“Where the hell was she?” she almost yelled, making her voice angry even though what she really was was disappointed and worried. “We come all the way here and she doesn’t show?”
For a few seconds, she and Will stood rooted to the sidewalk, not looking at each other. Pen stared at their two shadows stretching down the sidewalk as though they’d been flung from a bucket, then at the streetlamp that was casting them, shining yellow through a haze of bugs.
“That,” she said, “is a lot of bugs for this early in the summer.” Her eyes were filling with tears, which annoyed her.
“It is a lot of bugs,” agreed Will in a tired voice. “She’ll come.”
“What will we do if she doesn’t?” The childishness of this question deepened her annoyance, but she waited for Will’s answer anyway.
“We’ll think of something,” said Will. “And anyway, she’ll come.”
They started walking again. Pen’s shoes dangled from her fingers. A car quaking with bass trundled by, and Pen saw a child-skinny arm dangling out the passenger-side window, the orange pin-dot glint of a cigarette.
Finally, Pen said, “She might not.”
“Yeah,” said Will. “She might not.”
But when Pen got back to her hotel room, she found the gumdrop of a message light on the oldfangled phone blinking, and even though, when she hit the button and braced herself for the sound of Cat’s voice, it never came, relief washed over her because it was a message from Cat all the same. The man working the front desk read it to her: “Sorry I couldn’t make it tonight, but I will see you at the barbecue tomorrow.”
“Is that a note that someone dropped off?” As she asked, Pen was already slipping her shoes back on so she could run down and get it, was already seeing Cat’s curvaceous handwriting, capital “S” like a swan, but the man said, “No. Jonah the guy with the shift before mine took it. I’d know his chicken scratch anywhere. Must’ve been a phone call.”
Pen opened her satin evening bag and took out the napkin with Will’s cell number on it. When she saw that he’d written “Will W.” above it, she smiled. As if she wouldn’t know. As if she’d been collecting phone numbers from men named Will all night. And then she smoothed the napkin with her fingers and felt a twinge, below her sternum and on the back of her neck, of what she had felt when she had first seen him in the tent.
“Don’t be a sap,” she snapped. “It’s a name on a napkin.”
Then she called Will, said, “Listen to this,” and read him the message.
“I got the same thing,” he said, and for a moment, they basked in their shared relief, not saying anything. Then Will said, “Hey, you didn’t bring your bike with you, by any chance?”
PEN HAD FORGOTTEN HOW QUICKLY IT HAPPENED, HOW YOU ROUND a corner, pass a Shell station and the Kingdom Hall, go up a hill, and enter another world: sloping wooden porches, dogs chained to stakes in yards, dense trees, steep, thigh-burning hills, and the occasional valley farmstead opening up like an exhale. Once, years ago, Pen had hit a broken patch on the road and fallen and, with her bike on top of her, had been amazed to see children—white blond hair, knobby heron legs—materialize from between the trees to call, shyly, “Hey, lady! Hey, lady! You okay, lady?”
Pen and Will took a lunch break in the yard of the ancient gray church, leaning their bikes against an oak tree, tossing down their helmets and sprawling gratefully on the hard, balding lawn. Will had stopped at a deli on the way to pick up Pen at her hotel, and after he’d caught his breath, he unzipped his backpack and started to hand Pen a sandwich wrapped in white paper, but when she tried to take it from him, he got a look of concern on his face and didn’t let the sandwich go.
“What’s wrong?”
“I should’ve asked.”
“Asked what?”
“About your current relationship with brine-cured meat.”
“You got me a sauerkraut-less Reuben?”
“I did.” Will’s expression turned unexpectedly shy. “But, you know, it’s been six years. I shouldn’t assume.”
“My love for brine-cured meat has endured the test of time,” said Pen, yanking the sandwich out of his hand. “My heart belongs to brine-cured meat now and for all eternity.”
The Reuben was slightly leaky but otherwise perfect.
As Will began unwrapping his sandwich, Pen said, “You’re a whole other story. No love. No loyalty. Total sandwich promiscuity. You could have anything in there.”
Will grinned and bit into ham and Swiss with hot mustard on pumpernickel. “We’re talking about sandwiches,” he observed, after an interval of chewing. “We haven’t seen each other in six years.”
“You’re right.” She watched two dark birds wheel against the powder blue sky. Vultures, she figured, although they didn’t look ominous or even hungry, just lazy. An idea hit her and she slapped her palm on the ground. “I thought of a way to do this.”
“Do what?”
Pen raised an arm and made impatient, circular, flapping motions with her hand. “This! This-this. What other this would I mean?”
“Okay. So what’s the way?”
“Four sentences,” she said smugly.
Will waited, then popped the stopper of his water bottle with his teeth and drank.
“Brilliant, right?” said Pen.
“Four sentences. That’s all you’re going to say.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I got nothing.” He held out his empty hands.
“You used to be better at connecting the dots.”
“It’s been a while since I’ve been around your dots, remember?”
Pen sighed. “Six years in four sentences. No questions, no comments. Four sentences from each of us and we consider ourselves caught up.”
“Fine,” Will said slowly. “You first.”
“Oh, no,” said Pen. “I thought of it. I did the legwork.”
Will laughed and kept eating. “No questions or comments,” he said. “And that would apply to the person who did the legwork, too.”
“Right.”
Pen was suddenly nervous. As she redid her ponytail, she felt a rising urge to babble her way into and through the silence of Will’s thinking, and instead of fighting the urge, she decided to give in.
“My hair’s hot.” She petted her head. “You know how you have those things that you measure the start of a season by? Not you-you, but people-you. One, I guess. You might or you might not. But anyway, like if you wear gloves and a scarf, that means it’s winter? Like that? Well, even if, technically, it’s not summer, not, you know, summer solstice summer, I always feel, personally, that it’s summer when I sit in the sun and my hair gets hot.”
“I write books for kids, for a living,” said Will. “I live in Asheville, North Carolina, sometimes with my now-sober yogi/painter mom, sometimes by myself. When I get mad, I no longer go apeshit. My dad, whom I haven’t spoken to in about four years, has a girlfriend who had a baby last year, so I have a little brother I’ve never met, whose name, apparently, is Randall Junior, a. k. a. R. J.”
Pen absorbed this for a moment, her heart in her throat. It’s been so long, she thought. It’s been no time at all. In a soft voice, she said, “Am I allowed to say that I love your books?”
Will ducked his head, smiling. “No.”
Pen lay back on the grass with her eyes shut, feeling the sun on her face, pressing like warm thumbs against her eyelids, thinking how she could fall asleep there, with the sun and with Will and that old church watching over her, and it would have been so easy to do, even for Pen, who had trouble falling asleep in her own bed, but, instead, after a minute or so, she started talking, without sitting up or opening her eyes or even imagining what Will was thinking as she spoke.
“I have a daughter named Augusta who turns five in July. I am not now, nor have I ever been married. Augusta and I share an apartment in Philadelphia with Jamie. My dad died two years ago.” It wasn’t hard after all. She released the sentenc
es carefully, evenly, like someone placing leaves, one by one, onto the surface of a stream, letting the water carry them slowly into the trees and out of sight.
Will didn’t make a sound. Pen couldn’t hear anything except the tide of her own breathing and the sequined clamor of birdsong, but as she sat up, she kept her eyes closed, thinking, Please don’t let him be crying. If he’s crying, I might cry, I might roll over on the ground, bury my face in my arms and fall to pieces, and he will feel like he needs to say something or hug me, but he won’t know if I want him to, and it will be a disaster. So great was Pen’s need for Will not to be crying that it ceased, for a few seconds, to matter that he almost certainly wouldn’t be. Will had never been a crier, not even when he was a kid. This was something Pen knew, and, sure enough, when she opened her eyes, he wasn’t crying. He was almost not moving. The only giveaway that he was sad (a thing Pen had forgotten about Will until this very second) was a pair of parentheses etched into the corners of his mouth.
“Am I allowed to say I loved your dad?” Will said finally.
Pen caught his eye and smiled. “No.”
A red pickup truck with a German shepherd in the bed drove by.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a dog riding in the back of a truck,” said Pen. “Is that even legal anymore? You’d think not, with all the seat belt laws and car seat laws and so forth. I remember how when we were little, we’d take, I don’t know, ten kids to the pool in my mom’s Volvo station wagon. We’d lie in the back, head to foot, like sardines. Not that I’m not all for the new laws. They’re great. I just wonder if they apply to, you know, dogs.”
Pen stopped for breath, and Will said, “No feet.”
Pen looked at him quizzically.
“Sardines.”
“Oh. Right. Anyway—”
“So hold on,” Will broke in. “You live with Jamie?”
“Hey! No questions! Remember!” But Pen was laughing, and even though she knew that Will didn’t really expect her to explain why she lived with Jamie, that it was just his way of breaking the tension and navigating them away from the towering subject of Pen’s father’s death, she answered it anyway, surprising herself by beginning at the beginning, with Will and Cat leaving and with Patrick’s knack (“perverse knack” she said, even though she had found his arrival lifesaving, or close to lifesaving, at least once) for showing up at Pen’s most vulnerable moments.
“You didn’t meet cute,” said Will, resurrecting their old joke right on cue. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“I wish I could. I was sour and mopey, but pretty much everything Patrick does is cute. We met cute and irresponsible and slightly deceptive, which is Patrick in a nutshell.” Guiltily, she jumped in with a revision. “Well, except for the deceptive part. Well, I mean, he is deceptive sometimes, but he doesn’t really plan to be.”
“Spontaneous deception is much better,” said Will.
“I had just finished up my last requirements for my master’s in education,” began Pen.
“I remember you were studying to be a reading specialist. Congratulations.”
“Well, and I was feeling sorry for myself because I didn’t have anyone to celebrate with.” She shot him a look.
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“I guess I could’ve found someone. Jamie or one of the people in my program or someone, but I really just wanted to wallow. I did a fair amount of wallowing after you and Cat left.”
“I’m familiar with wallowing,” said Will.
“And I’m drinking coffee as morosely as I can and reading a book, a really sad book about a child murder because if you’re feeling glum you might as well go all the way, and this person sits at my table and says, ‘Is it okay if I sit here?’ Except he was already sitting, so I said, meanly, ‘I guess, but there’s a seat right over there,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I know, I was just sitting in it.’”
“You’re right. Cute.” Will pretended to gag.
“See? And then he said, and this was the deception part, ‘I was waiting for a friend who never showed, and I hate to drink coffee alone.’ And I said, ‘On the other hand, I like drinking coffee alone,’ and he said, ‘Not to be insolent or anything, but you don’t look like you’re liking it. In fact, you look miserable.’ And it made me laugh that he said ‘insolent’ so we ended up talking.”
“I get how that was nauseatingly cute and spontaneously deceptive, since I gather he didn’t really get stood up, but how was it irresponsible?”
“His wife had thrown him out of the house just five weeks earlier. They had a three-year-old daughter. And while he was busy hitting on a random girl in a coffeehouse, he missed a meeting with his attorney regarding their breakup.”
“Wow,” said Will. “That’s hard-core.”
“I know. But I was worse because even after I found all that out, I didn’t send him away.”
“I wouldn’t say worse,” said Will. “He was the one with a wife and kid.”
“I know, but he’s just like that. Careless. I’m not, but I threw myself into it, even though I knew better. I allowed myself to become criminally smitten.”
Will smiled at “criminally smitten.”
“I even let it affect my career. One day, Patrick said there was a reading specialist job at his old private school in the suburbs, the one he went to from the age of four until he graduated, and because it was his school, I applied for it. I’d been all set to work in a city school, and I got all goo-goo-eyed and dropped that idea in a flash. I think I’d known him for two weeks.”
“Still: wife, kid.”
“We were together five months that time, before I made him go back.”
“You felt guilty?”
“Yes, but also, he was pining for them, both of them. Anyone could tell that.”
“What do you mean ‘that time’?” asked Will.
Pen kept going, leaving out nothing, or almost nothing. How Patrick and Tanya had shown up at her school, Patrick’s alma mater, one day without warning, Patrick having forgotten to mention to Pen—having possibly forgotten altogether, knowing Patrick—that he and Tanya had always planned to send Lila there. How the admissions director stopped into the reading center as part of the tour and how Pen had kept her cool, pretending not to know them, but how Patrick had turned into a red-faced, stammering idiot so that Tanya knew something was up, and how the next day, the headmaster suggested that Pen take a semester’s leave of absence. Pen could still recall the way the icy doom settled in her stomach as she walked down the hallway to his office.
“Did you go back?” asked Will. “After that semester?”
“No. I found out I was pregnant soon thereafter. But I’d decided not to go back even before I knew. I was—disheartened.”
“I’m sorry you were disheartened. The whole thing sucks.”
Patrick had come back after Augusta was born. He hadn’t come to the hospital for her birth, which had earned him Pen’s parents’ and Jamie’s disdain until the end of time, but which was actually a relief to Pen. Patrick slouching among the nurses and Pen’s family members, with his uneasiness and his big hands in his pockets and his guilt-stricken eyes, asking her for whatever it was he needed from her—and there would’ve been something—while Pen tried to give birth would have been a distraction, one thing too many. Plus, there was a tiny, barbed part of her that had been glad he was missing it, glad that their baby’s sliding whole and gorgeous into the world would never belong to him.
It was ten days later, less than an hour after Pen’s mother had gone home (“What were you doing, spying on us?” Pen had asked. “Yes,” Patrick had replied.) that Patrick had shown up on Pen’s doorstep, unshaven and gaunt, his nails bitten to the quick, and Pen, her edges worn down by ten days of sleep deprivation, breastfeeding, and titanic love, had let him in and, when he begged to stay, had let him stay. Pen didn’t tell Will how Patrick had set his daughter gently back into her bassinet, then had fallen onto his knees in the bedroom, s
obbing, how she could still close her eyes and remember the sight of him in the half-light with his face in his hands, and the raw and honest sound of his weeping.
“I didn’t really love him. I didn’t even feel the charmed infatuation I had felt when I met him, but we spent our days in Augusta’s glow. She made things seem possible. So when he asked me to marry him, even though he wasn’t divorced yet, even though I didn’t have that much faith that it would work out, I said I would.”
She broke off a piece of her Reuben and tossed it to a couple of brown birds that were hopping near by. With affronted squeaks and a melodramatic agitation of feathers, they bounced backward and flew away.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” said Pen, sighing. “It made him really happy, though, and Patrick when he’s happy is just this big, positive force of nature, so I let down my guard and let myself start to believe in our happy little family, and as soon as I did that, the next day maybe, Tanya threatened to take Lila.”
“What do you mean ‘take’ her?” asked Will.
“She said she’d say anything; she’d lie and get other people to lie. She’d do whatever it took to get full custody. The day Patrick found this out, I came home to find him on the couch, looking like he’d been run over by a tractor, and even before he told me, I knew he was gone.”
“Man, Tanya sounds like a piece of work.”
“The thing is, though,” said Pen, “he would’ve left anyway. I like to think I would have come to my senses and broken it off eventually, but even if I hadn’t, I don’t think he would’ve gone through with it.”
“Why not?”
“He loves Tanya. It’s a fact. He loves Lila, too, of course. Lila alone might have been enough reason for him to leave us, but he is stone-cold, crazy in love with Tanya.”
“What about you? And Augusta?”
“Oh, he loves us, too. He told me one time, at a really low point, that he was cursed to be in love with two women. But he loved Tanya first. And best, which in a way is only fair because she loves him back in a way that I never did.”