Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [29]
I made my way slowly through his book, which was funny in places and slow in others, with long, twisting sentences and sex scenes that were funny and gross at the same time, and I started talking more with Gabe during our breaks. He told me he’d worked at Target ever since he was sixteen. He told me about college, how he planned on taking six years to graduate, then going for a master’s degree in hospitality and maybe, someday, opening a restaurant of his own. I told him about my boys, about Frank Junior in particular, how he was smart but a handful, and how his teacher had said, at the parent-teacher conference, that he was an exhausting child. “She wants us to ask his doctor about medication before he starts kindergarten,” I said. Gabe’s narrow face darkened.
“Don’t do that,” he told me, raking his fingers through his thick hair, then hitching up his pants. He was so skinny I wasn’t quite sure how his jeans managed to stay up at all, and his Target pinny, the one he’d had since he was in high school, was starting to come unraveled. Threads hung all along its seams. I wondered if anyone in his house sewed, if he had a mother or sister who could fix it for him.
“Why not?” I’d already decided on my own that I didn’t want Frank Junior taking pills. I’d read some articles online, on websites where mothers debated the pros and cons, and I thought that there was nothing wrong with my son except that he was a little boy with a lot of energy who hadn’t learned that he didn’t need to say, or shout, every thought that came into his head—but I wanted to hear Gabe’s opinion.
Gabe rocked back on the heels of his high-tops and gave me a speech about the dangers of doping little kids, how the purpose of the American educational system wasn’t learning but conformity.
“What do you mean?”
He paused, flipping his hair around. “Well, ‘conformity’ is making everyone act and think like everyone else.”
I nodded, even though I knew what the word meant. He went on, talking about how the drugs were designed to make it easier for teachers, not better for the children. Then he stopped, midsentence, looking embarrassed. “But what do I know?” he asked. “Like I’ve got kids.”
“No,” I told him. “This is good.” I imagined what he must have looked like when he was Frank Junior’s age. Probably his mother had kept his hair cut short, but I suspected that he’d dressed about the same way he did now, in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt, only without the Target pinny on top.
Gabe had been surprised to learn that I was only twenty-two. “I thought you were older,” he said, then quickly added, “Not that you look old.”
“Don’t worry,” I told him. The truth was I felt older than my years, like I’d been a wife and a mother forever.
Most days I drove to work, but one night Frank dropped me off, keeping the car so he could take the boys to the free concert downtown that night. At the end of my shift I went outside to wait for the bus, and Gabe, driving by in his car, spotted me.
“You need a ride?”
“Oh, no. I’m going to take the bus.”
“I’ll wait with you.”
He parked the car and jogged through the lot, back to me.
“You don’t have to do this. I’m fine.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “I could use the fresh air.” We looked at each other, both of us knowing that the air in the parking lot wasn’t particularly fresh. It had been in the nineties for three days straight. The bus stop smelled like baking tar and car exhaust, and the cigarettes the workers at Target and Marshalls and the Pancake Barn around the corner would sneak out the back doors to smoke. A humid breeze lifted my hair off my neck. Thunder rumbled in the distance; heat lightning crackled in the sky. I hoped it wouldn’t rain—the last time there was a storm, Frank and I had woken up to puddles in the basement and blistered paint on the ceilings, and I’d spent all morning running around the house with empty plastic containers, putting them under the leaks so the floors wouldn’t be ruined, too.
“Did you ever think about going to college?” Gabe asked.
I