“Jimmy Cummings said to give you a call. Would you like to meet somewhere later?”
We arranged to meet after her shift, and she had me write down directions to her house. At the bottom of the page, I doodled the name: Gustav.
she answered the door and stepped straight out to the porch, the afternoon sunlight stippling across her face and yellow sundress. Out of the shadows, she dazzled. All at once, it seems in retrospect, she revealed what I grew to adore: the asymmetrical mottling of the colors in her irises, a blue vein snaking up her right temple that flashed like a semaphore for passion, the sudden exuberance of her crooked smile. Tess said my name and made it seem real.
We drove away, and the wind through the open window caught her hair and blew it across her face. When she laughed, she threw back her head, chin to the sky, and I longed to kiss her lovely neck. I drove as if we had a destination, but in our town there was no particular place to go. Tess turned down the radio, and we talked away the afternoon. She told me all about her life in public school, then on to college, where she had studied nursing. I told her all about parochial school and my aborted studies in music. A few miles outside of town, a new fried-chicken joint had opened recently, so we bought ourselves a bucketful. We stopped by Oscar’s to steal a bottle of apple wine. We picnicked on a school playground, abandoned for the summer except for a pair of cardinals on the monkey bars, serenading us with their eight-note song.
“I used to think you were the strangest bird, Henry Day. When we were in elementary school together, you might have said two words to me. Or anyone. You were so distracted, as if you heard a song in your head that no one else could hear.”
“I’m still that way,” I told her. “Sometimes when I’m walking down the street or am quiet by myself, I play a tune, imagine my fingers on the keys, and can hear the notes as clear as day.”
“You seem somewhere else, miles away.”
“Not always. Not now.”
Her face brightened and changed. “Strange, isn’t it? About Oscar Love, that boy. Or should I say two little boys, alike as two pins.”
I tried to change the subject. “My sisters are twins.”
“How do you explain it?”
“It’s been a long time since high school biology, but when an egg divides—”
She licked her fingers. “Not twins. The drowned boy and the lost boy.”
“I had nothing to do with either one.”
Tess swallowed a sip of wine and wiped her hands with a napkin. “You are an odd one, but that’s what I liked about you, even when we were children. Since the first day I saw you in kindergarten.”
I sincerely wished I had been there that day.
“And when I was a girl, I wanted to hear your song, the one that’s playing in your head right now.” She leaned across the blanket and kissed me.
I took her home at sunset, kissed her once at the door, and drove home in a mild euphoria. The house echoed like the inside of an empty shell. The twins were not home and my mother sat alone in the living room, watching the movie of the week on the television. Slippers crossed on the ottoman, her housecoat buttoned to the collar, she saluted me with a drink in her right hand. I sat down on the couch next to the easy chair and looked at her closely for the first time in years. We were getting older, no doubt, but she had aged well. She was much stouter than when we first met, but lovely still.
“How was your date, Henry?” She kept her eyes on the tube.
“Great, Mom, fine.”
“See her again?”
“Tess? I hope so.”
A commercial broke the story, and she turned to smile at me between sips.
“Mom, do you ever . . .”
“What’s that, Henry?”
“I don’t know. Do you ever get lonely? Like you might go out on a date yourself?”
She laughed and seemed years younger. “What man would want to go out with an old thing like me?”
“You’re not so old. And you look ten years younger than you are.”
“Save your compliments for your nurse.”
The program returned. “I thought—”
“Henry, I’ve given this thing an hour already. Let me see it to the end.”