David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

The phone woke her. Benji’s face, warped into its best imitation of Marlon Brando yelling “Stella!”, lit up the screen. It was eleven o’clock, and Claudia was late. Unaccountably late. She offered a short secular prayer of thanks that the phone call came from Benji rather than her mother, whose four-minute, thirty-five-second reaction to this titanic news Claudia couldn’t bring herself to listen to. It sat among her waiting voice mails, ready to sink her with glacial tides the second she pushed the “Play” button. But Claudia couldn’t type alive —five lousy letters! — to allay Oliver’s fears that she’d taken a deadly nap behind the wheel on the interstate. Who could expect her to open her mouth, let alone speak in sentences, let alone defend herself?

Did you get there?

Hello?

Just tried calling. Call me back.

Getting worried.

Officially worried.

???

Babe?

She tossed her phone onto the seat beside her and was about to start the car when, cued, it seemed, from on high, an enormous red SUV with windows smoky and chrome gleaming pulled up alongside. The engine idled for a moment before dying, leaving the parking lot in a quiet gray stupor under low-hanging clouds. When the driver’s door slammed shut, Claudia closed her eyes, terrified that it was him, terrified that it wasn’t, until the scuff of footsteps stopped at the rental car’s side. A rap on the glass touched her like a live wire. She jumped. Nick leaned down and offered an apologetic wave. Time, in its ineluctable way, had transformed a familiar body into a strange one, replacing her lithe young love with this rugged and sturdier counterpart, no different than an Ovidian nymph turned into a towering and formidable tree. The blue of his eyes had softened toward gray. The self-consciousness that once stiffened his smile — she never did convince him that his crooked canine made him hotter — had been massaged away by time. He was as handsome as she remembered him, perhaps even more so with the signs of age ornamenting him like a patina: he now looked like he’d earned his beauty.

In Hollywood, Claudia would have rolled the window down for a game of cat and mouse, toying with him until he recognized her and his ancient grudges dissolved in a magical, amorous reunion — but Alluvia couldn’t have been farther from Hollywood. And Claudia wasn’t in a toying mood.

As soon as she was out of the car, standing before him, Nick took a polite step back, as if she worked in a department store and stood ready to spritz him with cologne. “If this is about my wife,” he said, “you should really speak to my lawyers.”

Claudia shifted under the weight of his scrutiny, willing him to recognize her, telepathically broadcasting her name like a distress signal tuned to his receiver. Eventually she said, “Nick.”

Only then did the calm waters of his composure break. He stared. “Claude?”

She nodded.

“What? What are you doing here?”

A sudden tremor seized her throat, but she pushed the words out anyway. “Visiting Benji.” She felt like glass, like her skin had gone translucent as a jellyfish, exposing her essential spinelessness, her secrets. She’d come all this way, it occurred to her, and she wasn’t going to tell him why.

“I heard. How’s he doing?”

“Better. Better. Word gets around.”

“In a town of twenty-three people? Of course word gets around.”

He invited her inside, listening to a version of Benji’s recovery she’d broken into bullet points, and poured fresh water into the coffeepot.

“But enough about him,” Claudia said. “My God, Nick. How are you?”

“I’m getting divorced. In case you didn’t figure that out. I thought you were one of my wife’s lawyers.”

“I caught that. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. We aren’t.” He laughed in his easy, effortless way, as if Claudia was in on the joke.

“We don’t have to talk about it.”

“Yeah. Let’s not.” He set her coffee on one of four plastic folding tables arranged in the center of the room to make a larger one. “Milk? Sugar?”

Claudia shook her head.

“So,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “Of all the people I expected to see.”

“I know. Is this okay?”

“Sure. Yeah. You might have given a guy notice.” Nick winked. “But sure.”

“Believe it or not, I didn’t know I was coming here.”

“I believe it. I was in New York last week. I was this close to looking you up.” He pinched two inches between forefinger and thumb. “Okay. Maybe this close,” he added, doubling the space.

Claudia noticed his wedding ring. “How did you know I’m in New York?”

“How did you know I’m here?”

She clinked her coffee mug to his and took a sip.

They’d walked countless miles through deep, deeply intimate, conversational territory, having been confidants, confessors, striders with the same stride, up until the day they weren’t, so it felt exceedingly strange to skitter along the safe path of small talk — Claudia’s current commission for Selkirk and Sons Funeral Home, Nick’s leaving a lucrative law practice to move back east and build things — when not far away, winding through the thorniest of thickets, ran the discussion they should have been having.

“And you don’t miss it?”

“The law? Going on seven years and not a single tear.”

“How could I not know you’ve been back for seven years? My mother—”

“How would she know?”

“In a town of twenty-three people.”

“Not all of them follow local real estate development.”

Casting a curious eye around the room, she surveyed the unfurled architectural plans spread out between them. If she looked interested enough, perhaps he wouldn’t notice she’d run out of things to say.

“Hey, those aren’t for show.”

“I–I—” she stuttered.

“Claudia. Relax. I’m kidding. You don’t need security clearance to be in here.”

In actuality, the plans hadn’t interested her, but now she felt obliged to give them more than their due. She stood to study them. “What is it?”

“Supermarket.”

“The one they’re building—” She pointed out the window, in the direction of the skeleton of steel and rebar she’d passed fifteen miles back, on the way into town.

“That’s the one.”

She’d gleaned enough about Amato & Sons on her previous night’s web search to know that the company had long ago traded house painting for larger construction and contracting jobs across the Capital Region. Nick stood at the helm of the development of countless subdivisions, a college dance theater in Schenectady, a glittering glass office park in Troy, and, most recently, a shopping plaza on the outskirts of Alluvia that housed a dry cleaner, a tanning salon, a Chinese restaurant, and a gargantuan, all-purpose supermarket.

“Wow.”

“Is that a good wow? Or a bad wow?”

“It’s a wow wow. This is enormous.”

“Forty thousand square feet.” Looking up from the drawings, he stood and took in the room with mock pride. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Oh?”

“He’s building forty-thousand-square-foot supermarkets, and his office looks like the inside of the Elks Lodge.”

She couldn’t disagree. The stained industrial carpet, the Stars and Stripes fastened to blond pressboard paneling, the dusty plastic spider plants struck her as the original set piece of sadness, but her mind at the moment was far away, on her parents’ porch, with the boy in the black hoodie.

“I wasn’t.”