Nice to Come Home To

by Rebecca Flowers

  “What is it?” Pru cried.

  “Just an animal,” John said. “Don’t be scared.”

  Whatever it was scrambled around some more. The sound was nails-on-blackboard awful. Pru had been so relaxed, in her sleep, but the sound made her whole body stiffen. She put her hands over her ears.

  “I’ll go see what it is,” John said, standing.

  “No!” said Pru. “What if it’s a bear?”

  John listened for a little while to the thing. “It’s not a bear,” he said, at last. “A bear would be much heavier.”

  “They make them small, too, you know.”

  He opened the back door of the van before she could say anything and stepped out quickly. She heard him shout and clap his hands. Then his head reappeared, still attached securely, she noted, to his body.

  “Raccoon,” he said, getting back into the van. “Cute little guy. He’s gone.”

  She now had so much adrenaline rushing in her veins that further sleep was impossible. There were hours more to pass. The floor of the van was hard and bumpy under her, making comfort impossible. They kept up an idly meandering stream of patter, singing jingles from TV commercials they knew from when they were kids, remembering their favorite rock bands. John could remember all the songs on his favorite albums in their proper order, year of release, and cover art. She told him that her first concert was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; he said that his was Queen and Thin Lizzy, on a double bill, and his father had taken him when he was fourteen. Pru told him how her father would change the words to songs, so instead of “When she’s weary, try a little tenderness,” he would sing, “Buy another shabby dress.” She told him about the other guys, the ones before Rudy. He laughed when she imitated Phil, who liked to narrate what was going on while they were in bed: “You’re here! I’m there! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

  “You know when was the last time I slept outside?” she said, sleepily. A wind had picked up outside. They could hear it rushing through the treetops. John was lazily tracing the outlines of her fingertips with his own, his head on her shoulder. It must be very late, now. Pru was relaxed and sleepy, saying anything that came into her mind. “Waiting in line at the Medina Ticketron for Springsteen tickets with Kate McCabe, when we were in high school. This was, like, The River, but we’d been in love with him since Born to Run. In junior high. Oh my God, you have never seen two girls so crazy in your life as me and Kate were for Bruce Springsteen. Her brother had all the albums, so we used to go sneak into his room while he was at basketball practice and listen to them.” She waited for him to say something. His answer was so long in coming that she almost fell asleep herself. She jerked awake. “Hey. Are you listening?”

  “Hmph? Yeah. I am now.” John moved his head from her shoulder to her lap and curled up into her. She put her hands in his hair. She didn’t want them to fall asleep yet. If they fell asleep, then it would be morning, and this would all be over.

  “All the other girls were all about Andy Gibb, you know, Shaun Cassidy. Boy singers with blond, feathered hair. And then there’s Springsteen, remember the cover of Darkness? He’s in that T-shirt, looking stoned?” John grunted something that seemed like assent. “I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life than that album cover. ‘Candy’s Room’ was my favorite song. I was probably the only fourteen-year-old girl in all of Ohio who got off to a song about a hooker.” John snickered a little, but he was mostly asleep. Softly, she said, “I always wanted someone who’d feel that way about me. Someone who’d still love me even if I was a hooker. He wants to protect her so much, you know? That’s my Springsteen, the one in the dingy T-shirt, in love with a prostitute. Did she live at Coney Island? No, that’s ridiculous . . . she couldn’t have . . .” Her eyes were closed and she was becoming confused. John had become very still, in her lap. Sleepily, she said, “Kate was more into Asbury Park. I don’t know, for me that one’s a bit overwhelming . . . all those words . . .” Then she was sitting on Josh McCabe’s green shag carpet, staring at the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the scrawny, young Springsteen in a white T-shirt, his hair badly cut in a sort of pointy V on top of his head, as bleary-eyed as if he’d just gotten out of bed . . .

  Pru awakened on the floor of the van sometime in the very early morning, before the sun was up. Even her head was under the blankets, against the cold. Her arms were wrapped around John. The way the front of her body was plastered against the back of his, she might have been a drowning victim he was pulling to shore. She started to ease herself away, but he rolled over and pulled her back toward him, tucking his arm under her head. She smiled, and closed her eyes. In a moment, she had fallen back asleep inside the warmth of his body, with his breath on her neck.

  When she woke up again, the sun was just beginning to rise. Her hips and back were aching but she didn’t want to move. For a long time, she watched John sleeping. She wanted to reach out and touch the sweet line curving around each of his fine nostrils. She wanted to sweep his hair off his forehead and kiss him there.

  He opened his eyes, blinked a few times, then smiled. “Hey,” he said, gently, without moving away. She smiled back.

  “Thin Lizzy,” she said.

  “Bruce Springsteen,” he said, yawning.

  “It was before Born in the U.S.A. and that supermodel,” Pru said. “You have to understand that.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, his body tensing. “I think I heard something.”

  In the next moment, the back door of the van flew open. It made a horrible wrenching noise. Blinding sunlight flooded the van. It was all so sudden and frightening that Pru felt like she’d been shot in the eye.

  “That shit for brains,” someone said. “What the hell?”

  John threw off the blankets and sat up. “Good morning,” he said, pleasantly.

  The morning park ranger blinked at them, completely surprised by their presence. He held a Starbucks cup of coffee, Pru noticed, and something about that struck her as so funny that she started to laugh.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” the ranger said.

  “Guess what,” said John. “No shit.”

  Ten

  “Oh, no no no no no,” Fiona said. “No. Rebound girlfriend: No.” The bartender passed by them and Fiona crooked a finger at him. “Hit me,” she said. It was the first night she’d had away from the kids in months, and she was going for broke.

  She had had three shots of whiskey and a margarita (on the rocks) in twenty minutes, to Pru’s one glass of wine. They were at the bar at City. Pru was in culture shock after her night in the woods. She’d slept all day in her flannel nightgown in a bed piled with as many covers as she could find. She couldn’t get enough warmth. Even in sleep, she kept remembering John waking up in the van that morning: “Hey.” She would have liked to wander by the café to see what he was doing, but she had promised weeks ago to take Fiona out for her fortieth birthday, and there was no getting out of it. Had something changed? She felt almost certain it had. She and John hadn’t so much as touched on the way home, but when she’d gotten out of the van on Columbia Road he’d said, “We’ll talk later.” Did he mean to call? She wasn’t entirely sure he had her number.

  “Anyway, it’s not like that,” Pru told Fiona. She wasn’t ready to get publicly excited about him, not yet. Not until she had more solid evidence that this was going somewhere. “I’m just the sympathetic listener. You know, a friend.”

  “Nooooo!” Fiona cried, throwing back her long ballerina neck. “The comfort girlfriend! That’s even worse! Rebound, at least it’s sexual. But comforter, once you’re that, you’re like his mother.” She downed the last of the margarita, and shuddered. “And believe you me, missy, that’s the last thing you want to be. Somebody’s fucking mother.”

  “Anyway,” Pru said, “I’m not convinced I could have a real future with a man who smelled my morning breath, without having had sex with me first.”

  “Please,” sa
id Fiona dismissively. “It’s just a matter of time.”

  Pru shook her head. “I don’t think so, Fi. He’s seen me at my absolute worst. The man has his pride, you know.”

  “You go to him right now,” Fiona slurred. “Right now, before it’s too late, and jump his bones!” She punctuated these last words with a swizzle stick she’d been mangling.

  Fiona clearly had a skewed idea of her life. She acted as though all Pru did was go out and meet men, everywhere she went. Married people, thought Pru, never pictured single people as they really were, eating dinner from a tin with the cat on the table. For the millionth time that day, she pictured John waking up next to her: “Hey.”

  Fiona turned to the guy sitting next to her. “Can I bum a cigarette?” she said, smiling broadly. He gave her one and slid over a pack of matches. She lit it, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. “Oh, yeah,” she said, exhaling a stream of smoke. “You know what I’d really love? A joint.”

  “Heroin?” Pru called out, looking around the bar. “Methamphetamines, anyone? Nursing mom here!”

  Fiona grinned and pointed the cigarette at her. “Listen, just don’t let on that you’re in love with him right away, that’s all I’m saying. I know you don’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to hear it either. But you can’t expect him to marry you if you don’t let him chase you a little bit.”

  “I’m not looking to get him to marry me, Liz Taylor. So, hush up.”

  After another round, when Fiona stood up and started doing her Axl Rose dance, Pru announced that it was time to go home.

  She saw Fiona to her door and then started up Eighteenth Street. Pru wasn’t stupid. She didn’t confuse love with sitting out a cold night in a dead van. Not real, lasting love, anyway. Maybe rebound love, like Fiona said. And that might be okay, she thought, as she walked. Getting-each-other-through-a-bad-time love. The kind of love that could turn from platonic to “more” to platonic again, as easily as a leaf turns in the breeze. She wouldn’t even want him to real-love love her right now. She wouldn’t trust it. She’d taken freshman psychology in college, after all, and was familiar with the way baby ducks imprint on the first adult they see after birth. Even if it’s not another duck, but, say, a cow.

  So, I’m way ahead of you here, Miss Fiona, she thought, turning onto Columbia Road. Unless, of course, John really did real-love love her right now. It didn’t seem entirely implausible. Perhaps a little soon, on the heels of his divorce. Fiona was right, one did like to put another relationship between oneself and the ex. A little palate cleanser between courses, as McKay called the little twenty-two-year-old who came his way right before Bill. An amuse-bouche. But what if it was happening now? What if it had happened already? Look at Patsy and Jacob and their twenty-second courtship! Maybe John felt the same way as she did, after all. Would that be so terribly bad?

  She found herself standing in front of the Kozy Korner. There were lights on inside. She pushed open the door and went in. John was standing behind the counter, washing up. She noticed, with a little thrill, that otherwise the place was empty.

  “Hey!” he called, happily, when he saw her. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Were you going to ask me to come up and listen to your Queen albums?” said Pru, swinging her purse as she strolled toward him, smiling.

  Just then, a girl came out of the bathroom. It was the exclaiming-over-the-cheesecake girl, the one who’d taken Pru’s seat at the counter. Sexy Yoga Babe.

  “Oh,” Pru said, with more obvious surprise than she could wish. She abruptly stopped swinging her purse and it hit her in the knee. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” the girl said, pleasantly.

  The girl was in date dress—silky top and skinny jeans, sparkly, strappy shoes. Of course, with a girl like that, thought Pru, such an outfit could be a taking-out-the-garbage dress. She turned to look at John. He was in date dress, too, a black sweater and gray trousers. She hadn’t noticed this before.

  There was an awkward, polite pause before John remembered to introduce them. The girl’s name was Gaia. Gaia stood with poise, her arms resting comfortably at her sides. Pru’s own arms, for all she knew, were flapping like a chicken’s.

  “Maybe another time?” she said to John.

  He smiled easily and said, “Sure.”

  She backed out of the diner and hurried home, a little stunned and now feeling the wine she’d drunk. She remembered what he’d said about Lila: I still sleep on one side of the bed, and she’s dating already. Didn’t that imply that he was not dating? Hadn’t he said that just yesterday? What, had he gotten on the horn and lined this up for tonight, while she was in bed all day, thinking about him? He had wrapped his arms around her, hadn’t he? Was that just for animal warmth, for survival? How could he be dating someone else. How?

  She sat down on her front steps. Oh, God. She was doing it. Exactly what she’d hoped to avoid. She realized she was sitting in the spot where she’d first met him, the night she dumped Rudy’s TV. Where Patsy and Jacob sat out talking until the sun came up. Where probably countless others had done the same thing, their little beating hearts in their outstretched hands.

  He didn’t real-love love her. Like she did him.

  Shit.

  “WELL, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?” MC KAY SAID. “A NICE, good-looking guy in D.C., going through a divorce? That’s like throwing a scrap of bacon to a pack of wild, hungry dogs.”

  They were sitting on McKay’s front steps, while Oxo sniffed around, looking for a place to pee. It was actually getting too cold to sit outside at night. Pru wondered again that she and John hadn’t died, sleeping in the van. Was that only three nights ago?

  She put her head in her hands. “I hate this stuff,” Pru moaned. “Boy stuff. I’ve been doing the same thing for twenty years now. When does it ever end?”

  In fact, what was happening with John was a lot like the only high school crush she’d ever had. The boy had been older and there wasn’t much to distinguish him from all the other boys except that his locker was right next to hers, and he had this face that she couldn’t look at full-on, for whatever reason. Her crush on him was huge and preoccupying and dwindled her down to the size of a peanut, in her mind. She practically hid inside her locker whenever she saw him. There wasn’t even a question of the boy liking her back. She didn’t for a moment entertain the possibility that, if her hair caught on fire, he would even notice, as he stood there spinning out the combination on his lock.

  But she had some reason to think that John would notice. That he had, in fact, already noticed. There was some possibility there . . . wasn’t there? No. She had been foolish to think so. The carrots in the waxed paper bag—the familiar, inevitable feeling of her hand in his—none of it meant anything. When she saw him a few mornings later at the Korner, she felt one part of herself removed, watching and listening with the eyes and ears of a Soviet-era spy. He was nothing but his usual, amiable self, although once or twice she thought he was looking at her strangely.

  The other thing that was like her only high school crush was the amount of John Owens-related trivia she’d amassed. He had flecks of green in his hazel eyes. He tied his apron in the back, and when he cooked, he put a towel over one shoulder. He gave free coffee to the people who couldn’t afford it. He was nice to the delivery guys and beggars, everyone who set foot in his café. He had two sisters and they were always calling him on his cell phone. His heroes were Charlie Parker and Lyndon B. Johnson. He grew up wild, near the woods, and scampered over rocks like a billy goat. When he fell asleep, his body jerked exactly one time. She was like a John Owens philatelist.

  Did Gaia know any of this stuff? Pru wondered. Probably not. Probably, that was the whole attraction.

  A WEEK AFTER THE NIGHT IN THE VAN, SHE WAS SPEEDING up the BWI Parkway behind the wheel of Jacob’s convertible. Patsy called the color look-at-me blue. It was, indeed, very, very blue.

  The convertible had a stick shift and ergonomic leather seats and a subw
oofer that pounded away right underneath the seat, as she drove. The sun was out as they sped north, toward the Delaware shore. Her whole body vibrated deliciously. So this is what it feels like to be Jacob, she thought.

  Jacob himself was sacked out in the backseat, fast asleep. He had tossed her the keys and jumped back there as soon as she’d come down with her overnight bag. He hadn’t even bothered to find out if she knew how to drive stick, much less whether she had a driver’s license, or any outstanding warrants for her arrest. He lay on his back with his arms crossed over his chest, wearing scrubs and sunglasses. Pru felt as though she had kidnapped a member of Prince’s band.

  It was a beautiful autumn day, cool enough so that she had turned on the car’s heater to warm her toes. Patsy and Annali were already at the beach house, having driven in from the airport in Baltimore in a rented car a few days earlier. This was to be their last trip before the move. Nadine knew about it now, and professed, even in private conversations with Pru, to be thrilled.

  Climbing the bridge over the Chesapeake, she gave the accelerator a little tap with her foot and the car leapt forward, out of the shadow of a semi in the next lane. She’d never driven a car like this before. Her only experience was with old beaters that you had to coax up the slightest rise, keeping your fingers crossed that the engine didn’t suddenly die.

  Jacob’s head appeared in her rearview mirror, just as they were cresting the bridge. He looked around, stretching and yawning, then clambered into the front seat.

  “Is that coffee?” he said, pointing to a styrofoam cup in the cup holder. He pried off the lid and drank the coffee in a long, undulating gulp, as if it were Gatorade. He replaced the empty cup in the holder and began riffling through a box of CDs on the floor. He flipped down the visor. He checked his cell phone for messages. Pru held her breath and tried not to go over any bumps in the road when he pulled out a little bottle of Visine and put drops in his eyes. He had the attention span of a cricket. “That’s where this went!” he said, digging a disc out of the glove compartment. He put it into the car’s CD player, and they were assaulted by the Pretenders’ “Message of Love.”