The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [109]
His mouth is tentative against her own. She can feel his straight upper lip, the fullness of the lower. He puts his hand to the side of her face.
She is embarrassed and looks down. He follows her eyes and sees her balled fists.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” he says.
Slowly, she opens her hands. She can smell his breath and the sweat on his skin, as unique and as identifiable as a fingerprint.
He is twisted in his seat, the parka jammed against the steering wheel. He presses his mouth against hers, and she feels his fingers on her collarbone. Despite herself, she flinches.
He withdraws his hand.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
He pulls her head to his shoulder.
“What about the boyfriend?” Thomas asks.
“He went away,” she says.
______
This goes on in increments, the way a timid swimmer might have to enter a frigid ocean, inch by inch, getting used to the brutal cold. Linda has had no way, before, to know how hard it might be; it has not been necessary to imagine physical love with a boy. Her mind does not flinch, but her body does, as if it had different memories, memories of its own. Another boy might have laughed at her, or given her up for hopeless, not worth the effort. Or might have insisted, so that she would have had to grit her teeth and think of something else, ruining pleasure forever. But Thomas doesn’t push.
One morning in November, the aunt says to Linda, “You have to get a job. Eileen works. Tommy and Michael work. Patty works. You want clothes, you’ve got to get a job.”
In her travels through the town, Linda has seen several possibilities for employment: a discount jewelry store; a Laundromat; a bowling alley; a photographic studio. In the end, she takes a job at the diner, waiting tables. She wears a gray uniform of synthetic material that crackles when she sits down. The dress has cap sleeves and a white collar and deep pockets for tips.
On a good night, she will go home with fifteen dollars in coins. It seems a fortune. She likes to walk out of the diner with her hands in her pockets, feeling the money.
Linda is a good waitress, lightning-fast and efficient. The owner, a man who drinks shots from a juice glass when he thinks no one is looking and who tries once to pin her up against the refrigerator and kiss her, tells her, in a rare sober moment, that she is the best waitress he’s ever had.
The diner is a popular spot. Some of the students are regulars. Donny T. sits in the same booth every day and holds what seems to be a kind of court. He also has what appears to be a long memory.
“Our Olympic hopeful,” he says as Linda takes her pad out. He has bedroom eyes and a canny grin and might be attractive were it not for his yellow teeth.
“A cherry Coke and fries,” says Eddie Garrity, skinny and blond and nearly lost inside his leather jacket, a precise imitation, she notices, of Donny T.’s.
“How many laps you do today?” Donny T. asks Linda, a snigger just below the surface.
“Leave her alone,” Eddie says under his breath.
Donny T. turns in his seat. “Hey, cockroach, I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.”
“Do you want anything to eat?” Linda asks evenly.
“Just you,” Donny T. says. He puts his hands up, mock-defending himself. “ONLY KIDDING. ONLY KIDDING.” He laughs, the snigger unleashed. “Two cheeseburgers. Fries. Chocolate milkshake. And don’t make me one of those thin jobbies, either. I like a lot of ice cream.”
Linda glances beyond Donny T. to the next table, where a man is having trouble with his briefcase: one of the latches keeps popping open every time he tries to shut the case. Linda watches him fiddle with the latch a half-dozen times and then, in seeming defeat, set the briefcase on a chair. He looks familiar, and she thinks that she might know him. He is twenty-two, twenty-three, she guesses, good-looking in a jacket and a tie. She wonders what he does for a living. Will he be a salesman? A teacher?
Linda takes the orders of the other boys in the booth. Donny T. travels with a retinue. She snaps her order book shut, slips it into her pocket,