CHAPTER FOUR
Everything That’s Between Us and
All
I slept later than I
intended the next morning, and when I went down to make myself
something for breakfast, my mother had already gone to the
hospital. An unopened box of Honey Nut Cheerios – which I ate
practically every morning while I was still living at home – sat on
the counter. I hadn’t eaten them in years, but my mother couldn’t
have known that. I threw a couple of slices of bread in the toaster
and poured myself a cup of coffee while I waited.
I hadn’t been
completely alone in the house in nearly ten years. For some reason,
I felt that I should take the opportunity to examine things more
closely, the whole-place equivalent of checking out the medicine
cabinet. I walked into the den, sat in my father’s recliner, and
looked around the room. There was a book on the coffee table that
they’d brought back from a trip to the Grand Canyon a few years
before. There was a photo of my mother standing uncomfortably (the
only way she ever posed for pictures) next to her goddaughter Lisa
on the weekend of Lisa’s wedding. The Raku vase I’d given them for
their thirtieth anniversary sat on a shelf next to the television,
at complete odds with all of the other adornments in the room. And
the old tapestry throw pillows had been replaced by a set of navy
velour ones. Other than that, the room looked exactly as it did
before I moved out. They still had Chase’s lacrosse trophies lined
up on one bookshelf. The set of ceramic candlesticks he’d made in
seventh grade and given to my mother for Christmas sat next to my
vase. My parents’ wedding picture was on one side of the fireplace
and the photograph of them renewing their vows twenty years later
was on the other. The frames with our high school photos hung on
another wall. I suppose when you’ve been living in the same house
for as long as my parents have, you stop thinking about making
changes.
I heard the bread pop
up in the toaster and returned to the kitchen. The local daily
paper, the Amber Advisor, sat on the
kitchen table and I absently perused the front page while I ate.
There might have been unrest all over the globe, a crippling
political scandal in Washington, or a life altering scientific
breakthrough commanding the headlines of the New York Times or the Boston
Globe. But the Advisor reserved
the space above the fold for matters of traffic lights, Amber
High’s SAT scores, and the visit of a Lithuanian folk musician to
the Community Center.
Just as they’d
reserved it ten years earlier for the report of an accident on the
Pine River Bridge that had claimed the life of the
eighteen-year-old son of a prominent Amber shopkeeper. I hadn’t
read the paper that morning, in fact didn’t remember seeing any
newspaper in the house for several days after the accident. But
just before I’d left town, I’d found the issue with the story
sitting on top of a pile of other “commemorative newspapers” on my
aunt’s bookshelf. I’d frozen at the sight and then walked away
without reading more than the headline.
After I finished
eating, I headed to the store. A college-age woman stood behind the
counter reading a copy of Entertainment
Weekly. She didn’t look up when I entered and I think I
could have taken the entire front display of stuffed toys out the
door without her noticing. Only when I walked behind the counter
did she pay me any attention.
“You the son?” she
said.
“Yeah, hi. You’re . .
.”
“Tab.” She moved her
head back and forth quickly as though she was shaking off excess
water. “Tabitha. I hate that name, so I make it as short as I can.
No one calls me Tabitha.”
“I’ll keep that in
mind.”
“Yeah, thanks.” She
looked back down at the magazine and turned a page. Clearly, this
was all the information she thought it was important for us to
exchange.
“Where’s Tyler?” I
asked.
She kept her eyes on
the magazine while she answered. “He doesn’t come in on Fridays.
Some independent study thing or something.”
“So he’s not going to
be here at all today?”
“Not unless he’s
planning to surprise us.”
She turned another
page. I wondered if I should apologize for breaking her
concentration. A customer walked up to the register and Tab moved
over so I could ring him up. For the first time since I had been
back in the store, I felt an urge to flash the authority that was
my birthright. I got over it and helped the customer. A few minutes
later, I suggested to Tab that there might be shelves that needed
restocking or merchandise that needed straightening and she
laboriously closed the magazine and walked to the back of the
store.
The stock guy, Carl,
was working again, but as was the case the day before, I saw him
only on the occasions when he wandered up from the back room. With
Tab tinkering at whatever she was tinkering at, I was alone behind
the counter to register a few sales and answer a couple of customer
questions. None of it was particularly taxing and, while I was
slightly irritated at Tab’s laxity, it was hard to fault her. The
closest thing to a challenge came just before lunchtime when the
candy vendor showed up – the same man who had sold my father candy
ten years earlier – to take an order for the next week. To keep
myself entertained, I reviewed every item available on the vendor’s
stock list and ordered a box of BlisterSnax.
“You sure about
this?” the salesman said. “Your dad doesn’t usually carry
these.”
“We’re gonna take a
walk on the wild side.”
That marketing
experiment addressed, I navigated my way through what stood for a
lunchtime rush and then settled into the long lull that typified
the early afternoon. Without Tyler there to talk to, and with very
few customers to deal with, I had no choice but to think about the
way the night before had ended. I hadn’t been conscious of how much
I wanted to kiss Iris again until I was actually kissing her. I was
certainly aware of how much I enjoyed talking to her, how beautiful
she seemed to me, and how I felt – especially that second night –
that I was beginning to get to know her in a new way. And of
course, I was aware that I simply saw her differently than I saw
most other women. But it wasn’t until she reached for me, until we
were actually kissing, that I realized how much I wanted her
physically. It was like exiting the highway expecting to eat at
Denny’s and finding The French Laundry instead.
And at the same time
as I was buckling under the sensual weight of the kiss, I was
sucker punched by the emotional impact. I hadn’t been smitten for a
long time, but when Iris kissed me, there was so much possibility
to the act that I allowed my mind to race. I began to calculate the
distance from Springfield to Lenox, to think that New Mexico (one
of the destinations I’d been considering) could wait for a while,
all immediately in the seconds after our lips first touched. And
when we continued to kiss, I swear I had actual visions of Iris and
me walking together and holding hands. It wasn’t simply a kiss; it
was a time altering act transporting my sensibility back to my
junior year of college.
And then she pulled
away. And there was that shake of her head, that muttering about
“gathering her wits,” that look in her eyes. It was a different
look from the one Iris had given me when we kissed ten years before
but, like that look, it suggested that she had experienced our
moment differently than I had. And I didn’t know what to make of
it. After all, she had reached for me. But in the end, something
about kissing me, something about an act that had sent my
imagination whirling, had caused her to retreat into
herself.
It felt a little
strange to me that while I had been kissing Iris this time, I
hadn’t thought about Chase at all. In fact, I hadn’t thought about
Chase until I was back in the bar with a double espresso. I’d
played a medley of guilt and frustration before settling into the
slow jam of confusion that I was still working on while I stood in
the store.
As Amber High let
out, the place got a little busier, allowing me to move on to other
things, at least occasionally. Tab’s shift ended and a high school
senior named Merry came on. Merry didn’t seem to take the store any
more seriously than Tab had, but she was at least willing to make
the effort to ring up a greeting card or show a customer where the
all-occasion wrapping paper was.
Merry had been in the
store about fifteen minutes when Iris walked in. I went over to her
as soon as I saw her and then pulled up short when I got within
five feet, suddenly remembering that her personal space was
decidedly not mine.
“Do you have a couple
of minutes?” she asked. I nodded and we started walking down the
street.
“I’m getting ready to
head back home,” she said, and then added, pointing back in the
other direction, “the dog’s already in the car.”
“I’m glad you stopped
by. It was really good seeing you the last few days.”
“Yeah, it was great
seeing you.” She looked over at me quickly and then looked back
ahead. “I didn’t want to leave without talking to you a little
about what happened last night.”
I assumed that
anything I said at that point would either be inappropriate or make
me feel foolish, so I simply kept listening.
“I was a little
surprised when that happened,” she said. “I mean, I know it was me
who started it, but I was just a little surprised that I did it. It
had just been so good talking to you and it was kind of fun seeing
you after all this time. And it just brought up a lot of stuff –
good stuff. You said that thing about missing me and I just got . .
. inspired, I guess. Then when we kissed, it was a lot more intense
than I was expecting it to be.”
“I felt that, too,” I
said, still not entirely sure where this was going and hoping that
letting her know that I shared the experience might
help.
She pursed her lips
and didn’t make eye contact. “That’s why it would be a really big
mistake to do anything with it.”
Even though only a
few minutes before I hadn’t been sure that I was ever going to see
her again and was positive that if I did she would say something
like this, I felt deflated. “What do you mean?”
“You know, with
everything that’s between us and all.” I could see out of the
corner of my eye that she glanced over at me. “You aren’t going to
tell me that it wouldn’t feel very weird if we actually went after
this, are you?”
“I’m not sure what
I’m thinking about it, to tell you the truth.”
“Yeah, well, there’s
a major difference between the two of us. I’ve been thinking about
it constantly since last night.”
I could have – in
fact should have – clarified myself, but there didn’t seem to be
much point to it. By the time I was out of college, I had decided
that no relationship was worth pursuing if the pursuit required
convincing the other party. The fact that Iris had come to the
store – with the dog waiting to go home – with the express purpose
of clearing up any romantic misinterpretations I might have had was
enough to make me just wish the entire encounter was over. I simply
laughed, turned, and took a couple of steps in the direction of her
car.
“Can I meet your
dog?” I said.
Iris’ expression
relaxed. She was clearly unsure of how I was going to react to what
she had to say and was relieved that I was letting her off the
hook. We walked toward the car. When the dog saw her, it pressed
its nose against the side window, fogging it with its
breath.
“Big guy,” I said.
“What is it?”
“It’s a Wheaton
Terrier. And a gal.”
“This huge thing is a
terrier?”
“Yeah, I know. She’s
really friendly.” Iris opened the passenger door and the dog came
bounding out, jumping up on Iris and then doing the same to me. She
calmed when I pet her, but then left our side and jumped back into
the car.
“She kinda likes road
trips,” Iris said.
“Maybe I should get
one of these to come with me to the southwest. Do they like the
Dave Matthews Band?”
Iris took her car
keys out of her jacket and walked toward her side of the
car.
“When do you think
you’re going to go?” she said.
“I’m not sure yet. I
need to find out what’s going on with my father and then I have to
take care of some stuff in Springfield. I have to do a little more
research on the place, too. I’m not that spontaneous. I’m thinking New Mexico. Maybe by
the end of the month.”
She nodded and I
thought she was going to say something else. But again she seemed
to fix on something in the distance. After a moment, she looked
into my eyes.
“Let’s stay in touch,
okay?” she said.
“Yeah,
sure.”
“I mean it. It was
really good seeing you. And I really
liked talking to you the last couple of nights. I always did. You
were a good friend, Hugh, not just Chase’s brother. Don’t let what
happened last night get in the way. I don’t want to completely lose
touch with you again.”
I closed the dog’s
door. “I’ll write you when I get out to wherever I’m going. Maybe
you can visit sometime. And I’m sure I’ll be back here every now
and then to check on my parents. Maybe our trips will coincide
again.”
“That would be good.”
She came over and kissed me on the cheek. Then she opened her car
door. “I’ve gotta get on the road. Stay in touch, though. I mean
it.”
I nodded and she got
into the car. I said good-bye to the dog and then watched as Iris
drove off.
Before going back
into the store, I took a side trip to the chocolate shop. I bought
a hazelnut truffle and a dark chocolate toffee, and then went to
Bean There, Done That for a triple espresso. I planned to take them
back to the store with me, but changed my mind and sat on one of
the sidewalk benches until I finished.
Russet Avenue
pedestrians had begun the annual process of slowing their pace for
the upcoming season. The winter’s brisk and purposeful headlong
charge began to relax in early March. By the beginning of April,
you could see walkers stopping to talk with one another on the
street, examining shop windows, and simply getting from here to
there with less velocity. As a kid, I’d loved getting a couple of
quarters from my father for ice cream from Layton’s Fountain Shop
(now replaced by The Cone Connection) on days like this one. I
would sit on a bench, peripherally watching the passersby, but
essentially taking as long as possible to enjoy whatever flavor I’d
chosen that day, all the while forestalling my favorite part, which
was eating the melted ice cream that gathered at the bottom of the
very last bite of cone. Early April days were especially appealing,
because it was warm enough to sit outside comfortably, but not so
warm as to make the ice cream get soft too fast. A few months
later, I would need to lick much more deliberately and it simply
wasn’t as much fun.
Sitting with my two
pieces of chocolate and my coffee wasn’t as idyllic. Still, there
was the feeling I remembered with absolute precision of being
completely unmoved to action. Then as now, being on a bench on a
warm spring day in Amber seemed the best possible alternative to
whatever else was going on in my life.
A teenaged couple
walked by with a small dog bouncing at their heels. I wondered what
Iris thought about when she was “constantly” thinking about our
latest kiss. Was there ever a point during this when she thought
that perhaps we should see what would happen between us? Or did she
spend all of this time thinking about how she was going to tell me
that nothing was possible? As much as I wanted to shrug aside her
dismissal the way I had with other women over the years, I knew
that this was unrealistic. It would be pointless for me to write
off what had happened the night before. Even before we’d kissed,
I’d known that I was being drawn to her all over
again.
And yet it would be
equally pointless for me to go after it. There was nothing about
the way Iris had approached me this afternoon that suggested
equivocation. She hadn’t said what she’d said because she wanted me
to protest or because she was unsure of her feelings. Iris had made
one thing abundantly clear: no matter what we were like when we
were together, we could never take that to another level because of
what I represented.
That was a wall I
felt utterly incapable of scaling. And as I bit into the second
chocolate, I realized that I was at least somewhat relieved. There
was no way that a romantic relationship wasn’t going to be fraught
with the kind of emotional gymnastics I’d been doing for the past
fifteen hours. She was and would forever be Chase’s last
girlfriend.
I finished the
chocolate and took the rest of the espresso back with me into the
store.