Missed Connections (7 page)

"Did you get your days off yet?" she asked.

Confused, Rob said, "Just got back from it, yeah. I think I learned some kind of lesson today. Maybe
don't follow shortcuts proposed by morons.
"

"No, I mean for the wedding. Time is getting short. It's like three weeks and you have to have your ducks in a row."

"I'm not the one getting married, Mom," Rob said. "Anyway, I don't know—"

"You do know. If you are not at my door on the afternoon of the tenth, George and Stanny will hunt you down and deliver you to me on the eleventh, with or without your best clothes, and heaven help you if you don't have your best clothes with you."

"Not a tuxedo?"

"No, that outfit you wore to graduation is good enough."

"Okay, Mom, look, I'll see what I can do but I can't promise the restaurant is going to cooperate."

When he finally got out of the shower—he found a tick in his hair, only one and it hadn't attached itself yet, but that was bad enough—he was ready to head out for that burrito and beer. He went on foot because he'd had to drive for forty-five minutes back from the hike with his back stinging from the branch whipping and he didn't want to face the car again.

The burrito place had a line almost out the door but it was only fifteen minutes till he got his order in. He ordered an extra
grande al pastor
and took his register slip with his order number, his beer, and his chips and salsa to one of the tiny tables to wait for his number to be called. His table had only one chair and the other one had been scooted over to make a place for somebody to sit at the next table. He smiled wryly when he saw that the table held Jack and the burly flannel shirt guy, along with a very professional-looking woman in her thirties and another guy in his twenties. He did some speculating about the relationships among the people. The first time he saw the burly guy, he'd had the feeling he might be Jack's boyfriend. He wasn't that much older. Now he wondered if he wasn't Jack's brother after all: this could easily be a gathering of siblings. Well, the woman could even be Jack's mother. It was possible. Rob's mother wasn't the only person ever to have a baby before she was sixteen.

Then he heard the burly guy say, "Jack, sweetie, all I'm saying is that everybody changes, and not always for the worse. I mean, there's me."

Rob decided his burrito was too big to finish so he wrapped it up and took it home to finish later. He didn't bother with the rest of the beer either.

Half time entertainments

He got the days off, but it came at a price: he had to put in extra time the week before, and accept several other days off before and after the days in question so as to make the time worth it to the boss's cousin who would be coming in from out of town to fill in. He also had to expect reduced hours for a while afterwards, for the same reason.

He lost his days off for the next two weeks, but he also had to do prep and backup work for the dinner crew on a few of those days, so he was getting out of work pretty late. In fact, Rob was pretty sure he was putting in more hours than was strictly legal, but he wasn't going to be the one who complained about it.

He was on his way home, browsing in the bookstore window, when he heard somebody calling Jack.
Not going to turn around
, Rob told himself. He still had a bit of a crush on the guy and he was still bothered by the fact that Jack didn't like him, but he wasn't going to obsess over it.

"Jack," the voice said again, closer, and a big hand fell on Rob's shoulder. Nervously, he turned to see who was accosting him. It was Jack's burly guy.

"Oh sorry," the guy said, holding his hands up as if he expected Rob to want to fight him over the unsolicited shoulder tap. "I thought you were someone else."

"No worries," Rob shrugged. His shoulder still felt the weight of the man's hand.

"You look just like him from behind," the man went on, with a nervous smile. "Sorry. It's just I was expecting him to be around here, that's why I—I probably wouldn't have mixed you up otherwise."

"No problem," Rob said again.

The burly guy's eyes were drawn towards a figure coming out of the bookstore. "There he is, okay, sorry. Jack," he said, "You're late. I got you mixed up with this guy here, real embarrassing."

"That
is
embarrassing," Jack said. "I'm nothing like Rob."

Rob thought he was supposed to be offended by that, and he almost was, but the insult just fell flat because Rob never thought he was all that special anyway. Just a nice guy.

"Oh you know him?" the burly guy asked. "You think you want to bring him to dinner with us?"

Jack glared at Rob and looked like he was about to make up some reason why they couldn't invite Rob along. Now Rob
was
a bit annoyed, "Sorry, can't consider it," Rob said. "Have to spend the evening on the phone."

There was only one phone call he had to make: to his mother to confirm that he had gotten the time off for this ridiculous wedding she had wished on him.

Jack gave him another hostile look and said, "Sorry, Chuck, but we'll have to go alone. Except for all the other people who are going with us, I mean."

"Just didn't want to fail to invite any friends of yours," presumably-Chuck said.

Jack snorted affectionately at Chuck. "Don't worry about it, you'll fail in other ways, and I will give you shit over it. Let's go."

Rob watched them as they walked off, arms around each other's shoulders, already laughing about something else.

Scene Change

Rob figured that as long as he wasn't going to be able to work for a few days before the trip he might as well go to his mother's house early. He was kind of tired of running into Jack and his burly guy friend anyway. A change of scene would definitely do him good.

It was a four hour drive down the coast to where Rob's mom lived with George and a constantly-shifting cast of children, stepchildren, friends and lovers of children, and random cousins and friends of cousins. By the time he pulled into Sera's driveway the last of the fog had burned off. The garage door was open and he could see Sera and George staring at the CRV.

"Something wrong?"

"No, we just don't know where to put everybody," Sera said.

"Not a problem. You, me, George, Stanny, right?"

"No, we're going to be eight altogether. Maria, Emily, Jaime, and Letty on the way up, then we do a switcheroo and bring back Rab because he's going up with Charles and of course Charles and Constance are going on a honeymoon, and Emily's going back with Charles's sister because they're both going to Berkeley."

"This car holds six, Mom."

"Right. So would you be comfortable driving up? You can choose who to take. And since Rab lives near you, you can drive him back."

"Sure, Mom, whatever." Rob said.

Rob killed the two days before they left rambling around the town he'd grown up in. He took out Stanny's bike and stretched his muscles as he rode around the town seeing the places that once constituted his whole world. He'd already had the big double take during freshman year, a shock of alienation after sophomore year, and a bittersweet nostalgia in junior year when he saw that his favorite video store had been converted into a thrift store. This time it was all of those things and also something else. There was something about being finished with college that was even more irrevocable than being finished with high school, as if being in college had allowed him to not quite let go of every bit of his childhood at once, even though it had felt like he was losing every shred at the time.

He carefully locked Stanny's bike at the middle school. He didn't need Stanny's ire from losing it. He walked around the back to the windbreak where his friends used to gather before school and race each other to class when the bell rang. He tried to remember the names of all his friends from that period. There were kind of a lot of them, and he'd never been all that close to any of them. He was the kind of person who was friendly with a lot of people, not the kind of person who had one very best friend. That was how he remembered it, anyway. There was his mother relating the legend of the True Best Friend from Preschool, but it always sounded like she was talking about some other kid.

Case in point: he couldn't even picture all his buddies from middle school. They were a crowd of pleasant faces and mostly ordinary names. He came up with six, maybe seven. He had a feeling there was at least one he wasn't bringing up. There was just kind of a presence, a feeling of comfort and a paradoxical counter-feeling of—what? embarrassment? guilt? shame? Something awkward, anyway.

Maybe he would run into somebody from that time and ask them to list off the old friends. Surely somebody who had stayed in town would remember better.

Minor flashbacks, not really revelatory

Rob thought that sometime in the two days he might run into someone from high school. But none of them were in evidence. He wasn't on a mission anyway.  He did feel the necessity to visit a particular burrito place and the burger place behind the high school. These trips turned into field trips for all his semi-siblings.

The high school looked smaller, of course, but it also looked paler, more wind-whipped, and dirtier. He did not feel the need to make a pilgrimage to the site of his coming out (to himself at least). It was a hallway, passing between classes, musing about something he'd read in the newspaper, when the sight of some boy's Adam's apple
had brought up the unexpected and unwanted image of licking it and he'd thought
well, that's gross, but the guy
is
pretty cute.
All the way to his next class he'd wondered about what
that
meant, and all through class—he couldn't remember which class, but he remembered looking around at the boys and the girls, evaluating them for his erotic or romantic interest, and by the end of class, he knew.

By the end of the day he'd told three select people what he had figured out, though not the image that had brought him to wonder about it. By the end of the month, all his friends were trying to set him up with some guy or other but he'd put a stop to it as fast as he could.

The whole event was unmemorable, but he remembered that much of it. Stanny asked him about it when they were having milkshakes, but Rob only told him the short version: "One day I just realized that I liked boys like that, and I only liked girls for friends. It wasn't a big trauma or anything."

Stanny said, "Nothing's ever a trauma for you, is it?"

"I'll get mine someday, probably. But it's totally not my fault your life is so full of drama, Stanny. You make that happen all by yourself."

Stanny made a face but he couldn't deny it. Though intelligent and sweet, and almost completely without malice, Stanny had managed three suspensions and a series of anxious meetings last year, and he had only graduated from eighth grade because the middle school administration didn't want him on their campus for another year.

"I don't get it," Rob said. "I mean, everybody's got something to be mad about, and if you said that's why you do stupid shit, I'd totally sympathize though you still shouldn't do it, but you say you're not pissed off or anything. You just haul off and break the faucets in science room for no reason."

"I wasn't trying to do that," Stanny said. "I was just fidgeting."

"There's got to be drugs for that, or something."

"That's what I said, but Dad doesn't like the idea. He just lectures me about resisting impulses when they come up."

"No offense, but George is not necessarily the right person to talk about impulse control. After all, plastic owls," Rob said. He didn't have to say more. Stanny nearly fell off his stool laughing.

"So, did you decide who gets to ride with you instead of Dad and Sera?" Stanny asked.

"I figure you all will let me know who wants to," Rob said.

"Me, Maria, and Emily. Letty definitely doesn't because she hates your car and Jaime—"

"Hates me. There are two people in the world who hate me and I can't figure out why either of them feel that way."

"There's another one?" Stanny asked. "And Jaime doesn't need a reason, he hates half the world."

"Yeah, there's the reader for my last class at university. Maybe he doesn't actually hate me but he really doesn't like me. He gets a look on his face like I smell bad or something."

"Maybe you do," Stanny said. "What? I mean, maybe you smell bad to him. People have different chemistries and stuff."

The roadside rest

George had to lecture Stanny about not doing anything stupid before he would let them go, and Sera had to triple check that they knew to meet them at Casa de Fruta for breakfast.

Rob agreed to let Emily and Maria take turns driving, but first he caused them to roll their eyes by saying, "I drive first so I can explain the car. It's not like other cars."

They made it twenty miles before Stanny started lobbying for driving lessons.

"No, Stanny, we're not going to do that," Maria said. "When we get back, maybe you can talk Rob into doing it in a nice safe empty parking lot. But nobody's tubing the road trip because you want to get behind the wheel and drive into a cow."

"There's no cows here," Stanny said.

"But there are cliffs," Emily said.

"You guys are no fun," Stanny said.

"Gosh, you're right," Rob said. "Don't you have a Gameboy or something?"

"No, I live in the here and now," Stanny said.

"So, are you excited to see your childhood sweetheart again?" Emily asked.

Rob waited to see what Maria was going to say. He didn't know she had a childhood sweetheart.

"Aren't you going to answer, Rob?" she asked.

"What did I miss? I was waiting for the answer to the last question."

"Emily asked were you excited to see your childhood sweetheart."

"… I don't think I ever had a childhood sweetheart. Did Mom say something about somebody?"

"Yeah, but she didn't have to. There's like a dozen pictures of you and that boy snuggling and there's the valentines too if that wasn't enough."