Lone Star

Chloe had to stop peeking at his despair. It was as if she had caught him in the shower, or them in a different sort of clinch. She became embarrassed, for herself, for him, for the passersby who slowed down, concerned at his distraught exhortations. He grabbed his chest, as if in the middle of heart failure.

After an hour he was still crying! And Hannah was still rubbing him, talking to him, gesturing far and wide.

Chloe understood nothing of this kind of emotion. Nothing. It seemed to her that logic must prevail in a grown man’s head when he spied himself standing in the middle of the college where he had tenure, bawling because his teenage lover had decided to move on. Not even move on, for Blake was the here and now, just … move sideways. Move back. Move away. How could the enormous common sense of that decision finally—finally!—not triumph over him?

Chloe had been keeping an eye on the time—the thing she usually had least of, next to money—but after ninety minutes her eyes left the watch permanently to pitch silent poison darts in Hannah’s direction, hoping her friend would sense Chloe’s own despair at the tedium of spying on a stranger’s excessive distress. Come on, wrap the whole thing up, put it in a doggy bag, take it home. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! Chloe kept silently shouting. LET’S GO!

There was pacing, but there was no departing.

A hundred and ten minutes. A movie now. First a tragedy, then a comedy, then a farce, now Shoah.

Wait. Something new was happening. The stooped old man nodded. He let Hannah hug him, pat him.

Unfounded optimism. There he was, crying again. He could barely stand on his grieving geriatric legs. Carefully Hannah helped him over to a bench, and sat down next to her soon-to-be-erstwhile lover, continuing to cajole and comfort him.

The girls had a three-hour ride back home.

“Did you see him?” Hannah asked.

Oh, I saw him all right. Saw him, heard him, memorized him. I could play him by heart on the piano, that’s how well I’ve studied him.

“Yes,” said Chloe.

How could she tell Hannah about college?

She couldn’t. And didn’t.

She wanted to ask if Hannah loved Blake half as much. Would she shed a quarter of Martyn’s tears when it came time to say goodbye to Blake? Would she miss him an eighth as deeply? What was it called when it wasn’t pain, but a fraction of pain? Grimly Chloe closed her hands on the wheel.

“What happens next, Chloe?”

“I don’t know, Hannah. What happens next?”

It was going to get dark soon. Her mother would be worried. Nothing to do but drive on. “Remember Darlene Duranceau?”

“Who could ever forget her? Why would you bring her up, of all people?”

Chloe shrugged. “I’m trying to make a point about what happens next.”

Blake and Mason had dismantled the woman’s overflowing garbage heap of house in Denmark, Maine, after she died. She had been a hoarder, hoarding even herself in the end. She kept eating and sitting, eating and sitting, and soon she got so big that she couldn’t move off her couch, and she just kept eating and eating and eating, using the couch not just as a bed and a dining table, but also as a toilet, and, eventually, as a grave.

It was winter when she died, and everyone had been snowed in for days. The local market couldn’t deliver Darlene’s groceries. When the roads were finally plowed, Barry the delivery boy brought Darlene her customary two boxes of Pringles and pretzels. Barry found her. Barry did not recover from this. He had been a shy clumsy kid in Chloe’s homeroom, but now he was on major meds, in therapy six days a week and home-schooled by Social Services.

The townies talked about nothing else. What was Darlene’s life like before she and the couch became one? What drama in her life had led her to the upholstered end? Was the end a consequence, an answer to a why? Or was it a catalyst? If everything you did led to everything else that would eventually happen, the question was: was Darlene Duranceau the beginning or the end?

After the coroner pronounced her dead, and it was time to remove her from the premises, the EMT workers discovered that she was stuck. From lack of movement, she had developed sores that festered, causing open wounds that oozed into the sofa, which then closed up around Darlene’s flesh like lichen to a rock. She had liquefied and then mummified into her furniture. The town cremated her with the couch. No one but the boys out in the schoolyard ever discussed how the funeral home fit Darlene and her Davenport into the relatively narrow opening of the cremation pyre.

How could Chloe add to Hannah’s chaos by confessing about California?

She wants to tell her, but she can’t.

She can’t.

And she doesn’t want to.

Hannah will feel betrayed.

What kind of a terrible friend would Chloe be to betray her friend and then tell her about it?

So she doesn’t tell her.

She thinks she justifies it beautifully.

Only a guilty mouthful of what feels like open safety pins alerts Chloe to the falseness of her excuses.

“I know the answer,” Hannah said. “You know what happened next for Darlene? Nothing.”

“Yes. That was the end of Darlene’s story. But yours is just beginning, Hannah. That’s what I’m trying to say. Take heart.”

“Did you see how upset Martyn was?”

“I saw.”

“Do you think he’s going to be okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think is going to happen?”

“It’ll be something. Martyn is not Darlene.”

“But what if what happens next is you and your sacred striped sofa become one?” said Hannah. “What if when God said flesh of my flesh, he meant flesh of my sofa? The Chesterfield of my flesh? What if Martyn is a Darlene?”

“You can’t possibly believe that.”

There was silence for a while. It was black out. There were no lights on the road except for the car’s headlights.

“Blake is the sweetest lover,” Hannah said in a small sad voice. “You don’t expect that from someone like him, because he’s so rough and tumble, but he is super gentle and super considerate. He’s always caressing me, kissing my back. He’s always trying to make me happy.”

“You’re lucky,” Chloe said, settling into the wheel, stepping on the gas pedal. She didn’t think Blake was so rough. For months, when his dad couldn’t walk, on account of nearly dying, oh and having a back broken in three places, Blake carried his father to the reclining chair by the sandy shore and set him down into it so Burt could watch the lake and the sky and Blake and Chloe fishing in the boat and skating on the ice. His dad liked to watch the kids having fun, Blake said.

9 (#ulink_67934995-a551-57f0-af46-ee45be3d6297)

Red Vineyard (#ulink_67934995-a551-57f0-af46-ee45be3d6297)

“TEACH ME, HAIKU. TELL ME HOW TO BEGIN. TUTOR ME IN beginnings.”

Blake plopped down across from her in the nearly empty learning center, scruffy, smiling, slapping his notebooks onto the heavy wooden table between them. His pens rolled toward the window. Chloe watched them, and he watched her watching them. Without breaking eye contact with her, he stopped them from falling to the floor and then he spoke. “What’s been the matter with you today?” When she didn’t reply, he went on. “Is it because of Barcelona? Don’t worry. They’ll say yes. They’ve been talking to my mom. Asking her if she thinks we’re trustworthy.” Blake laughed. “I told her, lie, Ma, say yes!”