He sighs. In the bright sunlight ahead, Joy Luck has crossed a bridge and started up a hill toward the redbrick fortress. She’s dwindled in the sunlight from a flesh-and-blood girl, with muscles gliding beneath her skin, her apple tattoo winking over her jeans, to an incorporeal, impressionist squiggle that means Girl, a couple of charcoal lines narrow in the middle and wide at the hips. He stands and steps out into the sunlight again and starts after her. Stella, Stella, Stella, he’s thinking, how’d that happen? She’s even met his mother, once, through no fault of Kevin’s, the day his mother asked him and his sister to come sort through the junk in the basement in Royal Oak. At last she was selling the old house and moving into a condo—“If you want any of this stuff,” she warned him over the phone, “it’s speak now or forever hold your peace”—and Stella invited herself along, as pert as Sarah Jessica herself in white tennis shorts and a ball cap with her bushy pony tail tugged through the back. She and Mom yakked it up in the kitchen, drinking highballs at one on a Saturday afternoon while Kevin and Kathleen sweated and sneezed in the basement, going through mold-spotted cardboard boxes full of nameless crap that Kevin, honest to God, had hoped never to see again.
“Ohmigod!” he heard Stella cry as he stumbled up out of the basement. “You’re not getting rid of this, are you?” Through the archway he saw Mom in the living room, swinging her leg in the rocking chair, dangling her second or third highball from her bent wrist. He got himself a glass of water at the kitchen sink, then came in and saw Stella bent over the back of the sofa, running her palms sensuously over the nubbly fabric. It used to be white, but now it was dirty white like an old dog, kind of gray, really, with cigarette burns and other unidentifiable stains that no combination of flipping the cushions could disguise.
“If you want to haul it out of here, hon,” Kevin’s mother said, “it’s all yours.”
Stella characteristically overdid her gratitude, dropping her jaw and widening her eyes at Mom. “No way,” she said, stamping her foot. “You are not.”
Mom shrugged and swiveled the tall glass up to her lips. Even backlit, with the afternoon light pouring in the picture window behind her, Kevin could see the lipstick print on the glass. “Take it,” she said.
Stella pivoted to Kevin and theatrically batted her eyes, a little girl who wants a pony. But before she actually said a word, Kevin slumped in the archway — God, he hated that fucking couch — and said, “Where you gonna put it?”
Not “Where are we going to put it?” He was careful never to say “we” with Stella, not like Stella ever noticed. But Mom did.
“Well.” Stella actually shifted her hip and cupped her elbow and put a forefinger to her cheek — just like Jack Benny, though she wouldn’t have had the slightest idea who Jack Benny was. “We could put it in my place,” she said, watching him, “until you get rid of that awful futon, slash sofa, slash whatever in your living room.”
Kevin’s mom gave him a look, and they each drank from their respective glasses, like a salute.
A little later, as Stella was squealing with delight over God knows what in the basement with Kathleen, Kevin’s mother asked him, “So how old is this one.” Very flat, more a statement than a question.
Kevin hesitated, because he didn’t know what Stella had told her. “Early thirties?” he said, like he wasn’t sure himself. He knew better than to try to lie to his mother. “Never kid a kidder” was her motto.
“How do you do it?” she said.
“Do what?” This was an old routine, Mom sounding more like an ex-wife than his mother.
“You don’t make that much money,” she said. “You’re not the best-looking guy in the world.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Well, you’re not bad,” she said. “For your age.”
Kevin drained his water and set the glass on an end table, pointedly missing the coaster.
“And how did you meet her?”
“I told you, Mom.”
“Tell me again.”
Kevin crossed his arms. “She’s my tenant.”
“Your tenant! You mean, she pays rent?”
“That’s what a tenant does, Mom.”
“What do you charge her?”
Now she’s just messing with me, Kevin thought. “She’s on commission, Mom. She makes more money than I do.” He wasn’t actually sure about that, but it sounded good, and it made Mom pause for a moment.
“So she’s in sales.”
“Yup. She’s a saleswoman.”
“What’s she sell?”
“Books,” he said. “Textbooks.”
“Hm.” Mom held her glass up to the light and regarded the level. He knew what she was thinking. She doesn’t seem like a reader to me. Never kid a kidder, bub. But instead, turning the glass in the light, admiring the stream of bubbles and the swirl of Dewar’s amidst the melting ice cubes, she said, “Now that Beth, she was a neat lady.”
“A little louder, Mom, I don’t think Stella heard you.”
“I’m just saying,” his mother said. “You shouldn’t have let that one go so easily.”
“She let me go, Mom, remember? She moved out.”
Things were about to get uglier when they were interrupted — rescued, really — by Stella herself, thumping quickly up the basement stairs. She had erupted into the kitchen beaming like a kid at Christmas, bearing in both hands his father’s old ice bucket, the silvery round one with the embossed penguins on it.
“Look at this!” she’d cried. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”
Joy Luck is nearly at the redbrick fortress. Kevin crosses a bridge over a creek bed of bleached stones and a stagnant trickle of water, unwholesomely green, the banks overgrown with untrimmed bushes and trees and clotted with weeds full of sun-bleached trash. The walls of the fortress up ahead turn out not to be redbrick at all, but some sort of reddish panels. The sun stings the back of Kevin’s neck; his shortening shadow glides ahead of him up the sidewalk. Joy Luck has crossed a little street that runs between a vacant lot and the building, and she’s passing under the lee of the building itself, which rises seven stories above Sixth Street. But by the time Kevin gets to the corner, Joy Luck has vanished. Kevin stops dead in his wilted shirt and hot, heavy shoes, dangling his limp suit coat over his shoulder. She’s vanished into thin air, squirted from the universe (as McNulty used to say) like a watermelon seed. He could swear he feels the thick soles of his shoes melting into the pavement, and he knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s a mere puddle himself, running back down into the dry creek bed behind him. He turns, looking wildly around him, but he’s the only pedestrian in sight. He looks up at the big block of building looming over him, where a sign says GAIA MARKET, and it slowly dawns on him where Joy Luck is going. Up ahead an SUV turns left off Sixth and disappears into the building itself, and Kevin breaks into a run despite the heat. A moment later, pouring sweat, a little light-headed, he’s in the echoing, exhaust-scented parking garage under Gaia Market, and there she is again, crossing the garage toward a bank of sliding doors.
Of course there was going to be a Gaia Market here. Hadn’t Kevin heard that Austin was just like Ann Arbor, only bigger, hipper, hotter? His eyes adjust to the shadowless fluorescent light of the garage, and his ears to the starship hum of ventilators and the echoing percussion of car doors. Kevin weaves between Beemers and Mercedes and high-end SUVs, zigzagging toward the sliding doors where Joy Luck is just now slipping through. In Ann Arbor every car from junker to luxury auto is marked by the stigmata of a Michigan winter — patches of rust, a rime of road salt — but here even a lowly Corolla has a gleaming finish and tinted windows, like a B-list actress with perfect skin and impenetrable sunglasses. Just as in the Gaia lot in Ann Arbor, many of the vehicles display Obama bumper stickers.