Falling Together (16 page)

Instead of kissing Will, she placed her hands in her lap, fiddled with the tassel on her satin bag, and said, “Have you seen her?”

“Not yet. Have you?”

“No.” Then Pen had a thought. “You mean you haven’t seen her here or you haven’t seen her since she left?” She’d almost said “left us” but stopped because it sounded both too plaintive and too final. “Left us” made it sound like someone had died. “I mean, since she moved away.”

“Both.”

Pen let slip a sigh, a drawn-out sigh, an
oceanic
sigh, of relief.

“Hey,” said Will, surprised. He looked at her until she looked back. “You didn’t really think we were out there somewhere being friends without you, did you?”

“Oh, no. Of course not.” But she found that her voice was shaky. “Okay, maybe. Once or twice, in my darkest hours.”

Will didn’t say anything. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“No. I’m sorry you had darkest hours.”

Pen swallowed. This wasn’t the time or place to talk about her darkest hours. There might be a time and a place later; she even hoped there would be, but not here in this serene and otherworldly garden, not now.

She said, “I just got an e-mail from out of the blue. It didn’t say much.”

“Mine said, ‘I know it’s been forever, but I need you.’”

Pen’s eyes widened. “‘Please come to the reunion. I’ll find you there.’”

“‘I’m sorry for everything.’”

“What did she have to be sorry about?” asked Pen, and immediately wished that she hadn’t, since who among them should be sorry and for what were untouchable topics, the very last ones she wanted to discuss.

Maybe Will felt the same way because he jumped in quickly with, “Weird how she sent us identical e-mails.”

“It is weird. And that e-mail just didn’t sound like her.”

“I thought the same thing.”

“It was flat.”

“And colorless.”

“And not at all long-winded.” Pen and Will exchanged a quick smile because Cat’s long-windedness was legendary, but then Pen frowned. “Honestly, the way she said what she said worried me more than what she said.”

“I know. I don’t like to think about what might have happened to Cat to make her write a flat, colorless, short-winded e-mail.”

Pen shivered and said, “You know what? We should…,” but before she finished, they were both standing up.

“Yeah,” agreed Will. “We should go back to the party, see if she’s there.”

But as they left, first Pen, then Will, and as Will closed the gate behind them, Pen felt her heart sink a little.

“I like that garden,” she said, picking her painful, tottering way across the bricks. “I could live in that garden. Pitch a tent under that big magnolia tree and live there. Just so you know.”

Will nodded. “I can see how you would. Although if you’re planning to live in a tent, you should probably consider some different shoes.”

Pen said, “Ha ha, very funny,” and slapped Will’s chest with the Chinet plate, and poof, there they were, the Pen and Will of ten years ago, twelve years ago. Then, without breaking stride or making a big deal about it, Will offered her his arm, and because when someone offers you his arm, you take it, that’s what Pen did.

I
F
W
ILL LEAPING, AFTER SIX YEARS, INTO A FULL-BODIED, RADIANT
being out of the chaos of a party was one thing, Will leaning back on his elbows in the grass under an ordinary noon sky turned out, to Pen’s profound relief, to be quite another. Longing didn’t jump up and seize her by the throat; she was not a voice crying in the wilderness; the “come live with me and be my love” nonsense from the night before did not evince itself for a second, having been washed out, apparently, by a flood of normalness and daylight. Even when she checked in with her body (
like a person poking a rattlesnake with a stick
, she thought), it seemed to be behaving itself.

It wasn’t that he didn’t look as good in the light of day. Pen knew that his austere angularity wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. (Once, in the throes of taking Intro to Architecture, Cat had declared Will’s looks as “either totally Bauhaus or totally Frank Lloyd Wright!” “Better figure that out soon,” Will had advised. “I
will
be on the midterm.”) Strictly speaking, he wasn’t even Pen’s cup of tea, since her taste in men had always leaned toward the lush-featured and swarthy. But, in a detached way, on the rare occasions when she’d thought about it, she had always found him oddly beautiful. Now, plopped down next to him on the grass, she had to admit that, while pretty much anyone could look good in a moon-soaked garden, Will was holding his own in the sunshine, and still, no fuss, no lust. All she felt was happy.

Cat never had shown up the night before. But, after sidling uneasily up to the party, an interesting thing had happened to Pen and Will: they had had fun. They’d eaten; they’d mingled. Will had run into a hallmate of his from freshman year, a guy they had all called Huey and whose dual claims to fame had been wearing cowboy hats and the ability to quote
Raising Arizona
—not bits and pieces, but the entire script—by heart. Now, Huey went by his given name, Paul, was a nurse-anesthetist with Doctors Without Borders, and was headed, in three weeks, for a two-year stint in Sierra Leone.

“You make me feel like a deadbeat, Paul,” Will had said.

“Don’t worry about it, man,” Paul had replied. “I make everyone feel like a deadbeat.” Then he squinted his eyes and drawled, “‘Son, you got a panty on your head.’”

“Thanks,” said Will. “That helps.”

Pen spoke with three separate women named Jennifer, one of whom now owned a designer resale shop in Richmond called Déjà Ooh!, a woman named Lane Lipton whom everyone had known would become a high-powered Washington attorney and was one, and a very drunk redhead whom Pen remembered not at all, but who tearfully apologized for having told “at least ten people” that a friend of a friend of hers had walked in on Pen, Cat, and Will having a threesome.

“Forget about it,” said Pen.

“I can’t!” the woman wailed. “Were you? Having them?”

Afterward, in the sleepy, easy quiet of Will’s walking Pen to her car, Will said, “I hate to even say this, but what if she doesn’t—” and Pen cut him off, saying, “I know. I hadn’t even considered that. I mean, until right now.”

“She’ll come,” said Will.

They walked a few more steps and Pen said, “My stupid feet are on fire,” and she stopped and slipped off her shoes, and, fleetingly, considered throwing them at something, the streetlamp by the side of the road, a passing car.

“Where the hell was she?” she almost yelled, making her voice angry even though what she really was was disappointed and worried. “We come all the way here and she doesn’t
show
?”

For a few seconds, she and Will stood rooted to the sidewalk, not looking at each other. Pen stared at their two shadows stretching down the sidewalk as though they’d been flung from a bucket, then at the streetlamp that was casting them, shining yellow through a haze of bugs.

“That,” she said, “is a lot of bugs for this early in the summer.” Her eyes were filling with tears, which annoyed her.

“It is a lot of bugs,” agreed Will in a tired voice. “She’ll come.”

“What will we do if she doesn’t?” The childishness of this question deepened her annoyance, but she waited for Will’s answer anyway.

“We’ll think of something,” said Will. “And anyway, she’ll come.”

They started walking again. Pen’s shoes dangled from her fingers. A car quaking with bass trundled by, and Pen saw a child-skinny arm dangling out the passenger-side window, the orange pin-dot glint of a cigarette.

Finally, Pen said, “She might not.”

“Yeah,” said Will. “She might not.”

But when Pen got back to her hotel room, she found the gumdrop of a message light on the oldfangled phone blinking, and even though, when she hit the button and braced herself for the sound of Cat’s voice, it never came, relief washed over her because it was a message from Cat all the same. The man working the front desk read it to her: “Sorry I couldn’t make it tonight, but I will see you at the barbecue tomorrow.”

“Is that a note that someone dropped off?” As she asked, Pen was already slipping her shoes back on so she could run down and get it, was already seeing Cat’s curvaceous handwriting, capital “S” like a swan, but the man said, “No. Jonah the guy with the shift before mine took it. I’d know his chicken scratch anywhere. Must’ve been a phone call.”

Pen opened her satin evening bag and took out the napkin with Will’s cell number on it. When she saw that he’d written “Will W.” above it, she smiled. As if she wouldn’t know. As if she’d been collecting phone numbers from men named Will all night. And then she smoothed the napkin with her fingers and felt a twinge, below her sternum and on the back of her neck, of what she had felt when she had first seen him in the tent.

“Don’t be a sap,” she snapped. “It’s a
name
on a
napkin
.”

Then she called Will, said, “Listen to this,” and read him the message.

“I got the same thing,” he said, and for a moment, they basked in their shared relief, not saying anything. Then Will said, “Hey, you didn’t bring your bike with you, by any chance?”

P
EN HAD FORGOTTEN HOW QUICKLY IT HAPPENED, HOW YOU ROUND
a corner, pass a Shell station and the Kingdom Hall, go up a hill, and enter another world: sloping wooden porches, dogs chained to stakes in yards, dense trees, steep, thigh-burning hills, and the occasional valley farmstead opening up like an exhale. Once, years ago, Pen had hit a broken patch on the road and fallen and, with her bike on top of her, had been amazed to see children—white blond hair, knobby heron legs—materialize from between the trees to call, shyly, “Hey, lady! Hey, lady! You okay, lady?”

Pen and Will took a lunch break in the yard of the ancient gray church, leaning their bikes against an oak tree, tossing down their helmets and sprawling gratefully on the hard, balding lawn. Will had stopped at a deli on the way to pick up Pen at her hotel, and after he’d caught his breath, he unzipped his backpack and started to hand Pen a sandwich wrapped in white paper, but when she tried to take it from him, he got a look of concern on his face and didn’t let the sandwich go.

“What’s wrong?”

“I should’ve asked.”

“Asked what?”

“About your current relationship with brine-cured meat.”

“You got me a sauerkraut-less Reuben?”

“I did.” Will’s expression turned unexpectedly shy. “But, you know, it’s been six years. I shouldn’t assume.”

“My love for brine-cured meat has endured the test of time,” said Pen, yanking the sandwich out of his hand. “My heart belongs to brine-cured meat now and for all eternity.”

The Reuben was slightly leaky but otherwise perfect.

As Will began unwrapping his sandwich, Pen said, “You’re a whole other story. No love. No loyalty. Total sandwich promiscuity. You could have anything in there.”

Will grinned and bit into ham and Swiss with hot mustard on pumpernickel. “We’re talking about sandwiches,” he observed, after an interval of chewing. “We haven’t seen each other in six years.”

“You’re right.” She watched two dark birds wheel against the powder blue sky. Vultures, she figured, although they didn’t look ominous or even hungry, just lazy. An idea hit her and she slapped her palm on the ground. “I thought of a way to do this.”

“Do what?”

Pen raised an arm and made impatient, circular, flapping motions with her hand. “
This!
This-this. What other this would I mean?”

“Okay. So what’s the way?”

“Four sentences,” she said smugly.

Will waited, then popped the stopper of his water bottle with his teeth and drank.

“Brilliant, right?” said Pen.

“Four sentences. That’s all you’re going to say.”

“Oh, come
on
.”

“I got nothing.” He held out his empty hands.

“You used to be better at connecting the dots.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve been around your dots, remember?”

Pen sighed. “Six years in four sentences. No questions, no comments. Four sentences from each of us and we consider ourselves caught up.”

“Fine,” Will said slowly. “You first.”

“Oh, no,” said Pen. “I thought of it. I did the legwork.”

Will laughed and kept eating. “No questions or comments,” he said. “And that would apply to the person who did the legwork, too.”

“Right.”

Pen was suddenly nervous. As she redid her ponytail, she felt a rising urge to babble her way into and through the silence of Will’s thinking, and instead of fighting the urge, she decided to give in.

“My hair’s hot.” She petted her head. “You know how you have those things that you measure the start of a season by? Not you-you, but people-you. One, I guess.
You
might or you might not. But anyway, like if you wear gloves
and
a scarf, that means it’s winter? Like that? Well, even if, technically, it’s not summer, not, you know, summer solstice summer, I always feel, personally, that it’s summer when I sit in the sun and my hair gets hot.”