Page 52

“Good night, Lorrie.”

“Good night.”

He got into the Saab and backed carefully down the drive. The headlights swept across the hedge, then disappeared between the trees.

I stood there watching until the sound of his car faded into the night.

Dean made me wonder about everything I’d missed.

Paul was beginning to make me wonder how much I’d overlooked.

10

Dean

Saturday — August 18, 1984

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken a full day away from the store. Hopefully, Brian wouldn’t get bored and sell everything for a name your own price sale, like he’d tried once in the spring.

Lorrie had met me at Side A around quarter to ten, bringing Brian a coffee and hash browns from McDonalds. My truck smelled like Otis, old cardboard, and the inside of a cassette case that had been left on the dashboard in the sun.

The cardboard smell came from six boxes of records that had been wedged behind the front seats before I’d dropped them on the counter of the store for Brian to price and put in the bins.

Somewhere near Middleton, the tape deck had eaten half of a Billy Idol cassette and refused to give it back so we’d switched to the radio and were now listening to Bruce singing his heart out.

She sat beside me with one bare foot braced against the dashboard, tugging gently on the ribbon of tape hanging from the slot while I drove with the windows open because the truck’s air-conditioning had stopped working last year and I hadn’t bothered to get it fixed.

“You’re making it worse,” I said.

“I’m rescuing Billy.”

“You’re pulling out his intestines.”

She gave me a look, then drew another inch free with the careful concentration of a woman defusing a bomb.

Outside, the sky had gone from a bright summer blue to the sort of gray that promised rain as cornfields rolled past on either side of the two-lane road, green and high. The truck rattled over patched pavement, Otis panted happily between us, and Lorrie’s ponytail swung against her shoulder every time we hit a bump.

She was wearing denim cutoffs, Keds, and a red tank that showed off her tan though she looked tired. I hadn’t asked what was wrong. She wouldn’t have told me. Or maybe she would have, and that might have been worse.

After the other night, standing close enough to kiss her and not doing it because she had a boyfriend with perfect manners, the right family name, and lots of money, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t be that guy.

And yet I’d told her about going to Verona for records, asked if she wanted to go with me, and now here we were. That had been the end of my plan.

A guy outside Verona was selling his late brother’s record collection. Jazz, blues, some folk, and, according to his phone call, a few first pressings he didn’t know much about but had been told might be worth something. I’d planned to go, pick through the boxes, make an offer, and get back to the store by lunchtime.

Now we were forty minutes west of Madison with sketchy directions, a broken tape deck, Otis shedding enough fur to make a second dog, and a handwritten note from the seller that said TURN AFTER RED BARN in an area containing enough red barns to make the instruction useless.

Lorrie held up the loose tape. “I think I saved it.”

She opened her purse and began digging through sunglasses, a wallet, two lipsticks, loose change, a folded newspaper clipping, three pens, a comb, a compact, and enough unrelated objects to make me wonder why girls carried so much stuff with them.

“No pencil.” She frowned into her bag then shrugged and used her pinky to wind the tape back into the cassette.

For a while, neither of us said anything. It should’ve felt awkward, but it didn’t, and that was the problem. I remembered the feel of her skin, the White Shoulders perfume she always wore and now lingered in my apartment, the change in her breathing when I touched her hair, and every time she shifted on the bench seat, I wanted to kick myself for not saying to hell with her boyfriend and kissing her senseless.

“Was that the barn?” Lorrie asked.

I looked in the mirror. “Which one?”