by Jess Riley
CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
A Novella Plus
By Jess Riley
Copyright © Jess Riley, 2013
Cover design by Okay Creations.
Formatting by Jason G. Anderson
Follow Jess Riley on Twitter @jessrileywrites, Facebook, and Goodreads.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. Individuals known to the author inspire neither individuals nor incidents mentioned in this novel. All incidents are inventions of the author’s imagination.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
What some people said about Jess Riley’s debut novel, Driving Sideways:
“Smart and funny without being forced, sentimental without being maudlin …”
—Booklist
“Jess Riley’s voice is irreverent and wonderful, and her writing is genius.”
—Marian Keyes, internationally bestselling author
“On page ninety-seven, how did you come up with the scene of the toddler singing “back that ass up?” I thought it was hilarious.”
—Student in Prof. Peter Martin’s Writing Based Inquiry Seminar
What other people said about Jess Riley’s second novel, All the Lonely People:
“… a gorgeous, deep, layered, nuanced, hilarious and fabulously written novel …”
—Danielle Younge-Ullman, author of the critically-acclaimed Falling Under
“If Tina Fey was from Wisconsin and decided to write a novel, I imagine she'd come up with something like All the Lonely People. This is women's fiction at its best …”
—Anna Roberts, kind unsolicited Amazon reviewer
“It’s pretty autobiographical, don’t you think?” and “This is the one I die in, right?”
—Author’s sister and author’s mother
Jason, this one’s for you.
Table of Contents
A Note from Me, the Author
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
THE RECIPES
Unstuffed Grape Leaves
Jamaican Jerk Chili
Loaded Miso Soup
General Tsalmost’s Tofu
Curried Chickpea Salad Sandwiches
My Version of That Yummy Bean and Corn Salsa Everyone Brings to Picnics
Spicy Peanut Noodles
Nostalgia Risotto
Massaged Kale Salad (You knew it was coming.)
Spiced Sweet Potatoes and Black Beans
FESTIVAL BINGO
Heartfelt Thanks
A Note from Me, the Author
Congratulations on your purchase of this authentic Novella Plus, hand-shrunk by a women’s cooperative in Nepal! When you don’t have time for a novel, try Novella Plus! What’s with the plus? To make up for not blathering on for 300 pages (what a relief! say ninety percent of my friends and relatives), I’ve enclosed two bonuses in the appendices: if the ending hasn’t left you in tears, chopping onions for Nostalgia Risotto might do the trick! That’s right, ten of my favorite vegetarian dishes, inspired by Harper and (reluctantly) husband-approved. Followed by the original templates for Festival Bingo. Bring them to Rock Fest USA! Sawdust Days! Peanut Festival! Your neighbor’s funeral!
No, don’t do that.
If you use Festival Bingo as a drinking game, I suggest Coors Light and a designated driver. If you print, laminate, and use them to cut lines of coke on a mirror, I don’t want to know about it. Also, you may want to seek help. Or, if you also played bass for a famous band from the eighties, write a detailed memoir, because I would totally read that.
And now, on with the show!
PART ONE
Harper
IT WAS WEDNESDAY, April tenth, one of those first dizzying spring days that require open windows and spontaneous singing, when she saw him again at the stoplight on the corner of Franklin and Elm: 8:40 a.m., right on time. He had his window rolled down, and she could hear the theme music for Morning Edition, faintly. He was already smiling a little; when he turned his head to the left and saw her, his smile widened, becoming something real and warm.
She smiled back. And then the light changed, and the man she’d seen more than a dozen times stopped at the same red light, turned right. She turned left. And that was the day she started to really wonder about him.
Her name was Harper, but not after Harper Lee, which was usually one of the first questions any of her professors ever asked her. Today she was driving to class (Nutrition in the Life Cycle), held every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 9:10. It was one of three classes she was taking this semester to complete the Didactic Program in Dietetics, which was a fancy way of saying one day she’d be a Registered Dietician. But first she’d have to complete her practicum program, which was a fancy way of saying internship, and pass the national registration exam, which was a fancy way of saying test.
She was too excited to simply listen to music for the rest of her commute, and found herself calling her best friend Natalie. “I saw him again today.”
“Saw who?” Natalie was eating something, crunching loudly.
“That cute guy who drives the Tubes and Hoses truck. You remember, I told you about him. I wonder if he’s going to work.”
“It’s probably safe to assume he’s not driving the Pubes and Hoses truck just for the fun of it.” Crunch-crunch-crunch.
The Tubes and Hoses signs were infamous in their city, because the graphic artist had rendered the lettering to look like actual pipes bent to spell the company name on billboards, in the Yellow Pages, and on the door of every company truck. As an unfortunate result, the T in Tubes looked more like a P.
“I wonder if he’s got a girlfriend.” The first time she saw him, she’d been singing along with obnoxious abandon to Justin Timberlake’s Summer Love, windows cranked all the way down on the first truly mild day of the year. When she saw him chuckling at her in the truck to her right, she’d blushed straight to the roots of her hair and peeled out as soon as the light turned green.
If she wasn’t driving, she’d close her eyes to conjure his face: wide, blue-green eyes that made her think of lime popsicles and science fiction, set above a nose that was larger than most, set above a smile framed by a dark, perfectly trimmed goatee and mustache (perhaps to make him look older, because his face was sweet and innocent-looking). She’d read somewhere that when women ovulated, they were most attracted to hairy, alpha men with square jaws and fists the size of Thanksgiving turkeys, but the rest of the month they preferred baby-faced, nurturing men, and how the cute guy in the truck pulled it off she didn’t know, but he managed to look both alpha and beta at the same time: an ultimate fighter who baked cookies and did the Times crossword puzzle on Sundays, a Navy SEAL who wore glasses and volunteered with the Humane Society. He smiled with his whole face, eyes all crinkly at the edges, which made her insides all—oh, he must have a girlfriend, if he didn’t there was—
“Did you hear the last thing I said?” Natalie was asking her.
“Sorry, what?”
“I asked if you want to work out tonight.”
Harper was still smiling in a dreamy way. “He listens to public radio. You wouldn’t think so, but he does!”
“Oh my God,” Natalie huffed, but with affection. “Pay attention! Are you actually driving in a ditch right now? Check to see if you’re going down a one-way street the wrong way.”
“Sorry! I’m sorry.”
Harper laughed self-consciously. She was still thinking about him. “Okay, working out tonight. Yes! Let’s do it. What time?” She pulled into her school parking lot and began to circle, looking for an empty spot. “Oh, wait! I can’t tonight. I promised to take Aunt Ginger shopping.”
“Friday then. If I don’t interact with another adult in public soon I might forget how.”
“What about Brian? He’s an adult.”
“He’s my husband. Technically, he doesn’t count.”
Zach
ZACH PARKER HAD a roommate named Josh, whose entrepreneurial spirit was as wide and hopeful as Christmas morning. His latest project was development of something called Festival Bingo, The App. On his good days, Zach found Festival Bingo amusing, inventive, and edgy. On his bad days, when the blank page refused to be unblanked, Festival Bingo seemed like a mean-spirited, cruel game on a cruise ship employing Idi Amin as the activities director.
“I just need two more spaces,” Josh said, tapping the screen of his iPad. “Come on man, who else would you see at Sawdust Days?”
Zach didn’t look up from his book. “You. People see you at Sawdust Days.”
“How about, ‘woman with tiny American flags painted on her fingernails’ or ‘man in padded neck brace carrying a pitcher of beer.’”
“I’m trying to read.”
“Yeah well, I’m trying to make us rich.” Josh worked for a landscaping company in summer, plowed snow for the county in winter—the combined efforts of which would never achieve that goal. Hence, Festival Bingo, The App. Josh and Zach shared a first-floor apartment on the south side of town—a newer complex with a snarl of woods in the back, across the street from a live quarry. You had to really secure anything you wanted to hang on the walls, because anytime they sounded the horn and blasted, things tended to fall. Zach learned this the hard way when a stained glass panel that had belonged to his grandmother fell from the kitchen window and cracked dully on the linoleum floor. In summer, birdseed from the five feeders hung on the balcony of their upstairs neighbor rained onto their grill and cement patio. Still, the complex had a fitness center and covered parking, and you could have a small cat or dog, if you paid the pet deposit. And no one had called the police to the building yet—nothing had warranted it, which was something.
Zach looked up from the book he was trying to read (it was so well-written he was growing more and more jealous of the author by the second) and thought about his own novel, an earnest and plucky little coming-of-age tale called The Last Summer of Beetles that his unflappable agent had been submitting to editors for the past two years. “Festival Bingo. Whatever happened to truth in advertising? You should call it Making Fun of Disabled People on Medicaid.”
“You’re not looking at it the right way. We’re also going to do Hipster Bingo, and one for bachelor and bachelorette parties. That’s why it’s an app. So you can put all the versions on your phone.”
“For douche canoes on the go.”
“Couple in Confederate flag garb,” Josh announced, and typed it into his iPad. “Hey! And instead of a free space in the middle, we’ll have a FREEDOM space!”
The Last Summer of Beetles had received its twenty-fourth rejection via email two hours earlier:
Zach is clearly a talented writer, the characters well-drawn and sympathetic, but I just didn’t connect with the story in the way I needed to. Nonetheless, it’s likeable and compulsively readable; I’m sure you’ll find the right home for it.
All best, Frances Drake.
Zach’s agent had added this postscript: How’s the new book coming along? You know I love Last Summer, but it just might not be the right time…
Zach turned his attention back to the book in his hands, because it actually was likeable and compulsively readable. Twenty-four. That seemed like a nice round number to give up on. When he first signed with his agent, he’d fantasized about getting the “Are you sitting down?” call for weeks, and all the people he’d thank in his book’s acknowledgments, and how Andrea Wallace would come up to him at Peabody’s, her wide, dark eyes full of tender regret: “Congratulations, Zach. I always knew you’d make it one day. I read your book, and I literally cried at the end. Oh my God, how the main character’s father died in his arms? And he forgave his best friend, even after everything? It’s just—oh, it’s heartbreaking. And … you should know that I’m miserable without you. Also? Derek Smith? Gave me non-dormant herpes!”
He had a sudden, unpleasant vision of himself at fifty: Welcome to Tubes and Hoses, your plumbing supply superstore. What can I help you find today? He wasn’t even a licensed plumber, which would at least be a living; he only drove a truck for the warehouse. In a fit of unexpected frustration and self-pity, he tossed his book across the room like a Frisbee.
“You’re in a mood,” Josh said with a lisp, flapping an effeminate hand.
“If I read one more book in which the author uses the word ‘impossibly’ to modify an adjective or adverb, I’m going to scoop out my eyes with a melon baller. ‘She was impossibly beautiful. The sky was impossibly blue. His balls hung impossibly low.’ What does that even mean?”
Josh began to sing. “Do your balls hang low, do they wobble to and fro … can you tie ’em in a knot, can you tie ’em in a bow…”
Zach frowned and wandered into the kitchen. “I’m having a beer. Want one?”
“Dude, I don’t know if I’m supposed to. I’m going to donate plasma in an hour.”
It turned out they didn’t have any beer, so Zach poured himself some orange juice instead. He drank it in four long swallows and set his glass in the sink. “So what happens to a dream deferred?”
He didn’t expect an answer, was only quietly asking himself in one last cranky, rhetorical gasp before he sucked it up and moved on from the disappointment, and was surprised when Josh answered from the living room: “Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun?”
“How’d you know that?”
“Langston Hughes is my man! We had to memorize and recite the whole poem in the sixth grade. I got detention because I rapped it.”
“Under a spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands.”
Josh gave him a blank look. “We didn’t learn that one, bro.”
Later, Zach opened his laptop and stared at the blank screen, the cursor flashing at him like an accusation. He thought of the girl he saw that morning, smiling shyly at him from her Kia Rio. Kia Rio—didn’t that sound like a party on wheels? Carmen Miranda sambaing down the highway, clusters of Chiquita bananas and Fruit of the Loom grapes stacked on her hat. A person who drove a Kia Rio was sensible but fun; someone who never missed her annual flu shot but who’d also completely cover a coworker’s cubicle in Saran Wrap while she was on her honeymoon in St. Lucia. He’d seen her at the same stoplight a few times before, and occasionally they shared a self-conscious smile. Her hair was long and brown, flashing glossy red on sunny days. Sometimes she wore a ponytail. Would it be weird of him to wave? He had no idea who she was, or if she was single or married. He simply liked the idea of her, and he found himself looking forward to the next time he might see her at the corner of Franklin and Elm. It felt like having a strange but happy little secret. Her eyes were impossibly gorgeous, he typed, grinning. He deleted this, replacing it with: She had the kind of smile you think only children are capable of, because they still believe in magic. He wrote for the next three hours.
Harper
AUNT GINGER WAS running late, so Harper turned off the engine, went to the front door, and rang the doorbell. She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered into the kitchen; after a few minutes, she heard footsteps. Ginger Gustman, age seventy-two (though she looked closer to forty-two), saw her niece and waved. She grabbed her purse and fluffed her hair. After she stepped outside and locked the door behind her, she stretched in the sunshine. “Well?” she asked, planting her hands at her waist, “what do you think?”
“Oh my God.”
“Isn’t it fabul
ous?”
“I don’t know what to say.” Harper truly didn’t, because her aunt was wearing a snug T-shirt that read, FREE MUSTACHE RIDES! Stretched in large white font across her breasts, which had been handcrafted into perky, age-defying pomelos by Ginger’s last boyfriend, Dr. Todd Henkelmann.
“Do you like it?” Beaming, Ginger continued to model her shirt on the side porch.
“Aunt Ginger, do you know what that means?”
“Well, sheesh, of course I do! But who cares, really?” She lifted a hand while she explained. “I got it to tease Jim, because he’s always giving me grief about my mustache bleaching. He’s such a smug little bitch sometimes.” Jim was Ginger’s forty-year-old son, a bank branch manager who lived in a state of perpetual embarrassment as far as his mother was concerned. This in turn fed Ginger’s antics, because the only thing she loved better than a practical joke was making a family member blush in public. Amy Sedaris was her personal hero, because she once left her brother David on a crowded elevator with the casual, “Good luck beating that rape charge!”
“Are you really going to wear that in public?”
“Absolutely! You know my motto.” Ginger paused, pointing a finger at Harper to prompt the answer. “Come on, what’s my motto?”
“Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse?”
Ginger smacked her niece on the shoulder. “No! All comedy is based on exaggeration, whatever you can get away with.”
“Who said that?”
“Drew Carey. And me.”
“That’s your motto?”
“Today it is. Now let’s get to Pick ’n Save before those coupon-clipping jackals pick the store clean.”