“It’s funny, you know,” Claire continued. “I know how things are always changing under the surface, and just because you don’t observe them doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. But when I saw Seth turning that cord over and over, and the head of it bobbing like he had a mouse in his hand, I knew then that period of my life was over. I wondered if he was fired, but I didn’t ask. Finally, he said to me, ‘I’ve found a way to make some money. But it isn’t, you know, exactly legal.’ ‘What do you mean by exactly?’ I asked him. It turns out he was running drugs for a man he knew who had offered him several hundred dollars to take a bundle of marijuana to Florida. He would borrow the man’s car and run it down there, and then bring back the cash. This didn’t necessarily alarm me at the time. I remember thinking it wasn’t cocaine, or heroin, only weed, and that he’d be back in three days. Seth told me he would be leaving the next morning.
“When he did, I went to work at the store and made sandwiches, just like every other day, but I remember how that afternoon even the store and the Korean man who owned it seemed changed. I noticed for the first time how boxes of condiments in the storeroom were covered with dust, and that someone had drawn into the dust a word in Korean script. They’d been sitting there a long, long time. And toward three o’clock, when people stopped coming in for lunch, and I was only doing the next day’s prep work, a man came in and spoke to my boss a single sentence in a whisper, and then the man handed him a playing card that was cut in the corner. I figured it had something to do with gambling, and I knew not to say anything. But it helped me recognize that after Seth had gone, whatever could have been described as the innocence of that period of my life had passed.
“Those nights I missed Seth. But I was also thinking how little I knew about him. I’m not saying he deliberately kept things from me, because I don’t think he did. But I realized that our time was about learning what our bodies liked, and drinking enough that our memories of what brought us to each other receded. When he was gone, I could remember only one story he’d told me about his childhood, a time when he went fishing with his grandfather, and how he’d hooked a big bluegill and got so excited that he stood up in the boat and went over the side, and when his grandfather pulled him out of the water he was still gripping the pole in his free hand, and the fish was still on the line.”
She stopped for a few moments, and Genevieve asked, “Why do you think he told you that story?”
“I don’t know, Genevieve. I think it was one of those days for him that seemed perfect in some way.”
Genevieve shifted onto her elbow, her face dim in the starlight.
“When I was a kid, I had a friend, and one spring day we hid in the woods and pretended we were both Snow White, and we held out our fingers for the birds to light on them like they did in the cartoon. And one actually flapped about a foot away from my finger before it realized I wasn’t a tree. That was a great day. Do you have any favorites?”
Despite herself, Claire smiled. “You like birds, don’t you, Genevieve?”
“Well, they can fly,” she said.
She laughed at this. “Yes, I suppose they can. But I already told you about that time in northern Michigan, on that river, when I was sixteen. Those were perfect days.”
“Any others?”
“I’m sure there are.” She thought about it for a few seconds. “I had a friend, too. Her name was Chloe. And I remember one of our rituals most summer afternoons was a long walk around a nearby lake to a candy store. We couldn’t have been more than ten years old. We’d get a dollar from our mothers and go out and buy some kind of treat; I think it gave our moms a break for the afternoon. One time when we were walking, we saw a dead squirrel on the street, and we felt sorry for it. We were both pretty squeamish about dead things, but I grabbed a long stick and pushed it into the high grass along the shoulder of that road. And when I was done, I started smelling my hand because I’d been pushing the squirrel’s little corpse, and Chloe said, ‘What’s the matter, Claire? You afraid your hand’s gonna smell like stick?’ And something about that struck us so funny, that we collapsed laughing, right along the side of the street.”
Genevieve laughed at this quietly, and then said, “That’s a nice memory.” Claire wasn’t certain, but this may have been the first time she heard her laugh. Neither of them said anything for a while. Something fluttered by the hood of the truck, an insect, but then flew off again.