Adult Assembly Required, page 16
After several hours, and once the two delighted garden owners had expressed their thanks for way longer than necessary, Laura found herself happily helping Bob load the extra plants and tools back into the truck. She always felt better when she was active, even though she’d developed a secret habit of imagining her own muscles while she used them, which was probably weird. When she was going through rehab, her PT would talk her through everything her body was doing, and it stuck. She would bend to lift a fifty-pound bag of soil up into the truck, for example, and visualize her own quadriceps, glutes, and abdominals working, then her shoulder girdle and arms as she lowered it onto the truck bed . . . weirder still—and this she was never going to tell anybody—she always imagined her muscles as a highly trained team of miniature hers, little Lauras in leotards looking focused and dedicated and crushing it like an amazing internal flash mob.
“What are you thinking about?” asked Bob, who had finished loading the last of the tools and was hunting in his pockets for his keys. “You’re smiling.”
Laura dusted her hands off on her jeans. “Nothing. Daydreaming.”
She walked around to get in the truck, and Bob watched the sun warm the honey tones of her hair. Get a grip, Robert, he told himself. You barely know this woman.
They climbed into the truck, and Bob turned to Laura. He was full of the energy he always got from finishing hard work, and for once he was able to talk without thinking about it.
“Are you hungry? We kind of worked through lunch . . .”
Laura looked at her watch. “It’s four thirty.”
“Early bird special?” Bob grinned. “Denny’s? Or Larchmont?”
Suddenly Laura was hungry, too. Ravenous, actually. “Denny’s,” she said. “I’m feeling a little homesick for diner food.”
“You grew up in a diner?” Bob was still grinning as he checked over his shoulder and pulled out into traffic.
“Yes,” said Laura, surreptitiously holding the armrest, “but behind the counter, so, you know, it was private.”
“Plus all the ketchup packets you could ever want.”
“Exactly.”
TWENTY-TWO
They pulled into the Denny’s parking lot and made their way to the entrance. The Denny’s smelled the same as every other Denny’s—pancakes, coffee, relaxed good humor. You know the smell.
Bob and Laura sat in a booth, and a friendly waitress came to take their order. That accomplished, and coffee received, they sat across from each other and smiled. Away from the work of the garden, Laura felt awkward. She started studying the surface of the table, which was remarkably consistent with every other diner table she’d ever sat at. She looked at the condiments: ketchup, check; sugar, check; little creamer things, check. Yup, everything appeared to be in order.
Come on, she told herself, say something. “That was fun,” she said, possibly a little too brightly. “Everyone seemed very happy with the garden.” She folded the menu and put it away, wondering if she would ever reach the point where conversation came easily to her.
Bob nodded, adding five little creams to his coffee. “I think they were. It was a perfect spot with plenty of sun, and we’ll monitor the pH levels and soil composition over time, obviously.” Scintillating conversation as ever, Bob, he thought to himself. What beautiful young woman doesn’t want to ponder soil composition?
Laura raised her eyebrows. “Do you taste the coffee anymore, or is it just flavored creamer at this point?” She sipped her coffee. It was unbelievably hot, but she managed not to scream and thought she carried it off pretty well.
He frowned, then realized what she was referring to. He tucked the little cream pots one inside the other. “They only hold enough to bathe an ant.”
Laura was puzzled. “Why would you bathe an ant? I think of them as pretty clean already.”
“No idea.” He wished he could think of something funny, but he kept noticing her eyelashes, or her freckles, and forgetting what he was going to say. Besides, he wasn’t really all that knowledgeable about ants. He tried to change the subject.
“What do your parents do?” Bob tried his coffee, too, and flinched. “How are you drinking this? It’s like lava.”
“They’re teachers, what about yours?”
He laughed. “They’re teachers, too!” He held up his hand to high-five, and they swatted at each other with moderate success. “Or at least, my grandmother, mother, and three sisters are all teachers. I don’t know about my dad, he left when we were young.” He didn’t seem bothered by this, as indeed he wasn’t. All those women had provided more than enough guidance, plus the half-dozen uncles and male cousins in his extended family were always around if he’d had a question that only someone with testicles could answer.
Laura asked, “What do they teach?”
“My mom teaches middle school everything, mostly social studies. I can name all fifty states in less than a minute.”
“Prove it.”
“Another time. Your turn.”
She looked at him and smiled. “Mom and Dad teach psychology and biology, my three brothers teach entomology, zoology, and botany.” She paused. “I not sure I could name all fifty states, but I can rattle off the Linnaean system of taxonomy.” She shrugged. “Animal kingdom only, probably, but I could take a swing at plants.”
“Wow,” said Bob, his hand still warm from the high five; he could feel it tingling. “I . . . uh . . . couldn’t.” He shook his head. “Not even sure what you said, all I heard was a lot of ‘ology.’ ”
“Yes,” laughed Laura, “we have lots of ology in our house.” She was feeling better. Bob really was easy to talk to, once she got over her fear of saying the first thing. “You have three sisters?”
He nodded. “All older.”
Laura laughed. “Wow. Were you incredibly spoiled or totally pushed around?”
He pulled a face. “I had a choice? I got both, depending on the day.”
“What’s the gap?”
“Small, between all of us.” He smiled and sipped his coffee. “My mom is very efficient.”
“I hear that, my mom is, too. I’m the baby, my three brothers are all older.” She grinned at him. “We’re a matching pair: teachers’ kids, baby of four, only one of our gender . . . Did you have a dog growing up?”
Bob nodded. “Yes, a mutt called Rusty.”
Laura crowed, “We had a mutt called Lemon.” She held up her finger. “Wait, let me clarify, we didn’t have him, my grandmother had him, which was nearly the same thing.” She could still remember long summer afternoons lying on her bed with Lemon, the smell of his fur when she buried her face in his side, which she did quite frequently. She realized there was a little of Lemon in Herbert; they both had that kind of erratic fur that looked like they’d accidentally gotten thrown in a hot dryer.
It was at that moment that a kerfuffle broke out over by the entrance to the Denny’s. They both looked around. A small crowd had formed around the claw machine, and judging by the crowing and yelling, someone had just won something.
Bob grinned. “One of my sisters once won five hundred dollars on a claw machine.”
“I thought they were all rigged,” said Laura. “I read an article that said the power is only sufficient to win a fraction of the time.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you read,” said Bob. “It’s absolutely a game of skill.”
“No way,” said Laura.
“Yes way,” said Bob.
They looked at each other and then, as one, got to their feet.
* * *
• • •
The simple fact of the matter is that claw machines can be rigged. The owner is able to alter the power of both the grip and the lift, but that’s a blade that cuts both ways. It’s possible the owner of this particular Denny’s was feeling generous, or that the claw machine had just been filled, or that a magical alien race had come down and souped up the machine for their own intergalactic reasons, but regardless of why, it was paying out big-time. The three teenage girls who were playing the machine when Bob and Laura walked over were giddy with success, despite the fact that they’d each won a toy none of them would have taken for free, had someone offered it to them. The first girl had a sort-of unicorn (the horn pointed backward; possibly the manufacturer had only heard unicorns described), the second had a stuffed rabbit that could have spawned a horror franchise, and the last one was clutching a stuffed mushroom that might have been video game inspired, but ended up looking like an inappropriate drug reference.
As Bob and Laura walked up, the girls stepped back.
“We won,” said the first one, looking up at the very cute guy who had just shown up. He was too old to be genuinely appealing, obviously, but still worth talking to. She was wearing a T-shirt for a band that had broken up seven years before she was born, a fact she was completely unaware of.
“I see that,” said Bob. “Do you think you used up all the luck?”
The second girl shook her head. A small cloud of glitter settled on her shoulders. “It’s not luck, it’s skill.” She was the one with the mushroom.
“My point exactly,” said Bob, pulling a pair of quarters from his pocket.
“It’s completely rigged,” argued another of the girls, the one with the unicorn. Now that she’d had a chance to look at it properly, she was uneasy . . . the backward horn made it look bad-tempered, and she wondered how her other stuffed toys were going to respond to it. Then she remembered she was sixteen and shouldn’t even have stuffed toys, then she felt guilty about the ones she did have, and then her brain short-circuited in a soup of hormones and neurochemicals and she went silent. Fortunately for her, nobody noticed any of this at all.
Bob stepped up to the machine and put in his money. The timer started to count down, and he moved the claw back and forth a few times.
Laura laughed at him. “What, feeling it out?”
Bob was unconcerned. “Yes. I am getting a sense of the mechanism, the timing, the power.”
Laura snorted. “Please.”
Bob took his hands off the controls and circled the game cabinet. He crouched and evaluated; he rubbed his chin and raised his eyebrows at Laura.
“Stuffed cat in the corner pocket,” he said.
Laura looked. “The pink one with a bad attitude?”
“I think that’s just the way its face is glued on,” said Bob, “but yes, that one.” He rubbed his hands on his legs, checked the timer, and moved the claw. In one movement he dropped, grabbed, and raised the claw, dragged the cat out of the pile of toys, and dropped it into the chute.
Laura goggled. Literally. Stood there with her mouth open and her eyes wide.
“No freaking way,” she breathed.
Bob laughed and handed her the cat. “Your turn.”
* * *
• • •
When they sat back down at the table to eat, Laura was down four dollars and was pretty vexed about it.
Bob reached for the ketchup. “Look, you did your best.”
“It’s rigged,” she insisted, the cat still clutched under one arm. “It works some of the time and you got lucky.”
“Me and the teenage ninja turtles?”
“Yes,” she said firmly, pouring syrup onto her pancakes. “Every so often it’s set to win like that so everyone gets excited and plays.”
“For, like, eight turns in a row?”
She laughed, and again there was that . . . something . . . between them. Less than an open declaration of attraction, more than a one-sided fancy. A silent acknowledgment they could leave unsaid, at least for now.
As Laura watched Bob eat, she realized she liked him more and more; he didn’t ask her challenging questions, he didn’t dominate the conversation, and he didn’t make her feel nervous. He was simply very present. Plus he was ready to drop everything and play the claw machine at a moment’s notice, and who didn’t love that?
Bob cleared his throat, and Laura looked up at him. “So,” he said, having spent a few minutes formulating this conversational nugget, “are you looking forward to grad school?”
Laura nodded. “Yeah, I am. Did you go?”
He shook his head. “Nah. I wanted to, kind of, but you know . . .”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “Money? Time? The whole complicated process.” He colored slightly. “I’m not a big fan of paperwork.”
Laura smiled at him. “It’s not that hard once you get started. What would you do at grad school?”
“Flunk, probably,” he said, looking away, out of the window. Laura frowned; had she said something wrong? She surreptitiously checked her phone. No messages. For a second she felt sorry for herself; when she’d been with Nick, she always had something to do. He loved to organize their time together, and she’d let him. Now that she was trying to build her own life, she realized she’d need more tools and materials than she’d thought.
She looked up and found Bob smiling at her. His smile was slightly goofy, making his face crease and his eyes crinkle. It canceled out the smooth planes and sharp angles of his resting face, replacing them with a warm and approachable humanity. All at once Laura felt grateful she was making friends in Los Angeles. Throughout her life her friendships had come through other people, through more popular and charming girls at school, through older students of her parents, and then, largely, through Nick. Bob and Polly and Nina . . . these were friends she’d made for herself. She was on a trivia team, for goodness’ sake; that had to count for something.
“Everything good?” asked Laura.
“Yup,” said Bob easily. “Do you want anything else to eat? More coffee?”
Laura shook her head. “I’m fine, thanks. Can we go home?” She noticed how easily she’d said that, but how strange it sounded.
Bob didn’t smile. “Sure, of course.” He gathered his stuff and turned around. “I’ll go pay the bill.”
“Thank you for dinner,” said Laura, following him. She twisted her hair around her finger, then realized what she was doing and stopped. She stuck her hands in her pockets instead, and then worried she was looking too casual. Then she desperately tried to stop thinking at all.
“Of course,” he replied. “Thank you for coming today and helping.”
He faltered into silence and gazed around, having temporarily lost the ability to look at Laura. His attraction to her had grown so much during the day, and he was wondering how to navigate literally going home together. For a split second, when she’d asked to go home, he’d let himself imagine she was his girlfriend, that they were going to go into his room and she was going to let him undress her and take her to bed. He was taken aback by how much that appealed to him, but it wasn’t really that surprising. He’d enjoyed her company so much, despite the fact he found her so physically attractive. Pretty girls normally made him feel clumsy and inarticulate, and he’d always blamed himself for that. For the first time he wondered if maybe it hadn’t been his fault at all. Laura was beautiful, but when she smiled at him, he felt . . . seen, not evaluated.
* * *
• • •
A few minutes later they turned out of the Denny’s parking lot and joined the stream of evening traffic heading along Sunset Boulevard. Traffic was heavy but moving steadily, and the sidewalks on either side of the street were thronged with people. Laura watched the people move and clump, marveling at the way they flowed and accommodated one another. A horn suddenly blared very loudly behind them, and seconds later a siren came screamingly close. Bob looked in the mirror and pulled to the side. An ambulance shot by, making the truck rock slightly, followed seconds later by a fire truck easily doing seventy.
Laura felt her heart starting to pound. Breathe.
As the sirens receded, Bob pulled back out into traffic, hitting the brakes to avoid a speeding car slipstreaming the ambulance. There’s always one.
Sirens. The pressure of the seat belt. The smell of gasoline, the shocking gut-panic fear of fire.
Bob realized something had changed, and shot a glance at Laura. Pale again, a visible dew of sweat on her forehead. He pulled over and turned the engine off, angling himself to face her.
“Laura, you with me?”
She looked at him without really seeing him, trying to claw herself back to the current moment.
He reached over and took one of her hands, rubbing it between his own. “Laura, everything’s fine, you’re totally safe.”
With a cold shiver settling over her skin, Laura nodded. “Sorry . . .”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said, letting go of her hand as he felt her tugging away.
“I’m fine now,” she said, sitting back. “Sorry, the siren made me jump is all.”
He looked at her and a line appeared between his brows. “We can stay here as long as you need.”
Her voice was sharp. “I don’t need to, we can go. Ignore it, I’m fine.”
Now his eyebrows went up, and he tipped his head slightly. “Laura, it’s really . . .”
“No, let’s go.” She turned away and wound down the window, letting the warm evening air into the car, closing her eyes where he couldn’t see her, waves of nausea receding as she breathed. This is not happening.
