“I hardly ever come here, but some of them from work bring takeout every week or so,” Ava said. The same waitress followed him to the table and took their order. The waitress’s lipstick was old and creased in the lines of her lips, her eyes lined too heavily with a dark brown pencil. She was pretty but not as young as she hoped you thought. “Your order might take a couple of minutes. We have so many call-ins tonight. Everybody has to have a king burger one last time, you know.”
“Thank you.” Ava watched the woman walk away from them. Her Bermuda shorts, the kind older women preferred that covered wrinkled knees, hung straight up and down like a young boy’s might, with none of that middle-aged spread. Poor women, Ava thought. Always worrying about what some man might think. “Men suck, you know that?”
“Yep, I do.” Jay laughed.
“That’s the best answer,” Ava said and sipped from her water. “Tell me where you’ve been. I’ve wondered where in the world you might be.”
“I’m boring.” Jay chuckled. “There’s not much to tell.”
“Well you can’t be more boring than me,” Ava said.
“I’ve thought about you a hundred times. More than that. I usually think about you in your house. That’s where I imagine you most,” Jay said.
“That’s where I’ve been for the past hundred years. Tell me what’s been going on with you,” Ava said.
Jay told her a story about his life in the army, about the months that turned to years when he meant to write or call her or e-mail her, but couldn’t imagine what he would say. He told her about traveling and spending so much time alone he talked aloud just to hear another voice in the room. He’d lived in Texas for two years, but he couldn’t get used to the heat. “Nothing prepares you for it,” he said. A certain kind of dry air still made him gulp oxygen like a starved man. For years he had lived in an apartment complex where he didn’t know the names of any other tenants. He told her about his time in a small town in Pennsylvania and the crows that darkened the sky every evening at dusk on their way to Crow Hill. Jay laughed at the memory. “You wouldn’t believe them. I heard an old man say one time they were around when he was a child. They tried everything to get rid of them. They cut down trees, played music, made all kinds of noise,” Jay said. “But they couldn’t get rid of them.” He laughed again. Jay told her about seeing his sister and her saying her life was full without him. That’s just what she’d said, that her life was full. He told her about being alone and feeling like the last of his kind.
“Why didn’t you come back here?” Ava asked. “You could have come back home.”
“I’m here. I did.”
“Took you long enough.” Ava tried to count up her years and distill them for Jay. Nothing felt important enough to recount. She had lived and worked and the years had piled on like cordwood virtually indistinguishable from each other. She wished he’d reached out to her.
“I looked you up on Facebook. There are more JJ Fergusons than you think.” Ava had searched through the list of JJ Fergusons and found teenagers, white girls, JJ’s of all ages and descriptions. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if she’d found him, probably sent him a note and tried to sound light and breezy like he was never important to her, something like “Hey stranger!”
“I looked for you too.”
“You knew where I was, Jay. I’ve just been here. Have you seen Alice’s yet?”
“A couple of weeks ago. The place is run-down. Same as ever. The barrel where she had me burn trash out back was still there.” Every few days before trash burning day, Jay had had to jump in that barrel, tamp down the trash that accumulated. Nothing else he had to do in that house made him feel more forlorn, like the boy in the novel begging for gruel.
“What’s going to happen to the house? Does her daughter want it?”
“I doubt it. I don’t think she spoke to Alice for years. I don’t care. I really don’t, Ava. I wouldn’t care if it burned to the ground. Don’t worry about me. I just went there to see the end. If I saw the house, then that part of my life happened. I hope it makes sense to you, because it doesn’t to me,” Jay laughed. “I just started thinking that I could put it behind me. How many times do you get to see the end of anything?”
“You’re looking for closure? Is that it?” Ava asked.
“Maybe.”
“Did you get it?” Ava asked.
“Not so you’d notice,” Jay smiled at her.
“Maybe it’ll come. If it does tell me what it feels like.”
The waitress brought the burgers to the table in red plastic baskets, mounds of shoestring fries spilling over the side. “Pure fat and salt. I’m going to miss these,” Ava said, holding a fry. “I’m not worried about you.” Ava smiled.
Jay picked up the burger, the bun glistened with grease. He took a huge bite and wiped his face.
“Are you married, Jay?”
Jay wasn’t sure how much he wanted to tell Ava about another woman. He took another bite of the burger to consider what to say. The waitress watched him from behind the fifties-style counter. He couldn’t tell if she watched him because he was a suspect or a patron. It could be both. “I spent about five years with a woman. Not married. It should have been two years.”
“What was her name?”
“I shouldn’t tell you. That was a long time ago,” Jay said, but it had only been three years.
“I’m not sure why that matters, but it does. What happened?”
“Bea said I was unreachable.”
Ava nodded sagely like she was intimately acquainted with a world of unreachable men. “Did you try to get her back?”
“It had played out. With some people it plays out like that.” By the end, Jay had imagined himself on an ice floe and Bea on another. At first they pretended not to notice the drift. Once the distance became unavoidable, they’d just kept going. Jay had loved Bea’s kids. The three of them had been little when he and Bea started together, and he had not wanted to leave them behind. He had told this to her, to stay together, let the children have the best of both of them. She’d looked at him like he had lost his mind. It pained him to think that someday in the not so distant future those children would not even remember his name.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Ava said. They looked at each other and laughed. “We all get disappointed.”
“Maybe.” Jay shrugged. “We want what’s missing. Everybody wants what’s missing. That’s it, Ava.”
Ava pushed her food away and wiped her mouth. “Henry’s got a child. I just saw him.”
Jay nodded.
“He is beautiful. God, Jay. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I hated him. That’s the first thing I felt about that beautiful child. Isn’t that terrible? I felt almost nothing for his mother. You know that doesn’t make sense.”
“You didn’t hate anybody. I know you. You were sad, baby,” Jay whispered.
“I would never have done anything to him. I don’t know what I felt.”
“Hey you know what? People think crazy shit all the time, and you get to think crazy shit. That’s all allowed.” Jay looked around the restaurant to see who heard him. He hadn’t mean to get loud. “You get to think anything you want to. Okay? Listen to me, Ava. Don’t worry about it,” he whispered.
Ava stared at Jay an uncomfortable amount of time.
“What? What is it?” Jay asked.
“You don’t know me, Jay. Maybe you used to know me, but I’m not the same.”
“People don’t change, Ava. I wish they did. You can hide but you can’t change. I’ve tried everything to improve.” Jay laughed.
“That can’t be true. We have to be able to do better. Right?” Ava felt her lip begin to tremble. She was not going to cry in goddamn Simmy’s.
“Y’all need anything else?” The waitress mercifully addressed the question to Jay. If she saw Ava crying she did not let on.
“Maybe in a minute,” Jay nodded.
“Let’s talk abo
ut something else. You caught me at a strange time, but maybe every time is strange. I miss being young. Not my twenties, they sucked,” Ava laughed. “But you here makes me remember being a kid. I’ve wondered so many times what it would feel like to see you again.”
“Take a look. It must be good. To see me, I mean,” Jay said.
Ava smiled at him. His teeth were slightly bucked, his lips large with a tendency to chap. His face fuller now than the skinny boy she’d known. He had a thoughtful more than handsome face, a kind face. Had she never noticed his very curly lashes? She couldn’t remember.
Jay tried not to return her stare. Who knew what registered on his face? He probably looked like he wanted her to say that he was in her thoughts; that he had never left her, that their time together however relatively short had meant as much to her as it had to him. He wanted her to say that there were days, many of them, that on the job, in the grocery store, in the car on the way to anywhere that she found herself breathless and disconsolate at the loss of him.
“Don’t think I’m going to say something nice, Jay,” Ava said.
Jay reached for her hand.
21
Night crept on them as they drove the curvy road to Jay’s house. Ava closed her eyes for most of the trip. No need to see the fine details of the landscape that blurred by. The first time she flew she imagined a giant movie reel outside of the plane, the landscape playing like a film, the plane unmoving. When they finally landed, she would not have been entirely surprised if the pilot announced they were in just the place they started. The landscape on the mountain was unchanging, tree after tree, curve after curve playing on the window screens.
Ava followed Jay to his front door. The yard was still hard-packed red clay, but the possibilities were enormous. Her mother would love to see all these big open spaces ready for planting.
“I’m glad we got here before dark.” Ava turned her back to the door. The house sat in the middle of a flat expanse at the top of a rise. Behind the house were large trees, the tangled woods and weeds that did not invite hikers or walkers. The front yard sloped to another flat-ish space of land that one day could be a tennis court, a camping space, a massive garden, anything your heart and pocketbook could imagine.
“Watch this,” Jay said as he punched numbers into the keypad. Four quick beeps and the locks clicked open. “Keyless.”
“Check out James Bond,” Ava said.
Jay turned on the light and let Ava look into the rooms and the staircase from the foyer.
“God,” Ava said. She turned to look at Jay as he stood in the entrance watching her. “You live in a mansion. What the hell?” Ava had pictured Jay many times over the years usually in an apartment or a run-down rental home, chain-link fences holding back vicious unhappy dogs in patchy yards. Jay all by himself making his own simple meals from cans, walking around in dingy underwear. She almost laughed aloud at the thought, the movie image of the lonely bachelor. Why she had not assumed that Jay could do at least as well as she had felt like vanity and embarrassed her, but she had never once pictured him successful or happy in a clean bright room.
“I didn’t think anything was possible,” Jay said and took Ava’s hand and looked around at what Ava saw. The house Jay grew up in was a rented one with jaundice-colored walls and an ugly dog bed of a sofa slammed against the wall. Jay remembered his mother’s slight back at the sink, the circle movement of her arms as she washed dishes while she stared out the window. In the evenings after dinner, he’d rest his head on her skinny hip, the smell of her dish soap and grease in his nose, the television the only light.
Jay reached for Ava’s hand. “Have we ever held hands?”
Ava laughed at him with an “are you kidding?” expression on her face.
“I know, I know, but I don’t ever remember us holding hands.”
Jay led Ava to his bedroom. A new mattress and box spring were on the floor dressed like spring in cheap floral sheets. Ava sat on the bed and ran her hand along the buttercups.
“Nothing has to happen here. I just don’t have any chairs.” Jay smiled at her.
“You are so full of shit.”
Jay laughed and sat by her. “I’m serious. Nothing has to happen that you don’t want. I just want to be here with you.”
Ava nodded and looked around the bedroom in the fading light. “This is a big room.”
Jay leaned back on the bed and searched the ceiling for something to count. He closed his eyes. The two of them danced at a party in a dingy basement apartment in Raleigh twenty years before. The well-worn furniture had been moved out to the yard, the music so loud it rumbled through their chests and their hips while a couple dozen of them, young, young people moved together like a throbbing living thing. She had wanted to go outside from the smothering heat and into the backyard. A few people smoked, others whispered and laughed together, but one couple talked quietly, she seated on a picnic table and he facing her between her legs. Ava and JJ couldn’t stop watching them. Their conversation too low to make out any but a few words in between their groping and devouring each other in the relative public of the backyard. The sight of the couple, their desire for just that feeling. Consumption—that was the feeling. More than anything else that had happened to them before that night that had made them go to Ava’s dorm room to attempt that same passion for themselves.
Jay rolled over to his side. “I don’t have television. I’ll get one if you want it.”
Ava stood up and unzipped the back of her dress and let it puddle on the floor. She stepped out of its ring. She felt slightly erotic, slightly disgusted like she stuck her finger in the muddy soil of a potted plant. She had never cheated on Henry, not once. Ava would have told Jay that fact, but she didn’t want to ruin the moment by saying Henry’s name.
Jay reached for Ava’s hand. “Don’t worry. Please. Let’s talk.”
“Talk dirty?”
“No.” Jay laughed. “That’s not what I meant.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Ava said. “You talk. I want to hear you.”
Jay hesitated not sure what to say. “I hate sleeping by myself. Did I ever tell you that? All this time by myself and I’ve never got used to it. Is that not manly? I shouldn’t tell you that, right?” Jay chuckled. “You’re supposed to say no, no, Jay you’re very manly.”
Ava smiled at him but said nothing.
Jay unbuckled his belt and took off his pants with his back to Ava. When he turned he hoped her eyes were closed. “Are you okay?” Jay asked. He hoped he looked less afraid than he felt. “Baby, no,” he said when Ava started to cry.
Ava let the wash of guilt and sadness flood over her. Lying in this bed, mostly naked on a sheet about as flexible as a piece of cardboard, she knew without question her marriage was over. She was not sad for the fact, but for the knowledge of the fact. She leaned back to look into Jay’s eyes. She wanted to tell him something important but she wasn’t sure what it could be. Jay’s bed was much bigger than the dorm room bed they had squeezed into so many years before. The first time they slept together she willed the ancient condom he had carried in his wallet to break as he unrolled it, but it hadn’t. She’d wanted a life, her life, but she’d had a small but palpable, unreasonable hope that she would get pregnant and the hard work of planning and focusing would be taken from her, out of her hands, and bound up in a baby with this sad sweet boy.
Jay put his hand on her thigh. She wrestled her bra off her body and tossed it on the floor.
“Turn off the light, Jay.”
“I don’t want to move from here,” Jay said, but he got up and turned off the light. He put his arms around Ava and let her rest her face on his shoulder.
“This is my first affair.” Ava said. Jay held her tighter.
“Nothing has to happen right now. Okay, baby. Everything I want is here right now.”
Ava reached to the end of the bed and pulled the cheap new sheet up between them and wiped her face on the scratchy material. She
rested her chin on Jay’s shoulder. “In a little bit, okay?
Jay held her tightly like she might fall off the side of the bed, his arms around her back, his fingers pressed into the hollow curves of her sides, the only sounds in the room their exhalations escaping their bodies, rising to the ceiling, winding around the thumping blades of the ceiling fan.
22
Sylvia waited in the driveway outside of Lana’s house. She tooted the horn for the second time in five minutes. Lana stuck her head out the door. “Stop blowing the horn, fool. This ain’t the getaway car.”
“Hurry up,” Sylvia yelled. “I’ve got things to do today.” Sylvia leaned the back of her head against the headrest. She would have to remember to smooth down her hair so she wouldn’t have a dent before she went anywhere in public. Black women are always thinking about their hair. She closed her eyes. Maybe Lana wouldn’t come out and she could sleep in the sun like an old dog.
“Okay,” Lana said as she plopped in her seat, buckled her belt. “Let’s go, you’re in such a hurry.”
Lana had coordinated her outfit, a black and white flowing top and black Capri pants. Her toes were done. Her toes! She had managed to look chic as usual. Not that Sylvia didn’t care about how she looked. Some women would go to town looking any old way, pink sponge rollers in their hair, housecoats and slippers in the grocery store. Not Sylvia. She would never do that. Never. Sylvia would see somebody she knew, some neighbor, some friend of a friend who couldn’t wait to talk to her. Sylvia believed in propriety, in time and place for things, in an orderly world with rules. Times had changed. The town had changed. Nowadays she could go anywhere most of the time in her hometown and not speak to a soul. That didn’t mean she wanted to go out looking like she just got out of bed. Despite her many efforts, she had still managed to look disheveled, unlike the women who wore linen, had manicures and beautiful haircuts, hair and makeup that stayed in place, shoes without scuffs. They were the very girly, feminine women that if she was being honest, she realized that she had always envied even as she mocked them. Women with ruffled shower curtains and dressing tables in their bedrooms, powdered and perfumed as loved babies. Women who never looked down at their hands at the dinner table and saw arcs of ashy skin in the space between thumb and forefinger or dirty, bitten nails. She hadn’t felt so unkempt until she saw Alma Parks at the gas station. Her husband had just left her, and her two grown girls were states away. None of that seemed to have fazed her, since she looked maybe just that side of forty-five, a few wrinkles on her forehead, but no waddles or marionette mouth that distracted. She could be a model for some menopause cream or adult diapers. If she was suffering Alma Parks would never let it show.
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