by Claire Cook
It wasn’t until I pushed GO HOME on my GPS that I started to cry. Ted Brody had hit the nail on the head: What was the point of going home when there was nobody waiting to notice if you got there or not? Out of the blue and with a force that tore me apart, I missed Kurt, the old Kurt, the one I used to come home to.
I wiped my eyes with an old take-out napkin I found in the glove compartment and put on my sunglasses for camouflage. As I rolled slowly out to the road, I suddenly remembered sitting in the courtyard of a different restaurant with Kurt a long time ago. We’d splurged on a hotel room with a water view on St. Simons Island for our anniversary. Even though they’d argued that they were old enough to stay home alone, Troy had a tendency to get so engrossed in a game of Nintendo that he’d miss the smell of a burning bag of microwave popcorn, and Trevor had a new girlfriend. So we’d left the boys with a babysitter.
It was a five-hour trek, but we were both on our best behavior. Kurt tried to tone down his driving, and when he forgot I distracted myself by scrolling past the surplus of country music stations to find songs from our own personal memory lane. Van Morrison’s “Moondance” from our wedding. Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” which I played nonstop for two whole melodramatic days after our first big fight. Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” from our favorite vacation. Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game,” which always made me cry when I was pregnant.
We checked into our hotel, made love, walked the beach. We found an old gas station that had been converted into a restaurant, complete with a big gas tank out front turned into a wood-smoke barbecue.
“What’ll it be, sugah?” the waitress asked Kurt, completely ignoring me.
Over the red-and-white-checked oilcloth-covered table, Kurt grinned at me to acknowledge the waitress’s slight.
Then he smiled up at her. “Two glasses of Chardonnay, please.”
She turned and yelled over her shoulder. “Two glasses of the white stuff. Make sure it’s the good jug. They’re from Bahston.”
We laughed and laughed until the whole restaurant was looking at us. When one of us would start to wind down, the other one would get us going again. I leaned across the table and wiped a tear from the corner of Kurt’s eye.
Kurt reached for my hand and held it between both of his. “And here I thought we were starting to pass.”
We cracked up all over again.
CHAPTER 8
To: Melanie
From: Finn Miller
Subject: Re: Re: sweet dreams of you
Were you a good kisser in my dream? The best. Bet you still are in real life too.
To: Finn Miller
From: Melanie
Subject: Re: Re: sweet dreams of you
Guess you’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?
Finn Miller and I were actually flirting. Flirting. FLIRTING.
I loved wings—butterfly wings, angel wings, even the Brownie wings I got when I flew up to Girl Scouts, which I was pretty sure I still had tucked away in an old jewelry box somewhere. But wings had been done and done again in metal sculpture. So I went with a small boat propeller I’d found picking through the metal section at a junkyard for my third box spring lady.
As a hat, it wasn’t very Southern. To make it work with the box spring hoop skirt, I welded strand after strand of thin curly wire to it, and then tied them all together under the chin of my third box spring lady in a jaunty little bow.
I added a parasol, of course, because repetition of elements brings cohesiveness to a series, and because the other box spring ladies had them and I didn’t want the third one to feel left out. Her parasol was extended over her head, back up to her propeller.
I gave her long, sexy eyelashes from the same curly wire, just because I could. They made her look happy, even glamorous. I could picture her saying, Beam me up, Scotty. And her propeller bonnet would whir and rev up and she’d raise her umbrella higher. And then a fresh, cool breeze would come along. And she’d flutter her eyelashes as she floated up, up—and away from it all.
If only I could hitch a ride with her. I’d have her drop me off at the reunion. I’d float down from the sky—strong, fearless, alive for the first time in years. Finn Miller would be waiting for me outside in the parking lot, sitting on an old New England park bench underneath a sky full of stars, the faint strains of “Stairway to Heaven” drifting out from the building. And the minute I set eyes on him it would all come back.
Because nobody knows you better than somebody who knew you way back when.
I’d buried the other paper boys in the bottom of the trash, but Finn’s face was now tucked into my yearbook, marking his page. I was curled up under the covers in the guest room, letting my thoughts wander as I held the yearbook. Thinking maybe I’d even sleep with it under my pillow and see if it might trigger a long, sexy dream.
My cell phone rang and I jumped. My heart went into overdrive, as if someone had caught me. Doing what? Acting like a lovesick high school girl? I reached for my phone and my reading glasses on the bedside table, saw that it was an 800 number I didn’t recognize, somebody trying to sell me something.
I got rid of the call, but my heart had triggered a full-blown flashback, bringing all those old feelings back. Oh, no, it’s him! Did he see me looking? Is he looking at me? Uh-oh, here he comes. How am I going to handle this?
And that’s when I finally remembered Finn Miller.
B.J., Veronica, and I met, like we did every day in high school, in the crowded girls’ room before the first bell rang.
“Are you sure it’s not too short?” I said. I stood on tiptoe and peered at myself in the mirror through the swirls of cigarette smoke rising from the stalls behind me. The waistband of my brown-and-ivory diamond-plaid A-line skirt had to be rolled down just right so the skirt didn’t poof out at the hips. I contemplated my lackluster thighs in the mirror. Was it possible they didn’t quite match? It was too gross to consider.
We still had a dress code and Mr. Bernardi, the assistant principal, was not above asking his secretary, Miss Knowles, to measure the distance between the middle of a kneecap and the hem of a skirt with a yardstick. B.J. said they were both perverts and she’d fight them all the way to the Supreme Court if they tried anything with her. I was hoping I’d have time to roll my skirt back down before we got to the office.
“Get over it,” B.J. said. “It’s not even close to wicked short.”
B.J. was wearing a denim skirt she’d made by cutting off a pair of dungarees, opening the crotch seam with a stitch ripper she’d stolen from Home Ec, then overlapping the pieces and sewing them up again. When she elbowed her way in to claim some mirror space, her new creation rode up to within inches of her underpants.
She pulled the pink-and-orange-striped cover off a tube of Yardley Slicker, waving it around as much as possible to make sure nobody missed it. Then she added a topcoat of Frosted Slicker over her Yardley Pink Frost lipstick. B.J. had Basic Slicker, Frosted Slicker, Surf Slicker, Sunny Slicker, and Tan-Tan Slicker, plus Uptown, Downtown, Good Night, and Good Morning. On the days she wore most of them at once, her lips took on the consistency of frosted Jell-O.
I reached into my fringed macramé bag and pulled out my own Yardley Liplighter case. One end held a Frosted Slicker and the other a London Look Lipstick in Pinkadilly, one of six new man-trapping colors. It even had a mirror attached to it that the Yardley magazine ads said were for peeking behind me to make sure I was being followed.
The Liplighter combo had only cost me $2.50 even though it was a $3.60 value. The Slicker came free with the purchase of the lipstick, saving me just over two hours of babysitting for the bratty kids down the street.
Beside me, Veronica dug her index finger into a Yardley Pot o’Gloss tinted lip gloss in an unfortunate bright coral color her mother had picked out. B.J. and I offered her our Frosted Slickers at the exact same moment.
“Jinx,” we all said at once. Then we passed around B.J.’s crea
my blue Cover Girl eye shadow, the exact same kind that Cybill Shepherd wore in Seventeen.
The bell rang and we walked down the crowded hallway together and then separated for our classes. Without my friends as bookends, my self-esteem took an immediate nosedive. My mouth went dry and I had to force myself to keep putting one foot in front of the other so I didn’t get stuck in the hallway alone forever.
I ducked into the doorway of my math class and dropped my head as I headed to my seat at the back of the room.
When I sat down in the beige Formica chair, I tried to yank some of my skirt under me so the back of my possibly mismatched thighs wouldn’t stick to the chair and have red marks on them when I stood up again. I moved my math book to the top of my pile and opened my five-section spiral notebook to the math section. Mr. Jackman was standing at the front of the room writing on the blackboard. He had a smudge of chalk shaped like a handprint on the back of his suit jacket. Last week it had been a jagged piece of masking tape that said TELL ME I HAVE A NICE ASS.
Beside me, Finn Miller looked over and smiled.
By the time I figured out he was smiling at me and I smiled back, he’d looked away again.
Then I looked away.
When the bell finally rang at the end of class, I squeezed my thighs together so my underpants wouldn’t show when I swung my legs out from under the desk. My skin peeled away from the chair painfully, like a Band-Aid.
Once again, Finn Miller and I looked at each other.
Then we both looked away.
B.J. and Veronica were waiting for me in the hallway, retouching their lips.
“So,” Veronica said. “Did you talk to him?”
My heart skipped a beat. “Shhh.”
“Ch-ch-chiiiicken,” B.J. said. “Where is he?”
“Shut. Up.” I scrunched my shoulders up around my ears and reached back to make sure my waistband hadn’t started to unroll. “Come on, you guys, let’s get out of here.”
All these years later, sitting on the guest room bed clutching my high school yearbook, I tried to imagine this lifelong ch-ch-chicken finally turning into a red-hot hen.
CHAPTER 9
When I came back inside from a sweaty session in my studio, two whole messages were waiting on my voicemail, like smoke signals from civilization.
My initial excitement turned into a dull dread when I saw one was from Kurt and the other from Ted Brody. A broken marriage and a broken hose did not bode well in the voicemail department. Anxiety bubbled up and I considered just deleting them.
I changed into a dry T-shirt and guzzled a glass of water. Deleting unlistened-to messages was probably a little bit crazy, but maybe it would be well within the realm of normal if I merely avoided listening to them until I was having a better day.
Wait. Now I’d be afraid of highways and voicemail. Pretty soon I’d add spiders and vacuum cleaners and maybe frozen pizza to the list, and one day I’d wake up and realize I hadn’t left my house in a decade.
I took a deep breath and tapped Kurt’s message.
It’s me. Listen, call me as soon as you get this. We both know we need to talk. So let’s just cut to the chase and do it. And FYI, this time I’ll expect you to dial down the hysterics.
“Dial down the hysterics?” I yelled. I started to throw my phone across the room. I reconsidered and walked over and kicked Kurt’s recliner with one of my welding boots instead.
“Dial down the hysterics?” I yelled again. And again. And probably a few times after that.
When I finally stopped kicking, my big toe really hurt and Kurt’s recliner looked exactly the same. “And FYI, you have crappy taste in furniture, you bastard,” I yelled.
I found my phone again and tapped Ted Brody’s message just to get it over with.
Hi, Melanie? This is Ted Brody. I wanted to let you know that no innocent bystanders have been watered by your sculpture since you fixed it, and I thank you kindly for that. And, uh, I seem to have said exactly the wrong thing when you were here and, well, I’m just checking in to make sure you’re okay. And to tell you that, pun intended, you have a rain check to be my guest for a bite to eat whenever and if ever it works for you. And finally, I agree, a house with no one at home waiting for you does suck. Big-time. Trust me, I know.
I thought about calling Ted Brody back, I really did. It was a sweet message, and chances were he was even a nice guy. But the thought of having to sit across a restaurant table from a perfect stranger and say all the right things while you tried to get to know each other all the way from scratch was just exhausting. Bone wearying. No shared frame of reference, no guarantee that you’d have anything at all in common. All that baggage to unlock and open and all those quirky little bits and pieces to sort through.
If Finn Miller and I were sitting across from each other in a restaurant courtyard, we’d both be wearing rose-colored glasses. A retro haze would surround us like soft lighting, taking away all the rough edges. If the conversation started to lag, we could tell old stories from high school, about things and people we’d both known.
Halfway through math class, I twisted in my seat and angled my Yardley Liplighter mirror so I could see Finn Miller. I watched him put his elbow on his desk and rest his chin on the palm of his hand. He tapped his fingers on his jaw over and over again as if he were playing the piano. I sighed.
When class was over, I pushed myself out of my chair and reached behind me to yank my skirt down casually and, with luck, dislodge a slight wedgie at the same time.
I picked up the stack of books on my desk. B.J. had borrowed some purple dye from the biology room and we’d all painted our fingernails and toenails with multiple coats last night and then Veronica and I had helped her sneak it back into the classroom before first period this morning. I wiggled my fingers and watched my nails under the flicker-y fluorescent classroom lights.
“A purple people eater, huh?” Finn Miller suddenly said beside me.
I jumped. My face burned a million shades of red, and I squeezed my hands into fists.
He grabbed one hand and unfurled a purple-tipped finger. “Psychedelic.”
A tiny laugh that sounded like the bark of a seal pup came out of my mouth. My heart skipped a beat.
Finn reached over, took my books from me, and piled them on top of his own. He turned and walked up the aisle. He waited for me at the doorway and let me go through first.
Then he walked over to B.J. and Veronica and handed B.J. my books.
“Take good care of her,” he said.
I finished the last of my breakfast yogurt, scraping the edge of the spoon around and around the plastic container as I tried to remember the rest of our story. It was sometime in the fall of senior year when Finn Miller finally asked me out. We went to the movies with two of his friends and their dates. Was it American Graffiti? Whatever it was, the guys hooted through the whole thing, loud and obnoxious. I’d found the movie beneath my level of maturity and wished we’d gone to see something more sophisticated instead, maybe The Way We Were or Scenes From a Marriage. Whenever I reached for our shared popcorn, Finn reached in, too, and our hands brushed. When he put his arm around me, all I could think of was that if he got butter on my sister’s sweater, she’d know I’d borrowed it while she was away at college, and she’d kill me.
We’d ridden together in Finn’s friend’s family’s boatlike, wood-paneled station wagon, and after the movie all six of us cruised around for a while in a pale imitation of the movie. “Hi, neighbor, have a Gansett!” Finn’s friends said over and over, as if it had been funny the first time, while we passed around two stolen-from-home cans of Narragansett Tall that tasted like watered-down skunk. The rest of the group waited in the car while Finn walked me to the door. When he kissed me, somebody leaned on the horn.
On Monday, Finn carried my books to my classes. He called me after school. And the next weekend, he ditched his friends and borrowed his own family car and let me pick the movie. He was nice. Attentive. A litt
le bit boring maybe, but who was I to talk?
I threw my yogurt into the trash. So hard to remember: Did this go on for a few weeks? Longer? At one point I broke his heart, but how?
Yikes. By telling him I wanted to spend more time with my friends. I cringed as I remembered delivering this, the lamest of brush-offs. On the phone, no less, holding the receiver to my ear and stretching the long curly black telephone cord until it reached the privacy of the bathroom, because I didn’t have the guts to say it in person.
Looking back, the truth might have been that he’d never stood a chance. From the start I’d thought there must be something wrong with him because he seemed to like me so much. Maybe steady kindness was too subtle for a young girl to appreciate. But now, all these long years later, it sure as hell looked like some kind of wonderful.
How lucky I was that Finn Miller had emailed his way into my life again. How incredible that our worlds had imploded simultaneously, that the universe was giving us this opportunity to rise from the rubble and build something better together.
Everybody knew that old magnetism never died. You could walk into a room decades later and still feel the pull. Physical attraction was chemistry, science. The shape of a face, the pitch of a voice, the scent of your perfect match.
I’d been such a little fool all those years ago. But I was older and wiser now, and I knew what was important in a relationship—kindness, stability, invulnerability to women named Crissy.
I’d appreciate Finn Miller the second time around. And when we saw each other again, this would be our chance to finally get it right.
The only thing standing between us was getting from Point A to Point B. Anxiety gripped my chest as I tried to picture making it all the way from the suburbs of Atlanta to the suburbs of Boston. I could only hope that love really did conquer all—including fear of highways.
