You do suck, she agreed. But you have potential.
Making out in a van became her new favorite way of resolving an argument.
Sometimes they drove in silence that she felt no pressure to fill. Through the softly undulating landscape of Pennsylvania, the industrial sprawl of Gary, Chicago, and Milwaukee, she rode high above the highway in Ben’s Astro minivan—an impeccably clean twenty-five-year-old vehicle that smelled of beeswax. She shelled pistachios and passed them to him to eat as he drove, kissed him under the awning of a gas station and accepted his gifts of glazed doughnuts and Funyuns.
She joked with him and punched him playfully in the shoulder when he said something too disgusting to be permitted.
She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper into her body, deeper into her heart, deeper into her life.
But over and over again, mile after mile, she kept reminding herself, This is temporary. You are driving toward the end.
And then they reached it, and she still wasn’t ready.
* * *
When they turned onto her street, it was past nine o’clock.
She’d called both her mother and her sister from somewhere north of Chicago to tell them she’d be in late and would drive over to her parents’ place in the morning. Allie said Dan wanted to know where to reach her. He’d left a message on Ben’s phone and on her Facebook page. His mom had even called the house once.
If he calls, tell him I’ll be in touch. Soon. Tell him good luck in the game tomorrow.
Ben must have heard her end of the conversation, but he hadn’t said anything.
Once they’d crossed the state line, he’d gone quiet. They’d had to stop around Kenosha, so he’d pulled over at Mars Cheese Castle and bought her a Taste of Wisconsin box, complete with a cheese in the shape of the state’s outline. She couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a joke or a treat or what, but when she kissed him to say thank you, he pinned her against the side of the van and kept her there until her knees started to buckle.
“Stay the night,” she’d said, and then immediately wished she hadn’t. It felt dangerous, exposing even that much eagerness when he was so closed off.
But he said, “Okay.”
Now he cut the engine and they sat in the driveway, pinioned in the beam of the security light mounted on her garage.
“Home sweet home,” she said.
She tried to see it the way he would, but it just looked like her house—a squat one-story ranch with beige siding, a two-and-a-half-car garage, and a bright red front door that she’d painted herself.
It didn’t have a lot of personality—a fact that seemed even more apparent now, with the sights of Bed-Stuy and Park Slope and Hell’s Kitchen still imprinted in her imagination. Her neighborhood wasn’t a neighborhood so much as it was a collection of almost identical boxes plopped down without regard to beauty or utility in the middle of what had once been a farm field. The trees were all spindly little babies, the roads broad and flat and perfectly paved.
Orderly, she’d always thought, but it must look pathetically unfinished to him.
“What do you think?” she asked brightly.
Please don’t hate my house.
He opened the van door. “Show me the inside.”
She tucked her cheese box under one arm and went to retrieve the spare key from under the doormat, where her mother had left it hours ago. The front door stuck a little, and she had to jiggle the key to get it unlocked—the movement still automatic, almost unconscious.
“You don’t use a deadbolt?” he asked.
“I do. But Allie lost her key to it. Then she lost mine.”
“And you didn’t get another one made because …”
“This is Manitowoc.” She pushed the door open. “Well, technically my house is right over the line into Two Rivers.”
“Trivers?”
“Twoooo Riiiiivers.” She said it slowly, exaggerating each word. “But if you say it like that around here, people will look at you funny.”
“God forbid.”
She flipped on the lights and dropped her purse and the cheese box on the table by the door.
Ben walked in a few steps, studying the room as though the choice and arrangement of objects had meaning. As though he’d learn something about her, just by looking.
She studied it, too, for clues to who she was.
There was the brown corduroy couch she’d bought because she really wanted the red one, but red was impractical. There was her collection of candles in glass jars, all of them gifts she’d been given and felt obligated to use, though scented candles made her nose feel strange. It seemed the more she had, the more people bought them for her. She was afraid she’d developed a reputation now as a candle person.