The Vast Fields of Ordinary (25 page)

“Okay. I’ll try.”

I waited a few seconds and then I said, “I saw her. I didn’t want to tell you this before because I didn’t want you to think I was crazy, but I saw her. Jenny Moore. I saw her in my backyard the night we were in the graveyard, after you dropped me off at home.”

“I don’t know, man,” he said with a nervous laugh. “You’ve gotta realize how that sounds, right?”

“I told Lucy,” I said. I don’t know why, but it felt like him knowing this would help. “She believes me.”

“What did you see?”

“She ran across my backyard and disappeared in the bushes. It was just a flash, but it was there. I’m sure.”

“Wow. That’s some heavy shit. I—I’m not sure what to say.”

“I shouldn’t’ve said anything.”

“No. I’m just . . . you know. It’s a lot to ask someone to believe.”

“I can’t doubt myself on this one. It happened. All those other people saw her. Why can’t I?”

“You sound convinced,” he said.

“I am.”

“Well, in that case, then I guess I am too.”

“Really?” I asked, a bit shocked.

“The world is a weird place,” he said. “Who am I to say I know everything that’s going on in it? I don’t. I know I don’t.”

“I feel the exact same way.”

There was a fat silence, one that seemed almost reverent of all the things in the world that couldn’t be understood.

“So dinner,” he said. “I work tomorrow night, so I can’t. But the next night I’m free.”

I smiled. I’d forgotten this whole conversation had started because I asked him to dinner.

“Great,” I said. “I’ll call you or text you with the details. Exact time and all that. Is there anything you don’t eat?”

“So polite of you to ask, but no, there’s nothing I don’t eat. I’m a growing boy. Some would say I’m a food vacuum.”

I laughed. “Well, cool. Sounds like a plan. I should really go now.”

“You should.”

“I should.”

“You know what’s funny?” he said. “If we did get married, your name would be Dade Kincaid. How funny is that?”

“Well, if you took my last name you’d be Alexander Hamilton. Are you saying that’s not equally funny?”

“Um . . . is it bad that I don’t know who that is?”

I laughed. “Are you serious?”

“I know he’s a history guy, but that’s it.”

“He’s on the ten-dollar bill. He was the first secretary of treasury.”

“Not fair. You’re fresh out of high school. And you didn’t get your education from Cedarville South.”

“Fair enough. I should go.”

“I should too. I promised my grandmother I’d do the dishes.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll get in touch with you about dinner.”

“Looking forward to it,” he said.

I hung up the phone and he was gone. Like he’d just been in the room a moment ago and had disappeared. I stretched out on my bed again. I stared up at the whirling blades of the ceiling fan. I thought of all the times I’d told it I was gay. That night I told it I was falling in love.

I had to work the next day. As always, I took the entrance around the back of the store. The purple-haired woman from the bakery was there, blowing the smoke from her Capri toward the metal bread racks waiting to be retrieved by the bread deliveryman and scratching the inside of her wrist with a construction orange fingernail. I’d never noticed her name tag before. It said Orla. Beside her name was a yellow chick sticker, probably from last Easter.

It was around noon when I was stocking the milk and heard someone enter the dairy cooler through the blue swinging door. I looked up, expecting to see my supervisor. Instead it was Pablo. I froze, unable to do anything or even move. He didn’t appear angry. In fact, he seemed eerily calm.

“Yo,” I finally mumbled.

He just kept on staring at me.

“I got your text the other night. Sorry I didn’t write back.” Nothing.

“Fine,” I said. “Don’t answer me.”

He walked slowly over to me, stood just a few inches away. How could someone’s face register almost nothing? I couldn’t tell if he was going to hit me or start crying or ask me to borrow a dollar.

“What are you doing here?” I said. “I thought you were working up front today.”

“So was that your new whatever?” he said.

“That’s none of your business.”

He spit in my face. It caught me off guard. My jaw dropped as a new kind of shock radiated through my body, especially in my chest. The pang of heartbreak mixed with anger and humiliation. I wiped the spit from under my left eye.

“Why are you doing this?” I whispered. “If you don’t like me like that, then why are you doing this?”

The question seemed to be too much for him. I could read the frustration in his eyes, the inability to really explain what was going on.

“So you have nothing to say?” I asked. My lower lip was quivering. I wanted to cry, but not because I was sad. I wanted to cry because I was so angry. “You just spit in my face and that’s all that you got?”

Nothing.

“Sad,” I said. “Beyond sad. Tragic.”

I turned around and went back to stocking the milk, shoving it toward the front of the cooler to be taken moments later by customers. The endless refilling. I thought back to English class, to the tale of Sisyphus.

I heard the rattle of his belt coming undone followed by the sound of his zipper. I turned around. His pants were partially down his thighs and his dick was hanging out.

“Dude.” His voice came out quiet and mangled, like an injured animal flopping painfully out of its hiding spot, and the massiveness of how sad it is to want someone suddenly fell on my head like an anvil in some comically violent cartoon.

“Oh my God.” I turned and hurried out of the dairy cooler. The back area of Food World was a maze of pallets stacked with products. Ketchup, paper towels, grape soda, macaroni and cheese. All on cardboard flats and wrapped in plastic. Their noisily bright colors flashed by in the corner of my eyes as I hurried toward the back door. Twice I checked over my shoulder to see if Pablo was following me, but he wasn’t. Of course Orla was still sitting on an overturned milk crate at the back door and smoking.

“See you later, Dade,” she said in a wobbly voice as I hurried by.

As if we’d spoken a hundred times before. As if all of this was normal. And then I thought,
How did she know my name?

The Cedarville Warriors cheerleading squad was hosting its annual car wash on the far edge of the parking lot. All the girls were in tiny shorts and bikini tops. Someone’s car stereo was playing some terrible Top 40 bubblegum crap. The girls were using the hose on each other, almost completely ignoring the gold Suburban they were supposed to be washing.

I got in my car and put the key in the ignition. I was technically supposed to be at work until three, and it was just a few minutes before noon. I sat there, ready to turn the key or pull it out. I wasn’t sure which I should do. Out the front windshield was a little grassy hill that led up to a small road, one that allowed easy access from the Food World parking lot to the mini mall across the way. Chain restaurants, a cell phone retailer, a women’s clothing store called Dress Explosion.

I suddenly felt the need to not be in the car. The interior was hot and stuffy. I grabbed some cigarettes from my glove compartment and stepped out of the car. Outside was hot too. I was already sweating. When had this started? My back was soaked with perspiration. I longed for the cold of the milk cooler. Did I want a cigarette? I’d thought that I did, but at that moment it sounded gross to me. I threw the pack on the ground. There were still at least ten cigarettes left, but that didn’t stop me from stomping on the pack over and over again.

I put my hands in my pocket and leaned against the trunk of my car and stared out across the parking lot. Cars and cars as far as I could see. I thought of the homeless guy I spotted at the car dealership lot when I was driving to Cherry’s with Lucy, of the way he gazed out in awe at all the cars.

You don’t want to be part of our world
. I was sending the voice in my head to wherever he was.
You think you want it, but you don’t. It all comes at a cost.

The cheerleaders squealed. One of them was hosing down her friend. Two suburban dad types were standing on the outskirts of it all, chuckling and nudging each other. I wanted to levitate away from it all. I wanted people to look up and see it happening. I wanted people to point up at me and say
That boy is floating away.
And then I wanted Pablo to come outside and wonder why everyone was looking up. I wanted him to follow everyone’s gaze and see me, the last thing he expected.

At seven thirty the next night I was waiting on the couch for Alex to arrive. There was the subtlest suggestion of evening, just a little shift in the angle of the sun that meant it would be setting in the next hour or so. I was wearing my favorite pair of jeans and a polo that my mother had purchased for me during our shopping spree a few weeks back. At the time I’d hated it, but that night it felt right. Pink with a fat lavender strip across the torso. I felt my mother hovering in the space where the living room met the dining room.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Your father wants to know if he should start heating the coals.”

“He’ll be here soon. It’s just now seven thirty.”

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

“A little.”

“Well, I am too, if that makes you feel any better.”

She’d already had three glasses of white zinfandel. And that was just what I’d noticed. How many pills had she taken that day? What parts of her were my mother and what parts of her were Peggy Hamilton, static-headed suburban housewife, a walking cocktail? Despite all this, I couldn’t be all that hard on her. I did drugs and drank for reasons that were more similar to hers than I wanted to admit. I thought back to one of my first nights out with Alex, the night when I thought I saw Jenny out by the pool.

“Can I have a beer?” I asked.

“Are you going to pass out in the yard?” she asked.

“It depends on how the evening goes,” I said.

“On second thought, why don’t you have an Arnold Palmer,” she said. “I’ve got a pitcher of iced tea in the fridge.”

It was just then that Alex rolled up to the house. My mother saw my expression change and looked over her shoulder out the giant picture window that looked out on the neighborhood. His crappy Citation looked so out of place against the backdrop of perfect houses. He stepped out of the car wearing baggy black pants, a short-sleeved dress shirt, and a blue and yellow striped tie. He was carrying something.

“Are those flowers?” my mother asked.

I smiled. They were.

He ambled slowly across the lawn toward the house, his eyes on the ground. Was his mouth moving? It was. He was talking to himself. Probably giving himself a pep talk. I broke into a wide grin and went for the door. I opened it before he could even ring the bell. He’d shaved. He didn’t look like the guy from
Lube Jobs 4
anymore. He looked like my boyfriend.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said. He handed me the flowers. “These are for you.”

It was a bouquet of carnations, the kind we sold in the floral department at Food World. I knew how much a bouquet of carnations cost, and in fact, I’d once overheard Judy and Jessica talking about how if a guy ever gave them carnations they’d never speak to him again. But for some reason the memory of that just made me like him even more. He’d gone out on a limb for me, stopped at some grocery store on a whim with the idea that he was going to make this night as special for me as he could. He was going to prove himself to me in front of my parents. It felt wonderful.

“No one’s ever brought me flowers before,” I said.

“Really? Pablo never brought you flowers?” I laughed and shushed him.

“Come on in,” I said.

I remembered my mother. She’d melted away for a moment. She was still standing by the couch. Her smile was a bit forced, but it was hard for me to get upset about it. This was all new. And at least she was smiling. She came over and put out her hand.

“Hi, I’m Peggy Hamilton. Dade’s mom.”

“Hi, Mrs. Hamilton,” Alex said, shaking her hand.

“Call me Peg. Actually, no. Call me Peggy.”

“Okay. Peggy.”

My mom laughed nervously. Then I started laughing nervously and Alex did the same, and all I could think about was moving away from the door, going farther into the house, and making the evening as comfortable as possible.

“Let’s go out back,” I said, leading him into the kitchen. “I think my dad is playing Grill Master. Should be fun to watch. You thirsty?”

“Yeah,” he said. He mouthed “Beer?” I shook my head.

“You want an Arnold Palmer?” I asked.

“What’s an Arnold Palmer?”