She wondered then if Jeremy understood what she meant. She wonders now if she still believes it.
She blows the candle out and carries the photograph back upstairs. The weather’s crappy, chilly and unusually gray for Reno, but Melinda spends the day rereading several of the Mitford books, and she enjoys her peppermint chocolate coffee, and when Jeremy comes home, he brings her a card and some supermarket flowers. This weekend, she’ll celebrate with Vera, who always drives her out to Gerlach and buys her a gorgeous piece of pottery, and at some point she hopes to celebrate with Rosie, who has her hands full with Walter at the moment. And she’s pretty sure that next year, Jeremy will remember.
* * *
Melinda’s birthday, and it has to fall on the Wednesday before spring break. This is the worst time of the semester. The students are exhausted. Veronique’s exhausted. Everyone wants to be on vacation already, although the vacation’s all too brief.
The only saving grace is that she knows at least a quarter of the class won’t show up. Also, there’s a class presentation scheduled for today. Veronique allows students to do these for extra credit; they’re usually weak work, but they’re much easier to grade than papers. And a presentation means that at least one student other than Amy Castillo will say something today.
Women & Violence has bombed. Veronique thought this topic would engage them, but it hasn’t worked very well. They still misread even basic plot points in the books, stare in incomprehension when she tries to introduce anything remotely theoretical, and ignore her efforts to challenge toxic assumptions. Girls who dress slutty deserve to be raped—this from a young woman wearing skintight jeans and a corset—and battered women who don’t just walk away from their abusers don’t deserve any sympathy, and all lesbians hate men, and all feminists are lesbians.
When Veronique tries to challenge these notions, the students just glare at her mutely. Amy’s a delight, but Amy already seems to know everything Veronique’s trying to teach, and the problem with having one bright student in the class is that the others are sure to accuse Veronique of favoritism on the end-of-semester teaching evaluations. Amy doesn’t need this class, and the others aren’t learning anything—except maybe to despise Veronique—and it’s Melinda’s birthday, and all Veronique wants to do is stay home, or get out of town. Flight, flight. Ten times this morning she’s been on the verge of calling in sick, but each time she’s remembered this presentation. The presenter probably wouldn’t mind a cancelation, but if Veronique cancels today, where will it stop? And anyway, she has other committee work piling up: junior faculty files to read for the tenure committee, a report to write on a new hire’s service record. She could write the service report at home, but no one’s allowed to remove the faculty files from the office.
She has to keep making herself go in. It’s her job, and this is the last day before vacation.
So she goes to work, even getting there early so she can read the committee files before class. She speeds through them, reading just carefully enough to know which of the cases will prompt the most discussion—at least no one’s actually up for tenure this year—but hangs on to the files for an extra forty-five minutes so the secretary will think she pored over them.
Then she hauls herself to class. As she expected, only twelve of her twenty students are here today. The presenter, a twitchy and entirely too thin young woman named Samantha, is setting up the electronic equipment at the front of the room. When she sees Veronique, she scowls and says, “It’s not PowerPoint. I’m showing a film clip. And I know the running time doesn’t count towards my ten minutes.”
“Very good,” says Veronique, giving Samantha what she hopes is a sufficiently warm smile. She sits in one of the student seats so she can watch with the rest of them. Evidently this presentation will fill up even more than ten minutes. Excellent.
The one male in the class, a lanky kid named Brent who only wears black and quite clearly has the hots for Samantha, says, “What’s the clip from?”
“Sin City.”
Brent whistles and sits up a little straighter. “Sweet!” He looks like he actually plans to pay attention. Nothing Veronique’s done all semester has gotten him to pay attention. He only stopped texting in class when Veronique threatened to confiscate his phone.
Sin City. Veronique frowns, stabbed by a thin sliver of memory. Melinda. Something about Melinda. A shiver runs over the top of her skull. “When did this movie come out?”
“Four years ago,” Brent says. “It’s awesome.”
Four years ago. Veronique remembers now: Jeremy wanted to see it, and Melinda said she’d go with him, and the film was so violent it made her almost physically ill. “It was disgusting,” she told Veronique. “Women were getting killed and the twenty-something guys sitting in front of me were moaning in pleasure, like they were having orgasms, and afterwards I tried to talk to Jeremy about it and he just rolled his eyes at me. ‘It’s just a movie, Mom. C’mon, weren’t the special effects cool?’ He had no emotional response to the carnage at all. God, Vera! I always thought he was basically a good kid.”
Veronique takes a dizzy breath. “Samantha, you know presentations have to be on work by women. Remind me who made this movie?”
Samantha glares at her. “Well, there are female characters. And there were women in the cast and on the crew and everything. Doesn’t that count?”
Brent snickers. “Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino.” Veronique’s impressed; the child actually knows something.
Samantha’s chin trembles. “It was a collaboration. Are you going to mark me down?”
The presentation checklist couldn’t have been any clearer. All right, never mind: it’s the Wednesday before break, and surely Samantha can’t expect a good grade in the course given her performance to date, anyway. “Let’s see it,” Veronique says, trying not to snap, trying to be kind. “Can you summarize your presentation for us, though, so we know what we’re looking for?”
Samantha shoves a lock of dyed blond hair out of her face, looking slightly relieved. “It’s about how there’s violence to women at the beginning but then in the middle the guys fight the violence against women and at the end it looks like there’s going to be violence again but the movie ends so you don’t know.” She says this in a rush, in one breath. “So maybe something changed. I’m going to show the beginning, and then I’ll talk about the middle, and then I’ll show the end.”
“What,” says Brent, “the first segment? ‘The Customer Is Always Right’? Miller said the woman hired the guy to kill her. She had an affair with somebody dangerous who was going to kill her and she hired the Salesman to do it instead.”
“It’s still violent,” Samantha says. “I’m just going to show it, all right?”
She shows it. Veronique watches in growing nausea: the man joining the woman on the balcony, their kiss, his shooting her. She imagines Melinda watching this four years ago. She feels herself begin to shake and sits trembling through the rest of Samantha’s presentation, which would probably be incoherent even if every other sentence weren’t being blocked out by static: flashes of Melinda’s face, flashes of the pain she must have suffered as she died, flashes of newspaper images of Percy Clark, that smug young bastard.
After the presentation, Samantha asks if anyone has any questions. None of the other students do, although Veronique notes dimly that Amy’s frowning. “I have a question,” Veronique says, and she almost doesn’t recognize her own voice, as hoarse and cracked as a crow’s cry. “That woman who dies. At the beginning. What’s her name?”
Samantha blinks. “Well, she’s just the Customer, like he’s just the Salesman.”
“No,” Veronique says. “She is not just the Customer. If the story means anything at all, she was a person. She had a name. She had a birthday. When was her birthday, Samantha?”
Samantha rolls her eyes. “How should I know?” Some of the other students are laughing. Veronique knows they’re laughing at
her. She doesn’t care.
She’s standing now. Somehow she’s gotten to the front of the room. “That woman had a name and a birthday and family and friends, but once she’s a dead body none of that matters, does it? Because the violence is the point. But it does matter. How are her family and friends going to deal with her being murdered? What are they going to do on her next birthday? Do any of you even think about that?”
“Professor Bellamy?” That’s Amy, looking worried. “Are you all right?”
Veronique’s not all right. She’s crying. She’s crying in class, but she’s also telling the truth. A great surge of energy pulses through her. She glares at them and says, voice breaking, “None of you are thinking about the right story, and probably you can’t because you’re too young and not enough has happened to you yet, and I guess I have to hope it never does, but what you saw on that screen isn’t the real story. It’s not even close to the real story. Let me tell you the real story.”
* * *
Jeremy’s adding whipped cream to a skinny mocha-caramel soy latte when Amy comes up to the counter. He’s been working at Emerald City for a month now; it’s close to the house, but far enough away from campus that he doesn’t see people he knows very often. That’s both good and bad. He misses his friends, but he doesn’t know what to say to them and they don’t know what to say to him, and he can’t go back to the time when everything was simpler. He’s a different person now than he was at the beginning of November.
The clientele of Emerald City is mostly older people, thirties and forties: parents with little kids, businesspeople on lunch break. Most of the customers tip well, and the café has a decent menu and also does catering. Jeremy’s thinking he might like to get involved in that, at some point, but he’s trying to make his mark as a barista and waiter first.
It’s ironic that he’s here making fancy coffee, since he always made fun of Mom for drinking the stuff. She’d laugh at him, if she were still alive.
He was afraid making coffee would be boring, but he enjoys it: the hiss of the espresso machine, the smell of the grinding beans, the ridiculous complexity of the coffee menu. He likes memorizing the favorite coffees of his regular customers, which leads to larger tips. The work’s involving enough to get his mind off Mom for at least part of each day—especially important today—and simple enough not to task his limited concentration and patience.
Aunt Rosie says the limited concentration and patience are normal. He hopes she’s right.
At any rate, he doesn’t miss school, which made him feel both bored and stupid. He doesn’t even know if he wants to go back, although he supposes he’ll have to, at some point. He can’t be a barista his entire life, can he?
Another thing he likes about being a barista is that it doesn’t leave him too much time for stressing about his future, or beating himself up for leaving school. Seeing Amy, though, snaps him right back into defensive inadequacy mode. She was absolutely the best thing about his first semester at UNR, the only bright spot in VB’s class. She’s smart, pretty, and into CC, and she’s not obnoxious smart, either, not I’m-smarter-than-you’ll-ever-be smart, which is VB’s brand. She’s the kind of smart person who makes everybody around her feel smart, and even though this rather miraculous trick works on Jeremy as well as it does on everybody else, he knows that she’s about twenty times too good for him.
She’s from Tonopah, middle-of-nowheresville Nevada, and the last he knew, she was living in the dorms, all the way across town. What’s she doing here?
“Hey,” she says, eyeing the whipped cream. “That looks good.”
“I’ll make you one, if you want. After this. This one’s for someone else.”
“Huh. You mean you didn’t read my mind while I was walking in the door, and know what I wanted?”
“Nope,” he says. “Back in a sec.” He carries the drink to Lucy, the lawyer in the corner who orders one of these every lunchtime, and has the belly to prove it. If you met her somewhere else, you might think she got that gut from drinking beer, but Jeremy knows better. The whipped cream, which she always requests specifically even though Jeremy’s made this concoction for her a million times, more than cancels out the skinny and the soy.
When he gets back to the counter, Amy’s still there, blushing. “Jeremy, I’m sorry. That was stupid.”
“Huh?” He starts to wipe down the counter with a damp cloth, one of those chores you do whenever you have a free second in a busy place like this. “What was stupid?”
“Making that dumb joke about the coffee.”
“Don’t worry about it. How are you, anyway, and what brings you to this fine establishment?”
“I’m fine. I’m here because–well, a couple of things. I wanted to tell you.”
He blinks. He thinks this means she’s here to see him, which goes beyond slightly miraculous into highly improbable. “How’d you know I even work here?”
“Kevin told me.”
Yeah, that’s right: he ran into Kevin at Raley’s, and they chatted in the checkout line, talked about cars and bands, promised they’d get together sometime, yada yada. Jeremy’d forgotten about it the second he walked out of the store. That was, what, last week, and he was fretting about Mom’s birthday today, wondering how he should handle it, if he should call in sick from work and try to do something special, or have Aunt Rosie and VB over for dinner or something. He can’t believe he forgot it last year. He thought he’d be able to make up for that this year, do something really nice.
In the end, this year, he decided to do almost nothing. He woke up this morning, lit a candle for Mom, and propped her photo up in front of him while he ate his breakfast, talking to her until he felt silly enough to stop. “Hi, Mom. So, well, I wish you were here. I wish you were alive. I wish Percy were alive, too, so I could kill him, or so you could, although I guess you wouldn’t. If you were still alive, you wouldn’t have to.”
When he was little, Mom told him she did that on her own birthday, talking to a picture of her parents. She said it helped, and now that she’s dead, family tradition suddenly seems important instead of stupid. This tradition, though, just seemed empty and awkward, so Jeremy put the picture away. Then he showered, dressed, and came to work as usual, which turned out to be the right thing to do. Today, especially, the job’s the perfect combination of busy and mindless.
“So, uh, did you hear about Professor Bellamy? I mean, I don’t know how you could have, it only happened an hour ago, but I thought maybe—”
“No,” he says, to cut her off. How can girls talk so much? “I haven’t heard anything. What are you talking about?”
Amy slides onto one of the bar stools at the counter. “She kinda had a meltdown in class. Because today’s your Mom’s birthday.”
“Meltdown?” Jeremy squints. “What kind of meltdown?”
“Well, she—she ranted for a while, and then she started crying, and then she started yelling at us for being young and not knowing anything, which is when it really got bad. For us. I mean, it must have been bad for her, before, but that was the part she’ll get into trouble for, I’m guessing.”
Jeremy’s stomach knots. He doesn’t like VB, but he doesn’t want her to get into trouble. She and Mom were real friends. “So somebody reported her?”
“Well, when she started crying, Sandy Askew slipped out and went to get somebody from the English Office, and some other professor—the head of the department, I think—came in right after she started yelling. And he tried to calm her down, and she lost it at him, too, except she kept crying the whole time.” Amy shakes her head. “You know, the kind of crying where you can’t catch your breath, but she was yelling through it, and I don’t think anybody could even understand what she was saying. It was pretty horrible. The other prof wound up calling the campus police.”
“The police? Holy crap! What’d they do, arrest her?”
“I don’t know. At that point, the other prof told all of us that class was over and w
e should leave now, please, and most people couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I wanted to stay and talk to her, but the cops asked me to leave. I mean, they were nice about it. One of them took my name and number, said he might be calling me to get my account of what happened.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.” Amy draws a shuddering breath—Jeremy realizes she’s on the verge of tears herself—and says, “Anyway, since she was friends with your mom, I thought you’d want to know. And I—it has to be hard for you, too. Your mom’s birthday. And I just wanted you to know that if you need to talk, I—”
“That’s nice, Amy. I mean, thank you. But I’m okay.”
She’s looking down at the counter, tracing the wood grain with an index finger. The other hand’s clenched so tightly that her knuckles are white, which Jeremy always thought was a total cliché. “I kept meaning to call you after your mother died, I did, I even planned to go to the funeral but then I chickened out at the last minute, but I should have written you a card, anyway, and I’m sorry, and—”
“Amy. Stop.” She looks up now; her hand stops moving. “I’m okay. Really. Not all the time, but right now I am. And there were so many people at the funeral I felt like I was suffocating, so just don’t worry about it. It was really nice of you to come tell me about Professor Bellamy.”
She swallows. She sniffles. “You’re welcome.”
“You want a coffee? On the house?”
Amy shakes her head. “I don’t think I need caffeine right now.”
“Herbal tea, then? We’ve got some fancy stuff that comes in funky little cardboard pyramids. Peppermint. Green with lemongrass. Chamomile.” Does green tea have caffeine? Yes. Not as much as coffee, or even black tea, but he shouldn’t have offered it to her.
She doesn’t seem to have noticed. “Sure. Thanks. Mint, please.”
So he makes the tea, which takes about ten seconds, and as he gives it to her she says, “What are you going to do? About Prof Bellamy? Are you going to do anything?”
Mending the Moon Page 18