Lone Star

“Tell them in a firm and convincing manner that you’re going and that’s all there is to it.”

“Yes, right, okay. Do you know what my mother has been doing?” Chloe said. “Buying me books. Frommer’s Guide to Spain’s Coastal Cities. Fun Facts about Barcelona. To Barcelona with Love. DK Guide to Spain’s Most Beautiful Churches.’”

“That’s nice. She’s being helpful.”

“You mean impossible. She says to me, see, honey, you don’t have to go anywhere, you can just read books about it.”

“True, your mother is always advising me to read more,” Hannah said. “She says you can live other lives through books, experience travel, love, sorrow.”

“She’s buying me books so I can see Barcelona from the comfort of my recliner while she makes me éclairs and rum babas.”

“Yeah,” said Hannah. “You have it so tough.”

Chloe drove. She didn’t want to say how much she envied Hannah her parents’ spectacular non-participation. Divorce did that—shifted priorities.

“They make unreasonable demands on me,” Chloe said.

Hannah turned down Nirvana. “I wish somebody would make a demand on me.”

Grandpa is making demands on you, Chloe wanted to say. How’s that going? “I thought you liked that they never asked you for things,” she said instead.

“Turns out, I want to be asked for something.”

“Like what?”

“Anything,” Hannah said. “Just to be asked.” She turned to Chloe. “Why are you so tense? Look at the way your hands are clutching the wheel.”

Chloe tried to relax, really she did.

“I’m the one who should be tense,” said Hannah. “You have no idea how upset he’s going to get.”

Chloe thought long and hard about her next question. “He’s generally in good health, right?” she asked. Like his heart?

“Oh, yes,” Hannah said. “Believe me, there’s nothing wrong with him.”

“Ew, gross. Not what I meant. But okay.”

“What’d you mean?”

“Nothing.”

Hannah was looking too pretty for someone who was about to break up with a nonagenarian. Almost seemed mean. The poor fellow was going to be feeling like shit anyway, why rub it in his face, the youth, the slim feminine attractiveness, the long legs? Hannah even wore a skirt, as if headed to church. Linen skirt as short as the month of February. Navy blue sparkly ballet flats. A cream top. Face deceptively “unmade-up,” yet fully made-up. Eyes moist.

Chloe couldn’t pay too much attention to Hannah’s appealing exterior while driving down a zigzaggy two lane country road, but from a surreptitious corner of her eye, Hannah was looking delectable, not forlorn.

“Hannah, why are you looking so pretty if you’re ending it with him?”

She beamed. “He likes to look at me, that’s all.”

“But you want him to like to look at you less, don’t you?”

Hannah didn’t reply, busy eating her fingers, twisting her knuckles.

To everything there is a season. That was another one of her mother’s mottos. This was emphatically not the season for college confessions. This was a time for lovers. Chloe cleared her throat.

“Can I ask you about Blake?”

“What about him?”

“Don’t you like him?”

“I love him, what are you talking about?”

“Well, then, why …”

Hannah waved at her. “You won’t understand, Chloe. You and Mason are so perfectly aligned.”

“You think so?” Chloe wouldn’t have minded talking about it.

“But it’s different with me and Blake. He’s so sweet, but …” Hannah paused, chewed her nails, stared out at the pines passing by. “Besides the physical, we have little in common. Don’t get me wrong. The physical gets you pretty far. With Blake, believe me, almost the whole way. If it was the only important thing, we’d be in great shape. But aside from that, what do we have? All the things I like, he couldn’t care less about, and all the things he likes I don’t get at all.”

“Blake’s so into you. He likes everything you’re into.”

“What do I care about junk hauling, or building things, or helping old people, or fixing band saws? Or fishing? And what does he care about Paris and museums, and classic literature, and pretty clothes?”

“There are other things …”

“Yes, we’ve done them.” Hannah sighed dramatically. “Do you think that boy will ever live away from his dad? He still helps him into the boat, for God’s sake. He wants to start a junk business. I mean, what am I going to do with someone like that?”

“He also wants to write a book,” said Chloe.

Hannah waved in dismissal. “He and a million others. Me, I want to travel the world. I want to learn three languages. I want to live in a big city. You and I both do. It can’t end with Blake any other way but this way.”

“But that’s the thing,” Chloe said, her gaze on the road. “It’s not ending. If you ended it with him, that’d be one thing. But you’re not.”

Hannah turned to Chloe, frowning disdain on her displeased face. “How do I do that? And then what? What do I do with us?” She made a large air circle, embodying by the broad sweep not just herself and Blake, but Chloe and Mason too. “We are all four of us together every day. We have one life. If I break up with him, what happens to the four of us? Do you even think before you speak? I mean, could you break up with Mason?”

“I don’t want to.”

“But if you did?”

They didn’t talk for a while. The road was narrow, the pines tall, the ride long, what was there to say? Except what a hypocrite Chloe was, what a deceiver. She decided she would tell Hannah about San Diego on the way home, her heart falling through her abdomen at the thought of it.

Chloe underestimated the open and public heartbreak a man near retirement age could display on the walkways of Orono, near the river on the University of Maine campus, when his eighteen-year-old lover told him it had to end.

Chloe stayed as far back as possible. She couldn’t believe Hannah would do this on the avenue where students and faculty strolled on a warm May evening. But his reaction was so extreme that perhaps this was why Hannah had chosen the public square for his flogging; she had hoped he would keep it together. At first they walked arm in arm, overlooking the flowing waters, the mountains beyond. He smiled at her, squeezed her arm. They made quite a picturesque couple against the backdrop of the snow-capped Appalachians.

Hannah spoke. He stopped walking. He took his arm away. She gestured, in her small elegant way, and he stood, a pillar of incomprehension. Then he started to weep. Hannah stroked him, embraced him, talked and talked, a filibuster of consolation. Nothing helped the gray man become less stooped.