Lone Star (6 page)

C
HLOE ASKED TO BORROW HER MOTHER'S CAR TO DRIVE
Hannah to Bangor. She made up some story about dorms and housing applications.

Lang only half listened. “Are you ever going to tell her?” she asked.

Hannah was headed to Bangor to break up with the grandpa who loved her. He might not make it out of the afternoon alive. Did she really need Chloe adding to her woes? “Not right now.”

“Tell her on the way. It's the perfect time. ‘Um, Hannah, guess what? Our trip to Bangor reminds me of something.' That sort of thing. You know she'll find out eventually.”

“Of course she'll find out eventually, Mom.” Duh.

“Perhaps when she moves into a UMaine dorm and instead of you her roommate is a tall black chick?”

“Yes, like then. And don't say ‘chick,' Mom. Ew.” If Chloe ground her teeth any more, she'd have no teeth left. Why couldn't her mother be like Hannah's mother? Terri never asked questions, never hounded, never scolded. Chloe wasn't one hundred percent sure Terri knew where her daughter was accepted to college. She was so chill and lax about things.

“Why won't you tell her? What are you afraid of?”

Why did everybody keep asking her this! What
wasn't
she afraid of? That Hannah would not forgive her. That she couldn't explain it. When Chloe tried to explain it to herself, she couldn't,
so how was she going to explain it to her best friend, and to Mason?

“Have you told Mason at least?”

Chloe didn't reply.

“Oh dear Lord. Chloe!”

“Mom! Can you please not stress me out more than I already am? I tell you what, sign my passport application, and I'll tell everybody everything in Barcelona.”

“Chloe, you haven't told your boyfriend you're leaving?”

“Mom, he'll find out soon enough! He's got his last varsity game coming up. He's been in training for three weeks. I didn't want to bother him. And I only just decided.”

“A month ago.”

“A few weeks ago.” She stuck out her hand, trying not to shake. “Please can I have the keys?”

“I'm telling you right now, I'm not doing it,” Lang said, opening her purse. “You're not hopping on a plane and leaving me behind to mop up your mess with Mason and Hannah and Blake.”

“What's Blake got to do with it? Let me go to Barcelona and I'll tell them myself.”

“Don't threaten me, young lady, I won't stand for it.”

“The keys. Mom.
Please.
”

In the car, while Hannah was angsting away about Martyn, Chloe wasn't listening, her focus elsewhere. Had there been silence in the car, she might have attempted a confession. A pretend-casual tone. No big deal, Hannah. I know you're thinking we're going to UMaine, but did I mention this other place I applied to, three thousand miles away from Bangor, our whole wide country away? A Spanish city with beaches, warmth, no mountains, no snow. Like Barcelona, but in the States.

“Have you applied for your passport yet?”

Chloe snapped out of it. “How can I apply? They haven't said I can go.”

“Tell them in a firm and convincing manner that you're going and that's all there is to it.”

“Yes, right, okay. Do you know what my mother's been doing?” Chloe said. “Buying me books.
Frommer's Guide to Spain's Coastal Cities
.
Fun Facts about Barcelona
.
To Barcelona with Love
.
DK Guide to Spain's Most Beautiful Churches
.”

“That's nice. She's being helpful.”

“You mean impossible. She says to me, see, honey, you don't have to go anywhere, you can just read books about it.”

“True, your mother is always advising me to read more,” Hannah said. “She says you can live other lives through books, experience travel, love, sorrow.”

“She's buying me books so I can see Barcelona from the comfort of my recliner while she makes me éclairs and rum babas.”

“Yeah,” said Hannah. “You have it so tough.”

Chloe drove. She didn't want to say how much she envied Hannah her parents' spectacular nonparticipation. Divorce did that—shifted priorities.

“They make unreasonable demands on me,” Chloe said.

Hannah turned down Nirvana. “I wish somebody would make a demand on me.”

Grandpa is making demands on you, Chloe wanted to say. How's that going? “I thought you liked that they never asked you for things,” she said instead.

“Turns out, I want to be asked for something.”

“Like what?”

“Anything,” Hannah said. “Just to be asked.” She turned to Chloe. “Why are you so uptight? Look at the way your hands are clutching the wheel. Like you're about to break it.”

Chloe tried to relax, really she did.

“I'm the one who should be tense,” said Hannah. “You have no idea how upset he's going to get.”

Chloe thought long and hard about her next question. “He's generally in good health, right?” she asked. Like his heart?

“Oh, yes,” Hannah said. “Believe me, there's
nothing
wrong with him.”

“Ew, so gross. Not what I meant. But okay.”

“What'd you mean?”

“Nothing.”

Hannah was looking too pretty for someone who was about to break up with a nonagenarian. Almost seemed mean. The poor fellow was going to be feeling like shit anyway, why rub it in his face, the youth, the slim feminine attractiveness, the long legs? Hannah even wore a skirt, as if headed to church. Linen skirt as short as the month of February. Navy blue sparkly ballet flats. A cream top. Face deceptively “unmade-up,” yet fully made-up. Eyes of course moist.

Chloe couldn't pay too much attention to Hannah's appealing exterior while driving down a zigzaggy two-lane country road, but from a surreptitious corner of the eye, Hannah was looking delectable, not forlorn. “Hannah, why are you looking so pretty if you're ending it with him?”

She beamed. “He likes to look at me, that's all.”

“But you want him to like to look at you
less,
don't you?”

Hannah didn't reply, busy eating her fingers, twisting her knuckles.

To everything there is a season. That was another one of her mother's mottos. This was emphatically not the season for college confessions. This was a time for lovers. Chloe cleared her throat.

“Can I ask you something about Blake?”

“What about him?”

“Do you like him?”

“I love him, what are you talking about?”

“Well, then, why . . .”

Hannah waved at her. “You won't understand, Chloe. You and Mason are so perfectly aligned.”

“Are we?” Chloe wouldn't have minded talking about it.

“But it's different with me and Blake. He's so sweet, but . . .” Hannah paused, chewed her nails, stared out at the pines passing by. “Besides the physical, we have very little in common. Don't get me wrong. The physical gets you pretty far. With Blake, believe me, almost the whole way. If it was the only important thing, we'd be in great shape. But aside from that, what do we have? All the things I like, he couldn't care less about, and all the things he likes I don't get at all.”

“Blake's so into you. He likes everything you're into.”

“What do I care about junk hauling, or building things, or helping old people, or fixing band saws? Or fishing? And what does he care about Paris and museums, and classic literature, and pretty clothes?”

“There are other things . . .”

“Yes, we've done them.” Hannah sighed dramatically. “Do you think that boy will ever live away from his dad? He still helps him into the boat, for God's sake. He wants to write a book so he can start a junk business. I mean, what am
I
going to do with someone like that?” Hannah waved in dismissal. “Me, I want to travel the world. I want to learn three languages. I want to live in a big city, not in this tiny crossroads in the middle of nowhere. It can't end with Blake any other way but this way.”

“But that's the thing,” Chloe said, keeping her gaze on the road. “It's not ending. If you ended it with him, that'd be one thing. But you're not.”

Hannah turned to Chloe, a frown on her displeased face. “How do I do that? And then what? What do I do with
us
?” She made a large air circle, embodying by the broad sweep not just herself and Blake, but Chloe and Mason, too. “We are all four of us together every day. We have one life. If I break up with him, what happens to the four of us? Do you even think before you speak? I mean, could you break up with Mason?”

“I don't want to.”

“But if you did?”

They didn't talk for a while. The road was narrow, the pines tall, the ride long, what was there to say? What a hypocrite Chloe was, what a deceiver. She decided she would tell Hannah about college on the way home, her heart falling through her abdomen at the thought of it.

Chloe underestimated the open and public heartbreak a man near retirement age could display on the walkways of Orono, near the river on the University of Maine campus, when his eighteen-year-old lover told him it had to end.

Chloe stayed as far back as possible. She couldn't believe Hannah would do this on the avenue where students and faculty strolled on a warm May evening. But his reaction was so extreme that perhaps this was why Hannah had chosen the public square for his flogging; she had hoped he would keep it together. At first they walked arm in arm, overlooking the flowing waters, the mountains beyond. They made quite a picturesque couple against the backdrop of the snowcapped Appalachians.

Hannah spoke. He stopped walking. He took his arm away. She gestured, in her subtle elegant way, and he stood, a pillar of incomprehension. Then he started to weep. Hannah stroked him, embraced him, talked and talked, a filibuster of consolation. Nothing helped the gray man become less stooped. It was as if Chloe had caught them in a different sort of clinch. She became embarrassed, for herself, for him, for the passersby who slowed down, concerned at his distraught exhortations. He grabbed his chest, as if in the middle of heart failure.

After an hour he was still crying! And Hannah was still rubbing him, talking to him, gesturing far and wide.

Chloe understood
nothing
of this kind of emotion. Nothing. It seemed to her that logic must prevail in a grown man's head when he spied himself standing in the middle of the college where he had tenure, bawling because his teenage lover had
decided to move on. Not even move on, for Blake was the here and now, just . . . move sideways. Move back. Move away. How could the enormous common sense of that decision finally—
finally!
—not triumph over him?

Chloe had been keeping an eye on the time—the thing she usually had least of, next to money—but after ninety minutes her eyes left the watch permanently to pitch silent poison darts in Hannah's direction, hoping her friend would sense Chloe's own despair at the tedium of spying on a stranger's excessive distress. Come on, wrap the whole thing up, put it in a doggy bag, take it home. Let's go, let's go, let's go! Chloe kept silently shouting. LET'S GO!

There was pacing, but there was no departing.

A hundred and ten minutes. A movie now. First a tragedy, then a comedy, then a farce, now
Shoah
.

Wait. Something new was happening. The stooped old man nodded. He let Hannah hug him, pat him.

Unfounded optimism. There he was, crying again. He could barely stand on his grieving geriatric legs. Carefully Hannah helped him over to a bench, and sat down next to her soon-to-be-erstwhile lover, continuing to cajole and comfort him.