This Lullaby

  I looked down at the bottle of KaBoom Lissa had forced on me. “You don’t want this,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” she said easily. “It’s scorching out here. Just let me have a sip.”

  I shrugged and handed it over. She screwed off the top, tipped it to her lips, and took a decent-size mouthful. Then she made a somewhat uneasy face, swallowed, and handed the bottle back to me.

  “Told you,” I said.

  Just then the white Truth Squad van bumped into the parking lot, pulling into a space by the auto bay. The back door opened and John Miller jumped out, his drumsticks tucked under his arm, followed by Lucas, who was eating a tangerine. They started unloading equipment and stacking it as Ted climbed out of the driver’s side, slamming the door behind him. And then, as I watched, Dexter got out of the van, pulling a shirt on over his head. He checked his reflection in the side mirror, then ducked around the side of the van, out of my sight.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him, of course. The morning after we broke up, in fact, I’d been standing in line at Jump Java for Lola’s morning mocha when he walked in, crossed the room in a most determined fashion, and came right up to me.

  “So I’m thinking,” he said, no hello or hi or anything, “that we need to be friends.”

  Instantly, my internal alarms went off, reminding me of the breakup logic I’d been preaching for almost as long as I could remember. Not possible, I thought, but out loud I said, “Friends?”

  “Friends,” he repeated. “Because it would be a shame if we did the whole awkward, ignoring-each-other, pretending-nothing-ever-happened thing. In fact, we could just jump right in and deal with it right now.”

  I looked at the clock next to the espresso machine. It was 9:05. “Isn’t it a little early,” I said slowly, “to take that on?”

  “That’s just the point!” he said emphatically as a man talking on his cell phone glanced over at us. “Last night we broke up, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, in a quieter voice than he was using, hoping he’d catch the hint. No luck.

  “And today, here we are. Meeting up, as we are bound to do endless other times between now and when the summer ends. We do work across from each other.”

  “Agreed,” I said as I finally got up to the front of the line, nodding as the guy behind the counter asked if I wanted Lola’s usual.

  “So,” he went on, “I say that we just admit that things may be a little strange, but that we won’t avoid each other or allow things to be awkward at all. If anything feels weird, we acknowledge it straight up and move on. What do you think?”

  “I think,” I said, “that it won’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can never go from going out to being friends, just like that,” I explained, grabbing some napkins out of the dispenser. “It’s a lie. It’s just something that people say they’ll do to take the permanence out of a breakup. And someone always takes it to mean more than it does, and then is hurt even more when, inevitably, said ‘friendly’ relationship is still a major step down from the previous relationship, and it’s like breaking up all over again. But messier.”

  He considered this, then said, “Okay. Point taken. And in this scenario of yours, since I’m the one pursuing the idea of a friendship, then it would be me who would get hurt again. Correct?”

  “Hard to say,” I said, taking Lola’s coffee and mouthing a thanks to the counter guy as I stuffed a dollar bill into the tip box. “But if this followed the formula, yes.”

  “Then I,” he said, “will prove you wrong.”

  “Dexter,” I said softly as we walked to the door, “come on.” It seemed surreal to be discussing the previous night in such analytical terms, as if it had happened to someone else and we were just off to the side, doing the play-by-play.

  “Look, this is important to me,” he said as he held the door open and I ducked beneath his arm, keeping the cup in my hands level. “I hate bad breakups. I hate awkwardness and those weird stilted conversations and feeling like I can’t go somewhere because you’re there, or whatever. For once I’d like to just skip all that and agree to part as friends. And mean it.”

  I looked at him. Last night, as we’d stood in my front yard, I’d dreaded this, seeing him again. And I had to admit I kind of liked that it was already pretty much over with, the first awkward Ex Sighting. Check it off the list, move on. Break up efficiently. What a concept.

  “It would be,” I said, brushing a hair out of my face, “the challenge of all challenges.”

  “Ah,” he agreed, smiling. “Indeed. You up for it?”

  Was I? It was hard to say. It sounded good on paper, but when actually put into practice I suspected there would be a few variables that would really screw up the numbers. But I hadn’t backed down from a challenge yet.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re on. We’re friends.”

  “Friends,” he repeated. And then we shook on it.

  That had been two weeks ago, and since then we’d talked several times, sticking to neutral topics like what was happening with Rubber Records (not much yet, but there was talk of A Meeting) and how Monkey was (good, but suffering through an infestation of fleas that had left everyone at the yellow house scratching and cranky). We’d even eaten lunch together once, sitting on the curb outside of Flash Camera. We’d decided there had to be rules, and established two so far. Number one: no unnecessary touching, which could only lead to trouble. And number two was if anything happened or was said that felt strange or awkward, there could be no strained silences: it had to be acknowledged as quickly as possible, brought out in the open, dealt with and dismantled, like diffusing a bomb.

  Of course my friends all thought I was crazy. Two days after we’d broken up, I’d gone with them to Bendo, and Dexter had come over and chatted with me. When he’d left, I’d turned back to a row of skeptical, holier-than-thou faces, like I was drinking beer with a bunch of apostles.

  “Oh, man,” Chloe said, pointing a finger at me, “don’t tell me you guys are going to be friends.”

  “Well, not exactly,” I said, which only made them look more aghast. Lissa, who’d spent the better part of the summer reading the kind of self-help books I normally associated with Jennifer Anne, looked especially disappointed. “Look, we’re better friends than dating. And we hardly dated at all, anyway.”

  “It won’t work,” Chloe told me, lighting a cigarette. “Crutch for the weak, the whole friends thing. Who used to say that?”

  I rolled my eyes, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Oh, that’s right!” she said, snapping her fingers. “It was you! You always said that, just like you always said that you should never date a guy in a band—”

  “Chloe,” I said.

  “—or give in to a guy who really pursues you, since they’ll just lose interest the moment the chase ends—”

  “Give it a rest.”

  “—or fall for someone with an ex-girlfriend who is still hanging around, because if she hasn’t gotten the message he probably isn’t sending it.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “That last one has nothing to do with this.”

  “Two out of three,” she replied, waving her hand. “My point is made.”

  “Remy,” Lissa said, reaching over and patting my hand, “it’s okay. You’re human. You make the same mistakes as any of us. You know, in that book I was reading, Coming to Terms: What Love Can and Can’t Do, there’s a whole chapter on how we break our rules for men.”

  “I am not breaking my rules,” I snapped, hating that I’d ended up on the advice-receiving end of things, jumping from Dear Remy to Confused in Cincinnati all in one summer.

  Now, at Toyotafaire, Chloe and I left my mother chatting with another fan and headed over to a patch of grass for some shade. At the microphones, Truth Squad was almost totally set up. Don had told us over dinner a few days earlier that he’d hired them to play an hour-long set of nothing but car-related songs to really push
the idea of fun, freewheeling summer driving.

  “Okay, so I’ve got some prospects for us,” Chloe said as Truth Squad launched into “Baby You Can Drive My Car.”

  “Prospects?”

  She nodded. “College guys.”

  “Hmm,” I said, fanning myself with one hand.

  “His name is Matt,” she continued, “and he’s a junior. Cute, tall. He wants to be a doctor.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s too hot to date.”

  She looked at me. “I knew it,” she said, shaking her head. “I knew it.”

  “Knew what?”

  “You,” she said, “are so not one of us anymore.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She crossed her legs at the ankles, kicking off her shoes, and leaned back on her palms. “You say that you’re single and ready to be out there with us again.”

  “I am.”

  “But,” she went on, “every time I’ve tried to set you up or introduce you to anyone, you beg off.”

  “It was just the one time,” I told her, “and that was because I’m not into skaters.”

  “It was twice,” she corrected me, “and the second time he was totally cute and tall, just the way you like them, so don’t give me that crap. We both know what the problem is.”

  “Oh, we do? And what is that?”

  She turned her head and nodded toward where Truth Squad was in full swing, while two little kids in KaBoom T-shirts were dancing, jumping around. “Your ‘friend’ over there.”

  “Stop,” I said, waving this off as ridiculous, which it was.

  “You still see him,” she said, holding up a finger, counting this off.

  “We work two feet from each other, Chloe.”

  “You’re talking to him,” she said, holding up another finger. “I bet you even have driven past his house when it wasn’t even on your way home.”

  That I wasn’t even going to honor with a response. God.

  For a minute or two we just sat there, as Truth Squad played a rousing medley of “Cars,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and “Born to Be Wild.” There were only a certain number of songs related to automobiles, but already they seemed to be grasping a bit.

  “So, fine,” I said finally. “Tell me about these guys.”

  She cocked her head to the side, suspicious. “Don’t do me any favors,” she said. “If you’re not ready to be out there, it’ll show. We both know that. It’s not even worth the trouble.”

  “Just tell me,” I said.

  “Okay. They’re all going to be sophomores, and . . .”

  She kept talking, and I half listened, noticing at the same time that Truth Squad was stretching the theme considerably as they started playing “Dead Man’s Curve,” not exactly the kind of song that fired anyone up to plunk down five figures on a shiny new car. Don picked up on this too, glaring at Dexter until the song was cut short, just as the curve was about to get really deadly: instead, they segued, a bit clumsily, into “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena.”

  I could see Dexter rolling his eyes, between verses, back at John Miller, and felt that twinge again, then quickly shook it off, not wanting to risk another set of told-you-so’s from Chloe. It was time to get back on that horse, before I’d done permanent damage to my reputation.

  “. . . so we set it up for tonight, seven o’clock. We’re all meeting at Rigoberto’s for dinner. It’s free breadstick night.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Count me in.”

  The thing about Out There that you always forget is how, at times, it can really suck.

  This is what I was thinking that night around eight-thirty, as I sat at a table at Rigoberto’s, chewing on a stale breadstick and wishing my date, Evan, a chunky guy with tangled shoulder-length hair that desperately needed washing, would shut his mouth when he chewed.“Tell me again,” I said under my breath to Chloe, who was already cuddled up close with her date, the only good-looking one in the bunch, “where you found these guys?”

  “The Wal-Mart,” she said. “They were buying trash bags, and so was I. Can you believe it?”

  I could. But this was because Evan had already told me that the day they’d met Chloe they had been on their way to pick up litter. Their fantasy game club had adopted a stretch of highway and spent one Saturday a month cleaning it up. The rest of their time, apparently, was spent drawing up sketches of their game “alter egos” and combating strange trolls and demons by rolling dice in somebody’s basement. In just an hour, I’d already learned more about Orcs, Klingons, and some master race invented by Evan himself called the Triciptiors than I ever cared to know.

  Chloe’s date, Ben, was cute. It was clear, however, that she had not taken the trouble to look past him when making these plans: Evan was, well, Evan, and the twins David and Darrin both were sporting Star Wars T-shirts and had spent the entire dinner so far ignoring Lissa and Jess completely while discussing Japanese animation. Jess was shooting Chloe death looks, while Lissa just smiled politely thinking, I knew, about her KaBoom coworker, P.J., and the crush she had on him that she thought wasn’t obvious. This, basically, was Out There, and I realized in the last four weeks I’d not missed it one bit.

  After dinner the brothers Darrin and David headed home with Evan in tow, clearly as smitten with us as we had been with them. Jess begged off by saying she had to put her little brothers to bed, and Chloe and Ben stayed at the table, feeding each other tiramisu, leaving just me and Lissa.

  “What now?” she asked me as we climbed into my car. “Bendo?”

  “Nah,” I said. “Let’s just go to my house and watch movies or something.”

  “Sounds good.”

  As we turned into my driveway, the headlights curving across the lawn, the first thing I saw was my mother sitting on the front steps. She had her shoes off, her elbows on her knees, and when she saw me she stood up, waving her arms, as if she was in the middle of the ocean clinging to a life raft instead of twenty feet from me on solid ground.

  I got out of the car, Lissa behind me. I hadn’t taken two steps when I heard someone off to my left say, “Finally!”

  I turned around: it was Don, and he was holding a croquet mallet in one hand. His face was red, his shirt untucked, and he looked pissed.

  “What’s going on?” I asked my mother, who was now coming across the grass to us, quickly, her hands fluttering.

  “What’s going on,” Don said loudly, “is that we have been locked out of the house for the last hour and a half with no way of gaining entry. Do you realize how many messages we’ve left for you on your phone? Do you?”

  He was yelling at me. This took a moment to compute, simply because it had never happened before. None of my previous stepfathers had taken much interest in the parenting role, even when Chris and I were young enough to actually have tolerated it. Honestly, I was speechless.

  “Don’t just stand there. Answer me!” he bellowed, and Lissa stepped back, a nervous look on her face. She hated confrontations. No one in her family yelled, and all discussions and disagreements were held in controlled, sympathetic, indoor voices.

  “Don, honey,” my mother said, coming up beside him. “There’s no need to be upset. She’s here now and she can let us in. Remy, give me your keys.”

  I didn’t move, keeping my eyes on Don. “I was at dinner,” I said in an even voice. “I didn’t have my phone with me.”

  “We have called you six times!” he said. “Do you have any idea how late it is? I have a sales meeting at seven A.M. tomorrow, and I don’t have time to be standing around out here trying to break into my own house!”

  “Don, please,” my mother said, reaching out a hand to touch his arm. “Calm down.”

  “How did you get home if you don’t have your keys?” I asked her.

  “Well,” she said. “We—”

  “We drove home one of the new year models,” Don snapped, “and that’s not the point. The point is that we have left messages for you and your brother
which were not returned or acknowledged and we have been out here for over an hour, about to bust out a goddamn window—”

  “But she’s here now,” my mother said cheerfully, “so let’s just get her key and we’ll get inside and everything will be—”

  “Barbara, for Christ’s sake, do not interrupt me when I’m talking!” he snapped, whipping his head around to look at her. “Jesus!”

  For a second, it was very quiet. I looked at my mother, feeling a pang of protectiveness that I hadn’t experienced in years, since it was usually me either yelling at her or, more often, just wishing I could. But regardless of the anger my mother could flare in me, there had always been a clear line, at least in my mind, de marking the short but always clear distance between the We that was my family and whatever man was in her life. Don couldn’t see it, but I could.

  “Hey,” I said to Don, my voice low, “don’t talk to her like that.”

  “Remy, honey, give me your keys,” my mother said, reaching out to touch my arm. “Okay?”

  “You,” Don said, pointing right in my face. I stared at his fat finger, focusing only on it, while everything else—Lissa standing off to the side, my mother pleading, the smell of the summer night—fell away. “You need to learn some respect, missy.”

  “Remy,” I heard Lissa say softly.

  “And you,” I said to Don, “need to respect my mother. This is nobody’s fault but your own and you know it. You forgot your keys, you got locked out. End of story.”

  He just stood there, breathing hard. I could see Lissa shrinking down the driveway, bit by bit, as if with just another couple of steps she might be able to disappear completely.

  “Remy,” my mother said again. “The keys.”

  I pulled them out of my pocket, my eyes still on Don, then handed them past him to her. She took them and started quickly up the lawn. Don was still staring at me, as if he thought I might back down. He was wrong.

  The porch light snapped on suddenly, and my mother clapped her hands. “We’re in!” she called out. “All’s well that ends well!”