Heart the Lover (14)

I stand there a while, then head toward home. At the foot of Pye Street is a laundromat called Bubble Time. I stop there next and look through the windows. It’s a funky place with good music and a café, indoor and outdoor seating. The walls are psychedelic colors and the machines are painted, too, each one a different animal. You feed your clothes into the mouth of a lion or an orca. I’ve heard it’s hard to get a job here. They pay over minimum wage, and there are tips from the café plus the tip jar at the register that’s always overflowing. Supposedly the couple that owns it sells drugs from the shed in the back parking lot.

It’s quiet when I go in, two people reading on a couch and the owner—Lorna—beside the register. She doesn’t look up. She’s swirling a paintbrush around in a glass of green water. When I get to the counter I can see her painting, a centaur holding a piece of fruit—a female centaur, with long hair, bangs, and breasts.

‘That’s lovely,’ I say, because it is.

She looks up at me.

‘Are you hiring?’

She holds her paintbrush up like she’s outlining my face. ‘Sure. Why not?’

Bubble Time is where I meet Claudette. Claudette is an incorrigible flirt. She’s most of the reason for the stuffed tip jar. There are always guys hanging around long after their laundry is done. Her other job is at H?agen-Dazs. I meet her there when she closes at eleven and we eat mounds of ice cream, lock up, and go to Don’t Answer, an outside bar with picnic tables and kegs along the fence. With Claudette you always met a guy, a fellow sidekick. I dance with them on the hardpacked dirt and go home alone. I like my room on Pye Street. I push the beds together and keep a stash of books beside me and read late into the night and early in the morning. I start reading Don Quixote for Dr. Gastrell’s seminar in the fall. I take notes. I write a short story, only five pages, the first one I’ve written that was not for a class. I like it. It has a different flavor somehow. It feels entirely my own.

There’s an oversized astrology calendar on the wall behind the counter at Bubble Time. Inside each day’s box are suggestive planet positions like Wet Venus in Aquarius or Sextile Jupiter in Scorpio. I flip past June to September 3, a Tuesday, the day I would have the first class with Yash. Mercury-Saturn Square, it says, unsexily.

I keep my eye on that calendar. I note the day Sam flies to Barcelona. He is gone. He’s left the country. Claudette and I go to Don’t Answer that night. They’re only playing Prince, and everyone gets up on the picnic tables for ‘1999.’

The next morning there’s a note pushed through the nail on my door:

Yash called




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.