All That's Left to Tell(65)

“For a while, I wondered if he could tell, and was looking for reassurance, but one afternoon, when I’d come back from the sandwich shop, and I was vacuuming the floor—I guess I liked our little domestic arrangement, the sense that I was taking care of a home—I didn’t hear him come in, and when I didn’t, he pulled the vacuum cord from the outlet, and he gave me sort of a half smile and sat down on the stool near the door where we usually threw our coats. But by then it was late March, and spring had come early, and I’d bundled up our coats in a plastic bag, and stored them in the back of our one closet. I remember thinking that was a hopeful thing, because it meant that come October or November, I’d be taking them out again.

“I was waiting for Seth to say something, but he just sat on the stool, with the end of the vacuum cord in his hand, rolling it over in his fingers so the plug looked like the moving head of a small animal. Finally, I said, ‘What? You got something against a clean floor?’ and tried a smile, but he shook his head. Then he said, ‘I lost my job.’ I knew that soon April rent would be due, and my check might cover it, but how we’d eat next month I didn’t know, and those were the first thoughts that crossed my mind. I asked him what happened, and he told me, ‘I’m really sorry, Claire. They laid me off three weeks ago. I should’ve told you. I didn’t tell you because I was trying to find work. I figured if I had a new job, what would it matter if pay was minimum wage, anyway, but no one seems to be hiring.’ He was still rolling the cord between his fingers, only now he was looking at the plug itself instead of me.”

Claire thought she had never in her life lain looking at the sky as the stars faded into dawn, and she was still waiting. “Do the cars on the highway sound like wind to you?” she asked.

“Yeah. They always have, when there’re a lot of them. But I like it best when I hear a lone car traveling late at night on the freeway. I think of the person in there as someone going on a long, long trip, like you’ve been, or someone who has just said good-bye, or someone going home after a long time away.”

Claire wondered if Genevieve was thinking all three were true of her, but she didn’t ask.

“It’s funny, you know,” Claire continued. “I know how things are always changing under the surface, and just because you don’t observe them doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. But when I saw Seth turning that cord over and over, and the head of it bobbing like he had a mouse in his hand, I knew then that period of my life was over. I wondered if he was fired, but I didn’t ask. Finally, he said to me, ‘I’ve found a way to make some money. But it isn’t, you know, exactly legal.’ ‘What do you mean by exactly?’ I asked him. It turns out he was running drugs for a man he knew who had offered him several hundred dollars to take a bundle of marijuana to Florida. He would borrow the man’s car and run it down there, and then bring back the cash. This didn’t necessarily alarm me at the time. I remember thinking it wasn’t cocaine, or heroin, only weed, and that he’d be back in three days. Seth told me he would be leaving the next morning.

“When he did, I went to work at the store and made sandwiches, just like every other day, but I remember how that afternoon even the store and the Korean man who owned it seemed changed. I noticed for the first time how boxes of condiments in the storeroom were covered with dust, and that someone had drawn into the dust a word in Korean script. They’d been sitting there a long, long time. And toward three o’clock, when people stopped coming in for lunch, and I was only doing the next day’s prep work, a man came in and spoke to my boss a single sentence in a whisper, and then the man handed him a playing card that was cut in the corner. I figured it had something to do with gambling, and I knew not to say anything. But it helped me recognize that after Seth had gone, whatever could have been described as the innocence of that period of my life had passed.

“Those nights I missed Seth. But I was also thinking how little I knew about him. I’m not saying he deliberately kept things from me, because I don’t think he did. But I realized that our time was about learning what our bodies liked, and drinking enough that our memories of what brought us to each other receded. When he was gone, I could remember only one story he’d told me about his childhood, a time when he went fishing with his grandfather, and how he’d hooked a big bluegill and got so excited that he stood up in the boat and went over the side, and when his grandfather pulled him out of the water he was still gripping the pole in his free hand, and the fish was still on the line.”

She stopped for a few moments, and Genevieve asked, “Why do you think he told you that story?”

“I don’t know, Genevieve. I think it was one of those days for him that seemed perfect in some way.”

Genevieve shifted onto her elbow, her face dim in the starlight.

“When I was a kid, I had a friend, and one spring day we hid in the woods and pretended we were both Snow White, and we held out our fingers for the birds to light on them like they did in the cartoon. And one actually flapped about a foot away from my finger before it realized I wasn’t a tree. That was a great day. Do you have any favorites?”

Despite herself, Claire smiled. “You like birds, don’t you, Genevieve?”

“Well, they can fly,” she said.

She laughed at this. “Yes, I suppose they can. But I already told you about that time in northern Michigan, on that river, when I was sixteen. Those were perfect days.”