Heart the Lover (15)

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.’