James Hynes - Next

Mom shrugged and swiveled the tall glass up to her lips. Even backlit, with the afternoon light pouring in the picture window behind her, Kevin could see the lipstick print on the glass. “Take it,” she said.

Stella pivoted to Kevin and theatrically batted her eyes, a little girl who wants a pony. But before she actually said a word, Kevin slumped in the archway — God, he hated that fucking couch — and said, “Where you gonna put it?”

Not “Where are we going to put it?” He was careful never to say “we” with Stella, not like Stella ever noticed. But Mom did.

“Well.” Stella actually shifted her hip and cupped her elbow and put a forefinger to her cheek — just like Jack Benny, though she wouldn’t have had the slightest idea who Jack Benny was. “We could put it in my place,” she said, watching him, “until you get rid of that awful futon, slash sofa, slash whatever in your living room.”

Kevin’s mom gave him a look, and they each drank from their respective glasses, like a salute.

A little later, as Stella was squealing with delight over God knows what in the basement with Kathleen, Kevin’s mother asked him, “So how old is this one.” Very flat, more a statement than a question.

Kevin hesitated, because he didn’t know what Stella had told her. “Early thirties?” he said, like he wasn’t sure himself. He knew better than to try to lie to his mother. “Never kid a kidder” was her motto.

“How do you do it?” she said.

“Do what?” This was an old routine, Mom sounding more like an ex-wife than his mother.

“You don’t make that much money,” she said. “You’re not the best-looking guy in the world.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Well, you’re not bad,” she said. “For your age.”

Kevin drained his water and set the glass on an end table, pointedly missing the coaster.

“And how did you meet her?”

“I told you, Mom.”

“Tell me again.”

Kevin crossed his arms. “She’s my tenant.”

“Your tenant! You mean, she pays rent?”

“That’s what a tenant does, Mom.”

“What do you charge her?”

Now she’s just messing with me, Kevin thought. “She’s on commission, Mom. She makes more money than I do.” He wasn’t actually sure about that, but it sounded good, and it made Mom pause for a moment.

“So she’s in sales.”

“Yup. She’s a saleswoman.”

“What’s she sell?”

“Books,” he said. “Textbooks.”

“Hm.” Mom held her glass up to the light and regarded the level. He knew what she was thinking. She doesn’t seem like a reader to me. Never kid a kidder, bub. But instead, turning the glass in the light, admiring the stream of bubbles and the swirl of Dewar’s amidst the melting ice cubes, she said, “Now that Beth, she was a neat lady.”

“A little louder, Mom, I don’t think Stella heard you.”

“I’m just saying,” his mother said. “You shouldn’t have let that one go so easily.”

“She let me go, Mom, remember? She moved out.”

Things were about to get uglier when they were interrupted — rescued, really — by Stella herself, thumping quickly up the basement stairs. She had erupted into the kitchen beaming like a kid at Christmas, bearing in both hands his father’s old ice bucket, the silvery round one with the embossed penguins on it.

“ Look at this!” she’d cried. “Isn’t it gorgeous? ”

Joy Luck is nearly at the redbrick fortress. Kevin crosses a bridge over a creek bed of bleached stones and a stagnant trickle of water, unwholesomely green, the banks overgrown with untrimmed bushes and trees and clotted with weeds full of sun-bleached trash. The walls of the fortress up ahead turn out not to be redbrick at all, but some sort of reddish panels. The sun stings the back of Kevin’s neck; his shortening shadow glides ahead of him up the sidewalk. Joy Luck has crossed a little street that runs between a vacant lot and the building, and she’s passing under the lee of the building itself, which rises seven stories above Sixth Street. But by the time Kevin gets to the corner, Joy Luck has vanished. Kevin stops dead in his wilted shirt and hot, heavy shoes, dangling his limp suit coat over his shoulder. She’s vanished into thin air, squirted from the universe (as McNulty used to say) like a watermelon seed. He could swear he feels the thick soles of his shoes melting into the pavement, and he knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s a mere puddle himself, running back down into the dry creek bed behind him. He turns, looking wildly around him, but he’s the only pedestrian in sight. He looks up at the big block of building looming over him, where a sign says GAIA MARKET, and it slowly dawns on him where Joy Luck is going. Up ahead an SUV turns left off Sixth and disappears into the building itself, and Kevin breaks into a run despite the heat. A moment later, pouring sweat, a little light-headed, he’s in the echoing, exhaust-scented parking garage under Gaia Market, and there she is again, crossing the garage toward a bank of sliding doors.

Of course there was going to be a Gaia Market here. Hadn’t Kevin heard that Austin was just like Ann Arbor, only bigger, hipper, hotter? His eyes adjust to the shadowless fluorescent light of the garage, and his ears to the starship hum of ventilators and the echoing percussion of car doors. Kevin weaves between Beemers and Mercedes and high-end SUVs, zigzagging toward the sliding doors where Joy Luck is just now slipping through. In Ann Arbor every car from junker to luxury auto is marked by the stigmata of a Michigan winter — patches of rust, a rime of road salt — but here even a lowly Corolla has a gleaming finish and tinted windows, like a B-list actress with perfect skin and impenetrable sunglasses. Just as in the Gaia lot in Ann Arbor, many of the vehicles display Obama bumper stickers.

Just as Kevin gets to the glass doors, they slide shut, breathing a puff of cool air into his sweating face. Even though he craves the arctic AC, even though he sees Joy Luck gliding up the escalator within, even though she’s doing the thing with her hair again that pierces his heart like a blade, he hesitates. She’s nearly at the top of the escalator, her head rising between the twin ramparts of a massive floor display of red wine. But Kevin stands just out of range of the photocell, warded off like a vampire by a sign on the door that commands

Love

Where You Shop

Or what? thinks Kevin. His stomach clenches. The peevish professional in him wants to put a period at the end of that sentence, but his inner suburbanite — the guy who goes to Gaia Market in Ann Arbor only when his girlfriend drags him there, the defensively proud patron of real grocery stores like Kroger and the late, great Farmer Jack’s — that guy immediately resents the poster’s imperative voice, its implicit superiority, its barely disguised snob appeal. You’re not just shopping for groceries at Gaia, you’re making a political statement, a moral choice — no artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners, say the signs, no exploited farmworkers — and you’re also proving that you’re not one of the lumpen, morbidly obese proles in synthetic fibers waddling under unflattering lights up the aisle of Meijer’s, filling your vast cart with family-sized packages of chicken, five-pound bags of frozen french fries, big plastic tubs of chunky peanut butter. Does your lumbering prole, stuffed into jeans and a gaudy sports jacket like a sausage in its casing, love where he shops? Because if you don’t love where you shop, then where you’re shopping isn’t good enough. In fact, if loving where you shop doesn’t matter to you, then maybe you shouldn’t shop here. That’s right, the sign’s telling Kevin, I’m talking to you, Mr. Royal Oak, Mr. Bachelor of General Studies, Mr. Non-Tenured Staffer, Mr. Maybe You’d Be Happier at Sam’s Club. It’s the same thing Kevin hears in his head every time he parks his five-year-old Accord among the Volvos and Subarus at the Gaia in Ann Arbor out on Washtenaw, where there used to be cheap motels and discount carpet emporia and the Ponderosa Steak House where his mother always took him to dinner when she came to visit him in college. It’s the voice that’s telling him that he’s an underachiever in every way he can imagine, professionally, personally, financially.