Free Losing Charlotte by Heather Clay Page A

wanted to say something bright, something useless.
    “Shitty band,” Bruce said.
    Jeb looked at him. “Hey,” he said, “I heard your mother died.”
    Bruce inhaled audibly. It had been years and he still did that.
    “Yeah. She did,” he said.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Thanks.”
    “I really, really liked your mom.”
    “Thanks, Jeb.”
    Jeb picked up a fawn-colored petal from the table and rubbed it between his fingers. Bruce watched as it was crushed into a tiny ball that darkened with its own moisture and the condensation from Jeb’s glass. Jeb rolled it onto the white cloth with the tip of his index finger; it left a threading, sluglike trail. He brought his fingertips up to his face and smelled them, then offered his hand to Bruce.
    “Rose,” he said. “Smells like perfume.”
    Bruce smiled.
    “Your dad doing okay?” Jeb asked.
    “Yep,” Bruce said, relieved that Jeb hadn’t found it necessary or been bombed enough to get into the long-ago whats and hows ofhis mother’s cancer (pancreatic) and length of treatment (nine and a half months). The details sounded too banal, too common, and he hated being asked about them. Unlike his father, who could still assume a grim expression, his eyes trained on the middle distance, and recite the events and progression of his wife’s illness as if they formed a litany, an epic poem, whose final lines he would only remember if he could speak it whole, start at the beginning and let rhythm and chronology guide him toward the elusive end. In the Vale of Tawasentha, / In the green and silent valley… He had moved out to the Springs, where he lived in a rented bungalow on a friend’s property and spent his days in a yurt he had erected himself, overlooking the rocky bay. Inside the yurt he typed at a manuscript that Bruce had never seen any part of and knew nothing about; he worked on his “art projects,” which were mostly red circles painted on board, painted as large as the turning circumference of his father’s body allowed. “It’s just what I feel like doing,” he told Bruce. “Making these circles. The world is too big to learn anything new. So I stand inside and draw a line around myself, over and over.”
    “Wasn’t he a teacher,” Jeb asked.
    “Adjunct mathematics professor. Up at Columbia. But he retired.”
    “Ah.”
    They drifted into silence. Bruce wanted a drink, thought of asking Jeb to go to the bar with him. But he feared that they would get separated if they moved from where they sat. It seemed the two of them should remain together until he found something real to love about his old classmate. That was it. It felt important, right now, to love something about Jeb Jackman. He signaled the waitress, who was stacking dessert plates at a nearby table. She frowned at him, then mouthed over the medium din of the electric bass, the wailing backup singers, “I’ll be right there.”
    “Shit, brother, you’ve got the right idea,” Jeb said. “That girl is not to be believed.”
    “Yeah, well. I’m just thirsty.”
    “Sure,” said Jeb. He laughed once, an aggressive “pah” thatlaced the inside corners of his lips with spittle, though the expression in his eyes remained grave. The girl made her way over to them.
    “You wanted something,” she said to Bruce. It was a statement, not a question, and from the slight nasal inflection in her voice, the bemusement that played across her mouth, the way she stood over him, taller than he had realized, her shoulders set in a languid slope that seemed to curve down through her hips, he knew to regret calling her over. She didn’t match her surroundings, or the task of fetching drinks. She looked, truly, like she belonged in a bed, or stretched out by someone’s fire, blinking sleepily. Her hair was pulled back into two messy pigtails, and a silver and turquoise bracelet circled her arm just above the elbow. Bruce willed away the desire that began to snake through his body—desire that felt