He smiled. "You went to medical school, right? And almost finished. That can't be too easy."
"When it stopped being easy, I quit."
"What were you doing in Tucson, then, before you came to Grace?"
"You don't want to know. Cashier in a 7-Eleven."
"Shoot. And I thought you were too good to go out with a locomotive engineer. What about before that?"
"You don't want to know."
"Yes, I do."
"Well, I did medical research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota."
"Damn! Really?"
"Yep. I was living up there two years ago when I first found out Doc Homer was sick."
"And before that?"
I rolled my head back and looked at the roof of the car. "You really don't want to know."
"You were President of the United States."
"Guess again."
"You hotwired Porsches."
I laughed. "The biggest thing I ever stole was a frozen lobster, for my boyfriend's birthday. I was working in frozen foods and I think I actually wanted to get fired. Doesn't that sound stupid?"
"Yes, it sounds stupid. So that came before Mayo Clinic?"
"That, and a bunch of different odd little things. A few piddly research jobs in between. Believe me, I never put everything on the same resume."
"And what's the one you never mention? The one you're trying not to tell me about."
"For a few years in there I lived overseas."
"No kidding. Did you fly? Shoot, I'd love to go someplace in an airplane."
"Flying's okay," I said. In truth, flying terrified me. It's the one thing I knew I had in common with my mother, who'd flat-out refused, there at the end. In my own life I handled it by means of steadfast denial. I'd flown over the Atlantic Ocean twice without even checking to see if there really was a flotation device under my seat; flotation seemed beside the point. Oh, I flew like a bird.
"So, okay, what were you doing overseas?"
I glanced at him. "I was my boyfriend Carlo's girlfriend. On the island of Crete."
He seemed amused. "What, you mean you cleaned house and made cookies?"
"Kind of. Sometimes I'd help out in the clinic. One time I set the broken leg of a sheep. But mostly I was a housewife."
"So you'd, what, go shopping in a bikini?"
I laughed. "It really was not that kind of island. You know where it is, right? In between Greece and Egypt. The women wear black wool dresses and crucifixes the size of a hood ornament. Getting the picture?"
He nodded.
"The main baby present for a boy is a silver knife, which they present in this ceremony where the godparents list all the enemies of the family going back to around Adam and Eve."
"You liked it that much, huh?"
I took my coat off. It was finally warming up. "Well, it was interesting. It was someplace to go. It was like going to another century, actually. But I felt like a complete outsider." I closed my eyes, fighting an old ache.
"How do you mean?"
"I'm pretty good at languages but I never could get the hang of fitting in. Not anywhere, but especially not there."
"Why do you think you don't fit in? Give me an example."
It was plain that I'd always been an oddity in Grace, so he must have meant how was I an oddity in Crete. "Well, my first day there I marched into the bakery and asked for a psoli. The word for a loaf of bread is psomi. A psoli is a penis."
Loyd laughed. "Anybody could make a mistake like that."
"Not more than once, I promise you."
"Well, you were foreign. People expect you to say a few dumb things."
"Oh, every day I did something wrong. They had complicated rules about who could talk to who and what you could say and who said it first. Like, there were all these things you were supposed to do to avoid the Evil Eye."
"How do you do that?" he asked. Loyd was full of curiosity.
"You wear this little amulet that looks like a blue eyeball. But the main thing is, you never ever mention anything you're proud of. It's this horrible social error to give somebody a compliment, because you're attracting the attention of the Evil Eye. So you say everything backward. When two mothers pass each other on the road carrying their babies, one says to the other, 'Ugly baby!' And the other one says, 'Yours also!'"
Loyd laughed a wonderful, loud laugh that made me think of Fenton Lee, in high school. Who'd died in the train wreck.