Chapter Twenty Nine
TWENTY-NINE
You should be screaming. Or rushing the tent.
But instead, you’re standing there, lost in your thoughts.
And that’s because you finally remember why those words sounded so familiar.
They’re almost exactly the same ones she sent you in a text after she and Sean broke up.
You hadn’t seen her for a week after that.
Not at school, where she left every day for lunch and often failed to make it back for the afternoon.
And not at Perkins, where you circled the parking lot like the world’s most obvious detective, peering in windows and scanning your old corner booth.
Then one evening, you got a text from a number you didn’t recognize.
Come over. I need to tell u something.
At first you thought it was a wrong number, and you were about to ignore it when something clicked and you fired off a response.
When did you get a new phone?
There was a substantial pause, the three dots flashing so long that you were expecting a novel when you got the next message. Instead you saw:
When I mastered enough Serbian vocab.
It was late, almost eleven on a Saturday, and Sean had been gone most of the day.
He was, you figured, either out riding or hanging out at the bike co-op with his new crew of pierced waifs.
He spent a lot of time there lately, and most nights, he was out bombing through the city, finding new ways to hurl his body through space.
Since the breakup, it felt like he was always in motion.
Unable to sit down. He’d leave in the afternoon and come back near dawn, drenched in sweat, barely able to move or speak.
On the night you got the text from Diana, Sean had left at four o’clock that afternoon and still wasn’t back.
Unlike some of his new bike shop pals, he did have lights and reflective gear, but you were planning on waiting until he returned before you went to bed, just to make sure he was safe. Now you weren’t sure what to do.
Part of you felt like it was your responsibility to help him through this time, since you had played a part in the end of his relationship, but he didn’t seem to want your help.
He’d rejected your offer to go back to the quarry a few days ago—and you knew it was probably time just to tell him what had happened.
But then there was Diana. Until this message, you weren’t sure if you’d ever see her again.
Now you had a chance to say an actual goodbye.
In the end, you grabbed your keys and told yourself you’d be back soon.
Your mom was out working a night shift, but your dad had fallen asleep waiting for Sean, so you were extra quiet leaving the house.
And you tried to go slow backing the Corolla out of the driveway to keep your bad muffler to a light wheeze.
You looked down the street in both directions before you left, hoping you might see the blinking strobe of Sean’s LED coming down the road, but there was nothing but darkness in either direction.
So you tapped Diana’s address into your phone and took off into the night.
You’d never actually been in her house before.
And you were pretty sure Sean hadn’t either.
The place, she always said, was in a gentrifying neighborhood that was gentrifying very slowly on account of the snakes.
The urban legend was that a pet escaped its terrarium in the eighties, but it was probably the proximity to the river.
Once, when Diana was young, she watched her baba casually grab a garter snake from the washing machine and toss it into the open mouth of her dog (who gagged and spit it out).
The drive took ten minutes or so, but eventually you pulled up to her light blue rambler with overstuffed gutters and an attached garage.
Though you had dropped her off here a few nights after Perkins, you’d only ever seen the place from afar, so it still felt unfamiliar, like the house of a distant relative.
Tonight, the driveway was blocked by an enormous Buick, so you parked on the street.
And when you made it to the front steps, a motion detector popped on and you froze in place like a thief.
In the light, you noticed all the bird feeders, hanging around you like a floating city.
You had to duck to get under one, and when you made it to the door, there was a single Post-it note on the screen that said ENTER.
You opened it up and stepped into a living room with wall-to-wall green carpeting and immaculate, dated furniture.
Through a narrow hallway, you could see Diana unloading a small dishwasher and carefully stacking glasses in a cabinet.
You walked down the hall, lined with formal pictures of Diana and her grandmother posing in cheesy photo studios over the years.
From the pictures, it seemed like Baba wasn’t a big smiler, and her glasses were the biggest you’d ever seen.
“Stop right there!”
You turned to find the woman herself only inches away, holding tightly to a Louisville Slugger.
She was much shorter in person—barely over five feet if you had to guess—and she had sneaked up on you like a ninja and taken aim at your head.
You stuck your hands straight up and took a step backward.
She grimaced at you, and her upturned lip revealed a single gold tooth.
“Why you are in this house right now so late? Eh?!”
She gripped the bat tighter, and now that you had a chance to get a better look, she appeared to be wearing a kimono and some compression socks, and little else.
A flurry of Serbian came from the kitchen, presumably from Diana, and Baba’s body went slack.
She looked you over again, slowly lowering the bat in the process.
Then she muttered something guttural and walked into the kitchen, where she started taking food out of the fridge like nothing had just happened.
Your heart was still thumping in your throat as you entered the eat-in kitchen with peeling seventies linoleum and a two-burner stove.
“He doesn’t need to eat, Baba,” said Diana. “It’s almost midnight.”
“Men are always hungry,” she said, dumping things out of yogurt containers onto a plate. “Always.”
Diana, wearing a ripped tank top and a pair of overlarge sweatpants, just shrugged. Baba stuck a plate in the microwave, and before she closed the door, she pointed to things on the plate.
“Sarmas. Gibanica. Pljeskavica and ?evapi. You like it?”
“Sure,” you said. “And it’s, um … really nice to meet you. Sorry for the intrusion.”
She nodded once and then walked out of the room, still clutching her bat. She shot one last comment at Diana, who fired back a barb of her own. Then it was just you and Diana, and the smell of gradually heating food in a cramped kitchen.
“What did you say to her?” you asked. “About me?”
“I said you had no sense of decency and always show up unannounced. But that you are a fragile man and you need our help.”
“Cool. Appreciate it.”
“No problem,” she said, drying a cup still wet from the washer.
You weren’t sure where your body should be, so you just hovered behind her for a moment before finally sitting in a ladder-back chair.
“Why don’t you ever have people over?” you said.
She grabbed a handful of silverware and shoved it in an open drawer.
“Perhaps you didn’t notice that my grandmother just considered murdering you with a bat.”
As if on cue, the microwave dinged and Diana brought the plate over to you and slapped it down.
“It’s no Perkins,” she said. “But Baba does make everything from scratch.”
It smelled like cabbage and pepper and paprika, and ordinarily it would have been fun to try new foods, but you couldn’t even pick up the fork.
“Despite being a man,” you said, “I’m not really hungry. Do you need any help?”
She shrugged again and pointed at the top row of the dishwasher where all the mugs were, then opened a cabinet. The mugs were mismatched and coffee stained like the ones at your house, and you were careful not to chip them as you pulled each one out and wiped it dry.
“Can I ask why I’m here?” you said.
You put a diner-style mug face down on a floral shelf liner. Diana took a few bowls and nested them inside one another.
“It wasn’t right,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you that.”
She stopped unloading the dishes for a moment, but she didn’t turn to you either. She just looked out the small window over the sink that had a view of the dark backyard.
“What exactly…”
“The way I made you tell me about Sean,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that to you, Case. It was … manipulative. And it’s not something a friend would do.”
You took out another mug and held it up. It read I’M NOT LOUD. I’M SERBIAN. You set it next to the last one.
“Okay,” you said. “But would a friend have kept it from you in the first place?”
You grabbed another mug, but instead of putting it away, you just held it at your side.
“You’re not my friend,” she said.
You almost dropped the cup, but you managed, somehow, to hang on. And before you could say anything, or ask a shaky-voiced question, she added:
“You’re in love with me.”
There weren’t any words then. Not one. Usually, there were a few in your head at least, even if they didn’t always make it to your mouth.
But this time, there was nothing. Just some dizziness and an inability to breathe.
You found yourself wanting Baba to return and hit you with the baseball bat just so your outsides could match your insides.
“Diana,” you said.
“I understand,” she said. “It’s not something you chose.”