Closer Than They Appear (7 page)

The health kick turned into something more permanent, and here she was, four classes from completing the Registered Dietician program, working as a personal chef for people with cancer, Crohn’s Disease, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. Volunteering at the food bank in winter, pulling weeds on a CSA farm in summer, diagramming square foot gardens and composting and planting parsley and tomatoes and squash under fluorescent lights in April. Gardening and cooking—you can’t get much more optimistic and nurturing than that. (Well, other than parenthood, but that was a few years away at best.)

Her phone vibrated in her purse. Natalie. “I kind of want to get a dog. Talk me out of it.”

“Did you just watch
Marley & Me
again?”

“No, but I was on Petfinder, because I was taking a break from job-hunting, and now I want to be a veterinarian. Well, maybe not a vet, but someone who rescues dogs from puppy mills.”

Harper realized with shock that Natalie was crying. “Sweetie, what’s wrong?”

“I’m sad. And I have a job interview in a few days but I have this huge zit on my neck and I picked it and now it looks like I have a hickey and they won’t give me the job and when I get home I’ll feel even more sad because nobody will greet me at the door and just be happy to see me because I don’t have a dog.”

“I’m always happy to see you! Everyone’s always happy to see you.”

“This morning Brandon took my face in his hands and said to me, ‘You’re not exactly ugly, but you’re not exactly pretty.’ I’m raising a monster!”

“You’re beautiful, and you’re not raising a monster. I believe the correct phrase is ‘spirited child.’”

“Why does life never turn out like you think it will?”

Harper sighed. “I think it was in the fine print on the kindergarten syllabus, but you miss so much when you can’t read yet.” She stuffed the uneaten half of her sandwich back in the brown paper bag and rolled it up. “I have a story that might make you smile.”

“Yes, please tell me.”

“Okay, did I tell you Aunt Ginger has a new boyfriend? He’s actually really nice and normal and everything, but when I stopped by the other night to drop off a quart of tomato basil soup, I walked in on them basically naked on her couch.”

Natalie laughed, blew her nose, and said, “She’s kind of like her own sitcom character, isn’t she?”

“Yep. But you could never tell her something like that, because she’d only become a bigger caricature of herself.”

“I like caricatures. And dogs. Hey, where are you right now?”

“At the student union. I have twenty minutes until my next class.”

“Do you feel old there? Maybe I could go back to school, too.”

Harper smiled. “Why, do you want to feel old?”

“I wish I liked science and blood. I’d totally be a nurse. Or a veterinarian.”

“You should be a plumber and get a job at Tubes and Hoses.”

“No, thanks. Not until they change their logo. But if I did, at least I could flirt with your pretend boyfriend all day.”

“You better not,” Harper said, laughing. “Nobody flirts with my pretend boyfriend but me, and only three days a week.” It started out funny, but talking about him summoned the fuzzy little cloud of melancholy again. When would she see him next? What if she never got a chance to hear his voice or see him smile at something she’d said?

She said good-bye to Natalie, and started walking down a curving cement path to her next class, one foot ahead of the other, quickly.

Zach

HIS PHONE RANG
while he ate lunch at the student union, where he’d gone to decompress after a meeting at the financial aid office and a quick visit with a former professor to discuss a potential graduate assistantship. It was his agent. He fumbled his phone and nearly dropped it in the puddle of ketchup near his French fries, a shot of adrenaline splashing into his stomach. “Hello?” he tried to sound cool and calm, the exact opposite of a person who’d been waiting for an unexpected phone call from New York for years.

“Are you sitting down?” his agent said, and he sounded excited—
more
than excited, really. Zach’s pulse began to sprint.
Was this it? Was this really it?
His grip on the phone tightened, and he tried to think of a response but before he could answer, his agent added, “Just kidding. I always wanted to say that to you.”

“Oh.” Zach blinked while his brain scrambled to re-set. He let out a bark of laughter, not in amusement but to let some of the pressure escape from his head.

“Okay, okay, in all seriousness now. I got your email, and I was sitting on this news at the time so I didn’t respond because we had a few kinks to work out. But we have an offer!”

Zach held his breath and closed his eyes, smiling so hard his face started to hurt.

“Now, don’t get too excited, because it’s small, but it’s from a good, indie press. They only publish a handful of books a year, but they treat their authors well, and one of the editors, Mike Reynolds, abso-fucking-
lutely
loves your book. He wants a few changes, like the title especially, but nothing crazy, no big whoop, every first book needs a little trimming. He’s great to work with, has a great vision for the book and your career as an author.”

His career as an author.
And who cared if they wanted to change the title? They could call it
Ten Easy Steps to Eliminate Radish Burps
for all he cared—someone wanted to publish his book, and give him money to do so! He meant to ask something insightful and creative, perhaps more about Mike Reynolds’ vision for the book and his future as an artist, but when he opened his mouth, this came out: “How much is the advance, may I ask?” He groaned inwardly at himself—first that he cared how much the advance was, second that he’d added “may I ask?” Gross.

“Twenty-five hundred, against royalties. They’re thinking hardcover, and it’ll be the lead title in their summer catalog next year. I know I don’t have to tell you how rare that is these days. But you’ve got a literary debut here, and they’ll push that angle, go for reviews with the standard-bearer heavyweights, all that jazz. Plus, you’re young and don’t have a face like a bagful of smashed assholes, so you’ll be a breeze to market. The next Jonathan Safran Foer and so forth. You’re on Twitter, right?”

His head was starting to spin. His book … published! In print.
Hardcover
, no less. Who cared if after taxes and his agent’s cut it would only cover two months’ rent. Who cared if it was a small press. He’d have an editor. Someone who abso-fucking-
lutely
loved his book. If the reviews and word of mouth were good, he might make something of this.

He had more questions for his agent, who answered what he could, and they set up a time for him to talk to Mike. His new editor, can you even
believe
that?

“It’s a good book Zach,” his agent said before he hung up. “You should be proud. People are going to love it.”

In a daze, Zach walked out of the student union and back to his truck. He wondered if this was how it felt to float around the space station on your first day in orbit. Colors looked brighter. He felt as if he could spontaneously burst into joyful flames, or at the very least, song. So he sang all the way home, to The Raconteurs and Trampled by Turtles and Pinback and Rod Stewart and even Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” which he usually hated with the kind of malice his Uncle Gerald reserved for Facebook and the hippies on
Whale Wars
. He nearly ran out of gas because he wasn’t paying attention, but luck was with him tonight. For the first time in what felt like years.

Harper

“DO THESE PANTS
make me look like a python that’s swallowed a deer? You’d tell me, right?” Natalie asked Harper, frowning down at her brown leggings, over which she wore a long, belted blue top with tiny pearl accents on the V-neckline.

“Where do you come up with this stuff?”

“I watch a lot of nature programs with the kids.”

“You look great, seriously.”

“Do I look like a panicked mother of three whose husband’s unemployment checks barely cover groceries and the mortgage?”

Harper smiled sympathetically. “No, you look like the relaxed mother of a loving, precocious child you adopted from Luxembourg, and your husband is in high-demand as a clown at children’s birthday parties.”

“What tricks can he do? Can he make good jobs appear out of thin air?”

Harper and Natalie were at Oblio’s, one of the more popular bars among both the college set and an older crew that played as hard as they worked. It was also one of the few places in town—with a high, engraved tin ceiling, elaborate mahogany back bar embedded with stained glass, hanging globe lights that had been resurrected from old churches, and twenty-seven beers on tap—where you could play pool, share a round of Irish Car Bombs with a stranger,
and
debut an expensive pair of sandals or dry clean only shirt you found via My Habit without feeling overdressed. The air was infused with the scents of popcorn and perfume and stale cigarette smoke and yeasty beer, but beneath all that, decades of stories and laughter and shameful hook-ups wafted from the woodwork. You could smell Prohibition, and bell bottom blues, and glitter and confetti and cheerful resolutions from New Year’s Eve, 1984.

Natalie and Harper were waiting to order a drink in a throng of people pressed against the bar. Someone had ordered a complicated cocktail, which the bartender frantically mixed and poured and measured while the queue bottlenecked behind him. “You want to try one of the back bars?” Natalie shouted.

“Yeah, I’m getting claustrophobic!”

They wove their way through the mass of people, past the second bar next to the shuffleboard table to the cozy, well-lit bar near the back patio. It was a mild night, and the garage door was up to provide access to the patio. People milled about under the portable propane heat towers, smoking and telling animated stories and checking their phones. “I was starting to feel like the kid brother in
A Christmas Story
when he was all bundled up in the snowsuit,” Natalie said, breathing a sigh of relief when they snagged a vacant stool at the bar.

“I can’t put my arms down!”

“
You can put your arms down when you get to school!
Want to sit?” Natalie gestured to the lone bar stool.

“No, you sit,” Harper said.

“Maybe we should go to The Algoma Club. Is there a band playing tonight?”

“I’ll go if it’s the Dead Horses. Just sit, seriously. I need to stand because I sat all day.”

“Here,” someone said from behind them, “Sit on this.” A second stool was shoved their way.

They turned together to thank their mystery seat benefactor and Harper’s smile faded—it was He Who Shan’t Be Named, looking distressingly good. It felt as if someone had suddenly poured a bucket of seltzer and Pop Rocks in her chest. Natalie scowled. “Sit on this? Nice.”

“Sorry, it was the first thing I could think of.”

“You generally shouldn’t say the first thing you think of.”

He paused for a moment, staring into the distance behind Harper’s shoulder. “Sorry, the second and third things I thought of sucked, too. Anyway, what are you guys up to tonight? Can I get you a drink?”

“No, thanks,” Harper quickly said, “We weren’t going to stay long.”

Natalie didn’t say anything, perhaps because she was too broke to decline a free drink, even one from her best friend’s sketchy ex-boyfriend.

“Come on, at least stay for one drink. Let me get you something. They’ve got Hometown Blonde on tap, and Serendipity.”

“Serendipity?”

The bartender, who’d been waiting on their order, jumped in to help close the sale. “It’s a seasonal sour brown ale made from cranberries, apples, and cherries. It’s pretty fucking good. New Glarus wouldn’t steer you wrong.”

“How’s the lemon berry shandy?” Harper asked, nodding at one of the tappers.

The bartender made a face around the toothpick he’d been chewing. “Not one of my favorites. Too watery. I wouldn’t even call it a beer, really. It’s more like a shitty Zima.”

Natalie caught Harper’s eye and shrugged. “It’s up to you. I
know
you’re not going to do anything stupid.”

The bartender began to fill a pint glass, angled at the tap, with frothy, brown Guinness for another customer. “Or I could make you a Peanut Butter Cup.”

“What’s that?”

“Half chocolate stout, half peanut butter porter.” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and sniffed. People were piling up at the end of the bar, waving ten dollar bills and shooting them cranky looks.

“Ah, you found my weakness,” Harper finally conceded, feeling magnanimous and brave and totally unlike the kind of person who used to wait for phone calls or cry after one too many glasses of wine.

Natalie ordered a Skinnygirl Tangerine Vodka and seltzer, with a lime wedge, because she was on Weight Watchers again. “So what brings you out tonight, Sam?” she breezily asked He Who Shan’t Be Named, temporarily forgetting her commitment to his nickname (or making a point of it, Harper couldn’t tell).

“Ah, you know, the usual. It’s too nice to stay home.”

“Translation: I’m too young and single to stay home,” Harper said, raising an eyebrow. “So who are you here with?” she added.

“Chase, Dylan, Tyler and some girl Chase just started dating.” Natalie used to call Tyler “Ugly Adam Levine.” Most of Sam’s friends had treated Harper dismissively, probably because they knew she wasn’t the only girl in his life, but Ugly Adam Levine had always been kind to her, asking her about her family, her job, the latest movie she’d streamed on Netflix. She glanced around but failed to see any of them, which made her wonder if Sam had seen her first and followed her to the back bar.

The bartender finished pouring and placed their drinks on three coasters before them. Sam handed him a twenty and told him to keep the change.

“This isn’t bad,” Harper said after sampling her beer. Natalie sipped her own drink, eyes scanning the room, still visibly annoyed.