Chapter I
I can’t call him back. I don’t have a number. He said he was going to live in his father’s barn for the summer. I could call information for his number, but I’m not about to call over there. Jordan is the kind of girl you divorce.
The only reason Yash would try to reach me would be something to do with Sam. A plane crash, a Eurail accident, a nightclub fire. Something awful must have happened to him.
I’m at Bubble Time when he calls again. Michael, Lorna’s husband, waves the receiver at me. ‘It’s a boy,’ he whispers loudly.
My stomach lurches. I reach for the phone.
‘Jordan,’ he says, with a little laugh that acknowledges the weirdness of his tracking me down.
‘Yash.’ I plug the other ear with my finger to block out the music. I brace myself. I don’t know what’s coming. ‘What’s up?’ I can hear the alarm in my voice.
‘Well, I’m—’ There’s a small crash in the background.
‘Shit. Catastrophes abound. I was thinking. I was wondering. I can’t find a job here.
I thought maybe I’d come back there. I have a couple of leads on a sublet but I’m wondering if—for just a night or two—if there might be a couch free on Pye Street? ’
My lungs feel hot and tight. Michael is wolfing down an enormous platter of nachos and watching me. I clench my eyes shut. ‘Yes, there’s a couch. We have a couch. It’s yours.’
He asks if tomorrow is too soon and I say it’s great. Then I say I have to go because my very stoned boss is glaring at me.
‘I wasn’t glaring,’ Michael says after I hang up. ‘I just thought I might have to go get my defibrillator for you.’
‘You know he’s never going to sleep on that sofa,’ Claudette says later, when I’m stuffing our filthy couch cushions into our biggest machines.
‘It’s not like that.’
‘Do you know how much you talk about this guy?’
‘It’s not like that for him. And even if it were, he wouldn’t. He never would.’
‘Right.’
She squats down behind the counter. I can hear her rifling through Michael’s stacks of CDs. She switches out the disc and ‘Jessie’s Girl’ comes blasting out of all eight speakers.
‘No, no, no,’ I say but she pulls me out near the door where there’s space and makes me dance with her.
The next afternoon I get off work and run up the hill. His car is there, his mom’s old red Chevy Nova. I touch it. It’s real. He’s here.
I climb the porch steps slowly. I hear Dylan playing through the window.
I see the back of his head. He’s on the freshly cleaned couch, my housemate Maxwell in the beanbag chair.
I listen at the screen door. Low rumbly talk about Blonde on Blonde.
He’s wearing a shirt I’ve never seen before.
His hand is on his knee, his long fingers thrumming along.
He is in my house. Dylan is singing about Johanna.
I step inside.
He jumps up.
‘You found the couch.’
‘I found the couch.’
‘Good drive?’
‘Good drive, yeah.’
We don’t hug. Maxwell watches our awkwardness. He has no plans to leave the room.
‘Thank you so much for this.’ He looks at Maxwell. ‘It will only be a night or two.’
Maxwell grins. ‘Uh huh.’ Maxwell slept on this couch for three months until a room opened up.
‘You hungry?’ Yash asks. ‘Should we get some dinner?’
I change out of my work clothes into my favorite summer dress, pale blue with big white buttons down the front. We’ve never had summer together. I force myself to breathe.
Then we’re in the Nova. I’d been in it a few times, Ivan up front, Sam and me in the back. We’d gone to a party in the woods somewhere. Another time we went to a barbeque restaurant in Raleigh. Now I’m in the passenger seat and Sam is in Europe and Yash looks over at me.
I want to tell him about Willie Sylvester. He asked me out at recess in sixth grade. I’d had a crush on him since third. ‘I feel like I’m in a dream,’ I said to him when he asked me. I feel like that again, in the passenger seat of Yash’s car.
‘Where to?’ he says.
I suggest Cate’s because it is a few miles out of town and I remember him saying once that they had the best bread pudding he ever tasted.
He looks relieved to have a destination, puts the car in gear, and pulls out slowly.
The Nova is at least fifteen years old. The smell, the seat fabric, the pebbly vinyl dashboard remind me of being little.
‘Did you grow up with this car?’
He smiles. ‘You can hear my mother screaming, can’t you?
’ He switches into a piercing Deep South accent.
‘You know what I think? I think all y’all are lazy butt bums!
’ He clenches the wheel and narrows his eyes at me then lifts himself up close to the rearview.
‘The three of you. Three lazy bird turds.’ He puts his eyes back on the road and pretends to swat everyone in the car.
‘Who were the other two?’
‘Arlo and Bean. They lived across the street. She yelled at them like they were her own. I was always with them.’
I ask if he saw them when he was home and he says that Arlo was working on an oil rig in Mississippi and Bean dropped out of school to manage a band called Stationery.
‘They’re going to be bigger than Toto, he told me, and I said, who the fuck is Toto, and he went crazy.
I still don’t know who Toto is and no one’s ever heard of Stationery, but Bean says they’re getting traction in Japan.
I have this scar on my lip’—he leans over to show me something I’ve seen a hundred times—‘because in fourth grade I said “Fly Like an Eagle” was a terrible song. He pushed me off my chair in homeroom and my front tooth went clean through. Oh shit, here we are.’ He turns into a dirt driveway.
Cate’s is a farmhouse. All the lights are on. He shuts off the engine and turns to me like he has no plans to get out of the car. ‘Who were your neighbors?’
I tell him about Mrs. Kane, her whispery voice and frizzy white dog and how she wrote books my mother wouldn’t let me read. ‘I tried to anyway, but they didn’t have them at our library.’
‘We’ll have to find them.’
‘We will.’ I look at him, then look away. I’m scared he’ll see how happy I am.
We walk up the farmhouse steps. It feels like a date, like something we’ve done many times with other people over the past few years but never with each other.
We don’t speak until the hostess asks us if we are two.
We follow her to a small corner table on the back porch.
It’s overlooking a flower garden. The plants have just been watered and the air is humid, dense with the smell of the roses and phlox below our feet.
A waitress comes over with a pitcher of tea.
She takes a book of matches from the pocket of her apron and lights the little candle in the glass holder in the center of the table.
There are no other students here. Everyone around us, including the waitress, is decades older.
We aren’t going to get interrupted or seen by anyone who knows Sam.
It’s just us. I have him all to myself. I take little glances of him looking at the menu, his thick hair falling across his forehead the way he likes it, his scarred lip.
I’ll never touch him. I know that. I don’t know what Sam has told him, but even if he believes Sam and I are truly broken up for the last time, he won’t cross that line.
He wouldn’t be here if that were a temptation.
There are plenty of other people he could have asked to stay with.
Once I think all this through, I relax. It’s not a date.
The waitress takes our drink order and leaves us alone in our corner on the porch. We look at each other and laugh.
I start to ask him what happened back home and he says at the same time, leaning in, ‘I was the one who pointed you out to Sam, you know.’
‘I thought it was when my stupid Bacon parody got read out loud.’
‘It wasn’t supposed to be a parody. “Contemporary imitation,” that was the assignment. But yours was a parody.’
‘I couldn’t help it.’
‘It was very funny.’
I take all the credit. I don’t say that it was the professor who made it funny.
‘It never occurs to me to be funny in writing. I always get so grim.’
‘But you’re such a funny guy.’
‘I know it.’ He widens his eyes in bewilderment and we laugh.
‘So that wasn’t why Sam noticed me?’
‘No, it was a little before that. And I noticed you. First.’
I look back down at the menu. I’m worried my blushing is making me sweat. I take a sip of the iced tea then blow into the glass and the air comes back cool on my face.
The waitress returns with two beers and takes our order. I hand back the paper menu quickly, hoping he doesn’t see it shaking.
‘So what happened back home?’
He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to talk about it.
‘Weren’t you going to work for your uncle at the paper?
’ His uncle Percy works at the Knoxville News Sentinel.
He told me once that Uncle Percy was like George Willard from Winesburg, Ohio, a newspaper man with big dreams stuck in his hometown forever.
But when Yash gave him the book and suggested the similarity, his uncle said, ‘You’re way off base, son. ’
‘Yeah, I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to be there.’
I thought there’d be more of a story.
He tells me he got a letter from Ivan in Dublin. ‘His first line was “I’ve seduced the landlord’s daughter.”’
‘Don’t tell me. He was incredible.’
‘Yes, he was. Off to Poland next, in time for the election.’
The elections in Poland are a source of contention on Pye Street. Solidarity is poised to defeat the Communist Party and possibly leave the Eastern Bloc. ‘The Marxists in my house are not happy,’ I say.
‘Marxists are never happy. There’s never quite enough purging or mass graves for them.’
‘Hungary could be next. Do you think it’s possible that it will all just collapse?’
‘And the wall comes down and everyone, even the Marxists, live happily ever after?’
‘More happily, at least.’