Long, Hot Summer Ch. 07

"You're nice," she said, "and kinda cute, and you're not a jerk. But there's something mysterious about you."

"I'm not mysterious."

"Okay, maybe mysterious isn't the right word."

"I'm just private," I said.

"Yep," she said. "You're that. But it's like the niceness... I don't know, hides something. Nothing bad, necessarily, but something... unexpected, maybe?"

"Maybe the niceness is just to hide that I really am a jerk," I said.

"Maybe," she said. "Are you?" But she didn't laugh about it.

"I'm not sure," I said. "I might be." I didn't laugh about it either. "Do jerks know that they're jerks?"

"Not usually. But hey, that's kind of a good sign. Your questioning it, I mean. Behaving like a jerk—I'm not saying that you are, 'cuz of course I wouldn't know—doesn't mean someone is really a jerk. Sometimes people just... lose their way."

She put her cigarette between her lips and held it there, leaned back on her arms. Her ankles were crossed and she was swinging her legs again. I looked at her then, thought about reaching for her, touching the bare plane of her stomach, of leaning in and kissing her, but didn't. Her eyes, as best I could tell in the near-dark, were closed. Part of me couldn't believe I was sitting there with her. She was as desirable to me at that moment as anyone I'd ever known. It was, suddenly, the happiest I'd ever felt.

"Why haven't we done this before?" I said.

"Mmm," she hummed. Then, "Well, this is a bit of a special occasion."

"Why is it a special occasion?"

"I've never quit a job before. Never had a job before, either, so..."

"You're quitting?"

"Quit. Today was my last day. I'm done."

"You're kidding?"

"Nope."

"But why?"

"Why not?" she said. "It's just a grocery store."

"But... what are you going to do?"

"I've got plans. Don't you have plans?"

"Yeah, but..." I said.

"But what? Some slutty little hump like me can't possibly have something better to do than bag groceries?"

"Hey, no, I didn't mean that. I wasn't thinking that."

"Well, that's where your 'but' sounded like it was going."

"No. You're... I didn't... Of course you have plans. Everybody has plans. You just never talk about anything like that."

"Yeah, well," she said. "I'm private."

We sat in simmering silence then. I felt deflated, embarrassed, and a little bit angry—the way people do when something shameful about them is exposed. The cheaters, the hypocrites... caught in their lies, they bare their teeth. Peevishly, I thought, I should just leave now. Go to Eleanor Kaminski's and bang the shit out of her for a couple hours, then go home and fall into bed. But the idea struck me as sad, emptying. The emotional swing from what I'd felt just mere moments earlier—happy, content—was so violent, so sudden, that I began to cry.

"Hey," said Sally, jumping up and getting in front of me. "Hey, College, hey..."

She put her skinny arms around me, squeezed me so tight I thought I might hear her bones snap, or mine. I felt her hard edges dig into me, wrist bones and elbows and hip bones; she was such a thin, sharp thing.

She pulled back and took my face in her hands, then wiped at my eyes and cheeks a bit.

"It's okay," she said. "It's okay. Hey."

"Who are you?" I said.

"Joe College," she said, running her hand through my hair. "I'm a slutty little Youngstown hump who fucks forty-year-old married guys who say their wives don't understand them. Or suck their dicks anymore. Then after they come, they run home to hug their kids and swear to themselves they'll never do it again. It's okay. We've all got our weak shit."

"I don't believe you. I don't believe that's what you do."

"It doesn't matter," she said. "Losing your way is a way of finding it. Hey."

She was looking at me but I wasn't looking at her. I didn't want to; I was embarrassed. I didn't want to think about her fucking forty-year-old guys or sucking their dicks; I didn't want to think about anyone even touching her. I didn't want to think about Suzie Bowen or Eleanor Kaminski or the fabric store or the A&P or college. She turned her head and looked off into the distance, or I thought so anyway, but it was really just a change of attention.

"What's that smell?" she said.

We'd been haloed in cigarette smoke for most of the time. I hadn't noticed anything, but now I caught a different, acrid odor.

"Something burning somewhere," I said. I looked past her shoulder and saw that one of the cardboard bales was smoldering at its base.

"Must have been from your cigarette," I said. I walked over at kicked at the spot from where smoke was uncoiling. My kick produced a spray of sparks. I keep at it a bit, but the burn had bitten into the thing.

"Do we have any beer left?" I said back to her. "We need to pour something on it, I think."

"It's gone," she said. "We drank it."

I kicked at it a while more, but that wasn't going to put it out. I walked back to our cars.

"There's not any water back here, I guess?" I said. We watched the bale continue to smolder.

"You know," she sighed. "I think we better get out of here."

"Yeah," I said. I grabbed her hand. "Can we go somewhere else?"

She smiled, and pressed the hand I held to my face.

"No," she said. "Not tonight."

"But when? How will I see you again?"

She rose up on her toes and kissed my lips gently, lingeringly, before dropping back down.

"I'll find you," she said.

"Can you meet me here again?"

"We'll see. Relax."

"But I'm going to be leaving soon," I said. "Going... you know. I don't know when... I don't know how often I'll be back here. I don't—"

She put her finger to my lips. "I'll find you. Don't worry."

"How will you—"

"I said, don't worry. You believe me, right?"

I looked back and thickening billows of smoke were swirling out of the smoldering cardboard cube. She pulled away from me and made for her car.

"You could be one of the good ones, Joe," she called back at me.

"Wait," I called after her. "Sally! Hey!"

But she'd slammed her tinny car door and started her engine. Those back quarter panels, threadbare from rust, rattled like maracas. As she sped off, she tossed an empty beer can out her window that clanked forlornly in the emptied wake of her departure.

I had nothing left to do but get in my car and drive away. I hoped that the bale burned itself out, or at least didn't spread itself in a way that brought fire to the decades old A&P. It was practically an institution in those parts, after all.