“I read about you going to Ballister. That’s great.”
I feel my face heat. “You read about it?”
“I looked you up online, back in the day. Before Google. I Yahooed you. I Ask Jeevesed you. Does that creep you out?”
“It makes me glad.” I lean in a little. He’s wearing a wool jacket. I smell aftershave, smoke. I have to force myself to lean back. “They had a great art department back then. Still do. It’s how I met Mel. That’s where we started working together.”
“And you ended up in New York.” He looks to me again. I tuck my chin down and smile. He nods leisurely, hands stuffed in pockets. “Had you pegged for a New Yorker,” he says.
“How so?”
He shrugs. Squints ahead of us. “I dunno. Let’s call it self-preservation. You seem tough. That rough chuckles thing you and Mel have going on. Seems very big-city. Especially to rubes like us.” He looks to me and his smile grows wider, goofier. It is unspeakably appealing when he turns on his dumb look, his put-on hillbilly face. The way he stretches out the word rubes. Is he flirting? I slip in another glance. Nah. Probably not.
“So how did you end up at the video store?” I ask him.
“I’m a film major who never made any films. See? It wasn’t as useless as some might think, watching all the TV we did. You went the way of Liquid Television, and I went the way of—shit. I dunno. Monstervision? Stolen HBO? Something stuck for us, is what I’m saying. Something constructive.”
“I like to think so.”
“Me too. So I took a few business classes, climbed up the ranks to Manager Extraordinaire, then bought part of it out. We’re surviving. Getting at the stuff so obscure you can’t find it online. Putting on events. I figure the niche market’s safe, for a while.” He removes his hands from his pockets, twiddles them in the air. “Very grandiose, I know.”
“That’s great,” I say. “You’re a business owner.”
He leans back and squints at me. “You look great for a stroke patient.”
I run my hand over my head. “Heh heh.”
“I just mean,” he says hastily, “my mom had a stroke a few years back—a minor one—but it was enough to make her look pretty rough for a while.”
“Is she okay now?”
“Oh yeah. Lives in a condo with her new husband. Goes to Florida a couple times a year. She blames the stroke on my dad. The stress he caused her. I let her have that one. I mean, she’s not wrong.”
“I remember your mom,” I say. “Blond. Pretty. Drove something with a drop top.”
“It was a Buick Reatta.”
“Holy crap. It was. And it was red.”
“Aren’t they always red? It’s no good as a memory unless it’s red.”
We laugh, still in step with each other, then let the silence spread and break while we search for something else to say.
“Well,” I try, “I’m glad to hear she’s bounced back. It’s scary, getting to this age where shit’s happening to our parents.”
“It happened to you.”
“It happened to me.”
God, I want to smell him again. I wonder if I would have noticed Teddy Caudill in New York—objectively, were he simply a man who looked like Teddy Caudill as opposed to the real thing. That pretty boy’s face is still pretty, with some well-placed lines around the eyes, a couple of feathery seams running nose to mouth. He’s wiry-strong. He makes eye contact. No one in New York has a face that open. I consider Louisville, and wonder how many baristas and bookstore clerks are after Teddy. How many come into his store in dresses and cowboy boots, hoping to see him.
Mel glances back at me, ticks her head. Ryan and Tatum are running circles around her, jabbering, poking each other.
“How are your parents?” Teddy asks me.
“Mom’s okay. We’re actually staying with her right now. She lives in the same house. A couple of years after Dad died—”
“Your dad died? Oh, Sharon. I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks. It was a while ago, actually. My sister and her husband bought the property where you were and built a new house there, so they’re next door.”
His Adam’s apple jumps as he swallows. “So they knocked the old house down.”
“Uh. Yeah.”
We fall silent. We listen to the back-and-forth between Ryan and Tatum and Mel—Mel holding court about some sketch technique and Tatum wagging his hands, saying, “Wait wait wait,” and Ryan punching him in the back, saying, “Dude, shut up.” We pass a head shop, a cupcake shop, another bookstore. A girl in front disassembles a sidewalk sale. She wiggles her fingers at Teddy, glancing surreptitiously at me. Something slick and familiar inside me turns over, hums. I nearly jump out of my skin. Holy shit, this is jealousy, all scales and forked tongue and lizard brain. The first stab of it I’ve felt since I got sick.
I smile wide, weirdly. I am returned to myself, new, rich blood pumping through my veins. Then I remember we’re talking about my dead dad and I try to tamp the smile down.
Teddy changes subjects. “What I meant a minute ago is that you look really healthy, for a stroke patient. Didn’t you used to have darker hair?”