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“Come on in,” he said. “I just need a minute.”

  I picked up the baby’s hand as I stepped inside. “What’s your name, little guy?”

  “This is Marco. Watch out, he’s stinky. His sister’s around here somewhere.”

  I looked around. The living-room walls were painted a sunny yellow, with a big, rustic stone fireplace taking up the better part of the larger wall. The furniture had a lake-cabin theme going; the sofa and a chair were made out of polished logs, with the cushions upholstered in an outdoorsy hunter green and brown print. Everything was very clean, except for a pile of baby toys spilling out from a basket and a Madeline doll sprawled on the floor beside the rocking chair.

  “So this is your house, huh?”

  “Yeah. I can give you the tour if you like.” Jerry pulled a basket from under the sofa and tried to wrestle Marco onto a plastic changing pad he had spread on the carpet.

  “Sure, I’d like that.”

  “Let me just get this kid changed first. No fair leaving my sister with a dirty diaper I knew about.”

  “That’s pretty nice of you.”

  He looked up at me, amused. “It’s just common courtesy.”

  A pair of blue eyes peeked at me around the corner under a mop of red curls. I crouched down to eye level. “Hello,” I said.

  The little head pulled back behind the wall. “That’s Betsy,” Jerry told me. “She’s shy.”

  I picked up the doll from the floor beside the rocker. “Betsy, do you want your Madeline doll?”

  She reappeared in the passageway, wearing a rainbow-striped sweater under a flowered jumper and sandals with smiling frog faces on the toes. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “She dressed herself today,” explained Jerry.

  “I figured.”

  “Follow me, I’ll show you around.” Marco bolted across the room, and Jerry stood up with a diaper in his hand, folded up into a neat little rectangular package. “Starting with the kitchen, since I need to wash my hands.”

  The kitchen was decorated as nicely as the living room, with a lot of natural wood trim and brass pots hanging on the walls, the bottom cabinets painted a weathered-looking blue-green. The formal dining room had dramatic, deep-red walls and goldframed still-life prints, a big Oriental rug under the dining table. Even his bedroom was tidy, with a kind of Ikea simplicity to it, just clean pine furniture and a duvet with a navy blue cover draped neatly over the bed. There was an Ansel Adams print on the wall above it, and on the desk beneath the window, an open laptop computer beside an overflowing fern. A TV armoire stood at the foot of the bed, the doors decorously closed.

  “Who decorated this place?” I asked suspiciously.

  Jerry’s eyebrows furrowed. “I did.”

  “It’s pretty…coordinated.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Sorry.”

  “Sorry?” I offered a nervous laugh. “It was supposed to be a compliment.”

  “I have a dirty little secret,” he said.

  I nodded. All the signs were there. He liked to cook. He was a cat person. He was thirty-three years old and unmarried, hadn’t tried to kiss me so far, and had a copy of The Bridges of Madison County on his DVD shelf. I could see where this was going.

  “You do, huh,” I sighed.

  “Yeah.” He sat down on the bed, sinking into the duvet. Carelessly he brushed a loose thread from the fabric. “I’m a huge Trading Spaces fan.”

  I cleared my throat. “Um…you are?”

  “Yeah. I have all the books and everything. I had to TiVo it last week to watch Belle of Georgia at your place.”

  I giggled. “That’s, like…the whole secret?”

  “Were you hoping for a better secret?”

  “Not really.”

  “I have some good stories,” he said. “I don’t have any good secrets.”

  “Can you tell me one of your good stories?”

  He stood up. The duvet was creased down where he had been sitting. “Sure. I’ll tell you over dinner.”

  A little while later, sitting under the fake King Tut frescoes at Egyptian Pizza, I asked him, “So what’s the story?”

  “Story?”

  “Yeah, the good story you have instead of a good secret.”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s a couple of stories. I’ll give you one of them.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. When I was twenty-one, I was in a pretty bad motorcycle accident. A drunk driver ran me off the road on his way into a tree.”

  “Oh, jeez. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m fine now. At the time, though, they had to take me to the shock-trauma center in a helicopter. That’s what they told me, anyway. I don’t remember anything about the helicopter.”

  “I’m not sure I like this story.”

  “I’m not at the good part yet. This was down in Lusby, where I grew up. My parents had just moved to Florida, and I was coming back from going over some stuff about the house with the real-estate agent. It was raining. The other driver, the one who was drunk, he died in the crash. It was big news down in Lusby, on the front of the newspaper and everything. Somehow or another, the information got mixed up, and they thought that both of us had died. A buddy of mine from high school was working on the paper, so he knew who my family was and all that, and he wrote up an obituary for me that was published in the same paper. I’ve got a copy of it at home.”

  I laughed. “You’ve got a copy of your own obituary?”

  “It gets better. They next week they printed a correction that I hadn’t actually died, but it was really small and jammed in with all the other corrections, so I guess a lot of people didn’t find out. So about five years ago—I guess it was seven years after the accident—I went to my ten-year high-school reunion. You should have seen the looks I got walking in. I was thinking, wow, these people must have hated me even more than I remembered. I’d known about the article, but I’d just assumed that everyone had found out that it was a mistake. But no. I go over to the punch bowl, and there’s this big bulletin board that says, like, ‘We Will Never Forget You’ across the top. There’s a bunch of pictures on it, like maybe four or five. This girl who died our senior year, and some other girl I didn’t know, and a picture of me. My yearbook photo.”

  “They all still thought you were dead?”

  “Not everybody. My friends knew I wasn’t, obviously. But all night long I had people coming up to me saying, ‘Jerry?’ like they thought I might just be haunting the place or something. Basically, I faked my own death without even realizing it.”

  “That’s completely bizarre.”

  “I thought it was kind of cool. I felt like Elvis. It was the most popular I’ve ever been in my life.”

  The waitress came by with our Mediterranean pizza. The scent of yeast bread and fresh tomato sauce rose up with the steam. Jerry and I both sat up straighter to make room for her to set it down.

  “So do you ever do that ‘write your own obituary’ activity with your students?” I asked as I carefully pulled off a piece.

  “I do, as a matter of fact. I always tell that story. It’s fun to see what they write. Half of them write about their all-star careers playing for the Lakers or how many Oscars they won. One time I had a kid write that he was survived by his twelve children by twelve different actresses, and he named every one of them.”

  “Did you make him redo it?”

  “No, I gave him an A. Far be it for me to shoot down his dreams.”

  We smiled at each other. “Would you mind passing the Parmesan?” he asked.

  I handed it to him over the pizza. His warm fingers bumped up against mine as he took it, sending little zaps of electricity down my hand like minnows through the water.

  Lauren was sitting at the dining-room table when I got home, her heavy-rimmed glasses on, tapping her highlighter pen against the open book in front of her.

  “How was your date with Jerry?” she asked.

  “It was fun. He’s coming by on Thursday to watch Belle of G
eorgia with me again, and we’re taking his niece and nephew to the Baltimore Aquarium on Saturday.”

  “Wow. Meeting the relatives, huh?”

  I hung my jacket up in the coat closet. “Only sort of. His sister and her kids live with him, so it’s the kind of thing he does on the weekend anyway.”

  “So, is he a good kisser?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know. I haven’t kissed him yet.”

  She gave me a disbelieving look over her glasses. “Not really.”

  “What’s so wrong with that?”

  “How many dates have you been on?”

  “Only three, and that’s if you count last Thursday.”

  “I left you guys alone for four hours. He didn’t even try?”

  “It was only the second date. Sort-of date.”

  Lauren turned back to her book. “I’d be getting worried if I were you.”

  “He’s just shy, that’s all. He’s not gay or anything.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, but he doesn’t act like he is.”

  “Sounds like he doesn’t act like he’s not, either.”

  “It’s not a big deal, Laur. He’ll get there.” I sat down on the sofa with a stack of handwriting papers to correct. Seinfeld was on. “How’s it going with all your men?”

  “I’ve got a policy analyst this weekend. We’ll see how it goes.”

  “What do your tarot cards say?”

  She scowled at me. “His user profile says he’s a Capricorn, he works out, and he just finished reading The Da Vinci Code. I’m cautiously optimistic.”

  “What does he drive?”

  “I don’t know yet. We’re meeting at La Grenouille. You know, you’re really taking your chances with Jerry. I know exactly who I’d set you up with if you’d let me. You know my friend Prabath? The tall Indian guy?”

  I laughed. “I’m not going out with Prabath. I know you’ve got your rules and all, but I’ve got mine, too, you know. I don’t go out with guys my age who still wear Stüssy shirts and Vans.”

  “I’m not talking about setting you up with Prabath, Fee. He’s got a friend who’s perfect for you. It’s this guy Brad—he’s kind of cute. He looks sort of like Nicolas Cage.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  She shrugged and thumbed back a few pages in her book. “Suit yourself. I really think you’d like him. He’s a youth mentor. And a Taurus.”

  Seinfeld went to commercial. A woman in her thirties with wavy brown hair hanging over one eye looked earnestly into the camera and said, “It’s everybody’s little secret.”

  “My little secret,” said a black woman with a headful of sassy highlighted curls.

  “Our little secret,” added a sporty-looking blonde with a colonial-blue cardigan folded around her shoulders, her open hands patting the chest of a brown-haired guy with a big jaw who looked like Prince Valiant.

  A paper napkin, thick like the ones they give you when you order ribs at a restaurant, floated out of a box across the screen. “Soft for when you need it to be soft,” whispered the voice-over. “Strong for when you need it to be strong. Afterglow Disposable Freshening Towelettes. For the two of you.”

  I shook my head and ran my red pen over the handwriting paper in front of me, correcting W’s with long sweeping lines like Japanese brushstrokes. Across the room, Lauren sat absorbed in the hardcover book before her, orange highlighter in hand, reading The Dewey Color System.

  Jerry had flowers for me again when he came by on Thursday. This time they were roses, pink ones, opening slowly under a net of baby’s breath. I gave him a hug and he squeezed me gingerly, his fingers curled into a fist at my waist so that only his wrist touched me. In his other hand he held a six-pack of A&W root beer, which he set down on the coffee table as soon as I let him go.

  “I’ll go make some popcorn,” I said.

  “Great,” he said. “I love your popcorn.”

  I smiled at him over my shoulder, on my way to the kitchen. “It’s just the regular microwave kind.”

  “Maybe sometime we can do dinner instead.”

  I arranged the flowers in the vase from last week. “Like over here?”

  “Or at my house. Either-or. I make really good flank steak.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I put the popcorn in the microwave and came back out to the living room. Jerry was still standing near the door, his hands behind his back. “I’ll come over to your place, then. It’s always a little scary to cook in someone else’s kitchen.”

  Jerry gave me a nervous smile. His feet shifted a little. “Come sit down,” I said. “The show’s coming on in just a minute.”

  He moved over to the sofa. “I’d better sit down, then. Especially if your sister says anything like what she said last week.”

  The competition was heating up on Belle of Georgia. The girls all lined up in the same garden where they’d had the barbecue, each wearing a bikini top and cheerleader shorts with her team’s flag stitched to the seat. They had some kind of elaborate, obstacle course-looking thing set up, with a bridge over the koi pond.

  “All right,” said Brent Holloway, his hands folded behind him so that his pecs looked bigger. “In front of each of you, you’ll find a bucket filled with whiskey and a gourd dipper. Fill the gourd, run over the rope bridge, and pour it out over your bale of cotton. Once you’ve emptied your bucket, take the matches you’ll find beneath your flag and set fire to your cotton bale. Remember, the more whiskey that actually makes it to the bale, the hotter and higher your fire will burn. Once the fire burns through the rope that’s holding down your flag, your flag will rise. First team to raise all of their flags wins immunity. Ready? Go!”

  The cameras jumped back and forth between back views of the girls crouching down to fill their dippers and front views of them running across the rope bridge. Every last one of them struggled with the matches. Madison’s flag was the second to go up for the Yankees. Finally, the last Yankee flag slowly unfurled, and the girls jumped up and down in a bouncing, screeching huddle.

  “Congratulations,” said Brent. “This evening, the Stars and Stripes will fly from the flagpole on the porch. Rebels, in a few hours you’ll be sending someone home.”

  The camera caught the defeated group standing off to the side, blinking mascara and sniffling. As the rest of them walked back into the mansion, Marci stood under a magnolia tree talking to the camera. “We were that close,” she said unhappily. “We’ll make it next time. The South will rise again.”

  The show went to commercial. For the fourth time that week, the ad came on with the brown-haired woman in close-up looking me in the eye. “It’s everybody’s little secret,” she said.

  Jerry coughed and scratched Pepper behind the ears. His knee jiggled.

  “What are they talking about, anyway?” I asked.

  He glanced at me for a tiny split second. “What do you mean, what are they talking about?”

  “What they’re selling. What are those things?”

  He cleared his throat. “You know.”

  “No, I don’t. They don’t actually tell you. They just talk about how they’re everybody’s little secret. Apparently I’m not in on this secret.”

  “But they do tell you,” he insisted.

  “Afterglow Disposable Freshening Towelettes,” said the voice.

  Jerry nodded toward the TV. “See?”

  “See what?” I asked. “What’s the little secret? What are they even for?”

  Pepper ducked her head as Jerry scratched her too hard. He rubbed his hand up and down his face quickly, his eyes squeezed closed. “You really don’t know?”

  “No, do you?”

  “Afterglow, Phoebe. Afterglow.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “For after two people…you know. So you don’t have to use a T-shirt or a towel or whatever, I guess.”

  “For what?”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “Are you messing with me?”

  “No,
I’m not messing with you. I just have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Slouched over with his elbows on his knees, he turned bright pink, pushed his hands back through his hair, and said, “They’re for cleaning up the mess after you make love.”

  I laughed. “Is there normally a mess?”

  He sat back against the sofa. “You are screwing with me.”

  “Jerry, I’m not. I just didn’t know.”

  “How can you not know? It’s not like it’s easy to miss.”

  “Well, it is if you’ve never done it before.”

  He cut his gaze in my direction, his hands still against his knees. “You haven’t?”

  “No. I guess I just assumed everything sort of…stays where it goes.”

  “You mean, you’re still a…” He coughed, like he was choking on a bit of saliva.

  “Yes. I’m not necessarily up on all of these things. All I know is what I’ve heard from my sister, and she’s not exactly going to share things like cleanup hints. Anyway, she makes the same assumptions as everybody else, and so half of what she says goes over my head anyway.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t, uh, know.”

  “That’s okay. I just don’t want you to think I’m stupid. They didn’t cover that part in health class, that’s all. When I hear ‘afterglow,’ I’m thinking about what they taught us about light in my physics class in college. There must be some sexual meaning I didn’t know about.”

  “Not exactly. It’s just referring to the cuddling part afterward.” He touched my knee with his knuckles. “I don’t think you’re stupid. It was stupid of me to assume. Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  I rested my head against his shoulder, and we watched the rest of Belle of Georgia together, his folded-up fingers still touching my knee.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I’m going crazy,” said Lauren.

  I shook a box of Rice-a-Roni into a pan of boiling buttertinted water and turned down the heat. Lauren was leaning against the wall edge by the refrigerator with one fist on her hip, giving me a tight-mouthed, irritated look.

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because of that.” She pointed to the six-pack of A&W root beer on the breakfast bar. “I know you don’t drink that stuff.”