Adam Johnson - Emporium

You two’ve done this routine before.

Blue Danube kicks into gear, and across the women’s faces in the mirror comes a certain serenity, like they’re all picturing the slow-tumbling spaceships from 2001: A Space Odyssey , a movie you thought was pretty sexual — all that docking and pod work — and which your dad said was a coded history of existentialism.

She lifts her flask high. “For my husband,” she says into the mike, addressing the bus like a lounge singer. “Scholar. Diplomat. NASA scientist of the year.” Here she whoops loud, and the women are swaying to the music just enough to make the bus woozy between lanes.

“He has a permit to buy weapons-grade plutonium, reserved parking at JPL. He wrote his name in the wet cement of Cape Canaveral’s launch pad, but it’s Thursday night, and he can’t come within five hundred feet of his wife for four more hours.”

The bus explodes, the women are in the aisles, some with their arms in the air, dancing and pirouetting homages to both the famous Cassini satellite and the weekly, six-hour Cassini restraining order.

Mrs. Cassini tosses the mike into your lap and from her glowing abandon, you’re trying to guess the destination this week: Shocking the tourists at the Idanha Hotel? Maybe scar-strutting with the black ties at the Capitol Club or lobbying complimentary cocktails from the Westin convention staff.

Cassini moves closer, her lips just brushing your ear, and you want to close your eyes. “To the Cove, young captain,” she mouths and you know there’s both a difficult U-turn and some slumming ahead. But your shoulders start to loll to the music and soon you have the old BlueLiner waltzing through the backroads of Boise, a little too fast perhaps, though none of your passengers are very worried about crashing because they’ve all had cancer, and the motion of their bodies tonight seems to confirm both Space Odyssey theories.

At the Cove, you wheel the bus around in a crush of white gypsum and bottle caps, coming to rest under the yellow buzz of bug lights and a single beer sign humming blue enough that cars look stripped of their paint. The Cove through the windscreen is a square slump-block hut set off by its brighter parking lot, dark-bordering pine, and backdrop of lake that’s snowmelt still.

The women descend beside you, heels sinking in gravel, and make for the only door there is. They move past, winking, patting your shoulders, letting the sheen of their nylons run staticky along your forearm as you hold the door lever. There are some new faces in the Cancer Survivor’s Club this week, but you don’t have the energy to meet their eyes. You look to familiar faces instead, the veterans. It’s pathetic, for sure, but they ladle love on you and you take it, these Thursday-night women who flirt with you, rub your shoulders, teach you to foxtrot. Judge Helen — the one who granted the restraining order — is the last to leave, and she already has her weekly Winston in her lips. She is a bigger woman with short, spiked hair who is not afraid to wear black spandex, and you like her for that.

They all cross the blue-yellow parking lot with a motion only cancer survivors can muster, a sexy, patient gait that comes with the knowledge bosses can’t fire dying women, that cops won’t cart them off, that bartenders don’t tell bald women they’ve had too much. Through a door padded with red vinyl and brass studs, they disappear, and you are alone again.

Out stumble two men who turn back to stare at the red door in disbelief. One is wearing fishing gaiters. They look at each other, at the bus, strain a glance at the sky as if the weather might have something to do with the women they’ve seen and then backtrack, heads shaking, for an old Subaru by the Dumpster.

You shut the door, check your watch, and pull out a Miller’s Analogies workbook. The college entrance test is Saturday, and you’re more than a year behind on everything. You put your feet up on the console and flip through the pages, a stream of letters and numbers that don’t even register.

“I’ll scream rape,” comes from the back of the bus, singed with mock-play and the smell of tobacco.

“You know the rules, Mrs. Cassini. No smoking on the BlueLiner.” You say this over your shoulder, feigning interest in antonyms in an effort not to encourage her. But you can feel her nearing, hear her slapping the overhead straps on the way, leaving them to swing in the dark behind her.

“I could have Helen throw away the key,” she says and pauses, smoking. “I’m willing to bargain on your punishment, though.”

“Cat-o’-nine-tails? Thousand licks, Mrs. Cassini?” Your voice is flat, disinterested.

“Benny, your tongue. You’re lacking a refining, feminine influence.”

“And you’re the best I’ve got?”

She’s standing beside you now, taking one step down toward the door so that she is lower, but farther, so she has to lean. “Oh, Ben. If you only knew how much control it takes to be a role model for you.” She runs a hand through your hair in a circular motion that leaves her holding your earlobe. It’s a thing your mother used to do. “Seriously, though, how’s things? Stan okay?”

“You know Dad, he’s sawing wood. I got a test coming up.”

“Good, good. You study hard and I’ll throw you a party.” She taps the cigarette ash into her hand. “In the meantime, are you gonna help me get off?”

“Mrs. Cassini?”

She nods her head at the lever, and you swivel the doors open for her. “Relax, Benny. Go with things, okay? Live for me.” She turns to leave, but on the last step stops and lifts her skirt for a full bare-ass flash before jumping down and trotting off toward the red vinyl of home, and you’re left shivering with a knob in your hand. You know these women well. You know a side of them nobody sees, and Mrs. Cassini’s been playing the flirting “auntie” for a long time. Back then, though, you were seventeen and your mom was on this bus. Now you’re nineteen, a lot of things have changed, and it’s fifty-fifty at best whether you’ll even show for that test.

You swing the doors shut and set the lock, more to keep yourself on the bus than anything, but the static is still in your arm, smoke hangs in the air. Your dad has a small State Farm branch — which is why Mom was insured to the teeth and you’re covered to drive a fifty-six-foot bus — but one time he took you with him to underwrite a warehouse, a windowless cinder building that stored marine batteries. Everything was primer gray except for the stacks of yellow cells with their red and green posts, but there was a pulse to that place that twitched like copper windings and made your mouth taste of zinc. You remember thinking this must be what it’s like inside a hydroelectric dam, with stands of vibrating water behind the walls. This is what you feel now from the Cove, this draw.

You pick up your books and set them down.

Your mom once said cancer was the best thing on earth, that as long as it didn’t kill you, you were going to live. When she and Cassini and the others started the club, they sat outside in your mom’s cactus garden, drinking tea and sharing. It wasn’t long before they started searching for stronger medicine and held rituals in the trees out back, events in the twilight where they buried their hopes and burned their fears in the group holes they’d dug. Except for a few veterans, the turnover rate in the club is pretty high, and you understand why green tea and empathy eventually yielded to Donna Karan dresses and a tang of vermouth.

The I-High school counselor, Mrs. Crowley, said writing an essay about struggling with your mom’s death could open the doors of a lot of good colleges. You didn’t jump at that idea. She said look at the big picture: it could help you get into medical school someday, where you could make a difference, where you could find a cure for what took your mother.