The Leftovers (35 page)

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing. Why?”

“You’re just standing there. Why don’t you come to bed?”

“I don’t know.” Jill tried to smile, but it didn’t really work. “I’m just feeling a little shy tonight.”

“Shy?” He couldn’t help laughing. “It’s a little late for shy.”

She moved her arm in a vague arc, trying to encompass the game, the room, and their lives in the gesture.

“You ever get tired of this?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “Not tonight.”

She didn’t move. After a few seconds, he stretched himself out on the bed, ankles crossed, fingers interlaced beneath his head. His briefs were unfamiliar, brown tighties with orange piping, unusually stylish.

“Nice undies,” she told him.

“My mom got them at Costco. Eight-pack, all different colors.”

“My mom used to buy me underwear,” she said. “But I told her it was weird, so she stopped.”

Max rolled onto his side, propping his chin on his hand, studying her with a thoughtful expression. Now he really did look like an underwear model, if there was a world where underwear models had hairy pipe-cleaner legs and bad muscle tone.

“I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I saw your mother the other day. She followed me home from my guitar lesson. Her and this other woman.”

“Really?” Jill tried to sound casual. It was embarrassing, the way her heart leaped every time someone mentioned her mother. “How’s she doing?”

“Hard to tell. They just did that thing, you know, where they stand really close and stare at you.”

“I hate that.”

“It’s creepy,” he agreed. “But I didn’t say anything mean. I just let them walk me home.”

Jill felt almost sick with longing. She hadn’t caught a glimpse of her mother for months and never bumped into her on the streets of Mapleton, though she was apparently a familiar figure around town. Other people saw her all the time.

“Was she smoking?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see her light a cigarette?”

“Probably. Why?”

“I gave her a lighter for Christmas. I just wondered if she was using it.”

“Beats me.” His face tightened with thought. “No, wait. They had matches.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” The doubt had left his voice. “This was like last Friday. Remember how cold it was with the windchill? Her hand was shaking and she was having a really hard time striking the match. I offered to do it for her, but she wouldn’t let me. It took her like three or four tries to get the thing lit.”

Bitch,
Jill thought.
Serves her right.

“Come on.” Max patted the bed. “Relax. You don’t have to take your clothes off if you don’t want to.”

Jill considered the offer. She used to like resting with Max in the dark, two warm bodies under the covers, talking about whatever came into their heads.

“I won’t touch you,” he promised. “I won’t even jerk off.”

“That’s sweet of you,” she said. “But I think I’m gonna go home.”

*   *   *

THEY WERE
both relieved when the food finally arrived, partly because they were hungry, but mainly because it gave them an excuse to suspend the conversation for a little while, take a breather, and maybe start over on a lighter note. Kevin knew he’d made a mistake, peppering her with so many questions, turning the small talk into an interrogation.

Be patient,
he told himself.
This is supposed to be fun.

After a few silent bites, Nora looked up from her mushroom ravioli.

“Delicious,” she said. “The cream sauce.”

“Mine, too.” He held up a morsel of lamb for her perusal, showing her how perfectly grilled it was, brown at the edges, pink in the middle. “Melts in your mouth.”

She smiled a bit queasily, and he remembered, too late, that she didn’t eat meat. Did it disgust her, he wondered, being asked to admire a piece of cooked flesh skewered on a fork? He understood all too well how you could talk yourself into vegetarianism, teach yourself to think “dead animal” rather than “tender and succulent.” He’d done it himself on numerous occasions, usually after reading articles about factory farms and slaughterhouses, but his qualms always vanished the moment he picked up a menu.

“So how was your day?” she asked. “Anything interesting happen?”

Kevin only hesitated for a second. He’d seen this moment coming and had been planning on playing it safe, saying something bland and innocuous—
Not really, just went to work and came home
—saving the truth for later, some unspecified time in the future when he knew her a little better and their relationship was a little stronger. But when would that be? How could you get to know someone a little better if you couldn’t give an honest answer to a simple question, especially about something so important?

“My son called this afternoon,” he told her. “I hadn’t heard from him since the summer. I was really worried about him.”

“Wow,” she said after a brief silence that didn’t quite thicken to the point of awkwardness. “Is he okay?”

“I think so.” Kevin wanted to smile, but did his best to resist the impulse. “He sounded pretty good.”

“Where is he?”

“He wouldn’t say. The cell phone he used had a Vermont area code, but it wasn’t his. I was just so relieved to hear the sound of his voice.”

“Good for you,” she said a bit stiffly, making an effort to sound pleased and sincere.

“Is this okay?” he asked. “We can talk about something else if you—”

“It’s fine,” she assured him. “I’m happy for you.”

Kevin decided not to press his luck.

“What about you? Do anything fun this afternoon?”

“Not really,” she said. “Got my eyebrows waxed.”

“They look good. Nice and neat.”

“Thanks.” She touched her forehead, tracing her fingertip over the top of her right eyebrow, which did seem a little more sharply defined than usual. “Is your son still part of that cult? That Holy Wayne thing?”

“He says he’s done with that.” Kevin looked down at the fat candle in its stubby glass holder, the quivering flame floating on a puddle of melted wax. He felt an urge to plunge his finger into the hot liquid, letting it harden in the air like a second skin. “Says he’s thinking about maybe coming home, going back to school.”

“Really?”

“That’s what he said. I hope it’s true.”

Nora picked up her knife and fork and cut into a ravioli. It was big and pillowy, crimped along the edges.

“Were you close?” she asked, still looking down, slicing the halves into quarters. “You and your son?”

“I thought we were.” Kevin was surprised by the shakiness in his voice. “He was my little boy. I was always so proud of him.”

Nora looked up with an odd expression on her face. Kevin could feel his mouth stretching, the pressure building inside his eyeballs.

“I’m sorry,” he said, in the instant before he clapped his hand over his mouth, trying to muffle the sound of his blubbering. “Just give me a second.”

*   *   *

IT WAS
maybe fifteen degrees out, but the night air felt clean and invigorating. Jill stood on the sidewalk and took a good long look at Dmitri’s house, her home away from home for the past six months. It was a shabby little place, a generic suburban box with a concrete stoop and a picture window to the left of the front door. In the daytime the exterior was a dirty shade of beige, but right now it was no color at all, just a dark shape against an even darker background. An odd sense of melancholy took hold of her—it was the same feeling she got walking past her old ballet school, or the soccer fields at Greenway Park—as if the world were a museum of memories, a collection of places she’d outgrown.

Good times,
she thought, but only as an experiment, just to see if she believed it. Then she turned and started for home, the street so quiet and the air so thin that her footsteps sounded like a drumbeat on the pavement, loud enough to wake the neighbors.

It wasn’t that late, but Mapleton was a ghost town, not a pedestrian or a stray dog in sight. She turned onto Windsor Road, reminding herself to look alert and purposeful. She’d taken a self-defense course a couple of years ago, and the instructor had said that not looking like a victim was Rule Number One.
Keep your head up and your eyes open. Look like you know exactly where you’re going, even when you don’t.

At the corner of North Avenue, she paused to consider her options. It was a fifteen-minute walk from here to Lovell Terrace, but only half that if she cut across the railroad tracks. If Aimee had been there she wouldn’t have hesitated—they took the shortcut all the time—but Jill had never done it on her own. To get to the crossing, you had to walk down a desolate stretch of road, past auto repair shops, the Department of Public Works, and mysterious factories with names like Syn-Gen Systems and Standard Nipple Works, and then slip through a hole in the chain-link fence at the rear of the school bus parking lot. Once you crossed the tracks and circled around the back of Walgreens, you were in a much better area, a residential neighborhood with lots of streetlights and trees.

She didn’t hear the car. It just whooshed up from behind, a sudden alarming presence at the edge of her vision. She let out a gasp, then whirled into an awkward karate stance as the passenger window slid down.

“Whoa.” A familiar blissed-out face was peering at her, framed by reassuring blond dreadlocks. “You okay?”

“I was.” Jill tried to sound exasperated as she lowered her hands. “Until you scared the shit outta me.”

“Sorry about that.” Scott Frost, the unpierced twin, was the passenger. “You know karate?”

“Yeah, Jackie Chan’s my uncle.”

He grinned his approval. “Good one.”

“Where’s Aimee?” Adam Frost called from the driver’s seat. “We haven’t seen her for a while.”

“Working,” Jill explained. “She got a job at Applebee’s.”

Scott squinted at her with puffy, soulful eyes. “Need a ride somewhere?”

“I’m good,” she told him. “I live right across the tracks.”

“You sure? It’s fucking freezing out.”

Jill gave a stoic shrug. “I don’t mind walking.”

“Hey.” Adam leaned into view. “If you see Aimee, tell her I said hi.”

“Maybe we could party sometime,” Scott suggested. “All four of us.”

“Sure,” Jill said, and the Prius departed as quietly as it had arrived.

*   *   *

IN THE
men’s room, Kevin splashed cold water on his face and wiped it off with a paper towel. He felt like a fool, breaking down in front of Nora like that. He could see how uncomfortable it made her, the way she froze up, like she’d never seen a grown man cry and didn’t even know it was possible.

He’d caught himself by surprise, too. He’d been so worried about her reaction to what he was saying, he wasn’t even thinking about his own. But something had snapped inside of him, a rubber band of tension that had been wound so tight for so long he’d forgotten it was even there. It was the phrase
little boy
that had done it, the sudden memory of an easy weight on his shoulders, Tom perched up there like a king on a throne, gazing down upon the world, one delicate hand resting on top of his father’s head, the heels of his Velcro-fastened sneakers knocking softly against Kevin’s chest as they walked.

Despite what had happened, he was glad he’d shared his good news with her, glad he’d resisted the temptation to spare her feelings.
For what?
So they could continue hiding from each other, eating their meal in uneasy silence, wondering why they had nothing to talk about? This way was harder, but it felt like a breakthrough, a necessary first step on a road that might actually lead somewhere worth going.

I don’t know about you,
he thought he would tell her when he got back,
but a nice dinner always makes me cry
.

That would be the way to handle it—no apology, just a little joke to smooth things over. He crumpled the towel and dropped it into the wastebasket, checking himself one last time in the mirror before heading out the door.

A small seed of alarm sprouted in his chest as he made his way across the dining room and saw that their table was empty. He told himself not to worry, that she must have taken advantage of his absence to make her own trip to the restroom. He poured himself a little more wine and ate a forkful of roasted beet salad, trying not to stare at the balled-up napkin resting beside her plate.

A couple of minutes went by. Kevin thought about knocking on the ladies’ room door, maybe sticking his head inside to see if she was okay, but the handsome waiter stopped by the table before he had a chance. The man looked at Kevin with an expression that seemed to combine equal parts sadness and sympathetic amusement. His voice had a slight Spanish accent.

“Shall I clear the lady’s plate, sir? Or would you just prefer the check?”

Kevin wanted to protest, to insist that the lady would be right back, but he knew it was futile.

“Did she—?”

“She asked me to convey her apologies.”

“But I drove,” Kevin said. “She doesn’t have a car.”

The waiter lowered his gaze, nodding toward the food on Kevin’s plate.

“Shall I box that up for you?”

*   *   *

JILL CROSSED
the street, keeping her chin up and her shoulders back as she hustled past Junior’s Auto Body, a hospital for cars with shattered windshields and dimpled doors, dangling fenders and crumpled front ends. Some of the bad ones had deflated air bags drooping from the steering wheels, and it wasn’t unusual for a bag to be spotted with blood. She knew from experience not to look too hard or think too much about the people who’d been inside.

She felt like an idiot for declining the twins’ offer of a ride home. It was just injured pride that made her do it, anger at them for sneaking up on her like that, even if they hadn’t meant to. There was also a certain amount of good-girl caution at work, the little voice in her head that reminded her not to get into cars with strangers. It was kind of self-defeating in this case, since the alternative seemed even dicier than the danger she was supposedly trying to avoid.