Flying Solo(21)

She lay back on the bed, feeling her heart donk-donk-donk in her chest, staring at the round brass light fixture in the ceiling. This was the orange room they had painted together, where Laurie would stay when she came over. When her parents were going out, sometimes they’d leave her brothers at home and let her come and curl up with Dot and eat popcorn and then stay overnight. It would be just the two of them; Dot sometimes called it “girls’ night.”

Her phone pinged, and when she picked it up, she had a text from Nick. Sure, it said. Happy to help. 8:00?

She sent back yet another thumbs-up. And then she texted June. P.S. Nick is coming over also.

June pinged her again almost immediately, in all caps: PLOT TWIST.



* * *



—

They sat on the floor of Dot’s living room, three members of the Calcasset High School Class of 2000, drinking wine out of juice glasses so they wouldn’t tip over on the carpet. They decided to divide up the work roughly by decade: Laurie took the first ten boxes, June took the middle third, and Nick took the last third. The rules they agreed on were that general travel photos could go, pictures with family (most of whom Nick and June could recognize) should stay to be picked over further, and it was perfectly acceptable to keep, as Laurie put it, “anything awesome.” And of course, there was the rule that ruled the other rules: Absolutely anything that had any connection to any kind of duck, wooden or real, had to be saved and pointed out immediately.

They dove in.

“So,” Laurie said as she started flicking through her stack, “do you guys see much of each other anymore besides when I make you do chores?”

June frowned. “Here and there. But when did I last actually talk to you, Nick? The Spring Dance?” He nodded. The Spring Dance was, incongruously, an annual charity baseball game played by the minor-league team Nick’s grandma owned. “We see each other at the store and stuff. But I mostly spend my time around other people who are also chasing their kids all over the place. Nick and I would see each other more if he shared my keen interest in Little League.”

“I only socialize with books,” Nick added, throwing two pictures into the KEEP box in the middle of the circle. “Other than that, I’m basically a seaside hermit.”

“Well, that’s no good,” Laurie said.

“This town and I are stuck with each other,” he said, tossing in a couple more pictures. “I’ve made peace with it.”

Junie paused and had just a little more wine. “Is it okay if I ask how Becca is?”

He didn’t look up. “You can ask. She’s good. If you believe in amicable divorces at all, we had one. She’s in Michigan. As you may have seen on Facebook, she is In a Relationship.”

“Do people still change that status?” June asked. “That seems so creepy. I mean, I say that as someone who has been with the same person since 2001. By the time Facebook came around, I was off the market.” She passed a picture to Laurie. “Look at this. That’s got to be your brother running the cereal box race.” The cereal box race around the bases was the between-innings entertainment at Claws games, and Laurie’s brother Ryan had won, wearing the Chex box, when he was nine. “Anyway, fortunately, yes, I was married before my relationship had to really deal with the internet.”

“Well, that is lucky,” Nick said.

“Have you done the online dating thing at all?” June asked. “Either of you?”

“I tried,” Laurie said. “I can’t say I tried for very long. I just could not handle signing on every day to be greeted by a bunch of guys saying ‘hey.’?”

“What’s wrong with ‘hey’?” Nick asked. “Maybe they’re trying to start a conversation.”

“How am I supposed to answer ‘hey’?”

He shrugged. “Say ‘hey’ back?”

Laurie switched to a new box. “I feel like it’s a very indiscriminate ‘hey.’ I feel like these guys go through and ‘hey’ at eight hundred women, and they see who will ‘hey’ back, like they’re blowing a horn at the top of a mountain and waiting for goats to come running.”

June shook her head. “I’m not sure that’s how those horns work. And I’m almost positive it’s not how goats work. And you would know.”

“Fine. I’ll get back on Winkr or Nudgr or Smasho or whatever and write ‘hey’ back to twenty guys, and we’ll see if any of them is my future husband.”

“I think Smasho is the most promising of those possibilities, although maybe not for getting married,” June said, shifting to rearrange her bent legs. “How about you, Nick? You out there?”

Nick shook his head. “I told Laurie, I’m apparently only a six. Plus, the first app I got on, I wound up on a date with my dentist.”

“You didn’t recognize her from her picture? You didn’t recognize her name?” June started on a new stack of Polaroids.

“Hey, I see her once every six months at most, and she wears goggles and a mask, and her name is ‘Dr. Smith.’ In her picture, she was wearing sunglasses and hugging a Chihuahua and her name was Leslie. I had already ordered a drink when I figured out where I knew her from.”

“And she didn’t recognize you?” June said.