“Pretty,” Avery said. “But Zach kind of picked me up, which is a little different.”
“Oh, bullshit,” Mel said. “He picked you up like this guy is about to pick me up.” She stood and brushed herself off. “Come with me,” she said. “For backup.”
Avery said, “I don’t know about this guy. Really.”
“Well, let’s go find out.” Melanie ran her fingers through her hair and then shook it out briskly. “We’ll just go over and talk to him.” She hesitated a moment, as if having slight misgivings, and then said, “He is handsome, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Avery said, “if you’re into the silent, brooding type.”
“I’m into it,” Mel said. “For tonight, anyway.” She started into the crowd and then looked back to make sure Avery was following.
Avery laughed, more a giggle than a laugh, which reminded her that she was still drunk. “Okay,” she said. “Whatever.”
Mel mouthed, “Don’t embarrass me,” and pushed forward.
LINDSEY sat up in bed with a hot cup of peppermint tea and a Land’s End catalog that pictured a beautiful twenty-something model walking barefoot on a pristine beach of white sand beyond turquoise water, wearing a subtle pink top and SwimMini™ skirt and trailing a matching beach towel, her eyes downcast as if shy about being photographed. She flipped the catalog to the foot of the bed, where it landed on top of several other magazines and catalogs, and pulled a Victoria’s Secret out of the night-table drawer. Here barely dressed women were all looking directly at her. She tossed the Victoria’s Secret on top of the Land’s End, poured a shot of Bacardi into her cup, and stirred it in with the tea bag, bouncing the porous sack of herbs around on its string as if were a dancing puppet. The house was quiet except for occasional TV sounds coming from the basement, where Hank was watching a football game. Keith, her seven-year-old, was asleep at the end of the hall. This was ten o’clock on a Saturday night, and when she thought about that and about not yet being thirty years old, a little hot flash of fury ripped through her, which she calmed with a swig of rum straight from the bottle.
Lately Lindsey’s sense of humor was failing her. She considered herself someone who took the world in stride and with humor, but lately—Her younger brother, Ronnie, was in Iraq, and that weighed on her because she loved the little shit, but she was simultaneously furious at him. He had gone to Iraq because his friends were going. That was what he’d told her. What kind of reason is that? You’re going to Iraq because Willy and Jake Jr. are going? She talked at him and talked at him about the stupidity of it, and he was just, Well, Willy and Jake Jr. are going, and we all went over to the recruiter’s together, and they said—Willy and Jake Jr. and Ronnie, who were all still little boys in her mind, kids screaming on the Slip’N Slide, boys off fishing on Claytor Lake together every chance they got. Now the three of them were in Iraq and every time an IED killed some boy on the news or in the paper—which felt like it was every goddamned fifteen minutes—her heart went to ice and her blood stopped till she heard or read the names and they weren’t her boys. This war was killing her sense of humor. Mostly she put it out of her mind as best she could, but it weighed on her and that was part of it.
Then there was her father, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. He was fifty-five when he married her mother, who was thirty-eight at the time, her second marriage, his third. Now her mother was dead some nine years, from breast cancer, and he was pushing eighty-five and in assisted care, which, luckily, he had the resources to cover, but, still, to see him going downhill so fast, a man who had once doted on her and now sometimes had trouble remembering her name. Still, still, still. She was alive and young and she had her health and her family, her baby boy, Keith, and . . . That brought her around to Hank. She sipped her tea.
It wasn’t even September yet and already he was down in the rec room watching some college football team play some other college football team somewhere out West. And he’d been looking forward to this event all week, yet. This, for Hank, was a big Saturday night: alone in the basement of his house watching television while his twenty-nine-year-old wife, who was pretty damn good-looking, lay in bed reading catalogs. How Hank could care so much about which bunch of boys scored more points than which other bunch of boys while boys he actually knew and loved were in real danger at first baffled her and lately was getting to downright piss her off. When she was inclined to think badly of Hank, which was not a rare thing anymore, she saw him as a moron, a gape-mouthed, mindless slug stuck to his La-Z-Boy, an idiot who had traded real life for a series of games, for watching a series of games.
Still. When she wasn’t inclined to think badly of him, which was most of the time, she loved him. Just, things were getting away from her. She started to pour more rum into her teacup, thought better of it, and took another swig straight from the bottle. Eventually this would put her to sleep. For the moment, though, she was stuck on the thought that this was a Saturday night, and she was still young, and there was something very wrong with feeling so alone in a house where her husband was in the basement and her sleeping son down the hall. When she felt, suddenly, as if she might break into tears, she got out of bed and walked through her dimly lit house to the patio.
It was hot out. She was wearing white linen pajamas and carrying the bottle of rum, and within moments after she pulled open the glass patio door and walked out into the heat, a patina of sweat coated her forehead. Hank had mowed the lawn late in the evening, and the smell of cut grass was still in the air. She sat on the wood swing, pushed it once for momentum, and then pulled her feet up under her. She loved this swing and she loved her yard. Their house backed up against undeveloped land, Roanoke Mountain looming in the nearby distance, and on summer nights like this one, the dividing line between their neatly mowed lawn and untended land was marked by swarms of fireflies. She held the Bacardi bottle to her nose, inhaled the rich aroma of rum. She took a sip and placed the bottle on the concrete patio under the swing. Across the yard, the fireflies were doing their magic, scores of them slow-blinking that bright dark yellow light.
The summer she was twelve and Ronnie was seven, the family spent two weeks on Smith Mountain Lake, a close-to-home vacation. Days were spent on a pontoon boat fishing and swimming, nights in the big, fancy house with a backyard on the lake. At twilight she’d chase lightning bugs with Ronnie. They’d put them in a Mason jar, punch holes in the lid, stick some grass in the jar. “How many’d you catch?” “How many’d you?” Dozens each, till it was time to let them go and they’d set up a folding chair out on the dark lawn and Lindsey’d settle in to watch and Ronnie’d place the two jars side by side, pop the lids off quick, then run back and jump into Lindsey’s lap, and sometimes, as often as not, he’d fall asleep while she held him cuddled against her watching fireflies float up into the darkness, spilling up out of the unseen Mason jars, drifting away into the night. It was almost as if, Lindsey now grown and married with children and Ronnie half a world away doing whatever a soldier does in the morning in Iraq—It was almost as if, swinging gently in her yard on a hot summer night with her son asleep and her husband in the house—It was almost as if she were that twelve-year-old girl again, she could feel the past that vividly, so sharp it was like it wasn’t past, and that might be Ronnie in the house sleeping peacefully, and Mom and Dad in the basement watching TV. Then, when a couple of things happened at almost the same time, when Lindsey missed her mother and father so powerfully it was as if Mom had just died and Dad had overnight grown old, and she could almost feel her little brother’s warm body wrapped in her girlish arms, the physical senses of that memory, the heat of Ronnie’s sleeping body, the weight of it, his little-boy’s sweet, sweaty smell, when that came back to her tangibly for the briefest of seconds and then disappeared, leaving her bereft—when those two things happened so quickly, one instantly after the other, then she cried. Her face scrunched up like a child’s and warm tears seeped out of the corners of her eyes. Once it was gone, the moment passed, she felt a little better.
A swell of dizziness hit her when she sat up so that she had to lean back and close her eyes and wait it out. She was sweating more than she should be, more from the rum than the heat. She took off her pajama top and wiped her face with it before tossing it onto the lawn