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Deja vu All Over Again

Page 23

by Larry Brill


  Tears came back, but they comforted her this time. Her mother was right. The father in those earlier years, the one she had forgotten, was full of life. He really was Nate-like. The father she remembered was steady, reliable, loving but distant in a way that left her craving his attention and more grateful when she got it—like Russell. She ran the tip of her finger tracing the top of the slide carousel in its full circle.

  That was life.

  Two in one back then. Two men in her life now. One of them goofy, who made her feel loved, and the other one who made her feel grounded and safe. Good grief.

  She continued reminiscing through vacations, Christmases and birthdays, with Julie growing up and Dad growing middle-aged. Then she came upon one of her favorite slides, a picture of her father straddling his motorcycle parked in the driveway. She had taken that one herself and guessed it was early in high school. Julie fingered the button on the remote control to move to the next slide when she stopped and drew a startled breath. How could she have forgotten? How could she have looked at that picture through the years without noticing the grinning, fuzzy-focused face peeking over her father’s shoulder. Nate was sitting on the motorcycle behind Dad, but over the years he had become nothing more than a tree or a house or some other bit of irrelevant background to fill the scene. Now he was back. And she noticed. She pulled a pillow to her chest and leaned into her knees.

  Tony and Nate had just returned from a ride around the neighborhood. It was Nate’s first time on a motorcycle. She couldn’t remember why he had been at the house that Saturday. Maybe it was a Sunday, but they mugged for her camera like best pals, thrilled to be together. Mother said that Tony had always wanted a son. For whatever reason, it never happened. Julie laid back on the bed and buried her nose in the pillow, amused by the irony that the picture suggested, if Nate had played his cards right, he’d never be Tony’s son but he might have ended up being his son-in-law.

  She tossed the pillow aside, its winter flannel fabric too rough and too warm against her face. She stopped smiling.

  Prom night had been a disaster, but what she remembered more was the shithead Nate became afterwards. Some days she thought he was avoiding her. And on days when they were hanging out with friends, he wouldn’t talk with her much and laughed less than he did with the others. She confronted him about it one time, and he mumbled an apology and looked into her eyes. What she saw was pity before he shuffled away. She wanted to forgive him. She would do anything to forgive him, but he wouldn’t let her. And now it pissed her off.

  Thirty minutes later, she was sitting at the IHOP across from Nate. It was near midnight, and she had been surprised that he was there to answer her call.

  “I was writing,” he said. He asked about her mother. That was sweet of him. She replied Mom was doing as well as could be expected and the prognosis was good. But she didn’t call him in the middle of the night in need of a shoulder to cry on.

  She asked how things had gone at school since they got back from the break. She was stalling, a little impatient, and didn’t listen to his answer.

  “Everybody misses you. When do you think you’ll be back?”

  “Huh? Oh. I’m not sure yet. As much as I can get away with, I suppose. It depends on Mom.”

  She sipped coffee. He wore the whipped cream from his hot chocolate on the tip of his nose. She swore he did that to make her laugh.

  “Why did you turn into such a jerk after the prom?” Just like that, she ambushed him with her question.

  He looked hurt. He sounded hurt. “Was I?”

  “You were. Not to anyone else, but you were to me.”

  Her mother had asked if he had broken her heart “again.” No, he hadn’t, but she was beginning to worry he might. She wasn’t about to start channeling the teenage angst she buried so long ago, but that night she needed to know why he did it the first time.

  Nate put his hand on her arms that she crossed on the table like a barrier between them. He was surprisingly composed for someone hit with a question like that. He did flinch slightly at the tone of her voice, but seemed more amused than defensive, and answered easily as if it had happened only yesterday. He said, “For the record, yeah, I was avoiding you. But it wasn’t like I was trying to be an asshole or stuck up or mean. Stupid? Yes, but never mean.” He scratched his chin while she let the pressure to explain expand with the silence.

  “I was crazy about you. Surely you know that,” he said.

  “Nice try. I wanted to forgive you for taking Eppie to the prom, but you treated me like dirt.”

  He thought about it and then answered with a slow, measured and rambling story of prom night. “Julie, I can’t lie. I’ve had this very conversation in my head for going on forever, and more often than ever lately. It’s crazy; I never thought I’d have a chance to sit here and tell you straight up, just like I imagined it. So here’s the deal…”

  Julie could see that, at the time, it might have seemed like a much bigger deal back then. She could also see how, of all the boys she knew, only Nate Evans was dumb enough to turn something the others might have bragged about into a reason to push her away.

  Damn him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Prom Night

  Nate wore rented black. Eppie wore bridesmaid blue. The ballroom at the Sainte Claire Hotel downtown was dressed in gold. The lights were dim and the band only knew a smattering of disco. Disco was dead by then, and he was among those least likely to mourn its passing.

  For a girl confined to a wheelchair, she had plenty of moves in her upper body to swing and fling and rock to the roll of the music. Sometimes Nate took the handles and spun her in circles across the dance floor. They had so much fun that, instead of being the odd couple out, they were the cool kids that the others wanted to dance near, and they formed small clusters of communal boogie.

  Eppie predicted it would be a great night when he picked her up in his little beat-up Gremlin. The hatchback was perfect for carrying her wheelchair. Helping her in and out of the passenger side of the car was tricky, but the advantage was it required a kind of physical intimacy so close that he couldn’t tell where his cologne ended and her perfume began.

  Nate steered Eppie to a table during the first slow dance. She closed her eyes, her head swayed to the music and she had a mile-wide smile on her lips. He went to fetch punch, and she must have felt his return, because without opening her eyes, she beckoned him to bend close and then kissed him on the cheek.

  “Evans, you really are the best thing ever. Thank you for doing this.”

  It was the third or fourth time she had said that in some form. “There’s nothing to thank me for,” he replied. He thought she was being too grateful. Embarrassingly so. He was having a good time and reassured her. “You make it sound like I’m doing you a favor. I’ve been looking forward to this.”

  “Just the same,” she said. Then she tugged his jacket, pulling him close enough for another kiss. Lips this time.

  Rocking with the up tempo was not a problem, but Eppie’s wheelchair got in the way of a nice, romantic slow dance. It was during the medley of Styx/Kiss “Babe” and “Beth” that he watched Eppie’s mood sink as they sat out the songs. Nate excused himself and took a break to cut a deal with two linemen from the football team in the men’s restroom.

  So he was prepared when Nancy Ashford took up a microphone and gushed as she announced the name of this year’s prom queen: Eppie Johnson. It surprised no one, and he rolled her to the front of the dance floor to the sound of modest cheers. Eppie did the Queen Elizabeth hand wave and nodded like the royalty she was. Nancy put a cheap paper crown of gold on her head. As her Prince Charming, he also got one. Then the band began playing the ceremonial ballad while the other students cleared the center of the dance floor for the royal couple. Everyone was watching, gawking, he thought. The band played Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight,” a perfect song for dancing with full body contact, and she asked him to take her back to the table
.

  The football linemen he hired for two bucks apiece stepped up on either side of her and lifted her from her wheelchair. Nate sat down and they set her on his lap. The crowd clapped and cheered. Somebody whistled as he rolled to the center of the room. They had the dance floor to themselves, and he steered the chair in lazy circles to the rhythm. They surrendered to the music and the mood. Eppie held tight with her arms around his neck and head on his shoulder. He could feel her breath soft against his neck. She turned her head and their cheeks brushed. Nate knew there was a tear on hers, and the moment felt pure and right.

  After the dance, they cruised from one side of the valley to the other with no particular destination in mind, not ready to let go of the evening.

  She suggested stopping at a liquor store where her older brother worked nights and they could get beer without a hassle. He knew of a nice little opening on a short dirt road hidden in the Mirassou vineyard where they could watch the stars.

  It turned out that Eppie’s brother didn’t sell Nate a six-pack of beer after all. He sold Nate a six-pack of Coke instead.

  And a pint of Jack Daniels.

  Nate laid a blanket down in the vineyard clearing where it sloped back toward the valley. They spent the rest of the evening staring up at the stars, spiking the Coke and sharing sips from the same can. The ratio of whiskey to soda increased with each one. He had a cassette deck in the car jammed by spaghetti of broken tape spilling from its mouth that he hadn’t gotten around to fixing yet, so they tuned the radio to KLIV instead and relaxed as the DJ spoke to them and the music soothed them as it floated out the back of the Gremlin.

  They talked a little, sighed a lot, and enjoyed just being. Eppie lay on her back, he was stretched out on his side with his head propped up by his elbow and the third can was empty when she said, “This is really nice, Evans.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  She had one arm crooked beneath her head. Nate was gently stroking it between the edge of her short sleeve and her elbow.

  “It’s been perfect, I’d say,” she said.

  Nate felt warm and relaxed. He was carefree; the booze tickled his nose and relaxed him. He moved his attention to Eppie’s neck and chin, and wondered if he could get away with moving his finger down and under her neckline, under her bra, teasing her with a touch on her breast. That would be enough to make his night.

  He said, “A perfect night. Couldn’t be better.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Eppie then took his hand and guided it to a spot above her knee under her hiked-up skirt. Nate was still contemplating whether this meant what he thought it meant, and if it really meant that, how to do it without coming off as an inexperienced jerk, when she patted her leg from waist to her knee and laughed to find Nate’s hand where she left it.

  “Don’t tease me, Evans. It’s up here.” She drew his hand higher. “My legs may be worthless, but I’m not dead. I don’t want to live like it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Busted in a Bustier

  “So what you’re saying is, he cheated on you. That scum bucket.”

  Carla sat across from Julie at a long, black laboratory table strewn with notepaper, beakers, whiteboard markers, notepads, safety goggles and textbooks abandoned by students in their rush out of the last class on Friday.

  “No. What I’m saying is, that’s how Nate feels. He had this notion that, when he had sex with Eppie Johnson, he was being unfaithful to me.” Julie had stopped by the school on her way to Mom’s house to collect some things for Ethel’s move to a rehabilitation center. After that, she would head back to the hospital for a few hours. Russell was already gone for the day when she passed his office; his secretary said he didn’t come back from lunch.

  Carla shrugged. “That’s it? That’s all?” She said it with an incredulous dash of drama. “That’s the big kerfuffle that ruined your relationship with Nate? I am so disappointed.”

  “We never had a real relationship. We weren’t going steady or anything close. That’s what makes it so weird.”

  “He takes a girl to the prom and things go too far afterwards. They had sex. Nowadays too many kids think there’s something wrong if they don’t have sex. Though I guess it was a bigger deal back then. I thought so at the time. Didn’t you?”

  Julie ignored the question. “Let’s face it, when you’re seventeen, everything is a big deal in any generation. Anyway, he swears he once promised me that, when the time came, his first time and my first time would be our first time together. At least in Nate-speak, that’s how he put it.”

  “Do you remember it? Did he really promise that?”

  “Not in so many words. But we had a really close call two months or so before the prom. And that’s when—”

  Carla’s eyes lit up. “Do tell,” she interrupted. “So things between you were hotter than you’ve led us all to believe. I think I’m hurt. You had ample chance to say something. And nothing. Not even to your best friend.”

  Julie picked up a whiteboard marker sitting in front of her on the table and flung it in the general direction of Carla. “The point is, before it went too far, we got busted. By Mom.”

  “Your mother caught you?”

  Yes and no. She told Carla how Nate scrambled out the bedroom window and they thought they had gotten away with it until Ethel told her, forty years later, that she knew all along. It seemed comical now. “A day or two later was when Nate gave me his “wanting to be first and only” speech. I thought he was asking me to go steady, but he wasn’t. And when he started ignoring me after the prom we didn’t go to, like we had broken up and he didn’t want anything to do with me, actually what he was feeling... He was feeling guilty about having sex with that other girl and didn’t want to face it. Or me, rather.”

  “And you’re buying this now?”

  “With anybody else, chances would be slim. But with Nate?” She shrugged and nodded with fatalistic resignation. What could she do? He was the only one she could think of who was naïve enough to see it as being unfaithful and dumb enough to let it come between them. “I have to say, it was sweet the way he apologized last night for it.”

  “Just a hundred years late.”

  Silence might be golden, but the quiet of a classroom that normally reverberated all day long with the chatter of students had a profoundly unique comfort. Julie sipped tea that Carla brewed on a hot plate behind her desk.

  “I know what I have to do; I just don’t know how I’m going to do it,” she said. “But I surely don’t need this kind of complication. It’s too hard and I’m too old to put up with it. Do you know we sat and talked until nearly two o’clock this morning?”

  “No wonder he dragged in here this morning like a whipped puppy.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not feeling particularly frisky myself.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m scared.” She said she was drawn to Nate, and the comparison to Russell couldn’t be clearer. That comparison led her to think about all the little ways Russell cut her. Nate made it harder to ignore or excuse them. She had been doing too much of that.

  She loved the way Nate was always upbeat and pulled everybody up with him. He was generous with compliments and was quick to help others in a quirky kind of way, pretending to be Seth in order to set up a blind date with the girl he didn’t have the nerve to ask out about as goofy as it gets. That turned out to be not only fun but productive. They were getting married. And he told her he was in love with her in a way that made her want to believe. But.

  “But he’s a big risk. He’s never been reliable in our history together. And now he’s back with this crazy thing about living high school all over again. I’m afraid that maybe I’m just part of that and he’ll be gone as soon as I break up with Russell. If I do.”

  The look on Carla’s face was somewhere between amused and a superiority complex born in sarcasm. Julie pointed that out.

  “You know I’ve never been totally sold on Ru
ssell. It’s his weak chin, I think. And you know I’ve never thought it was a good match, at least ever since you told me he uses bacon-flavored dental floss.”

  “Floss aside, the point is, you can’t go around trying to love one guy when you can’t stop thinking about another guy, and thinking about the other guy all the time means you’re not being fair to the guy you’re going to marry, right?”

  “Good lord, you’re even starting to talk like Nate.”

  Julie sighed. “Yeah. Isn’t that sweet?” The sarcasm was wasted on Carla.

  “So I’m going to talk with Russell, tonight if I can. I need to see if he wants this marriage enough to stop dragging his feet.”

  “An ultimatum.”

  Julie nodded. “If he loves me as much as he says he does, we can live together until the wedding, and I can stop thinking about what it would be like to be with Nate instead. It would be settled. Nate would go away, and we could get on with our lives.”

  “That doesn’t seem like the best basis to marry someone on. Aren’t you listening to yourself?”

  Julie said she didn’t mean to sound so emotionally mercenary. She was only making an argument for the practical, sensible choice. It wasn’t the fun choice, though.

  She called Russell before heading to the hospital and left a message, annoyed again that he didn’t answer. That had been happening more frequently. With all the time she’d taken off work, Julie hadn’t seen much of her fiancé lately. She needed to fix that as soon as possible.

  She stayed late, watching television as Ethel drifted in and out. When she was sure Mom was asleep for the night, Julie clicked off the TV and headed back home feeling guilty for being preoccupied with confronting Russell. Alone in the confines of her car, she allowed herself to focus on her problem. What would she say? She pulled into a Chevron station and leaned against her car with her arms crossed while the pump filled her gas tank.

 

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