Lynn Strong - Hold Still

She walks down the stairs where Stephen waits while checking email on his phone, and Ben stares at her, his coat on but unbuttoned, his sweatshirt still covering his hands.

“Shoes, Maya,” says Stephen. She wants to place her hand, palm spread, thumb and forefinger firmly on his collarbone, and put her face up close to his and tell him not to treat her like a child.

She pulls on boots.

Ellie hasn’t seen him coming, though the coffee shop — where she works, where she doles out coffee and pastries every morning while every other kid she knows is enrolled in some college she has somehow failed to get into — has a large window looking out onto the street. It’s almost ten and the early morning rush has emptied. She’s had no warning, no time to prepare; she stands stock-still, a black apron tight around her waist, short shorts, two coffee stains on the hip and shoulder strap of her white shirt. She’s half listening to a girl from down the street who talks in front of her, something about new neighbors, a book she’s read.

Ellie smiles at whatever the girl’s saying, but her eyes stay fixed on him. He’s taller than he was when they first met, broader, the sleeves of his shirt newly taut across his arms.

The girl, round-faced, soft-spoken, hands Ellie the money for her order, takes her coffee. Ellie doesn’t turn to him until she’s gone.

Dylan’s hair has always been long, but it’s short now, clipped down to a nub around his head. The whole time she’s known him it’s flopped down heavy in his face; he would toy with it incessantly, one large hand palming up over his head. Now, the sharp lines of his face and the largeness of his features shock her; he has big dark eyes, a long straight nose, thin lips. She can’t imagine what he does now with his hands.

He wears a gray T-shirt, jeans, and what her brother would describe as “douchebag loafers.” As he stands there, hairless, so much bigger, she has an image of him, fifteen, in Prospect Park: both of them stoned, no clothes and cold, his arms planted straight, chest hovering, thin but broad and firm, angling himself slowly, till his length had swallowed hers. He’d cupped his hand over her mouth and she’d bit the base of his thumb hard until he winced, still silent; he’d let her go. Ellie’d laughed out loud then, Dylan still on top of her, and she’d thought, Finally, I’m just like all the other girls .

He takes a piece of the free sample brownie. He swallows without chewing and takes another piece.

She can taste his breath: cigarettes, Mexican Coke, and ginger chews. She can feel the brush of her tongue along the crooked jumble of his bottom teeth.

He still calls her sometimes. Mostly she’s able to ignore it: his name flashing over and over on her cell phone as she sits curled under her duvet not able to sleep. But sometimes she answers; sometimes she slides open the phone and lets him talk: she needs too much sometimes to be reminded that he’s out there, that there’s still someone in the world who’s wanting her.

She tries to look at him sternly. “What do you want?” she says.

“Nothing,” Dylan says.

She feels Joseph — short and sweet, her coworker and only friend here, her only friend at all right now — he’s right behind her and Ellie wishes Dylan would just leave them. Instead, he leans in close to her: the smell is brownie and the hand-rolled cigarettes he smokes only when there are people around to watch him roll them. The rest of the time he smokes his mother’s Parliaments. “You,” he says. “Always, always. Pretty, pretty Ellie.”

She feels her body leaning toward him. She holds tight to the countertop with both her hands.

“Where will we go?” Maya says.

“Indian?” says Ben.

“Sure,” says Stephen. “The closer one.”

There’s a better place in Crown Heights, but Stephen hates driving the car.

“How was campus?” asks Maya, because Ben’s next to her and the silence gapes. They walk down Garfield to Fifth.

“Fine,” says Stephen. “Usual early semester jostling.”

“Things in order?” she says. “What are you teaching again?”

He pulls at a thread on one of his coat’s buttons and pretends not to hear her. He’s been teaching the same classes every semester for the past ten years.

“What about you, Benny?” she says, turning to him as they keep walking. She loops her arm through his elbow and thinks she feels him wince. Across the street on the next block is the coffee shop Ellie worked the few months before she left. All three of them are silent for a block; Ben and Stephen look back toward Sixth Avenue; Maya looks up at the brown awning with the too-bright white scrawl: GINNY’S, it says.

“Calc 2,” Ben says. His voice is flat, disinterested. “Western Political Thought,” he says. This is Stephen’s domain and his back straightens.

Stephen starts to speak, but their son stops him.

“It’s a requirement,” Ben says.

“Of course,” says Stephen. “Speaks highly of the school, then.”

Ben’s in school in Ohio, bucolic, foreign, a soccer scholarship. Maya was jarred, baffled by the choice when it came.

Ben nods, and Maya leans in closer. “What else?”

“Spanish,” he says. It’s January and frigid and she wants to tell him to put his hands inside his pockets. She wants to bend down and button up his coat.

“I might have to retake English,” he says, turning to look at her.

Stephen stops and faces them. He takes his hands out of his pockets and folds his arms across his chest. “Retake?” he says, lingering on the first syllable in a tone that Maya knows too well.

Ben turns toward Maya. He curls his hand into a fist.

“It’s not a big deal,” he says. “The class was really early in the morning. I just sort of stopped showing up.”

This is her son whom teachers have been calling “gifted” since preschool. Her son for whom there has never been space enough to be a problem too.

“Sort of stopped showing up,” says Stephen. Like he’s trying out the feel of this idea. “Does your coach know?”

“It’s fine, Dad. I’m covering it.”

“Covering it.” Stephen has been reduced to only able to repeat.

“Fuck off, Dad,” her son says.

“Excuse me?” says Stephen, keeping his voice steady, though he looks like he’s been hit.

“I’m starved,” says Ben. “And cold. Can we keep walking?”

Stephen turns and walks ahead of them. Maya holds tight to her son.

They get samosas, tandooris, rogan josh, and spoon rice and creamy sauces on their plates. No one’s speaking and Maya’s grateful each time the waiter comes to cut into the quiet.

“All right?” he asks. He’s older, with a thick, clipped accent. Maya nods, smiling at him, trying to think of what she might say to keep him there. A Bollywood musical plays on low behind them on a large flat-screen TV. Blues and oranges and purples all mixed up with lithe brown limbs. The waiter walks away.

“I heard Kenny Lambert made the Olympic Development Team,” says Stephen.

Maya drops her fork and glares at him. They’ve agreed not to talk about the soccer. The coach called weeks before to express concern about Ben’s “lackluster” involvement at practice in the fall.

A girl on the TV behind Stephen does a back bend, revealing a slick, perfectly flat midriff. Stephen never played or even cared about sports until their son suddenly proved himself a prodigy. By the time Ben was in high school, he was being recruited by a handful of colleges and Stephen knew the stats and names of every high school student in the state.

“Jesus, Maya, what? He’s a friend of his.”