The Trouble with Lexie (4 page)

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, PETER PULLED UP IN HIS WHITE CARGO
van. Lexie had always disliked the van, but tonight she hated it. She suddenly realized why: It brought to mind perverts and pedophiles. On the sexiness scale of vehicles, the van lingered in the boggy bottom with sled-back trucks (like what Bert had driven) and '80s era Ford Fiestas (like what Mitzy had—until she totaled it when Lexie was thirteen). She knew the van was necessary for Peter's
business, useful in that it could haul materials, tools, and guitars. But the utility of it currently felt pointless. All Lexie could see was the fact that as soon as she was married, she would be an official co-owner of that van.
You can take the girl out of San Leandro, but you can't take San Leandro out of the girl.

Lexie watched Peter walk across the lot. He was all sinew and gristle—a rib bone sucked of its fat. At thirty-five he didn't have a wrinkle on his face and his hair was a boyish mop of brown curls. She had always loved his youthfulness, his wiriness, his smooth face that only needed to be shaved every third day or so. But in the time she'd waited for him (her Yahtzee game going full force), Peter's youthfulness had lost its appeal. She was pissed off that they couldn't afford a better car, and angry that the reason this car was dead was that Peter hadn't taken it in for her to get things checked out. Lexie wanted Peter to grow up and be responsible. She wanted him to be the man.

“Hey.” Peter picked up Lexie's purse and put it in the backseat so he could sit down.

“Hey.” Lexie tossed her phone onto her purse. She met him halfway between the seats to exchange what she intended to be a quick, angry kiss. But Peter didn't let her pull away. He took his long, lean arm, wrapped it around Lexie's head, and guided her in closer for another, softer, kiss. When she tried to pull back from that, he kissed her again. Lexie's eyes shut and she felt herself exhaling some anger. “Hey,” Lexie said again. She felt a little better about him. About being stuck with a piece of shit Saab and the sex-offender van.

“This for me?” Peter picked up the bag from the floor, opened it, and pulled out a rib. “What'd Triple A say?”

“It'll be at least an hour. I hope that truck won't be going any
where until the place closes.” Lexie pointed toward the license plate in front of them.

Peter held a rib in front of his mouth like it was a flute he was about to play. He read the license plate and smiled. “Owner?”

“No idea. But they've got to work here, right?”

“Definitely.”

Lexie watched Peter eat and her head and heart softened further. It was against Lexie's nature to hold on to bad feelings—an inclination that had helped her coast through her emotionally cluttered childhood with unreasonable alacrity. She knew she was a shit for being irked with him about the cars. She knew he wasn't callow and irresponsible. For all of her adult life, Lexie believed that a guy like Peter was a dream come true—even if they were sitting in a dead Saab outside a rib joint in nowhere Massachusetts. But the problem with dreams, Lexie had found, was each time she caught up to one, it started to feel less significant, and suddenly she was aiming for more. Time to be grateful, Lexie thought. Who knew how long something this good could last?

“How were the parents today?”

“Fine.” Lexie blushed and shook her head as if to expel the redness from her ears. “There was this one dad who I thought was flirting with me. I felt like I was reading his mind and his mind was very dirty.”

“I'm sure there was more than one dad with a dirty mind.” Peter put the gnawed-down, raggedy bone back in the bag and removed another rib.

“Well, I was wrong about him flirting with me. He only wants to have coffee so he can pick my brain about his kid.”

“So you're having coffee with a Dirty Mind Dad?”

“Yeah. But I think I misread the dirty mind part.”

“I wouldn't be so sure about that. Who's his kid?” Lexie often told Peter stories and news about the students. She never shared the confidential stuff, though most of that, she thought, wasn't pulpy enough to be a real secret.

“Ethan. My favorite.”

“Ethan's your favorite? I thought that girl Hadley was your favorite.”

“Hadley was last year's favorite. Ethan's my current favorite. Of all the kids I see, he's the most . . . I don't know, I don't feel like I'm talking with a kid when I'm with him. He's a more fully realized human than the others.”

“You were probably like that as a kid.” Peter pulled apart a biscuit, eating it layer by layer.

“You don't care that I'm meeting his dad, do you?”

“Why would I care?” Peter rummaged in the bag and took out another rib. “It's your job.”

“I'm meeting him off campus. He wanted to have coffee at the Inn on the Lake.”

“Rich people.” Peter shrugged. “Gotta have the best even if it's just a cup of coffee.”

“Maybe we'll be rich people one day.” Lexie leaned in toward Peter and licked a smear of sauce from the corner of his mouth.

“We're already rich in love.”

“Holy shit, my fiancé's a Hallmark card.”

“Hell, yeah. If I could draw, I'd draw a kitten crawling out of a red bucket beside a wheelbarrow and I'd say, in calligraphy,
you are the wind beneath my wings, the wind in my sail, and the . . .
” Peter took another bite of rib.

Lexie was laughing. Her prior anger had disintegrated into flecks of floating thought she had no interest in following. “And the cold wind biting my face?”

“But you're not the cold wind biting my face. You're the warm wind caressing my—” Peter took another bite.

“Your silky thighs?”

“Sounds too much like a Nair commercial.”

“Your balls?”

“Too porny.” Peter sucked the rib bone.

Lexie winced. Sometimes she felt like a pervert compared to Peter. Maybe she should be the one driving the van! “Your cheeks?”

“Yeah, my cheeks.” Peter leaned in and kissed Lexie on the cheek in a way that made her feel sleazy and oily for having thought of the wind on his balls.

LEXIE SAT IN THE PASSENGER SEAT OF THE VAN AND ADMIRED PETER'S
die-cut silhouette as he drove. The radio was on, classical, and Peter was singing along, la de de de dum dah. Soon, Peter started making up words using an operatic voice. “
The car has been toooowed
. . .” His alto was so deep that his voice cracked and they both laughed.

“
It was towed, it was towed
. . .” Lexie did her best soprano.

“
But we are in the van
. . .” Peter continued.

“
The VAAAAAAAN
. . .”
Lexie held the note until Peter laughed.

In this way, they narrated the night's adventure: Triple A assessing the car, finding that the starter was broken, hooking it up to the tow truck, and hauling it off to H and M Repair a half-mile away. There was a notice taped to H and M's door that said they were closed for the weekend because of a family wedding in New
Hampshire (
THEY'D FLED TO NOUVEAU HAMPSHIRE!
Peter boomed dramatically) and so the car had been left there, outside the garage doors, with a note on the windshield.

When they got home, Lexie went upstairs and ran a bath. She wanted to float in the tub and feel the relief of nothingness. When the mirror was fogged and the room was steamy-warm, Lexie undressed and lowered herself into the water. Everything felt satiny and smooth, like she and the water were a single fluid being. Lexie sank down so that her long hair swirled around her head like golden seaweed. Her knees jutted up, glowing red from the heat. She was almost in a trance, spacing out in the way she'd done since childhood, when Peter came in to brush his teeth.

Peter rubbed the mirror clear and stared at Lexie's reflection in the tub. Toothpaste foamed out of his mouth as if he had rabies. “I need a bath, too.”

She popped up a little and slid forward to make room for him.

Peter dropped his clothes on top of Lexie's—a pile of shed fabric skins. He stepped in behind Lexie and pulled her in toward him like the coupling of train cars. Lexie's thoughts swirled—no edges, nothing clear or articulate, everything flowing until she remembered she hadn't put in birth control.

“Pull out,” Lexie whispered, and dutifully, Peter did.

She didn't think of Daniel Waite until she and Peter were climbing out of the tub. And then she thought only how odd it was that she was thinking of him at all.

PETER SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, EATING A BOWL OF OATMEAL
Lexie had made for him and reading the
Boston Globe
on his iPad.
It was Monday; he could saunter into his studio whenever he damn well pleased. Lexie was beside him, on the phone with H and M, drinking coffee and eating a bowl of Cheerio's
O
by
O
so that Howie (the H in H and M?) couldn't hear her chew. She looked at the clock on the oven every few minutes, aware that she needed to hustle and get to Ruxton. When she finally hung up, she didn't hustle. She stared at Peter until he looked up.

“It's a lot more than the starter, and he's not even sure he'll be able to find the parts.” There it was. That irrational anger over the car again.

“Take the van. I've got all the materials I need. If I have to go somewhere I'll bike.”

“I hate the van.” Lexie gave a strained smile. She was such an asshole. What was wrong with her that she couldn't appreciate that she had transportation and didn't have to take a bus—not that there were any buses this far in the mountains.

As a kid, Lexie took the bus everywhere—she had spent hours of her life sitting at bus stops waiting. Around the time she was fourteen she began pick-and-choose hitchhiking, sticking out her thumb only if someone safe-looking was driving by. A couple times she'd stepped into a car only to find it wasn't as safe as she'd thought. There was the guy with the bottle of whiskey tucked between his legs who offered her a drink by sliding the bottle between Lexie's legs. And there was the French couple who pulled out a packet of naked photos of the wife, handed them to Lexie, and asked her what she thought. Lexie had told them that she thought she should get out at the next stoplight.

“I could drop you off and pick you up if you hate the van so much.” Peter wasn't insulted. He was wise enough to take
nothing personally. Lexie thought it was one of his better traits.

“But I have to meet Ethan's dad at the Inn at the Lake for coffee.” Lexie looked back at the clock on the oven. She had to leave within the next five minutes.

“Call him and tell him to pick you up.” Peter went back to reading the iPad.

Lexie imagined herself in the passenger seat of Daniel Waite's car. It would be a leather seat, she knew. Warm. Supple. Like sitting on a lap.

“I'll drive the van. I'm ridiculous.” Lexie reminded herself that she shouldn't be coveting expensive leather laps.

Peter shrugged.

LEXIE HURRIED OUT OF THE ROOM WHERE SHE TAUGHT HEALTH
and Human Sexuality. The semester had only started, so they weren't into the good stuff yet. For now it was simply anatomy. It was amazing how these kids, who could take the SAT in ninth grade and score in the top third, didn't know the difference between a vagina and labia. Well, they'd know it by the end of the semester.

In her office, Lexie brushed her hair, put on lipstick, and checked her face in the wall mirror. She'd worn a black wrap dress that dipped down a little too low for teaching and so she'd pinned it shut in the morning to avoid flashing her students. Lexie took the pin and readjusted it one inch lower in an effort to feel a little less schoolmarmish and a little more Californian. She turned off her cell phone, dropped it into her purse, and hurried to the van.

Her stomach churned on the drive to Inn on the Lake. “It's only a cup of coffee,” she said aloud.

Lexie parked the van in the far end of the lot where she hoped Daniel Waite wouldn't see her getting out. She circled the van, hand-locking all the doors. It was a pointless exercise in a town where nobody locked their car, and half of the residents didn't lock their houses. But even after three years in Ruxton, Lexie never left a car, her office, or the house without revving up her lifelong
Did I lock the door?
OCD. Once the van was secured, Lexie walked—head high, shoulders back—into the café.

Daniel Waite was already there, sitting at a corner table, reading the
Wall Street Journal
. He put down the paper and stood. Lexie's stomach tumbled. She often got a little nervous before talking to parents, but this was unusually forceful.

“It's great to see you again.” Daniel Waite pulled out a chair for Lexie.

“Oh, yeah, thanks.” Lexie's hands shook as she laid her napkin on her lap. Her fingers jumped—two leaping crickets—to the spot where she'd pinned her dress shut. Was it too low? Would Daniel Waite think a woman in a V-wrap dress wasn't professional enough to be counseling his son? This would be so much easier if she had taken a Klonopin.

“Did you pin that dress shut?” Daniel's mouth was open, a loose, toothy smile.

“What?” Lexie dropped her hands. She felt her face flash with color, like a peacock's suddenly fanned tail.

“I can see that little stick of silver, like you pinned it shut from the inside.” He was pointing at her, his finger only inches from Lexie's chest.

“Well—”

“It's those boys, isn't it! Damn those horny little buggers staring at Miss James so much she has to track down a safety pin and secure her dress shut!” He was laughing.

Lexie laughed with relief. “I was trying to be proper.”

“I know, I know. You got Don McClear walking around with a broomstick up his ass and Janet Irwin the sheriff's deputy—”

“I thought she was a hunting dog, sniffing you out.” Lexie felt her body easing into this. Daniel Waite wasn't so hard after all.