The Book of Us Page 6

  “I love …,” she began, staring up, her last word repeating three times after it left her lips.

  “You,” he answered, when her word began to die.

  They looked down and grinned at each other.

  “I love …,” he offered up to the ceiling.

  “You,” she answered, but this time, gazed right at him.

  They liked the same artists too. The Group of Seven room made them sit down and stare, the van Gogh paintings, the big Seurat, the Frida Kahlo, the Georgia O’Keeffes, and a double whammy of Dali had them pulling each other from one to the next. The Warhols made them smile, so did the one Yoko Ono. The abstract stuff left them both with questions, though Miranda had some good ideas about why Jackson Pollock’s works, which looked to Noah like the artist had simply spilled his paint, might be great works of art. It had to do with the paintings being “real”: honest acts of emotion put right onto the canvas, instead of pretending to make pictures that were imitations of life.

  They came home on the train, hardly saying a word, she leaning on his shoulder, then he leaning on her.

  “This is water,” he heard her whisper again.

  * * *

  20 Starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, novel by Truman Capote, an awesome author. Movie was great, the book was even better, as is always the case.

  21 Rosie told me all of this too, turning red, again.

  22 To others.

  23 Don’t laugh!

  24 This despite the fact that my apartment was closer to the bookstore.

  25 Hitchcock seemed to have a sort of fetish about his leading women in his movies. He wanted them all to be beautiful and blond. He put them into horrifying situations in scenes, and made that real for them, sometimes terrorizing them. At least one actor said he assaulted her.

  26 Constance told me, much later on, that girls never tell guys which girls have crushes on them, unless a girl asks them to. Apparently, it’s a bit of a betrayal. Amazing the rules girls have! Miranda actually looked more than “a little guilty” when she said this. I think she was just feeling great about us, trying to flatter me, and then realized her mistake. She did say it, though.

  27 More about that later.

  5

  First Trouble

  Noah was careful about being seen any time he left the apartment to go to work. It wasn’t that he didn’t want anyone to know that he had a job. Lots of kids had them. In fact, having a job was a sign of being grown-up in one of the few ways that it was good to be thought of as an older person. It was just that he didn’t want to do any explaining. He didn’t want to lie. He didn’t want to tell anyone that he was working because he was supporting his family … his family being him and his dad. The government checks his father got didn’t cover much. Neither did the fifteen hours Noah worked at the grocery store, if the truth were told. They would likely have to move again. He especially didn’t want to tell Miranda anything.

  “I don’t know how long I can keep this from her,” he whispered to himself as he held his hands in his pockets and clutched his arms to his side in his thin coat. The wind was blowing in the icy way it sometimes did in these parts in November, when it blew right into you. “Miranda Owens deserves more in a boyfriend than what she gets in me. I suppose Walk deserves more honesty from a friend too.”

  He kept his head down, hood on, as he strode through his neighborhood’s east end. It seemed like all the bad areas in every town were in the east end. Even in the Charles Dickens novels set in London in the nineteenth century, everyone feared that part of the city. His apartment building was probably the tallest in town, seven stories high. Most of the other structures in this area were government-subsidized housing, many the same color, barely even brown. There were crack dealers around here too, though not whole gangs of them like there had been in his part of the big city, where he often had to run to or from school, or at least chose to.

  “Imagine if Miranda knew I had to do that.”

  There was a house or two here though that had all the telltale signs: late night visitors, drapes often closed, not much furniture evident the few times you could see inside the windows.

  The buildings became more commercial and he could see the grocery store up ahead.

  “Me in the frozen meat department … with a vegetarian girlfriend. Imagine if she knew that too.”

  Being in that department was a good thing though, in a way, because he was almost always out of sight. Any time he had to go out into the main part of the store, leave the area where he worked behind the scenes and possibly encounter customers, he could do so surreptitiously.28 He always peeked his head out the swinging flap of a door first, checked out the aisles for anyone he knew before going out, and then kept his head down as he turned toward the meat. Customers didn’t often ask him questions. He tried to keep his bloody apron on as much as possible, figured that warded off some people. It was one of those stores built to look like a warehouse, giving the impression that all the produce inside was the cheapest in town.

  “Fits me,” he said inside his head as he went through the front doors.

  Miranda Owens was standing right in front of him, almost blocking his way as she picked up a shopping basket. What a sight, he thought, in about a million ways.

  “Noah!” she cried. She dropped the basket on the floor and threw her arms around him and he was instantly warm for the first time since he left home. Being in her arms always felt like home to him, the most like home anything had ever felt. It also made him feel as if he were just visiting, since Miranda Owens was simply too good for him. He wondered when she would figure that out.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Noah?”

  “Um … picking something up, but you know what? I also just realized that we have it … stupidly … and … I’ve got to go, got to get home.”

  “Who is we? You know you never —”

  “Sorry, Mir, I have to run.”

  With that, he turned and rushed out through the doors. As he moved along the front of the store from the outside, he eyed her peripherally through the big windows, making it seem like he was looking straight ahead. She stood still for a while, watching after him, then shrugged and turned back to her groceries. When he reached the far end of the store, he could see her through the big floor-to-ceiling windows as she headed up the aisle at the other end and turned her attention to picking the vegetables she was going to buy. She was at the opposite side of the store from the meat section. Her back was to him and then she moved out of sight. He quickly turned around, re-entered the store, slipped along the front of the row of cashiers, darted past the last one and in seconds was up the far aisle and safely through those heavy, swinging doors into the behind-the-scenes frozen meat area where he worked.

  “You’re late, Greene,” said his boss, a heavy-set man with a square nose, flat at the front. There were faded streaks of red across his white apron, which it seemed like he had been wearing since the day he started working here more than twenty years ago.

  “Yes, Mr. Swain, sorry, only a few minutes, though.”

  “Few minutes or fifty minutes, doesn’t matter; being on time counts for something in this world.”

  “Yes, sir.” What Noah felt like saying was that if being on time mattered so much, literally to the minute, and Mr. Swain had always been that punctual, then why was he still the manager of a frozen meat section in a grocery store in a small town?

  “I have lots for you to do,” said Swain. “Take the pork chops and the hams out first. Why don’t you wear a warmer coat back here?”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  The meat was packaged and lined up and ready for him to load onto a cart and put on display. That was a problem, a big one — Miranda was still out there.

  “I … I have to use the bathroom.”

  “Make it quick.”

  He didn’t. When he came back, thank God, Mr. Swain wasn’t around. Noah stood by the cart for the longest time, looking at his watch, thinking about how long Miranda would be in the store, wondering how long he could chance standing here doing nothing before Swain-Swine caught him. He could not afford to lose this job.

  After about ten minutes, he got sloppy. He turned his head away from the back office door, where Swain would re-enter.

  “Hey!”

  Noah swung around.

  Swain was glaring at him. “I thought I told you —”

  “Had to go back to the bathroom, a couple of times. Not feeling the best.”

  “What are we talking about here, a stomach issue or —”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Swain paused for a moment. “Maybe you should go home.”

  “No. I’ll be fine. I’m feeling a little better, just had to, you know, go there a few times and I —”

  “Yes, you don’t need to explain.” He glanced at the cartload of meat. “Have you, uh, washed your hands thoroughly?”

  “Yes … pretty well.” Noah still didn’t have his rubber gloves on.

  “Pretty well?” A look of slight panic came over Mr. Swain’s face. “Have you touched the meat?” He didn’t wait for Noah to answer. “Go back and wash again, very thoroughly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Noah smiled as he made his way back to the bathroom. He spent as much time in there as he assumed one would spend if washing very, very, very thoroughly. By the time he came out, there was no way that Miranda could still be in the store. He seized the cart, smiled at Mr. Swain, and rushed the meat out through the heavy swinging door … and almost collided with Miranda again.

  “Noah!”

  At this point, he realized that all sorts of things were against him. It would now not only be obvious to her that he had lied when he last saw her, he was also doing something that he had kept hidden from her for a while … and he had almost pushed a cart full of meat into his vegetarian girlfriend.

  His opening line was brilliant. “What are you doing here?”

  “Me?” she said as a look that would be best described as shock came over her face. It would have been preferable, he thought, if she had just been angry, but she looked upset, deeply disappointed … in him. “I …,” she began, “I forgot something and had to come back.” It was impressive, actually; she was almost giving him an excuse. Maybe this was what someone who really loves you does? Then her face nearly crumpled. “Noah, what’s going on?”

  It was time for his face to fall. He was tough. He had been through a great deal. This, however, was unbearable. Miranda could not be lost. She just could not be lost.

  “I … I work here. I didn’t tell you because it embarrasses me. I live with my father, just him, and we do not have very much. I didn’t want to tell you that either, any of this.” His eyes began to fill with tears. Never, even on nights when his father had come home drunk and there had been nothing to eat, had he ever cried. This was no tactic though, no calculated thing to impress this girl. He was really about to cry. It was panic time.

  Miranda reached out and put a hand on his arm right where it was dangling at his side next to a bloodstain. “I love you,” she said, “just the way you are.”

  Somehow, he had impressed her … again. He also had the feeling, though, that impressing Miranda Owens was different than impressing other girls. There was something damn near perfect about her.

  And maybe about the two of them too.

  * * *

  28 Good word for this, not just trying to impress.

  6

  Home Visit

  The relief Noah felt was enormous. Not only could he stop hiding his job from Miranda, but the release of his secret had drawn them even closer, if that was possible, and now, at least for a while, he didn’t need to tell her anything else; he didn’t need to explain exactly why he and his father were struggling.

  He realized though, that she hadn’t told him much about her parents either. In fact, after a month of dating, she had basically said nothing, and the closest he had been to her home was that night she kissed him on her veranda. He remembered the beautiful old house, the love-seat swing, the comfortable straw chairs outside on the wide, varnished boards, the glow inside, and the classy neighborhood. Miranda didn’t seem like the type to hide things though. He assumed that an opportunity just hadn’t arisen, or that Miranda, smart and cautious, was waiting for the right time to introduce him. The fact that it was taking so long, though, worried him a little.

  Sometimes she seemed like a difficult girl to date. She was busy, beyond busy. It was almost as if their dates were things that had to be fitted into her schedule. But he couldn’t say anything, and not only because he didn’t want to blow things between them, but because what she was doing on any given day was always an activity about which he couldn’t complain. She, of course, set aside a great deal of time for studying, and there were basketball games and practices, but somehow, she also found time to do other things, for other people. She didn’t like talking about it, so sometimes he had to ask her what she was doing when he wasn’t around. The things she kept from him seemed so much better than what he kept from her. Or were they?

  “Where were you last night?” he asked her, the day after she had discovered his secret at the grocery store.29 He had been excited to see her that morning and stood waiting at the front door of their school, the old entrance in their ancient brick building, where the arched door still had the word girls over it, etched into the sandstone.

  “Nowhere,” she said and rushed by him. “I’m late.”

  “I called you.” His heart had begun to pound. In fact, he had been a little terrified all night and into the morning. He had called her to talk more, still reeling from what happened at the store, still a bit insecure about it, seeking more comfort, but her cellphone had rung and rung and rung. And she hadn’t answered two texts either. What was she doing? Was she with another guy?

  “See you later!” she cried over her shoulder, smiling at him, but the smile seemed a little forced. He froze in place, not bothering to try to follow her.

  “I thought so,” he whispered to himself. She disappeared up the stairs and out of sight. “She doesn’t even want to speak with me. This whole thing, this whole relationship, was a fantasy.”

  “Hey … bozo!”

  Noah had been looking down at his shoes. Constance Mark was standing right next to him. He hadn’t seen her approach. She was likely in tow with Miranda and he hadn’t even noticed. She had caught him rolling his eyes at her opinions once or twice in the past and was likely glad that Miranda had left him. She had obviously stopped to make fun of him.

  He straightened up. “Go away, Constance.”

  “You were talking to yourself.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Actually, I think I would.” She looked up the stairs where Miranda had vanished. “Don’t get possessive, Noah.” Constance started to walk past and then turned back. “She was with me, at a seniors’ home, just talking to people. She makes Rosie do it too, at least once a week. The people there get lonely, you know. Don’t tell her I told you.”

  * * *

  “Take me with you, next time,” he told Miranda as they walked out of the same entrance at the end of the day. She had smiled at him, a real smile, and taken his hand.

  “Where?”

  “Wherever you went last night.”

  She regarded him for a moment. “People aren’t supposed to know. It isn’t the same if people know. It means you are doing it to get praise or something. That’s the way I look at it.”

  “Well, bring me along next time … and I won’t breathe a word.”

  That night, she asked him over to meet her mother. That was the way she put it, and she didn’t say anything else. It was almost as if she were inviting him because she felt guilty about missing his phone call the night before.

  When he arrived at the door, rather than letting him in, she stepped out onto the veranda with him and took him over to the love-seat swing.

  “Just so you know, I only have one parent.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” The instant that came out of his mouth, he realized it was a mistake.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Interesting question.” She paused. “After we meet my mom today … we are going to your house tomorrow to meet your father.”

  “It’s … it’s not a house.” He said it so quietly that she didn’t appear to hear.

  “My mom and dad split up a long time ago, when I was little,” said Miranda. It seemed like there should be more to the story, but she didn’t add anything. She looked down.

  “Why did they break up? They grew apart?”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” she said, lifting her head to look at him with steel in her eyes as if she were facing him on the court. “There are two reasons. The first one isn’t true, it’s a lie, and the second one is hard for me to deal with.”

  “Tell me the first one then.”

  “My father hit my mother.”