Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [45]
He tried to return to the subject of writing, but I told him I didn’t like talking about my stories.
“Why not?”
“It’s a little self-absorbed, don’t you think?”
“Not if someone asks.”
“Why don’t you tell me about your work.” I nodded at the napkin he’d now covered in ink caricatures and hatch-marked clouds.
“This,” he said with an affectation of pride, “is Pew Art.” He signed his name on the ribbed margin of the napkin and slid it over to my side of the table.
“Pew Art?”
“That’s what my Aunt Jenny used to call the drawings I did in church when I was supposed to be listening.”
“I didn’t think you went to church,” I said.
“I didn’t think you drank Guinness,” he replied.
Apparently, I was the only one at the table trying to make an impression, and I was making entirely the wrong kind. I already felt guilty about the beer. It had taken years to drain a modest, ritual glass of wine from an accompanying sense of transgression. Walking around at parties with a plastic cup of five-dollar Merlot, I sometimes felt that I’d switched teams in the middle of a very important game.
We were two of five people in the entire pub, but our food took forty minutes. In that time Eli managed to cover three napkins with drawings and inquire about everything personal: how I’d voted in the last election, why I wasn’t dating, who I’d last dated. To my surprise, I answered every question at length.
“Am I talking too much?” I asked.
Laugh lines framed his smile. “I think you should talk like this all the time.”
He ate like he hadn’t seen food in days. I imagined the calories burning on impact, like water evaporating on contact with a hot, greased skillet. You had to admire such a body.
I said, “So you still haven’t told me what your tattoo means.”
“I thought I did.”
“No.You told me I disapproved of it and then you didn’t say anything else.”
He wiped his fingers on his one still-blank napkin. “You want the long version or the short version?”
“Whichever’s better.”
He sat back in his seat. “I was in a car accident when I was twenty-three. It was on an old country road. I don’t remember seeing headlights behind me, but right after I wrecked the car, a man in a pickup truck driving around the corner saw the fire from the accident and came running to pull me out. If he hadn’t gotten me out, I’d have been badly burned, at the very least. He was a total stranger. I couldn’t tell you a thing about the accident, about this guy’s face or what he was wearing or what he said to me in that ER, but I can see the tattoo on his arm like he lifted me up out of that car five minutes ago.” He examined his arm. “It was this same pattern.”
I admitted that was an amazing story.
I asked if that was the short version or the long version.
He considered the question. “If I tell you the long version, you may not want to talk to me again.”
I crossed my arms. “I hate to think what Zoë’s told you about me.”
“Only good things.”
“She’s right that I grew up in a strict environment,” I said. “The First Fundamentalists.”
“Never heard of them.”
Remembering a jingle Grandma liked to sing, I said, “They don’t smoke, chew, or go with girls that do.”
“Sounds like about every denomination I know.”
We were talking about me again.
I said, “So you grew up in church …”
He wiped bits of salt from the table onto the floor. He folded and unfolded his napkin. “My Aunt Jenny was a Methodist,” was the unlikely beginning of the long version.
Eli’s parents despised the church almost as much as they despised each other, but he’d grown up under its influence nevertheless, his aunt and uncle being devoted Methodists charged with the duty of civilizing him.
Aunt Jenny and Uncle Rod lived across town from Eli’s family in a ranch house with a steep front yard they decorated with porcelain ducks dressed in raincoats for April, polka-dot frocks for May and June. In winter the ducks were replaced with a plastic Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus who glowed. In texture and color the nativity figurines reminded Eli of Nik-L-Nip wax bottle candies, the Virgin Mary’s cheeks