“If you must.” He stepped back and put out his arms. “Let’s take a look at that downspout.”
Dash knew what he was doing when it came to gutters. Apparently the job had to be done three times a year in Ithaca. Since his father was a wounded veteran from Michigan—where you mowed your own damn lawn and took care of your own damn house—and since Dashiell was the oldest son, three times a year, he cleaned the gutters. An hour after he’d started my house, he’d not only told me all about his dad, his two-story, gutter-clogged childhood home in a frozen wasteland, and the sloped roofs that had nearly killed him four times, he’d also finished up the job perfectly.
“You ready to go?” He slapped his hands together to get the grime off.
“Sure. Where are we going?”
He lowered his voice and pointed to the driveway where my dad slowly raked the leaves. “We’re going to finish that guy’s birthday present.”
twenty-four
Vivian
Dash helped Dad with the leaves while I changed. I put on a wool maxi dress with a tiny black-and-white geometric pattern. It had a matching tote that fit a wallet, a notebook, a Kindle, a phone, and a secret birthday baseball.
Dash drove up the 101, hand in my lap, thumb stroking my hand absently.
“English lit,” he said. “I figured if baseball failed, I’d have that BA. I didn’t know it didn’t work like that.”
“Wait. Is that how you memorized so much Shakespeare? It’s freaking me out.”
“It’s a long story.”
“Okay? Were you in drama club ten years running or something?”
“English class. Seventh grade. I was just getting this weird fuzz on my face, and the thing with the voice? I sounded like two rocks smacking together. We were doing a semester of Shakespeare’s comedy and a semester of tragedy with Mrs. Newman.”
“You had a crush on your teacher?”
“A crush? Oh no. This was true love. Okay, let me start from the beginning. She was a black lady with a little Caribbean accent. A good Christian woman. Like, all turtlenecks and long pleated skirts. One day, she was marking up my paper, and it was so much red. I had no idea what to do with a comma. Still don’t. But I was sitting at her desk, and I saw her from the side, and I could see her eye on the other side of her glasses, and she had these lashes that curled up. They were short, but I’d never seen lashes with that much curl. I didn’t expect it. I felt like I was seeing inside her, and I got really turned on.”
“Oh, wow.”
“Yeah, and I realized she had breasts and hips. And lips. I mean, she was gorgeous, and it wasn’t flashy, but she was stunning. I fell deeply in love with her.”
“And she taught you how to seduce her with Shakespeare?”
“Mrs. Newman? Fuck no. Are you kidding? She’d never. I decided I was going to win her when I turned eighteen. So I memorized all Shakespeare’s romantic shit. All the sonnets. All the quotes about love and sex. I figured in six years, I’d be ready for her.”
He turned off the freeway. He didn’t continue the story. I punched his arm.
“Ow. What?”
“What happened?” I asked.
“What do you mean what happened?”
“When you turned eighteen?”
“I don’t know. I had a girlfriend by then. I mean, come on, sweetapple. I wasn’t really going to spend six years pining for my married English teacher. I just, you know, grew up.”
“But in the meantime, you had a ton of love sonnets to seduce women with. Nice job.”
He laughed and touched my face without looking away from the road. “Never occurred to use them before. I only pulled out the big guns for you.”
He pulled down a private road. The gate was open into a short stretch with a dozen big houses.
“I wasn’t that unattainable.”
“Maybe not. But it seemed like you’d appreciate it.” He turned off the car. “Got your ball?”
“Yup.”
We kissed, and I thought I’d never been so happy in my life.
twenty-five
Vivian
Greg Duchovney was a closer. He kept his hair and beard long because it was lucky, earning him the name “The Samson of Elysian.” He didn’t have more than fifty pitches in him per game, but of those fifty, eighty percent were brilliantly placed tricks of air and physics. The rest were signs he was getting tired. That was why they called him “The Forty.”
“Jesus, Wallace.” Duchovney turned the ball over in his hand, a blue Sharpie wedged between two fingers. “You John Hancock or something?”
“There’s room,” Dash said, stretching up to turn on the third air heater in the yard. The gas flame whooshed to life. “Stop whining.”