Some oppressive quality in the room—its small size, or its overstuffed furniture, or its dimness compared to the sunlight out on the street—made Abby feel suddenly desperate to get away. Although she loved her home, really. And loved her family, too, and had thought she couldn’t wait to finish her freshman year and come back to where she was cherished and made much of and admired. But all this summer she had felt so itchy and impatient. Her father told corny jokes and then laughed louder than his audience, “Haw! Haw!” with his mouth wide open, and her mother had this habit of humming a tiny fragment of some hymn every few minutes or so, just a couple of measures under her breath, after which, presumably, the hymn continued playing silently in her head until a few more notes emerged a moment later. Had she always done that? It would have perked things up if Abby’s brother were around, but he was away lifeguarding at a Boy Scout camp in Pennsylvania.
Oh, and here came Dane! His two-tone Buick, blue and white, slowed for the stop sign at the corner. Already she could hear the pounding thrum of his radio. She grabbed her purse and tore open the screen door and rushed out lickety-split, so that by the time he’d double-parked in front of the Laundromat across the street she was flying down the stairs at the side of the house and there was no need for him to honk. His arm was dangling out his window—tanned skin, subtly muscled, glinting with gold hairs, she knew—and his face was turned toward her but she couldn’t read his expression because cars kept passing between them. (All of a sudden there was traffic, as if his presence had enlivened the neighborhood.) She waited for a driver who made way too much of a production about having to veer around him, and then she darted across, causing another driver to brake and tap his horn. She circled the Buick’s front end and opened the passenger door and hopped in with a flounce of her skirt. “Johnny B. Goode” was the song that was playing. Chuck Berry, hammering away. She set her purse on the seat between them and turned to meet Dane’s gaze.
He tossed his cigarette stub out the window and said, “Hey, you.”
“Hey, you.”
Last night they had been all over each other but today they were playing it cool, evidently.
He shifted gears and started driving, his left arm still trailing out the window, his right wrist resting casually across the top of the steering wheel. “You look like you’re still asleep,” Abby told him.
In fact, he always looked that way. He kept his eyes so narrowed that it wasn’t clear what color they were, and his pale-blond hair was too long and hanging over his face.
“I wish I were asleep,” he said. “Last thing I wanted to hear was that alarm on a Sunday morning.”
“Well, it’s nice of you to do this.”
“It’s not nice so much as I need the money,” he said.
“Oh, they’re paying you?”
“What’d you think: I’d be getting up this early out of the goodness of my heart?”
But he just liked to sound tough, was all. He and Red were old friends, and she knew he was glad to help out.
Although it was probably true that he was short of cash. A few weeks back he’d been fired from his job. His family was well off—better off than hers, at least—but lately he’d been taking her on the kind of dates that didn’t cost much: eating hamburgers at a drive-in or sitting around with their friends in somebody’s parents’ rec room or going to a movie. He would watch any movie that was showing, especially Westerns and tacky horror shows that made him laugh, though she was less enthusiastic because they couldn’t really talk in the movies. Should she offer to pay her own way from now on? But the little she earned from her summer job was meant to pad out her scholarship. And besides, he might be insulted. He was prickly, she had learned.
They were leaving Hampden now. The houses grew farther apart; the lawns were bigger and greener. Dane said, “I don’t guess I happened to mention that my dad’s given me the boot.”
“The boot?”
“Kicked me out of the house.”
“Oh, my goodness!”
“I’ve been staying with my cousin. He’s got an apartment on St. Paul.”
Dane didn’t often volunteer any personal details. She grew very still. (The radio had switched to “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and Dane’s reedy, drawling voice was hard to distinguish from Little Richard’s.) “I needed to get out of there anyhow,” he was saying. “Me and Pop were fighting a lot.”
“Oh, what about?”
Dane unhooked his sunglasses from the rearview mirror and set them on his nose. They were the wraparound kind and she couldn’t see his eyes at all now.
“Well,” she said finally, “that can happen, in families.”
It wasn’t till they were waiting for the light at Roland Avenue that she ventured to break the silence again. “What is it you’re helping to do today, anyhow?” she asked him.
“We’re cutting up a tree.”
“A tree!”
“Yesterday some of Mr. Whitshank’s work crew took it down and today we’re cutting it up. He wants the yard to look good for the wedding.”
“But the wedding’s at the church. And the reception’s some place downtown.”
“Maybe so, but the photographer’s coming to the house.”