1594634777 by Emma Rathbone

Author:Emma Rathbone [Rathbone, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-27T16:50:21+00:00

Nine

A few days later I sat with Allison Block from work in a downtown seating area with pink concrete dividers separating us from the historic main street walkway. People waded through the heat, peering into store windows. A very old man and woman walked by, hand in hand.

“Cute couple,” she said, tilting her head to the side.

“Awww,” I said, trying to get into the spirit.

We were people watching. It’s what Allison suggested we do when I’d asked her if she wanted to get a drink. We’d always been chatty, and I thought it would be good to have a friend in town. Someone to go out with. But within five minutes of sitting down with her, I could tell she was already zipped up in her life and didn’t have time for or really need another girlfriend.

“Anyway,” she said. She stealthily whipped her hair around so it landed on a different shoulder and readjusted her sunglasses. “We settled on the farmhouse-style tables in the end. God. Stop me. This must be so boring for you.”

“No, no! I mean, it sounds like it’s like trying to organize a United Nations conference,” I said. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

She was telling me about her wedding. She was getting married in the fall. The guy was named Caleb Clark and they met at Duke but they hadn’t hit it off. It was only now, years later, when they were the only two people on some stupid ghost tour, that they’d reconnected. These were some of the things she told me. He was from a large, sprawling, storied Southern family, and his mother was addicted to sleeping pills, but it was more like a joke, just one more quirk in a cast of eccentrics because—and this is something I gathered, that she didn’t tell me—they had money. Money like ancient ore in the Clark family line, money that nullified all problems and that had a home in a mansion surrounded by forty acres on an estate about thirty miles out of town. Allison had alluded to this in an under-the-breath way, but I could tell she savored it, the fact that this would be her life, that she held it in her mouth like a lemon drop. And maybe because of this, or maybe because this was just the way she was, her whole bearing was as peaceful as a just-made bed. And so it didn’t seem right to nose in with my uncomfortable problems.

I watched an ant, trapped in the hairs on my arm. I wondered if, now that she’d fallen through all these lucky chutes, if it must have seemed preordained to her, like it would never have been any other way. I wondered if she’d ever felt like a pinball, rolling appallingly down the center of the board toward the gutter at the bottom, unable to divert into a different life.

“My aunt Viv,” I offered up, “who I’m staying with, is fifty-five and she’s a virgin.”

“Oh, no!” said Allison, as if my hat had flown off.

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