A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [117]
“Thank you,” Gordon said when he and Inez and the girl were down on the sidewalk. He explained how the dog had been caught in the bushes.
“You should’ve left him. Better off there than with that,” she spat, then hurried down the street, the child in tow.
Jada was at his door within minutes. She rang the bell, knocked, then tried the back door. She probably wanted to thank him, but that’s all it would take, the slightest civility, just a few words, and she would be right back insinuating herself into his life. He stayed upstairs until she finally went away.
When Delores called he was eating a tuna-fish sandwich. He had forgotten all about the band concert in the park. When she had invited him two weeks ago his life had been fine, and now it was a mess. He still hadn’t found a job, money was running low, and he had wrenched his back yesterday scraping a patch of peeling paint from the back of the house. Because he didn’t have a ladder, he had climbed onto the porch railing, balancing himself quite well until he heard the wood crack. He’d jumped off, landing so awkwardly that something had pulled in his lower back. It especially hurt when he walked any distance, he was trying to tell Delores, but she said he wouldn’t have to walk far at all. The parking lot was right there on the edge of the park. It hurt to sit for too long, he said.
“You just don’t want to go, right?” she asked.
“No. No, it’s not that. I do. It’s just my back.” He didn’t want to go, but he also didn’t want to make her mad. He hadn’t seen her since their ride to the beach, and he missed her. They had talked on the phone, but she had been distracted, almost cool to him. He was afraid Jada had told her about climbing into his bed.
“All right, I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes, then. Just come out when I toot,” she said, and he hobbled around to get ready.
Here he was now, shivering on a low, flimsy beach chair on the Dearborn Common, listening to a four-piece band playing “Sweet Caroline.”
It was chilly, but Delores wore a sleeveless blouse. She claimed not to be cold. “All my natural layers,” she said, passing him a plate piled with chicken she’d fried, potato salad, beans, and cornbread. The drumstick was still warm and crispy. Delores was a wonderful cook. His mother had hated cooking, so his father had done most of it. Inexplicably, that had changed after Gordon went away. Dennis said she learned to enjoy cooking, but Gordon couldn’t help thinking his absence had made it more pleasurable, a less onerous task without her three-hundred-pound oafish son underfoot every minute.
He had eaten practically everything in the picnic basket. Delores had made an apple pie, but it had been too hot to cut and pack, so they would have it afterward at her house. His back ached. He would rather go home when the concert ended, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and there was still the pie. Fireflies flickered in the distance while barefoot little girls danced around the musicians, who for some reason sat playing on folding chairs below the bandstand. Delores kept waving at different people going by. For someone who didn’t even live in Dearborn, she knew a lot of people here, he said. Many were customers, she said, and a lot were Collerton people who had made good and moved to Dearborn.
“See her?” Delores said with a nod toward the woman walking by. “That’s Dawn Lintz. We went to school with her. She got married the weekend we graduated. Remember? She was so pregnant you could tell even with the graduation robe on.”
“Oh,” he said. Of course he didn’t remember, but once again he let the flow of her voice carry him along through memories that had little to do with him.
“She’s been married two times since. Three kids, one with each guy. Her son’s an Olympic gymnast. Well, used to be. He’s a coach now, I think ...”
It wasn’t so much that he had stopped listening as he was sinking into the comfort of her nearness. Jada couldn’t have said anything, he decided. Delores was just the same as always. There seemed less need to keep up his guard every