you even make the phone book fun.”
“It’s all in how you look at things,” she let him know.
His mood now fully brightened, he poked through her work on the shelves and pulled out some linens to admire.
“These are lovely.”
She stopped working and addressed him with a serene expression. “Thank you.”
“Hey, you know things that make you laugh, like time zone and Mr. Melon?” he asked, folding her things and putting them back on the shelves. She looked at him gamely, and he continued. “I walked by the roller rink coming down here. Is that old guy still there on the Wurlitzer?”
She confirmed the continuation of the organist at the establishment, and he resumed his discourse.
“Just about anything that guy says will make me laugh. It’s that drone he has, I guess, when he calls out the skating routines, or whatever they’re called—you know? When you have to skate a certain way?”
“Couples skate. Promenade two by two.” She imitated his hypnotic drawl perfectly.
“Yeah, that’s it. There was one, I forget what you were supposed to do, but I cracked up when he said it: ‘Let The Grand March begin!’ It all just seemed so absurd somehow—that cheesy organ playing, people skating around, everybody doing their thing. I don’t know why it was so funny, but it was. I totally lost it.”
“Guess you had to be there,” she said distractedly, putting the final stitch in her last article. She got up and unplugged the iron. The phone rang.
“It’s my mom,” she predicted as she walked into the kitchen to answer it. He followed and helped himself to a glass of water.
“Yes, Mom,” she was saying while making goofy faces at him. “Yes, I just finished. As soon as I get off the phone with you, Mom.”
She hung up and returned to her sewing room. He stayed in the kitchen, drinking his water and checking out her sketches on the cabinets. She packed her work in a milk crate, then took it through a door off the kitchen and strapped it to a rack on her bike. She returned, quickly went down the hall and came back with a helmet on her head.
“Help yourself to anything,” she offered. “Manny might be home for lunch. I’ll be home this afternoon. I’ve got errands to run for my mom, then I’m going over there to start cooking for this big family thing tonight, all the kids and cousins and everybody. You can come, too, if you want.”
He nodded and placed his empty glass in the sink, then followed her out the door. They stood on the porch.
“If you leave, just pull the door closed behind you and it’ll lock, but you have to slam it pretty hard. There’s a foldout kind of couch-bed thing in the room right next to my sewing room. Get some rest. You must be tired.”
She smiled at him as she coasted off. Near the end of the driveway she turned and waved.
“I’m glad you’re here, Russ.”
3
Russell was tired but couldn’t sleep, his mind abuzz with speculative scenarios of what the summer would bring and where this trip was heading. It occurred to him that it might be a good idea to record his thoughts. But he’d captured enough drivel in his notebook already. He would wait for inspiration before he picked up his pen again, knowing that it might remain capped for a long time. He resigned himself to staying awake and folded up Carmela’s couch-bed thing. Then he went roaming around their house.
The two rooms upstairs were being used for storage. It was hot up there, and he went down again quickly. To the right of the staircase was a door that opened to their bedroom. It was sparsely furnished, very airy, with a gleaming oak floor. He turned and walked through the living room again, past a wall of photographs: Carmela and Manny in Mexico on their honeymoon, them standing with a number of her extended family, a candid wedding shot, Carmela’s parents in their youth, snapshots of her nieces and nephews. Among all the pictures displayed there was none of Manny’s family.
Manny and his mother, Olivia, had moved here from Chicago when he was eight, a year after his father was killed in an industrial accident. Russell had been to their house a few times, but only briefly. Olivia did not welcome visitors, especially Manny’s friends, none of whom she liked. Manny himself more often than not fell short of her expectations. But she was not without a sense of humor, expressed in an acerbic sarcasm that was hard to laugh off. Manny inherited her sharp tongue.
Workbenches in the basement were piled high with all manner of electronic component: stacks of circuitry, spools of wire, miscellaneous hardware. Pegboards held specialized tools whose functions mystified Russell. He walked back upstairs. Above the clothes washer in the utility room hung a Door Prairie poster like the one Carmela had sent him. This one showed a beauty on the beach, in full-body suit and cap, someone he’d surely enjoy spending a day at the beach with. He walked past the guest room, then by Carmela’s sewing room. Noting that the lights were still on, he switched them off and went into the kitchen. A cool breeze blew through the open windows, calling him out to the porch.
Milky clouds smeared the sky. Water lilies shimmered on the lake. An image of the house swirled around the surface of a blue reflecting ball on a concrete pedestal in the front yard. Russell stretched out on the porch swing, closed his eyes, and let the birds sing him away.
He was roused by the sound of car tires on gravel. The engine shut off, a door opened then closed. Russell willed himself upright, groggy and stiff. Manny was startled at first when he saw someone sitting and stretching on his porch. It took him a moment to recognize his old friend, then he ran to the stairs.
He came to a dead stop and assumed a wild fighting posture. His lips moved rapidly and soundlessly, mimicking a poorly dubbed film, then he blurted out, “I told you if you ever returned you would die!” He stood locked in his stance while his lips continued moving a few seconds more.
Years before, when Russell and Manny were getting to know each other, they were amused to learn that they had independently developed the same parlor trick of speaking while moving their lips in a way that produced the effect of being overdubbed. They had both spent too many hours of their youth watching low-budget martial-arts movies and learning to do things like throw their lips out of synch with what they were saying. So this was the game they played now, a display of their peculiar bond.
With a whoop, Russell nimbly leaped onto the porch railing, adopted a similarly exaggerated position and dubbed over himself, saying, “Listen to me! We need to form an alliance!”
Manny chopped at the air, crazily kicking and flailing his arms about. Then he stopped, spit on the ground and said, “Do you think your Kung Fu is better than mine?”
“Why do you want to forfeit your life?” Russell responded, feverishly moving his mouth. “If we band together we will never be defeated.”
Manny drew himself up, squared his legs and placed his fists on his hips, like a warrior at ease, then announced, “Today we are friends. Tomorrow, we fight to the death.”
Russell laughed and hopped off the railing. Manny climbed the stairs and greeted him with a casual, “Hey, man,” as if they saw each other every day. He patted Russell’s shoulder as he walked past him and sent the door to his kitchen flying open.
“I’m
