“You liked how he tucked in his shirt?” I was intrigued. I was repulsed.
“No, I knew how he tucked in his shirt. It’s different. And I was flattered. He was just out of graduate school, a big deal on campus for an article he’d published in Nature, and he said to me, oh, maybe, a month or so in, that he hadn’t told me everything about himself. He said he wanted to tell me everything, and, you know, I was nineteen. I was like, oh no, he’s a felon or a pervert or something! I was just a kid.”
“He wasn’t a pervert,” I said.
“No, nothing like that. He just wanted to tell me about his religion, he was a third-generation Christian Scientist, and I laughed at him when he said it, I was so relieved. I was really afraid of what he’d say.”
By then I could see Leo coming down the street. He was shading his eyes with his hand, scanning the crowd for the car. He had two backpacks over his shoulder, mine and Paul’s together, and the big rolling suitcase in one hand. He was half trotting as he went, khaki shorts bunching in the crotch, exposing his pale thighs.
“What happened then?” I asked Patra, feeling urgent about it now.
What I meant was, what are you trying to say to me? I felt that I’d missed something along the way, that the essential part of the story had already come and gone while I’d been looking out the window.
“Oh, I don’t know!” She must have seen Leo too, then, because her voice changed—lowered and glazed over, got sweet and cool, almost arch. “I laughed at how serious he was. Then I married him. I liked that he was serious, and I thought I stood apart.”
Together, we watched as Leo caught sight of the car. He went around back and loaded the trunk. Clearly he couldn’t see us inside, staring right at him, because when he came back around, when he saw his reflection in the car window, he took a deep breath and flattened down a tuft of blown hair at the top of his head. He plucked his shorts out from between his crotch with two fingers. But that wasn’t all.
“Watch,” Patra whispered.
An instant before Leo opened the door, he slid his flattened hands an inch beneath his belt and shoved his blue cotton shirt in deeper. It was an automatic gesture, and he looked a little flustered, as if he wasn’t sure whether he’d be welcomed back in the car—or what he’d find when he opened the door.
Patra said to me, “You think you’re as old as the ages when you’re nineteen, that you’re years past being grown up. You’ll see.”
“Everything okay in here?” Leo asked, sitting down hard in the driver’s seat.
Patra leaned forward, kissed the lobe of his ear.
He swung around to study Paul’s sleeping face, then Patra’s.
“We’re okay,” I answered for her.
The car ride home reshuffled things. The whole way Leo asked me polite but absentee questions about lake fishing and iron ore, and it was Patra who whispered games to Paul in the backseat. We sat in the construction traffic outside Duluth even longer this time around. Through it all, through the orange dust and the black exhaust, Leo spoke to me without turning his head, nodding and noncommittal about my answers. I stopped answering with more than a few words, and finally he stopped asking. An hour, two hours of silence opened up between us. Nobody suggested we stop at Denny’s on the way back. Once the construction ended, I started looking for landmarks I remembered from the day before—the purple water tower, the tunnel blasted through the hillside—but everything looked different from the other direction, and I couldn’t anticipate when these landmarks would appear. I only recognized them in retrospect, the moment we passed, and I had to turn around and watch the water tower receding in the window.
“Almost home!” Leo cried triumphantly, when the tunnel spat us out. He seemed resolved to this idea long before it was an accurate description of our circumstances. By the time we got to the old familiar highways—the ones I’d walked for years—Leo had been saying “Almost home!” for more than an hour. Then Loose River appeared in the dappled sun of the deep woods, and Leo was so elated he broke into a round of “Good King Wenceslas.” Patra joined him in an obedient soprano. My heart disobediently sank. “We’re back!” Leo announced when Patra trailed off in the middle of the second verse, so I slid my hands under my butt and imagined the car breaking down or a wretched deer in the road or any kind of calamitous barrier. I didn’t offer to get out and walk up the sumac trail. I let Leo scrape up his car driving through that dense corridor of trees in the early evening shadows.
Slowly, slowly, I retrieved my backpack from the trunk.
“‘Night!” Leo called through his open car window, turning the Honda around as soon as I slammed the trunk. I didn’t hear if Patra or Paul said anything. The backseat window was rolled up tight.