The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [71]
“Were you very close to your parents?”
“We were never close. I don’t think it has anything to do with closeness. It’s involved with perception. You stop being a child when you stop being somebody’s child.”
“And become an adult.”
“I guess that’s the word for it. It’s like joining a club, isn’t it?”
“The membership requirements aren’t very strict.”
“But the dues are high,” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette. “And you keep on paying them, don’t you? I hadn’t known that. I thought you could buy life membership, but it doesn’t work that way.”
He remembered the girl she had been when he first asked her out. That had been little more than a week ago and yet she seemed to have changed in a fundamental way.
It was not just her mood that had changed. He had met her on Wednesday and asked her out on Thursday, and after she turned him down he found it impossible to shrug it off. Over breakfast Friday he recounted the incident to Karen and they laughed about it. She had wanted to know if he intended to pursue the girl. He had said he didn’t think he would bother.
Friday he walked past the mall but kept himself from going in. Saturday and Sunday he carefully avoided going to town, and Monday he drove in purposely to see her and the store was closed, all the stores were closed. He returned Tuesday late in the afternoon. He had the scene already blocked in in his mind: He would visit the shop and they would talk, and he would leave without attempting to date her. Then he would return Thursday or Friday and perhaps she would have coffee with him. If not he would ask her one more time the following week, and if she turned him down then he would say the hell with her.
So he walked into the Lemon Tree Tuesday and she greeted him with a huge smile and came out from behind the counter. “No business at all today,” she said. “How would you like to buy me that cup of coffee give me an excuse to take a break?”
A cup of coffee Tuesday, with effortless conversation as an accompaniment. Thursday he dropped over to the shop at six and had the uncanny feeling that she had postponed her break and expected him. They had coffee and sandwiches and he asked her to dinner Saturday night. “I’d like that very much,” she said.
Something had happened to change her mind. One day she had decided to discourage him and a few days later she did precisely the reverse.
Without intending to he said, “How come you’re here?”
“You invited me.”
“I know.”
“How come I accepted? I ought to invent something plausible but I can’t think of anything offhand.”
“Then let me withdraw the question.”
“Oh, I’ll answer it, if you’ll let me be cryptic. I’ve been in the stages of something, and it seems to nave run its course. Or part of its course.”
“That’s cryptic, all right.”
“I decided you were safe. Unthreatening. Easy to handle. Like that better?”
“Bitch.”
“More of a bitch than I ever knew. You seem to bring out the bitch in me, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Could we go, do you think?”
He raised a hand for the check.
He drove slowly, disliking the feel of the heavy car. He was driving the Buick. For the past half year he had barely driven it enough to keep the battery charged, but Karen preferred the VW so he had used the Buick since her arrival. He pulled into the driveway. The lights were on in Mrs. Kleinschmidt’s quarters over the garage. He pressed a button on the dashboard and the garage door swung up and back.
He stopped the car in front of the garage. She asked him what was the matter.
“The Volks is gone,” he said. “That means Karen’s out”
“I thought you were busy not playing the heavy father?”
“That’s not the point. I brought you here to meet her.”
“And now it looks like a setup to get me to your lair.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“That’s exactly what it looks like, except I saw your face when the car wasn’t in the garage, and you couldn’t have faked such a complete look of where-do-we-go-from-here? without acting lessons.”
“Where do we go from here?