Sometimes Peter felt like he’d spent the past eight years trying to dig himself out of that first moment they’d met, when he’d announced himself as someone intelligent to a girl who seemed to look upon this particular trait with great ambivalence.
But Emma wasn’t like most kids who hated school or found homework boring; she wasn’t indifferent and she wasn’t stupid. It was as if somewhere along the way, she’d simply decided to take a different route than the rest of her family, a conscious decision that seemed to inform everything else in her life. Still, whatever it was that drove her to act this way—brilliant parents and intelligent siblings and a home that sometimes felt more like an old-fashioned literary salon than anything else—Peter couldn’t help being jealous of the simple fact that these things drove her nonetheless.
Just the other day, on the Fourth of July, Peter had run into her as she made her annual escape from her family’s cookout, this almost as much of a tradition as the party itself. He hadn’t exactly been looking for her, but they had an uncanny habit of stumbling across each other nonetheless. Not that this was unwelcome. It was, in fact, the highlight of his days, when all the planning and mapping and waiting and hoping had been cast aside, and all he was left with was a town no bigger than a postage stamp, a father who barely noticed he was around, and a school he considered both too slow academically and too fast socially for someone of his nature. Emma’s tolerance of him—he didn’t fool himself into believing it was something it clearly wasn’t—was the one bright spot in an otherwise dreadfully monotonous existence.
He’d fallen into step beside her as she headed up toward the campus, the collection of pale stone buildings and dorms set high above town. The sun had slipped to the other side of the valley, the day was cooling off already and Peter pushed at his glasses as he tried to think of something to say.
“How long’s your brother in town?” he asked finally, and Emma looked over like she hadn’t quite realized he was there until just that moment.
“Not long,” she said. “I’m going back to New York with him tomorrow.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Emma said, then grinned. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
Peter ducked his head and kicked at the tall grasses as they crossed the lawn. “Can I come too?”
She laughed, though he hadn’t really been joking. “You don’t even know how long I’ll be away.”
“I don’t mind staying awhile.”
Emma frowned and shook her head. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I’m probably going somewhere else after New York.”
“Where?” Peter asked, quickening his pace to keep up with her, but she didn’t seem to have an answer to this, or at least not one worth mentioning to him. “If there’s no room, I could always take a car from the lot,” he said, thinking of the small patch of asphalt behind their house that served as a makeshift lot for impounded or abandoned cars. “We could caravan.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“I might,” he said. “I know how to jump-start them.”
Emma rolled her eyes, but Peter thought he could detect the faintest trace of interest even so. “Maybe another time,” she said absently, already striding out ahead of him, her shadow long across the grass, leaving him there to watch her go.
The next morning, though he suspected she was already gone, he found himself standing in front of her house, wondering if it was okay to bother her parents so early on a Saturday. Much to his relief, the barbershop where he occupied himself five to six mornings a week for minimum wage was closed for the holiday weekend. It was a job he found nearly unbearable, pushing the broom in figure eights around the old-fashioned chairs, holding his breath against the fruity smell of the shampoo, and worst of all, disposing of the hair clippings, the flakes of dandruff still clinging to them determinedly.
Other summers, his jobs had been somewhat better. In fact, in his sixteen years in this town, Peter figured he’d done odd bits of work for at least three-quarters of the shops, everything from bussing tables and washing dishes to serving slices of pizza and bagging groceries. He’d once even worked as a janitorial assistant up at the college, which was just another reason he felt he could never go to school there: How could you attend classes at a place where you’d picked sludgy cigarette butts out of the fake plants in nearly every building on campus?
The lights appeared to be on in the Healys’ kitchen, and so after a moment, he found himself following the flower-lined path up to their blue front door.
“This is a nice surprise,” Professor Healy said, and his wife appeared in the doorway beside him, the two of them both dressed in khaki pants and navy sweaters, unwittingly matching in the way of long-married couples. “We’re just about to have breakfast. You brave enough to try Katherine’s eggs?”
Peter grinned. “That would be great.”
He followed them into the dining room, and took a seat at the large oak table, which was seemingly engaged in a mighty struggle to stay upright beneath so many piles of papers and books. The surface was littered with reading glasses and pens, random pieces of day-old fruit and two mugs of coffee that had left permanent ring stains in the dark wood. He spotted a ruler and a calculator, sheaves of typed pages and others decorated liberally with red pen, and not for the first time, Peter wished that he lived in a place like this, a dust-filled room that smelled of books.
Mrs. Healy poured him a cup of tea, and Peter added some milk, watching the white liquid cloud his mug. Part of what he loved about coming here was this: the way they treated him like a colleague, a grown-up, a fellow intel lectual. There were never any silly questions about school unless he brought up a certain paper he’d written or a subject he happened to be enjoying. He liked how they never assumed he was there to see Emma either; in their minds, it was just as likely he’d arrived for a discussion of the peculiar rituals of ancient Mayan funerals or the newest collection of poetry by Seamus Heaney.
There was something about them, too—an undercurrent of sadness, distant and lingering—that Peter found oddly comforting. He’d never had the chance to know his mother, and this absence often made him feel painfully alone. But every now and then—when Mr. Healy was scanning a bookshelf or Mrs. Healy’s eyes drifted to the sun-bleached windowsill—he could very nearly see it etched in their faces, a mystery that seemed both sad and sweet at the same time, like sleeping with a blanket even after you’d long outgrown it.