Long Division (43 page)

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She hid it well with the sweatshirt and the packaging tape. When she told us about the baby, I said “Cool!” So dorky.

I forgot to get stamps.

Helen really loved her corn.

ABORT MISSION EVERYTHING (see how easily this is done, George?). Memoir is out. Raw, uncut journal is out. Writing to produce a product is out. New goal: Write myself back to sanity.

Cheesefest 2004, but I do mean it.

By “both” I think she means me and Helen.

We're actually quite good at this now. It's not as distracting as you'd think.

I am feeling really bad that I haven't told Loretta anything about Alden. But is it really that big of a deal? Of course, I'm thinking about him as we talk about spicy death salsa. Oh my.

I am only using this word because it's Loretta. No one except people like Loretta can do things gingerly.

Gus doesn't have many possessions. This blue flannel beanbag used to occupy the basement of his father's home.

Gus has a lot of things that
were
his mother's. Since she left when he was just a few months old—and I guess in some sort of fury—she didn't take much. Gus has always liked to use her things though. “It's nice that she has given me more than just a life,” he often says, which I've always thought was a very mature take on it.

It's a Spanish film called
Hable con ella
(
Talk to Her
) about a comatose female bullfighter, her boyfriend, and this fucked-up nurse who is obsessed with another comatose woman: a beautiful ballerina.

For some reason, while walking the Freedom Trail, I couldn't shake this preoccupation with literally walking right on it. Like a kid who mustn't step on a crack for fear of severely injuring his mother, my gaze was constantly being pulled down to my sneakers, striving for careful heel-toe placement on the narrow stripe. Narrow = about eight inches in most parts.

Only if I actually had a fanny pack. I am kind of the type.

I was really expecting his name to be Marco or Luigi or Frankie. Tyler? It just didn't fit.

I know. I know. There are many twenty-five-year-olds pursuing undergraduate degrees, but I always feel so much older. Maybe because I like gardening and wearing bathrobes around the house. Also: College just feels so long ago.

Though we are not yet great friends, Stephen's and my experience of fishing together created the ability to share long, comfortable silences early on in our friendship.

My birthday is tomorrow. Wahoo-twenty-five.

Well, that's good that I talked to David because now I probably won't need to talk to him until the end of the trip and I don't have to worry about keeping a close eye on my cell phone and I can just enjoy myself.

I actually wrote down the entire subway terrorist fantasy before we even took off.

A teenager reading
Rolling Stone
and a middle-aged woman with chin hairs.

What kind of girl breaks up with a man in a war zone? I mean, I know that women have been doing the Dear John thing since the beginning of wars, but how do they muster up the ovaries to break someone's heart while he's so horribly busy doing horrible things? This is why I should have taken up with the Knitters. Surely they know someone who's gracefully done it. If two people aren't right for one another, why should a war be a reason to keep them together? What if David dies tomorrow in a moment where I don't actually love him like he thinks I do? And earlier that afternoon he had a chance to have steamy, rich, passionate, danger war sex with Jayna Hotstuff Austin. And he didn't do it because he loves me and because he believes I love him. And in that case he would be dying in a blanket of delusion. TO DIE INSIDE A LIE. That's what I should call the heavy-metal symphony I should compose about my life. What's worse: To continue under disingenuous auspices? Or to kick someone who is already down? But then, there is also the escape clause note. He wrote it. I didn't write it. It was all his idea. His words. A permission slip. A coupon. A coupon he left on a pillow. On purpose. He gave it to me. I swear.

Consider taking out the word penis.

Why am I waiting and hoping for David to seriously wound me so I can have a way out of this? That is fucked up, Miss Harper. I've got to bare my fangs and accept my role as the wounder. At least this time.

This month's pairing: A South African sauvignon blanc and a chunk of Ossau-Iraty (oh-soh ee-R AH-tee), a semisoft sheep's milk cheese from the French Pyrenees. A cool, crisp wine meets the toasty, nutty cheese in a somewhat jarring, but ultimately satisfying juxtaposition.

I used to do this all the time before Helen moved in. It spooked her. It's nice to do it again, though. I have different point levels for getting through different holes on the fence. The siblingless are great at making up one-person games.

This is really how people talk in these mega intense situations. I always thought it was a movie thing where the revelation is reiterated just for the sake of audience comprehension.

Not true. It was actually sweat on the glasses, I believe.

But what is there really to say? My parents still have one child. Gus still has no mother. Alden is still dead. Nothing is different except for this connection that we know exists, and we now can get drunk and bask in the eerie shadow of its reality.

Brillantly mature, Miss Harper!

I pretty much do everything slowly in Violet Meadows. Nobody likes a show-off.

“
Like we discussed!!!!
” Mr. Bush, please pay Loretta Schumacher two hundred bucks an hour for all the time she's spent with me, all the guidance she's provided me, and for all the word vomit of mine she's kindly mopped up. Yours, AH.

I've never even been to a circus.

Unreasonable knitting-group-joining pressure. Proposed lying about third-grader haikus. Lack of Loretta enthusiasm. Big-time chicken skepticism. Lack of Helen death empathy. Flores death secret keeping and other vastly less serious secret keeping about Jayna Austin, First Captain of Sexiness. And probably fifty more ridiculous little things I can't remember now. What a troublemaker I've been. Sheesh.

Not a chicken dying or a chicken-finger-fakeout death or the revelation of a shared past that didn't matter because Alden (a stranger) is dead. No. SOMETHING THAT WAS ACTUALLY AFFECTING ME.

Title of this chapter purposefully withheld. ☺

I could probably ruin one of those indestructible, waterproof, Gore-Tex jackets with just a drop of my toxic saliva.

A Riesling. Month two of the Chesalon club. I already ate the fancy blue cheese. The remnants of it are now preparing to further their aging process in the controlled environment of my vacuum bag.

This appendix was brought to you by Gus Warren, the letter H, the number 2, and the letter O.