The Big Crunch (24 page)

“Um … I don’t really wear makeup, usually,” June said.

“You’re wearing makeup now.”

“I was sort of experimenting.”

“It looks cool.”

June caught Mrs. Andrews’s eye. She was smiling, but not in a nasty way — more like she completely understood and was amused not by June’s makeup disaster, but by Paula’s kidlike directness.

“You’re twelve, right?” June added two years to Paula’s real age.

“Ten!”

“Really?”

“I should know how old I am.”

“Tell you what, when you turn thirteen, I’ll give you a makeup lesson, if you still want it.”

“That’s a long time. What if you’re not still Wes’s girlfriend?”

The strangest thing happened then: Everybody laughed. Even Paula. Even June.

When they got in the car so Wes could drive June home, she didn’t say anything for the first few blocks. Finally, as they were pulling onto the freeway, Wes asked her what she thought about his family.

She said, “It’s what I want.”

“What is?”

“I want a family like yours. That’s what I want. In a real house
that you live in for years and years, and everybody likes each other, and they laugh at stuff, and nobody gets mad.”

“They get mad.” He turned onto the freeway. “They were pretty mad when they had to come get me out of jail in Omaha.”

“Your mom’s really nice.”

“You have a nice mom too.”

“Yeah, but it’s different. We move around so much. My dad’s wound up all the time, worrying about work and stuff, and my mom gets all frantic trying to be the good wife. We can’t ever just relax and be who we really are with each other. We don’t laugh.”

“Your dad laughs.”

“That’s different. He laughs when he thinks he’s scored a point, or when he’s trying to cover up being embarrassed or anxious.”

“He gets anxious?”

“Sometimes I think he’s scared all the time. It makes me scared too.”

“Scared of what?”

“For one thing, I’m scared that I’ll go upstairs and find out he choked.”

Elton Edberg was alive, sitting in the black leather recliner, watching TV.

“Wes!” he boomed.

“Hi, Mr. E.” Since Wes had never gotten comfortable calling Mr. Edberg “El,” they had compromised at “Mr. E.”

“How was your date?”

June said, “It wasn’t really a date, Daddy. We went to Wes’s house for dinner.”

“Of course! To meet the outlaws.” He laughed.

“Outlaws?”

“You know — if you two were married, Wes’s folks would be your
in-laws
.” He laughed again, and Wes could see what June had been talking about: That was a point-scoring laugh.

June said, “I was worried you might have choked on your grilled cheese.”

“
Grilled?
I was supposed to
cook
it?”

“Why did you think I left it sitting in a pan?”

“Oh!” He laughed again, a covering-up-embarrassment laugh. “I guess that explains why the bread was buttered on the outside.”

June was looking at the TV. “What are you watching, Daddy?”

“Oh, just some old thing.”

It was a black-and-white movie. Wes recognized Humphrey Bogart.

“Is it
Casablanca
?” he asked.

“Very good, Wes! It was my parents’ favorite movie.”

“Since when do you watch anything except the business channel?” June said.

“It’s a good movie. Why don’t you two sit down and watch it with me?”

Driving home, Wes couldn’t stop thinking about the movie. They’d only watched the last forty minutes — the most he’d watched of any black-and-white movie, ever — so everything that happened didn’t make complete sense, but he got the gist of it: Humphrey Bogart giving up the girl because he knew it was the right thing to do. During the last scene, as Bogart watched his one
true love walk out of his life forever, Wes had looked at Mr. Edberg and could have sworn he saw tears in his eyes. It was embarrassing, but it made Wes like him better.

Then he started wondering if Mr. Edberg had made them sit and watch the movie to make a point. That June would be better off without him. But he was pretty sure those tears had been real.

O
NCE ALL THE SHREDDED CHECK COLORS
had been separated into bins, the women began dividing the strips according to check pattern. The process was slow and exacting. It was August by the time the work of piecing together each individual check began. The first time she assembled one entire check, June’s boredom turned to elation. One down, five thousand nine hundred ninety-nine to go. The other temps were having success as well. With each reassembled check, the piles of strips grew smaller, and the job slowly moved toward completion. Some of the women deliberately slowed down. They needed the work, and the sooner the temp job was done, the sooner they would have to look for another source of income.

June slowed down as well. Whether the job was done or not, she would be flying back to Omaha before school started. She tried to talk her mom into letting her stay with Dad, but there was no way.

“I am not spending another month in this house all by myself!” her mom said.

“You could move up here.”

“Junie, that’s not how it works.”

“Because it’s not how you
want
it to work!”

Her mom sighed so loudly it sounded as if she was blowing into the phone. “Honey, I know that you and Wes are really serious.
But if you’re as in love as you think you are, a little time apart won’t hurt. It might actually be good.”

“Good for who?”

“For everybody,” her mom said in a barely audible voice.

When she got all soft and quiet like that, June knew it was time to stop fighting. Besides, she knew her mom was right. She and Wes had been together almost every single day for weeks. She knew his face better than she knew her own. She could close her eyes and feel his lips on hers, almost as if he were really there. They had become so close that the idea of being apart didn’t frighten her anymore, because even when she wasn’t with him, he was a part of her.

They settled into a routine. Wes would rush home from his planting job, shower, and either borrow his mom’s car or take a bus downtown. If the weather was nice, they would go for a long walk along the river. If it was rainy or too hot, they would hang out at the condo, watching TV or just talking, until Mr. E got home, usually around seven.

Sometimes Wes would help her make dinner. Even though he was hopelessly clumsy in the kitchen, it was always fun. June knew how to make about ten different things: grilled cheese, scrambled eggs, hamburgers, spaghetti, tuna casserole — things like that — but she never tried to roast another chicken.

At home, as long as he was home by ten every night, his parents mostly left him alone, not quizzing him too much about what was going on with him and June. Every now and then, he caught his mother giving him this sad look. Paula was getting older every day, pointedly ignoring him as she immersed herself in phone calls
and online girl chat. It was almost as if he was leaving them all behind. He would be a senior in a few weeks, and after that would come college and a new life. He was holding off on choosing a school, waiting to find out where June might be going. It was one of the things they hadn’t really talked about.

They decided that one day a week they would go a whole twenty-four hours without seeing each other, just to prove they could do it. Wes would hook up with Calvin or Robbie after work and play video games or whatever. At first, when he was with his friends, it felt unreal — as if June was his real life, and his old friends were synthetic. But after a few hours, the feeling reversed, and June became the fantasy.

He and Calvin were in the arcade at the mall one evening when Wes saw June walk past. He started after her, then hung back to see where she was going. Abercrombie & Fitch. She took some tops into the dressing room. Wes stood behind a display at the back of the store and imagined her changing clothes. It felt strange being so close to her without her knowing, but also exciting, just knowing she was there. After several minutes, she came out and returned the tops to their racks and left without buying anything.

He followed her to Macy’s, where he lost track of her in the maze of counters and displays. He wandered through the store searching for her as if in a dream, everything too bright, too in focus, not real. Had he really seen her, or had he made it up?

After a time, he gave up and returned to the arcade. Calvin, still playing Street Fighter, looked at him and said, “Dude. Are you okay?”

That night, he called June and told her he’d seen her at the mall.

“I saw you,” she said.

“You did?”

“At Abercrombie, in a mirror. I pretended I didn’t know you were there. When I went in the dressing room, I kept thinking you might come in.”

“What, walk into the women’s dressing room?”

“It would be a good place to get naked and have sex.”

Wes felt all the blood and heat in his body rush south.

June said, “But if we did, I don’t think I could ever stand to be without you.”

Wes made an inarticulate sound deep in his throat.

They didn’t talk about sex much, but it was always there. They would make out, and then when things got really hot, they would always stop, like hitting an invisible wall, leaving Wes feeling as if he’d been punched in the gut, followed by a swirly, bubbly sensation that reminded him of the time he’d climbed a grain elevator, ten stories tall, and forced himself to stand right on the edge.

If they went all the way, it would be over — whatever this thing was that they had going. Like the end of a journey. Or maybe it would be the next stage of another journey.

It wasn’t about abstinence, or what was right and what was wrong, or any of that stuff. It was more about finding that perfect moment — a point in time that was sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes years in the future.

“We’ll be done with the checks in a week or two,” June said.

“That’s great,” said Wes, wondering what that had to do with getting naked in the Abercrombie dressing room.

“I have to go home when my job ends.”

“Home?”

“To Omaha.”

All that blood and heat moved up to his stomach.

“I thought your dad got that job permanently.”

“He did, but he’s still not sure where they’re going to send him. Mom and I will be staying in Omaha. Temporarily. So I have to go back and get ready for school and stuff. Also, I think my mom’s lonely.”

“Oh.” Wes waited for his insides to settle.

“You know what she told me once? She said being apart is part of being in love.”

“What does that
mean
?”

“I don’t know.”

“W
HEN DO THE METEORS START?”
June asked. They were reclined on the hood of Wes’s dad’s car, their backs against the windshield.

“I don’t think meteors have a schedule,” Wes said.

June shifted her body closer, so their shoulders pressed hard together. Above them, the myriad stars pulsed and glittered.

“So many,” she said. “So far away.”

They stared up into the sky.

“I can see the Milky Way,” June said.

“They named it after the candy bar.”

“They did not!” She looked at Wes, at his little smile, and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. “You are so goofy.”

“Goofy?”

“Goofy.”

“That sounds like something Paula would say.”

“Smart girl.”

They watched the stars.

“Summer is almost over,” Wes said.

“At least it’s not a thousand degrees out.” The previous week had been hot and sticky. Every afternoon, when June left the airconditioned bank building, it had been like stepping into an oven, but the day before a cold front had rolled in from Canada, and the air had turned dry and crisp. “I’m actually kind of cold.”

“I can fix that.” Wes rolled off the hood and got a wool blanket from the trunk. He looked around, scanning the horizon from the hilltop where they had parked. There were a few lights in the distance: farms, a handful of red blinking cell tower lights, a subtle glow from the Twin Cities forty miles to the south. Most of the light came from the stars, though. That was the idea, to find a place where the stars could shine.

“You must have been a Boy Scout,” June said as they snuggled beneath the scratchy blanket. “Be prepared.”

“I think my dad was a Scout. He’s the one who told me about the meteor shower. Tonight is supposed to be the peak.”

“How many meteors are there?”

“Millions. But only a few thousand you can see.”

June was falling up. Gravity had lost its hold; the starry sky was swallowing them. She squeezed Wes’s hand, but the sensation persisted.

“It feels like flying,” she whispered.

“I know,” he said. “If you look up so all you can see is stars, it’s like being weightless. Do you know where the center is?”

“Center of what?”

“The universe. The place where the Big Bang started.”

“I don’t think the universe has a center.”

“How can it not have a center?”

“According to Mr. Reinhardt, the universe has no center and no edges.”

“It had to start somewhere!”

“When the Big Bang happened, there was no ‘somewhere.’ There was no time and no space. Just nothing and nowhere. And
then it happened, and suddenly there was something and everywhere.”

“What about the Big Crunch? That has to happen
sometime
and
someplace,
right? I mean, if everything starts moving together, there has to be a time and place where it will all meet. Right?”

“It will meet everywhere at once. At the end of time.”

“It hurts my head to think that,” Wes said.

“I like it. I like thinking about things that are far away. It’s the in-between stuff that’s hard. It’s easy to think — to talk — about things that won’t happen for a long time. Like living in a real house, or having kids, or the end of the world. The same goes for close stuff — what’s going to happen in the next hour, or tomorrow. But the in-between stuff …” Her eyes blurred; the stars became streaky and smudged. June spoke under her breath, barely breathing the words, “That’s harder.”