Old Records Never Die by Eric Spitznagel

Author:Eric Spitznagel
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-16T11:31:41+00:00

Seven

She looked confused at first. Unbelieving. Like the expression you might give to an ex-lover who showed up at your doorstep unannounced, just to tell you about the kid they forgot to mention a few decades ago was yours. Her mouth opened, but the words weren’t coming. She gasped. Then giggled. Then gasped again. Her brain was trying to catch up with the clearly ridiculous information that was being delivered to it.

“Is that . . . ? It can’t be . . . Are you kidding me?”

Heather G.—twenty-five years older than the last time I’d laid eyes on her—pulled the Bon Jovi record out of my hands like a purse snatcher. She held it close to her face, studying the numbers, tracing them with a finger.

“Jesus Christ, this is my phone number. It is!”

“No it’s not,” I said, scoffing. I was pretty sure she was mistaken. How could she have recognized it so quickly? If you showed me a random series of digits and asked if it was my home phone number from 1987, I couldn’t have told you with any certainty. But she seemed convinced.

“It’s absolutely mine,” she insisted.

“It can’t be!” I said.

“It totally is. I can’t even believe you found this.”

She reached into her pocket, pulled out a pair of glasses. Granny glasses! Or at least the type of frames I once associated with grandmothers, with the delicate horn rims. She slid them onto her nose, and then pulled the record closer, giving the faded Sharpie on the sleeve a thorough inspection.

The woman for whom I once would have gladly crawled through a bed of hot coals and broken glass just to touch one of her inner thighs was sitting in front of me, older than our parents were when I first touched her breasts over a varsity cheerleader sweater, wearing granny glasses so she could read the fine print on a Bon Jovi record.

“Why didn’t you call the number and find out?” she asked. “You should have called. You would have gotten my brother. He’s got the number now.”

“Come on! Seriously?”

“I still had that number six years ago. When I moved into my parents’ house, I just transferred the service over.” She laughed, maybe at me, maybe a little at herself. “Not a lot has changed since you’ve been gone.”

So it really was my record. I poured myself another glass of Michigan red wine. Because what the hell, if we were going to do this, let’s do this.

Everything about this was surreal. Not just reuniting with my first girlfriend—the first person to ever do things to my body that I had previously only done to myself—but to be in this house, which seemed so familiar, even though I’d never set foot in it before today. It looked almost identical to the house where Heather lived when we were teenagers—which, weirdly, was located less than five miles away from where we were currently sitting.

South Chicago suburban houses all look the same to me. The architecture is the same,

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