The Gap Year (30 page)

DECEMBER 12, 2009

A
s the sunset fades and the sky goes black, I flip over onto my stomach, prop my head on my hands like a third grader at story time, and ask Tyler to tell me, one more time, my favorite bedtime story. The one that answers the question, “Why me?”

“You’re beautiful, you’re smart, and you have a soul.”

“Madison is beautiful, and she got into Duke.”

“Right. And the soul part?”

We laugh. We are pretty much laughing at everything.

“I also like that you never wore brand names.”

“But I did. I started wearing brand names for you.”

“Yeah, I noticed those Nike shorts and I liked that too. That’s hard work, fitting in. I knew you were doing it for me.”

“How did you know that?” I play-slap at him like I used to when it was the only way I had to touch him.

“I knew. Plus you totally had the booty for them.”

“Really?”

“Oh. Really.”

He slides his hand down and pats my butt. I guess I have to thank Shupe and all that marching for something, because my butt is as springy as a bag of Gummi Bears. He strokes my hair; his fingers catch it, pull it into a fan, then let it fall slowly.

“What did you mean when you said that you wanted it to be different with us?”

“Different in every way.”

The rumble as he answers, my chest against his, makes me think of the girl I was with my head against his heart that first time and how long ago that seems. A lifetime ago.

“Different in the important ways.”

“But how? Different from what?”

“You do not want to hear any more of Tyler Moldenhauer’s loser redneck stories.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

The wall heater clicks as it switches on. Out on the highway a car passes with a stereo playing so loud the bass pulses through us. “You know those vampire books that all the girls are reading now?”

“Oh, yeah, right.
Twilight
? Or something like that.”

“That’s how I always felt. I felt like a vampire.”

“You want to drink my blood,” I joke, tilting my head to offer my neck to Tyler, wanting his mouth there.

“Well, that goes without saying. But it’s the other part. That the vampires have lived forever and they’re older than everyone else and will always be older. That’s how I always felt. I mean, I was older. But it was more than that. I always had to pretend to be ignorant. Especially about girls.”

“Girls? You were pretending about girls? God, you’re a good pretender.”

He traps me in his arms, rolls over on top of me, his hair making a curtain that encloses both of us, moves against my crotch so that I can feel him. “Yeah, I may have to start pretending again right now.”

I brush his hair back from his face and hook it behind his ears. Him talking about us together is as good as sex. Better. “No, really, tell me. About vampires. About us being different.”

He flops back onto the pillow. “You know, all that locker-room shit that starts, like, in grade school or something?”

“Uh, not really.”

“At first, it’s just guys bragging or lying about touching some girl’s tit, scoring a hand job. Shit like that. But it made me feel about a thousand years old. I always wished I could be like them, wanting sex so much, wanting to touch a girl, just touch one, but you were so scared that you had to either lie or laugh about it with a bunch of dumb a-holes even more clueless than you were.”

“But you weren’t.”

“Clueless? Way I grew up? Foster care? Ah, no. Jesus, hand jobs? I blew past hand jobs in kindergarten. Those group homes they toss kids into?” He makes a face, starts to say something, stops. “Someone should go to prison just for what they let happen there; forget the shit they personally do themselves.”

“What? What did they do to you?” I think about things I’d heard on the news. About the things that happen to kids in foster care. I think about Tyler as a little boy with no one watching out for him.

He studies me, makes a decision. “No, not that part. I don’t want you to ever know that part. Being with you. Like how we were at the quarry? It’s like none of that ever happened. It’s like everything was the way it was supposed to be. Like I was a regular kid who’d had a mom who told him if he wasn’t home at this exact time she’d blister his behind for him if he was two minutes late. Then he’d go home and there’d be sheets on the bed and she’d hold up two things for dinner and ask him if he wanted chicken pot pie or steak fingers. And he’d pick the steak fingers. Then she’d make him eat peas with it. Help him with his spelling words. Make him turn the TV off, brush his teeth. All that shit. All of it.”

“I’ll make you eat peas.”

“I knew that you would.”

“Really? How did you know?”

“I just knew. Right from the beginning I knew.”

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

T
own Square is Parkhaven’s cheesy attempt at a downtown. The last time I visited here was almost ten years ago. Back then it had been an empty block with a few saplings no one had even bothered to remove the nursery tags from, surrounded on three sides by vacant stores abandoned after the tourists that they’d planned to sell fudge, T-shirts, and wind chimes to failed to materialize. There was a swing, but Aubrey and I were always alone playing on it and that had depressed me so much that I made a point of avoiding Town Square. A fact that Aubrey was well aware of.

As Martin and I approach, it is clear that Town Square is not quite so dire any longer. It certainly isn’t deserted. Signs of life abound. The scrubby trees have grown into broad-leafed oaks shading the park where a pack of boys in droopy shorts and thick-soled tennis shoes perform skateboard tricks on the sidewalks. Moms sit around on benches while their offspring romp on safety-engineered play equipment. Businesses have opened on the streets around the park: a card shop, a coffee shop with a display case of cookies and muffins in the window, an antique store, a Thai restaurant, a shop advertising custom tilework, and a clothes store with a rack of summer dresses marked for clearance displayed on the sidewalk.

The block at the far end of the park is still vacant except for an overgrowth of weeds and one single, solitary vintage Airstream trailer. Even shaded by the tall oaks, the polished aluminum pill bug’s mirror finish shines like a huge, segmented silver bead. In spite of the new life around Town Square, the trailer is still too shiny, too hip for Parkhaven. A Grand Opening banner flaps bravely above the trailer. A few twinkle lights twined over the trailer’s humped arc try for a festive touch. After the genuine gaiety of the street-fair atmosphere in Sycamore Heights, they seem forced and unconvincing.

We park out of sight and sneak in on foot for a closer look. Never taking his eyes off the trailer, Martin points to our right like the leader of a reconnaissance patrol silently signaling to his men, and we tack off at an angle that will keep us out of Aubrey’s sight lines.

We hide behind the racks of sale items outside the clothes store for a long time while Martin watches a form that I know to be Aubrey, moving about inside the trailer. Within the shiny frame of the silver window she moves with efficient grace, doing things I never taught her to do, off on a field trip I never signed a permission slip for.

Martin is mesmerized, grinning as he watches his daughter for the first time in sixteen years. He doesn’t seem to notice that there is no one, not one single customer, outside the trailer.

DECEMBER 12, 2009

I
snuggle up next to Tyler and we watch the last wisps of the sunset like a happy old couple tuning in their favorite show. Finally, the darkness outside pulls us from our secret underwater world, back to the surface, back into the room. That and Tyler’s stomach growling.

I switch on the bedside lamp. Tyler slugs his gut as if to knock the growl out. But it just keeps growling. “OK, Aubrey Jean, two problems. We haven’t eaten since last night, and you have to call your mom. I’m gonna go out and solve the first one.”

He gets out of bed. I notice his crotch and say, “I can’t believe I ever thought you were gay.”

He looks down at himself, laughs. “What do you think now?”

“Not. Not gay. I also thought you might be a secret Christian with an abstinence pledge.”

“All true. I am a secret gay Christian.” He pulls his jeans on.

“My other theory was that you might want me to spank you or put on an animal costume.”

“Girl, you are a freak.” He grabs his keys off the nightstand and grips them between his lips. They jingle as he hops from one foot to the other, tugging on his boots. Not bothering with a shirt, he throws on his jacket, points to me as he opens the door. “Call your mom.”

“She’ll just scream and tell me I have to come home.”

He points again and gives me a stern look, the way a strict father would. I hold up my phone in surrender.

“Call her. Then get out the hairbrush and antlers and be ready for me when I get back.”

After he leaves, I sit on the bed hugging my knees for a long time. My lips are tender, sore and soft from being kissed. My hair smells like him and like the smell we made together. When I shower, I wish I could save every drop of water that streams away. That I could distill it and bottle the essence to have forever.

Then I call my mom.

Tyler comes back holding a red-and-white pizza box with drinks in thirty-two-ounce cups and a bouquet of flowers balanced on top. He gives me the flowers. They are your average grocery-store bouquet, chrysanthemums, carnations dyed blue, leathery ferns. They are more beautiful than the aurora borealis sunset.

He holds the box out to me like a snooty waiter as he kicks the door closed with his foot. “Mademoiselle ordered the Grease and Dough Lovers Special.” He is happier than I’ve ever seen him. Bringing me pizza, taking care of me, makes him happy.

He notices my face. “What’s wrong?”

I put my nose next to a droopy daisy and pretend that it has a smell. “My mom.”

He puts the box and drinks down. “What?”

“I think she’s serious. If I don’t come home, she’s seriously going to call the cops.”

“Shit. I thought we’d get to sleep together tonight. You know, sleep.”

“Yeah, me too. I guess we’d better leave. This would mess up your scholarships, wouldn’t it? Scare off the recruiters if they hear?”

Tyler snorts and smiles with one side of his mouth. “Yeah, I’m really worried about recruiters and scholarships.”

“You don’t care?”

“Me?” He taps his chest, looks behind himself, acts like I’m talking to someone else. “A.J., I told you, I am done. So this? Going back? This is totally your decision. But I like that your mom’s freaked out and ready to call the cops. She’s protecting you. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“Can you eat and drive?”

“Can’t hardly digest without a steering wheel in my hand.”

I slide my legs out from under the covers. My feet touching the dirty carpet brings me back to earth and I sag. Thinking of returning to Parkhaven, to school, to my mom makes me more tired than I have ever been in my life.

“We’ll have other nights together. We’ll have years together.”

“We will?”

“We will.” Tyler takes my hands, hauls me to my feet. “Now show me some hustle, Lightsey!”

Instead, I put my arms around his neck, say, “Tyler Bronco Moldenhauer, I love you.”

Tyler puts his hands on either side of my face. “Aubrey Jade Lightsey, I love you.”

“You know my name.”

“I knew your name before you were born.”

It is cheesy. But sometimes cheesy can be true.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

W
ithout taking his eyes off Aubrey, Martin tells me, “She moves like you. Graceful and determined. Knows exactly what she’s doing.”

Though I can’t conjure up any such moments of certainty, I have accepted that, somehow, Martin and Aubrey believe that I always knew what I wanted and was implacable in getting it. “She has your eyes.”

“I thought she might. From the Facebook photos. Everything else is you, though. Thank God.”

“She’d love to meet you.” I point to the trailer. “There’s no one there.”

“No. This isn’t the right time for that. This is her time. Can we stay here for a while longer? Just watch her?”

“Sure, Martin. Of course.”

We spy on them from our hidden spot for a long time until Martin says, “Be right back,” and ducks into the clothing store behind us. I assume he’s going to search out a restroom, but through the store window I watch him charm the owner into letting him use her computer.

On the square, the businesses all around close. One by one, the lights in the card store, the tile store, the coffee shop go out; the owners emerge and stroll down the block to line up and buy dinner from the newcomers to Parkhaven Square. They’re obviously a tight group. They chat amiably, joke with one another as they carry their food to the tables chained to the tall oaks, then eat and visit as the sun sets and the day starts to cool.

Martin is back by my side when Aubrey opens the trailer’s door. As she stoops through the low doorway and puts her foot onto the metal step, her new neighbors, the other business owners, hold up their cups and the paper trays of the food Aubrey made, and cheer her. Tyler hangs back at the open doorway, letting Aubrey have her moment.

Martin whispers to me as if Aubrey were near enough to hear, “This area, very good location. Very underserved. Ripe for exactly what she’s doing.”

All I can think is that I’m watching a thirty-thousand-dollar party.

“Can you believe she did this all by herself? She’s so intrepid, isn’t she?”

“I still haven’t gotten past the lying and fraud.”

“We’ll deal with that.”

I don’t know how I feel about him saying “we,” but I don’t comment, and Martin never stops gazing at his daughter.

A pair of young men, one wearing a fedora, both in short-sleeved Western shirts, hurries past us, heading toward the trailer. They stare into iPhones as if they were holding Geiger counters that will lead them to the places that are hot.

“I knew it,” Martin says. “I knew that the foodies would be all over this.”

One of the young men pauses to read the name off a street sign, then works his thumbs, checking the spelling of the street as he enters that information.

Martin nods gleefully at the busy thumbs. “Let the Tweets begin.”

I point a finger behind me at the clothing store computer he had borrowed earlier. “Did you …?”

“Yep. Got the word out. The kids’ complete lack of business savvy actually works in their favor with the cognoscenti. Foodies live for a discovery like this.”

The kids. He called them “the kids.
”

He was right. More clumps arrive. They’re mostly young with interesting haircuts, all of them eager, filled with purpose. Like shoppers on Black Friday, rushing to get a cut-rate laptop, they hurry to the order window, eat their food, discuss, trade bites, begin texting. A little while later, more clumps arrive.

We keep up our stakeout as it grows dark and the twinkle lights really do seem festive shining down on tables full of customers. After each new surge, Tyler comes out and wipes some menu item off the dry-erase board that we are too far away to read.

“Oh, that is fantastic,” Martin says. “They’re running out of food.”

“That’s good? Seems like poor planning to me.”

“No, it’s really good. Foodies love scarce and hard-to-get only slightly more than they love exotic. Hey, look, they’re taking menus with them.”

It’s true; almost everyone grabs a menu from the rack outside the order window. When a couple hustles past us—both of them in thick, black, dorky-chic glasses—Martin asks if he could have one of the menus they’ve taken.

“It’s my daughter’s place,” he explains. “But we don’t want to intrude on her big night.”

The young woman hands him a menu, tells him that the food is “surprisingly imaginative” and that they’re coming back. “Soon.”

Martin and I read the menu together. At the top of the sheet is the name “FalaFellows.”

“FalaFellows?” I say out loud.

I read and reread the menu my daughter has created. In addition to daily specials like coffee-braised brisket and chicken and dumplings, their mainstay is falafel, a salad with blood oranges, and mint tea.

“What a hodgepodge,” I conclude. “They might get a few first-night curiosity seekers, but all the people around here really want is burgers.”

“Cam, don’t you see?” Martin stares at me both amazed and exasperated. “Don’t you get it?”

“Get what?”

“Those are the foods we ate in North Africa.”

“Well, yeah. North African food and then a random assortment of other things.”

Flabbergasted, he says, “Camille, our daughter is making the foods we ate when we fell in love.”

The aromas of cumin, garlic, onion, cilantro, and chickpeas overtake me, overtake my anger and disappointment. For a long time I watch Aubrey moving inside the trailer, lit up like an actress onstage, and I experiment with this feeling of being offstage, of not having the leading role in her life. It hurts. College must have been invented to ease parents’ pain, an institution devoted to helping everyone separate at the same time.

Martin betrays no mixed emotions; he is openly smitten. He beams the sort of paternal pride I wanted so badly to see on the face beside me at every Christmas pageant and band concert I ever attended by myself. It is so clear that he loves her the way I do—insanely—that I say, “I miss her.”

“Of course you do.”

“She’ll never be little again.”

“No, she never will.”

“She’ll never grow up with a father.”

“She won’t.”

“This part is over.”

“But a new part is starting.”

“I’m not ready for the old one to end. I never taught her to change a tire.”

“Cell phones.”

“She has no idea how to check for a tripped switch in the fuse box.”

“Google.”

“God, look at her.” Like so much else that seems to be happening without my permission, tears start running down my face. I squeegee them away. “I didn’t even think she was listening. I thought she hated my stories. Shit, I thought she hated cooking. What else don’t I know about the person I love the most in the whole world?”

“You know all the important stuff.”

“But this?” I hold my hand out to indicate the entire world that my daughter has created without my knowledge.

Martin asks, “Do the roots know the tree that grows above them?”

I wrinkle my eyebrows in warning and he hurries to add, “That’s not from Next.”

“In that case, it’s not a bad metaphor.”

“Okay, it
is
from Next.”

“You, Martin Lightsey, you are such a jackass!”

“Oh, we have firmly established my jackassnificence already, haven’t we?”

I laugh. Martin could always make me laugh.

I want him to hold me. I want for us to have raised the daughter we’re watching over now. I want for us to have raised her together amid a happy bounty of friends and families.

But laughing … laughing transports me to a place that is neither before nor after sixteen years ago but only right now, watching our beautiful girl dancing in the spotlight, doing what makes her happy.

Laughing is good. For right now, this one, singular moment, laughing is enough.