My First Love (6 page)

“Don’t you look pretty,” she said to me, when she’d dropped the flour on the table and come over to where I was sitting. “And you smell nice, too. What’s the occasion?”

I glanced up quickly, plucking at the green linen shirt I’d worn in honor of my date. “No occasion.” It came out as kind of a squeak. “I mean, just your raise,” I added lamely.

She stared at me with one eyebrow raised for about ten seconds before she dug into her grocery bags.

“You must be exhausted,” I said, getting up to help her.

“Not at all,” she replied, producing a plastic bag full of apples. “In fact, I thought we’d celebrate our good fortune by making a big apple pie.”

“Pie?” I looked at my watch—it was already nine-fifteen. “You’ll be asleep before it’s out of the oven,” I said doubtfully, watching her dart around the kitchen, pulling out ingredients, a rolling pin, and a pie tin. She was acting as if it were first thing in the morning and she had a full tank of energy.

Mom put her hands on her hips and gave me a mock frown. “What’s gotten into you, Amy? You sound like my mother, telling me it’s past my bedtime.”

“It is,” I said, yawning as I turned on the oven and got out the butter to grease the pie tin. If she was determined to bake at this unlikely hour, there was no stopping her. The least I could do was to speed the project along. “I’ll do the filling,” I said, “if you’ll make the crust.”

As I worked, I mentally counted up the minutes: a half hour to make the filling if I peeled and cored and cut the apples fast. Add an hour more to bake, which would bring us up to ten-forty-five. Even if we saved the pie for tomorrow, quarter to eleven was cutting it close. If I turned up the oven temperature a notch or two, would the pie bake faster or would it just burn?

“Besides,” Mom said, as if continuing a conversation she’d started in her head, “we’ll need a snack if we want to stay up for the lunar eclipse.”

I nearly choked on the piece of apple I was munching. Right before she said it, I’d been debating whether or not to tell her about the physics assignment. But just then, the prospect of telling her went from risky to too late.

“Oh,” I said dumbly. “I didn’t know you were planning to watch the eclipse.”

“Come on, Amy, can’t you show a tad more enthusiasm?” Mom complained as she plunged her hands into the mixing bowl, working the butter into the flour. “It only happens once every few years.”

“I am excited,” I protested glumly. “It’s just that … it’s so late.” Meanwhile, my mind was racing. What would I do when Mom and I were outside at midnight looking moonward and Chris just happened to show up? I couldn’t very well call him, and risk waking up his parents, to tell him the whole thing was off. Desperately, I thought of suggesting that Mom and I watch from the apartment pool out back, so we wouldn’t run into Chris, who’d be waiting out front. I was thinking I could hang a banner from my bedroom window that said, “Chris—I have to cancel. Something urgent came up.”

While I was scheming like a criminal, trying not to act nervous but throwing glances at the oven clock, Mom was humming and pinching her piecrust into a delicate scalloped edge. She was never as happy as when she was baking, which she rarely got to do. That and classical music were the two things that helped her relax.

“How about some classical music while we wait?” I suggested while she put the pie in the oven. I went to the kitchen counter and turned on the radio.

“Since when are you willing to switch from the rock-and-roll
station?” She laughed. “No, thanks, it’ll make me too sleepy. Let’s clean up the mess we’ve made, then find something lively on TV instead.”

By that point, I was the one who was exhausted, mostly from being so nervous. When we finished cleaning up, I dragged my feet to the living room and flipped through the TV channels, looking for something that would put Mom to sleep. An old movie maybe, one she’d seen at least a dozen times. I’d have settled for a rerun of a sitcom—anything, really, as long as it wouldn’t keep Mom on the edge of her seat.

“Listen, the late movie sounds terrific,” Mom said, pressing a finger to a column in
TV Guide
. “ ‘Based on a true story: Mother launches a nationwide search for her daughter, who disappeared under suspicious circumstances.’ ”

For a minute, I thought she was teasing, that somehow she’d found out about my plans to “disappear” with Chris. But when I turned to the channel she told me to, I saw it was a real show,
Bring My Daughter Back
.

We settled down on the sofa, while in the kitchen the oven timer tick-ticked away. “Let’s turn the lights off, so it’s like a real movie,” I said, reaching for the lamp.

“Okay,” she said with a yawn.

Despite the action-packed plot of the movie, thirty minutes into it and two minutes before the pie was done, Mom had curled up on the couch and fallen fast asleep. Moving carefully so as not to wake her, I stood and turned off the
TV. In the semidarkness, I pulled a blanket from the linen closet and tucked her in from neck to feet. Then I tiptoed into the kitchen and quietly turned off the oven timer.

When I took the steaming, bubbling pie out of the oven, my mouth watered from the spicy-sweet smell that filled the kitchen. And even though I’d been looking forward to meeting Chris, I felt a twinge of regret that tonight wouldn’t be as simple as Mom and I sharing a piece of hot, homemade apple pie. I had this funny feeling that nothing after that night ever would.

Outside it was breezy and warm, shorts-and-T-shirt weather, the kind of night that feels more like the end of summer than the middle of fall. But as Mom says, that’s Arizona for you, with its two seasons: hot and even hotter. Sometimes I wished I lived in a more changeable climate, a place that had the brilliant-colored leaves and snowscapes we’d been taught to draw in second grade. But that night I was happy being just where I was. I felt content sitting in the square of grass outside our apartment, breathing in the scent of eucalyptus and cooling earth, watching
the wind fan the branches of the spindly palm trees above me. Waiting for Chris.

He showed up at exactly eleven, turning the corner of our street pedaling a bike. Around the handlebars, he’d strapped a blanket and a wicker picnic basket. “My mom packed this for us. Cokes and brownies,” he said, jumping lightly off his seat. He unleashed the basket from the bike and handed it to me. “You know, to help us stay awake.”

I felt envious for a boy’s life then, in which you could walk out the front door at eleven with your mother’s goodie basket and blessing, instead of stuffing your bed with clothes to look like a sleeping body (as I had) and tiptoeing out. I was afraid Chris would think I was a baby if he knew I hadn’t gotten permission, so I didn’t tell him.

“How come you didn’t drive?” I asked instead. In fact, I was curious why a guy whose family had money didn’t have his own car.

“You promise you won’t think I’m a dork?” he asked.

I couldn’t imagine what he was going to say. “I promise.”

“I just think that the less we pollute the environment, the better.” Then he added quickly, “I’m not a fanatic or anything. I love driving my brother’s car, and if I get into Stanford next year, I’ll get a car. But if I don’t need a car, why buy one?” He shrugged.

“I think that’s great,” I said sincerely.

He seemed embarrassed, and he looked up at our apartment. “You have a nice place.”

“Thanks,” I said, but I could tell that he was trying to be nice. The Palms apartments aren’t exactly luxurious. They’re a series of slightly run-down two-story buildings with balconies, forty years old, as old as just about anything in Phoenix ever got before some new developer came in and tore it down. Chris’s family, on the other hand, lived in a neighborhood full of new houses, huge Tudor and French château mansions. I knew that because the swimming bus had dropped him off there after a few late meets.

I led him around to the tiny side yard. We stashed his bike in the oleanders, dragged an old ladder from its resting place in the crabgrass, and leaned it up against the side of the house. “Be careful of the roof tiles,” I whispered as I began carefully climbing. “There were a few loose the last time I was up.”

“You’ve been up here before?” Chris asked, following my slow steps up the ladder, the blanket around his shoulder and the picnic basket tucked under his arm. “And here I thought I was being so original.”

“Well, I’ve never been up here
with
anyone before,” I said. “It’s a good place to think. You can see a lot of the neighborhood—though not the whole city, the way you can from Squaw Peak.”

We climbed onto the gently sloping rooftop, spread out the blanket, and settled down to watch the sky. I couldn’t help feeling grateful that my mom was asleep on the first floor, rather than right below us. Chris lay back
against the roof. I sat up straight beside him, my arms wrapped around my knees.

Chris looked adorable in his baggy shorts and baseball T-shirt. I felt strangely calm sitting next to him. My heart wasn’t hammering, like it was the day we watched the sunset together, and my palms were dry. I’d never done anything like this in my life, but somehow it felt perfectly right.

“Fifty-three minutes to show time,” I said, squinting at my glow-in-the-dark wristwatch. Tayerle had told us that at 12:08
A
.
M
., the moon would slowly move into the Earth’s shadow. Since this was a total lunar eclipse, the full moon would be entirely in shadow. I knew from our astronomy book that the eclipse could last over three hours.

“Let’s synchronize our watches,” Chris said.

“Eleven-fifteen,” I said, and Chris answered, “Check.”

We were quiet for a few minutes looking up at the sky. “This sort of reminds me of camping,” Chris said finally. “The darkness, the quiet, the whole sky spread out above you …”

“The backache you have in the morning from sleeping on the ground …”

Chris laughed, and readjusted his body on the hard, jutting tiles. “All we need to make it perfect is some poison ivy and a few mosquitoes. I remember once, when I was a Boy Scout—”

“
You
were a Boy Scout?” I interrupted.

Chris propped himself up on one elbow. “Went all the way to Eagle,” he said.

“No way!”

“Why don’t you believe me?”

“I just can’t see you in one of those little uniforms,” I said. “I mean, don’t you lose merit points or something if you have holes in your pants?”

Chris sat up and tried to look indignant but then let a grin escape. “I’ll tell you, wearing that uniform was lame. But my parents were always too busy being lawyers to take my brother and me camping. If it hadn’t been for Boy Scouts, I might never have gotten out of Phoenix or learned the names of the stars.”

“I didn’t know both your parents were lawyers,” I said.

“Yeah,” Chris said, but he didn’t sound too impressed. “And they’re waiting for one of their children to follow in their footsteps. My brother Dave wants to join the Peace Corps, so I guess they’re thinking I’m their man.” He hesitated. “But I know I’m not.”

“Mmm,” I said, thinking of how I sometimes felt I was living my mother’s derailed dreams. “What do you want to do?”

Chris opened the wicker basket and pulled out two Cokes. “Well, I had this incredibly cool job last summer. I worked for Habitat for Humanity building houses for low-income families,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m signed up to do
it again this summer, but considering I don’t get paid anything, I guess it’s not a practical choice for a career.” He shrugged and handed me a Coke. “If we stay up here talking long enough, maybe you’ll help me figure it out.”

“I’ll try,” I said, reaching into the basket. “But first I’ll need a little help from these brownies.”

Chris’s mom had stacked the brownies four across and three deep, and wrapped them first in plastic, then in aluminum foil. Chris tore the package open, making no effort to be neat about it. I thanked him for the brownie he offered, then took a big bite.

“This is delicious,” I said. “Tell your mom she’s a terrific baker.”

“Oh, my mom didn’t bake these,” he said. “She’s too busy to bake. She bought them at Sutton’s.”

I was silent, thinking of my mom baking an apple pie after working two jobs. “Well, they’re still really good,” I said.

“Mmm,” Chris said, his mouth full of brownie. “So what do you think about when you’re sitting up here?” he asked.

“Oh, a bunch of things,” I answered, trying to talk without chewing. “What college will be like, all the books I haven’t read … lots of things. Sometimes I even count up all the trash cans in the neighborhood and try to imagine where all of it goes.”

I didn’t tell him that I also thought about what love
means and whether marriage can last, and why my father had abandoned us so long ago. You couldn’t tell a guy something that personal on your first date.

“Garbage! Now there’s something that’ll blow your mind,” Chris said. “At our house we recycle everything, but it doesn’t make a dent in what’s thrown away. I really worry about what’s happening to our environment and how we can solve the problems we’re creating with all our waste.”

“I do too,” I said. “But somehow, up here, all problems seem solvable. Maybe it’s because I’m looking down on them.”

“Yeah,” Chris said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

Blythe and I were always finishing each other’s sentences or punctuating them with “Exactly!” but I had never expected that to happen with a guy.

We sat talking, eating, and watching the moon until finally we noticed that one side of it was changing shape. Twenty minutes later it was totally in eclipse.

Even though I had read all about eclipses, I was still surprised that the moon hadn’t disappeared in blackness. Instead, it was a dull coppery color. It was eerie but also comforting, like the gentle glow of a child’s night-light. “Amazing!” I said. “I expected it to look much darker.”

“It is amazing,” Chris said. “Some of the sunlight that shines on Earth is scattered by our atmosphere, and enough of that light reaches the moon.” He laughed. “I don’t think
Tayerle would be too pleased with my nontechnical explanation.”