.
He said it just like that, ‘It was fine, Mom. Just fine.’ So sweet, my Brad.”
A little later Henry pulls his Jeep into space number twelve in front of his apartment building. There are two visitor spots for every unit in his building but his have never been used.
He unlocks the top lock, then the bottom, lets himself in and closes the door. He throws his keys like dice to the counter and reaches for the phone book.
“L, m, n … n … ni … Nichitas … Nicholas,” Henry says. “C. Nicholas. Bingo. C. Nicholas, 452 Railroad Avenue.”
He looks up and squints while tracing the back roads of town in his head. Railroad Avenue should be familiar as he knows where the tracks are and how they cut through town, but he is quite certain the road that runs alongside it is Lockridge. The train tracks are not so obvious in their division of the town for they cut through like a knife into a sandwich, separating east from west to no effect. Rather, the real distinction lies between the town’s north and south.
After the cluster of Victorians and small Cape Cods huddling near downtown, the roads wend their way north past larger properties, set farther back from the road. In many cases, tucked nicely in the center of manicured and landscaped lawns, more likely called grounds. Homes protected by gates, some wrought iron, others fashioned to look like barn locks, crisscrossed-and-painted wood. Mallard mailboxes, stone walls, forsythia, boxwood and rhododendron, in different combinations, complete the complexion. Over there the Petersons’, where Henry drank too much beer after their senior prom and passed out in the pool house next to fat Sally Evans, who had vomited up her drinks. Over here the Childers’, where Henry walked in on Steve Wilson, a junior at the time, in the master bedroom with a classmate’s college-age sister. Just up that hill, behind the Alcatraz gates, sophomore Henry brokered a peace agreement between John von Sutter and Kitty Connors, who were on the angry side of the breakup-reconcile pendulum.
In one motion the phone book is closed and keys are grabbed. The light is fading and Henry wants to set out while he can still read street signs.
The Top 40 station is playing “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” and it crosses Henry’s mind that 1985 is not a good year for music. He hasn’t bought a record in two months. Turning from his low-rise apartment complex he drives down Elm to Lockridge and follows the tracks, slowing at each intersecting street to read the signs. Mason, Brookridge, Shore and one that has no sign at all but could not be Railroad as it dead-ends into the town dump.
Two verses into Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen” he sees it. Railroad Avenue. He takes a chance and turns right but it is wrong, as all initial directional choices turn out to be. The numbers are going lower from 132, not higher. So he pulls into a driveway in front of a decrepit boxy house and flips the Jeep into Reverse, lowering the radio before backing out.
He slows in front of number 452, a brick apartment building that yields no clues, as he had hoped it would. He parks the Jeep across the street and waits. Other than a discarded plastic bag jellyfish dancing along the sidewalk, filling up then deflating with wind, there is no movement anywhere on the block. An empty Tab can rolls under a car across from his. He turns up the radio even though it’s “Ghostbusters,” a song he hates. He rests his head back and closes his eyes, remembering her trying to blow her hair out of her face. Then shaking his hand. Then saying her name. Cathy Nicholas.
By the time he opens his eyes, “Purple Rain” is ending and it is dark. No plastic bag in sight. Several lights are on in the apartments facing the street and he regrets not getting out earlier to see which is hers. He cannot do it now, he reasons, because someone may have seen him—she may have seen him—and he feels he must go home.
In the dating world there is a finite amount of time in which date requests can be made following random meetings. To Henry’s way of thinking, this period is not greater than forty-eight hours. The sooner the better, he tells himself. And so the next day, the day after meeting her, Henry goes in to Cup-a-Joe before going in to work.
“Hey,” he says once it is his turn to place an order.
“Hi, there,” she says. “What can I get for you?”
“We met yesterday,” he says, coloring. “The flooding? You dropped your keys?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says. But she does not appear to remember. “How are you?”
“I’m Henry,” he says. “It’s Cathy, right? I helped you unlock the store in the morning.”
“Oooh, yeah,” she says, this time with genuine recognition. “Thanks again.” She glances around him to the line that has developed. “What can I get you?”
“Ah, actually I was wondering if you wanted to grab a bite later,” he says. “Lunch, maybe?”
“What? Oh, ah, I don’t know,” she says. “Um, do you mind … I’m not supposed to … um, can I just help this … ah, lemme see.” The stammers are meant to encourage Henry to move over to the side of the register so others can order.
Before he can do this the woman in back of him in line tilts Von Trapp-family-style to the side to catch Cathy’s eye and orders a decaf. Henry now sees the line and moves over.
“I’m sorry,” Cathy says, turning to fill the order, “it’s a really bad time right now.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Henry says. “Sorry. I’ll come back. I’ll try you again later.”
“Yeah, thanks. Sorry,” she says.
“No problem.”
But it does indeed present a problem to Henry, who is now unsure of when he can revisit the topic with her. Did she mean it was a bad time now as in time of day, he wonders, or as in time in her life? He decides she must have been alluding to the early-morning rush for caffeine.
Baxter’s is dark and locked, as Henry knew it would be this early. It is eight o’clock, two hours before the store is set to open. Even though he told Mr. Beardsley he would open the store, he had half expected his boss to be there himself to assess the damage.
Henry separates the store key from the others on his key ring and unlocks the door. The smell is like a punch. Mildew. Unmistakable. It reminds Henry of the boathouse at Fox Run where they jockeyed for the newer, less-smelly, life jackets before sailing class.
Henry knows Mr. Beardsley will unravel when he arrives so he hurries over to the phone.
“This better be an emergency,” Tom Geigan says in lieu of “hello.”
Geigan has worked at the local hardware store for as long as Henry could remember. His specialty is cutting keys. There is a sign reading Key Korner above his tiny nook toward the back of the store. Henry at first thought him much older but in fact only two years separate them—Geigan dropped out of high school and Henry assumed this adds to the division.
They met soon after Henry began working at Baxter’s in his senior year of high school, but both seemed to sense his impermanence so, while they were cordial to each other (no smiles, just respectful head nods and the occasional “How you doing?”), they more or less kept to themselves. It wasn’t until Henry was full-time at Baxter’s and found himself sitting on the bar stool next to Geigan that they both spoke to each other in complete sentences and the friendship took flight. Still—Henry being completely honest here—he had the itch of a thought that the friendship was temporary. The feeling that it would not be the sort of friendship to withstand a geographical move or a major life change. There was something that kept them off kilter. Fox Run? Henry was not sure.
“You don’t even know who this is,” Henry says.
“I don’t care who it is. If you’re calling at this hour, it better be an emergency,” Tom says. “There’s a construction site banging away in my head.”
“Yeah, well, get up, it’s an emergency,” Henry says. “You’ve got to come down here.”
“What is it?” Henry can