The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(89)

She took another deep breath and exhaled.

After a bit I said, “I better go clean up the peas.”

“No. You’ve done enough.” She stood. “I saw a movie on the table.”

“Mickie and I were going to watch it, but she had to go home.”

“If you wouldn’t mind the company, I could use a distraction.”

“I’ll clean up the peas and make popcorn,” I said.

“Forget the damn peas,” my mother said.





28

The next morning, I awoke early, but my mother had already cleaned up the mess in the kitchen and left to be with my father. I picked up flowers and drove the El Camino. I would tell Mickie that I hoped she didn’t regret what we had done, because I didn’t. I would tell her that it wasn’t going to ruin our friendship, because I wanted to be more than friends. I loved Mickie. I knew it then, and I was convinced it could be the same kind of love my mother and father shared. What was better, after all, than being in love with your best friend?

Walking up the driveway, I felt butterflies and had to tell myself this was the same person with whom, twelve hours earlier, I would have shared my darkest secrets. Joanna answered, looking up at me with her big brown eyes from beneath wisps of bangs and smiling brightly. “Hi, Sam.”

“Hi, Jo-Jo.” She leaned back, swinging on the door handle, smiling. “Is Mickie here?”

She shook her head. “Uh-uh. She’s not home.”

“Do you know where she went?”

“She went to college,” Jo-Jo said, still smiling.

My heart sank. “She left already?”

“Who are the flowers for?”

I looked at the bouquet, and for a moment I didn’t say or do anything. Then I plucked the card from the plastic stem and handed the flowers to Joanna.

“They’re for you,” I said.

She took them, either too startled to speak or worried I might be joking. I turned and walked down the steps.

“Sam!”

When I turned back, Joanna stood on the top step, holding the flowers just beneath her chin. She looked like an angel. “Thanks for the flowers, Sam.”





29

I didn’t hear from Mickie, but I thought of her every day and occasionally contemplated calling her mother to get her dorm number, or driving to Davis and surprising her, but each time I found a reason not to go. I was grateful to be so busy. Each morning my mother and I ate breakfast together; then I drove to the store, and she drove off to be with my dad and participate in his continued rehabilitation. Eventually she would go with me to the store so I could begin training her to take my job. I’m not sure she would have done it for anything less important than getting me to college.

In November we decorated the store in anticipation of Thanksgiving. The holiday would mean several days off school for Ernie and for Mickie, and I wondered if either would come home. Ernie had a football game that weekend, and he and his parents had traveled back to Indiana for a game against Notre Dame, followed by Thanksgiving with the rest of the team.

The day before Thanksgiving, I answered a knock at the door, and there Mickie stood. She looked thinner than when she’d left, and her hair was longer, nearly touching her shoulders.

“Hey, Hill. How’s it going?” She walked past me and plopped down on the sofa.

“It’s going good,” I said. “How’s college?”

“The dorm food sucks, most of the kids are neurotic, and my chemistry teacher is a lecher I’m about to kick in the nuts. Can I get a glass of water?”

She made her way into the kitchen and pulled a glass from the cabinet, filling it at the sink, not far from where we’d had the war of peas and fallen to the floor to make love.

“I have soda,” I said.

“Throw it out. We did this experiment where you put a piece of meat in the soda, and it eats the flesh.”

“So you gave up soda?”

“And red meat. My roommate’s a vegan, but I’m not going there. She doesn’t shave her legs or her armpits, either.”

“Please don’t go there,” I said.

“Your mom home?”

“She’s at the store.”

“She’s working?”

“One afternoon a week to give me a break. How long are you home?”

“Sunday. You get me for four days, Hill. Let’s catch a matinee. You’re buying. I’m a poor college kid now, and you’re a rich business mogul.”

“Hardly.”

She stepped forward and gave me a hug, and for an instant I thought she might kiss me. Then she pulled back and was again on the move. “All right, Hill, daylight’s burning, and I want to stop at the store and say hello to your mother and use my discount to get some candy. I’m still family, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The store is under new management, you know, and I hear the new boss is a real hard-ass.”

She laughed and pulled me by the hand out the door.

We did not talk about what happened the night of the last supper. But I did not feel like a notch on Mickie’s bedpost, as I had with Donna. Over the course of the fall months, I’d had a lot of time to think about Mickie and to consider what had happened that night. I knew Mickie loved me, or at least that’s what I told myself. And I told myself that she’d fled that night because she had felt something with me that she had never felt with any of the others, and it had scared her. Mickie didn’t want to be in love, burdened by the terrible lessons her parents had taught her. She didn’t want the pain. Her knocking on our door that Thanksgiving was Mickie’s way of telling me she loved me. It wasn’t enough, not for me, but I was certain it was also all I would ever get out of Mickie.