stopped. “If it’s okay with you, I should probably leave you here and have you meet me at the apartment,” I said. “Not the best idea for people to see us riding through town together.”
She climbed carefully down from the seat. She set the small suitcase she had with her onto the pavement, straightened her skirt, and touched her wet hair self-consciously. When she took off my shirt and handed it to me, I thought for a moment that she was going to let me go. I imagined pedaling away as fast as I could. I imagined forgetting all about her, about the wreck, about the river. But instead, I stayed on the bicycle, unsure of what to do next. I gripped the handlebars tightly, ready to go, but immobilized.
The lot was full of cars but empty of students and teachers. We were bound to be discovered by some kid ditching class or sneaking a smoke.
“This a high school?” she asked, looking at the low brick building in front of us. At the football field in the distance.
“Yeah,” I said. It was my high school, unchanged in all the years since I’d graduated. I knew every brick in this building’s walls. Every vine of ivy clinging to them. I knew the smell of the cafeteria vent on a cold autumn afternoon, the sound of the bell announcing the beginning of the day.
“No one will think nothin’ of it if they see me here then?” she asked.
I shook my head, though I wasn’t sure what someone would make of this girl, this dark-skinned girl, dripping wet and pregnant in the high school parking lot. While it had its share of matriculated expectant mothers, Two Rivers High had seen all of two black students in the last two decades.
“Walk that way,” I said, motioning toward the road that would wind behind the school and ultimately down into the village where I lived. “I live on Depot Street. Upstairs, above Sunset Lanes Bowling Alley. Number two. I’ll be waiting. I’ll make you some soup or something. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”
I stood up on the pedals and pushed off, looking over my shoulder at her briefly, and then rode away as fast as my tired legs would allow. I should have gone home. It wouldn’t take her long to walk from the high school into the village. I knew the apartment was in no condition for company, and that the folks at work were probably wondering where I’d gone. But my bike seemed to have a will of its own, carrying me away from the high school, down the winding road toward town, and then onto the little dead-end street I hadn’t visited in more than twelve years. As if Betsy would simply be waiting there, ready to help me figure out what to do next.
Betsy
T he neighborhood in Two Rivers where Betsy and I grew up was made up of row after row of crooked Victorians—crumbling monstrosities sinking in upon themselves. Each house on Charles Street had its own peculiar tendencies. The one next-door to ours had a widow’s walk whose railing had, unprovoked by either natural or unnatural disaster, collapsed into a pile of pick-up sticks on the lawn below one afternoon. The family who lived at the end of the street had the misfortune of owning a house that wouldn’t stay painted. No matter what pastel color they chose each summer, by the following spring it would have shrugged off the pink or yellow or lavender, the paint peeling and curling like old skin. My own family’s house was tilted at a noticeable angle; if you put a ball on the kitchen floor and let go, it would roll straight into the dining room (through the legs of the heavy wooden table), past my mother’s study, and finally into the living room where the pile of my father’s failed inventions inevitably stopped the ball’s trajectory. Most of the homeowners in our neighborhood had at some point given up, resigning themselves to sinking foundations and roofs. To the inevitable decay. There simply wasn’t the time or the money or the love required to keep the places up. This was a street of sad houses. Except for the Parkers’ place.
Though it was one of the oldest homes in the neighborhood, the Parkers’ house was meticulously maintained. Its paint was fresh: white with green shutters and trim. Its chimney was straight. The cupola sat like an elaborate cake decoration on top of the house. A clean white fence enclosed the front yard, which looked exactly as the town barber’s yard should. Rosebushes bordered the uncracked walkway, and other flowers littered the periphery of the yard in meditated disarray. A swing hung still and straight on the front porch, and the porch light came on without fail or flicker each night at dusk. On a street of forlorn houses, the Parkers’ made the other houses look like neglected children.
Of course, I knew Betsy Parker long before I loved her. We had lived on the same street since we were born. Our fathers nodded at each other as they went off to work each morning. Our mothers made polite small talk when they saw each other at the market. Betsy and I had knocked heads once during a game of street hockey, the result of which were two identical blue goose eggs on our respective foreheads. In the sixth grade, we had been the last two standing in a spelling bee (though I’d ultimately won with the word lucid ). But in the summer of 1958, when we were twelve, our relationship changed from one necessitated by mere proximity into a full-blown crush—on my part anyway; she didn’t love me then. In fact, she didn’t love me for a long, long time. But that summer the seed was planted, and my unrequited passion, like all the other untamed weeds in our yard, grew to epic and tangled proportions by summer’s end.
When school let out in June, I’d taken up fishing, drawn by a local legend that, on a good day, the spot where the two rivers meet was teaming with rainbow trout. But by July I’d spent entire days with my line in the water, and I still had yet to catch a single trout (or any other kind of fish for that matter). The day I found myself smitten by Betsy, I’d also spent fishing, and, once again, I hadn’t caught anything but a cold. I’d meant to go home. I thought I might take a snooze in the hammock in our backyard. But instead of walking down the shady side of Depot Street to the tracks and then heading up the hill toward home, I crossed the street, into the sun. Once there, I stood in front of her, rendered mute.
Orange Crush and skinned knees. This was Betsy at twelve. I’d walked past Betsy Parker a thousand times before. A thousand bottles of Orange Crush. A thousand Band-aids. But that day, as I strolled past her daddy’s barbershop, there she was, with fresh scabs on both golden knees, and it felt like I was seeing her for the very first time. I’m not sure which made me dizzier–the twirling red, white and blue barber pole or Betsy. Can I remember the way I saw her then? You’d think it would be hard after all these years, but it isn’t. Perhaps I was memorizing her before I even knew I should. Here’s the way she looked to me in June when we were twelve: her fingers were long, her legs longer, stretched out on the steps of her daddy’s shop where she sipped her soda through a straw. Her tongue was stained orange, and her hair was like syrup running down her back. (I remember touching my tongue to my lips when I saw her.)
Betsy sipped long and thoughtfully. Then she leaned toward me and looked into my empty bucket. “Whadja catch?”
I felt heat rising to my ears. “Not much today.”
“Yesterday?”
“Not much yesterday either.”
“Why do you bother?” she asked. “If you don’t ever catch anything?”
I shrugged.
“You’re probably the kind who sees the glass half full.” She sighed and sipped the last of her soda pop loudly. “Not me, I’m a half-empty kind of girl.”
I didn’t know what she meant, only that she thought we were somehow fundamentally different, and this made my heart ache.
“You live on my street,” I said stupidly.
“You live on my street.” She smiled, setting the amber-colored bottle on the pavement
