A Regular Guy (26 page)

“You know, I’m not sure I can make it back on skates,” Julie said, not caring what Owens thought of her. Her ankle hurt, and a half hour earlier, in a calculation much quicker than she was aware of, she’d decided he was no longer worth discomfort.

“Oh, there’s a back way,” Owens said winningly. “We don’t have to go up that hill.”

But she was already unlacing her skates. If there was a back path, she was thinking, why didn’t you take us there in the first place?

“I can drive you in the van,” Noah said. He noticed some friction between them and wondered, for the first time, whose friend she was. She seemed pretty, though too thin. But almost instantly, Noah assessed Louise’s view of her—
off the map, she doesn’t count
—and accepted it. Years afterwards, he would think back to that moment of easy judgment.

Owens slid his hand over the bill.

“No, this one’s on me,” Noah said, putting down his credit card.
“You know, I’m wondering,” Owens said, after Noah had dropped the three of them off at his house. “I’m not sure Mary’d like the idea of us all skating tonight. Maybe we shouldn’t mention it.”

“Not say we went skating?” Jane asked.

“Well, you can say we went skating, but maybe don’t mention that we all did.”

Julie stood next to her car, holding her keys. I get it, she thought. He has no intention of seeing me again, so it’s not worth riling Mary up. “That’s fine. I won’t say anything,” she said, getting in her car and slamming the door. And in the course of that one evening, Julie changed. She would no longer say with perfect sincerity that she’d never been in love. From then on, she spoke of “that kind of love” as something dangerous and immature. She called Peter when she got home, and they talked for an hour and a half.

Jane walked through the empty house in silence. She wasn’t used to keeping secrets from her mother.

“Jane, wake up—it’s me. Come on, get dressed. Eli’s waiting in the car.” Her mother’s face was alive and hard, leaning over the futon. She wasn’t supposed to be back from New Orleans yet. She had finally had her own adventure. It was all her, she was the center now, in the middle of the night.

“Mary?” Owens’ voice stopped them, halfway down the hall. “Everything all right?”

“Thanks, Owens, for taking her.” His voice, Mary remembered, had often been kind.

Eli sat with the motor running, like a getaway. No one talked as he drove the dark roads home. They told Jane to get into bed, but she couldn’t sleep and she shuffled into the kitchen. “What are you talking about?”

“Jane, this isn’t for you, this is for grown-ups. Go to sleep. It’s past your bedtime.”

“Then why’d you wake me up in the middle of the night!” All of a sudden, she was supposed to have a bedtime.

“I wanted you home, that’s all.”

And Jane was glad to be back in the bungalow. She always sneezed
in Owens’ mansion, up and down in her jacket, the way dogs shake. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and hoped he didn’t notice.

So many times, the night rinsed her mother back to what Jane knew.

Owens gave Jane a camera for Christmas. It was the same thing he gave Olivia. He gave Mary perfume, which was what he’d given her the year before.

Julie and Peter drove to his family’s ranch, two hours east. When she called on Christmas morning, Julie said they had artichoke and almond orchards. “Well, we’re engaged, but we’re not telling anyone yet,” she said to Mary and Jane, who had their faces pressed together near the receiver. “Any news on your end?”

“Oh, no.” Julie still didn’t know that Mary had left Huck in a French Quarter hotel room and come home early.

“Well, hurry up,” Julie said. “I will if you will.” She laughed.

Mary and Jane had known beforehand it was going to happen. They had even helped, with the blue velvet from Jane’s coat. But still, when they hung up the phone, they didn’t know what to do the rest of the day. Eli slacked around. Mary suggested they go to a movie.

A week later, they were at Julie’s cottage. She’d found little tin charms in Chinatown, and they helped her hang them on ribbons all over. It was going to be a New Year’s scavenger party, and at the end, you’d string them together for bracelets.

While they were making dinner, Jane slipped into the bathroom. Sitting there among plaid towels and a plaid shower curtain, she overheard them talking.

“I don’t know if I’ll keep it,” Mary said softly.

“Whose?” Jane yelled out, over the flushing, before she even thought it.

“What are you talking about, honey?”

“Whose baby?” She was winging it, guessing, being smart-alecky, with every sureness she wasn’t right.

“Well, Eli’s, of course.”

“Why of course? You went to New Orleans with Huck.” Jane was stunned. She’d said the most shocking thing she could imagine, now it was true, and she was the one who was shocked.

“Honey, that didn’t really work out.”

The way her mouth went, with the lip, Jane wasn’t sure she believed her.

“I guess the question is, you’ve done it this way already,” Julie said. “Do you want to repeat yourself or do something different this time?”

Mary sighed. “I’d like to try it the right way once, being married and having enough money.”

“You deserve that,” Julie said, her hand flat, at a sharp angle. Sometimes Jane could see her being a lawyer.

Eli was waiting on their porch. The bungalow glowed from inside. He’d put lightbulbs in all the lamps and swept the anthills from the corners. When they came in, he put his palm over Mary’s belly, and then Jane understood: he wanted her to know. As far as he was concerned, this was her sister or brother and they were going to be a family now.

It seemed almost nice that night. Eli had stopped at her grandmother’s old bakery and brought them each a dessert. Years later, Jane would remember that as part of the problem, those little pretty fancy pieces of pastry. That night, her mother wanted the whole cake, big and decorated, even if there were only three of them and it would be a waste.

It didn’t help that the ring Eli stuck on top of Mary’s nasturtium poppy tart, her favorite, looked more like one of Julie’s Chinatown charms that there were a hundred of than anything meant and precious. He’d gotten it out of a bubble gum machine. He seemed sheepish saying that, not like himself, then admitted he’d put in nineteen quarters. Jane knew that a year before, her mother would have loved it. She and Eli didn’t want to live the way their parents did, they used to tell her. But Mary and Jane weren’t hungry, even though he’d remembered their favorites.

“Eat some dessert,” her mother ordered, as Jane’s fork dallied and scrolled. Eli stood up and shut the back door. “He brought it,” Mary whispered. Just then, Jane realized what was horrible: it was all up to her.

Afterwards, people would always tell her it had not been. Because of her age and all. She was the daughter only. She knew the decision
should never have been hers to make at twelve, but it was. Nobody ever judged her, but she did, gravely. And it was something she would struggle with for a very long time.

Owens didn’t know. He lived high up and far away those years, like a rumored emperor. He didn’t know what they were really like. Eli did know, and he understood that she’d been the one. Ever after, he looked at her as if he’d been harmed.

When Jane finally made the decision, she was alone in the bungalow, doing laundry and trying to clean up. They’d been to Julie’s cottage, which was becoming Julie and Peter’s, and which more and more put them in a bad mood. The work they had to do at home was infinite. Every little drawer you opened had a whole new universe of mess.

Jane worked furiously. Julie had them over for celebrations, and her house always stayed perfect, while theirs was in the perpetual process of becoming.

“Do you want a little brother?” her mother asked, walking into the kitchen.

On her knees, Jane was scrubbing the tiles, one by one. “You don’t know it’s a brother.”

“I kind of sense it. Do you ever feel like that, like you can’t really know but you do?”

“No, I don’t, really. And I don’t especially want a brother or sister. I feel like we should get our lives the way we want them first. I think if you and Eli have a baby, we’ll never catch up and be on time.” She plunged her arm into the bucket of suds water.

Jane didn’t fully mean what she said, but her mother didn’t question. The next day, they went together in Eli’s car. The clinic was like any clinic, with stupid cat posters on the wall. Jane sat in the waiting room while her mother and Eli went inside. Eli looked in the toilet bowl and said it was a boy.

“You shouldn’t have looked,” Jane said.

“We’re Christmasing tonight,” Julie said, laughing into the phone, a year later. Mary softly complained about how much she still had to do, and Julie said it was the same with her. “It’s not easy to make cards and
get presents for everyone and deck a tree and bake and still have a job,” she said. This was a fragile and unconvincing point of connection. They were not in the same situation anymore, if they ever were, and all they could find in common was being behind on Christmas. Mary and Jane even doubted that Julie was really behind. They believed that whatever it was Julie decided to do, she knew how to do it. Mary and Jane didn’t send cards. And Mary didn’t have a job. The parties, the wedding, Julie just did it all and never seemed flustered. She’d be the same way with her baby. Jane could never imagine herself or her mom like that.

The only thing that flustered Julie was easy for them. She didn’t know how to really want things, or want them badly enough.

She did want some things, Jane remembered, to be fair. She was so glad when she found out from the test her baby was a girl. Jane couldn’t understand that, honestly: how you could be so sure you wanted a girl. Jane would want a boy; she couldn’t even say why. There are too many reasons to be a boy to know which is first.

Mary and Eli broke up, stayed apart for a long time and then drifted together again, but not as much as they once were. Mary never did have another child.

And the rest of her life, Jane knew: I could have had a brother.

Cherries

E
veryone seemed to know what wasn’t true. Friday night at eight o’clock, under a transparent sky, Owens had his hand on his key in the parking lot when a guy from the south building speared by in Rollerblades and stopped still, tall in the dark and neon. The sleeves of his tee shirt billowed back, winglike. “I’m sorry to hear about your mom,” he said.

“Don’t be,” Owens answered. “She’s not dead yet.”

“They were saying she was sick.” He had light-red hair and freckles, and there was something phosphorescent about his skin. He wavered on his skates, huge like a defective angel.

“Yeah, she is. But I think she’s going to get better.”

“Well, God bless her,” he said, wheeling quickly, turning his whole self on the skates, that big galumphing guy talking about blessings.

Some of the things Owens knew best he could never explain. He could fix a machine, especially a machine he used every day. And he believed he could cure his own ills. He understood his body the same way he tapped those machines. When his stomach swelled at the top, bunched just under his rib cage, he knew what would cure him was
fruit. Because he could, when he needed to, tamper or trick a machine to work one more time or coax his body to mend itself, he believed fundamentally, and no matter what she said, that his mother need not die.

It was almost June and there were cherries. All along 580 East, there were fields and fields of dark double Bings, some yellow with a blush of red, dotted faintly. Queen Annes, Rainiers, Jubilees. He wanted her to fast. But if she couldn’t do that, she could eat cherries.

At the farm stands, cherries came cold, opaque with condensation, under burlap. Like most kids who grew up anywhere near the Great Valley, he had picked when he was a boy. Fifty cents a bushel, when money mattered. He would see her tomorrow. He’d get up at five or six, take the motorcycle and bring the cherries back to her by noon.

But Saturday he woke late, at eleven, caught in sticky sunlight. He would’ve enjoyed the bike ride—it was a dry, clear day—but anyway there was a place here, and he drove with the car top down. The stand had Bings and Rainiers, two sizes. He asked how much it was for all the big ones.

“More in back. Many as you want.”

He had to know how much for them all.

Nine ninety-nine a pound, that was high; on 580 they’d be less than half, maybe a third. He’d grown up waiting for the fruit prices to come down. His family could never afford the first strawberries or white anything—albino nectarines, Babcock peaches. Now he bought the best fruit, regardless. This is what he felt most from his money.

A one-hundred-dollar bill for the farmer’s cherries, and the full bags collapsed into a torso on the passenger seat, almost touching him. They made sifting noises as he drove. From anywhere he ever was, he knew his way back to the house. In different layers of sleep, when everything stretched to become unrecognizable, the house endured. In one dream it was white, older, alone on a low dark span of land, with lighted windows and round, old-fashioned furniture, but he knew it was the house. He was running, being chased; if he could only get to the porch she would open the door and let him in.