Kiss Me Hello (4 page)

“Aunt Amelia. Can you believe it? She wants me to come see her.”

Before Bram could respond, the waitress showed up. “So what’s my favorite author having?” She’d bought his book months ago and raved about it every time they came in.

“That depends,” Bram said. “What’s my favorite waitress serving?”

He said it suggestively, as usual. With Bram, flirting was a way of life. He held onto Sara’s hand, circling his thumb on her palm, and a jolt of desire ran through her. His schedule was seriously ruining their love life, and little teases like this made her ache for him.

“So what’s happening with your aunt?” Bram said after the waitress left.

Sara told him about Aunt Amelia’s fall. She meant to sound concerned—and she was—but she couldn’t hide her excitement. She was going to see Turtledove Hill again. “I have a bad feeling about it,” she said. “Aunt Amelia didn’t sound very happy. I don’t think she likes the rehab place.”

“Who would?” Bram made a face. “It’s probably full of old people. Sick old people.”

Sara was used to Bram’s comments about older people. She’d given up trying to change his attitude. “I wish I could go right now.”

“She said to wait, and she’s right.” Bram still ate like an athlete. He raced through his Moroccan chicken. “In two weeks school will be out, and she’ll be home from rehab. Better for both of you. She’ll need you more then.”

“That’s true.” Sara picked at her Caesar salad. It was too soon after lunch, and she wasn’t hungry. “When I go, why don’t you come with me, just for a few days?”

“Nah.” Bram pushed his empty plate away. “She wants to see you, not me. And I could use the space.”

“Space.” Sara put her fork down. Sometimes Bram could really hurt her feelings without realizing it.

“Ah, come on. I love ya, babe.” He smiled and raised one eyebrow. He knew she loved that. “But you know I can’t write when you’re around.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

She acted like she was joking, but her smile was a lie. She was dead sure how she felt about it. She hated it. It felt wrong that Bram couldn’t be creative when she was in the same room. It would be more romantic to be a muse, not an obstacle.

“Aunt Amelia would like you.”

“I doubt that.”

“If you spent a little time with her, you wouldn’t dislike old people so much.” Actually, that might not be true. The one time Sara saw Aunt Amelia, she wasn’t very friendly. But Sara remembered liking her anyway.

“I don’t dislike old people,” Bram said. “I’m just not used to them.”

“Not just old people. Anybody over forty.”

Before he finished kindergarten, all four of Bram’s grandparents had died. His father was killed in Iraq when he was ten, and his mother had died of cancer when he was sixteen, just before Sara met him. She believed his aversion to the elderly came from the same place as his need to flirt. It was all about his fear of death.

The first time they had sex, he collapsed on top of her and said, “Fucking is the opposite of dying.” It sounded philosophical and deep, and it made her feel powerful and necessary.

“Everybody dies,” he said now. “Especially old people. I can’t be near that.”

She wasn’t going to argue with him. “Aunt Amelia must hate being away from Turtledove Hill.”

“She’s eighty-five. She should get out of there,” Bram said. “Sell it. A couple hundred acres in the middle of nowhere.”

“She’s lived there sixty years,” Sara said. Sixty years of constancy, dependability.
It must be wonderful.

Bram stabbed a piece of the chicken on Sara's salad with his fork. “Are you going to eat this?” He knew her too well. When she started pushing her food around, she was finished.

“Marie got a final notice.” She slid the plate over to him. “I forgot to check the mail yesterday. I’ve had intimations of doom ever since she told us.”

“You’ll squeak through.” Bram’s face clouded over at the mention of RIFs. “You’re safe.”

“If I taught math or science, maybe. Today Charlotte threatened to quit. Her husband made partner at his firm, and she’s been talking about having another baby anyway.”

“Nice to have a choice.”

Thoughts of children made Sara restless again. Envious, if she’d admit the truth. “Where are we going, Bram?” she blurted out. Her heart pounded hard. Had she really said that?

Bram closed up. He sat back in the booth, and his eyes dulled. “What?”

“We’re closer to thirty than twenty.” This would make him uncomfortable, but this was important. This was their marriage. “We should be more … I don’t know. Settled.”

“I’m sorry.” He dropped his fork on the plate with a clatter. “I’m sorry I lost my job. It wasn’t in the plan, I know. I’m sorry the economy has gone to hell. I’m sorry I’m not—”

“I didn’t mean that. It isn’t you, Bram. It’s us.”

“I’m working on it, babe.” He squeezed her hand and softened his voice, but there was no warmth in it. She’d pushed him away. “I do need the time to write. That’s my real work now.”

“I wish we could move in with Aunt Amelia.”

“So your banishment is over, now that she needs you,” Bram said. “I doubt Pelican Chase High School is hiring.”

“Turtledove Hill would be a great place to write. Wait until you see it.”

“I’m sure it’s as perfect as you say,” Bram said. “But for now it’s writer for love, waiter for money, and this is where the waiter jobs are.” He threw too much cash down on the table and slid out of the booth.

“We have to stop living like this.” Sara grabbed Bram’s hand. He never wanted to hear anything that wasn’t cheerful, but sometimes things came spilling out.

Bram twisted his hand out of hers, as if he wanted to put his wallet away. “What choice do we have?” he said, his eyes on the restaurant door.

“We can’t keep passing in the hall, one clocking in as the other clocks out. We’ll become strangers to each other.” It would be a wrench to quit teaching, but better that than lose her marriage. “We could run the vineyard.”

“Yeah, right. And that doesn’t take any special training.” Bram leaned over and kissed her forehead. “We can’t talk here. I’ve got to go, babe.”

- 4 -
A One-Off

B
RAM’S SNORE STARTLED SARA
awake. Her reading glasses were askew on her face, jabbing below one eye, and her reading light was still on. She was pinned under Bram’s bare arm. He smelled like scotch and salmon and charbroiled filet mignon. She crawled out from under the arm and set her glasses on the nightstand by the clock.
5:19.

The essays she’d been grading before falling asleep were strewn all over the floor out of order. She gathered up the papers and went to brush her teeth, closing the bathroom door so she wouldn’t bother Bram.

Work today was going to be crappy. Everybody would be depressed over final layoff notices. No way was Marie the only victim. Sara spit out her mouthwash. She’d call in sick if it wasn’t a Friday. The district was such a dick about people taking Fridays off.

She had to go in.

She had to finish grading those
Jane Eyre
papers.

Gah!
She had to read Bram’s book.

Everything in her life was about
have to.
It felt like her whole life was slipping away. Everyone said twenty-eight was still so young. Then why did she feel so old?

She’d spent all her life waiting to be older.
You can’t drive until you’re sixteen. When you’re eighteen you can vote. You can’t buy a beer until you’re twenty-one.
Now she felt too old for anything. Too old to change careers.

Too old to start having children.

She didn’t want to start being a mom in her late thirties, ancient when her last kid was still in high school.

She took the last two
Jane Eyre
essays out to the kitchen. The morning light was beginning to outline the trees in the backyard. She made a cup of coffee and opened a window to let in some fresh air. Her ereader lay by the Keurig.

She’d meant to look at
Hot Heat
again last night, but she’d been caught up in grading papers. She opened the book now.

I small-talked the stenographer while Hizzoner and the shysters met in chambers. “I hear court reporters stroke with speed and accuracy,” I said to the red-headed dame. “I’ve got something hard and hot that could use a few strokes.”

The stenog stared at my bulge. The light in her eyes didn’t help my concentration. Her voice was like honey and mint over ice on a long, hot summer day.

“Someday I’ll show you what I can do, Harker,” she said. “I’m accurate as hell, but I can be slow too.”

Sara switched off the reader.
Bleah!
She just didn’t get Bram’s style. She suspected he was a bad writer. She should know—she had a master’s degree in English lit! But her judgment went out the window where Bram was concerned.

Besides, it wasn’t him. It was her. She was too old-fashioned. She should have been born in another time, when Dickens and Trollope and Gaskell were giving way to George Eliot and Henry James.

Not to detective pulp fiction.

She made another cup of coffee and went back to high school freshman treatments of
Jane Eyre.
David needed a B to pass the class. Sure enough, he wrote about “the Prometheus dude” —and misspelled Prometheus. Thankfully one paragraph redeemed him.

Everyone says Rochester is bad and St. John is good, but it’s the opposite. Rochester loves Jane just the way she is. He doesn’t want her to change. St. John never listens to what she says. He wants her to want what he wants and think what he thinks and go slave for him on his mission.

Relieved, Sara put a big blue B by David’s name at the top of the essay. One drop of critical thinking improved an ocean of regurgitation and nonsense.

She moved on to essay she’d saved for last because it would be the best and would prove she wasn’t a failure as a teacher. The one from the ghostly Mona, her most thoughtful student. Mona made a similar point to David’s, but with elegance. And proper spelling:

In the end, Bronte’s novel is about inner truth versus outward appearances. That conformity is often a lie. She says it’s better to follow your own values. Who you are matters more than who other people want you to be.

Sara marked the paper with an A and went back to the bedroom. Bram wasn’t in bed, and the water in the bathroom was on. It sounded like he was brushing his teeth, which was odd. When he worked until two in the morning he usually didn’t wake up until close to noon.

“Goodbye, Bram,” she called out and picked up her briefcase. “I’m going to school.”

As she reached the kitchen she heard him running down the hall. He stopped her before she could open the door to the garage.

“We need to talk, babe.” His face was a blank, but pale.

“Now?” Fear ripped through Sara. If guts could spontaneously open up and spill out on the floor, Sara would swear hers just did. “I’m going to work, Bram.”

“We have to stop living like this.” He looked as sick as she felt. “That’s what you said.”

“What are you saying?”

He took her briefcase out of her hand and slipped her purse off her shoulder and dropped them on the ground. She let him lead her to the kitchen table.

“I’ve been seeing someone,” he said. “One of the waitresses at work.”

No. This wasn’t happening.
“You…you’ve been having an affair.” It wasn’t a question. It was a dull, flat, statement.
Affair, affair, affair…

“It doesn’t even rise to that level,” Bram said. “It was meaningless. A one-off.”

“Was?”
A one-off
. So unfeeling. Should that make her feel better or worse?

“It’s over,” he said. “It was over the minute it started. I couldn’t live with myself anymore without telling you.”

“Maybe I wish you hadn’t.”

“God, I’m sorry, babe.”

“Yeah. Well.” She couldn’t think. She had to get away. “I have to go to work.”

SARA DROVE AUTOMATICALLY, BARELY
seeing the road or the traffic. She had a searing headache. She didn’t want to go to work. She hated Bram. She hated the world. She hated Rocklin. Each summer here was hotter than the last, but it wasn’t just the
hot heat
. She drove by her old church. It always reminded her of her dying mother and how quickly Dad found a new wife there.