheet from the bed.

“Oh kids…” he whispers, and the room closes in around him.

Somehow he gets the linens downstairs and into the washing machine, but later when he thinks about it he won’t remember how.

From his bedroom, Stan checks his watch against the bus schedule. He wants to phone the very second the twins’ bus is due to arrive home in Piedmont, California, but that would be rude, right?  They’ll be happy to see their parents, they’ll be telling stories.  So he waits twenty minutes and finally can’t take it anymore and he calls.

“The bus was early?  Can I talk… oh, they’re already asleep?  Oh, they were exhausted when they arrived and collapsed the second they got to their bedrooms to unpack.”  Stan repeats everything he’s hearing, as if to let Ford know what’s being said on the phone, but Ford’s not there.  No one is there.  He’s alone.

“No, don’t wake them up.  I’ll call back in the morning.  Sure, yeah, they were fine.  No trouble at all.  Just … just tell them when they wake up that I, er, that we love them.”

Stan sits on his bed holding Dipper’s sock in his hands just like he used to hold Ford’s glasses.

And he loses it.

The kids are heading into puberty, he thinks, and they’re gonna get all moody and they’ll be embarrassed to think they ever loved a hairy old grump like Stan.

They’ll never come back, and if they do it’ll be a quick visit where they’re rolling their eyes at everything, the same way Wendy and her friends do.

And sure, Ford says they’ll hit the high seas together someday but will it ever happen?  And even if it does, what happens in the meantime?  Is he going to be downstairs 24/7 except to eat?

“Would I have been better off if I’d never fixed the portal, if the kids had never come to visit?”

The hot tears start rolling down his cheeks again.  "I’m too old to feel this way,“ he says to no one.

He takes the framed photo of Mabel and Dipper off the bureau and he hugs it to his chest.  He curls up on the bed and sobs.

Later, Ford hears the oven timer and he ascends the steps from the basement to the kitchen.  Dinner looks and smells amazing!  It’s some sort of casserole, but Stan’s nowhere to be found.

It looks like Stan has set the table for two.  He’s gone all out, with a bouquet of flowers, a bottle of red wine open and ready to pour, candles waiting to be lit, and linen napkins.  But where has Stan gone?  Out to the store for something he forgot?

When Ford shuts off the timer, shuts off the oven, and takes out the casserole, he hears crying coming from Stan’s bedroom.

Ford stands in the door.  He sees the photo clutched in Stan’s arms, and Dipper’s sock askew at the end of the bed.  He wants to speak, but doesn’t know what to say.  He wants to comfort Stan but he doesn’t know where to start.

He goes to the opposite side of the bed and sits down.  Stan’s weeping pauses, an acknowledgment of being joined on the bed, but he resumes, more softly now.

Ford has seen a lot in thirty years away, but he’s never felt so at a loss for the right thing to do.  He’d learned to trust his instincts, but his instincts offer him nothing in this situation.  He reaches out to touch his brother but he hesitates, his fingers not making contact with Stan’s shoulder, but close enough to feel the heat of his body.

He touches his shoulder.  "Don’t cry, Stanley.  I’m right here.”

Stan curls forward, away from his touch.  Through his tears he says, “No you aren’t, Ford.  Not for long.  You’re going to leave me just like everyone leaves me.  For Christ’s sake, if this is how I’m going to feel for the rest of my life I wish this summer had never happened.  I wish you’d find that gun and shoot me again, for good this time.”

Ford leans down to kiss him on the cheek.  He breathes in deeply through his nose, loving the smell of Stanley, thrilling at the thought that he’ll fall asleep to it every night, wake up to it every day, for the rest of his life.