Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

I parked in front. The roof of Betty’s was dripping and one cold droplet caught me on the left ear as I walked in. I remember that odd detail. In line at the counter I held a little debate with myself-how wild a night should it be?-then asked for two chocolate-glazed instead of one, a medium instead of a small decaf. Carmine was counting money in the floury kitchen. I could see him there through a sort of glassless window. He looked up at me from his stack of bills, pointed with his chin at the waitress’s back, and made a John Belushi face, pushing his lips to the side and lifting one eyebrow, the expression of a man who had not a millionth of a chance of ever touching the waitress in a way she liked, and knew it.

I carried my paper cup of coffee and paper plate with two doughnuts on it to a stool at a counter that looked out on Betty’s wet parking lot. In a minute a trim, balding man sat beside me, with a black coffee and the Sports section of the New York Times . “Nice truck,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“I saw you get out of it,” he said.

I could not think of any response to this.

He kept trying. He said: “You don’t see many of them still around. Fifty-one Dodge?”

“Forty-nine.”

“Gorgeous,” he said. “Like you.”

I looked away. I was waiting for my coffee to cool, and was not really in the mood to talk, and though I understand sexual loneliness as well as the next person, there was not much I could do about this man’s loneliness. Just at that exact moment-it was after midnight-a woman walked out of Betty’s carrying a small bag and got into her car and she must have had a slippery shoe or been distracted by something because she put her new Honda in reverse and drove it across about fifteen open feet of parking lot and straight into the back of my truck.

“Whoa!” the man beside me yelled.

I took a good hot sip of coffee. I watched the woman get out, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand and looking as if she wished she had never been born. And then, very calmly, I went outside to talk to her.

SHE WAS A NICE-LOOKING woman. Not very tall, thin, with large breasts under a gray cashmere sweater and wide hips and what looked like genuine cowboy boots on, and jeans. She wasn’t really dressed to be out in the rain, and she was coughing. I had my coffee cup in one hand and my first instinct was to offer her some because she looked so miserable there, in pain, upset at her bad luck, and sick besides.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Jake. That’s my truck you just mashed.”

She coughed and coughed and said how sorry she was.

I said it wasn’t the end of the world-a phrase I had been using with myself all year. She got out her registration and insurance papers and gave me her business card, and since I don’t have a business card, I wrote my name and number on the back of another one of hers and that was the end of it. Carmine had come out and was wielding an old golf club in case there was any trouble, which, of course, there wasn’t. Just before the woman ducked into her Honda, she swung her long black hair away from her face and looked at me. Thank you for not making a big deal about it, the look said. But Carmine interpreted it differently.

“You have the phone of this girl?” he asked, when she had driven away.

I said that I did. We were standing there side by side in the drizzle.

“Wait three days for the cold she has to go away, then call.”

I finished my coffee right there in the rain, and Carmine took the cup, and I went home and more or less straight to bed.

OVER THE NEXT FEW days it wasn’t easy to keep from thinking about the young woman in the cowboy boots because I used my truck for work and I liked to look at it from time to time to cheer myself up. It was an official antique, forest green, with a bright chrome grille and a handmade maple rack over the bed for lumber and ladders. Every time I looked at the truck from a certain angle I could see the broken taillights and dented fender and I wondered how hard it would be to get replacement parts and I thought about the black-haired woman coughing in the rain.

I didn’t mention her to anyone, not even to Gerard, who works with me and is closer to me than my own brother and sister. I waited three days-for her cold to go away and so as not to seem overly anxious-then dialed the number on her card.

“Hi,” I said. It was my lunch hour, I was calling on Gerard’s cell phone, because I didn’t own a cell phone anymore. I didn’t own a TV, either, or a microwave, or a single pneumatic nailing gun, even though I could have afforded those things. I was sitting on a set of exterior steps we’d built as part of a new addition to a professor’s house in Cambridge, tuna sandwich on my lap. “I’m Jake Entwhistle,” I said into the phone. “You mashed up my truck the other night in front of Betty’s.”

For a few seconds there was no reply. It sounded to me as though she was still coughing, but trying to stifle it. I pictured her turning her face away from the phone.

“The doughnut shop,” I suggested, when she didn’t speak.

“My insurance company should have sent you the papers by now.”

“I’m not calling about that. I’m calling to ask you out.”

“I’m at work,” she said.

This didn’t seem like a promising answer, but I kept trying: “A restaurant dinner, on me. Maybe a walk around the block afterwards if it’s a nice night and we get along.”

“Thank you, but I can’t,” she said. “And I’m very busy right now.”

“Alright.”

“You should get the insurance forms within a day.”

“Alright,” I said. “I’m not worried. It’s an old truck.”

“Good. Good-bye. Thank you anyway.”

“’Bye,” I said. I set Gerard’s phone down on the new stair tread, finished my sandwich, folded the wax paper up into a perfect square, and put it in my back pocket. I looked out at the neighborhood of neat, wood-frame houses with swing sets in their backyards. Eventually I stood up.

Instead of eating, Gerard was using the lunch hour to take a nap on the plywood subfloor of what would someday be the professor’s new bedroom. For a while I walked around, checking things that didn’t need to be checked, and at twelve-forty-five I went up and woke him. When he opened his eyes and saw me he said, “One more minute, Colonel, I was having the dream of dreams.”

Everything was the something of something with my friend. The dream of dreams, the woman of women, the divorce of divorces. He had a rough, honest-looking face, a difficult past, and the two sweetest young daughters in the world. In another minute he stood up, ate a pear, and we spent the afternoon cutting two-by-six studs for the walls of the upstairs rooms and nailing them in place.

“Let’s spruce things up, Colonel,” Gerard suggested at one point, because the two-by-sixes had been sawn from spruce trees.

“The professor would like that,” I said.

“The professor was in my dream. She was asking me to… well, I can’t say what she was asking me without the risk of offending community standards of decency.”

“We’re in a school zone, besides,” I said.

“The professor had given me a physics problem, I can say that much.”

“She’s a good professor. We like her particularly much.”

“Physics, biology, chemistry. All the sciences were involved. Latin, Spanish.”

“Italian?”

“Tongue of tongues.”

We went on for a while with this kind of nonsense, driving sixteenpenny nails one after the next through the sole plate and into the ends of the spruce two-by-sixes. When the walls were framed, and the light had softened to an early evening light, we packed our tools away in a safe place upstairs, stood around for a while looking at the work, asked each other what kind of plans we had for that night, shook hands, as we always did, and went home.