“Who else’ll be there?” he asked. “Anybody I know?”
She named two or three names he didn’t recognize—they were from either before or after his time. Then she added, “Oh, and Paul and Janine Werber said they’d come.”
“How about that? I remember them, yeah,” Marshall said. He’d had serious hots for Janine Werber when he was seventeen years old. She’d been Janine O’Sullivan then: a gray-eyed blonde who looked as Irish as her name. She’d liked him okay, but not like that. She’d had eyes only for Paul. In high school, he’d already had his eye on becoming a CPA. Marshall thought Paul was the dullest thing that walked on two legs, but even he knew he might not be completely objective.
“Paul is… very reliable,” Mrs. Lundgren said.
“Right,” Marshall answered. If that was the best she could come up with, she thought Paul was the dullest thing on two legs, too. “Look, I’ll see you about one Saturday after next, okay?” He said his good-byes and hung up.
“Somebody you knew way back when?” Kelly asked.
“Uh-huh. A couple—they’ve been a couple a long time, I guess. She was kinda cute then.” Marshall didn’t want to admit too much, even to himself. “He was kinda nerdly.” That was an understatement.
One of Kelly’s eyebrows quirked. “Okay.” She left it right there. So did Marshall. If Paul and Janine were still an item all this time after graduation, what else could he do?
On the appointed day, he pedaled down to Torrance. Clouds blew past the watery sun. He got a couple of spatters of drizzle, no more. It was chilly, but he didn’t mind that. He’d work hard enough to warm up.
Mrs. Lundgren’s apartment was on the ground floor, which was good. He wouldn’t have to lug heavy stuff down stairs. Piles of boxes stood everywhere. His old teacher introduced him to a couple of guys he didn’t know. One of them said, “Hey, haven’t I seen some of your stories online?”
“Yeah.” Marshall grinned from ear to ear. He’d had one or two people recognize his name before, but only one or two. It was still a treat when it happened.
Then he forgot about it, because Paul and Janine Werber showed up. Paul had put on fifteen or twenty pounds; his hair was thinning. Janine looked… just the way Marshall remembered. Damn good, in other words.
Paul started gabbing with Mrs. Lundgren and even trying out bits of the Spanish she’d taught him. He’d always been a suckup—looked as if he still was. That left Marshall with Janine. “Long time,” he said brilliantly.
“It has been, yeah,” she said, and held out her hand. Marshall shook it. Then—Paul was paying zero attention to anything but his old teacher (and himself)—he kissed her hand and quickly let it fall. If she didn’t like that, she’d let him know about it. If she did like it… He didn’t know what he’d do then. It was like putting a story together. If you didn’t write the first sentence, you’d never see how it came out.
Her eyes widened. Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it. She didn’t look mad or anything, though. “What have you been up to?” she asked.
“Got out of UCSB a few years ago,” he said. “I write some stories. I sell ’em, but I’m not getting rich at it or anything. How about you? Kids and all?”
“No kids.” She shook her head. “I’m a paralegal. It’s not exciting, but it pays some bills. Paul’s practice is doing pretty well, too. We’re so busy all the time, we hardly get to see each other.”
Was that a hint? He didn’t get the chance to find out, because Mrs. Lundgren said, “Come on, people. You didn’t come over here for Old Home Week. You came to work for your dinner. So work!”
Work they did, hauling boxes and furniture out to a big U-Haul parked in front of the building. They went on talking while they worked, of course. Mrs. Lundgren, it turned out, was moving to Copala, a town on the west coast of Mexico not far from Acapulco. She spoke the language, her money would go further there, and the weather would be better. She liked it hot—to her, L.A. these days might as well have been Minneapolis.
Marshall listened to her with one ear. With the other, he listened to Janine as much as he could without—he hoped—being too blatant about it. She seemed glad to see him and glad to talk to him. She’d always liked to talk. He remembered as much. But she seemed interested in him, too. “A writer!” she said. “How cool is that?”
He shrugged, as well as he could with a box of books—why did even a little box of books always weigh a ton?—in his arms. “It’d be cooler if I could, y’know, make a living at it.”
“But it’s so creative! All I do all day is look for papers and fill out forms,” she said. He was sure she got paid more than he did for staring up to the ceiling and making feckless lunges at the keyboard. But if she wanted to think he was cool and creative, he sure wouldn’t try to tell her she was wrong.
By the time the apartment was empty and the truck was full, Marshall felt bent-kneed and long-armed, like an arthritic chimpanzee. The restaurant, a Chinese place called Helen Yue’s, was only a couple of blocks away. Had it been any farther, he might not have made it.
He told himself he sat down next to Janine by coincidence. Even he didn’t believe it, but he couldn’t prove he was lying. Paul kept talking with Mrs. Lundgren, now about tax tricks for people who lived outside the United States. He didn’t even notice when Janine gave Marshall her cell and e-mail, or when Marshall gave her his. Tax tricks, now, tax tricks mattered.
After dinner, they all went back to the Spanish teacher’s now-empty apartment. She hugged her ex-students one by one. “You get to go back home,” she told them. “Me, I get to see if I remember how to drive. I have a motel room rented for tonight, and I need to have that U-Haul at the pier by seven tomorrow morning. Ain’t life fun sometimes?”
Just then, Marshall was thinking life might be fun sometimes after all. Mrs. Lundgren stepped up into the truck, started it, and drove away. She’d be Queen of the Road wherever she went. Nobody on a bike would argue with that big, noisy, smelly thing. Marshall remembered taking internal combustion for granted. No more. No more.
The former Spanish students shook hands with one another, unchained their bikes, and climbed aboard. “Take care, Paul,” Marshall said. “See ya, Janine.”
Paul Werber kind of grunted. “See you, Marshall,” Janine said. Marshall pedaled back to San Atanasio several inches above the potholed pavement.
Colin Ferguson was reading Deborah The Wind in the Willows. It was an unabridged version, so she didn’t come close to getting all of it. But it had plenty of colored pictures. She liked those fine. And she liked sitting on the couch with her daddy while it poured outside.
Marshall came downstairs. He didn’t sound as much like a stampeding buffalo as he had when he was a teenager. He was wearing his plastic rain slicker. When he raised his bike’s kickstand and rolled it toward the front door, Colin called, “Where are you going in this lovely weather?”
“Out.” Marshall threw the word over his shoulder.
“Out where? Somewhere in particular, or kind of everywhere at once?”
“Out to lunch.”
“Who with?” Colin knew Marshall and Vanessa both could have gigged him for that. He wouldn’t have written it that way himself. But writing and talking were different critters. Dammit, they were.
“Janine.” Marshall was out the door and had it closed and locked behind him before Colin could have answered even if he’d wanted to. As a matter of fact, he did want to, but he wasn’t nearly sure what to say.