Slide - Kyle Beachy [50]
“Sounds like a walrus dying,” I said.
Carla leaned back so she could unfold her legs. She stood and stretched arms over her head with the mug hanging from one finger. Then she approached me in my father's chair, leaned forward, and kissed my forehead.
“I love you so much sometimes I wonder if it's even fair.”
When I awoke, still in my father's chair, the first razors of dawn were slicing through darkness outside and everything looked a color right smack between yellow and not yellow. I heard the first cries of early-rising birds and the metallic, ratchetlike snores sounding from the master bedroom, where I imagined my exhausted mother lying, eyes open, staring at the ceiling above.
It was almost time to go deliver the city's bottled water.
I worked. I went and loaded and drove and unloaded and reloaded and drove and punched my time card and came home. I showered. Each day I considered writing something to Audrey, and each day I did not.
I sat on the front porch sipping a beer, listening to the come-and-go drone of cicadas. One house over, the Hoyne daughter emerged from the front door and began the walk to a silver Jetta parked in the street. I followed her blond hair against the background of prevailing green, like some halo accompanying her frame, and her name came to me: Zoe. She drove the twenty yards to the front of my house, then sat there with her left arm hanging out the window. She didn't look at me. And there was something about her arm, a nonchalance, call it a poetic carelessness, hanging there, hand patting the beat to whatever music she had on. I finished my beer at what I pretended was my own pace, then set the bottle down and approached her car in deliberate steps, stretching my forearms as I went. She wasn't wearing any makeup.
“You should get in.”
“Into the car, you mean. Where you headed?”
“Anywhere. I had to get out of my house. Mom is on the phone with my brother because something's wrong, or his version of wrong, so she had to console. My mother consoles loudly.” She smiled, and something I kept inside ceased to exist. “Come on.”
“Tonight's a big night. The mother's got some kind of roast going in the oven.”
“How about you just get in the car.”
A woman in a minivan passed by and waved, while a squirrel sat motionless on the power line directly overhead, nibbling at something in its paws, watching us all. I walked around the car and got into the front seat. The music was old, staticky reggae. The interior was littered with the normal bits of teen-girl livelihood. Magazines full of bad advice. Those cheerleading shoes with the removable plastic-triangle colors. Things I wanted to call trinkets. I was pleased to see a standard transmission. I pulled a cigarette from the pack in the emergency-brake divot and examined the song list from one of the blank CD cases scattered around the front seats. I put the cigarette back. We still hadn't moved.
“I'll admit a small amount of relief that even your brother needs consolation.”
“He's probably eight times more pathetic than you'd ever imagine.” She picked up the pack of cigarettes. “He calls with weekly law school updates on his class rank. And Christ help us if it ever falls below three.”
“How long have you been a smoker?”
“Been a smoker?” she said. “Oh God. I've never thought of myself that way. I started in sixth grade to make sure none of my friends would disown me.”
I formulated a plan to avoid any and all references to age, grade, or temporality in general. Which I knew was impossible since this immaculate girl was a full six years younger than me, meaning right now the ratios of age disparity over personal age (6/22 and 6/16) were too significant to shrug away. I had already run through the usual extension of relativity: at my thirty she'd be twenty-four,