“Yes, yes. Sorry. I just spilled coffee all over myself. How are you, Eliza?”
“I’m very fine, thank you. I just wanted to touch base with you about tomorrow. Give you directions and all that.”
Tomorrow? Was it really tomorrow? She needed a pedicure, a new bathing suit.
“Sure. Sure. I was going to call you today.” Amy looked at the rooster clock on the far wall: eight sharp. “What can I do to help?”
“Well, I’ve already talked to the kids and they’re all set. We’re all just going to have the best time.” Eliza’s words sounded robotic, prerecorded.
“Well, we’re really looking forward to our time at the lake. And it’ll be great for Molly and . . . What’s your son’s name who is the same age as Molly?”
“Alex.”
“Well, it’ll be nice for Molly and Alex to meet.”
“You’re bringing Molly?”
“Well, yes. She’s part of the family. Aren’t you bringing your boys?”
“Well, they have wrestling practice and all. I was going to leave them with my parents.”
“I don’t have . . .” Amy took a deep breath and Eliza filled in the gap.
“Can your daughter stay with friends this weekend?”
“I’ve already told her she could come.”
“Well . . .” Eliza paused while Amy waited and knew what the silence was for—Amy’s chance to give in, but she wouldn’t. Eliza must give in or be the worst of all Southern epitaphs—a bitch.
“Molly and Alex would have a lovely time together, I’m sure. Max has a wrestling match . . . so he can’t come, but . . . I’ll bring Alex,” Eliza said.
“Okay . . . well, tell me what I can do to help.”
Directions obtained, meals assigned, Amy hung up. Throughout the conversation, Amy had realized Eliza had assumed she and Phil went to college together. She didn’t correct Eliza, didn’t tell her that she hadn’t dated Phil until she had discovered Nick wouldn’t be returning from his trip to Costa Rica.
Phil was from their hometown, Darby, but hadn’t gone to Saxton University. The people Amy had always known were his friends, too; their lives had been intertwined since they’d been delivered in the same county hospital two months apart, since they’d attended the same nursery school. They were never close friends, or even casual friends, despite knowing each other.
Phil’s parents couldn’t afford an out-of-state university, so he’d gone to the local community college. Studies, books and high grades had come easily to him, therefore frequent time at a university not his own hadn’t caused a dent in his academic prowess. He’d had the pleasure of watching and vaguely participating in the Saxton rituals and parties without ever becoming wholly part of them. Even now if you asked an alumnus would say Phil went to school with him. Amy had always perceived him on the outskirts, part of the scenery but never the center of it. It wasn’t until she’d needed the comfort of his familiarity that she had finally noticed him waiting for her. His aloofness became part of his attraction, his separateness part of his belonging.
She sat at the kitchen table after hanging up with Eliza and ran her fingernails along the grooves and marks on its surface. She followed the small numbers and letters pressed there over years of homework assignments.
“Get it together,” she mumbled out loud to herself. There were things to do. Eliza had asked her to make one lunch and one breakfast this weekend. She’d use this chance to show off her homemaking expertise. No prepacked sandwiches for the Lowry lake house.
Amy pulled down a set of cookbooks from the kitchen shelf. If she focused, some thick cement of obligation would obstruct thoughts of Nick.
But she couldn’t find the magic recipe—or the will—to stop the escalating memories of the night she met Nick Lowry.
Chapter Four
The congested room reeked of stale beer and the sweet-rotten smell of human contact. Sweat trickled down the back of Amy Malone’s neck. Her skin felt thick under her blouse and she wished she hadn’t worn long sleeves. The frigid air outside had fooled her into believing that she wouldn’t sweat in the airless, windowless cinder-block basement of the Kappa Alpha house. She’d lost her roommate, Carol Anne, the minute they walked in the door and she didn’t know a soul in the room.
She glanced around; there was a boy with a cleft lip smiling at her, a boy with a pledge pin on his Izod shirt being convinced to drink beer through a long plastic tube: funneling. A frightened look clouded his face, and she imagined that he wished he were home in his adolescent bedroom dreaming of college, not facing the reality. She turned from him, walked toward the bar, hoping for ice water and a glimpse of Carol Anne.
A slime-thin mixture of substances she would rather not think about coated the floor, and she realized she was ruining her JCPenney shoes.
“Excuse me. Sorry.” She bumped her way to a slab of plywood on top of old kegs—a makeshift bar. Fraternity pledges stood dutifully dispensing beer from a silver keg into red plastic cups for girls they could never hope to lay a hand on that year. They would wait for their time on the other side of the bar.
“Water,” Amy yelled across the plywood.
“Water?” a boy with a pimply face asked.
She couldn’t look at him; his blemishes made her feel soft inside, sorry for him. “Yes, water. I am dying here. A big water.”
“What?” He obviously couldn’t hear a word she said over the thumping Rolling Stones screaming about finding satisfaction.
“Water. Water. Water,” she screamed as the vibrating bodies of the crowd swayed in an animalistic grind to the music. Everyone in the room moved to the same universal rhythm, while she stood rigid and unaffected.
The pimpled pledge searched for water and finally held out a lukewarm cup. Amy took it, chugged its contents, and nausea plowed through her. She pushed her shoulder up against a side door: escape. The door opened and she fell ungracefully on her Levi’s into the yard of the imitation antebellum mansion. She looked toward the sloping front lawn, through the magnolia trees frozen in their winter waiting, to the white pillars anchoring the roof to the front verandah. The architecture mixed two separate Southern historical periods. She scoffed at the sloppy counterfeit.
“There would never be a party like this at a real Southern home,” she whispered to herself, lifting her face to the cool air. The smell of night-blooming jasmine cleansed the stench of the party from her head.
“Excuse me.” A hand reached down and touched her shoulder as she sat on the hard, cold earth. She started, but the air fanned out to allow room for this voice. She didn’t hesitate when she reached for the hand belonging to the disembodied sound, allowed it to lift her from the ground.
Amy stumbled to her feet. “Huh?”
“Are you, my darlin’, implying that we, the KAs of the South, are not truly Southern?”
“You heard me?”
“Ah . . .”
Amy laughed, decided to join in the playful banter. “Well, sugah . . . are you a true Southern gentleman?” She found herself answering this boy as if she knew him, and in an odd way, she felt she did. The full moon lit one side of his face, his jawline a shadow across his neck, his eyelashes casting a feather on his brow. His hair corkscrewed around his right ear and a thin layer of stubble covered his chin. It wasn’t any single attribute, but the combination that caused her insides to quiver—something broke loose, leaving part of her exposed.
He laughed. “Am I a true Southern gentleman? Ashley Wilkes, maybe?”
“No, you seem more the Rhett Butler type.” Her body began to shift to the rhythm that the others inside siphoned from the Rolling Stones.
He stepped from the shadows into the moth-diffused ring of light from the bulb over the back door; she stared at him. His shadow swallowed hers, overcame it, and she couldn’t find her own outline on the yard underneath his bulked shape. A shiver trailed do
wn her legs.
His brown hair fell to the side—curly, hiding his left eye. She wanted to brush the curl aside so that she could see where the black of his pupil ended and the deep copper color began. His stance was wide—his legs apart as if he were leaning back against an invisible wall. His jeans were ripped at the knee and he wore a wrinkled white button-down shirt, a jean jacket.
A moth flew into his hair and she reached to shoo it away. He didn’t move.
“Well,” she said when she felt she could speak again. “I don’t believe real Southern gentlemen lurk outside back doors.”
“They do if they’re protecting the innocent girls inside. I was instructed that no true Southern belle leaves unescorted. It is my assigned duty.” He bowed, revealing the hair at the back of his neck. She almost reached to touch it—discover what it felt like, if it was bristly or fine.
“You mean making sure they don’t escape.”
“You.” He lifted her chin so she directly faced the light. “I won’t let you escape.”
Her blood ran thicker, warmer, in the instant his finger touched her face. The cloying warmth of the basement party seemed to return. She pulled her face away from him. “I guess you’ll just have to tell the troops that you failed in your mission. I’m leaving.”
She walked away from him, feeling she was escaping some potential danger; a parachute jump where the chute wouldn’t have opened.
He called after her. “Don’t go without telling me your name.”
She kept walking, digging the car keys out of her purse.
“Ah, but tomorrow is another day,” he called after her, repeating the final line of Gone with the Wind.
How unoriginal, she thought—just another frat boy trying to get laid. “That’s my line,” she called back, without turning around.
His laugh carried over the night air—grainy, deep and as “too much” as his body and eyes. She began to jog to her car. She wanted to be in her VW with Billy Joel’s latest eight-track turned up as loud as it would go, with the car’s cloth seats absorbing this vibration she knew as her body’s signal of danger. At that moment, she couldn’t have been more thankful to her mother for winning the fight with her daddy about having a car in college. Her mother had finally convinced him that it was actually safer for Amy to have her own transportation than to be at the mercy of other students. So her daddy had given in, but he had bought her the cheapest stick-shift station wagon he could find in Darby, Georgia. She was allowed to have a car, but she wasn’t allowed to be a show-off about it.
The cool air began to seep down her neck, drying the sweat. Although she knew she shouldn’t leave Carol Anne unescorted at the party, she longed only for what she thought of as the me-filled dorm room. Carol Anne was the one who got her invited to this party, Carol Anne could find a way home—this would not be a difficult task for her.
Amy wanted to bury her head in the pillow that smelled like mother’s laundry at home—an aroma Amy hadn’t been able to duplicate in the dorm quad’s clanging laundry even when she used the same detergent. Now she brought the sheets home every other week. She thought of it as the magic smell of home—a potion Mother wouldn’t give her the recipe for, as it kept her returning with her overflowing pink laundry basket.
Her parents lived only two hours away and Amy had the freedom to escape when college life overwhelmed her. Of course, she would never admit to the need for escape; she was only coming home to get her laundry done. She felt sad for the girls from farther away, the ones who were relegated to holiday visits with family. Their muffled cries of homesickness and the whispered calls on the hall phone to parents they pretended were boyfriends saddened her, made her appreciate how lucky she was.
The dorm room she shared with Carol Anne was just like the other rooms that ran up and down the hall, up and down a thousand buildings like it on campuses across the kudzu-covered South. Brick buildings holding rooms with posters taped crooked and tattered on the walls, filled with bedspreads and pillows bought with parents the weeks before school started, in a frenzy to claim one’s own space in a mass of uniformity. Gaudy colors and crisp sheets filled the rooms the first day. Framed pictures of family and friends sat on gunmetal desks and bedside tables in an attempt to conjure up their love and presence in a chaotic world of books and competition.
Amy’s bedspread was blue and green plaid. She’d chosen it from the Sears catalog and had thought it grown-up and classy. When she’d first smoothed the quilt across her dorm-room bed and lain on top of it, she’d realized with a twist of sadness that she was no different than any other freshman putting her quilt on her bed.
Now, curling beneath the covers, she felt somehow that in meeting the boy with no name, in touching his hand, in allowing him to touch her face, she had become a tiny bit of an individual; maybe she could claim something different than the sameness surrounding her. She tried to sleep, but found herself in a spiral, never quite reaching its end. She would begin to fall asleep, then startle to the touch of the boy’s hand on her chin, to the flash of his jaw. She tossed against the sheets as she heard his gravely drawl thicken her sleepless fatigue.
Carol Anne’s drunken attempts to navigate the minefield of their dorm room—full of books, laundry and clothing they’d tried on but discarded that night before going out—thoroughly woke Amy. In the full dark, Carol Anne cursed each shoe and book she tripped on.
“You can turn the light on, Carol Anne.”
“Oh, you’re awake. My loyal roommate is awake.” Carol Anne flicked on the overhead light and Amy buried her head under the pillow.
“I believe the bedside lamp would have done just fine.”
“Oh, but you deserve it. Leaving me all alone at the KA house. My, my, what would our dorm mother say if she knew the sainted Amy left her roommate at a fraternity keg party?”
“I couldn’t find you anywhere. I looked.”
“So you just left.”
“Hmm.”
Carol Anne giggled, hiccuped. “I’m glad you did. I got a ride home with the evening’s designated protector of innocent young ladies.” Carol Anne sat on the side of the bed, pulled a cigarette from beneath the mattress and lit it.
“Don’t, Carol Anne. You’re going to get us expelled from the dorm. Go outside.”
“Don’t you want to hear about this delicious boy?”
“I’m glad you found a ride home. Now go to bed and sleep it off. I have a study group at eight a.m. I’m gonna be a wreck.”
“Who in the living passion has a study group on a Saturday morning?”
Carol Anne was always doing this: sounding as if she was going to say “who in the living hell” and then replacing the word “hell” with some other word that struck her fancy. And never the same word twice. Passion, Amy thought, was a good choice for the evening.
“I have a chemistry midterm on Monday,” Amy said.
“Oh, yeah, that’s why I don’t take chemistry. That would be your fault for having an architecture major . . . not mine.”
“I’m finding a new roommate first thing in the morning.”
“Oh, no, you’re not. You adore me, and where would you find such a complementary and perfectly opposite companion to complete your soul?” Carol Anne took one more drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out on top of her history book.
“Carol Anne, you should be a drama major. Now leave me alone.”
Carol Anne turned off the light, stumbled into the bathroom they shared with their suite-mates. The sink gurgled its ancient song down rusted pipes—a song heard by hundreds of other freshman girls.
Amy fastened her mind to this—to the water, to the dorm, and to the chemistry midterm. She began to picture the neat rows of numbers and their conclusions: only one answer for each row, no maybes. She saw the white test paper in front of her. Then a hand landed on the paper, large enough to lift her chin to a muted overhead light and copper eyes.
Damn. She opened her eyes to the morphed shapes of her dorm room. She would imagine her home in Darby; her bed, her room. She envisioned her childhood room in sequential order, used it as a sedative to assuage the body-humming thoughts of the boy at the back door. She began to fall into a misted gray oblivion.
Carol Anne banged back into the room; she had more to tell.
“Ooh, Ame. You should’ve seen the adorable boy who brought me home. I’m going to find him again. He was absolutely edible.”
Amy considered telling Carol Anne about the boy she had met at the door, then she decided she wouldn’t speak of him. She lacked the words to describe him; it was as if she needed another language to explain how he made her feel—a language she wasn’t sure she was ready to learn.
“If I know you . . . you at least got a taste of how edible he actually was.”
“Well, thanks for your confidence, Ame, but he was a perfect gentleman. Nick Lowry. Even his name is cool. I am going to find him. Ask him to the formal next weekend.”
“You already asked Cameron.”
“I did, didn’t I? Guess I’ll have to come up with something extremely creative.”
“You’re the worst.”
“I think you’re mixing up the word ‘worst’ with the word ‘amazing.’ ‘You’re the most amazing’ is what I think you meant to say. Someday in your old age you’ll appreciate me.”
“Not tonight, Carol Anne. Not tonight.”
Carol Anne laughed, then abruptly fell asleep. Amy listened to her soft, rhythmic breathing—a lullaby for Amy as she finally fell into a blank-slate sleep without copper eyes and large hands.
Chapter Five
Nick stood in the back hall, the hum of the air conditioner the only noise he heard except for the vague thumping sound of the boys, obviously wrestling each other, in the upstairs hall. Only four days had passed since Nick had seen Amy, and the reality of her, of her son dating his daughter, had only begun to sink into his consciousness. He walked into the kitchen, set his briefcase on the kitchen floor and lifted the mail from the counter. He did the same thing every damn day—walked in the house, dropped his scarred leather briefcase in the same spot on the floor, sifted through the mail. Any second now, Eliza would come in and kiss him on the cheek and ask him about his day—and he would tell her it was fine, just fine. How had he settled into these routines?
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