I glance down at the tops of my shoes. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Just leave a note or something. All right?”
“All right.”
She looks me over and if she can tell anything, she doesn’t say. “I’m going to bed. Good night.”
“Night.”
I stand there while I listen to her go upstairs, down the hall, her bedroom door close. I turn to look out the patio door to see if maybe he’s looking out his window, smoking on his balcony, but his lights are off.
I didn’t ask him, after all.
I thought he’d invite me, suggest it, but I guess because he’s got work tomorrow. Aunt Amy’s got work tomorrow. Everyone’s a functioning member of society except me, earning their keep, and I waste away my days, just waiting. I don’t even know what for. I could do better than this.
But I am in limbo. A perpetual almost. I’m straddling the border of one decade into another. One foot in responsibility and the other in carelessness. There’s the slightest whisper from my conscience about how maybe,maybe, I should consider getting a job and paying Aunt Amy rent. Maybe I ought to act like the man I so desperately want to be, that I so desperately want someone to defend, that I so desperately want someone to say that they’re on my side, in my corner, and that they won’t leave me abandoned in an overgrown lot.
I get in the shower, and a hot stream washes him away, where his come dried on my stomach, where I got his orangey spice and cigarettes on my clothes and in my hair, where I’m dazed in the steam because even though I’ll see him tomorrow, I feel let down and as if someone gave me a gift and promptly took it back.
It feels like the most unnatural thing in the world: to be with him and then go to sleep alone.
This doesn’t bode well, does it?
I fall onto my grandmother’s quilt, a towel around me, and realize this does not bode well indeed. If I don’t watch it, I’ll be like Grantaire, a drunk and frightfully ugly, following the revolutionary Enjolras into oblivion. Before I can think better of it, I reach under my bed for my book and flip through it, worn pages bending until I find the first mentioning of Grantaire. I’m almost feverish as I read. He’s suddenly more important to me than Marius, than Javert, than Jean Valjean.
Because Grantaire was a leaf in the wind for the longest time, a real lush, but in the end, he chose Enjolras first. In the end he was on his side, in his corner, and if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
So they died together, hand-in-hand.
And if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
I don’t want to be rude.
I try not to rush through my dinner, and I compliment Aunt Amy’s Jell-O mold. I try to be more pleasant and pretend as if I’m not listening for his motorcycle. And although I sense there’s something she’s withholding, I try to ignore that, act as if this is just another dinner I have to get through before I can walk out those patio doors and right into his arms.
And when I’m ready to do just that, eaten the last spoonful of ice cream, pushing away from the kitchen table, she reaches across and stops me.
“Paul.” She puts her big man-hand over my wrist. “Can you hold on a minute?”
“Sure,” I mumble, and glance longingly toward Asher’s apartment. I haven’t heard the Triumph yet, but it always seems like he’s there, even when he’s not. As if he leaves behind a piece of himself in a cloud of orangey spice and cigarettes to watch over me.
Aunt Amy irritatingly takes her time. She removes our ice cream bowls, rinses them in the sink. She sponges at some crumbs on the counter. She folds the dish towel and opens a drawer. She takes out an envelope, smooths her skirt underneath her as she sits, and pushes the envelope over to me.
My heart is in my throat. It’s typed out nice and neat, my name and Aunt Amy’s address, and I recognize the ‘e’ that drops a little bit lower than the rest of the letters. I remember the sound of my mother on her Olympia, mostly before the cancer and sometimes after, when she was feeling okay. The terse pecks of the keys that echoed in every room of the house, even when I shut my bedroom door. She always typed her letters, saying her penmanship wasn’t the best, but I always liked her handwriting. The way she looped her ‘l’ and the flowy stem of the ‘p’— especially when she was writing out my name. On a birthday card, kneeling beside me, her bracelets silver and her rings gold. She smelled like springtime lilacs and honeysuckle.
I blink hard, as if that will make the envelope go away. It’s as if his face is staring back at me in each hard line of the letters. Impaled on the points of the ‘u,’ his thick set jaw hidden in the ‘a.’ Pops couldn’t ever type to save his life. His secretary did it all, it’s how he met my mother after all, they’d always say, so I can picture him hunched over the Olympia, scowling, index fingers poking and pecking, and then pasting the green-tinged postage stamp with a trio of Boy Scouts, honorable and true.
I feel as if I’ve just been knocked upside the head, a blow that’s left me reeling. I push back from the table and my chair makes a God-awful screech.
“You don’t have to read it now,” Aunt Amy says. “But —”
“Throw it away —”
“You can just hold on to it —”
“When did he —when did it come, huh? When did —”
“— and you can write him later. Or not at all. But at the very least —”
