the needlepoint sampler over the stove that said, Take All You Want, But Eat All You Take.
“Here you go,” she said, setting the backpack and trumpet down on the table.
“Thanks.” Paul smiled, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a pale green dish towel. He seemed to be having a little trouble catching his breath. “Didn't know … how I was gonna … carry all that shit.”
“No problem,” said Ruth. “It was on my way.”
He used his pinky and ring fingers to lift a few strands of hair from his forehead and tuck them behind his ear, an oddly girlish gesture that made Ruth suddenly conscious of the delicacy of his features— small nose, feathery eyelashes, the ghost of a narrower face encased in the flesh of a broader one.
“You, uh, want a sandwich or something?” he asked.
Ruth hesitated. The kitchen was dim and silent, and it was no longer possible to ignore the obvious fact that they were alone in the house. Mr. Caruso worked on the assembly line at the GM plant; Mrs. Caruso ran the office for Ruth's dentist. His brothers and sisters were older, living on their own.
“I don't think so,” she said.
“We got roast beef, ham, turkey—”
“I'm not really hungry.”
“You sure? How about a soda or something?”
“I better get home.”
He gave her what Ruth later remembered as a searching look, focusing a whole new kind of attention on her, as if he'd suddenly realized that she'd grown up, and had become something more interesting than his next-door neighbor's little sister.
Embarrassed by his scrutiny, Ruth felt her eyes drift down over his soft belly and broad thighs before finally landing on his cast, which was almost completely covered with psychedelic graffiti. There were still a couple of empty spaces near the toe, and she wished she knew him well enough to fill them with her name and a brief, cheerful message. She gave an apologetic shrug.
“Lotta homework,” she said.
THAT WAS an odd, unsettled spring for her, the first time she'd ever really been alone. Ever since Mandy left for college, Ruth had been sunk in something approaching a state of mourning. Her big sister was the one indispensable person in her life—ally, best friend, consoler, explainer of the world. They'd shared a bedroom for thirteen years, trading gossip, complaining about their parents, mumbling secrets to each other until they nodded off, then waking up together to the tinny music warbling out of the clock radio on the table between their beds. With Mandy away, the house seemed perpetually out-of-whack—distressingly tidy and much too quiet, as if something more than a single person had been subtracted from the whole.
It hadn't been so bad for the first couple of months. Mandy called most nights and came home every other weekend, full of fascinating new information and unusually strong opinions. But then, at Thanksgiving, she solemnly informed the family that she'd fallen in love—she delivered this announcement at the dinner table, with an air of self-importance that Ruth had found both thrilling and vaguely sickening— and since then, she hadn't come home at all, except for an obligatory couple of days at Christmas. Now Ruth considered herself lucky if she spoke to her sister once a week, and when she did, Mandy's mind was a thousand miles away; she couldn't even fake an interest in the details of Ruth's pathetic teen dramas. All she wanted to talk about was Desmond, the Irish grad student with the beautiful eyes and soulful voice, who had awakened her to the suffering and injustice of the world. They were planning on traveling to Nicaragua over the summer to see the Sandinista Revolution for themselves, to cut through the fog of lies and propaganda spewed out by the American government and its toadies in the media.
Great, thought Ruth. And I'll be home with Mom and Dad, waitressing at the IHOP.
It wasn't that Ruth had a bad relationship with her parents, at least not compared to a lot of kids she knew. They weren't especially strict or even normally vigilant; for the most part, they trusted her to make her own decisions about who she hung out with, where she went, and what time she came home. It probably helped that Ruth got good grades, didn't have a boyfriend, and rarely got invited to parties.
She had only one real problem with her parents, but it was a big one: they were just so depressing. With Mandy around, she had barely noticed. Now, though, Ruth had no choice but to observe her mother and father during their interminable, mostly silent family dinners, and wonder how it was possible that two reasonably attractive, reasonably intelligent people could sleep in the same bed and have so little interest in what the other was thinking or feeling. They rarely spoke a kind or curious word to each other, and hardly ever laughed when they were together. They did kiss good-bye in the morning, but the act seemed utterly mechanical, no more tender or meaningful than when her father patted his back pocket on the way out the door to make sure his wallet was there. They paid so little attention to each other that a stranger might have assumed they'd been randomly assigned to live together, roommates who wanted nothing more than to keep out of each other's way.
It hadn't always been like this, though. Ruth had the photographic evidence to prove it—wedding albums, honeymoon snapshots, happy family portraits from when she and her sister were little. In the old pictures, her mother and father smiled, they touched, they looked at each other. So what happened? Every now and then, when Ruth was alone with her mother, she tried to find out.
“Is something wrong? Are you and Dad mad at each other?”
“Not at all. Everything's fine.”
“Fine? You never even talk to him.”
“We talk all the time. We have a very good relationship.”
Conversations like this made Ruth glad her mother had gone back to work full-time, which meant that she at least had a few hours to herself when she got home from school, some time to mellow out and do her homework in peace. It hadn't mattered so much in the fall, when Ruth had been a jayvee cheerleader, an activity that kept her busy in the afternoons and gave her a ready-made social life. But she'd hung up her pompoms at the end of football season—she just wasn't peppy enough—and immediately found herself exiled from the clique of pretty, popular girls she'd drifted into freshman year, coasting on the widespread misconception that she was a younger version of Mandy, who actually was a pretty and popular varsity cheerleader, though she now regretted it on feminist grounds.
All Ruth really knew as that fateful April cracked open was that she was living in a kind of limbo, a waiting period between what had happened before and what would happen next. Temporarily sisterless and friendless, she spent a lot of time in a state of vague anticipation, staring at the phone, willing it to ring, hoping to hear a friendly voice on the other end, a mystery boy who confessed that he'd been watching her and thinking about her, and wouldn't she like to put away her homework and maybe have a little fun?
SO IT was nice to suddenly have a regular date with Paul Caruso, even if it didn't amount to anything more than a fifteen-minute walk home from the bus stop. They hit it off right away, slipping easily past the awkwardness of the first day into a realm of relaxed intimacy that made her feel like they'd been friends for years instead of neighbors who'd barely acknowledged each other's existence until a few days ago.
He confided in her about his troubles with Missy, who'd become increasingly clingy as they approached the end of high school. They were heading to different colleges—she'd been recruited to play soft-ball at the U. of Delaware; he was going to major in Music at William Paterson—and
