Sarah Dessen: This Lullaby

“You know what?” he said, pointing up at the speaker, which popped again, louder this time, then hissed before resuming the theme song at full blast. “From now on, forever”-he pointed up again, jabbing with his finger-“ this will be our song.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, and right then I was saved, hallelujah, as Don’s office door swung open and Ruth, led by her salesman, came out. She was holding a sheaf of papers and wore that stunned, recently-depleted-of-thousands look on her tired face. But she did have the complimentary fake-gold-plated key chain, all hers.

I stood up, and the guy beside me leapt to his feet. “Wait, I only want-”

“Don?” I called out, ignoring him.

“Just take this,” the guy said, grabbing my hand. He turned it palm up before I could even react, and pulled a pen out of his back pocket, then proceeded-I am not joking-to write a name and phone number in the space between my thumb and forefinger.

“You are insane,” I said, jerking my hand back, which caused the last digits to get smeared and knocked the pen out of his hand. It clattered to the floor, rolling under a nearby gumball machine.

“Yo, Romeo!” someone yelled from the showroom, and there was a burst of laughter. “Come on man, let’s go!”

I looked up at him, still incredulous. Talk about not respecting a person’s boundaries. I’d dumped drinks on guys for even brushing against me at a club, much less yanking my hand and actually writing on it.

He glanced behind him, then back at me. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, and grinned at me.

“Like hell,” I replied, but then he was already going, dodging the truck and minivan in the showroom and out the front glass door, where a beat-up white van was idling by the curb. The back door flung open and he moved to climb in, but then the van jerked forward, making him stumble, before stopping again. He sighed, put his hands on his hips, and looked up at the sky, then grabbed the door handle again and started to pull himself up just as it moved again, this time accompanied by someone beeping the horn. This sequence repeated itself all the way across the parking lot, the salesmen in the showroom chuckling, before someone stuck a hand out the back door, offering him a hand, which he ignored. The fingers on the hand waggled, a little at first, then wildly, and finally he reached up and grabbed hold, hoisting himself in. Then the door slammed, the horn beeped again, and the van chugged out of the lot, bumping its muffler on the way out.

I looked down at my hand, where in black ink was scrawled 933-54somethingsomething, with one word beneath it. God, his handwriting was sloppy. A big D, a smear on the last letter. And what a stupid name. Dexter.

When I got home, the first thing I noticed was the music. Classical, soaring, filling the house with wailing oboes and flowing violins. Then, the smell of candles, vanilla, just tangy sweet enough to make you wince. And finally, the dead giveaway, a trail of crumpled papers strewn like bread crumbs from the foyer, through the kitchen, and leading to the sunporch.

Thank God, I thought. She’s writing again.

I dropped my keys on the table by the door and bent down, picking up one balled-up piece of paper by my feet, then un-crumpled it as I walked toward the kitchen. My mother was very superstitious about her work, and only wrote on the beat-up old typewriter she’d once dragged around the country when she did freelance music articles for a newspaper in San Francisco. It was loud, had a clanging bell that sounded whenever she reached the end of a line, and looked like some remnant from the days of the Pony Express. She had a brand-new top-of-the-line computer too, but she only used that to play solitaire.

The page in my hand had a 1 in the upper right-hand corner, and started with my mother’s typical gusto.

Melanie had always been the type of woman who loved a challenge. In her career, her loves, her spirit, she lived to find herself up against something that fought her back, tested her resolve, made the winning worthwhile. As she walked into the Plaza Hotel on a cold November day, she pulled the scarf from her hair and shook off the rain. Meeting Brock Dobbin hadn’t been in her plans. She hadn’t seen him since Prague, when they’d left things as bad as they’d started them. But now, a year later, with her wedding so close, he was back in the city. And she was here to meet him. This time, she would win. She was

She was… what? There was only a smear of ink after the last word, trailing all the way down the page, from where it had been ripped from the machine.

I continued picking up discarded papers as I walked, balling them into my hand. They didn’t vary much. In one, the setting was in L.A., not New York, and in another Brock Dobbin became Dock Brobbin, only to be switched back again. Small details, but it always took a little while for my mother to hit her stride. Once she did, though, watch out. She’d finished her last book in three and a half weeks, and it was big enough to function effectively as a doorstop.

The music, and the clanging of the typewriter, both got louder as I walked into the kitchen, where my brother, Chris, was ironing a shirt on the kitchen table, the salt and pepper shakers and napkin holder all pushed to one side.

“Hey,” he said, brushing his hair out of his face. The iron hissed as he picked it up, then smoothed it over the edge of the collar of the shirt, pressing down hard.

“How long’s she been at it?” I asked, pulling the trash can out from under the sink and dumping the papers into it.

He shrugged, letting some steam hiss out and stretching his fingers. “A couple of hours now, I guess.”

I glanced past him, through the dining room to the sunporch, where I could see my mother hunched over the typewriter, a candle beside her, pounding away. It was always weird to watch her. She really slammed the keys, throwing her whole body into it, as if she couldn’t get the words out fast enough. She’d keep it up for hours at a time, finally emerging with her fingers cramped, back aching, and a good fifty pages, which would probably be enough to keep her editor in New York satisfied for the time being.

I sat down at the table and flipped through a stack of mail by the fruit bowl as Chris turned the shirt over, nudging the iron slowly around one cuff. He was a really slow ironer, to the point that more than once I’d just jerked it away, unable to stand how long it took him to do just the collar. The only thing I can’t stand more than seeing something done wrong is seeing it done slowly.

“Big night tonight?” I asked him. He was leaning close to the shirt now, really focusing on the front pocket.

“Jennifer Anne’s having a dinner party,” he said. “It’s smart casual.”

“Smart casual?”

“It means,” he said slowly, still concentrating, “no jeans, but not quite a sport jacket event either. Ties optional. That kind of thing.”

I rolled my eyes. Six months ago, my brother wouldn’t have been able to define smart much less casual. Ten months earlier, on his twenty-first birthday, Chris had gotten busted at a party selling pot. It wasn’t his first brush with the law, by any means: during high school he’d racked up a few breaking and enterings (plea-bargained), one DWI (dismissed), and one possession of a controlled substance (community service and a big fine, but just by the skin of his teeth). But the party bust did him in, and he did jail time. Only three months, but it scared him enough to shape up and get a job at the local Jiffy Lube, where he’d met Jennifer Anne when she’d brought her Saturn in for a thirty-thousand-mile checkup.

Jennifer Anne was what my mother called “a piece of work,” which meant she wasn’t scared of either of us and didn’t care if we knew it. She was a small girl with big blond hair, whip smart-though we hated to admit it-and had done more with my brother in six months than we’d ever managed in twenty-one years. She had him dressing better, working harder, and using proper grammar, including wacky new terms like “networking” and “multitasking” and “smart casual.” She worked as a receptionist for a conglomerate of doctors, but referred to herself as an “office specialist.” Jennifer Anne could make anything sound better than it was. I’d recently overheard her describing Chris’s job as a “multilevel automotive lubrication expert,” which made working at Jiffy Lube sound on a par with heading up NASA.