“I will,” she said, backing her car out of the space and leaving the parking lot.
I stood in the same place, as though planted there by that kiss, until she drove away. Then, instead of getting into my own car, I went back into the bar and ordered some coffee. I wasn’t ready to drive just yet.
CHAPTER FOUR
Everything That’s Between Us and All
I slept later than I intended the next morning, and when I went down to make myself something for breakfast, my mother had already gone to the hospital. An unopened box of Honey Nut Cheerios – which I ate practically every morning while I was still living at home – sat on the counter. I hadn’t eaten them in years, but my mother couldn’t have known that. I threw a couple of slices of bread in the toaster and poured myself a cup of coffee while I waited.
I hadn’t been completely alone in the house in nearly ten years. For some reason, I felt that I should take the opportunity to examine things more closely, the whole-place equivalent of checking out the medicine cabinet. I walked into the den, sat in my father’s recliner, and looked around the room. There was a book on the coffee table that they’d brought back from a trip to the Grand Canyon a few years before. There was a photo of my mother standing uncomfortably (the only way she ever posed for pictures) next to her goddaughter Lisa on the weekend of Lisa’s wedding. The Raku vase I’d given them for their thirtieth anniversary sat on a shelf next to the
television, at complete odds with all of the other adornments in the room. And the old tapestry throw pillows had been replaced by a set of navy velour ones. Other than that, the room looked exactly as it did before I moved out. They still had Chase’s lacrosse trophies lined up on one bookshelf. The set of ceramic candlesticks he’d made in seventh grade and given to my mother for Christmas sat next to my vase. My parents’ wedding picture was on one side of the fireplace and the photograph of them renewing their vows twenty years later was on the other. The frames with our high school photos hung on another wall. I suppose when you’ve been living in the same house for as long as my parents have, you stop thinking about making changes.
I heard the bread pop up in the toaster and returned to the kitchen. The local daily paper, the
Amber Advisor
, sat on the kitchen table and I absently perused the front page while I ate. There might have been unrest all over the globe, a crippling political scandal in Washington, or a life altering scientific breakthrough commanding the headlines of the
New York Times
or the
Boston Globe
. But the
Advisor
reserved the space above the fold for matters of traffic lights, Amber High’s SAT scores, and the visit of a Lithuanian folk musician to the Community Center.
Just as they’d reserved it ten years earlier for the report of an accident on the Pine River Bridge that had claimed the life of the eighteen-year-old son of a prominent Amber shopkeeper. I hadn’t read the paper that morning, in fact didn’t remember seeing any newspaper in the house for several days after the accident. But just before I’d left town, I’d found
the issue with the story sitting on top of a pile of other “commemorative newspapers” on my aunt’s bookshelf. I’d frozen at the sight and then walked away without reading more than the headline.
After I finished eating, I headed to the store. A college-age woman stood behind the counter reading a copy of
Entertainment Weekly
. She didn’t look up when I entered and I think I could have taken the entire front display of stuffed toys out the door without her noticing. Only when I walked behind the counter did she pay me any attention.
“You the son?” she said.
“Yeah, hi. You’re . . .”
“Tab.” She moved her head back and forth quickly as though she was shaking off excess water. “Tabitha. I hate that name, so I make it as short as I can. No one calls me Tabitha.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Yeah, thanks.” She looked back down at the magazine and turned a page. Clearly, this was all the information she thought it was important for us to exchange.
“Where’s Tyler?” I asked.
She kept her eyes on the magazine while she answered. “He doesn’t come in on Fridays. Some independent study thing or something.”
“So he’s not going to be here at all today?”
“Not unless he’s planning to surprise us.”
She turned another page. I wondered if I should apologize for breaking her concentration. A customer walked up to the register and Tab moved over so I could ring him up. For the first time since I had been back in the store, I felt an urge to flash the authority
that was my birthright. I got over it and helped the customer. A few minutes later, I suggested to Tab that there might be shelves that needed restocking or merchandise that needed straightening and she laboriously closed the magazine and walked to the back of the store.
The stock guy, Carl, was working again, but as was the case the day before, I saw him only on the occasions when he wandered up from the back room. With Tab tinkering at whatever she was tinkering at, I was alone behind the counter to register a few sales and answer a couple of customer questions. None of it was particularly taxing and, while I was slightly irritated at Tab’s laxity, it was hard to fault her. The closest thing to a challenge came just before lunchtime when the candy vendor showed up – the same man who had sold my father candy ten years earlier – to take an order for the next week. To keep myself entertained, I reviewed every item available on the vendor’s stock list and ordered a box of BlisterSnax.
“You sure about this?” the salesman said. “Your dad doesn’t usually carry these.”
“We’re gonna take a walk on the wild side.”
That marketing experiment addressed, I navigated my way through what stood for a lunchtime rush and then settled into the long lull that typified the early afternoon. Without Tyler there to talk to, and with very few customers to deal with, I had no choice but to think about the way the night before had ended. I hadn’t been conscious of how much I wanted to kiss Iris again until I was actually kissing her. I was certainly aware of how much I enjoyed talking to her,
how beautiful she seemed to me, and how I felt – especially that second night – that I was beginning to get to know her in a new way. And of course, I was aware that I simply saw her differently than I saw most other women. But it wasn’t until she reached for me, until we were actually kissing, that I realized how much I wanted her physically. It was like exiting the highway expecting to eat at Denny’s and finding The French Laundry instead.
And at the same time as I was buckling under the sensual weight of the kiss, I was sucker punched by the emotional impact. I hadn’t been smitten for a long time, but when Iris kissed me, there was so much possibility to the act that I allowed my mind to race. I began to calculate the distance from Springfield to Lenox, to think that New Mexico (one of the destinations I’d been considering) could wait for a while, all immediately in the seconds after our lips first touched. And when we continued to kiss, I swear I had actual visions of Iris and me walking together and holding hands. It wasn’t simply a kiss; it was a time altering act transporting my sensibility back to my junior year of college.
And then she pulled away. And there was that shake of her head, that muttering about “gathering her wits,” that look in her eyes. It was a different look from the one Iris had given me when we kissed ten years before but, like that look, it suggested that she had experienced our moment differently than I had. And I didn’t know what to make of it. After all, she had reached for me. But in the end, something about kissing me, something about an act that had sent my imagination whirling, had caused her to retreat into herself.
It felt a little strange to me that while I had been kissing Iris this time, I hadn’t thought about Chase at all. In fact, I hadn’t thought about Chase until I was back in the bar with a double espresso. I’d played a medley of guilt and frustration before settling into the slow jam of confusion that I was still working on while I stood in the store.
As Amber High let out, the place got a little busier, allowing me to move on to other things, at least occasionally. Tab’s shift ended and a high school senior named Merry came on. Merry didn’t seem to take the store any more seriously than Tab had, but she was at least willing to make the effort to ring up a greeting card or show a customer where the all-occasion wrapping paper was.
Merry had been in the store about fifteen minutes when Iris walked in. I went over to her as soon as I saw her and then pulled up short when I got within five feet, suddenly remembering that her personal space was decidedly not mine.
“Do you have a couple of minutes?” she asked. I nodded and we started walking down the street.
“I’m getting ready to head back home,” she said, and then added, pointing back in the other direction, “the dog’s already in the car.”
“I’m glad you stopped by. It was really good seeing you the last few days.”
“Yeah, it was great seeing you.” She looked over at me quickly and then looked back ahead. “I didn’t want to leave without talking to you a little about what happened last night.”
I assumed that anything I said at that point would
either be inappropriate or make me feel foolish, so I simply kept listening.
“I was a little surprised when that happened,” she said. “I mean, I know it was me who started it, but I was just a little surprised that I did it. It had just been so good talking to you and it was kind of fun seeing you after all this time. And it just brought up a lot of stuff – good stuff. You said that thing about missing me and I just got . . . inspired, I guess. Then when we kissed, it was a lot more intense than I was expecting it to be.”
“I felt that, too,” I said, still not entirely sure where this was going and hoping that letting her know that I shared the experience might help.
She pursed her lips and didn’t make eye contact. “That’s why it would be a really big mistake to do anything with it.”
Even though only a few minutes before I hadn’t been sure that I was ever going to see her again and was positive that if I did she would say something like this, I felt deflated. “What do you mean?”
“You know, with everything that’s between us and all.” I could see out of the corner of my eye that she glanced over at me. “You aren’t going to tell me that it wouldn’t feel very weird if we actually went after this, are you?”
“I’m not sure what I’m thinking about it, to tell you the truth.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a major difference between the two of us. I’ve been thinking about it constantly since last night.”
I could have – in fact should have – clarified
myself, but there didn’t seem to be much point to it. By the time I was out of college, I had decided that no relationship was worth pursuing if the pursuit required convincing the other party. The fact that Iris had come to the store – with the dog waiting to go home – with the express purpose of clearing up any romantic misinterpretations I might have had was enough to make me just wish the entire encounter was over. I simply laughed, turned, and took a couple of steps in the direction of her car.
“Can I meet your dog?” I said.
Iris’ expression relaxed. She was clearly unsure of how I was going to react to what she had to say and was relieved that I was letting her off the hook. We walked toward the car. When the dog saw her, it pressed its nose against the side window, fogging it with its breath.
“Big guy,” I said. “What is it?”
“It’s a Wheaton Terrier. And a gal.”
“This huge thing is a terrier?”
“Yeah, I know. She’s really friendly.” Iris opened the passenger door and the dog came bounding out, jumping up on Iris and then doing the same to me. She calmed when I pet her, but then left our side and jumped back into the car.
“She kinda likes road trips,” Iris said.
“Maybe I should get one of these to come with me to the southwest. Do they like the Dave Matthews Band?”
Iris took her car keys out of her jacket and walked toward her side of the car.
“When do you think you’re going to go?” she said.
“I’m not sure yet. I need to find out what’s going on
with my father and then I have to take care of some stuff in Springfield. I have to do a little more research on the place, too. I’m not
that
spontaneous. I’m thinking New Mexico. Maybe by the end of the month.”
She nodded and I thought she was going to say something else. But again she seemed to fix on something in the distance. After a moment, she looked into my eyes.
“Let’s stay in touch, okay?” she said.
“Yeah, sure.”
“I mean it. It was
really
good seeing you. And I really liked talking to you the last couple of nights. I always did. You were a good friend, Hugh, not just Chase’s brother. Don’t let what happened last night get in the way. I don’t want to completely lose touch with you again.”
I closed the dog’s door. “I’ll write you when I get out to wherever I’m going. Maybe you can visit sometime. And I’m sure I’ll be back here every now and then to check on my parents. Maybe our trips will coincide again.”
“That would be good.” She came over and kissed me on the cheek. Then she opened her car door. “I’ve gotta get on the road. Stay in touch, though. I mean it.”
I nodded and she got into the car. I said good-bye to the dog and then watched as Iris drove off.
Before going back into the store, I took a side trip to the chocolate shop. I bought a hazelnut truffle and a dark chocolate toffee, and then went to Bean There, Done That for a triple espresso. I planned to take them back to the store with me, but changed my mind and sat on one of the sidewalk benches until I finished.
Russet Avenue pedestrians had begun the annual process of slowing their pace for the upcoming season. The winter’s brisk and purposeful headlong charge began to relax in early March. By the beginning of April, you could see walkers stopping to talk with one another on the street, examining shop windows, and simply getting from here to there with less velocity. As a kid, I’d loved getting a couple of quarters from my father for ice cream from Layton’s Fountain Shop (now replaced by The Cone Connection) on days like this one. I would sit on a bench, peripherally watching the passersby, but essentially taking as long as possible to enjoy whatever flavor I’d chosen that day, all the while forestalling my favorite part, which was eating the melted ice cream that gathered at the bottom of the very last bite of cone. Early April days were especially appealing, because it was warm enough to sit outside comfortably, but not so warm as to make the ice cream get soft too fast. A few months later, I would need to lick much more deliberately and it simply wasn’t as much fun.