The Next Things

The busboy was a tall kid, lanky and glossy, brown-eyed, long-lashed and graceful. He worked the early shift at the cafe, clearing the old timers breakfasts away, keeping up with their coffee consumption. Secretly, they liked him. In the evenings, we'd see him out on impossibly long runs all the way up the Farm to Market hill and over highway 20 to the other side of the valley. He came back looking damp, relaxed, shaking out his long limbs and brushing dark curls off his forehead.

Amanda had been a lacrosse player in high school, and once we found out about them, we all sort of pictured her tackling him more than we pictured anything sexual. It seemed like that between them, more a collision, an accident than anything. Amanda had her own unavoidable charms, poreless skin, the sweet freckles of summer across the bridge of her nose, always, a face that broadcast every emotion and   an easy way of touching everyone. She and her sister Iris used to walk to the cafe together in the mornings for takeaway coffee sometimes, Amanda's arm draped over Iris' strong swimmer's shoulders, their gait a kind of drawling, lazy thing.

She had told Jerry she couldn't do another summer of him in Alaska, that she wanted time together in the daylight for a change. She wanted him there when the garden was going, wanted help with weeding and putting in some new brassica beds. She didn't want to taste the first strawberries of the season without him, or stand out in the twilight alone watching the bats' quiet swerving flight over the back acre. There were meteor showers to be there for, and if he wouldn't let her hire Tucker Bennett to fix the corroding water line out to the greenhouse, then he would need to be there to do it. He had missed all her summer naps and the three times a year she swam outside and he hadn't helped wash the antique quilts, delicate heavy things she carried in the sling of an old sheet, arranged carefully on the back lawn to dry on the longest day of the year.

That was why he couldn't do much more then punch the kid, and why at the end of it he was apologizing to Amanda instead of the other way around, and that was how we finally got the Edison Free Library she had dreamed up ages ago, a cedar-shingled shack on the corner at the bend of the road, tended by Amanda twice a week like a vase of flowers that needed emptying, a good rinse, a generous refilling.