I stopped suddenly, breathless, unsure of where I was. The houses in my neighborhood all looked the same, one floor plan reversed and then back again. More kids on bikes, more mothers on corners, flags with watermelon and sunshine designs hanging from front porches. I could have lived in any of these houses. Any of these families could have been mine, once.
The tight, throbbing feeling in my throat made me want to start sobbing, to break down, right there on an unfamiliar corner in front of a house just like my own. Everything seemed so out of control, as if even running the streets wouldn’t save me. I wondered if this was how Gwendolyn felt running wild at night, this lost, loose feeling that no consequence could be so harmful as the sense of staying where you were, or of being who you are. I wanted to be somewhere else, out of the range of my mother’s voice and ears, of Ashley’s pouty looks, of the News Channel 5 viewing area. Someplace where the sight of me sobbing would tie me to no one and no one to me.
I was going to let it happen, let the tears come and the sobs rise up from my chest. I imagined crying until I was exhausted, dry, finally letting it all go.
And then I heard that blub-blub-blub puttering around the corner where I stood. Sumner was behind the wheel, so busy adjusting the stereo that he didn’t even see me at first. Just as I thought to call his name he glanced over his shoulder.
He backed up beside me, smoothly aligning with the curb. The passenger seat was filled with books, heavy black volumes with gold monograms. “Hey, Haven. What’s going on?”
Even as he spoke I was doing it, breathing in and clearing my head, swallowing until the lump in my throat disappeared. Digging my heels in again, regulating myself. “Nothing,” I said.
“Need a ride?” He started pushing books into the back.
“Sure.” I climbed in and we were off, puttering along the short distance to my house, passing the Rogerses’, familiar territory. Sumner pulled off his tie and reached across me to stuff it in the glove compartment.
“So,” he said after a while. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just . . . my father and his new wife are going to have a baby.”
“A baby?”
“Yeah. They just got married.”
He smiled. “Wow. They didn’t waste any time, huh?”
“I guess not,” I said. “I mean, it’s like this just makes it official. My father has completely begun his life over.” We passed the Melvins’, where baby Ronald was playing on the steps.
“Well, maybe he is. And that sucks. But it doesn’t mean he’s forgetting you or anything,” he said, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. “It’ll work out, Haven. This is the worst of it.”
I knew he was probably right. It seemed like every time I saw Sumner lately I was reacting to a crisis. And every time, he said the one thing, the right thing, that no one else could say.
“So,” I asked him, “what are you doing around these parts?”
“Selling encyclopedias. It’s a new job. My first day, actually.”
“Did you sell any?”
“No, but three people invited me in for soda. One of them was really old, too old for encyclopedias, but we looked at all her photo albums and talked about the war.”
“I didn’t think you could ever be too old for encyclopedias,” I said.
“Maybe not,” he said, “but according to my marketing manual eighty-five-year-old widows with ten cats and a houseful of dusty antiques are not writing a lot of term papers. Heard some great war stories, though. There’s nothing like a good war story.”
He slowed down; we were coming to my house. Ashley was walking up the front steps, still in her work clothes. She wore that damn lab coat everywhere.
We pulled up to the curb just as she got to the door, but she was digging for her keys and didn’t notice us. She didn’t remember the sound of the car the way I did. I wondered how she could ever have forgotten, but Ashley was always good at that.
We watched her fumbling in her purse, which was balanced against her knee. She brushed her hair impatiently out of her face, then tucked it behind her ear. Under her lab coat she had on a red dress that showed off her tan and wore black sandals over her tiny little feet. I thought again of her Barbie adolescence and how I’d envied her, and I looked at Sumner, at the expression I couldn’t read on his face. I wondered how she looked to him, if she was older or fatter or just the same as that last time he saw her on the porch, when she put a door between him and herself. Finally she found her keys, opened the door, and kicked it shut behind her, rattling the glass. I still hadn’t gotten out of the car.
“Do you want to come in?” I asked him.
“Oh no,” he said. “I have to get to work.”
“At the mall?”
“No.” He shifted in his seat, reaching behind to pull out a stack of records: Lawrence Welk, Jimmy Dorsey, the Andrews Sisters. “I’m getting fifty bucks to dance with old women at the senior center. They’re having a nostalgia dance but they’re short on men. I’m not supposed to tell them I’m getting paid, though. It would ruin the spirit of it all.”
“You dance?”
He sighed. “Sure. My mother thought she was Ginger Rogers. Didn’t Ashley tell you? I taught her every dance she knows.”
“I didn’t even know Ashley could dance.”
“You should see her waltz,” he said, putting the records back behind the seat. “She’s incredible. Of course, she always wanted to lead. She’s not much of a follower, you know.”