The Big Crunch

by Pete Hautman

  “Is it okay if he comes over?”

  He looked at her for a long time. June felt herself blushing, though she wasn’t sure why.

  “I’ll be home by nine,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “You start work in the morning.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll go shopping for food tomorrow. Tonight you can order in.” He opened his wallet and handed her two twenties. “Pizza, or whatever you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  Again, the long, searching look, then he looked at his watch. “I have to go. Call Mom and tell her we’ve arrived safely. And say hello to Wes for me. Tell him I look forward to spending some time with him. Just the three of us, hanging out.”

  “Uh, sure, he’d like that.” It was all June could do to keep her face blank.

  Wes’s hair was still wet from the shower when he arrived at Riverview Terraces. He felt strangely cavernous, as if his insides were hollow. He hoped he was dressed okay. He’d changed his shirt three times, finally deciding on the plaid cotton shirt he’d worn the first day he met her. Was that okay? Would she notice?

  He stepped out of the elevator on the seventeenth floor. June, wearing jeans and a powder blue T-shirt, stood at the end of the thickly carpeted hallway. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and her feet were bare. Wes floated toward her. He could not feel his legs. Neither of them spoke.

  He was close enough to touch her when she turned and glided into the apartment. He followed her. She led him into a large, high-ceilinged room with tall windows and black leather furniture. They stood in front of the windows, inches between them, and looked out over the river.

  Wes’s hand found hers. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said. They weren’t looking at each other. Her hand was cool and slightly moist.

  “Me neither.” She withdrew her hand, turned toward him, and slipped her arms around his back. He did the same. They held each other loosely, not hugging, the fronts of their bodies barely touching. Wes’s cheek brushed delicately against her temple. His hands were shivering. He felt her shoulder blade beneath his right thumb; the fingers of his left hand grazed the knobs of her spine. If he squeezed her, would she dissolve like a dream?

  June was terrified and she didn’t understand why. Who was this boy? What was she doing here, high above the city, alone with him, her breasts separated from his flesh by only three layers of cotton fabric: her bra, her T-shirt, and his plaid flannel? He smelled like deodorant — one of those harsh-smelling brands that boys thought made them smell manly. She wondered what she smelled like. Her shampoo, probably — rosemary — with a whiff of fear sweat and a hint of candy smell from the mint she’d eaten a few minutes earlier. Why was she so jangly?

  Wes’s arms tightened, just a little. June made her arms do the same, and as she did so, she became acutely aware of her body. She gasped.

  Abruptly, Wes released her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  June nodded, taking a step back. “I just … I don’t know. This all feels so weird.”

  “Me too.”

  “It’s like you’re not real.”

  Wes nodded. “I think I’ve been thinking about seeing you so much that it’s like … like what if none of this was real? Like we’re in a dream or something.”

  “Maybe we are.”

  “I wonder if it’s your dream or mine.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s mine.”

  “Or both of ours. You’re still in Omaha, and we’re both asleep and our dreams got hooked up.”

  June felt herself smile, and some of the tension drained from her shoulders. “If it’s a dream, we should be able to look out the window and see the Eiffel Tower.”

  They turned back to the window.

  “Doesn’t look like Paris,” Wes said.

  “Dreams are weird.”

  Wes laughed, and at the sound of his laugh, something inside her came unstuck and she laughed too.

  “Do you ever eat pizza in your dreams?” she asked.

  “I only dream about two things. Pizza and you.”

  “In that order?”

  “Not always.”

  “Because I was going to order a pizza. Are you hungry?”

  Wes smiled, a wide, open smile that echoed in her heart.

  “Always,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SIX

  WES WAS DREAMING OF TREES — pink, pale blue, yellow, lavender, bright orange — all the colors of the rainbow. Except green. He didn’t understand how they had changed color, or how he was supposed to plant them. One row of all pink? Or alternate the colors: red, orange, yellow … He tried to ask Chuckles what to do, but Chuckles only laughed and laughed and —

  Suddenly, he was awake. He felt June’s arm draped across his chest, heard her breathing in his ear. He opened his eyes to find Elton Edberg standing over him.

  Wes threw June’s arm off him and leapt from the sofa. June, startled, let out a yelp and sat up.

  “Dad!”

  “Hi, honey,” said Mr. Edberg, his voice weirdly normal.

  Wes’s brain creaked and jangled as he strained to throw off the effects of sleep.

  “Hi, Mr. Edberg,” he said in a muddled voice.

  “Hello, Wes. Sleeping with my daughter, I see.”

  “Daddy! We weren’t doing anything!”

  Mr. Edberg looked at his watch. “Nine o’clock,” he said, looking from June to Wes. “Time to leave, don’t you think, Wes?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Wes.

  “Unless, of course, you had planned to stay the night?”

  “Daddy!”

  Wes wasn’t sure he could move; his feet felt as if they were glued to the carpet. His thoughts flashed back over the evening — the talking, the pizza, more talking, making out … of course, Mr. Edberg would know, all he had to do was look at June, at her swollen lips, at the way he had found them wrapped in each other’s arms. Was that bad? All he knew was that he was horribly embarrassed. But it wasn’t as if he had caught them romping around naked. They’d never even gotten naked.

  June stood up and took his hand. “Come on. Daddy is just being sadistic and weird.”

  Elton Edberg’s eyebrows lifted. “I’m your father. It’s my job.”

  June rolled her eyes and led Wes to the door. “I’ll walk you out.”

  On the way down, in the elevator, she said, “I don’t know why he has to be that way.”

  “Like he said, it’s his job.”

  “He doesn’t have to be so sarcastic.”

  “Better than chasing me out with a shotgun.”

  “Daddy doesn’t even own a shotgun.”

  “Probably a good thing.”

  June rode back up the elevator feeling embarrassed, relieved, and happy: embarrassed because her dad had to be so, well, embarrassing. Relieved that he hadn’t been as embarrassing as he might have been. And happy because … well, not really happy, but more like proud that her dad had seen her and Wes together that way. Like he had seen that grown-up side of her, more woman than girl. And he hadn’t freaked. At least not too badly.

  She was pretty sure she hadn’t violated any of her mother’s rules. Technically.

  Back in the condo, her dad was taking a shower. June cleaned up the pizza box, napkins, and glasses she and Wes had dirtied. She plumped and arranged the sofa pillows and set up the coffee machine for the morning. She was wiping down the kitchen counter when her dad came in wearing his bathrobe. He put his hands on her shoulders, looked into her face, kissed her forehead, then went off to bed.

  A little later, she called Wes.

  “Did you know you’re a good kisser?” she said when he answered.

  “I am?”

  “Yeah. Really good.”

  “What’s good about it?”

  “Not too sloppy, not too dry, not too hard, not too, uh, tentative.”

  “Not tentative? I should put that on my gravestone. He was not a tentative kisser.“<
br />
  “And hot. Be sure to add hot.“

  “Are we having phone sex?” he asked.

  “You know, my mom forgot to put that on her list of no-nos.”

  “Everything okay with your dad?”

  “Yeah. Dad’s fine. We’re all good. I start my job tomorrow, putting Humpty Dumpty back together.”

  They talked for an hour, jumping from one thing to another, until the spaces between their words grew languid and long, and June’s eyelids kept falling shut. She didn’t remember saying good night, but she must have, because when she woke up at three A.M., her heart pounding from an already-forgotten dream, her phone was perched silently upon her bedside table and all the lights were off. She lay awake for a long time trying to remember her dream, but it would not come.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SEVEN

  OPERATIONS MANAGER GRETCHEN HILLER, a pinch-faced, dark-haired woman wearing a navy blue suit and high heels, greeted June with a flat smile. “Welcome to my nightmare,” she said. She led June to an elevator, heels clicking the marble floor with metronome precision. “Before you ask,” she said as they entered the elevator, “this catastrophe was not my fault.”

  “I didn’t think that,” June said.

  Gretchen Hiller compressed her lips and pressed a button labeled M.

  “Mezzanine?” June guessed, hoping to impress her new boss with her alertness and powers of deduction.

  Gretchen Hiller snorted. The elevator began to descend. “Hardly. If it stands for anything, it stands for Most Deep. The room you’ll be working in is six levels below street level.”

  “Oh. No windows?”

  The woman gave her a narrow-eyed look. “Go to school for six years, work hard, and get yourself a sex change. Then maybe you get a window.”

  Bitter much? said Sarcastic June — thankfully, not out loud.

  The elevator eased to a stop; the doors opened. They were looking directly into a cavernous, white-walled room set up with about twenty long tables arranged end to end in five rows. Nine women of various ages sat at the tables. In front of each of them were several boxes. The boxes were labeled with the names of colors: blue, yellow, pink, lavender, etc. Each woman had a pile of shredded paper in front of her; they were pulling strips of paper from the pile one by one, and putting each one into its appropriate box.

  At the far end of the room was a pile of bulging black plastic garbage bags.

  “As you can see,” said Gretchen Hiller, “the process is both tedious and exacting. We begin by separating the check shreds by color. That will be the easy part….”

  By mid-morning, June had learned the names of all the other women. She was the youngest by several years. When they broke for lunch — catered sandwiches that they ate at their work stations — she learned that she had nothing in common with any of them. By two P.M., the only thing keeping June awake was a painful twinge in her lower back and the stinging dryness of her eyes. The tiny strips of paper seemed to suck every molecule of moisture out of the room. Out of her fingers too. At two thirty, Gretchen Hiller came down to check their progress.

  She was not pleased.

  “At this rate, ladies, we’ll be stuck down here until Christmas.”

  Not me, June said to herself. She would have quit on the spot if it weren’t for Wes.

  “Maybe if we had some, you know, ergonomic chairs it would go faster,” she suggested.

  Gretchen Hiller gave June a withering look. “You remember what I said about windows?”

  June nodded.

  “Same goes for ergonomic chairs.” She wheeled and clicked back to the elevator. The moment the doors closed, one of the older temps said, “Heil Hitler.”

  June looked at her, startled.

  “Wretched Hitler,” the woman explained. “It suits her better than Gretchen Hiller.”

  They returned to their work.

  Wes’s phone buzzed as he was starting down his last row for the day.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey. You still working?”

  “Yeah, I got about a hundred more trees to plant, then I can go.”

  “I just got done,” June said. “I close my eyes and see little strips of colored paper, mounds of them. One of the women I work with figured out how many we have to sort through. Like five million.”

  Wes said, “I bet we have the two most boring jobs in the world.”

  “My boss’s nickname is Hitler.”

  “Mine’s Chuckles.”

  “It’s like we’re slaves.”

  “Yeah, exactly. Except for no whipping or chains. And we get paid, and we can quit and go home if we really want to.”

  “Minor details. Can you come over tonight? Daddy wants the three of us to have dinner. I think he feels bad about scaring you off last night. I’m making chicken.”

  “Absolutely.”

  After that, the planting seemed to go a lot faster.

  Two hours later, June answered the door wearing an apron and pressing a phone to her ear. My mom, she mouthed.

  Wes followed her into the kitchen. June was saying, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Do I have to stick my hand in there? Yuck.”

  A whole raw chicken was sitting on the counter, looking pale, flabby, and morose.

  June fiddled with the knobs on the oven. “Four hundred? Okay. What if I don’t have a meat thermometer? Oh. Okay. So then I just stick it in the oven? Okay. Bye. I’ll call you if the kitchen catches fire.” She clicked off. “Do you know anything about chickens?” she asked Wes.

  “Yeah. They come fried, in cardboard buckets.”

  “I’m roasting this one. I think.”

  Wes put his arm around her and they stood together, regarding the chicken.

  “I think my mom buys them already cut up,” Wes said.

  “That’s what I should’ve done. Now I have to put my hand in and pull out the giblets.”

  “You want me to do it?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “You sure it’s dead?” Wes asked.

  “Pretty sure.”

  Wes peered into the chicken. He reached into the cold cavity and pulled out the heart, liver, and gizzard. “Like that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Now what?”

  “We salt and pepper it, put it in a big pan with some potatoes and onions, then roast it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “According to my mom.”

  “Why are you making chicken?”

  “It’s my dad’s fave. I was thinking I’d surprise him.”

  “Oh.” Wes had been thinking it was for him. He looked at the pile of slimy organs in his hand. “So what do I do with these?”

  With the chicken in the oven, they quickly cleaned up the mess they’d made. Working together in the kitchen was fun — June loved the way they kept bumping into each other, getting in each other’s way. Wes kept saying “Sorry” and “ ‘Scuse me.” But she could tell he was bumping her on purpose. She could tell he wanted her, and that made her want him even more.

  The next time he bumped her, she threw her sponge in the sink, took off her apron, grabbed his hand, and pulled him into the living room.

  “What?” he said.

  She kissed him — harder than she ever had before — and pulled him down onto the sofa. The kiss went on until they broke apart, gasping. Wes’s eyes had glazed over and his hands were shaking. He made an animal sound, somewhere between a whimper and a growl. She put her fingers to his lips.

  “How long?” she said.

  Wes’s eyes came into focus, a silent question.

  She said, “How long do you think it will be before we actually do it?”

  “It?”

  “Make love for real. Have sex.”

  Wes swallowed. “Thirty seconds?”

  June laughed. “Silly. My dad could walk in anytime.” She sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. “Seriously. How long?”

  “How long do you want?”

  “Part of me wants to do it
right now, and part of me wants never.”

  “Never?”

  “So we always have something to look forward to. Like, anticipation is ninety percent of the fun.”

  “Ninety percent?”

  “Give or take. Also, I did sort of promise my mom.”

  “Oh yeah — the rules.”

  “The rules.”

  Wes scrunched up his nose. At first, June thought he was going to say something nasty about her mom, but instead he said, “Do you smell something burning?”

  Elton Edberg arrived home to find the condo reeking of smoke, and all the windows wide open. June was in the kitchen scrubbing a blackened roasting pan.

  “Junie?” he said.

  “Hi, Daddy.” She kept on scrubbing.

  “What happened?”

  “Just a little cooking disaster. I put the oven on broil instead of bake.”

  “Oh. Is Wes here? I thought the three of us were having dinner together.”

  The doorbell chimed.

  “That’s probably him now,” June said.

  A minute later, Wes came in carrying a red and white bucket of fried chicken with all the fixin’s.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-EIGHT

  STANDING ON THE OLD STONE ARCH BRIDGE, June looked down at the brown waters of the Mississippi River. Slow swirls of foam, floating leaves, and bits of trash rode the current, flowing from the north, disappearing beneath the bridge.

  “All the way to the Gulf of Mexico,” she said.

  Wes said, “We could take a boat. Or a raft, like Huck Finn.”

  During the two weeks June had been in Minneapolis, they had spent every evening together. They had gone for long walks, seen a movie, tried some of the nearby restaurants, and visited a museum. Just the two of them, mostly — except for the time they’d eaten KFC with her dad. They didn’t see any of their friends at all. June hadn’t even told Britt, Jess, or Phoebe that she was in town. The only person she was interested in was Wes.

  “I should probably get back,” June said. “Dad’s going to be home at six.”

  “Where’s he taking you?”

  “Some fancy restaurant. He says we’re celebrating.”

  “Celebrating what?”

  “I don’t know. He’s being very mysterious.”