Everyone in the school district knows about Ben and Gillian; the news has gone through the neighborhood like a grass fire. Even the janitor has congratulated Ben on his good fortune. They’re the couple watched by neighbors and discussed at the hardware store and at the bar of Bruno’s Tavern. Dogs follow them when they go out for a walk; cats congregate in Ben’s backyard at midnight. Each time Gillian sits on a rock at the reservoir with a stopwatch to time Ben as he runs, the toads climb out of the mud to sing their deep, bloodless song, and by the time Ben has finished with his run he has to step over a mass of damp gray-green bodies in order to help Gillian down from her rock.
If they’re out together and Ben accidentally meets one of his students, he gets serious and starts to talk about last year’s final exam or the new equipment he’ll be setting up in the lab or the countywide science fair in October. The girls who have been in his classes become wide-eyed and mute in his presence; the boys are so busy staring at Gillian they don’t pay attention to a word he says. But Gillian listens to him. She loves to hear Ben talk about science. It makes her stomach flip over with desire when he starts to discuss cells. If he mentions the pancreas or the liver, it’s all she can do to keep her hands off him. He’s so smart, but that’s not the only thing that gets to Gillian—he acts like she is, too. He assumes she can understand what the hell he’s talking about, and just like a miracle, she does. For the first time she grasps the difference between a vein and an artery. She knows all the major organs, and what’s more, she can actually recite the function of each, not to mention its placement in the human body.
One day, Gillian completely surprises herself by driving to the community college and signing up for two classes that start in the fall. She doesn’t even know whether she’ll be here in September, but if she should happen to stay on, she’ll be studying earth science and biology. At night, when she comes home from being with Ben, Gillian goes to Antonia’s room and borrows her Biology I textbook. She reads about blood and bones. She traces the digestive system with the tip of her finger. When she gets to the chapter on genetics she stays up all night. The notion that there is a progression and a sequence of possibilities when dealing with who a human can and will be is thrilling. The portrait of Maria Owens above Kylie’s bed now seems as certain and as clear as a mathematical equation; on some nights Gillian finds herself staring at it and she has the feeling she’s looking into a mirror. Of course, she always thinks then. Math plus desire equals who you are. For the first time she has begun to appreciate her own gray eyes.
Now when she sees Kylie, who looks enough like her that strangers assume they’re mother and daughter, Gillian senses the connection in her blood. What she feels for Kylie is equal parts science and affection; she would do anything for her niece. She’d step in front of a truck and trade away several years of her life to ensure Kylie’s happiness. And yet Gillian is so busy with Ben Frye, she doesn’t notice that Kylie is barely speaking to her in spite of all this affection. She’d never guess that Kylie has been feeling used and cast aside ever since Ben entered the picture, which is especially painful for her, since she took her aunt’s side against her mother in the birthday debacle. Even though Gillian took her side, too, and is the only one on earth to treat Kylie like a grownup rather than a baby, Kylie has felt betrayed.
Secretly, Kylie has done mean things, nasty tricks worthy of Antonia’s malice. She put ashes in Gillian’s shoes, so her aunt’s toes would be dirty and smudged, and even added some glue for good measure. She poured a can of tunafish down the bathtub drain, and Gillian wound up bathing in oily water that had such a strong scent four stray cats jumped in through the open window.
“Is something wrong?” Gillian asked one day when she turned to see Kylie glaring at her.
“Wrong?” Kylie blinked. She knew how innocent she could seem if she wanted to. She could be an extremely good girl, just the way she used to be. “What would make you ask that?”
The very same night Kylie had five anchovy pizzas delivered to Ben Frye’s house. Being resentful was an awful feeling; she wanted to be happy for Gillian, really she did, but she just couldn’t seem to manage it until one day she happened to see Gillian and Ben walking together by the high school. Kylie was on her way to the town pool, with a towel draped over her shoulder, but she stopped where she was, on the sidewalk outside Mrs. Jerouche’s house, even though Mrs. Jerouche was known to come after you with a hose if you walked across her lawn, and she had an evil cocker spaniel, a prize bitch named Mary Ann, who ate sparrows and drooled and bit little boys on the ankles and knees.
A circle of pale yellow light seemed to hover around Ben and Gillian; the light rose higher, then fanned out, across the street and above the rooftops. The air itself had turned lemony, and when Kylie closed her eyes she felt she was in the aunts’ garden. If you sat there in the shade during the heat of August, and rubbed the lemon thyme between your fingers, the air turned so yellow you’d swear a swarm of bees had gathered above you, even on days when it had done nothing but rain. In that garden, on hot, still days, it was easy to think about possibilities that had never crossed your mind before. It was as if hope had appeared out of nowhere, to settle beside you, and it wasn’t going anywhere, it wasn’t going to desert you now.
On the afternoon when Kylie stood in front of Mrs. Jerouche’s house, she wasn’t the only one to sense something unusual in the air. A group of boys playing kickball all stopped, stunned by the sweet scent wafting down from the rooftops, and they rubbed at their noses. The youngest turned and ran home and begged his mother for lemon pound cake, heated, and spread with honey. Women came to their windows, leaned their elbows on the sills, and breathed more deeply than they had in years. They didn’t even believe in hope anymore, but here it was, in the treetops and the chimneys. When these women looked down at the street and saw Gillian and Ben, arms looped around each other, something inside them started to ache, and their throats got so dry only lemonade could quench their thirst, and even after a whole pitcherful, they still wanted more.
It was hard to be angry with Gillian after that, it was impossible to resent her or even feel slighted. Gillian was so intense when it came to Ben Frye that the butter in Sally’s house kept melting, the way it does whenever love is under a roof. Even the sticks of butter in the refrigerator would melt, and anyone who wanted some would have to pour it on a piece of toast or measure it out with a tablespoon.
On nights when Gillian lies in bed and reads biology, Kylie stretches out on her own bed and leafs through magazines, but really she’s watching Gillian. She’s feeling lucky to be learning about love from someone like her aunt. She’s heard people talking; even the ones who feel the need to point out that Gillian is trash seem envious of her somehow. Gillian may be a waitress at the Hamburger Shack, she may have little lines around her eyes and mouth from all that Arizona sun, but she’s the one Ben Frye’s in love with. She’s the one who has that smile on her face, night and day.
“Guess what the largest organ in the human body is,” Gillian asks Kylie one evening when they’re both in bed reading.
“Skin,” Kylie says.
“Wise guy,” Gillian tells her. “Know-it-all.”
“Everybody’s jealous that you got Mr. Frye,” Kylie says.
Gillian goes on reading her Bio I book, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t listening. She has the ability to talk about one thing and concentrate on another. She learned it from all that time she spent with Jimmy.
“That makes him sound like he was something I picked up in a store. Like he was a grapefruit, or something on sale, and I got him half-price.” Gillian wrinkles her nose. “Anyway, it wasn’t luck.”
Kylie rolls onto her stomach so she can study her aunt’s dreamy face. “Then what was it?”