This is Just Exactly Like You (25 page)

Two days go like this: Jack gets up early, earlier than usual, because Hen’s up early—he’s not used to the way the light works over here, and his dresser is too far away from the wall. Once Jack gets that figured out, though, things go better. They haven’t been back across the street. They’re making a go of it. And overall, it’s been fine, has been better than Jack really could have hoped for: Hen’s found the faucets over here, has eaten the fish sticks Jack’s made him, has been deep into his new phone book. Jack sits up in the evenings, gets used to a whole new set of sounds.

He goes in to the yard both days, makes sure to meet Beth there, lets her take Hen on errands, lets her take him to lunch. He’s not sure that he wants her to know he’s moved out. He’s doesn’t know what he’d say to her about it. She’d have questions.
You’ve just got lawn furniture everywhere?
Rena shows up at the house unannounced a couple of times, brings a poster for a bike race in Durham, hangs it on the wall in the living room.
You need some kind of color in here somewhere
, she tells him. Jack brings home catalogs from work, tears out pictures of shrubs, hangs them on Hen’s wall.

PM&T grinds along under its own power. Butner and Ernesto work the vegetable gardens, and when he’s in, Jack drives the loader back and forth, sets rows of boulders along the front of the lot, in between the flags. Butner’s idea. He’s got it in his head that a boulder might be an impulse buy. They get another truckload of roses in, all in bloom, run a special: Three for the price of two. They move pretty well. Butner’s got a second dry-erase board going in the office now, a gridded schedule of incoming and outgoing. Hen likes to touch his thumb to the ink, leaves little thumbprints all through Butner’s tallies of cubic yards of crush rock. They sell out of petunias. A woman wearing an accountant’s visor buys the last few four-packs.

Hendrick finds a closet full of old
National Geographics
in the back bedroom, and they spend all of Thursday night looking at the rivers of Zaire, dugout canoes in Greenland, humpback whales off the shores of the Aleutian Islands. There are large maps of the Cherokee Nation, of the Sea of Tranquility. Hen loves the maps, folds them and unfolds them, runs his fingers along the thin red topographical lines. Jack hangs a couple up next to the bike race poster.

Friday late afternoon Jack takes Hen outside, gets him set up with November 1989: The Colorado River, the Urals, the Bay of Bengal. Jack’s got a project: He’s replacing the mailbox, finally. He digs it out, resets it in a new hole, pours in a bag of concrete mix and soaks that down with the hose. Frank comes down his driveway to retrieve his trash cans, waves at Jack, face full of questions. Jack waves back, squats down to see if the mailbox looks plumb and level. Frank rolls the bins back up to his house one at a time. Jack pulls a can of marking spray paint out of the truck, starts drawing in big ovaled flowerbeds in his new front yard. He’s trying things out. He’s planning.

Rena arrives that night with another sleeve of crackers. They drink gin and tonic. She wants to know things—wants him to show her what he’s thinking of doing to the house, what colors he’s going to paint everything. She asks him how he was able to buy it in the first place, how he got the cash for the down payment, how much he thinks he might make when he sells it, how soon that might be. She makes him tell her the Sarah Cody story again, asks him more questions.
Was she smart? Who kissed who?
They have another drink. Before she leaves, she stands in his kitchen, says, “I think I want two things from you, OK?”

“OK,” he says, looking at the pale hair on her arms.

“One: I want us to go to yard sales some day soon. I’ve been feeling like buying some useless shit.”

“I can do that,” he says. “We can go to yard sales.”

“We need lamps with no cords,” she says. “I want a pasta bowl and a Salad Shooter.”

“Good,” Jack says, feeling like he’s fallen off of something. “That sounds good to me.”

“And second,” says Rena, holding up two fingers.

“Second,” Jack says, feeling like, for once, he knows what’s coming.

“Take me on a date, Jackson. It’s time, I think. Isn’t it? I think it is. I want you to take me to Gubbio’s.”

SATURDAY’S ARE KARAOKE NIGHT’S AT GUBBIO’S! is what the sign says outside, big lightbulb arrow running across the top of it. Jack works on apostrophes and possessives while he gets the dump truck wedged backwards into a space next to the Dumpster. Hendrick’s riding between them, tuning the radio in to station after station. He does not get easily babysat, so he’s along for the ride. Rena insisted, anyway.
It wouldn’t be right without him. You two are like some kind of package deal.
And Hen will eat pizza: Plain cheese, and you have to blot the grease off with a paper towel, but he’ll eat it. Jack’s wearing a pair of jeans he bought this afternoon specifically for the occasion. He’s pretty sure he’s headed for catastrophe. He just doesn’t know precisely what sort.

They sit over on the side, away from the bar. The music’s not going yet, but there’s a folding table with a karaoke machine and a huge white three-ring binder set up in the corner, a couple of microphones and speakers next to that. A banner hanging off the wall says JEFF AND AARON! KARAOKE, and then under that, WEDDINGS-PARTIES-ANYTIME. There’s no sign of Jeff or Aaron. The restaurant is about half full, mostly families and couples. No students, it looks like. There are a couple of tables of kids about the right age, but they look like locals. Jack’s only been back here once or twice. It does not feel like the scene of the crime, does not feel charged with anything like import. There is Carolina Panthers paraphernalia all over the walls, plus NASCAR posters and beer company banners of bikini-wearing volleyball girls. Drink specials. Pitchers are four dollars. Hendrick starts in on lining up the sugar packets in rank and file across the table. A girl at the bar puts down her cigarette, comes to take their order. She’s wearing a black T-shirt that shows off a good stripe of her stomach. She’s thin, fit. “What can I get you?” she asks them.

“What kind of ice do you have?” Jack asks.

“Huh?”

“Is it cubes, or is it the little crunchy kind?”

“Isn’t it the same thing?” The girl’s lipstick has glitter in it.

“Is it big pieces or little pieces?” he asks her.

“Do you mean the turd ice?” she says. “Like at the movies?”

“Yes,” he says. “Yes.”

“No. Our kind is square, with, like, little belly buttons in them.”

“Then he’ll have whatever you’ve got that’s diet, no ice,” Jack says, nodding at Hen. “He can be choosy.”

“That is choosy,” she says. Hen looks up at her, blinks. “Diet Coke or Diet Sprite?” she asks.

“Diet Coke or Diet Sprite?” Hen says right back.

She says, “Diet Sprite, if you ask me.”

Hendrick says, “A sprite is a mythical woodland creature.” He says it very seriously, and Rena laughs out loud.

“Cute,” says the girl. “What about for y’all?”

“We’ll take the pitcher special,” Jack says.

“They’re four dollars,” she says. “All of them.”

“Whatever’s coldest,” Jack says.

“They’re all cold.”

“Bud,” says Rena, interrupting. “Jesus. We’ll be here all night if you let him decide. Bud.”

“Pitcher of Bud and a Diet Sprite,” the waitress says. “Y’all want menus?”

Jack says, “Two slices of cheese and a large—” he looks at Rena. “Pepperoni?”

“And sausage,” she says. “Make it pepperoni and sausage.”

“We got good sausage,” the girl says.

“Great,” Rena says. “Perfect.” The girl walks over to the bar, writes up a ticket, hangs it on a wheel in the window through to the kitchen. She comes back with the pitcher, with Hen’s soda. “She’s about your speed, right?” Rena asks, after she’s sitting back down at the bar again. “About the right age?”

“She doesn’t strike me as a big reader,” he says, pouring the beer.

“That’s what you’d want her to do to you? Read?”

“Here,” Jack says, handing her a glass. “Drink this. Leave me alone.”

She smiles at him, clinks her beer against his. “To Gubbio’s,” she says. “To you and Hendrick.” She takes a long sip, wipes the foam off her mouth with her wrist. Hendrick stacks the sugar packets in a little rampart around his Sprite glass. Here’s what’s wrong, or what isn’t: They feel like a family. It doesn’t feel anything like a date. It just feels easy. “Tell me where you and the world-famous Sarah Cody sat,” says Rena.

“Over there.” He points out a row of tables underneath a map of Italy. “It was a bunch of us. We pulled the tables together.”

“I don’t care about anybody else,” she says. “Everybody else is ancillary. Tell me what she was wearing. What she looked like. If she kept leaning over so you could see her tits.”

“Tits,” says Hen.

“Sorry,” Rena says.

“Sorry,” Hen says back.

“I don’t know what she was wearing,” says Jack.

“That’s a complete load of shit,” she says.

“That’s a complete load of shit,” says Hen, leaning his catalog up against the wall, putting it on display. Then he says, “Lone Oak Tree Farms can deliver in as little as forty-eight hours. All trees, if installed by Lone Oak certified arborists, are guaranteed for one full year.”

“Is it OK for me to curse in front of him?” Rena asks. “I won’t do that any more.”

“It’s OK,” Jack says. “I do. Butner does.”

“What kind of name is that, anyway? Butner?”

“A family name, he says.”

“What about Hendrick?”

“Also family. Beth’s grandmother. Her maiden name.”

Mentioning Beth makes everything squeeze down for a minute, but Rena saves them, bangs her fist on the table, says, “Come on. Tell me what she was wearing. Explain to me, in detail, the outfit of Sarah Cody.”

“Jeans,” he says.

“Tight jeans?”

“Just plain jeans.” He runs his thumb over the logo painted on the side of his glass. The Bud Racing Team, it says. “Holes in the knees,” says Jack. He remembers being able to see her knees, remembers that mattering very much.

“And?”

“And I don’t know, something white, I think. A white tank top. Jeans and a white tank top.”

“What color is her hair?”

“Brown.”

“Is it long and perfect?”

He smiles. “It is sort of long and perfect, or at least it was. Probably she’s chopped it all off now, and she’s dating some singer in a band. Or the drummer.”

“No,” she says. “She’s not dating anybody in a band. No way. She’s all settled down. She’s with a tax attorney. Or an anesthesiologist.” A couple of boys are playing a Ms. Pac-Man game in the corner, and one of them yells at it, kicks it. The waitress shouts at them from the bar:
Y’all treat that thing right or I’m unplugging it, OK?
Rena says, “Tell me why you didn’t go home with her. I would have gone home with her, I think.”

“You would have?”

“Sure,” she says. “Twenty-one? If I was you? Come on.”

“What does that mean, ‘if I was you’?”

“Just that. If I was you, I’d have done it. I mean, you’d already kissed her. You were already fucked. No pun intended.”

“She didn’t ask me to.”

“But you would have, right?”

“No,” he says. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I couldn’t see it.”

“Couldn’t see it how?”

“I couldn’t see me waking up there. Couldn’t figure out how it would work, or what we’d talk about. Or what I’d tell Beth.”

“First of all, you don’t wake up there, obviously. You leave that night. Do you have no idea how to do this?”

“What are you talking about? Do you know how to do this?”

“I know how I
would
do it.” She pulls a couple of napkins from the dispenser. “I’m just surprised you had it that well thought out, is all. You had
that
all planned, anyway.”

“I didn’t have it planned,” he says. “I was planning not to.”

“That’s still planning, isn’t it?”

The boys’ game ends, and they feed Ms. Pac-Man more quarters. Somebody’s phone rings. The girl from the bar brings their pizza, sets some plates down hard on the table. She says, “Here y’all go. I’m going on break. Yell for Tommy if you need anything.”

“Who’s Tommy?” Rena asks.

“Cook,” she says, and points at the man in the kitchen window. He pulls another ticket off the wheel, waves it at them. They wave back.

Rena takes a slice, puts it on her plate, starts blotting at it with napkins, the same as Hendrick. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack says. Both of them are going through exactly the same motions.

“What?”

“You both do that,” he says.

Rena looks at Hen, nods her approval. “Great minds, and all, I guess,” she says. She lifts her greasy napkin off her pizza, puts it in a little defeated pile on top of a clean one, gives him a triumphant smile, starts eating. She takes tiny, delicate bites. Grease shines at the corners of her mouth. Jack tries not to look at her too often.