Laura Kasischke - The Raising

Here, at least, Craig quit grimacing at his menu and looked up at the waitress looking at the ring on Nicole’s right hand. Nicole held it up to her like a queen waiting for it to be kissed.

“Wow,” the waitress said, taking Nicole’s little fingertips in her own, twisting her hand so she could see the ring in better light. “Wow. It’s sap , isn’t it? There’s… something in it.” She bent down to look at it closely.

“A little fruit fly,” Nicole said proudly. “It could be forty million years old.”

Craig had told her this.

His science teacher in sixth grade at Fredonia Middle had kept a little collection of things stuck in amber—a spider, a frog, some mosquitoes. He’d even had a piece of amber with what looked like a long black hair floating in it, and another with two sad little ants scrambling over each other to get out before they were trapped in the stuff forever. Craig had been horrified and thrilled by the idea that, as Mr. Barfield had explained it, they’d probably stumbled in there in the first place because they were attracted to the whole sticky mess. Imagine, he’d thought, having the evidence of your fuck-up preserved for millions of years in amber.

“It’s not sap,” Craig told the waitress. “It’s resin.”

The waitress nodded then as if that were the most interesting thing she’d ever heard in her life, left their table finally, tossed the piece of paper with their order at the cook, and then disappeared, later leaving their sandwiches under the red lamps on the counter between the kitchen and the restaurant for a good ten minutes. When she finally brought them over to the table, they were stone-cold.

“Why do you have to be so negative?” Nicole asked after the waitress was gone. “What difference does it make? If you were a Greek, you’d be doing something like this, and I’d understand.”

“Look, Nicole. Hell Week, whatever. Do what you have to do—but, like, don’t expect me not to be unhappy that I’m not going to see you for a week. I mean, if you were going to Spain or something, I’d get it, but sewing doilies in a basement?”

The tears that had been pricking at the inner corners of Nicole’s eyes ever since he’d waved the waitress away turned into the real thing. When they started to run pathetically down the side of her nose, one of them even spilling over her upper lip, Craig jumped up from his seat and came around to her side of the booth, and put his arms around her, and kissed it away.

“Never mind, never mind. I’m an asshole, I’m sorry,” he said, kissing and kissing. “Do your damn doilies. Just come back to me. I can’t survive without you.” He took her face in his hands and looked at it.

Nicole inhaled a wavering, aborted laugh before she put her head on his shoulder and started to cry even harder:

“But you’re never going to understand. It’ll always be this thing between us. You’ll always be laughing at me. I just—”

“Are you saying you want to break up?” Craig asked, stiffening, trying not to shout it. He was painfully aware of the waitress hovering around behind him now, and knew she wasn’t going to go anywhere until she’d caught enough of this conversation to figure out what the problem was. He lowered his voice, and said, “So, you want to dump me for some frat asshole? Is that what this is about?” He started to pull away, and then Nicole reached out and grabbed the lapel of his corduroy jacket, bunched it up in her fist, the way a baby would, and it made him want to start sobbing, too, looking at her small soft hand clutching at his Salvation Army jacket. (She’d bought it for him. She and her sorority sisters had gone to the thrift shop to buy costumes for some carnival they were planning, and she’d seen it there. “I knew you’d look so cute in it! And it was your size!”)

“No, Craig. No. I want you , but I just wish—”

“I told you, Nicole, I’ll think about it. I can’t join this year anyway. Next year, okay? I’ll think about next year, okay?” She didn’t nod or say anything, just continued to clutch the jacket with her face against his shoulder. “Okay?”

She whimpered a little, and then she said, “No. You won’t. You’d hate it.”

Craig was about to try to deny it, but then she looked up at him and she had a little smile on her face—a wistful, regretful little smile like nothing he’d ever seen on her face before, maybe never before seen on anyone’s face.

She said it again, “You’d hate it,” and started to laugh. “I can just see you.” She was laughing really hard now, and he started to laugh, too, looking at her, looking at him, regarding him, and he realized what it was, that expression—that she was recognizing him, that she knew him for exactly what he was, and it amused her:

Despite herself, she liked what she saw.

She maybe loved what she saw.

He could see it in her eyes.

Had anyone ever looked at him that way?

Craig felt as if he were made of glass, that a note played now on a violin or a flute could shatter him into a thousand pieces. He was trembling, he realized, and he had her hair in his hands, and he was trying to keep himself from sobbing out loud, and he vowed in that moment, not for the first time, that whatever she wanted, whatever it took to keep her, for the rest of his life, for the rest of her life, he would do it .

A bitterly cold wind blew through their booth at that moment, and he instinctively turned to look at the door of the diner. Someone had come in—a silhouetted figure in the doorway, blurred in Craig’s teary eyes—and the figure stood in the threshold for a second or two before Craig, blinking, looking more closely, recognized him just as he turned quickly and walked back out the door.

Craig pulled away from Nicole, and nodded toward the door. “That was him,” he said.

“Who?”

“That guy. The EMT guy, Nicole. The fucking ambulance driver. He saw us, and he left.”

“What EMT guy?” Nicole asked, bringing her napkin to her eyes to wipe them. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ve seen him, that guy, like five times at your sorority. I told you already. Remember? I told you that I keep seeing him around there. Who is he?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Craig. I don’t even know what EMT stands for.”

Craig didn’t bother to argue with her, or to tell her what EMT stood for. He watched the plate glass window to see if the guy would walk past it, but he must have gone the other way: To avoid the window? To avoid being seen by Craig?

Craig stood up, as if to follow, although he had no idea what he’d do if he caught up with the guy—and, anyway, Nicole took the sleeve of his jacket in her hand and tugged him back down to her, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him so sweetly, and for so long, that even the waitress, who’d been watching them, must have felt embarrassed, and went away.

“Let me get the mail,” Perry said, trying to grab Craig’s elbow as he turned from the window to the door, but Craig was already gone before Perry could stop him.

They’d been watching from the window together, waiting. Below, the mailman was finally crossing the street, his face down against what must have been a pretty stiff wind (a bright end-of-October day, not a cloud in the sky, but the bare branches of the trees were being whipped around mercilessly, and the wind blowing through the gaps between the window frames and the glass panes felt frigid to Perry). The mailman disappeared from view for a few minutes, presumably standing in the foyer of their apartment house, sorting and distributing. Then they saw him emerge and start to walk across the grass to the apartment house next door, a bright red leaf stuck to his blue cap, scores of other leaves catching to his black boots as he trampled through them.