Lauren Fox - Send for Me

“Good riddance,” Annelise’s parents said; “good riddance,” Dora echoed, with a quavery catch in her voice. In Annelise’s memory, that was all they said, a constant refrain, but she knew that Max cried himself to sleep. A few months later, Max and Dora moved into a smaller apartment a few miles away, in an older, less prosperous part of the city. The distance cost their friendship nothing. He was her brother.

Which is why their first kiss, three weeks ago, shortly after Annelise began working full-time at the bakery and Max started classes at the university, was a shock to both of them. They came together practically by accident— was it an accident?—in the cluttered kitchen of Max’s mother’s apartment, and then both jumped back as if their lips repelled each other, the north-seeking poles of two magnets. But it was just as shocking how quickly they came back together, seconds later, eager and undeterred, how their familiarity recalibrated and became a sparkling curiosity.

“Lise?” Max whispered, as if he weren’t quite sure who she was. She felt the sharp corner of the counter poke into her back. Max’s hand, in a confused flutter, patted her head, then came to rest on her shoulder. What is this? she thought, and then, Why not? It was the best kiss of her life. It was the only kiss of her life.

Ever since then, they’ve been sneaking around like teenagers, which they are: back in his apartment, while his mother is out shopping; in the bakery, after her parents have gone home, when she is supposed to be sweeping the floors and double-checking to be sure the ovens are cool and the lights are off. Their lives are enmeshed, but her options are limited, which makes their moments together more thrilling. Max wraps his arms around his old friend and whispers his plans to her— after university…the two of us…Berlin.

All they’ve done is kiss. Is there more than that? She’s eighteen years old, and she’s quite sure there is. She and Emmi and Sofie used to whisper about boys they liked, but those boys were abstractions: blue eyes, quick learners; jokesters or thinkers, fast runners or quiet readers; unknowable hearts.

Now, with Max, her oldest friend, she’s in a constant, heightened state, whirring like the bakery’s cast-iron hand mixer. She is waking up, wanting. The haze inside her is being burned away by the unlikeliest of kindling. In between carefully monitoring rising dough and wrapping loaves of bread for customers, Annelise is beginning to reimagine her future.

He stops in after his classes, his leather book bag slung over his shoulder. Klara peers around the corner as soon as she hears his voice. Her round face is bright pink from the heat of the industrial ovens. “You’re coming for dinner tonight, darling,” she tells him, clapping her hands together, sending up a little puff of flour, and Max says, “Yes, thanks,” and when Klara hustles back to her work area, Max grins at Annelise, and they share this buzzing secret, and the electricity of it carries her through the rest of her long day.

*

They sit across from each other at the dining room table, curtains open to the fading light of the day. Max teases Annelise for having flour in her hair, and he fights her for the last potato, finally spearing it with his fork and waving it at her. Klara asks him about his classes, and Julius is his typical quiet self, nodding in peaceable agreement, letting his wife speak for him, but he likes to make up nicknames for the customers at the bakery, and today he tells Klara and Max and Annelise about his favorites: Willi the Walrus, the man whose mustache curled low beneath his droopy face, and Mother Goose, the woman who kept her four tiny, blond children in a straight line behind her at all times. Annelise snorts when she laughs, and Max kicks her under the table, and they’re just like they’ve always been: practically siblings. But then, after dinner, after eating the anise cookies she baked this afternoon, while her mother is doing the dishes, Annelise walks Max out, and he kisses her in the stairwell, the taste of licorice still on their tongues, and she runs, flushed, back to her apartment.

—

One day, a few weeks into this—what is it? they’ve never actually said—Max doesn’t show up at the bakery, not at all. At six in the evening, Annelise, not exactly worried but not exactly not worried, folds up her apron and untwists her hair and sweeps and scrubs and locks the door with the feeling that fourteen empty hours have just sifted through her fingers.

He doesn’t come in the next day, either, and so, late in the afternoon, when the store is quiet and the bread is sold and all that’s left are a few slices of streuselkuchen and a couple of kipferln, Annelise slips away and walks quickly to the café where they sometimes meet, her heels clopping hard on the narrow cobblestone sidewalk. The café is seven long blocks from the bakery, and when she arrives she’s breathing heavily and perspiring, even though the day is cool. She pushes the heavy door open and sees him almost immediately, sitting alone at a round table near the window, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, his books and notebooks spread out in front of him. She stands there for a second, in the doorway, wiping her sweaty hands down the sides of her green dress, blocking foot traffic until someone pushes past her and she is forced to come all the way in. Max, sensing the movement, looks up and sees her.

Annelise is, to her surprise, overcome with anger. Where have you been? she wants to say. Where the hell have you been? She is crackling with rage, a fishwife, a shrew. But she’s eighteen years old. She is not that. She raises a palm to her warm face, feels suddenly like crying. She swallows, walks over to him, trying to be casual, knowing instinctively that her approach to this situation is important.

“I was just feeling a little hungry,” she says brightly. “So I thought I’d stop in for a pastry. Didn’t know where else to go around here!”

Max laughs, puts his book down, and pats the chair next to him. “I’m sorry,” he says, and Annelise sits and tries to gauge the warmth in his tone from those two words. He moves his hand in a circle over the smooth grain of the table. “I had to study,” he says. She leans in close to hear him over the din of the café. He juts his chin toward the books and papers. “I have so much work to do.”

She nods, startled by how the slightest change in Max’s gaze, the dip of his head, the flicker of his focus, transforms her. Two days ago, she was a perfect composition of face and limbs and breath and heart. Now she is a rag doll, lumpy, mismatched, stitched together and stuffed with old cloth.

Max’s hand is resting, fingers splayed, palm down, on the table, and Annelise moves her own hand toward his at the exact moment that he reaches for his cigarette, and they do not touch: an awkward ballet.

I love you, she thinks. I love you, I love you, I love you. She is not stupid enough to say this out loud, but she feels her face go soft, her eyes watery with an ocean of affection, and Annelise hopes that Max is too preoccupied to notice.

This moment is nothing, really. Her heart will mend: Even as she can practically feel it cracking, she has an inkling that it will eventually glue itself back together. Maybe it’s even starting right now, the delicate process of repair. This is not a devastation like the ones that will follow, nothing like those great, gasping, winged monsters of ruin that will come later, the ones that will try to pick her up in their claws and fling her to her death. It’s nothing like those, obviously, but still, years from now, in another country with her handsome husband, this life irrevocably behind her, she will remember it: the smell of coffee beans and cigarette smoke, the clink of dishes and the laughter drifting over from other tables, the sudden rearrangement of their relationship reflected in Max’s face.