Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [61]
He banged on the hood of her car, making more noise than he intended.
Elizabeth jumped up, her hair wild, her glasses still on but not quite resting on her nose. Huddie wanted to calm her down and he wanted to slap some sense into her.
“Max died,” she said, holding on to the steering wheel.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Why don’t you get out of the car? Come on in and wash up and I’ll make us coffee.” It was the kind thing to do, it was also the most convenient and the least likely to destroy his life, which seemed highly perishable and sweet and in need of immediate care. Elizabeth wasn’t a weeper; it would probably be okay to set her up at the table near the back, even if other people came in.
Huddie filled two mugs with fresh coffee and put a pile of rugalach on a plate, although his impulse was to hand her a to-go cup and a muffin in a bag. He showed her the bathroom and hugged her before she closed the door. He said he was sorry about Max, and he was sorry about the old man, seemed like a sad end to a sad life, but the real issue was that Elizabeth was now free to leave and might require a reason to stay.
Sunday night, on the way home from the movies, Huddie’s arm began to tremble under Larry’s sleep-heavy head. June had lifted Larry’s head with one hand and folded up her sweater to make a pillow for him. Elizabeth doesn’t know how to do that. He can’t see her lifting Larry’s head so smoothly it seems to grow out of her fingers, can’t see her traveling with a comfortable sweater, extra kleenex, Life Savers, and a Frog and Toad book scrunched into a big vinyl purse.
June has four capacious, indestructible tote bags, in black, brown, navy, and bone. She is embarrassed and proud, too, defiant about her bags, all just like her mamas pocketbooks, and when they window-shop, she looks sideways at tiny evening bags with thin, pointless straps, jewel-studded bouquets, playful minaudières, and she shakes her head. “Not for the mother of Larry.” She doesn’t say anything about what the wife of Horace should wear. He won’t tell her, and she makes herself believe, whistling in the dark of love’s signless neighborhood, that he does like her, must love her, as Larry’s mother, and will then come upon her, and love her, as June.
She fell in love as he spun through Michigan, a hundred times handsomer than the other handsome boys, kinder than the other sports stars. Even girls he slept with only once had nothing bad to say about him. A big hello for everyone, putting his arm around every girl, including the plain and dull, as if it were a privilege and a pleasure, always making it clear that his singleness was not due to any shortcoming on their part, but entirely and only because he hadn’t been ready. And each woman knew that if he’d been ready, it would have happened with her. He attended eighteen weddings in four states the summer after his senior year.
June’s small circle barely overlapped his; her friends were Christian, future nurses and social workers and mothers, and they held themselves apart from the radical girls with wide Afros and new names and hoop earrings to their shoulders, and apart from the Black Power boys in tight jeans and berets, sexy and scary and wrong, and they held themselves apart from the white girls who were everywhere, Jewish girls with auburn Afros and little blue glasses on their long noses, Protestant girls with Breck-shampoo blonde hair, flat as silk to their skinny behinds, managing to apologize for that hair and still toss it around a room like Stardust. If June had not moved to Boston, by chance and because her mother’s best friend was director of a nursing program, she might have lost Huddie sooner. But she saw him play two games for the Celtics (her mother’s best friend was a fan, had touched the smooth hands of JoJo