“Where is he?”
“What? You wanna scare him away?”
Ranthus shrugged.
“Rehab,” she said.
“Good. Right?”
She shook her head. “It’s never going to be like the way it was.”
Ranthus thought that was the point.
“His parents decided I was the problem. Enabling. These two… Their house smells like Scotch but, you know, it’s me. They sent him a first class ticket home. One. Told him it was about his inheritance. The night before he left he was talking about how our life was gonna be. Bragging. We would buy something small, out of the way. Maybe Wisconsin. He called me when he landed and that was the last time… The dad calls me that afternoon: ‘Ms. Carnation? Can I be frank?’ His name is Frank. For real. He laughed and then he told me.”
The guy from behind the counter, bald and bug-eyed, stood at the bottom of the stairs. He’d been listening. Ranthus glared and the guy raised his wrist and pointed to his watch.
“Two minutes,” said Ranthus.
They looked at the books. Pocket paperbacks priced a buck or less. They forgot what a poem could do. On the way out, the man behind the counter, his shirt spotted with yellow stained, urged them to visit again and put out his hand. Ranthus shook. An unavoidable fate like a traffic jam.
“Jerry,” said the man.
“We don’t want to know your name,” said Ranthus. “Sorry.”
“Please visit again.”
“Barthelme, O’Hara, or Pinter,” said Adelina. “Put them aside for me?”
The man just smiled.
They got whiskeys at a dive with half an American flag printed on the brick wall facing the train. Hers was cut with sour mix. The Allman Brothers Band on the jukebox. In the corner two tall guys with long hair, moustaches, and dirty hands were looking over maps and talking about metal bands. Adelina rolled her eyes when Ranthus said he thought they were a couple. A heavy guy with a broad red nose and a black Member’s Only jacket sat at the end of the bar and bought a round for everyone just before he left. Adelina thanked him and put her arm around him, kissed his cheek. He blushed and waved her away.
They got talking about the greatest album period. Adelina wanted absolutes, not subjectives. Ranthus said All Things Must Past and she refused to even consider it, citing every Beatles record that preceded it, and insisted he name something else on the spot. He said London Calling, which she thought reasonable. She was proud of her pick, Nashville Skyline. Ranthus was quietly happy – he thought Nashville Skyline perfectly analogous with All Things Must Pass. All these years later and they were still so similar, like nothing had changed, the empty years hadn’t choked their friendship.
“Seriously,” said Ranthus, “Do you hate George Harrison that much?”
“You’re trying not to laugh at your own joke. I remember that look exactly.”
He put his hand on her thigh and startled her.
“Sorry.” He pointed to the whiskey and then removed his hand.
She asked the old Pole behind the bar his name. He nodded and poured them another drink. She told Ranthus she imagined the Californian – Was it her ex? Ranthus wasn’t sure – tricked by his parents, kidnapped even, suffering in some factory that’s whole purpose was to make him bland.
“Am I supposed to love him still when he gets out or do I act like I don’t care anymore? ‘Cuz then I am an enabler. Maybe I could break him out. A chapter for my memoir.”
She really had been writing a memoir, she confessed to Ranthus sometime that night. Ever since High School. It was 700 pages long and detailing mostly her sex life.
“Am I in it?”
“Why would you ask that?” she said.
“The one that got left behind?” He laughed and then he waited and then he said, “Your love isn’t lost.”
They sat in her car listening to the gentle rain and splitting a fifth of cheap whiskey, less money than a single drink served by the Pole. The conversation ran dry and Adelina tuned the radio to a love song with strings and horns. The lyrics were awkward and the singer had a Nordic accent. Ranthus passed the whiskey and turned to the oldies station.
“I was listening to that.”
“What is this?” said Ranthus. “Disco? They used to play the same twelve doo-wop songs all night.”
“That doesn’t even sound good.”
He looked at her and almost pouted.
“Your favorite deejay died,” she said. “While you were gone.”
“He had grace.”
“I was in the suburbs when they buried him. I got stuck in the traffic. They had the service on the radio. The host starts weeping and they had to cut away.”
“To what?”
She didn’t say anything and Ranthus waited. Lightning striking in the distance.
“Well…?”
“I wish I could remember for you.”
“Where were you going?”
“When?”
“When you got stuck waiting for the traffic?”
“I don’t remember that either,” she said. They both knew it wasn’t true. She started the car.
“You’re OK to drive?”
She rolled down her window and turned off the car. Took a swig of the whiskey.
“Are we gonna survive?” she said.
Adelina went to school on the Halloween of her senior year in an NCHS cheerleading uniform. She looked better than most of the cheerleaders and the whole school was talking about it by the end of the day. Ranthus saw her in the computer lab, her arms around Jonesy and Tom-O, all of them laughing at some big joke that he didn’t understand. Her legs were gorgeous and he realized he’d never even seen her in shorts. She lifted her skirt and flashed the ass-end of her white underwear. “You love it! I know you do.”
She spent the previous summer in the city, riding the train in circles and reading Atlas Shrugged. She was a missionary for Ayn Rand but Ranthus couldn’t be bothered. By August she was over it and admired him for not wasting his time. “I knew you’d come around.” That was the summer she started sleeping with Tom-O and by the end Ranthus was just happy he didn’t have to listen to the two of them insist they’re physical relationship was independent of their conscious decisions.
There was a hot dog joint across the street and the air stank of mustard.
