Chapter 42
— Chapter 42 —
It’s been too hot for days, but the field mice made a project out of the wires of The Aster’s A/C over winter and Sam hasn’t gotten it fixed yet. We’re stuck with open windows and ceiling fans churning the humid air, but no one seems to mind. School let out for the year and the bar is packed with teachers, all raucous and relieved. They drink pina coladas and cold beer in frosted mugs and order way too much food for the table. Their laughter rises to hysterical heights and falls into sighs as they catch their breath.
The kid! With the pants!
And the girl! Who forgot! Aboutthecheesesandwich! In. Her. Backpack! For six months!
They are once-a-year drunk, and I’ve already put in a call to the cab company to give them a heads up.
I know a few of the teachers; they were my teachers too. While I pour beers and run the blender, I vacillate between the burning embarrassment of realizing they may have laughed about me this way, and feeling like it doesn’t matter at all. I would laugh the same way about them in the right company. I am not ashamed for working at a bar, though. I thought maybe I would be, in the face of teachers who last saw me as a college-bound kid. But I’m good at what I do. I’ve helped Sam and Carlos make this restaurant a place that is always full of happy customers. I am paying my way in the world, taking care of my niece, fixing my house, working on my carvings. I’m not living my life waiting for the end of something—I am living in my life. So lately, I have been feeling a lot less like a college dropout and more like someone who’s got a good thing going.
At last call, Mr. Gioletti sits at the bar in front of me and orders his third whiskey sour. I don’t think he’s a big drinker, and he seems slightly in the bag, so I make it heavy on the sour.
“I remember you, Freya,” he says.
“I remember you too, Mr. Gioletti.” I put his drink on a napkin in front of him. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt that gives off a whiff of closet when the breeze hits right.
“You,” he points at me, “were always so smart.”
“I think I almost failed your class.”
“School has nothing to do with being smart.” He takes a sip of his drink and laughs. “Good call,” he says. “I’m driving.”
“That one’s on me,” I tell him.
He holds up his glass to thank me. “School is about fitting in a system. Some smart people do that well. And some smart people would perhaps be better off if we left them to their own devices.” He blinks at me, owl eyes magnified by his glasses. “Your niece is the same way. She plays the system a little better than you did. But only a little.”
“She stole your rat.”
His face lights up. “I know.”
“You know?”
“She walked out of the classroom with a rat in her coat pocket. You think I didn’t catch that?”
I laugh. “But you didn’t stop her?”
“I was happy for that poor little bugger to get a good home.”
“Mr. Gioletti! You are full of surprises.”
“It’s Bob. You’re a grown up. You can call me Bob now.” He polishes off his drink. Burps a little. “And yes, I am.”
Eddie nurses his beer until everyone else has gone home. I barely saw him all night. He was sitting at the table of teachers for a while. He went out to the pier for a smoke with Sam a few times. I think Bee was buying his beers. I keep track of him more than I should. I try not to think about him too much, but I do anyway. I like it when he’s here.
While I count the drawer, Eddie clears the glasses from the end of the bar and brings them into the kitchen.
When he comes back, he rinses the rail mats in the sink under the bar.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say.
He smiles at me. “Good to be busy.”
“Thank you.”
I watch him when he isn’t looking. He works his jaw like a nervous habit, but the rest of him seems so easy. He’s clean-shaven, not wearing a hat today, and his hair looks freshly cut. His EMS t-shirt is spotless, free of wrinkles, even though the navy has been washed down to a softer blue.
When I’m done with the drawer, I pour beers for both of us.
“I’ve still got some left,” he says, pointing to his glass, a quarter full.
“That’s definitely room temperature,” I say, handing him his fresh beer.
We sit next to each other at the end of the bar. Eddie digs some quarters from his pocket and picks out songs on the jukebox.
“How old is this thing?” he asks, turning the dial to flip through the cards.
“It’s been here as long as I can remember. I’m surprised Sam kept it.”
“Woah, England Dan and John Ford Coley!”
“Huh?”
“My dad loved them,” Eddie says, hitting the buttons to choose the song. “I thought they were singing about how they weren’t talking about Millennium, because it was a song about the Millennium Falcon, but they’re saying ‘moving in.’?”
“I thought that Eagles song was a guy singing about his peaceful easy penis when I was a kid.”
Eddie snorts his beer.
“I could never understand how they could just play it on the radio, but I didn’t want to ask anyone about it.”
“How did you hear penis instead of feeling ?” Eddie asks, and I think maybe he’s blushing.
“I don’t know. Sound gets distorted in the way-back of a station wagon.”
He laughs. “Ah, the way-back. They don’t let kids sit there anymore.”
“They sure don’t,” I say, remembering the car sickness I endured to be as far from Steena as I could get in the confines of Step’s Chevy. “Best seat in the car.”
We listen to the song that’s not about the Millennium Falcon while Eddie chooses more music. He won’t let me see what he’s picking.
When the record changes, it’s that morning train song by Sheena Easton that was always on the radio when my mom drove me and Steena to school. Eddie bops his head ever so slightly.
“Do you remember when Jennifer S. danced to this in the third-grade talent show?” I ask.
“Oh god! I forgot about that!”
“She dressed up all cute in tights and leg warmers and that white sweatshirt—”
“That was so awful!” Eddie holds his hand over his nose, and I know we’re both picturing the moment when she tripped over her shoelace and face-planted, knocking out her front teeth.
“What song is next?”
“I can’t remember now,” he says. “It was twelve songs for a dollar.”
“Twelve? We’ll be here all night.”
“We don’t have to stay and listen to all of them,” he says, but I can see the hope in his eyes.
“Of course we do. I want to know what you picked.” I am also curious about the way my heart is thudding in my chest.
Eddie definitely blushes. “Alright.”
“We probably need french fries,” I say, because I’m feeling like I might start blushing too. I prop the kitchen door open so I can hear the music and switch the deep fryer back on.
Foolish Heart by Steve Perry starts playing as I get fries and chicken fingers from the deep freeze.
“Good one,” I call out.
“Thanks,” Eddie says.
I throw a few handfuls of fries and a stack of chicken fingers into the fryer baskets and lower them into the oil, watching the sizzle.
There have not been many men in my life. Not many and no one significant. Sad guys in bars. The ones I could tell would be bashful and grateful and, most importantly, gone at the end of their long weekend in Acadia. They were using me to feel less lonely, I was trying to erase what happened before them, and of course it didn’t work. Two panic attacks. One awkward night with a recently divorced dad who had a shocking amount of hair on his toes. One somewhat steamy affair with a vacationer that lasted for two weeks and was full of the kind of sweet false promises you make to friends at summer camp. And one ill-advised fling with Buck’s fishmonger, who dumped me after I drunkenly referred to marriage as a stupid vestigial custom, because he was “looking for something real.”
But Eddie.
Everything I feel about Eddie is laden with wants. I want to kiss him. I want it to be amazing. I don’t want to have a panic attack. I want him to like me the way I like him. I want him to be nervous, too, so I can feel like we’re carrying this fear together, like we’re two people with sweaty palms, breathing muggy air in the same blanket fort. Everyone I’ve ever been with has chosen me, and then I figured out how to want them like I was playing catch up. But Eddie who had a crooked bowl cut in third grade, Eagle Scout Eddie, EMT Eddie, is the kind of guy you dream about when you have your head on straight. And I don’t know if someone like me is capable of straight-headedness. He is stand-up, earnest, heart-on-his sleeve. I would hate myself for hurting him. It takes so much more courage to make french fries for Eddie than it does to ask a random sad guy at a bar to drive me home.
The song switches to Separate Ways by Journey.
“This is prime Baldwin Place roller rink music,” Eddie says, coming into the kitchen, leaning against the door jamb.
“Absolutely.” The carpeted walls and disco ball at the mini-mall roller rink flash in my head, as if I could be here and there at the same time. Eventually, the whole shopping center closed and started falling down, but for a little while that roller rink was the most magical place I’d ever been.
“I love any song that reminds me of skating there,” Eddie says, grinning.
“Yeah, I do too.”
“They built a new shopping center.”
“Really?”
“You haven’t seen it?”
“I don’t do much,” I say.
“If it had a roller rink, I’d take you,” Eddie says, his eyes meeting mine. I feel it in my chest. “On a date.”
I can smell the fries starting to burn. I pull them from the fryer. Shake off the oil.
“If you wanted,” Eddie says.
I try to meet his eyes, but he won’t look at me.
“I would,” I say. “If they had a roller rink.”
Eddie smiles. “Well, I guess it’s lucky for you they don’t.”
“What are we going to do on our date now?” I plate the fries, shake salt on them. Watch the chicken like it needs my full attention.
“I guess we can start with dinner,” Eddie says, pointing toward the plates.
We’re pretty quiet while we eat, sitting next to each other at the end of the bar. Eddie kicks the toe of my Docs with his work boots. I kick his boot back. He eats his chicken first, then squirts ketchup in zigzags all over his fries instead of making a puddle on his plate.
“Woah, you’re a weirdo,” I say. “I didn’t know this about you!”
He shrugs. “Just easier.” He grabs a few fries at a time, shovels them into his mouth. “If you don’t finish your food when a call comes in, you don’t finish your food.”
I dip a fry into the puddle of ketchup on my plate, grin as I eat it, like I’m demonstrating how you’re supposed to eat french fries. “How long have you been an EMT?”
“Since graduation. I started in the fire department senior year.”
“You were a firefighter in high school? I didn’t know that!”
“Yeah. My dad did the fire department thing, so all those guys were kind of like my uncles. I loved it. It was all I wanted to do. But Somers is just volunteer, so if you want to make any kind of living, you got to go to the EMS side. I mean, it’s not like super great pay. But I pick up construction jobs. And I live with my mom now, so I don’t need a whole lot.” He says it like he’s embarrassed. This man who walks around saving lives is telling me about his work like it’s not enough. “I need the flexibility to take care of her, and they let me plan my shifts around her health aide schedule.”
I have too many words in my head, and I feel like whatever I say will be wrong. But I want Eddie to know that I think he’s amazing.
“What?” he asks. “What’s that look?”
I shake my head, hoping the right thing to say will come into focus, but it doesn’t, and I can feel Eddie closing up. He believes I’m thinking the opposite of what’s in my mind. So, I slip off my barstool to stand in front of him, touch my hand to his cheek. And I kiss him.
I feel like every color I’ve ever seen is racing toward me in my head. I don’t understand how a kiss can be so electric. Eddie puts his hands on my hips, and it seems like he’s the only thing keeping me tethered to the ground. But then I realize he’s not embracing me; he’s separating us. He pulls away. Turns his head from me.
“Sorry,” he says as my heart plunges and my knees are about to fail. “I still have chicken in my mouth.” He chews. Swallows. Takes a swig of beer. “Can we try that again?”
I nod and he kisses me and all those colors in my head are reflecting off a spinning disco ball.
Rock Me Amadeus starts playing on the jukebox and we both laugh.
“I wasn’t, uh, curating this well,” Eddie says.
“Come on!” I laugh. “What’s more romantic than Falco?”
Eddie brushes hair from my cheek, rests his hand on my shoulder. “Our first school dance in seventh grade, a song came on that I really liked, and you were standing there, and I was going to ask you to dance, and I just froze. Like, I couldn’t even walk over. I remember staring at you, trying to work up the nerve, feeling like the song was moving quicker than my courage, and then they switched to a fast song, and you went back to dancing with Bee.”
“So you gave up?”
“I don’t know how to dance to fast songs. Dancing wasn’t the point anyway. I wanted to know what it was like to hold you.”
I’ve never had someone lay out their feelings for me so clearly before. And I had no idea that anyone felt that way about me back then with my frizzy hair and Laura Ashley jumpsuit.
“What was the song?” I ask.
“Bob Seger,” he says.
“ Night Moves ?”
“ We’ve Got Tonight .”
I pick a quarter out of my tip jar. “We have that one,” I say.
I unplug the machine and plug it back in, push my quarter into the slot, and flip through the little cards until I find the right numbers to press.
Eddie is grinning. “Yeah?”
I hold my arms out. “Yeah.”
We slow dance on the floor I haven’t swept yet. He’s big and tall and I feel safe in his save-people-from-burning-buildings arms.
“I don’t really know how to dance,” he says.
“We’re not real dancing. We’re junior high dancing. So you’re doing it exactly right.”
By the time the song is over, we’re pressed together, kissing. My entire body is pulsing. He starts to unbutton my shirt.
“Sam wanders over here for food at all hours,” I say, stopping him.
“I live with my mom.”
“I live with my niece.”
“Maybe we should call it,” he says. “There’s no rush, right?”
“Yeah,” I say, even though it’s been so long, and I’ve been so lonely, and I like him so much.
He kisses me again. “It’s like a rain check situation, though, right? I don’t want to call it for good.”
“Absolutely. Rain check.”
Eddie helps me close up and walks me to my car. The air is muggy and hot even though it’s almost three in the morning. The moon is full. Our footsteps on the gravel sound loud. I unlock my car and turn around. Eddie slips his hand behind my neck, running his fingers up the base of my scalp as he kisses me.
“I can’t believe I just kissed Freya Arnalds,” he says.
On the drive home, I find Lite FM on the radio because they play all those roller rink songs. I catch the end of Faithfully— the part when the drums kick in and Steve Perry’s voice begins to soar above the guitar riff—and I feel like I’m in the kind of scene I always daydreamed whenever I heard this song. I watch Eddie’s headlights in my rearview mirror until I turn off his street onto my own. He flashes his lights as I drive away, and there’s a warm kind of hope growing in my chest.
I let myself into the house quietly and go straight to the bathroom to brush my teeth instead of prowling around in the kitchen for cereal. I don’t want to wake Aubrey. I want to be alone with my night, to exist in it a little longer. I want to crawl back into that moment of slow dancing to Bob Seger and think about what it would have been like if Eddie had asked me to dance to that song in seventh grade.
I’ve got a mouth full of toothpaste when my phone buzzes.
“It just started raining,” Eddie says when I answer.
I laugh. “For real?”
“For real. And it’s still really warm out, and I was thinking… do you want to go swimming?”