“Like, running sneakers?” Joanna asked.
Scott drummed his fingers on the table. “Designer sneakers. You wouldn’t get it.”
She squinted, thinking. “Is this the store that just opened near South Street in an alleyway? It used to be part of an old cheesesteak place?”
He raised an eyebrow accusingly.
“I read about it in City Paper,” she explained, almost like she was making an excuse.
He pointed at her. “Well look at you. You get an A-plus.”
She shoved her tongue into her cheek. To him, she was a brownnoser at the front of the classroom, calling out the answer.
Scott raised his eyebrows. “Oh. I guess I should ask you about your new house, huh?”
“It’s all right.” She waved him away. “I’m sick of talking about it.”
He cocked his head.
“It’s just exhausting to unpack, that’s all.”
He was still watching her, not buying it. She sighed and leaned forward, aware of the crowds around her. “Are people out here typically … cold?” she whispered.
Scott’s eyes widened. He rested his chin on his palm, intrigued. “Cold?”
She rubbed her hand on the back of her neck. The overhead lights seemed to burn like ultraviolet. “I just mean … women in this neighborhood. Suburban women.” She gestured around them. The women she was referring to were on all sides. “How does one get accepted by them? Is there a password?”
He snorted. “How about, ‘You’re a bitch, and so am I’?”
She hid a smile.
Scott leaned forward. “Are you talking about those ladies that live next door to you?”
She looked up, startled.
“After Charles bought the house, but before you guys moved in, I drove by. I saw them standing in the yard.”
Her cheeks burned. “Well, yeah. I’m talking about them, I guess.”
Scott balled up a paper napkin and aimed it for the trash can. It went in. “They’re fucking Stepford wives.”
She stirred her coffee. There—that was the answer she’d longed for when she called Charles yesterday. That was what she’d wanted him to say.
A woman passed carrying four bouquets of tiger lilies in her arms. And then something else tumbled unwittingly out of Joanna’s mouth. “How about . . . Bronwyn?” She squinted, as though groping for Charles’s ex-girlfriend’s name. “Was she cold, too?”
Behind them, a man working at the bakery counter called the next number, and a woman strutted up and asked for a box of croissants. “Probably,” Scott replied, his tone suddenly hard.
“I’ve never met her. I guess she moved or whatever.”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
She rotated her ankle, feeling the joint pop. “Do you know why they broke up?”
He raised his eyebrows, creasing his forehead. “Like I would know?”
“Well, Charles hasn’t really given me an answer, so …”
He pointed at her. “I never pegged you for that kind of chick.”
She sat back, self-consciously touching her chin. “What kind of chick?”
“The kind that cares.”
“N-no,” she answered. Her pulse raced, throbbing at the insides of her elbows, the backs of her knees. I didn’t used to be, she almost said.
She sat back, having said way, way too much. “No, I’m not,” she said more firmly, more certainly.
This was by far the longest, most intimate conversation she’d ever had with Scott. It was wearing her out, but at the same time, she didn’t want to move. “I’m going to see my mother next week,” she said. “I was talking to her when you came up.”
Scott smiled. “I remember your mom from your wedding. She wore that red dress.”
Joanna hid a smirk. After a few cocktails, that red dress had slipped off Catherine’s shoulders, exposing the lacy edges of her strapless bra.
“What?” Scott asked, noting her look.
“Nothing.” She stared down at the checkerboard floor. It was shiny, so clean one could probably eat off it. “She’s having some kind of breast biopsy.”
“That’s funny?”
“No . . .” She waved her hand. “I mean, it won’t be anything. It never is. But I always have to go and be with her.”
“Why do you have to go?”
“Because …”
“Doesn’t she friends who live closer? Other family members?”
Joanna stared at the barista behind the coffee counter as she industriously wiped down the steamed-milk nozzles. She wasn’t about to try and explain her issues with her mom to Scott of all people. “It has to be me,” she finally said.
“That’s pretty shitty.”
“It’s … complicated.”
Joanna’s eyes finally wandered to Scott’s shopping basket. There were a few items in it—peanut butter, a jar of olives, Klondike bars, an industrial-size bag of beef jerky. It didn’t exactly add up to a meal. Then she noticed a purple box tucked into the corner. “You like Sleepytime tea?” she exclaimed, pointing at the bear mascot on the label.
Scott paled and quickly turned the box of tea over. But that just made it worse—the bear mascot was now tucked into bed, a striped sleeping cap on his head, little holes cut out for his ears, his eyes two closed half-moons. Little z’s floated above his head, and a cup of tea sat on his nightstand, steam rising from the cup.
“Aww, that’s you,” Joanna said, pointing to the bear.
Scott winced. But his face was still open. He hadn’t shut down, amazingly.
“Does it help you sleep?” Joanna pressed.
“Maybe.”
“Do you have trouble sleeping?”
“Only when I’m thinking about you.”
Joanna flushed and looked away. But when she glanced at him again, he was chuckling. It was a joke. Of course it was a joke.
The automatic doors wheezed open again. Cold wind blew in, and as Scott raised his eyes, his face went gray. Joanna turned around to see what he was looking at. A few people had stopped to gather baskets or carts: a guy talking on his cell phone, a college-age couple, a fortysomething woman in a tan trench coat and gray pants.
“What?” Joanna asked as Scott’s face tightened.
“I think I know that bitch.”
“Which one? In the trench coat?” Joanna wondered how often Scott went around calling people bitches.
Scott nodded and shrank against the wall. “She won’t recognize me or anything. She never came to the matches.”
Joanna struggled to understand. “Her son wrestled?”
“I saw her picking him up a few times. She never came to watch, though, just waited outside in her car. And even if the kid had had the shit kicked out of him, she never helped him with his bags or anything.”
Joanna glanced at the woman again. She had short, no-nonsense sandy hair and wore pearl earrings. A white oxford collar peeked over the neckline of her sweater. She smiled at the elderly woman handing out toothpicked samples of Gruyere.
“What about the father?” Joanna asked in a low voice. “Did he come to the matches?”
Scott shrugged. “Never saw him.”
Joanna raised an eyebrow.
“That mother, though. She’d wait at the curb, talking on her cell phone the whole time. She wouldn’t even say hello to the kid when he threw his stuff into the car, just look at him like he was this huge burden. This one time she was pissed because his shoes were dirty—we’d been running laps on the track outside, and it was muddy—and she was worried it would get all over her precious car floor mats. I heard her screaming at him.”
They both watched the boy’s mother, who was now perusing the baked goods. After a moment, she cocked her head and reached into her jacket pocket. Her cell phone blinked, silently ringing. They watched as she cradled it between her ear and her shoulder.
“I used to tell them to visualize things,” Scott murmured. “Like, reasons to fight, I guess. People’s faces, Satan, Jesus, I didn’t really care. I never asked any of them what they visualized, but I wondered sometimes, with a few of them. If I were that woman’s kid, I would’ve visualized her.”
Joanna remained very still. It felt as though she was close to finding something out about Scott, but she had no idea how to forge the rest of the way there.
Scott leaned back, put his arms behind his head, and whistled through his teeth. “This place. Sometimes I wonder why I’m still here. It’s so fucking stifling, don’t you think? I’ve thought about getting the hell away.”
“Where would you go?”
“I don’t know. Drive across the country. Settle in … who knows … New Mexico? Arizona? I could, like, be a rancher.” He glanced at her. “Would you miss me?”
She startled, jostling her coffee cup. “I …”
“Maybe a little?”
Her mouth felt gummy. “Sure. We all would.”
“Charles wouldn’t.”
Joanna rushed to correct him, but then stopped—it might be true.
“I probably won’t go.” Scott stared out the window into the parking lot.
Joanna had a thought, breathed in, but then changed her mind and clamped her mouth shut. Scott stared at her, sensing she’d been about to speak. “It’s just, if you need to get out of town, you could come with me to visit my mom,” she said.
A little smile blossomed on Scott’s face. Wrinkles formed at the corners of his eyes when he smiled. His teeth were white and straight. “Really?”
Joanna touched her earlobe. Her stomach hurt; now she just wanted to get out of there. “Well, no. I mean, I was kidding. I don’t know why I said that. I mean, why would you want to visit my mom?”
He waited, that same smile hovering.
“I was just kidding,” she repeated.
“Well,” he balled up a napkin in his palm, “if you change your mind, I’d be happy to come.”
Joanna stood up to throw away her cup of coffee, eager to create some space between them. A few feet away, the wrestler’s mother finished her phone call and was heading to the back of the store toward the wine section. A college-age girl was heading in the opposite direction, and both were caught in a narrow strait between two cheese tables. The mother stepped aside, letting the girl pass first. She even smiled graciously.
It was amazing how appearances could so easily fool everyone. A clean, well-made trench coat, a nice necklace, decent manners, it all said this woman was a good parent, a respectable person. As Joanna dropped her half-empty coffee cup in the trash, she wondered what else she didn’t know about the polished, preppy people around her. Maybe the man in the three-piece suit lived in his car. Maybe the poised, stately woman with the butter-blonde hair, wearing the pink Lilly Pulitzer dress was so dreadfully unhappy she could barely drag herself to the store.
Then she peeked at Scott, who was still sitting at the little bistro table, fiddling with his cell phone and swimming in his sweatshirt, with his coffee-colored skin and thick, almost dreadlocked tufts of hair. What did people assume about him? How did it contrast to what was going on inside of him? It was so hard to know.
