The Big Crunch (22 page)

They talked for an hour, jumping from one thing to another, until the spaces between their words grew languid and long, and June’s eyelids kept falling shut. She didn’t remember saying good
night, but she must have, because when she woke up at three
A.M.
, her heart pounding from an already-forgotten dream, her phone was perched silently upon her bedside table and all the lights were off. She lay awake for a long time trying to remember her dream, but it would not come.

O
PERATIONS
M
ANAGER
G
RETCHEN
H
ILLER,
a pinch-faced, dark-haired woman wearing a navy blue suit and high heels, greeted June with a flat smile. “Welcome to my nightmare,” she said. She led June to an elevator, heels clicking the marble floor with metronome precision. “Before you ask,” she said as they entered the elevator, “this catastrophe was
not
my fault.”

“I didn’t think that,” June said.

Gretchen Hiller compressed her lips and pressed a button labeled
M
.

“Mezzanine?” June guessed, hoping to impress her new boss with her alertness and powers of deduction.

Gretchen Hiller snorted. The elevator began to descend. “Hardly. If it stands for anything, it stands for Most Deep. The room you’ll be working in is six levels below street level.”

“Oh. No windows?”

The woman gave her a narrow-eyed look. “Go to school for six years, work hard, and get yourself a sex change.
Then
maybe you get a window.”

Bitter much?
said Sarcastic June — thankfully, not out loud.

The elevator eased to a stop; the doors opened. They were looking directly into a cavernous, white-walled room set up with about twenty long tables arranged end to end in five rows. Nine women of various ages sat at the tables. In front of each of them
were several boxes. The boxes were labeled with the names of colors: blue, yellow, pink, lavender, etc. Each woman had a pile of shredded paper in front of her; they were pulling strips of paper from the pile one by one, and putting each one into its appropriate box.

At the far end of the room was a pile of bulging black plastic garbage bags.

“As you can see,” said Gretchen Hiller, “the process is both tedious and exacting. We begin by separating the check shreds by color. That will be the easy part….”

By mid-morning, June had learned the names of all the other women. She was the youngest by several years. When they broke for lunch — catered sandwiches that they ate at their work stations — she learned that she had nothing in common with any of them. By two
P.M.
, the only thing keeping June awake was a painful twinge in her lower back and the stinging dryness of her eyes. The tiny strips of paper seemed to suck every molecule of moisture out of the room. Out of her fingers too. At two thirty, Gretchen Hiller came down to check their progress.

She was not pleased.

“At this rate, ladies, we’ll be stuck down here until Christmas.”

Not me,
June said to herself. She would have quit on the spot if it weren’t for Wes.

“Maybe if we had some, you know,
ergonomic
chairs it would go faster,” she suggested.

Gretchen Hiller gave June a withering look. “You remember what I said about windows?”

June nodded.

“Same goes for ergonomic chairs.” She wheeled and clicked back to the elevator. The moment the doors closed, one of the older temps said, “Heil Hitler.”

June looked at her, startled.

“Wretched Hitler,” the woman explained. “It suits her better than Gretchen Hiller.”

They returned to their work.

Wes’s phone buzzed as he was starting down his last row for the day.

“Hey.”

“Hey. You still working?”

“Yeah, I got about a hundred more trees to plant, then I can go.”

“I just got done,” June said. “I close my eyes and see little strips of colored paper, mounds of them. One of the women I work with figured out how many we have to sort through. Like five million.”

Wes said, “I bet we have the two most boring jobs in the world.”

“My boss’s nickname is Hitler.”

“Mine’s Chuckles.”

“It’s like we’re slaves.”

“Yeah, exactly. Except for no whipping or chains. And we get paid, and we can quit and go home if we really want to.”

“Minor details. Can you come over tonight? Daddy wants the three of us to have dinner. I think he feels bad about scaring you off last night. I’m making chicken.”

“Absolutely.”

After that, the planting seemed to go a lot faster.

Two hours later, June answered the door wearing an apron and pressing a phone to her ear.
My mom
, she mouthed.

Wes followed her into the kitchen. June was saying, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Do I have to stick my hand in there? Yuck.”

A whole raw chicken was sitting on the counter, looking pale, flabby, and morose.

June fiddled with the knobs on the oven. “Four hundred? Okay. What if I don’t have a meat thermometer? Oh. Okay. So then I just stick it in the oven? Okay. Bye. I’ll call you if the kitchen catches fire.” She clicked off. “Do you know anything about chickens?” she asked Wes.

“Yeah. They come fried, in cardboard buckets.”

“I’m roasting this one. I think.”

Wes put his arm around her and they stood together, regarding the chicken.

“I think my mom buys them already cut up,” Wes said.

“That’s what I should’ve done. Now I have to put my hand in and pull out the giblets.”

“You want me to do it?”

“Yes, please.”

“You sure it’s dead?” Wes asked.

“Pretty sure.”

Wes peered into the chicken. He reached into the cold cavity and pulled out the heart, liver, and gizzard. “Like that?”

“I think so.”

“Now what?”

“We salt and pepper it, put it in a big pan with some potatoes and onions, then roast it.”

“That’s it?”

“According to my mom.”

“Why are you making chicken?”

“It’s my dad’s fave. I was thinking I’d surprise him.”

“Oh.” Wes had been thinking it was for him. He looked at the pile of slimy organs in his hand. “So what do I do with these?”

With the chicken in the oven, they quickly cleaned up the mess they’d made. Working together in the kitchen was fun — June loved the way they kept bumping into each other, getting in each other’s way. Wes kept saying “Sorry” and “ ‘Scuse me.” But she could tell he was bumping her on purpose. She could tell he wanted her, and that made her want him even more.

The next time he bumped her, she threw her sponge in the sink, took off her apron, grabbed his hand, and pulled him into the living room.

“What?” he said.

She kissed him — harder than she ever had before — and pulled him down onto the sofa. The kiss went on until they broke apart, gasping. Wes’s eyes had glazed over and his hands were shaking. He made an animal sound, somewhere between a whimper and a growl. She put her fingers to his lips.

“How long?” she said.

Wes’s eyes came into focus, a silent question.

She said, “How long do you think it will be before we actually do it?”

“It?”

“Make love for real. Have sex.”

Wes swallowed. “Thirty seconds?”

June laughed. “Silly. My dad could walk in anytime.” She sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. “Seriously. How long?”

“How long do you want?”

“Part of me wants to do it right now, and part of me wants never.”

“Never?”

“So we always have something to look forward to. Like, anticipation is ninety percent of the fun.”

“Ninety percent?”

“Give or take. Also, I did sort of promise my mom.”

“Oh yeah — the rules.”

“The rules.”

Wes scrunched up his nose. At first, June thought he was going to say something nasty about her mom, but instead he said, “Do you smell something burning?”

Elton Edberg arrived home to find the condo reeking of smoke, and all the windows wide open. June was in the kitchen scrubbing a blackened roasting pan.

“Junie?” he said.

“Hi, Daddy.” She kept on scrubbing.

“What happened?”

“Just a little cooking disaster. I put the oven on broil instead of bake.”

“Oh. Is Wes here? I thought the three of us were having dinner together.”

The doorbell chimed.

“That’s probably him now,” June said.

A minute later, Wes came in carrying a red and white bucket of fried chicken with all the fixin’s.

S
TANDING ON THE OLD
S
TONE
A
RCH
B
RIDGE,
June looked down at the brown waters of the Mississippi River. Slow swirls of foam, floating leaves, and bits of trash rode the current, flowing from the north, disappearing beneath the bridge.

“All the way to the Gulf of Mexico,” she said.

Wes said, “We could take a boat. Or a raft, like Huck Finn.”

During the two weeks June had been in Minneapolis, they had spent every evening together. They had gone for long walks, seen a movie, tried some of the nearby restaurants, and visited a museum. Just the two of them, mostly — except for the time they’d eaten KFC with her dad. They didn’t see any of their friends at all. June hadn’t even told Britt, Jess, or Phoebe that she was in town. The only person she was interested in was Wes.

“I should probably get back,” June said. “Dad’s going to be home at six.”

“Where’s he taking you?”

“Some fancy restaurant. He says we’re celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?”

“I don’t know. He’s being very mysterious.”

“Maybe he’s going to tell you you’re not really his daughter. You’re the secret love child of a powerful wizard, and you have
superpowers. With a single gesture, you can make all those shredded checks put themselves back together. Or go back in time and save them from the evil shredder monster.”

June laughed. “Do you have any idea how silly you are?”

“I know exactly how silly I am,” Wes said with a grin.

“You’re still invited, you know.”

“I’m still recovering from the last dinner with him. Anyway, my mom’s been giving me grief about never having dinner at home anymore.”

They walked back to June’s building without talking. June kept thinking of things to say, but the silence between them was too comfortable to break.

The silent times — the two of them together, without talking — had been getting longer the last few days. Was that okay? Was she boring when she didn’t talk? Did she talk too much? Maybe she should be more mysterious. Maybe he’d gotten to know her too well, and now she wasn’t interesting anymore. Was it possible to get to know someone too well? Was it possible she could lose interest in him? She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. What was he thinking right now?

She had no idea. Once, after some boys had teased her at school — she had been about thirteen — she had asked her mom, “What’s wrong with boys, anyway? What are they
thinking
?”

“Boys only think about one thing,” her mother had said. “Sex.”

But Wes wasn’t like that. He thought about all kinds of things. But he had to think about sex sometimes. Maybe even as much as she did.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him.

“Huh?”

“What were you thinking about. Two seconds ago?”

“Oh. Um … I was thinking about what my mom was going to make for dinner. Why?”

“Never mind,” she said.

Food would have been her second guess.

What Wes was thinking about — he would never have admitted this to June — was how nice it would be to go home and shower and eat with his sister and his parents, and watch some TV without having to talk about what he was watching, and then go to bed early. Because even though June was the most important person in the universe and spending time with her was, mostly, all he wanted to do … it wore him out sometimes.

And he was thinking about last week’s fried chicken dinner with Elton Edberg, how Mr. Edberg had asked him a thousand questions:
Where do you plan to go to college? What do you want to do with your life? Have you considered banking? Have you considered the military? Who do you plan to vote for in the next election? It’s not too soon to open an IRA account. Do you go to church? What does your father do?

Most of the questions had been about things Wes had never thought much about. By the end of the evening, his brain had been in complete overload.

He kissed June good-bye in front of her building, then walked down the block to where he’d parked. As he got closer to the car, the tension flowed out of his neck and shoulders.
Being in love is
hard,
he thought — wanting to be perfect for her every second they were together, and trying not to think too much about the scary, murky future when they would be apart. Between the tree planting and his time with June, he was exhausted.

He had never been happier in his life.

J
UNE’S DAD TALKED ON HIS CELL
from the time they left the condo until they got to the restaurant. Watching him in action — switching from call to call, changing tone from demanding to cajoling to syrupy sweet depending on what he wanted from whoever he was talking to — was both impressive and sickening. June considered taking out her own cell and calling Wes. Just to make a point. But she didn’t.

Her dad didn’t stop with his phone calling until they were seated in the restaurant, then he made a big show of turning his phone off.

“Isn’t this nice?” he said.

June wasn’t sure if he was referring to the two of them being together, or to having turned off his cell phone, or to the restaurant itself.

“It’s sure
big
,” she said, going with the third option. Everything at Sammy’s Steak House was huge: high ceilings, oversize water glasses and utensils, towel-size napkins…. Even the leather-bound menus were enormous. She looked around at the other customers. They were big too. Probably from eating at Sammy’s.