Courting Mrs. McCarthy (4 page)

Chapter 6

Dinner was uneventful. Victoria ordered Thai food, a favorite of the Rousseau family. While she and Megan were picking up the food, Nathan and Griffin smoked another joint in a shed behind the house that served little other purpose. Old lawn tools were kept there, but the Rousseaus had a lawn service like most of the neighborhood.

Nathan felt a bit better after he was stoned and had a stomach full of curry and noodles. Victoria and Megan asked them about the gossip around the school. There were a few questions asked about Sarah, which Nathan tried his best to deflect. Maybe Griffin was starting to pick up on things, but it was unlikely because both boys had foggy minds.

Each of them received text messages from Ralph Romero, another friend of theirs, about a party that he had decided to throw at the last minute. Ralph was a good friend, but neither Nathan nor Griffin felt much like getting drunk again. The late night parting into the wee hours of the morning had made them less likely to go to another the next day. Griffin had to work the next day, and Nathan had some homework to do. He was planning to do it at the library so that he could talk to Mrs. Buchanan and maybe watch a film with her.

Griffin declared that he was going to pick the movie, which drew little objection from Nathan. The events of his long day had started to take a toll of him. Nathan was glad they had decided not to go to Ralph’s soiree.

The movie Griffin selected was the 80s cult film
Dune
. The film had not been considered a successful adaption of the popular science fiction series written by Frank Herbert, but it remained beloved by strange people and stoners like Griffin. Nathan had only seen the film once before and while it would not have been his choice to watch it again, he didn’t object.

A journey to a distant land of mediocrity did his mind some good. He particularly enjoyed the performance given by Sting. Nathan was not surprised Sting hadn’t seriously pursued his acting career.

Nathan returned home shortly after the movie was over. It was only eleven o’clock, but he was tired and ready to unwind after a taxing twenty-four hours. Griffin put up little fuss as he needed to be at work at nine o’clock the next morning and relished the night ahead of him in a bed that was not adorned with Care Bears.

Victoria had offered to drive Nathan home, but he chose to walk instead. The walk was only fifteen minutes and the fresh air was nice. He took out his cell phone to see if there was anything important to check. There wasn’t, but he decided to send Sarah a text message. She had told him she wouldn’t be able to text while she was in Prague and he wasn’t entirely sure she’d even get the message at all. The message simply said:

I’m sorry.

Nathan wasn’t sure exactly what he was sorry about, but the word could be used as a general blanket covering all potential offenses.

Aunt Cassidy and the twins were asleep by the time Nathan returned home. Uncle Martin was watching an old episode of
Cheers
on Netflix, a service that Nathan provided. It wasn’t rent, but it was a hit. Nathan had tried to show him everything else he could watch, but Martin was content to watch classic sitcoms from the eighties. Nathan had tried to watch the show, but was unable to understand the humor of the time period and could only laugh when instructed by the program’s laugh track. Until he watched
Cheers
with his Uncle, he hadn’t understood what the laugh track was for.

Martin was a salesman for a faucet company in New York City. When the economy took a big hit in the recession, he was never in serious danger of losing his job.

“People will always need faucets,” he’d said, when asked if there was anything else he’d like to do with his life. His job paid the bills and allowed his family to live in the comforts of suburbia.

Nathan and Martin exchanged basic pleasantries before Nathan headed up to his room. His uncle was not a blood relative, and they did not share any interests. He put this blame on Martin, since Nathan had plenty of interests. His father had never warmed up to his uncle either. This was one of the few things Nathan had in common with his old man.

He watched an episode of
Twin Peaks
before going to bed. Like
Dune
,
Twin Peaks
was the product of David Lynch and starred Kyle MacLachlan. Nathan admired Lynch for his outside the box thinking, and MacLachlan for his success in unconventional roles. He saw himself as weird, and embraced that too. He thought a weirder town might be a more suitable place for him.

Suddenly, he found himself at the beach. He sat on a picnic blanket with a plate of hors d’oeuvres that were unspoiled by the sand around him. As he placed his hands in the sand, he felt it was much finer than the common sand around Long Island Sound.

He was not alone on the beach, though he couldn’t make out any of the faces in the distance. As he looked toward the ocean, he saw a girl with her back turned to him facing the water. Nathan saw two glasses in the sand next to his blanket. With no one else around besides the girl, he assumed they were sharing the picnic.

“Hey, are you coming to sit down?” Nathan called out. He didn’t care this girl’s identity was a complete mystery. That is, until she opted not to reply. He called out again but once again there was no answer.

He stood from the blanket that may or may not have been his, and walked up to the girl, who continued to act as though he wasn’t there. “Excuse me, aren’t you going to sit down and enjoy these hoer d’oeuvres?” he asked. There was still no answer.

Fed up with her rudeness, Nathan reached out to touch her shoulder. He generally didn’t make it a habit of touching people he didn’t know, but he made an exception in this case. The girl had been rude first.

Just as he touched her shoulder, she turned around. Though Nathan suspected Sarah might be the girl whose face was elusive to him, it wasn’t her after all. It was Mrs. Jacqueline McCarthy. Her expression was identical to the one she had made earlier that day except for one difference. Her eyes glowed in a way that pierced straight through Nathan until he felt an uneasy shriek emerge from deep inside him.

The shriek was not real. Nor was the rest of the beach scenario. Nathan awoke in bed. He was as he had left himself before he entered the dream world except for one noticeable difference. Under his covers was a massive erection. While he was shaken from the dream, one thing was clear. Thought he was confused, he could not deny he had been enjoying his slumber. This had been no nightmare.

Despite Nathan’s apparent enjoyment of the dream his brain had concocted, he was unable to fall back asleep for some time. The dream kept replaying itself in his mind over and over. Each time the dream would take an extra-long pause at the sight of Jacqueline’s face so Nathan could stare into those eyes again and again. He felt befuddled, but he wasn’t sure this was a bad thing.

Sometime later, Nathan fell back asleep. If there had been a dream again, he would not remember it in the morning. It was unlikely he had dreamt of Mrs. McCarthy again or else he would have remembered. There was also no erection. Not even the occasional “morning wood” that many males have in the a.m. hours.

Chapter 7

Nathan had breakfast with the Thompson family. He talked to Elizabeth and Piper about their softball game. He feigned an attempt to show genuine excitement at the shaky recap provided by Piper, but this pleasant sentiment sailed over the heads of the girls. They weren’t so sure about all the rules of softball, but they liked that their cousin was interested in their activities.

Aunt Cassidy saved Nathan from the world of peewee softball by asking, “What are your plans for the day? Are you hanging out with Griffin? Do you want to come to the club?” She often presented many questions all at once. She had not mastered the art of talking to a teenager just yet.

“Possibly. I think I’m going to go to the library for a bit and do some work. Finals start in a week and I want to end on a good note. If I finish with that and it’s nice out, I’ll be sure to drop by.”

He then dug in to blueberry, banana, and chocolate chip pancakes that had been prepared by Uncle Martin. While Nathan found his uncle’s taste in television rather abhorrent, he did have a few recipes worthy of some praise.

Nathan took longer than usual to get ready. His mind kept returning to the dream he had the night before. He didn’t try to analyze it, as he was just happy to relive it in his head over and over as if there was some sort of expiration date on it.

A vibration coming from his cell phone interrupted the thirtieth or thirty-first replay of his dream. Nathan checked to see that Griffin had texted him.

Come visit the store later, I will be bored.

Nathan would consider this request, but he did not feel obliged to visit.

He didn’t like most of the clothes in the store Griffin worked at, and his visits were often disturbed by customers. Griffin would remind him this was the point of working, which begged the question of why Nathan would make the trek to his store in the first place.

Nathan packed two bags in preparation for the library. He brought his laptop and some books for school in one bag. In another, he put his swimsuit, a towel, and goggles in case he decided to go for a swim. He wasn’t completely sure he wanted to put himself in a position where the urge to do so would become irresistible.

He poured the remainder of the coffee from the pot into a to-go mug and said goodbye to his aunt. Nathan hadn’t driven his car in a few days. It was an old green Jeep Cherokee. It smelled like an old car, unsurprisingly. Jerome had offered to buy him a nicer car, but he didn’t want a new one. The car was well suited for someone who didn’t like to drive and lived close to New York City. The mayor of New York City didn’t like people to use cars in his city, and Nathan was happy to oblige.

The library was not very crowded for a Sunday morning. It was a little after eleven o’clock when Nathan arrived. There had been story time for the little kids early in the morning, but that over. Children usually got up earlier than teenagers.

Nathan found his way to his favorite spot on the second floor. There was a table between two bookshelves that was easy to find, but out of the way of general traffic. He explained this to Mrs. Buchanan once, who asked him to move an armchair to the area as well. The armchair was where she could usually be found if she was at the library. No one had commented on the rearrangement, though Mrs. Buchanan had instructed him to tell anyone who asked that it was good for the ‘feng shui’
of the building.

Mrs. Buchanan was sitting in her armchair when Nathan arrived. She had a cup of tea next to her, resting on a side table. A passerby who didn’t know her might think of her as an old lady who was confused with where she was. Little did they know that Mrs. Buchanan was merely soaking in her community.

“What are you doing here on such a nice day?” she asked. Her often sharp words with Nathan were said in a joking manner. She spoke with a smile on her face.

“I have finals in a week. There will be plenty of time to be outside when those are over,” he replied.

“I don’t think you’ll get much studying done on a day like this, but I do enjoy your company. How was your weekend? Did you say goodbye to your little girlfriend?” She took a sip of her tea. The tea was
Scottish Afternoon
, her favorite brand. Many people, including the librarian who had brought her the tea on that particular day, assumed Mrs. Buchanan liked it because she was from Scotland. Mrs. Buchanan once told Nathan that she wanted to tell the librarian that such an assumption was racist, but she didn’t want her to stop bringing it.

“Weekend was fine, thanks. I did, and she is on the other side of the Atlantic now,” Nathan said, with a devil-may-care attitude.

Mrs. Buchanan picked up on Nathan’s peculiar tone. “Did something happen? Teenage girls can be very funny about goodbyes.”

“I’d rather not talk about it.” He didn’t want to be rude to his friend, but he didn’t want to tell her about it anymore than he wanted to tell Griffin. Mrs. Buchanan would provide an objective view on his relationship if he chose to tell her, but Nathan tried to bury himself in his studies instead.

Studying became much harder than anticipated. The combination of restless sleep, warm weather, and his friend doing her crossword puzzle in a more comfortable chair than his had Nathan quite distracted. He also wasn’t sure how hard he needed to study anyway. He was a good test taker and had a firm grasp of the material.

The constant glances at Mrs. Buchanan did not go unnoticed. “Do you have something to say or are you just procrastinating?” she asked, as they made unexpected eye contact for what seemed like the tenth time that morning.

“Just procrastinating.” He put his head down.

“Look somewhere else or I won’t finish my crossword puzzle,” she said.

“You probably won’t anyway,” he replied without lifting his head up to see her reaction.

Someone else might have taken offense to a jab from a boy more than sixty years her junior. But Mrs. Buchanan was not an average person. She had often expressed that she enjoyed Nathan’s company because he, unlike many people who spoke with her, did not seem preoccupied with asking her if she needed something. And he didn’t tell her stories of other old people he knew who had died. Keeping subject matters contemporary was a main reason why their friendship worked so well.

Nathan was about ready to give up studying for the day. His mind kept returning to his dream, but he was even more frustrated that there was nothing he could do about it. Despite his recent twenty-four hour obsession with Mrs. McCarthy, he could not remember a single instance where he’d actually spoken to her. This could be why she had nothing to say to him in the dream.

He decided to seek the counsel of Mrs. Buchanan. She was about as close to impartial counsel as he could get in his life. There weren’t really any other appealing options either.

“Actually, there is something,” he began. “And don’t say I told you so.”

Mrs. Buchanan said nothing but there was a look on her face that indicated she was pleased with herself. There was a long pause that followed as Nathan was hesitant to proceed.

“Is
go on
acceptable, or shall that be banned from my vernacular as well?” she asked. Nathan felt embarrassed as he took another pause to formulate his words.

“Do you remember the time we looked at that magazine and you told me about reading people?”

“I do. Are you auditioning for
Criminal Minds
, or is this a new hobby of yours? Heavens knows you’ve got plenty of those,” she added.

Nathan ignored the reference to the popular crime procedural and asked another question. “Can someone feel something strong toward another person just from sight alone?”

Mrs. Buchanan looked like she was taken aback by the question. “I take it there’s more to this story than just that. Do you have a flask? That would go quite nicely with my tea for a discussion like this.”

Nathan tried to describe his feelings with as few specific details as possible. This was challenging given the brevity of his dilemma and the lack of suitable stand-ins for the people in question. Mrs. Buchanan was not likely to prod where he was vague, but he wanted to give her an honest portrayal of his confusion so as to make proper use of her time.

The description was long and relatively uninformative. He tried to avoid the cliché of, “I have a friend” as a proxy for the situation but he seemed to return to it every time there was pause in the story.

They exchanged puzzling looks for a while before she began to speak. Nathan sat upright in his chair to give the sign of full attentiveness, for he knew this would be a long one. Mrs. Buchanan was good for advice, but was rarely brief about it.

After a few deep breathes, she began to spoke. “Nathan, honey. I fear I will collapse and pass on from this world right here in this chair if I try to decipher that cryptic code you spent the better part of ten minutes trying to explain. Perhaps Dan Brown should sit in on our next conversation.”

Nathan tried to speak, but she cut him off.

“I’ll instead answer your original question. You’re asking me whether or not you can have strong feelings for someone you’ve never spoken to. I don’t know if there’s a yes or no reply to that. I’d like to say yes, but I’m not so sure that’s entirely accurate. Before you wander off into la-la land and ignore the rest of what I’m going to say, know this. Feelings are important. They’re not necessarily something you always want to act on. Let them guide you, but don’t make any strong impulse decisions until you’ve got something stronger to go on. That’s why you don’t kill someone who cuts you off, or bounces in that beer pong game, if that example is more fitting to your life.”

Nathan laughed.

Mrs. Buchanan allowed him to chuckle. She seemed to enjoy that she could still make a good joke at eighty-two. Then she continued.

“It’s easy for me to say I loved my husband from the moment I met him decades after the fact. Had I gone by that idea when I was your age, who knows what might have happened? Which is to say, it didn’t happen. Women don’t generally have to worry about this kind of stuff.

“Look, you obviously felt something for someone. I wasn’t there and even if I was, I can’t really tell you what that means. I should hope you’re not busy trying to find your soul mate just yet. Use your feelings to guide you, but don’t let them get behind the wheel until you know what you’re doing. And whatever you do, do not tell this girl what you’re feeling or she’ll think you are nuts and you’ll have no chance. Give your feelings a chance to grow and maybe you’ll find that love at first sight does exist, and then years from now you can come back here and tell me I was right.”

Nathan sat for a couple of minutes to absorb her words. He tried to come up with a reply, but all he could say was, “Hmm.”

“Hmm? That’s all I get. Looks like you’re not the only one who should take up a new hobby and get out of this place.”

“You should get a Twitter account. It would expand your reach quite a bit. Social media is all inclusive.”

“I don’t need social media. Most of the people I talk to either live in this town or have left this planet.”

Nathan laughed. “That’s pretty depressing.”

“Oh, shut up.”

The two friends returned to their respective projects. Nathan felt a renewed sense of sanity after his conversation with Mrs. Buchanan. He hadn’t really at any point in the night or morning stopped to consider these feelings could be the ramifications of a fuzzy conscience from his break-up with Sarah.

He felt better about his dream. A little silly maybe, but Nathan knew he was not in love with Jacqueline McCarthy. Studying went a little easier, even if it was a little unnecessary.

“Nathan, I have a question.” Mrs. Buchanan glanced up from her crossword puzzle. “Is
Yeezus
a word?”

He laughed. “Sort of. Is Kanye West mentioned in the clue?”

Mrs. Buchanan nodded.

“You’re not the only one with wisdom, old lady,” he said.

She gave him the middle finger, which caused a man across the room to drop his book.

Nathan left the library a short while later, and drove Mrs. Buchanan home. Sometimes she drove herself, but today she had blamed the heat. She told Nathan that old people were especially susceptible to the heat, which he only sort of believed. Studying had mostly been an excuse to seek her advice, which had been achieved. He decided not to visit Griffin, who would be busy with customers by now anyway. Instead he chose to go to Seers Point for a nice swim.

He was unsure of whether or not he felt excited or nervous by the prospect of seeing Mrs. McCarthy there. Another encounter could mean some further clarification on the feelings he had, but it could also lead to more frustration. He had still never actually spoken to the woman whom his consciousness was now obsessed with. He had not shared that tidbit with Mrs. Buchanan for fear of mockery.

Nathan didn’t think his head was any clearer after the library visit, as many emotions were making their presences known. Confusion, guilt, and embarrassment to name a few. He felt slightly comforted by the wise words of Mrs. Buchanan, but he questioned his need to seek these answers in the first place. He wondered why he couldn’t just let it go.