Closer Than They Appear

by Jess Riley

  Harper was closer to her Aunt Ginger than to her own mother, possibly because Aunt Ginger sometimes believed herself to be the same age as Harper—twenty-eight. Also, Harper’s parents lived in Wheatfield, Illinois, more than 300 miles away, so Aunt Ginger was the only family Harper saw on a regular basis.

  On the drive to the store, Ginger pulled a wrinkled note from her purse; Dick and Sally Westfield, 1274 Marigold Drive was scribbled on the front, an email and phone number on the back. “I found you a new client, Cheeto.”

  Cheeto had been Harper’s nickname in childhood; now that she was studying to become a Registered Dietician and worked as a part-time personal chef for people with special dietary needs, the nickname had assumed an exceptionally grating irony.

  “Dick and Sally Westfield. I met them at Silver Sneakers. Nice couple, but boy howdy does Dick have halitosis. No big health concerns that they told me about, other than Dick’s kitty litter breath, I guess. They just want to try eating healthier. Oh, excuse me. I mean, more healthfully.”

  “You’re too weirdly adorable to be annoyed by. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I depend on it!” They drove in silence for a while before Ginger glanced down at her comically large breasts, an amazed yet slightly bewildered look on her face. “I still can’t get over these.”

  “Neither can I.”

  Zach

  IT WAS FRIDAY morning, and the forecast called for rain. But there she was at the stoplight, left turn signal blinking—sunshine on wheels, her own small, portable ecosystem. He was two cars behind her today (beyond even her blind spot, so to speak); this was disappointing, because he’d brought a pair of oversized, novelty sunglasses to wear when she spotted him, just to see if she’d laugh. It was an odd stunt to pull, he knew, but he’d woken up feeling strangely confident and free. He peed an insouciant arc into the toilet bowl that morning, drank his coffee with gusto, wrote “Roach clip on a feather” on a Post-it note for Josh and actually caught himself whistling when he left for work. Whistling!

  He pulled up behind the last car in the right lane, waiting for the light to turn, and she saw him in her rearview mirror. Her eyes lit up with her smile, and he quickly put on the sunglasses with the pink plastic frame and waved.

  She laughed and gave a small, surreptitious wave back.

  GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!

  Harper

  THE YMCA CARDIO machines were nearly smoking, gym members frantically running in place like large, sweaty, Lycra-clad hamsters. Harper and Natalie somehow snagged two adjacent Stairmasters, on which they now grimly climbed. “I saw my pretend boyfriend again this morning,” Harper said, her breath ragged and her face hot. “He put on a pair of huge pink sunglasses when he saw me.”

  Natalie dialed down her pace. “You’re not that bright.”

  “He was trying to make me laugh.”

  “Huh. So what does he look like?”

  “Yesterday I saw a video on Cute Overload of a baby otter floating in a pool, stacking cups together on its belly. And then I watched a trailer for the new Quentin Tarantino movie. He’s somewhere in between. He looks sort of exotic.”

  “If you can say all that and still exercise, you’re not at your peak intensity.”

  “Who cares. I’d rather tell you about my pretend boyfriend.”

  “Okay, so he looks exotic,” Natalie puffed, punching a button to further decrease her speed. “Like, Gael Garcia Bernal-exotic? Or Tony Leung-exotic?”

  “You’ve been watching too many foreign movies on Netflix lately.”

  “Well, which is it?”

  “Kind of like if Freddy Rodriguez and Christian Bale and that girl from Afghanistan with the green eyes—” she paused to catch her breath “—the one who was on the cover of National Geographic? If they all had a baby.”

  “That’s creepily specific, but I get it. I love eyes that color. They’re like a portal to another dimension. Like The Tommyknockers.”

  “Okay, now you’re making it sound weird.”

  “I’m making it sound weird?” Natalie pushed a stray hair that had escaped from her blond ponytail out of her eyes. “Why don’t you look up his license plate? You can find out anything about anybody these days if you know their license plate number.”

  The machine hummed beneath Harper’s feet, which stepped and stepped and went nowhere. “Because that’s kind of stalker-y, and also, it’s a company truck.”

  “Yeah, Pubes and Hoses. Boo. Gross.”

  “Tubes and Hoses. They just need a better graphic designer.”

  “What about the company website? Sometimes they have photos of the employees.”

  “They don’t.” Harper wiped her sweaty forehead with the scratchy gym towel she’d hung on her machine.

  “You already looked? Psycho.”

  “You told me to!”

  “I’m kidding. Hey, my nose is totally running. Do you have any travel-sized tissues in your fanny pack? Next to the Tide pen, antibacterial hand wipes, and portable defibrillator?”

  Harper turned off her machine and rode the pneumatic steps down to floor-level. She rummaged through her small gym bag and extracted a clean tissue, which she handed to Natalie.

  “Thanks, Sally Plan-ahead. Oh, I just had a terrible thought! Do you think maybe he’s following you?”

  Harper shook her head while she sprayed the handles of her machine with cleaning solution. She swabbed it down with a fresh towel. Almost immediately, a teenage girl with a blue streak in her hair and glittery shoulders claimed the Stairmaster. “He’s just going to work. I think he might live near me. Oh, I hope he doesn’t use the phrase ‘making love.’”

  “Does he at least buy you dinner first?”

  “Of course he does!” Harper said, giddy from exercise and new crush endorphins.

  “Hey, want to go to the grocery store with me? I don’t want to go home yet.” Natalie had three children between the ages of two and six whose collective screaming could drown out the engine of a Boeing 747. For Natalie, grocery shopping alone was like a trip to the spa. She also had a patient husband named Brian, whom she nearly broke up with early in their relationship because the first time they had sex he wore a striped glow-in-the-dark condom and she said it was like watching a caterpillar crawl in and out of her vagina.

  “No, I went yesterday with Aunt Ginger. Besides, I have too much homework.”

  “Look-at-these-fake-tittayz Aunt Ginger?” Natalie wiped her own machine down.

  “You’re such a dirty old man.”

  Natalie sighed. “Sorry, I haven’t slept through the night since 2004 and my entire household is nothing but a giant fart joke these days. It makes me belligerent.” As they made their way back to the locker room, Natalie tipped her head at an older woman stretching on a mat near a pyramidal stack of weights. A man with muscles so large he looked like a cartoon was lifting a weight tied to his neck behind her, grunting with the effort. “First, that woman is wearing nude pantyhose under her shorts. Second, that man is going to break his neck and we’ll probably have to be interviewed because we watched it happen. Third, homework on a Friday night? You do realize you’re wasting the most attractive year of your life.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  What did the sunglasses mean? What if he was crazy? What if he was an escaped convict, or a creepy married man with a foot fetish? She imagined herself buying a handgun and shooting paper targets at a gun range and felt a little better. Or—what if he was a single father with a loving, rambunctious extended family who all lived within a ten mile radius and every Christmas they went “treeing” and had soup at each other’s homes? What if he made a great lasagna? What if he had a living room full of books and an adorable, bug-eyed Pug whose tongue always stuck out? What if he was a cancer survivor and a mountain biker and an art teacher at an elementary school, and he planted a small garden every spring? Wait, he couldn’t be an art teacher, because he worked at a plumbing supply store. She hadn’t experienced an
ything this exciting or mysterious since Nick Carter almost came to the mall in 1997. She could hardly wait for Monday morning.

  Zach

  ON SATURDAY NIGHT Zach had a blind date with his coworker Cindy’s old college roommate. She’d been trying to set them up for months. “I’m not sure it’s such a good idea,” he always said, finding one reason or another to decline, but this time she’d called in a favor, and he did owe her one, because she’d switched prime vacation days with him twice in the last year.

  “She’s really pretty,” Cindy told him. “You’re going to thank me later. Would I steer you wrong?” Zach wanted to believe her, but Cindy routinely wore PajamaJeans to work and once had her identity stolen after paying $100 for a vial of “healing miracle water” from some TV evangelist, which “was totally a joke!” Cindy insisted. Still, it made you wonder about her judgment.

  He had some time to kill before leaving, so he flipped open his laptop because while brushing his teeth an interesting line popped into his head (It had taken only sixteen months for their relationship to degenerate from “I can’t believe we both love Steve Buscemi and pho!” to Googling “How to fake your own death”), and he wanted to write it down before he forgot it. Whose relationship would this even refer to? He wasn’t sure his last girlfriend, Andrea Wallace, knew who Steve Buscemi was, and the closest they ever came to Vietnamese street food over the course of their four-year relationship was when The Deerhunter was on Turner Movie Classics at his grandmother’s house during Easter dinner. And he’d never Googled “How to fake your own death,” though he thought the kind of person who did would make a great character in a book.

  He wondered what the girl in the Kia Rio was doing tonight.

  “If your date turns out to be a butterface, shoot me a text,” Josh said, eyes glued to Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. “Cocksucker!” He hammered the controller, and gunfire and explosions filled the room. “We’ll be at Oblio’s. Maybe around eleven.” The apartment sounded like a war zone and smelled like dirty gym socks.

  “I don’t know,” Zach replied. Even if his blind date turned out to be more disappointing than the film adaptation of The Stand and ended early, he was afraid he’d run into Andrea if he went out later. She’d ended their relationship four months earlier, and his heart still twisted painfully whenever he saw her face. He was surprised how often that accidentally happened in their city of 65,000. He’d finally deleted all the photos of them as a couple from his computer, and she’d unfriended him on Facebook, but with a confusing message that was practically an invitation to her back pocket:

  One day I know I’ll regret this. I already do, actually. I miss you. I miss how you just ‘got me.’ I even miss how you used to laugh at Futurama. But until I figure things out, learn to love myself first, I don’t know if I can be with anyone. One day, we might get another shot at this. You are my lucky star, my sweetest, dearest (and most handsome!) friend, and I don’t ever want to lose your friendship. Thank you for being patient with me. I am so lucky to have you. I’m so sorry.

  He could hear the country song now: “Please Darlin, Won’t You be my Plan B?” It was hard to believe this was the same girl who used to trace patterns on his back and whisper things like, “Promise me you won’t die, ever.”

  So she’d unfriended him, but he couldn’t bring himself to unfriend her brothers. As a result, he still knew far too much about her life. In fact … he braced himself and pulled up Facebook, and there she was, laughing brightly at the photographer: dimples, mischievous smile, long, dark hair tucked under a blue newsboy cap, knees tucked up against her chest, slender arms wrapped around her shins. Her nose curved slightly to the left, and he remembered how she used to absently press a finger against the bridge while she read, as if she could push it into symmetry. Her latest status update read: Shiny new job… terrified, but excited! It had fifty-four likes. There was already so much happening in her new life without him. At least she hadn’t posted any photos of herself with Derek recently.

  He didn’t visit her page often, only when his curiosity and loneliness got the best of him. It felt a little masochistic; like donning a pathetic (wavy, brown, jasmine-scented) hair shirt. But he was still trying to find his way out of that murky post-relationship wasteland where you pray for a head injury for the memory loss alone. Time had faded the bruise somewhat, but every so often he still binged on memories. He couldn’t help himself, even if it always made his heart feel like the runt of the litter. The ugly puppy nobody picked.

  The plan was to go with Cindy, her husband Ted, and Cindy’s former college roommate Nicole to a group cooking class at eight, which almost sounded like the punch line to some joke. “So … a cooking class?” he’d asked Cindy, trying to sound enthusiastic despite the queasy burble of doubt rolling around his stomach.

  “Yes! Doesn’t that sound like fun? You know, not your typical thing to do on a Saturday night. It’s on campus. Ted’s sister teaches in the dietician program.”

  It was a hands-on class in which they prepared their own dinners—part of the Healthy Classics series. It sounded like the enemy of fun.

  But first, they were meeting for a drink at Friar Tuck’s, a Merry Old England/Sherwood Forest-inspired pub that Josh (and most people he knew, now that he thought about it) liked to call, “Try our Fucks.” It turned out Nicole actually was pretty, though the lighting in the bar was so dim every woman looked pretty. They could all pass for a poor man’s Jennifer Garner, or at the very least, Emily Blunt’s aunt. It took his eyes a full five minutes to adjust after they’d walked in. Nicole chewed fruity gum and wore long, dangly earrings that swayed and sparkled below her short, wispy blond hair. She extended a hand when Cindy introduced him, and Zach shook it. She had a surprisingly firm grip, and was nearly as tall as he was. Which, let’s face it, wasn’t hard to do, since he was only five foot eight.

  They slid into a booth near the swinging kitchen doors, and a waitress in a short brown friar’s tunic, nylons, and Birkenstock sandals stopped by to take their order. Nicole ordered a dirty martini. “With Grey Goose, extra olives.”

  “Whoa, Nicole, go for the jugular!” Cindy whooped, and ordered one, too. Ted ordered a whiskey seven and began to fiddle with his iPhone. Ted was quiet, uncomfortable in group situations, and rabidly followed every sport played by a major Wisconsin team, regardless of season: the Bucks, the Brewers, the Admirals, the Packers, the Badgers, even the Timber Rattlers, a minor-league baseball team most people in the state probably weren’t even aware of. Zach ordered a beer, wondering if anyone would find it amusing if he asked for it in a flagon.

  “So Zach,” Nicole asked, “Got any good plumbing supply stories?”

  He shifted uncomfortably in the booth. He wished he hadn’t majored in English or graduated without a teaching license. “I don’t think an interesting answer to that question exists.”

  “Sure it does!” Cindy said. “Tell her about the time all those long pipes fell from the back of the truck onto the highway.”

  Nicole smiled politely. “Is that what you went to school for? Did you always want to do this?” The kitchen doors swung open as a waitress barged in, and the sound and smell of something crackling in a deep fryer temporarily filled the air.

  Even a mortician. He paused to consider that a mortician probably made a lot more money and had practically guaranteed job security and a certain kind of satisfaction from providing essential community services and comforting the bereaved. It seemed like a peaceful gig, if you didn’t mind the smell of formaldehyde. “I always wanted to be a writer,” he finally said. He remembered Andrea reading a short story he’d written in college, looking at him with soft wonder after she’d finished, saying, You’re going to be published one day. I know you will. “What do you do?”

  “I work in an office.”

  Did she want him to ask a follow-up question? There were lots of things a person could do in an office. “Oh?” he said, to be polite, but she was waving—actually waving—at someone
she knew at the bar.

  “Sorry, I went to school with that guy.” She turned her attention back to him, but she seemed like she’d rather go talk to the guy at the bar. Cindy was nagging Ted to turn his phone off. At that moment, their waitress appeared with a tray full of drinks and passed them around. He poured his beer into a frosted mug and began to pick at the label on the empty bottle.

  Nicole lifted her martini carefully to her lips with both hands and took a long sip. It looked like she was drinking out of a bowl. “So what do you write?”

  Cindy beamed. “He wrote a novel called The Last Summer of Beetles. He has an agent and everything!”

  Nicole wrinkled her nose. “The Last Summer of Beatles? Like the band?”

  “Kind of,” he heard himself saying. “It’s a play on words.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She took another sip of martini and her eyes wandered back over to the bar.

  He turned to Ted. “Hey, what’s happening with the Brewers game?”

  The last time Zach had been to Friar Tuck’s, he’d been with Andrea. They shared a basket of deep fried mozzarella logs and she’d said to him, “Long-term relationships can be so hard.”

  He’d laughed, suddenly nervous. “Should I be worried about where this is going?”

  But she smiled gently and shook her head, her dark eyes reflecting the light from the candle flickering on their table. “No. Because anytime I feel myself drifting, I think about what you must have been like in high school. Shy, always with your nose in a book, and you played baseball and made a mix tape for Jenny Sherman.”

  He put his hands over his face and peeked through his fingers at her. “Not Jenny Sherman!”

  She reached across the table to pull his hands down, took his right hand in her left. “Yes, Jenny Sherman. Against whom all other girlfriends will be measured, from now until the end of time.”