by P. E. Ryan
“I wish,” she said. “Models probably make a lot more than psychologists.”
“You want to be a shrink? I thought you wanted to be a veterinarian.”
“One or the other. There’s plenty of time to decide.”
“Good thing, too,” he said. “If I don’t get picked up by a scout this year, I’m going to need a backup plan.”
“You could always coach.”
Yep, she thinks I’m an idiot. “I’m not really good at yelling. Coach Bobbit yells himself hoarse by the end of every practice. Plus he just seems mad all the time. And did you notice how fat he’s getting? We call him the coach potato.”
“Looks-ism,” she said, reminding him of that concept he still didn’t understand. “You wouldn’t have to be like Bobbit. Besides, he’s mainly a football coach. Basketball coaches are different. They’re kind of…academic and sexy.”
“Gross,” he said. “You sound a little a looks-is-my yourself. Nah, I don’t want to coach. I want to play ball for a good school, then for a great team. I want to retire at thirty, and then…” He didn’t feel like telling her about wanting to own his own island. It seemed silly, at the moment. Because he had to say something, he said, “I don’t know, become an astronaut.”
Kate burst out laughing. “You can’t just decide to become an astronaut one day! Those people train for years. Most of them start off as pilots.”
“I meant as a millionaire,” Charlie said, embarrassed. “That’s how they’re going to fund the space program in the future, you know. Millionaires buying seats on the shuttle. Be nice to me and I’ll get you the seat next to mine.”
“Great,” she said. “I can treat all the people who go crazy on Mars.”
They were south of Anastasia Island now, crossing the bridge onto Summer Haven. There were plenty of beaches to choose from in St. Augustine, but Summer Haven was theirs. It was where they’d ended up on their first date four months ago, and where they’d made out for the first time. They hadn’t been to any other beach all summer.
He turned off Old A1A onto a road that led to a clearing large enough to park the Volkswagen.
“Wow,” she said as they got out of the car, “could this thing be any shinier? You must wash it twice a week.”
“Almost,” Charlie said, grinning.
“Maybe you should detail cars for a living.”
“You really have high hopes for me, don’t you? I don’t want to clean other people’s cars. Just mine.” He grabbed their blanket and towels out of the backseat, and they headed down the footpath toward the beach.
They picked a spot as far away from other people as possible. Charlie unfolded the blanket while Kate took off her shirt and cutoffs. The lime green bikini seemed to glow against her tan. He stripped down to his swim trunks.
For a while, they just lay there side by side, soaking up the sun and listening to the surf. Then Charlie asked if she wanted to go into the water. “You go, Charlie Horse,” she said. “I don’t want to wash off all this sunblock.”
“I’d be glad to help you put it back on.”
“Go swim, smart-ass.”
He grinned at her and charged off toward the water.
The waves were good. He ran straight into them, spiking his knees above the waterline until the ocean slammed into his chest, pushing him back. He dove beneath the surface. When he came up, another wave smashed into him, knocking him sideways. The next wave came and he dove for it, bodysurfing at least twenty feet before it let him go. His father had taught him how to do that. It was hard to imagine now, since the man almost never left the house, but the three of them—Charlie and his mother and father—used to come to the beach every Sunday. Charlie remembered holding his father’s hand and walking out farther than he’d ever been, learning how to dive at just the right moment so that the wave caught him and shoved him toward the shore. They bought a raft at Eckerd one Sunday—it was bright yellow and had a blue rope—and Charlie had blown it up on the beach and then ridden waves that dropped him right onto the sand at his parents’ feet.
His mother went out on the raft with him once. They sat together, laughing, as the waves bounced them up and down. Charlie’s father had brought their camera, and he snapped two pictures in a row: photos they laughed about later and stuck up on the refrigerator, like two consecutive frames of a comic strip. In one, Charlie and his mother were perched on the raft, holding hands, looking down at the water, and trying to stay balanced. In the other, the raft was tossed upward, and only their bare legs and feet were showing, pointing at the sky as they were tipped into the water.
He jumped at another wave that brought him halfway back to shore. Then another that moved him so close, his toes dragged the sandy bottom.
Kate was propped up on one elbow, reading a large paperback. He pushed his wet hair out of his eyes and squinted at the cover. The Story of Philosophy.
“That’s the book we had in Mr. Metcalf’s class,” he said.
“Yep.” She glanced up at him and smiled, then looked down at the page.
Charlie picked up his towel and dragged it over his head. “I used to call it The Story of Nytol.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Why are you reading it again? Is it on the senior list?”
“No. I just like it. I’m rereading the part on Immanuel Kant. Did you know when he was seventy and really sick, he wrote an essay called ‘On the Power of the Mind to Master the Feeling of Illness by Force of Resolution’?”
Charlie couldn’t follow the title. In fact, two seconds after she said it, it seemed to evaporate from his mind. “Huh,” he said, drying his legs.
“Kant was an interesting guy. He liked to breathe only through his nose when he took walks. He thought he could experience nature and not get a cold, that way.”
“You can only get colds through your mouth?”
“That’s what he thought.”
“Well, what if he already had a cold?” Charlie asked. “His nose would be clogged up. How would he breathe?”
Kate clucked her tongue. “It’s philosophy, not biology. It’s like an idea injected into the world of facts, instead of the world of facts shaping ideas.”
“Sounds like he had issues.” Charlie dropped down onto the blanket next to her. He stretched out on his back and cupped his hands behind his head. “I was thinking about my mom, out there. She went out on my raft with me one time, and this wave just totally knocked us over. My dad took some pretty funny pictures of it.”
“How’s your dad doing, anyway?” Kate asked, closing her book.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean”—she seemed to search for the words—“in his grief. You know, grieving is a process. He must miss your mom an awful lot.”
“I miss her, too.”
“I know you do. I was just thinking about him as a widower. Losing a spouse is a whole different process from losing a parent.”
“You sound like a shrink already.”
“Therapist,” she corrected him. “I’ve just been reading some things. So how’s he doing?”
“I don’t know. We don’t really talk about it.”
“You have to. It’s just the two of you in the house. You lost the one person you both shared.”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said again.
“Come on, you must talk about it sometime.”
“We don’t.”
“Well, you should. It’s part of the process—”
“We don’t. Okay? We don’t talk about anything, as far as my mom goes.”
“Don’t get mad. I’m just asking as your friend.”
“I’m not mad,” Charlie said. But he was. To talk about it was to talk about how his dad was turning into a hermit, and how he drank every evening, and it was embarrassing to even think about that stuff around Kate, much less speak it out loud. If she thought he was a lamebrain who should wash cars for a living, what would she think if she knew his dad was going off the deep end? She’d reopened her b
ook and was staring into it now. “Sorry,” he said. “It just…bums me out to think about that stuff.”
“It’s okay,” she said without looking up. “When you want to talk about it, I’m all ears.”
“Spoken like a true shrink. I mean, therapist.”
They stayed out for another hour or so. When they were back in the car, Charlie started to turn the ignition but stopped, let go of the key, and put his hand on the back of Kate’s head. He stroked her hair and said, “You’re really great, you know that?”
She pecked him on the lips. He leaned into her and kissed her back. Then kissed her again, opening his mouth over hers and sliding his hand against her hip.
After a few minutes, she said, “You know, I love your car. I really do. But sometimes I wish it was a little bigger.”
“We could get in the backseat.” He gestured toward the space that looked even smaller than where they were sitting now.
“It’s broad daylight,” she said.
“We could go…someplace else.”
“Where, one of those seedy motels on A1A?”
Actually, he was thinking about asking her if she wanted to go to the Danforth house. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in it, and the floors had gotten pretty dirty since Charlie had started smashing out the windows. She probably wouldn’t want to go if she knew the condition the place was in. But they definitely could have some fun there, even if they had to stand up the whole time.
Kate was giving him a funny look. “Hello,” she said, waving at him. “I was kidding. You look like you were watching a porno film in your head.”
“I was not.” He felt himself flush.
“It’s okay,” she said, grinning, “as long as it starred us.”
He kissed her again. He wanted her to put her hand in his lap, like she had for that brief, amazing moment the last time they’d made out. Instead she squinted at the dashboard clock. “Oh my god, is it really five thirty?”
“No, that thing stopped working. There’s a watch in the glove compartment.”
She opened the little door and pushed her fingers through the random junk he’d accumulated there.
“So maybe I was seeing a little film about us,” he said playfully, rubbing her arm.
“What’s this?”
He looked down. She was holding a small wooden pipe.
He felt his stomach fold up. “What’s what?”
“This.” She scowled. “It’s a pipe.” She brought it to her nose and sniffed, then shuddered. “It stinks. You told me you weren’t doing this junk anymore.”
“I’m not!” He tried to calm his voice.
“Then why do you even have this?”
“It’s from back when I was doing it. I forgot it was even there.”
She glared at him.
“I swear!” There was at least a little truth in what he was saying: He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used that particular pipe, and he really had forgotten it was in the glove compartment. He had a much better pipe and rolling papers in his bedroom at home.
Kate stared down at the stinking piece of wood. “I made it really clear when we first started going out. You can do whatever you want, dope yourself up, live in a cloud. Fine. But I’m not interested in dating someone who gets high. You can do this stuff, or you can date me. That’s it.”
“Kate, I know that. Honestly, I’m not doing it anymore. That’s like a—a relic from the past. Look, give it to me.” She didn’t move. He took the pipe from her hand and tossed it out the open window. It vanished into the palm scrub. “See? Gone.”
She didn’t say anything.
“All right? Do you believe me?”
“All right,” she said finally.
“Thank you.” He leaned over and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. A long, awkward silence followed, while they both just sat there, staring forward at the beach. Charlie could hear his heart beating in his ears. “You want to go to a movie at the mall this weekend?”
“Sure,” she said, though her tone had flattened out some and she kept her gaze forward.
“Good,” Charlie said. “Just us. Whatever movie you want.”
He turned the key in the ignition.
That night, his father started crying at dinner. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and a moment later he was pinching his eyes with his fingers and it was over. Charlie sat across the kitchen table, and for some reason what he felt wasn’t sadness, but fear. “Are you all right, Dad?”
“I’m fine.” He swallowed some wine and a bite of food and looked toward the television, which was on in the next room.
“Do you…do you want to talk about anything?”
“Me?” his father asked. “No. You mean, how was my day, that sort of thing?”
“Y-yeah,” Charlie said uneasily.
“My day was fine,” his father said in a flat voice.
“Did you get out of the house any?”
His father sniffed. He shot Charlie a look. “You like that question, don’t you? You ask me that almost every night.”
“It’s just a question.”
“Well, yes, I drove to the office. Did some things around here. The usual.”
The usual, Charlie thought. That meant he hadn’t done anything or gone anywhere.
After his father had drifted off to sleep on the couch, he went to his room, put on some music, and settled down next to his open window with his headphones on and the fan going. It wasn’t so bad, what he was doing, was it? It wasn’t like he was cheating on Kate. Lots of guys he knew at school had girlfriends and tried to mess around with other girls. This was just getting high and lying about it. Sue me, he thought, lighting his pipe.
6.
(Didn’t you move here from one of those square states?)
Mr. Webber started pointing to his head long before he reached the Goody-Goody booth. Sam pretended not to see him. Standing behind the counter, he kept his eyes down on the round waffle iron and the spatula in his hand.
“Sam, how many times do I have to tell you? Hat.”
“Huh? Oh, hi, Mr. Webber. I was just making some waffle cones. I want to be ready for the Saturday-night rush. Did I show you my trick with the miniature marshmallows to solve the leak problem?”
“Where is your hat?”
“It’s around here somewhere. I’ll find it.”
“That was an awful visual I just got, Sam. I’m crossing the food court and I see eight different eateries, and eight identical mannequins behind the counters. If I were a potential customer, I could just as easily have gone over to the Cinnabon. Or the Dairy Queen. The eye should stop at Goody-Goody. That hat’s an attention magnet.”
It certainly is, Sam thought. Mr. Webber was a widower and a retiree from the phone company, where he’d worked as a supervisor for forty years, and once he’d retired, he hadn’t known what to do with himself. So he’d bought a frozen-yogurt franchise and supervised that. He was a stickler for rules, and he was always popping up out of nowhere. He’d worked out a whole Goody-Goody philosophy, even though there was only him and a staff of four. “Draw ’em in hungry, send ’em out happy” was one of his mottos. “A little extra topping equals a little extra business” was another. For Sam, his five days a week were pretty much a cakewalk, because there were so many eateries in the food court that he never had more than a couple customers at once. He didn’t like the cleanup or the yogurt-machine maintenance, but other than that it was easy money—and a good excuse to get out of the house and away from Teddy for long stretches of time.
But the hat. What a nightmare. It was a blue baseball cap with the top of a brown waffle cone sticking out high on one side, and the bottom, pointy end sticking out low on the other, so it looked like the cone had come down out of the sky and pierced Sam’s skull at a diagonal. The cone was topped with a round, white polyester blob that was supposed to be frozen yogurt and a cherry that dangled like a tassel. And, of course, the words GOODY-GOODY were stitched across the front. Franchi
se stuff Mr. Webber had been delighted to receive in the mail a few weeks ago, along with a new list of suggested company rules, one of which stated that if you were behind the counter, you wore the hat. It would have been better, Sam thought, if the cone had been turned upside down, like a dunce cap.
He held out as long as he could, but Mr. Webber wasn’t going anywhere until he put that hat on his head, so eventually he dug it out from under the counter and put it on.
“That’s better,” Mr. Webber said. “Now what’s this about a miniature marshmallow?”
“You put a miniature marshmallow in the bottom of the waffle cone while it’s still hot,” Sam said in a flat voice, his enthusiasm gone now that he was under the weight of the hat. “It seals off the bottom so it won’t drip.”
“That’s great, Sam. You’re using your head. I like that. Now, I’ve got some shopping to do, but I’ll be back shortly, and I don’t want to see you looking like all these other mannequins, you understand?”
“Absolutely,” Sam said.
Mr. Webber turned to go, but then glanced back over Sam’s shoulder. “Vanilla’s low,” he said. Then he wandered off through the food court.
Stuck in the hat, Sam thought wearily. From the walk-in cooler he got a bag of vanilla mix as large as a king-size pillow, then climbed onto a footstool, hefted the awkward blob up, and flipped it over, twisting its spout open. A wave of milky liquid glucked out in surges, and gradually the bag got lighter.
“Pretty impressive,” said a voice behind him, “for someone who has a cone jabbed through his head.”
He started and turned around. “Melissa, you scared the hell out of me. You know what would happen if I dropped this?”
“Extra cleanup tonight?” She pushed her straight jet-black hair back from her face.
“Let’s just say you could make a disaster movie out of it. The Goop. How are you?”
“The usual.” Melissa shrugged. “You’re still coming over Monday night, right? There’re going to be six of us this time.”
“Yeah, I’ll be there.”
“Without the hat, I hope.”
