Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [44]
“Anything interesting?” I asked.
“Some,” he murmured.
I made a few more gentle attempts at conversation. He met each with a succinct reply. I finally gave up. I worked; he read pictures. Had a stranger walked in the room, she might have found the situation companionable, but I felt acutely aware of his silent rebuttal.
Around eleven he tossed the last magazine aside and wandered into the kitchen. The fridge door open, shut. He returned to the living room empty-handed.
“Are you at all hungry?” he asked.
I hesitated. It was late, a school night, and all I really wanted was to sleep.
“I could eat,” I said.
We took his van, driving slow over the mounds of accumulating drifts, fat flakes of snow getting mashed in the windshield wipers. I suggested Bailey’s Bistro or the Chinese restaurant, but both were closed.
“The Lucky Tavern?” he asked.
“Sounds good to me,” I replied as enthusiastically as I could manage.
There were more bars than restaurants on the downtown strip. I hadn’t been in a single one since the last time my graduate workshop had met to celebrate Valerie’s thesis defense. I counted The Lucky Tavern among my least favorites. It was the hot spot for upperclassmen jocks who came in droves to watch The Big Game. It was crowded and dark and perpetually damp. Everything came with grease: fried pickles, oily onion rings, and soggy menus.
While the waitress led us to a booth, Eli eyed me skeptically over his shoulder, as if his first glance around the room had been enough to tell him how little such a place could possibly have to offer and how unlikely it was that a person like me would actually prefer it. His skepticism rallied what little school spirit I had. I resolved to have a wonderful time. I resolved Eli would have a wonderful time.
“All burgers are good here and the curly fries are superior to the French fries,” I said as he reached for his menu. “But I wouldn’t recommend the veggie burger. It’s a patty of beans squashed between toast. The taste is bad and the texture is even worse.”
“Anything burger, no veggie,” he echoed.
I considered the menu without any real interest. I couldn’t think of what Eli and I could possibly talk about for an hour and a half. And there was the problem of what to drink. I never touched beer, but it seemed wrong somehow to order wine in The Lucky Tavern.
When the waitress returned, I ordered the cheeseburger and a Guinness. Eli ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke.
“You don’t drink?” I asked.
“I don’t. ” He pulled a Sharpie marker from his back pocket and began drawing on his napkin. “So I hear you typing away all the time. What are you working on?”
“I have a few stories I’m revising.” This was an exaggeration. Aside from my slavish transcription of every classic on my shelf, I’d been retouching one story—the one I’d been farming out to rejections since last summer. This mostly involved swapping limp words for synonyms and reshuffling commas. Since graduate school I’d lost the faith and enthusiasm that serious revision required. “I haven’t been making much progress,” I admitted.
“That’s all right,” he said. “As long as you’re working.”
“Teaching’s the real work.”
He glanced up from his drawing. “I’ve tried to imagine you as a teacher. I can’t see it.”
I tried not to feel offended by his remark. “Why not?”
He thought before he spoke. “Maybe I just never had a good English teacher.”
“Maybe you were a lousy student.”
“Unfortunately, that’s a distinct possibility.”
The waitress returned with a pint of beer as black as coffee. The glass was enormous—I’d meant to order a bottle.
“How long have you been at it? The teaching,” he clarified.
“Two years? I lose track. It feels like so much longer … I think people who teach age in dog years.”
I was surprised to hear him laugh.
“Sometimes in the middle of class I’ll suddenly realize where I am and what I’m doing,” I said. “It’s like I’m waking up in the middle of someone