Aquamarine Read Online Free PDF Page B

house before him. On the way home, Jesse hugged Laurel and, out of Neal’s earshot, told her he was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her.
    She had never met anyone who was more of a sure thing, sure to stay put in her life now that he’d walked through its door. Now she could unhook her hopes from lost love. Now she didn’t have to go looking for a future.
    Laurel was the one who went on to a big future, first to college, where she met Claude. When they graduated, they got married and began moving around a lot so Claude could set up QwikLube franchises. They’ve lived in Flint, Michigan, in Calgary up in Canada, in Belgium, and for a year in Abu Dhabi. Each of their four kids was born in a different place. Now Claude has been transferred to a territory covering the middle southern states, and is working out of New Jerusalem to make Laurel happy. She wanted to come home for a while to be near her mother and sisters. She and Claude have been back less than a year, and don’t really know how long they’ll be staying before he gets sent off somewhere else.
    When Jesse thinks about Laurel, it’s mostly as she used to be, in grade school and junior high and high school. When she was so shy about her skinny legs, she tried to get Miss Thorpe, the gym teacher, to let her play basketball in her raincoat. When she brought strange hot lunches to school, mysterious murky soups and stews packed into a widemouthed thermos by her mother, who is a strict vegetarian. Jesse remembers the thick slices of dense, dark bread Laurel would eat silently while everyone else at the table had steam table cheeseburgers and little glass cups of pudding with a rubbery skin on top.
    Jesse thinks she probably remembers Laurel’s younger self better than Laurel does. Living her whole life in this one place sometimes makes Jesse feel as though she is holding the heavy scrapbook of her friends’ pasts, while they’re able to move streamlined into unfurnished presents. It’s an extension of the feeling she used to have as a girl standing in the Goudys’ pasture, her Schwinn propped against her hip as she’d watch the long-distance trains shrilling past, on their way from here to there, New Jerusalem being neither.
    She missed the one fast chance she had to slip out—when Tom Bellini came first to Mexico City scouting the U.S. women’s team, then down to Missouri later that summer, trying to persuade Jesse to endorse a signature racing suit for his sportswear company. He had a mock-up with him, designed like a tennis sweater, only with the colors reversed—navy with a V-neck bordered in white and maroon. He wanted her to sign her name, to be replicated on thousands of these suits, and then go on a ten-city promotion tour with him. She couldn’t tell if, along with this offer, he was flirting with her.
    But by then she was wanting to cut free from swimming, which seemed to have taken so much from her and given so little back, really. Plus she had just started up with Neal, who stood solid and unblinking in front of her, holding her hand lest she drift back up into the ozone, offering her the alternative of himself.
     
    The night is so hot, it really doesn’t seem like any relief from the day. Neal has offered to set up the card table down in the cave, where it is always cool no matter what, but Claude is with Willie on this one. The caverns creep him out. And so the four of them are sitting around the dining room table between two roaring box fans, drinking beer out of sweating bottles and Cokes poured over lots of ice, and eating Cheetos, which Claude says is the official snack food of Sheepshead. They’ve got the oldies station on the radio in the living room. Little Eva is singing, “So come on, come on, do ... the Loco-Motion with me.”
    “I like imagining this scene,” Claude says as long as they’re waiting forever for Neal to get his plan of attack together. “There’s this party. Middle-aged folks, but still rockers. Like