Atmosphere(38)

Joan frowned. “Maybe I’m just a nice person,” she said.

Vanessa shook her head. “No, I bet it was because of all the drama with Barbara.”

Joan blinked. “Would you like me to psychoanalyze you?”

“It would be too easy—I’m too rich a subject.”

“Well, don’t do it to me.”

“Fine. What time is it?”

Joan looked at her watch. “A little after five.”

“Blow off Griff and come get a beer with me.”

“Why won’t you just join us?”

“Because I just want to get a beer with you.”

Joan considered this. “I don’t know . . .”

“Doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me to just leave a note on his door saying you need a rain check,” Vanessa said.

Joan bit her lip, unsure. “Okay,” she said finally, with the spirited verve of someone agreeing to break the law.

Vanessa popped down off the counter and pulled Joan toward the door. “I’m driving.”


Vanessa took Joan to a dive bar outside the city with a dirt parking lot, sticky tables, and dollar bills pinned to the ceiling. Someone was feeding coins to the jukebox to keep it playing Willie Nelson.

They’d been there a couple of hours and had had a few beers. Which was why Joan was tipsy enough to tell Vanessa about Adam Hawkins, the neighborhood boy who wanted to marry her.

“He was good-looking?” Vanessa asked.

“Yeah.” Joan shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. Barbara always thought he was cute. We went out on dates here and there, to the movies and some parties together. He was fine.”

“Did you like him?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. Which I think means no.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

“Oh, my gosh, no.”

“But the two of you kissed?”

“Sometimes, sure.”

“So he was your boyfriend.”

“I don’t know about that. He was a boy I dated, and it was clear our parents wanted us to get married. And he did, too.”

“How is that not a boyfriend?”

“I think of a boyfriend as someone you love. I never loved him. I would know if I’d fallen in love.”

“Have you ever?”

“What?”

“Have you ever fallen in love?”

Joan glanced down at her fingernails. “No,” she said, looking back up.

Vanessa nodded, absorbing it all. “Because you haven’t met the right person?”

“I don’t know. Or . . . maybe it’s just not my thing.”

“What’s not your thing?”

“Falling in love, getting married.”

Vanessa cocked her head and finished her beer. “So there’s this nice, handsome guy, and your family liked him. And he asks if you could see yourself marrying him and you said no?”

“Yes?”

“If a different boy had asked, would your answer have been the same?”

“I think so.”

“I’m impressed, Joan Goodwin.”

“What? Why?”

“It puts you in a different context, that’s all,” she said. She wasn’t slurring her words, but there was a laziness to her mouth.

The table was a mess. The empty beer pitcher—the foam drying along the sides—hadn’t been cleared. What was left of their burgers sat off to the side. The air smelled acrid. The bar was quiet for a moment as the song changed over. When a new one started, Joan recognized it as “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

Vanessa started humming along.

Joan realized she was sweating. “What context does it add?” she asked.

“You could have married a nice handsome guy and had some kids. Happily ever after and all that. It would have been easier than all this,” she said, gesturing to the restaurant around her as if it were NASA itself. “But you didn’t go that route.”

“Neither did you.”

“Well, right, but . . . I never could have. Whereas it seems like you had the option.”

Joan gazed down at the remains of her meal. “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”

Vanessa looked at her, inviting her to explain.

“Marrying Adam Hawkins and being a wife? Waiting at home and making dinner every night? My mom is so good at that stuff, but I never looked at her and saw myself. I know that hurt her feelings. I know that me choosing a different life didn’t quite make sense to her at first. But I think choosing that other life, her life, would have been very hard. I think it would have been one of the hardest things I’d had to do. I chose the only life I knew how to choose.”

“I was trying to compliment you,” Vanessa said. “But you look insulted.”

Joan shook her head. “No, I just . . . Don’t make it out like life in the suburbs is easy. Life’s not easy for anybody, first of all. And second of all, I’ve never fit in there. That life, in particular, would not have been natural for me at all.”

Joan could feel Vanessa studying her face. But then Vanessa pulled back and put her arm on the back of her chair. She sat slumped ever so slightly, with her knees apart. When she sat like this in bars or buses, Joan cringed a bit.