The Best American Short Stories 2013

by Elizabeth Strout

  I placed one hand at the small of Celia’s back, pulling her to me. The crowd continued to voice its disapproval, scandalized, but also—I felt certain—glad for us. The dance is complete. The virile foreigner has made his mark. The pretty girl has claimed her property. And it was the role of the gathered men to be appalled, or to pretend to be; the role of the mother to wail about her daughter’s chastity when she herself had never been chaste. But when it was over, when Celia and I separated, everyone was grinning. The old men, my father, even Elena.

  Very late that night I called Rocío. I did not feel any guilt. I just wanted to talk to her, perhaps have her read me the letter I’d already imagined. Be amused by her. Perhaps laugh and discuss her lover’s murder. It must have been three or four in the morning, and I could not sleep. I’d begun to have doubts about what had happened, what it meant. A few hours before, it had all seemed triumphant; now it felt abusive. The plaza was empty, of course, just like the previous night; only more so—a kind of emptiness that feels eternal, permanent. I knew I would never come back to this place, and that realization made me a little sad. From where I stood, I could see the sloping streets, the ocean, the unblinking night; and nearer, the listing palm tree scarred with names. I would have written Celia’s name on it—a useless, purely romantic gesture, to be sure—but the truth is I never knew her name. I’ve chosen to call her Celia because it feels disrespectful to address her as the barwoman’s daughter. So impersonal, so anonymous. A barwoman’s daughter tastes of bubblegum and cigarettes, whereas Celia’s warm tongue had the flavor of roses.

  Santos and Cochocho and Jaime and Erick left us soon after the kiss, and it was just me and my father, still feeling amused by what had happened, what we’d been a part of. We maybe felt a little shame too, but we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t know how. Grown men with hurt feelings are transparent creatures; grown men who feel dimly they have done something wrong are positively opaque. It would’ve been much simpler if we’d all just come to blows. Santos and Cochocho wandered off, a bit dazed, as if they’d been swindled. My father and I did a quick circle around the plaza and begged off for the evening. We never ate. Our hunger had vanished. I tried and failed to sleep, spent hours listening to my father’s snores echoing through the house. Now I punched in the numbers from the phone card, and let the phone ring for a very long time. I wasn’t drunk anymore. I liked the sound because it had no point of origin; I could imagine it ringing in the city, in that apartment I shared with Rocío (where she was asleep and could not hear, or was perhaps out with friends on this weekend night), but this was pure fantasy. I was not hearing that ring at all, of course. The ringing I heard came from inside the line, from somewhere within the wires, within the phone, an echo of something mysterious emerging from an unfixed and floating territory.

  I waited for a while, listening, comforted; but in the end, there was no answer.

  We left the next morning; locked the house, dropped the key in the neighbor’s mail slot, and fled quickly, almost furtively, hoping to escape without having to say goodbye to anyone. I had a pounding headache, and I’d barely slept at all. We made it to the filling station at the top of the hill without attracting notice, and then paused. My father was at the wheel, and I could see this debate flaring up within him—whether to stop and fill the tank or head north, away from this place and what it represented. Even the engine had doubt; it would not settle on an idling speed. We stopped. We had to. There might not be another station for many hours.

  It was Cochocho’s son tending the pumps. He was a miniature version of his father: the same frown, the same fussy irritation with the world. Everyone believes they deserve better, I suppose, and in this respect, he was no different from me. Still, I disliked him intensely. He had fat adolescent hands and wore clothes that could have been handed down from Celia’s mother.

  “So you’re off, then?” the boy said to my father through the open window.

  The words were spoken without a hint of friendliness. His shoulders tensed, his jaw set in an expression of cold distrust. There was so much disdain seeping toward us, so determined and intentional, I almost found it funny. I felt like laughing, though I knew this would only make matters worse. Part of me—a large part—didn’t care: my chest was full of that big-city arrogance, false, pretentious, and utterly satisfying. The boy narrowed his eyes at us, but I was thinking to myself:

  Goodbye, sucker!

  “Long drive,” said Cochocho’s son.

  And I heard my father say, “A full day, more or less.”

  Then Cochocho’s son, to me: “Back to California?”

  I paused. Remembered. Felt annoyed. Nodded. A moment prior I’d decided to forget the boy, had dismissed him, disappeared him. I’d cast my eyes instead down the hill, at the town and its homes obscured by a layer of fog.

  “That’s right,” I said, though California felt quite far away—as a theory, as a concept, to say nothing of an actual place where real human beings might live.

  “I used to work here, you know,” my old man offered.

  The boy nodded with sublime disinterest. “I’ve heard that,” he said.

  The tank was filled, and an hour later we were emptying our pockets for the bored, greedy soldiers. They were the age of Cochocho’s son, and just as friendly. Three hours after that, we were passing through Joselito’s hometown, in time to see a funeral procession; his, we supposed. It moved slowly alongside the highway, a somber cloud of gray and black, anchored by the doleful sounds of an out-of-tune brass band. The two men who’d fought over the moto-taxi now stood side by side, holding one end of the casket and quite obviously heartbroken. Whether or not they were acting now, I wouldn’t dare to speculate. But I did ease the car almost to a stop; and I did roll my window down and ask my old man to roll down his. And we listened to the band’s song, with its impossibly slow melody, like time stretched thin. We stayed there a minute, as they marched away from us, toward the cemetery. It felt like a day. Then we were at the edge of the city; and then we were home, as if nothing had happened at all.

  CHARLES BAXTER

  Bravery

  FROM Tin House

  AS A TEENAGER, her junior year, her favorite trick involved riding in cars with at least two other girls. You needed a female cluster in there, and you needed to have the plainest one driving. They’d cruise University Avenue in Palo Alto until they spotted some boys together near a street corner. Boys were always ganged up at high-visibility intersections, marking territory and giving off cigarette smoke and musk. At the red light, she’d roll down the window and shout, “Hey, you guys!” The boys would turn toward the car slowly—very slowly—trying for cool. Smoke emerged from their faces, from the nose or mouth. “Hey! Do you think we’re pretty?” she’d shout. “Do you think we’re cute?”

  Except for the plain one behind the wheel, the girls she consorted with were cute, so the question wasn’t really a test. The light would turn green, and they’d speed away before the boys could answer. The pleasure was in seeing them flummoxed. Usually one of the guys, probably the sweetest, or the most eager, would nod and raise his hand to wave. Susan would spy him, the sweet one, through the back window, and she’d smile so that he’d have that smile to hold on to all night. The not-so-sweet good-looking guys just stood there. They were accustomed to being teased, and they always liked it. As for the other boys—well, no one ever cared about them.

  Despite what other girls said, all boys were not all alike: you had to make your way through their variables blindly, guessing at hidden qualities, the ones you could live with.

  Years later, in college, her roommate said to her, “You always go for the kind ones, the considerate ones, those types. I mean, where’s the fun? I hate those guys. They’re so humane, and shit like that. Give me a troublemaker any day.”

  “Yeah, but a troublemaker will give you trouble.” She was painting her toenails, even though the guys she dated never noticed her toenails. “Trouble comes home
. It moves in. It’s contagious.”

  “I can take it. I’m an old-fashioned girl,” her roommate said, with her complicated irony.

  Susan married one of the sweet ones, the kind of man who waved at you. At a San Francisco art gallery on Van Ness, gazing at a painting of a giant pointed index finger with icicles hanging from it, she had felt her concentration jarred when a guy standing next to her said, “Do you smell something?”

  He sniffed and glanced up at the ceiling. Metaphor, irony, a come-on? In fact, she had smelled a slightly rotten egg scent, so she nodded. “We should get out of here,” he said, gesturing toward the door, past the table with the wineglasses and the sign-in book. “It’s a gas leak. Before the explosion.”

  “But maybe it’s the paintings,” she said.

  “The paintings? Giving off explosive gas? That’s an odd theory.”

  “Could be. Part of the modernist assault on the audience?”

  He shrugged. “Well, it’s rotten eggs or natural gas, one of the two. I don’t like the odds. Let’s leave.”

  On the way out, he introduced himself as Elijah, and she had laughed and spilled some white wine (she had forgotten she was holding a glass of it) onto her dress just above the hemline. He handed her a monogrammed handkerchief that he had pulled out of some pocket or other, and the first letter on it was E, so he probably was an Elijah, after all. A monogrammed handkerchief! Maybe he had money. “Here,” he said. “Go ahead. Sop it up.” He hadn’t tried to press his advantage by touching the handkerchief against the dress; he just handed it over, and she pretended to use it to soak up the wine. With the pedestrians passing by and an overhead neon sign audibly humming, he gave off a blue-eyed air of benevolence, but he also looked on guard, hypervigilant, as if he were an ex-Marine. God knows where he had found the benevolence, or where any man ever found it.

  “Elijah.” She looked at him. In the distance a car honked. The evening sky contained suggestions of rain. His smile persisted: a sturdy street-corner boy turned into a handsome pensive man but very solid-seeming, one thumb inside a belt loop, with a street lamp behind him to give him an incandescent aura. Physically, he had the frame of a gym rat. She had the odd thought that his skin might taste of sugar, his smile was so kind. Kindness had always attracted her. It made her weak in the knees. “Elijah the prophet? Who answers all questions at the end of time? That one? Your parents must have been religious or something.”

  “Yeah,” he said noncommittally, bored by the topic. “‘Or something’ was exactly what they were. They liked to loiter around in the Old Testament. They trusted it. They were farmers, and they believed in catastrophes. But when you have to explain your own name, you . . . well, this isn’t a rewarding conversation, is it?” He had a particularly thoughtful way of speaking that made him sound as if he had thought up his sentences several minutes ago and was only now getting around to saying them.

  She coughed. “So what do you do, Elijah?”

  “Oh, that comes later,” he said. “Occupations come later. First tell me your name.”

  “Susan,” she said. “So much for the introductions.” She leaned forward, showing off her great smile. “This wine. It’s so bad. I’m kind of glad I spilled it. Shall I spill more of it?” She hadn’t had more than a sip, but she felt seriously drunk.

  “Well, you could spill it here.” He reversed his index finger and lifted up his necktie. “Or there.” He pointed at the sidewalk.

  “But it’s white wine. White wine doesn’t really stain.” She threw the wineglass into the gutter, where it shattered.

  Twenty minutes later in a coffee shop down by the Embarcadero she learned that he was a pediatric resident with a particular interest in mitochondrial disorder. Now she understood: out on the street, he had looked at her the way a doctor looks at a child. She herself was a psychiatric social worker, with a job waiting for her at an outpatient clinic in Millbrae. She and Elijah exchanged phone numbers. That night, rattled by their encounter, she couldn’t sleep. Three days later, still rattled, she called him and proposed a date, something her mother had advised her never to do with a man. They went to dinner and a movie, and Elijah fell asleep during the previews and didn’t wake up for another hour—poor guy, he was so worn out from his work. She didn’t bother to explain the plot; he was too tired to care.

  He didn’t warm up to her convincingly—not as she really hoped he would—for a month, until he heard her sing in a local choir, a program that included the Vaughan Williams Mass in G Minor. She had a solo in the opening measures of the Benedictus, and when Elijah found her at the reception afterward, his face, as he looked at her, was softened for the first time with actual love, the real thing, that yearning, both hungry and quizzical.

  “Your voice. Wow. I was undone,” he said, taking a sip of the church-basement coffee, his voice thick. Undone. He had a collection of unusual adjectives like that. He had a collection of them. Devoted was another. And committed. He used that adjective all the time. Never before had she ever met a man who was comfortable with that adjective.

  A few months after they were married, they took a trip to Prague. The plan was to get pregnant there amid the European bric-a-brac. On the flight over the Atlantic he held her hand when the Airbus hit some turbulence. In the seats next to theirs, another young couple sat together, and as the plane lurched, the woman fanned her face with a magazine while the man read passages aloud from the Psalms. “‘A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand by thy right hand,’” he read. When the plane bucked, passengers laughed nervously. The flight attendants had hastily removed the drink carts and were sitting at the back, doing crossword puzzles. The woman sitting next to Susan excused herself and rushed toward the bathroom, holding her hand in front of her mouth as she hurried down the funhouse-lurching aisle. When she returned, her companion was staring at his Bible. Having traded seats with Susan, Elijah then said some words to the sick woman that Susan couldn’t hear, whereupon the woman nodded and seemed to calm down.

  How strange it was, his ability to give comfort. He doled it out in every direction. He wasn’t just trained as a doctor; he was a doctor all the way down to the root. Looking over at him, at his hair flecked with early gray, she thought uneasily of his generosity and its possible consequences, and then, in almost the same moment, she felt overcome with pride and love.

  In Prague, the Soviet-era hotel where they stayed smelled of onions, chlorine, and goulash. The lobby had mirrored ceilings. Upstairs, the rooms were small and claustrophobic; the TV didn’t work, and all the signs were nonsensical. Pozor! for example, which seemed to mean “Beware!” Beware of what? The signs were garbles of consonants. Prague wasn’t Kafka’s birthplace for nothing. Still, Susan believed the city was the perfect place for them to conceive a child. For the first one, you always needed some sexual magic, and this place had a particular Old World variety of it. As for Elijah, he seemed to be in a mood: early on their second morning in the hotel, he stood in front of the window rubbing his scalp and commenting on Prague’s air quality. “Stony, like a castle,” he said. Because he always slept naked, he stood before the window naked, with a doctor’s offhandedness about the body, surveying the neighborhood. She thought he resembled the pope blessing the multitudes in Vatican square, but no: on second thought, he didn’t resemble the pope at all, starting with the nakedness. He loved the body as much as he loved the spirit: he liked getting down on his knees in front of her nakedness to kiss her belly and incite her to soft moans.

  “We should go somewhere,” she said, thumbing through a guidebook, which he had already read. “I’d like to see the Old Town Square. We’d have to take the tram there. Are you up for that?”

  “Hmm. How about the chapels in the Loreto?” he asked. “That’s right up here. We could walk to it in ten minutes and then go to the river.” He turned around and approached her, sitting next to her on the bed, taking her hand in his. “It’s all so close, we could soak it all up, first thing.”


  “Sure,” she said, although she didn’t remember anything from the guidebooks about the Loreto chapels and couldn’t guess why he wanted to see them. He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers one by one, which always gave her chills.

  “Oh, honey,” she said, leaning into him. He was the only man she had ever loved, and she was still trying to get used to it. She had done her best not to be scared by the way she often felt about him. His intelligence, the concern for children, the quiet loving homage he paid to her, the wit, the indifference to sports, the generosity, and then the weird secret toughness—where could you find another guy like that? It didn’t even matter that they were staying in a bad hotel. Nothing else mattered. “What’s in those chapels?” she asked. “How come we’re going there?”

  “Babies,” he told her. “Hundreds of babies.” He gave her a smile. “Our baby is in there.”

  After dressing in street clothes, they walked down Bělohorská toward the spot on the map where the chapel was supposed to be. In the late-summer morning, Susan detected traceries of autumnal chill, a specifically Czech irony in the air, with high wispy cirrus clouds threading the sky like promissory notes. Elijah took her hand, clasping it very hard, checking both ways as they crossed the tramway tracks, the usual Pozor! warnings posted on their side of the platform, telling them to beware of whatever. The number 18 tram lumbered toward them silently from a distance up the hill to the west.