CHAPTER SIX #4
Perhaps the joke was ultimately on Scott, though, since he wasn’t even married.
He had fallen in shallow love here or there, he’d had a lot of fun, but no one had volunteered to share his life permanently and he hadn’t felt stirred to ask.
The most he’d ever asked for was from Carver: come to California with me.
And the answer was no. And Scott ended up writing a lot of songs about California.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “That’s his business.”
The patio door scraped open. They all glanced up and saw Carver coming out. He’d taken his button-up off and was now in a white t-shirt and tight black jeans. He was carrying a lowball glass with some scotch in it. It was a good look on him. A curated look? Or was that delusional to wonder about?
“Carv,” Letty said, too brightly.
“Hi,” he said, eyeing them as he approached the table. To Scott’s surprise, he walked around to the unoccupied left side and sat in the open seat beside him. He correctly read their expressions and said, “Speak of the devil?”
“No, we weren’t talking about you,” Letty said. “Narcissist.”
Carver grinned at her. “What were you talking about, then?”
“Their elopement,” Scott lied smoothly.
“Alright,” Carver said. To Scott, he said, “Can I get a cigarette?” and to Letty and Sana he said, “Where’d you elope?”
It was strange to hear Carver’s voice again.
Scott remembered the sound of it but had forgotten the finer details.
Like Chip, his voice was low but not excessively deep — a high baritone.
But unlike Chip, who was often loud and spoke with a scratchy boyish quality, Carver’s voice was smooth and sometimes soft, like water over rocks.
The brides told Carver the whole story while he smoked one of Scott’s Marlboro Reds. When they concluded, he said, “That sounds really nice.”
“It was,” Letty said.
“How’d you guys meet?”
“At a bar,” Letty said with a smile. Sana’s eyes were twinkling. “I’d just gotten out of this heinous relationship, and I was there with some friends, and I kept staring at her, I guess, because she came up to me and said, hey, are you gonna keep fucking staring at me all night —”
“That’s not what I said!” Sana exclaimed, laughing. “I said, you keep looking over at me, would you like to buy me a drink?”
“That was it.”
“It was pretty out of character for me,” Sana said. “I was a little drunk.”
“Anyway, I did buy her a drink, and the rest is history,” Letty said, still smiling. “Carv, I heard you in there talking about work stuff, is everything okay?”
Carver exhaled smoke. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”
“So it’s all good?”
“No, but it doesn’t matter, so don’t worry about it.”
“Uh, okay.”
“How’s business going for you, Letty?”
“Hmm, remind me what I do?” she teased him.
Carver dropped the butt of his cigarette into the ramekin and took a sip of his drink. “I remember you’re with an HVAC business out in Jersey,” he said. “And last time we talked, you were in purchasing.”
“Very good. I’m the logistics manager now.”
“Yeah? How is that?”
Letty shrugged. “It’s a desk job, it’s pretty recession-proof and it pays the bills. I work with a lot of men, some great guys and some assholes.”
“Do you guys live close to each other?” Carver said to Scott, making brief eye contact.
“Nah,” Scott said. “I’m in Hoboken, they’re in New Brunswick, it’s like a forty minute drive.”
“I got my master’s at Rutgers, and then I got a job nearby after,” Sana explained. “And then I met Letty, so it’s just kind of turned into home.”
“Baby, seriously, we can leave anytime you want,” Letty said. “I can work anywhere. You know I bartended in college.”
“But consider that I’ve been working for the same company for twelve years, and I’m too scared and weak-willed to leave.” Sana grinned. “What if I go somewhere new and they’re mean to me? Or their printer is too confusing?”
“I get it,” Carver said. “I’m the same way. Other than two years at Goldman, I’ve never worked anywhere but Blackbrick.”
“Except for when we waited tables together at Max’s for a summer,” Letty said.
“Right. I always forget. I was so fucking bad at that.”
“He had no customer service voice,” Letty told Sana. “He would walk up to the table like, ‘Hey, I’m Carver. What do you guys want?’ Just all business, immediately. And we pooled tips, so the rest of us were always busting his balls.”
“I can sympathize, though,” Sana said. “Like, can’t I just bring them the food? Why does there have to be theater?”
“See, but the theater is actually the easy part, keeping track of the food is what’s hard,” Letty said. “I was always happy to do as much theater as they wanted, ‘cause then they’d forgive me if their food was late.”
“But I was never late, is the thing,” Carver said, tapping his temple.
“Yeah, we should have teamed up like Ratatouille.” Letty glanced at Scott. “You came by a few times to visit us, didn’t you?”
Scott felt Carver’s gaze on his face. “Uh, yeah,” he said.
“I remember you riding up on your skateboard,” she said with nostalgia. “And you’d order a large iced tea and take up a booth for hours, and distract us when we walked by. I think Debbie hated you.”
“Nah, we were cool,” Scott said, smiling. “I saw her at ShopRite before graduation, she remembered me and we talked for a bit.” Suddenly he realized that he’d absentmindedly tucked the new joint into his shirt pocket after rolling it. He produced it, to everyone else’s happiness.
“I totally forgot I was yelling at you to roll this,” Letty said, accepting the joint and lighter.
“Because you’re already high,” Sana said.
“Baby, how dare you? But yes.”
“I think Debbie hated me,” Carver said. “I always felt like she wanted me to act like waiting tables at her restaurant was my life’s calling.”
“I think it was more that you made it obvious the opposite was true,” Letty said, laughing and exhaling smoke. “You were always like, ‘Debbie, of course I can’t pick up a Saturday shift, are you insane? That’s my SAT prep class day.’”
“Carver, you would feel so at home in NoVa,” Sana said, running her hand through her dark hair’s shaggy layers. “Should we all say our SAT scores?”
“Uh, no,” Letty said, passing her the joint.
“1430,” Carver said. “Both times I took it.”
“Nice,” Sana said.
“And yours?” he said. “Since you’re asking?”
Sana grinned sheepishly. “Um… 1470.”
“Well, fuck you then,” Carver said, and she laughed.
“I’d prefer not to say mine,” Scott said. “Actually, I don’t remember it.”
“I remember you actually got a slightly higher verbal score than me,” Carver said.
Scott dropped his gaze, suddenly self-conscious. “Did I?”
“Yeah. I was pissed ‘cause you didn’t even study.”
“But I tanked the math part completely.” The joint entered Scott’s field of view, and he accepted it from Sana. “I was never any good at math.”
“Only ‘cause you have some kind of learning disability,” Letty said. “You mix up numbers.”
“How’s that different from not being good at math?”
“Because even when you put the work in, you’re still at a disadvantage.”
Scott exhaled smoke. His dry mouth was starting to taste tangy and bitter from the weed and alcohol. He passed the joint to Carver, who inhaled hard, hollowing his already hollow cheeks.
“Carver and I actually met when he tried to tutor me in geometry,” Scott told Sana. “We had mutual friends, and somebody suggested it.”
“I think I was the mutual friend, no?” Letty said.
“You connected our friend groups, but you didn’t introduce us, that was Bryce.”
Carver shook his head. “I was a shitty tutor.”
“I was a shitty student.”
“I was impatient, though. I kept rushing.”
“I didn’t care enough, or try hard enough,” Scott said.
He remembered his ability to perform geometry had fallen apart when trigonometry got involved, and he was embarrassed by how lost he suddenly was, so he’d opted to slack off to protect his ego.
Carver was right that he’d been a lousy tutor — he didn’t seem able to comprehend Scott’s inability to comprehend — but Scott never gave the tutoring a real chance.
He was more interested in Carver. He remembered sitting in the library and watching Carver work himself into a lather explaining something, bright-eyed and gesturing voluminously while Scott watched his lips move.
He didn’t even mind when Carver got frustrated with him, he just found it funny and endearing.
He should have known then that he liked him in a certain way, but he was a dense 15-year-old.
“It’s ancient history,” Scott said. “You guys are getting married tomorrow, let’s talk about that.”
Letty and Sana looked at each other, their eyes mutually twinkling. Everyone fell quiet for a moment, and the sound of the crickets became obvious again. The smell of imminent summer was on the breeze.
Summer was Scott’s favorite season. He loved when it was warm enough at night to roam around freely and sleep outdoors, when the world was its most wild and alive. He didn’t even mind the heat. He liked the way it brought his blood to the surface.
His phone buzzed in his pocket again, and Scott pulled it out to glance at it. It was a reply from his former drummer, Joe: yeah give it 2-3 months and they’ll be begging for me back lol. how are things going on long island or wherever? Scott slid the phone back into his pocket.
“I’m a little nervous,” Sana said. “Not about getting married, but the public speaking portion.”
“Just ignore the crowd and talk right to me,” Letty said, touching her arm. “That’s what I’m gonna do.”
“I don’t know how to ignore them, though. They’re all right there.”
“We can ask them to leave if you want.”
Sana laughed.
Carver ashed the joint into the ramekin and passed it to her. “You want some Xanax?”
Sana looked at him with wary interest in her bright eyes. “Hmm. Maybe.”
“You don’t need a Xanax,” Letty said, laughing.
“Just half of one,” Carver clarified.