Peach Bourbon

Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI

by Nathaniel Berry

A mason jar of Peach Bourbon Jam, so well received that K promises she’ll make even more next season. A ceramic coaster with the latitude and longitude of Adrian, Michigan exact to the fifth decimal point. Ginger snaps in a Ziplock bag, minus one I took for tax. A Ziplock container of pretzel rings with Hershey’s kisses melted in, each set with an M&M like a jewel. A bag of unground coffee, a paper packet of Bucatini, Robby’s credit card, two sealed tax documents and a reminder from Robby’s dentist, in Adrian, that it’s time for a cleaning.

I know what this box is, Mom tells me over the phone. This is the box a mother puts together when she has one or two things she really wants to send her son, and then she walks around looking for other things she can get the hell out of her house.

The box arrived yesterday. Missing are Robby’s snow boots—a gift (a hand-me-down) from me, two winters ago—forgotten by him in Adrian over Christmas. Missing also: K’s Habanero Gold, distilled from Robby’s mother’s garden, crushed tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, green beans, salsa and jam (not Peach Bourbon). Heavy, bulky, breakable or unseasonable things await the man who pilots the Pontiac Vibe over the long miles between New York to Adrian.

Robby moved here in October. He wore a blue suit in conscious imitation of a star-bound hayseed getting off the Greyhound, 1961. I drove halfway to meet him, and into the Vibe we packed his curved monitor, his computer tower, matching wheeled suitcases, two unworn suits on wooden hangers, a briefcase of embossed leather made to look like the mosaics on Aztec temples; somebody’s souvenir of Mexico, that is Robby’s souvenir of a trip to the Salvation Army in Ann Arbor. We unpacked all into his sublet in Brooklyn, arranged through a friend of mine who was flight-attending in Germany that month. Her no-lease place on a dead-end street was filled with statement outerwear on bare closet poles, statement footwear on slightly crooked shelves, fading Instax nudes on a photo tree, a gilt mirror the size of a Billiards table. Robby lived there for a month, and then he came to live on our couch in Manhattan.

Oh, don’t trouble yourself, he told me, as I tried to work the elastic of our second fitted sheet over the cushions of Loren’s couch. I don’t need it for sleeping, so don’t bother with that unless you want to protect the couch from me. The sheet goes back in the closet.

The Midwest is something you take with you, like a box of stuff you can’t seem to unpack: Is this bothering you? Is this in the way? I’m sorry, I can move that if it’s bothering you. Would it bother anyone if I—the kind of perpetual monitoring that occurs when three people from Michigan share a 600 square-foot apartment. Family dinners every night, somebody cooked and somebody else opened a bottle of $3.00 wine. Bucatini with tomatoes from K’s garden, spiced with Habanero Gold, appetizer of Salsa from K’s kitchen. More things came back after a November pilgrimage to Adrian: a birthday package from K to her son (cinnamon rolls, Jack O’Lantern Oreos, more unground coffee). Three coats I was entrusted to select from his thrifted collection: a brown ‘70s gaberdine, a charcoal topcoat, a vintage Zero King lined and trimmed with gray acrylic shearling. Robby’s Mr. Grindy coffee grinder from the closet off the kitchen.

And do you know about this sweater he’s looking for? The gray cardigan? I didn’t know, and neither did K and we looked many places for it—in the closets of the rooms he’d slept in, the attic where his dad was likely to have stashed it, the laundry room, behind the machines.

We knew where everything was when we thought Robby was only going to be here for a few months K says, a statement which conveyed a number of things at once. Robby quit his job in Chicago in the summer of 2020: the idea was that we’d move to New York together. Our planned move to a cramped bachelor’s place in Queens was as good an idea as I could encompass in the summer of 2020, although after COVID I had no enthusiasm for any major city. I knew Robby wanted to come for his career, for the kind of anonymity and energy a city like New York can bestow on the willing. Instead, I went West with Loren and he stayed in his childhood bedroom, awoken by K for afternoon eggs and fresh-ground coffee.  

I bought us a flask-sized bottle of Bushmill’s and we walked all the paths in Adrian that we loved as teenagers the night I told him that I wasn’t going with him.

You don’t need to apologize, he said in Riverside Park, for prioritizing your own happiness. And, later, drunk outside the Historical Society he said: Did you know you weren’t going when I quit my job?

Loren and I had dinner at Robby’s parents’ house last December, after he moved out of our apartment for a room in Brooklyn belonging to an Italian artist who is never home. We ate egg noodles and beef goop; Robby’s dad snuck bites with me while K and Loren and Robby were still in the kitchen. We just wanted to thank you for taking in Rob, K said, in place of a prayer at dinner. And for giving him a ride home for Christmas.

I don’t know how to accept thanks for something like that. The Vibe I drove us home in was a gift from Robby, who received it earlier that year as a gift (a loan, as it turned out) from me. He needed to go West in the summer of ’21 to see if he liked Los Angeles, and when he found that he did not, he called and asked what he should see on the way back to Adrian. He drove most of Route 66, went north to visit Kurt in Denver, crossed Central Time through the Black Hills, I90 over South Dakota. He stopped at my favorite spot, a turnoff above the West bank of the Missouri. I had almost told him about it, but I didn’t want to smother the joy of discovering something. He stopped there anyway, because of the rolling green hills, the empty sky, the sound of distant water; he called me from that spot to see if I’d ever been.

You two share a lot of things, K said to me. New York dinners from groceries brought from Meijer’s and the tomato sauce from K’s garden. Rusting cars, apartments, couches, moving days. Resentments, grudges, tragedies, hand-me-downs, boxes from our mothers: local butter, escabeche, the last of this year’s Peach Bourbon Jam.