Closer Than They Appear (10 page)

Growing up, Saturday had always been cleaning day. His mother would put on some old Motown records and haul out the cleaning bucket full of bottles and canisters: Windex, Pledge, Comet, Scrubbing Bubbles. Sometimes they’d listen to
Michael Feldman’s Whad’Ya Know?
on public radio. He’d dust the living room while she watered her plants, a load of towels tumbling happily in the dryer as the background bass line. Sundays he’d have brunch across town with his father and step-brothers, maybe catch a matinee or get a pick-up softball game going at South Park. He still saw his father at least once a month, his step-brothers somewhat less than that. Holidays were always a juggle, but who could complain? They were all good people.

There was a guy in a wheelchair who worked at Target. Somehow, Zach usually wound up in his lane. He seemed to have a good sense of humor, was patient with idiot customers like him. Zach always wanted to ask him if he were single, if he found being in a chair was a help or hindrance in the dating world. He always thanked his lucky stars when he saw this clerk that he’d sold his motorcycle two years ago, that he drove defensively and soberly.

He thought he saw Andrea Wallace smelling a scented candle in home goods, her brown curls pulled into a ponytail, wearing skinny jeans and navy ballet flats, and his heart leaped into his throat and lodged painfully there for a beat. But when the girl turned around it wasn’t her.
Whoosh, went the ghosts passing him by…

And he was fine. Those bastards had overstayed their welcome, anyway.

Harper

ON SATURDAY MORNING
Harper began to prepare a picnic lunch for Dick and Sally Westfield: chopped chickpea sandwiches with kale salad and taro chips, iced hibiscus tea in a Thermos. They’d also ordered a pan of roasted veggie lasagna to freeze for the week, and she filled a deep stockpot with water and salted it. While she waited for the water to boil she sharpened her knives and created a new Pandora station based on The Middle East, a band her professor Darla had turned her on to. She was feeling thoughtful today, one step ahead of the familiar melancholy that had been dogging her all week.

Soon she lost herself in the rhythmic, nearly therapeutic chopping of onions and peppers and kale. Steam began to fill the kitchen, mingling with the rich smells of roasted garlic and sautéed onions and bubbling tomato sauce. She opened the kitchen windows wide, startling a flock of sparrows from the hedge below. Her neighbor’s wind chimes gonged softly, melodically in the breeze. Sunlight splashed onto her red crockery canisters and chrome stand mixer. She pulled the wet whole-wheat noodles from the water and began to build the lasagna, lulled by the layering process. After the lasagna was assembled and packaged, she wrote baking instructions on an index card, then turned her attention to the chickpeas. She gave them a quick whirl in the food processor, followed by more dicing: celery, green onion, olives … everything folded into a bowl with Greek yogurt, capers, a squirt of Dijon mustard, a dash of curry powder, sea salt, a few grinds of fresh pepper. She tasted a spoonful and nodded in satisfaction.

She felt herself drift while she built the sandwiches on nutty, multi-grain bread, a parade of culinary memories waltzing through her head. Her mother’s plump, crispy pierogies, her grandmother’s tangy German potato salad, the terrible quiche she made her first boyfriend in college, even a memory from something that hadn’t actually happened but was so vivid it felt as if it actually had: a long, rustic table outdoors, the sky striped with a pink July sunset, lanterns hung from a nearby oak tree, crickets chirping softly in the tall grass, and Harper walking through that cool, tall grass carrying a big bowl of cold potato salad toward all of the people she loved the most. The image was so strong she knew on some level it would happen, if she wanted it to badly enough.

When she finished she was surprised to see not two but four sandwiches lined up on the cutting board. She stared at them dumbly for a moment, then tucked each into a wax paper envelope.

She packed the picnic hamper with the kale salad and taro chips and sandwiches for the Westfields … and an insulated cooler with the other two sandwiches and a separate container of salad, another bag of taro chips and another Thermos of iced hibiscus tea.

Her heart stutter-stepped while she zipped it shut, because she was really going to do this, before she lost her nerve. It was a spring day you couldn’t deny, practically begging you to be brave, to surprise yourself, because by some strange miracle related to the axis of the sun or the weather or the new pollen in the air, your soul was actually younger than it had been in January. Robins trilled in the trees and ran determinedly across lawns, stopping now and then to cock their heads and tug long, pink worms from the earth. It wasn’t yet cottonwood season, when the air was thick with fluffy white detritus, but bits of dandelion fuzz caught the wind and swirled around her while she carried her bags to the car.

Harper hadn’t seen him all week at the corner of Franklin and Elm. Every empty morning without him cast a wistful shadow on her heart. Later, she’d walk into rooms forgetting why she’d gone into them. She grew embarrassed at how often she had to ask people to repeat themselves on those afternoons, frustrated at her inability to focus, re-reading the same paragraphs in her textbooks over and over.

A blast of explosively hot air took her breath away when she opened her car door. It wasn’t yet eleven in the morning and the molded plastic dashboard was warm and pliable, probably off-gassing strange, chemical fumes that were at that very moment tying her fallopian tubes into bows. She’d heard of people baking cookies in their cars on sunny days and made a mental note to try that on a hot, sunny day when summer had arrived in full. She turned on satellite radio and cranked her window down, pulled out of the parking lot, a feeling of anxious optimism churning in her stomach. The sky was free of clouds, and everyone seemed to be out today, riding bikes or walking rambunctious puppies or simply driving with the windows down, blissed out on the day. After a few blocks she turned right when she should have turned left if she were heading straight to the Westfields.
Just a little detour
, she told herself, smiling. When she reached her destination, her heartbeat doubled. She slowed down and tried not to look too obvious as she craned her neck for a better view.

But the parking lot of the single-story brick building was empty, except for the blue Tubes and Hoses pick-up truck and a few scraggly dandelions sprouting in cracks in the pavement. A CLOSED sign hung on the glass front door, and her heart sighed. Well, it was a long shot, and it was a Saturday. And even if they had regular Saturday hours, it was too beautiful a day to stay indoors—who could blame anyone if they played hooky today?

She pressed the gas pedal again, inhaled and exhaled deeply to shake the disappointment off. There would be other days, she supposed. She had a delivery to make, and she could save the fourth sandwich for lunch tomorrow. But in a tiny corner of her mind, she knew this about those other days: it might be raining, or cold, or gloomy. The birds could be gone, nobody flying kites or picking tulips for a bouquet. And on those days, surprise picnics would be that much harder to come by.

Zach

THE SUN WAS
blazing today—a hot, white orb that made you wonder where your bathing suit was, or maybe how long it would take for your pale, winterized skin to develop the first sunburn of the season. It actually hurt his eyes when he walked out of Target into the parking lot, bags swinging against his thighs. Back at the car, he cleaned the lenses of his sunglasses with the edge of his shirt and put them on. It was one of the first gorgeous Saturdays of the year—sixty-eight degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Too nice to clean indoors, really. Maybe he’d go to the park with a paperback, read on a blanket by the water unless the grass was still too wet or there were too many seagulls shitting all over the place. He decided to drive a bit more, maybe even stop by the Humane Society to see if there were any small, apartment-friendly dogs up for adoption. It was the kind of day where anything felt possible. He rolled his window down and cranked WOZZ—they were on a real Tool kick lately, but right now they were playing “Ballroom Blitz.” He left it on anyway, but turned the volume way down. It was nice to hear the birds singing. He became a tourist in his own city, driving aimlessly through the streets—left turn here, right turn there. He passed the stately Victorian homes on Washington, admired the old architecture of the downtown buildings, considered stopping for a sandwich at The Blue Moon.

And that was when he saw her, slightly ahead of him in her blue Kia Rio, turning right on South Main, sunlight flashing from her back window. He scanned the radio to find a better soundtrack and reluctantly settled on “Rocky Mountain Way” by Joe Walsh because every other station was playing Bruno Mars or a commercial for Kessler’s Diamonds.

She slalomed around a mini-van and he temporarily lost track of her, so he nudged the gas pedal to catch up. He didn’t want her to see him, but he didn’t want to lose her at a stoplight.
Well, what are you going to do if you catch up? She’s going to think you’re stalking her!
a small voice told him. This was the same voice that also reminded him to take a multi-vitamin, wash his bedding every other week, and pay the balance of his Visa off in full each month. It embarrassed him to acknowledge that yes, this probably did qualify as stalking, but he wasn’t embarrassed enough to stop. He passed the mini-van, but she was nearly two blocks ahead by now, in front of a white Honda Civic.

After a few more blocks, past the Dairy Queen and Tew’s Two Sporting Goods, the city fell away and you got a great view of the lake to your left. South Main turned into what most people simply called “The Lake Road,” which hugged the western shore of Lake Winnebago and offered a more scenic route to Fond du Lac than Highway 41. It was almost lake fly season, and yes—there they were, massive black clouds of them in atmospheric patches above the road. Railroad tracks ran between the road and the lake for a stretch; he heard the distant whistle of an oncoming train and stepped on the gas again, not wanting to get stuck at the crossing near Ardy & Ed’s Drive In, which always made him think of Ed Hardy T-shirts. It was open again for the season, the girls in their carhop outfits skating to and from cars in the parking lot, balancing trays of food. He considered stopping in for a coney dog, but it wasn’t as much fun to eat there alone. The boat landing across the street was packed with the trucks and trailers of early season fishermen.

At that moment the lights at the railroad crossing began to flash; he watched her Kia and then the Honda zip over the tracks just as the gate swung down. The freight train blew its horn again as it reached the crossing, and the endless procession of connected boxcars blocked any view of his mystery girl, who was sure to be long-gone by the time the caboose came on scene. And then The Fox began to play “High and Dry” by Radiohead, which felt strangely perfect and profound. He shifted into park, listening to the train’s soothing clickety-clack, clickety-clack on the rails, the familiar
DING-DING-DING-DING
of the warning bell, and laughed out loud. Because life could be so absurd. Most of the boxcars and shipping containers were decorated with colorful graffiti, which he tried to read: large, boxy lettering that didn’t make much sense but made him think of the opening montage to
Soul Train
. Pops of light flashed between each passing boxcar; he had to look away because it was starting to give him a headache. A line of vehicles began to pile up behind him, and he debated turning his engine off to save gas.

Over the din of the train he heard a faint prehistoric rattling overhead and leaned out his window to see what it was. Sandhill cranes. A pair, flying north, ready to start their summer together. They flew neatly above a flock of pelicans, cruising in a solid, low V-formation over the lake like a squadron of bombers.

Ah, shit. How could you be frustrated on a day like this?

The boxcars clickety-clacked, clickety-clacked, until finally the last one cleared. The red lights stopped flashing and the striped gate shuddered, began to rise.

And there she was. Parked down the road a bit on the gravel shoulder, leaning against her car with her arms crossed, waiting for him. Smiling in a faded denim skirt, green peasant top, and cowboy boots, her hair held back by a clip—the prettiest person ever to wait for a tow truck, to hitchhike, to patiently and bravely wait to introduce herself to the boy whose Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she’s been brightening for the last few months.

For the rest of his life, he’d remember what was playing on the radio at that exact moment (“My Heart” by The Perishers). And he’d remember the pelicans, and the sunshine glancing off the lake, and her smile, of course. And that he finally understood how it was possible for the human heart to feel both wide open and utterly full, all at once.

THE END