The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  “You don’t know him. He’s a Marine. Doesn’t look a thing like you, either. We’re getting married in September, and of course you’ll be invited to the wedding.”

  “Oh,” I say, making a mental note not to come. I resist the urge to check if she is pregnant. “What’s his name?”

  While Joellen tells me the life history of Edwin Cubbies, hailing from Chevy Chase, Maryland, I finish the food on the table, my drink and Joellen’s drink. I order two more drinks and finish those too. While she is telling me the story of how they met at a costume party on the fourth of July (he was a walrus, and she was Scarlett O’Hara), I try to make the umbrellas stand upright in the thick and seeded duck sauce.

  Last year when I came to speak at the high school we drove to the place where we both lost our virginity—a field in some conservation land that turns purple with fireweed at the end of the summer. We sat on the hood of her little car and drank Yoo-Hoo from a convenience store and then I lay down in the grass to watch the night come. Joellen sat between my legs, using my bent knees as a kind of armchair, and she leaned back against me so that I could feel the hooks of her bra through her shirt and mine. She told me again how sorry she was that she had broken up with me, and I reminded her that it was me who did it-one day I had just realized I didn’t feel the way I used to. Like barbecue coals, I said, you know the way they’re orange one minute and then you turn around they’ve just become grey dust? As I told her this I cupped my hands around her breasts; she didn’t stop me. Then she flipped herself over and began to kiss me, and rub her hands up and down the legs of my good khaki pants, and as I got hard she said to me, “Now Sam, I thought you didn’t feel the same way.”

  Joellen is still going on about Edwin. I interrupt her. “You’re the only girlfriend I’ve ever had who’s gotten married.”

  Joellen looks at me and she is truly surprised. “You’ve had other girlfriends?”

  Although we haven’t had our main course yet I signal for the check. I’ll pick it up as an engagement present; we usually go dutch. She doesn’t seem to notice that the lo mein and the beef with pea pods haven’t come, but then again she hasn’t really eaten much of anything. “Don’t worry about driving me home,” I tell her, feeling my face turn red. “I can get Joley or Hadley to take a run out here.”

  The waiter, I notice, is a hunchback, and because I feel bad I take a couple of dollars extra out of my wallet. He has brought pineapple spears and fortune cookies with the check. Joellen looks at me and I realize she is waiting for me to pick a cookie. “After you,” I say.

  Like a kid, she dives into the puddle of pineapple juice and uses her nail as a chisel to crack it. “Great beauty and fortune dwell in your smile,” she reads, pleased with the outcome. “What’s yours?”

  I break my cookie in half. “You will find success at every turn,” I read, lying through my teeth. Really, it says something dumb about visitors from afar.

  As we walk out of the restaurant Joellen takes my arm.

  “Edwin is lucky,” I say.

  “I call him Eddie.” And then, “You really think so?”

  She insists on driving me back to Stow; she says it could be the last time she sees me as a single woman, and I can’t argue with her there. About halfway, in Maynard, she pulls into the parking lot of a church, an old New England white clapboard church with pillars and a steeple, you name it. Joellen reclines her seat all the way and rolls back the moonroof in the car.

  I get the feeling I have to leave. Fidgeting, I open the glove compartment and riffle through the contents. A map of Maine, lipstick, two rulers, a tire gauge and three Trojans. “Why are you stopping?”

  “Jeez, Sam. I’m doing all the driving. Can’t I take a little rest?”

  “Why don’t I drive? You get out and sit over here and I’ll drive. You’ve got the whole way back to drive, anyhow.”

  Joellen’s hand wanders across the console, like a crab, and comes to rest on my thigh. “Oh, I’m not in a hurry.” She stretches, deliberately, so that her ribs rise and her breasts get flat under her blouse.

  “Look, I can’t do this.”

  “Do what,” Joellen says. “I don’t know what we’re doing.” She reaches across to loosen my tie and unbutton my shirt. Pulling the tie through the buttoned collar, she wraps it like cord around her hands, and slips it over my head to rest on the back of my neck. Then, drawing me in, she kisses me.

  God can she kiss. “You’re engaged,” I say, and when my lips move hers move with me, pressed on mine, like an echo.

  “But I’m not married.” With amazing skill she swings her leg over the center console, pivoting, coming to sit spread-eagled on my lap.

  I am losing control, I think, and I try not to touch her. I wrap my fingers around the plastic fixtures of the seat belt until she takes my hands and holds them up to her chest. “What’s stopping you, Sam? It’s the same old me.”

  What’s stopping you? Her words stay, frosted on the window. Morals, maybe. Idiocy? There is a buzzing in my ears, fueled by the way she is rubbing against me. She slides her hand down my shorts and I can feel her nails.

  There is this buzzing and what is stopping you? My head keeps ringing and at some point I realize that I cannot be held accountable for what is happening, for my hands ripping at her and the taste of the skin on her nipples, and she closes on me, closes and holds from the inside. Remember when it was you and me, baby, in this field, at fifteen, with life laid out in front of us like a treasure chest; and love was something to breathe in your girl’s ear. Do you remember how easy it was to say forever?

  When it is over her hair is free and our clothes are puddled around us on the front seat. She hands me her underwear to wipe myself clean and smiles with her eyes slitted shut as she climbs back into the driver’s seat. “It was nice seeing you again, Sam,” she says, although we are still seven miles from my place. Joellen puts on her blouse but leaves her bra in the back seat with her teaching tools, and insists on driving naked from the waist down. She says no one will see but me, and then she asks for my undershirt, on the floor, to sit on so she won’t drip onto the red velveteen seats.

  I do not kiss her goodbye when she pulls into the driveway. In fact I don’t say a word, I just get out of her car. “I can keep the shirt?” she asks, and I don’t bother to answer. I’m not about to wish her a nice wedding, either, I’d expect lightning to come out of the sky and strike me. Chrissake, we were in the parking lot of a church.

  When I walk into the Big House, Hadley and Joley are still at the kitchen table playing Hearts. Neither of them looks up when I come in and throw my tie on the floor. I strip off my shirt too and toss it so it slides across the linoleum. “So,” Hadley says, grinning. “You get any?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I tell him, and walk upstairs. In the shower I use up an entire bar of soap and all the hot water, but I imagine it will take some days before I feel truly clean.

  14 JANE

  It spreads out in front of us like a pit of fire, flamed red, gold and orange in layers of rock. It is so big that you can look from left to right and wonder if the land will ever come together again. I have seen this from a plane, but so far away it was like a thumbprint on the window. I keep expecting someone to take down the painted backdrop: that’s all folks, you can go home now—but nobody does.

  There are plenty of other cars parked at this “PICTURE SPOT” along the highway that borders the Grand Canyon. People popping flash cubes in the afternoon light, mothers pulling toddlers away from the protective railing. Rebecca is sitting on the railing. She has her hands on either side of her hips, a brace. “It’s huge,” she says, when she can sense me behind her. “I wish we could go into it.”

  So we try to find out about burro rides, the ones where they take pictures of you on the donkey to put on your living room table when you get home. The last tour, however, has left for the day—which doesn’t really upset me since I have little desire to ride on a burro. I agree with Rebecca, th