Meantime by Katharine Noel

Author:Katharine Noel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-10-17T13:45:15+00:00

14

the salvage yard sprawled just off Third Street, not far from the warehouse where Jeremy and I had seen the Beckett plays a million years ago. Wild fennel grew by the fence; under the flat hand of the afternoon heat, its sharp chartreuse smell was everywhere.

Jeremy’s niece, Kaylyn, didn’t move to unfasten her seatbelt. “We’re at a junkyard?”

“It’s cool.”

“Ohhh-kkay,” Kaylyn said, as though placating a madwoman. Her big glasses—they had lightning bolts for stems, probably supposed to be “fun” but mostly just looking left over from 1983—reflected the sunlight so that I couldn’t see her eyes. I wondered if she felt that her dramatic skills were being wasted without an audience of her peers. But with her peers, she probably was the audience, trying to laugh enough to be part of things but not so much that one of them might spin around to snap, Who asked you?

Not that I knew anything about that.

I’d offered to bring Kaylyn with me to give Jeremy some time alone with his older sister. When we’d left, he and Janice had been lying on the living room floor. “I still can’t believe about your toes,” Janice had said, chopping the side of her hand against her own foot. She liked to take Jeremy’s painkillers with him; it was her way of commiserating.

“They actually didn’t cut my toes off with a cleaver,” Jeremy told Kaylyn. He, too, was on serious Vicodin, but he was used to it. “Despite your mother’s highly scientific demonstration of the process.”

Janice giggled. She wore primary colors and Statement Jewelry, big hammered-metal pieces that looked like plates of armor. She was an attorney—never lawyer—who lived in San Carlos, a celery-green suburb forty-five minutes south of us, in a house so bland it made my jaw hurt. Janice’s ex-husband, also an attorney, lived in an almost identical house two doors down. I’d met him a few times, and they in fact seemed like a perfect match, two people who saw injustice everywhere: a neighbor’s barking dog, the steak that came medium when he’d ordered medium-well, an idiot principal at Kaylyn’s supposed-to-be-so-excellent public junior high, the pebbles from the driveway that flew onto the lawn. Always in a joking tone, meant to show that they weren’t complaining, they just thought it was funny how nothing ever worked out for them.

I swung myself down from the truck’s cab and headed for the salvage yard gate. Kaylyn could hang out in the pickup if she really wanted. After a minute, though, I heard her door open and close behind me.

The salvage yard was one of my favorite places in the city. To the right of the entrance were hundreds of old doors; further on, bathtubs rested on their bellies like sea lions basking in the sun. There were windows, cabinets, rust-speckled stoves. Kaylyn came up to stand at my elbow. I asked, “Don’t you love this place?”

She rolled her eyes, saying with what was probably meant to be withering irony, “Not ex-aaact-tally.”

“Is it still here?”

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