Chapter 8 A Sampling of Balls
A Sampling of Balls
Saturday, Now
The truck stop door clangs behind me on my way out. I cross the parking lot with my duffel under one arm and a toilet-water-soaked shirt in a plastic bag in the other.
“Don’t say a word,” I demand.
Ethan’s leaning against his van, arms folded. The sun reflecting off the bright white paint casts him in a warm glow and spotlights his utterly deranged grin.
“Don’t,” I repeat, my voice pleading.
“Beekman.” He says my name like a compassionate T-ball coach watching a grounder roll between a pair of children’s cleats. “I would’ve given you something to wear. You didn’t have to…” His eyes are glued to my new white oversized shirt, which reads “SEXY MOTHER TRUCKER” in capital letters.
“There was a mishap with a toilet. I’d rather not get into it.”
The Sydney Sweeney doppelg?nger was actually quite helpful in my time of need. When I tiptoed out of the bathroom, still wrapped in my towel, she directed me toward the only rack of T-shirts that weren’t confrontationally patriotic.
I lift my plastic bag. “Should I stick this with the vomit clothes?”
“You fished it out?” He grimaces, and I know for sure that any fleeting moment of physical chemistry next to that shower is long gone.
“Duh, it’s linen.” I yank open one of the rear doors to search around for myself.
“You packed linen for a camping trip?”
I shrug. “It’s summer. I wear linen in the summer. I don’t want you to look at me differently or anything, but I’m fancy now.” I toss my wet hair with an alarming degree of confidence for a woman who just fished her shirt out of a rust-stained toilet bowl.
“Oh, I know it. Here, let me.” He unlatches something on the edge of the other door so both sides can swing open, exposing the mosquito screen that’s protecting a mattress from the elements.
I hadn’t really considered the lack of a traditional trunk. Every square inch of this thing is maximized for living space.
“I rinsed your clothes off at the spigot.” He points to the putrid, rainbow-shaped rust stain on the side of the building. “That should help with the smell, but we’ll have to line-dry them wherever we set up camp. I’ll keep my eye out for a laundromat.”
He pushes and pulls on something in the bed frame until it releases a long, sealed bin.
I’d always assumed that Ethan living out of a van would look more like, well, living out of a van. Messy, aimless, crowded. But Ethan’s world seems intentional and well designed.
“I hate to say it, but I think your laptop might be cooked.”
I laugh grimly. “Paul’s going to love that.”
“IT guy?” He ties off the plastic bag I hand him and stuffs it into the bin holding the other things I ruined today.
I shake my head. “My workplace nemesis. He’ll stop at nothing to destroy me.”
The back doors shut with a satisfying series of thuds and clicks. “Poor Paul.”
“No ‘poor Paul.’ Paul sucks. The only crime I committed was starting at A & G the same day he did. For that grave offense, he sniffs next to me in the break room and goes, ‘Was that you?’ then slinks away like the little snake he is. He does that, like, once a month.”
He removes my neoprene bag from my shoulder with a cough-laugh. “No, Paul, my guy.”
“Right?” I climb into the passenger seat while Ethan secures my bag in the cabin.
“I was inclined to take his side,” he says with a grunt, “because I know you’re secretly a monster, but I’ve flipped. I’m on your side now.”
“You’re the worst person I know,” I tell him in the flattest voice I can muster.
Ethan rests a hand on my headrest as he climbs into the driver’s seat from behind. “You don’t believe that for a second,” he tells me before cranking the ignition switch.
We drive north on the highway that snakes along Lake Superior.
Our van pokes out from the trees to view the shoreline every so often.
There’s some light weekender traffic, but not enough to ruin the drive.
We’re quiet for a bit, our chatter replaced by the music pouring from the stereo.
I roll down the window to stretch my arm into the breeze like I’m in a road trip movie, but the mood is spoiled by the wind’s low, obtrusive throb against the glass.
A familiar feeling grips my throat. Something like homesickness. Nostalgia. Longing. It all mixes together in that wistful cocktail of feeling like you’re losing grip of the moment even as you’re experiencing it.
“Did I see a camera back there earlier?” I ask. “And your toe running shoes? I thought you burned those, by the way.”
“You mean when you were traipsing around a moving vehicle, like a drunk girl on a Spirit flight, and then got sick, like…a drunk girl on a Spirit flight? Yes. There’s a camera and barefoot toe shoes back there. I can’t get rid of them. They’re the only kind I can run in with my plantar fasciitis.”
His eyes shoot daggers at my straightening legs, so instead of standing, I reach behind his seat, groping around for the guitar strap poking out of a nylon camera bag. When I tug on it, a Nikon swings between our bucket seats and plops into my lap.
“Careful,” he intones. “I spent way too much money on that thing.”
“Nah. These babies can take a beating. You should see the kinds of stuff my parents put theirs through.” The weight of his camera sinks into my hands. It feels nice. It’s been ages since I’ve broken out my sturdy DSLR camera, but it’s also been ages since I was in a moment I felt compelled to keep.
I zoom in on Ethan until his profile is perfectly framed by the blur of sun-soaked trees whipping past. I adjust the shutter speed and curl my feet under me like a bird perched on a fence, repositioning my body so that the daylight floods his features.
“What are you doing?” he asks, curious but not exactly surprised.
I gently press the shutter and watch Ethan’s eyes come into focus in the viewfinder. “Keeping this for later,” I answer.
He shakes his head like I’m hopeless but he smiles anyway.
It bursts across the tiny screen like a solar flare.
It’s exactly the moment I wanted. I press down my index finger and hear the burst of images the camera captures, and know without looking that one of them is it .
One of those photos is exactly Ethan at this exact moment, and even once he leaves, I’ll have a piece of him frozen in time, forever.
“There. Moment captured.”
“Good,” he responds, sneaking a glance at me swiping through his camera roll. “Searching for nudes?”
“I don’t need to look for those. You’ve sent me plenty.” I don’t bother looking up.
He rears back but keeps his eyes on the road. “Are you referring to the medical photo I sent of a very troubling bruise you inflicted on me ?”
I lower the camera. “If you pick up a woman from behind in a crowd of strangers, she’s going to struggle. It would’ve been insane if I hadn’t kicked you in the junk.”
“You missed my junk—thank god—but your boot turned my inner thigh green .”
“I know. I saw it in the nude you sent me.”
“That was not a nude!” His laugh turns his cheeks bright crimson.
There’s something that always shakes loose in Ethan when he laughs like that—that laughter that starts in his belly and bursts from his chest like a firework. It’s as though, for the briefest moment, the small part of him he keeps for himself is on full display, and it’s magnificent.
I shake my head, hiding my own reddening face with his camera. “There was a sampling of balls. Balls equal nude, dude.”
He looks between me and the highway. “I’m worried about the caliber of nudes you’re receiving from the local uncle scene.”
“I wish there were some uncle balls in this camera roll. What is this lighting, Powell? Seriously, are these crime scene photos?”
“It’s the camera,” he says defensively. “They looked fine when I was using my phone but I wanted nicer photos of my custom van builds. The guy at the store said it would give me wide-angle shots, but the thing’s a disaster.”
“Please don’t blame sweet baby Nikon for your ineptitude.” I pet the camera at issue before plopping it back into the open bag behind his seat.
He grins, but then it slips. His eyes drift to my phone, sitting on the dash, which is flickering with notifications like a dying incandescent lightbulb.
“Sorry. That must be distracting.” I reach for my phone with a groan, grateful I managed to take my picture before life crept back in. “What status do you think Microsoft Teams displays when you soak your computer in stomach acid?”
“Skull and crossbones?”
I don’t respond, already absorbed in the relentless messages. Work anxiety whistles in my brain like a neglected teakettle.
“Why don’t you use ‘getting sick’ as an excuse to take an actual weekend off?” he suggests, slowing to let a lime-green PT Cruiser pass him on the narrowing highway. “You must get a gimme for an act of god like this. It won’t kill you to relax a little.”
“I can’t relax knowing I’m going to have seventy fires to put out Monday morning,” I tell him, my sentence scored by the click-clack of my nails against my phone screen.
“Why can’t people wait a day to hear from you? You’re an intellectual property lawyer. No one is taking anyone’s liberty away if you don’t respond immediately.”
I snort. “So?” I press my phone to my chest, allowing myself this diversion to brief Ethan on the intersection of capitalism and the American legal system.
“When it comes to big corporate clients, the best lawyer is the one who responds to their email the fastest. I can be more capable and passionate than every other attorney on their payroll, but at the end of the day, general counsels of Fortune 500 companies will never accept anything less than immediate responses to the inane questions that pop into their heads at nine p.m. on a Friday night. It’s a race to the bottom, and if I don’t send that billable email during my friend’s birthday dinner, Paul will .
And he’ll cc our bosses with a pointed postscript because he’s trying to destroy me. ”