by John Brandon
“That’s what they say,” said Kim.
“In Tahiti or whatever. That’s him, right? He was always having his way with the natives.”
“There was so much molesting going on in those days,” said Kim. “Hardly seems fair to keep bringing it up.”
She excused herself and went upstairs, her blood quickening with escape. She couldn’t be around Rita’s new friends another minute. She reached the landing without a backward glance and strode down the hallway. The second floor of the house was a whole different kingdom. It smelled different up here, like brand-new furniture, like bamboo.
In the shower she rubbed herself up with gel, breathing the steam. She soaped her thighs, her shoulders, massaged the back of her neck. Kim still liked her body. Her lips were plump and her legs were firm and shapely. Her skin was soft enough. A stranger would never have guessed that she’d used up more than half of her thirties.
She stayed in the shower long after she’d rinsed off, enjoying the warmth, and then she stepped out onto a plush teal rug, water streaming off her. The mirror and fixtures were fogged. She wrapped a towel around herself and wandered into the closet connected to the guest bathroom, dripping on the carpet among a hundred dresses, many with their tags still on. This was Rita’s runoff area, for the clothes that wouldn’t fit in her primary closet. Kim thought of her own cramped bedroom closet back in Galesburg, her bulky coats and worn sundresses. She couldn’t have fit another hanger in there, yet she didn’t own one article of clothing she still liked.
Staying in Galesburg had never been the plan, of course, and she thought about this often now—just how she’d wound up where she was. When she’d graduated, the part-time position she’d taken as a senior in college had been offered to her full time. She could still remember how grateful she’d been. She’d wanted money, not more loans. She’d wanted aimless weekends and a little cash to spend, not more Sundays of homework. Her job as an assistant became a job as an adviser. She went as far, those first couple years, as sending off for the grad school applications. Places like Arizona, Oregon. She felt herself envying the professors on campus, with their consuming research, with their peculiar, prized minds. But then she was moved laterally and promoted; she decided to buy a new car, and take a trip to Italy. She was administrating the honors program now, a position of accomplishment. The higher-ups loved her. She had great insurance and a retirement account and summers off. For the last sixteen semesters she’d been making sure all the hottest shots at the school—so many twenty-year-olds with cutesy snow hats and ear buds hanging down their shoulders and knobby knees and cheery jewelry—had the ducks of their futures in a row. The years were coming and going, the seasons slipping past.
She tightened the towel around herself and sat down in a rustic ladderback chair that Rita had, for some reason, put in the bathroom. When Kim had first started visiting her, in her new neighborhood, they had laughed at the fact that Rita had started playing bridge and had joined a book club. They’d laughed at the invitations Rita received to attend Tupperware parties and lingerie parties and other types of parties that weren’t really parties. Now Rita didn’t make excuses. Now these women were simply her friends. These women were fast becoming her old friends. Rita had had Franklin young, a surprise, but becoming a mother hadn’t changed her. It was being around these other mothers, all of them kept women, that had made her different.
Kim got dressed and brushed her teeth and went back down to the kitchen. She entered the walk-in pantry and surveyed a row of cereal boxes, each a version of granola. There was a case of pomegranate juice, unopened bottles of vinegar and marmalade and steak sauce and brown mustard. There was an entire shelf of whole bean coffee. Kim heard footsteps and turned to see Franklin leaning in the doorway of the pantry.
“You’re already getting dirty,” he said.
Kim looked at him neutrally. He’d changed his shirt to a yellow polo. His eyelashes were long and thick like a girl’s.
“It’s like they say how once you’re born, each minute brings you closer to death. After you shower, every minute brings you closer to being filthy. It’s exhausting to think about.”
“Unless you like to shower,” Kim said. “Unless that’s a highlight of your day.”
She brushed past Franklin, getting out of the pantry, and sat at the table. He followed her over. He picked up the soda Kim had left before and drank half of it down with a series of hard glugs. The clouds were clearing off and the sunshine was softening, a reasonable springtime sky prevailing.
“You had me worried there for a minute,” Franklin said.
“How’s that?”
“When I brought up the museum.”
Kim’s bare feet were cold on the tile. She pulled them up under her on the chair.
“I knew you didn’t want to go to the mall,” Franklin continued. “It’s funny, I outgrew hanging out at the mall right around the same time my mom got back into it. We just missed each other. Of course, she prefers the outlet mall and I always went to the proper mall.”
“So is there really a Gauguin assignment?” Kim said. “Or did you make that up?”
“Oh, the assignment exists. It’s just a matter of getting ourselves to do it.” Franklin’s lemonade was still sitting out on the counter, and now he dumped it down the sink. He opened a drawer and found some kind of protein bar, which he ripped open and took a chewy bite of. Kim could smell him now, a combination of ordinary scents—clean laundry, lotion, unwashed hair.
“Do you ever miss your old house?” Kim asked him.
“All the time,” said Franklin. He was chewing with effort.
“I can’t get used to this one. I’ve been here twice now and it still feels like a bed-and-breakfast.”
“You can get off by yourself in this house. That’s the silver lining. You don’t know anyone else is home.”
Kim felt her stomach growl. She wasn’t going to do anything about it.
“I feel sorry for men who have to live in houses like this,” she said. “It’s a big dollhouse. I feel sorry for you and your dad.”
“Well, sometimes I go weeks without a Dad sighting. He lives at hotels. Not that I don’t like the guy. Not that I’m complaining or anything. Somebody’s got to bring home the bacon.”
“It can’t be good for a man’s soul to have a cutesy mailbox.”
Franklin craned his neck, as if to look out at the mailbox. It couldn’t be seen from where they were sitting.
“Do you have a job?” Kim asked.
“Yeah, right. Me with a name tag, speaking to customers.”
“So what do you do with your time? I’m sure they’re big on extracurricular activities at that school of yours.”
“My time?” Franklin took a moment. “I guess I lose track of it quite a bit.”
“No volunteering with the poor? No socializing?”
“I steal mail sometimes. Speaking of cute mailboxes. That’s something I used to do. That’s pretty much the opposite of volunteering with the poor, huh?” Franklin gave up on his protein bar, or maybe he was only taking a break. He set it on a paper towel on the counter. “It’s not like I never make friends. Girls seem to like me okay. A couple of them.” He lowered his eyes, which were a wan green. Kim could hear the ticking of clocks from other rooms, all slightly off rhythm with each other.
“Full disclosure, I’m suspended right now. From school. My mom doesn’t know. I had my dad talk to the Assistant Dean of Studies and sign the papers and he promised he wouldn’t tell her. I’m suspended this whole week.” Franklin produced a chuckle that didn’t make it past his throat. “Dr. Crantz told me the suspension would be in my file forever and I told him it was important to me to have an interesting file. He didn’t think that was humorous. I told him I wanted my file to be a fun read. I think I saw somebody say that in a movie once. It was pretty lucky I got to say it in real life.”
Franklin insisted on driving. He had a used Audi sedan he was letting go to hell. He’d t
ried to peel the bumper stickers off it, but you could see where they’d been. The hubcaps were missing. As they walked down the driveway toward the car, which was parked half on the curb, a little boy wearing a loose jersey hopped over a bush from the yard next door and winged a football toward Franklin. Franklin didn’t see it in time to catch it, but he managed to flinch so it wouldn’t hit him in the head. The ball glanced off his forearms and bounced out into the road and came to a stop. Franklin’s face was red. He looked at the boy in exasperation, before taking a breath and regaining his composure. “I’m the quarterback,” the boy declared. He scuttled past them and retrieved the ball from the road, then ran back over to his own yard, leaving them standing there.
Franklin unlocked the driver door and opened it, still flustered, and hit a button on his armrest that unlocked Kim’s door. Before he got in, he placed a hand on the roof of the Audi and poised himself to speak. “I fucking hate kids,” he said. “Let me be clear on that. They should be kept somewhere until they’re twelve. Like a bunker. Until they’re at least twelve.”
Franklin drove them to the entrance of the neighborhood, then turned in a direction opposite from the museum’s. Kim knew which way the city was, and this wasn’t it.
“So I decided we’re not going to do the extra credit.” Franklin was picking things out of the cup holders in the console—gum wrappers, paperclips, parking garage cards—and tossing them into the back of the car. “I hope you didn’t get your heart set on seeing paintings. My grade is beyond help. It would be a waste of time in that respect. And really, you’ve seen one museum, you’ve seen them all.”
There was a huge book on the floorboard by Kim’s feet. She picked it up with two hands and twisted around so she could set it on the back seat. “Okay,” she said. “So no museum.”
“We can find a better use for a nice day like this, so here’s what I’m thinking. We go to this farm I know where we can get fresh fruit, then we go to this… well, it’s like a sculpture garden, and then we’ll have a picnic where we can eat the fruit we got at the farm. It doesn’t sound like much of an itinerary, but believe me, it’ll be enough.”
Kim couldn’t help but laugh. Nothing was funny. She felt a little snuck up on. “I’m not the one with a GPA to think about,” she told Franklin.
“Don’t remind me. Do me a favor: I’m going to take a vacation from GPAs and permanent records today. Let’s not mention any of that.”
Kim ran her window down with the button, then changed her mind and rolled it back up. She had a feeling she should protest, that she shouldn’t allow herself to be swept along on this new course, but the feeling was too remote. She didn’t know what the grounds for the protest would be. She looked over at Franklin, and his face betrayed nothing at all, just concentration on the road, peaceful focus. There was something about him that seemed above dishonesty, like he wouldn’t bother with it.
“Hope you don’t mind if we abstain from the radio today,” he said. “I’m taking an indefinite break from music. I think I listened to too much of it in too compressed a time frame. I’m really sick of songs.”
They proceeded over a couple overpasses, then a low bridge that spanned a still river. They were taking a back way out of the suburbs. There were a bunch of quiet apartment complexes out here that were neither upscale nor crummy. A big hardware store that didn’t seem open for business yet. Franklin had a firm grip on the top of the steering wheel, his wiry forearm muscles tensed. He had wispy sideburns, the kind you’d trim with scissors rather than shave. His lips were bright red, his skin healthy-looking against his shirt. Kim suddenly thought about how she looked, what she was wearing. Her toenails were freshly painted and her navy blue shorts were probably a little shorter than they should’ve been for an outing with a teenage boy, especially when she was sitting down. She rested her hands on her thighs and tugged at the material. She’d packed these shorts, she remembered, thinking she and Rita might go down to the lake, to get some sun and catch up. Turned out they hadn’t gone anywhere alone, hadn’t done a bit of catching up.
They passed an ice cream stand with a lone customer standing in front of it, then a big empty lot with a hill of reddish lawn mulch at its center. There was a part of Kim that was happy in a simple way, at being away from Galesburg and now away from Rita and her friends, getting driven around on a warming aimless weekday. The houses around them were growing austere, the yards turning into fields. Franklin slowed the car in front of an out-of-place Tudor-style strip mall, but he didn’t pull into it. Just past the mall he made a left, and they rolled down a bumpy lane lined with homes of all styles and sizes. Some of the yards were overgrown and strewn with tools or toys, and some were neat as a pin. They passed under a series of huge shade trees, which gave Kim the feeling of driving through a tunnel, and when they came out into the sun again Franklin raised his hand and pointed excitedly.
“The red pickup means she’s home,” he said. “This is our day. Luck is playing nice with us.”
He pulled onto the pale dirt drive and put the car in park. The house had a shingled roof and beige siding. There was a chimney on one side that seemed too big. Franklin squirmed in his seat, getting at one of his pants pockets, and yanked out the money Rita had given him.
“You don’t mind if lunch is vegetarian, do you? I know some people like a more substantial midday meal.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” Kim said, sounding odd to herself. This wasn’t an expression she ever used.
“I have a picnic spot in mind, but maybe when we’re out there we’ll see something better. A covered bridge or some such, or a broken-down tractor. Something in that ballpark.” He unfolded the cash. “Thirty bucks. That ought to do it. Two people like us ought to be able to have a rewarding day for less than thirty dollars. There was a show on TV like that, where this lady tried to do a day in different cities for thirty dollars. I think it was thirty. She had to leave a crappy tip if she went to a restaurant.”
Kim thought she remembered the show Franklin was talking about. For years she’d been trying to get herself to watch more TV, but none of it seemed intended for her. She wasn’t a target audience, she supposed—there wasn’t a spinster-in-training-of-above-average-intelligence demographic. She hardly even watched movies anymore.
Franklin led her around the back of the house, past a latticework apparatus covered in ivy. In the yard they found an old woman sitting in a lawn chair. The woman set her book aside, but didn’t stand up. She told them everything was the same price and sold by the bin, and you could fill your bin as much as you could manage not to spill. The old woman wore her hair up in a soft bun, and her jewelry was all of a set, silver with large scarlet stones. Franklin went and grabbed a bin, and stepped over to a row of crates that contained different sorts of onions. He picked a few up and sniffed them with gusto.
Kim heard music from inside the old woman’s house—dreamy electric guitar, Hawaiian-sounding. She let Franklin wander off by himself to choose the fruit, and stood by the lawn chair as the woman began talking as though continuing a conversation that had been interrupted an hour before. She told Kim she was taking a class at the junior college about the Mayans and the Aztecs. She was able to attend the class for free because she was old. The teacher was a handsome Spanish guy with an accent, who often told hunting stories. The woman said the seasons had been perfect lately. Fall and winter and spring, all perfect. Right on time, like the movements of a symphony. Franklin was at the far end of the crates now, holding in one hand a vegetable Kim didn’t recognize. He was spindly, too tall, but she liked that there wasn’t a bit of put-on in his mannerisms, no practiced reluctance, no breeziness, no mope. Perhaps he’d given up on being something other than himself.
“Your boy there’s a spitting image of my first husband. When I first met him, I mean. In those days, you got married young. You didn’t wait until you had a million dollars and all your towels matched. And of course people dressed different. He was always wearing a p
ressed white shirt and a vest and good shoes.”
The old woman cautiously pulled a stick out of her bun and let the hair fall in sections down her back. She set the stick on the table beside her. It was a regular stick from outside; it looked like a twig from the oak tree that was shading this portion of the yard. Kim had no idea if the woman thought Franklin was her son or her brother or what.
“He died young, in his forties. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give for one more day with that man. I knew the first time he held my hand there’d never be anything else like him, and I was right.”
Franklin walked up close then, carrying the bin and eating a strawberry. He gave the woman a twenty and thanked her, and she tucked the money into the pages of her book.
As they were walking back around to the car, Kim noticed there were flowers in the bin. Daffodils, the same color as Franklin’s shirt. As soon as Franklin found a place for the bin in the back seat, he emerged and presented the bouquet to Kim. He wore a daffy, bright-eyed expression, bowing slightly. Kim looked at him and at the flowers, and took them.
“I thought you might like these because you’re a woman and women enjoy when men buy them flowers. That’s one of those things you can depend on. It’ll never change. It crosses cultures.”
The stems of the daffodils were warm in Kim’s hand, still alive and doing the work they’d been doing before they’d been cut. “What if the man’s mother bought the flowers? Does the woman still enjoy it then?”
Franklin wanted to grin. “I don’t think when a woman gets flowers, she’s supposed to worry about exactly who financed them. Seems like a vulgar thing to worry about. It’s just something simple that both parties can feel good about.”
Kim could remember when Franklin was a toddler, could recall Rita forcing him to be normal, forcing him to eat what the other kids ate and play with balls and stare at cartoons. She couldn’t believe that that little kid was the guy standing in front of her. She couldn’t believe that so much time had passed. He was taking her out for the day, buying her lunch, giving her flowers. His expression was open and artless, without agenda, and maybe that’s what was making Kim feel disarmed. Kim was the adult and should’ve been the one steering the direction of the day. She found herself thanking Franklin for the daffodils, putting her face near them to breathe them in. She found herself trying to remember the last time she’d received flowers. Valentine’s Day a couple years ago—the obligatory roses, probably from the supermarket, picked up at the last minute.