Closer Than They Appear (2 page)

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 fabulous?”

“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.”

Harper was closer to her Aunt Ginger than to her own mother, possibly because Aunt Ginger sometimes believed herself to be the same age as Harper—twenty-eight. Also, Harper’s parents lived in Wheatfield, Illinois, more than 300 miles away, so Aunt Ginger was the only family Harper saw on a regular basis.

On the drive to the store, Ginger pulled a wrinkled note from her purse;
Dick and Sally Westfield, 1274 Marigold Drive
was scribbled on the front, an email and phone number on the back. “I found you a new client, Cheeto.”

Cheeto had been Harper’s nickname in childhood; now that she was studying to become a Registered Dietician and worked as a part-time personal chef for people with special dietary needs, the nickname had assumed an exceptionally grating irony.

“Dick and Sally Westfield. I met them at Silver Sneakers. Nice couple, but boy howdy does Dick have halitosis. No big health concerns that they told me about, other than Dick’s kitty litter breath, I guess. They just want to try eating healthier. Oh, excuse me. I mean, more
healthfully
.”

“You’re too weirdly adorable to be annoyed by. You know that, don’t you?”

“I depend on it!” They drove in silence for a while before Ginger glanced down at her comically large breasts, an amazed yet slightly bewildered look on her face. “I still can’t get over these.”

“Neither can I.”

Zach

IT WAS FRIDAY
morning, and the forecast called for rain. But there she was at the stoplight, left turn signal blinking—sunshine on wheels, her own small, portable ecosystem. He was two cars behind her today (beyond even her blind spot, so to speak); this was disappointing, because he’d brought a pair of oversized, novelty sunglasses to wear when she spotted him, just to see if she’d laugh. It was an odd stunt to pull, he knew, but he’d woken up feeling strangely confident and free. He peed an insouciant arc into the toilet bowl that morning, drank his coffee with gusto, wrote “Roach clip on a feather” on a Post-it note for Josh and actually caught himself whistling when he left for work. Whistling!

He pulled up behind the last car in the right lane, waiting for the light to turn, and she saw him in her rearview mirror. Her eyes lit up with her smile, and he quickly put on the sunglasses with the pink plastic frame and waved.

She laughed and gave a small, surreptitious wave back.

GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!

Harper

THE YMCA CARDIO
machines were nearly smoking, gym members frantically running in place like large, sweaty, Lycra-clad hamsters. Harper and Natalie somehow snagged two adjacent Stairmasters, on which they now grimly climbed. “I saw my pretend boyfriend again this morning,” Harper said, her breath ragged and her face hot. “He put on a pair of huge pink sunglasses when he saw me.”

Natalie dialed down her pace. “You’re not that bright.”

“He was trying to make me laugh.”

“Huh. So what does he look like?”

“Yesterday I saw a video on Cute Overload of a baby otter floating in a pool, stacking cups together on its belly. And then I watched a trailer for the new Quentin Tarantino movie. He’s somewhere in between. He looks sort of exotic.”

“If you can say all that and still exercise, you’re not at your peak intensity.”

“Who cares. I’d rather tell you about my pretend boyfriend.”

“Okay, so he looks exotic,” Natalie puffed, punching a button to further decrease her speed. “Like, Gael Garcia Bernal-exotic? Or Tony Leung-exotic?”

“You’ve been watching too many foreign movies on Netflix lately.”

“Well, which is it?”

“Kind of like if Freddy Rodriguez and Christian Bale and that girl from Afghanistan with the green eyes—” she paused to catch her breath “—the one who was on the cover of
National Geographic
? If they all had a baby.”

“That’s creepily specific, but I get it. I love eyes that color. They’re like a portal to another dimension. Like
The Tommyknockers
.”

“Okay, now you’re making it sound weird.”

“
I’m
making it sound weird?” Natalie pushed a stray hair that had escaped from her blond ponytail out of her eyes. “Why don’t you look up his license plate? You can find out anything about anybody these days if you know their license plate number.”

The machine hummed beneath Harper’s feet, which stepped and stepped and went nowhere. “Because that’s kind of stalker-y, and also, it’s a company truck.”

“Yeah, Pubes and Hoses. Boo. Gross.”

“
Tubes
and Hoses. They just need a better graphic designer.”

“What about the company website? Sometimes they have photos of the employees.”

“They don’t.” Harper wiped her sweaty forehead with the scratchy gym towel she’d hung on her machine.

“You already looked? Psycho.”

“You told me to!”

“I’m kidding. Hey, my nose is totally running. Do you have any travel-sized tissues in your fanny pack? Next to the Tide pen, antibacterial hand wipes, and portable defibrillator?”

Harper turned off her machine and rode the pneumatic steps down to floor-level. She rummaged through her small gym bag and extracted a clean tissue, which she handed to Natalie.

“Thanks, Sally Plan-ahead. Oh, I just had a terrible thought! Do you think maybe he’s following you?”

Harper shook her head while she sprayed the handles of her machine with cleaning solution. She swabbed it down with a fresh towel. Almost immediately, a teenage girl with a blue streak in her hair and glittery shoulders claimed the Stairmaster. “He’s just going to work. I think he might live near me. Oh, I hope he doesn’t use the phrase ‘making love.’”

“Does he at least buy you dinner first?”

“Of course he does!” Harper said, giddy from exercise and new crush endorphins.

“Hey, want to go to the grocery store with me? I don’t want to go home yet.” Natalie had three children between the ages of two and six whose collective screaming could drown out the engine of a Boeing 747. For Natalie, grocery shopping alone was like a trip to the spa. She also had a patient husband named Brian, whom she nearly broke up with early in their relationship because the first time they had sex he wore a striped glow-in-the-dark condom and she said it was like watching a caterpillar crawl in and out of her vagina.

“No, I went yesterday with Aunt Ginger. Besides, I have too much homework.”

“Look-at-these-fake-tittayz Aunt Ginger?” Natalie wiped her own machine down.

“You’re such a dirty old man.”

Natalie sighed. “Sorry, I haven’t slept through the night since 2004 and my entire household is nothing but a giant fart joke these days. It makes me belligerent.” As they made their way back to the locker room, Natalie tipped her head at an older woman stretching on a mat near a pyramidal stack of weights. A man with muscles so large he looked like a cartoon was lifting a weight tied to his neck behind her, grunting with the effort. “First, that woman is wearing nude pantyhose under her shorts. Second, that man is going to break his neck and we’ll probably have to be interviewed because we watched it happen. Third, homework on a Friday night? You do realize you’re wasting the most attractive year of your life.”

“Thanks, I think.”

What did the sunglasses mean? What if he was crazy? What if he was an escaped convict, or a creepy married man with a foot fetish? She imagined herself buying a handgun and shooting paper targets at a gun range and felt a little better. Or—what if he was a single father with a loving, rambunctious extended family who all lived within a ten mile radius and every Christmas they went “treeing” and had soup at each other’s homes? What if he made a great lasagna? What if he had a living room full of books and an adorable, bug-eyed Pug whose tongue always stuck out? What if he was a cancer survivor and a mountain biker and an art teacher at an elementary school, and he planted a small garden every spring? Wait, he couldn’t be an art teacher, because he worked at a plumbing supply store. She hadn’t experienced anything this exciting or mysterious since Nick Carter almost came to the mall in 1997. She could hardly wait for Monday morning.