When You Were Older Read Online Free PDF Page B

my car, though. Otherwise …’
    ‘I never touched her. We never touched each other. In any way. Ever. It was just something that happened … you know … on a feeling level. It was just feelings.’
    ‘Where I come from,’ he said, his knuckles pale on the steering wheel, ‘you don’t even have
feelings
for your best friend’s wife.’
    A flare of my own anger surprised me.
    ‘Oh, thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks for letting me know. You seem to know everything, so … care to let me know how I go about not having feelings?’
    A long silence. I watched him chew on the inside of his cheek. Then I looked in the side mirror and watched the sky reddening. I figured he was just looking for a place to pull over and let me out.
    I looked back to see his right hand extended in my direction, as if he were waiting for me to shake. Which, it slowly dawned on me, he was.
    ‘Accept my apology?’ he asked.
    ‘Oh,’ I said. A bit dumbfounded.
    I still had not shaken the hand.
    ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry. Hearts pretty well do what they do. Can’t tell ’em much of anything. I guess it’s mostly what you actually
do
that you gotta answer for. So … forgive my outburst?’
    ‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ I said, staring at the hand. I shook it. It felt calloused and dry. ‘Everybody’s just a little on edge. More emotional than usual.’
    ‘Got that right.’
    We rode in silence for a long time. I watched him pull an individually wrapped toothpick from the pocket of his orange jersey and peel back the paper. I expected him to pick his teeth with it. Instead he just held one end in his mouth. The world’s smallest cigarette, without all that dangerous smoke and fire.
    Insects were hitting the windshield. We were driving through an agricultural landscape, and big bug after big bug tapped the glass, each leaving a whitish splotch to mark the moment of its death.
    ‘Besides,’ he said, as if we’d never paused the conversation. ‘You told her just exactly the right thing. Not over his dead body.’
    I stared at the bugs some more.
    ‘It wasn’t as noble as it sounded,’ I said.
    I remembered a joke my friend Mark had told me in grade school. Well, my acquaintance Mark. I grew up next door to him. But we never really fit quite right.
    What’s the last thing that goes through a bug’s head when it hits your windshield? Its ass.
    I didn’t think it was funny.
    Maybe it’s an overload of empathy on my part, or maybe I just have a too-well-developed sense of fairness. The problem with that joke is that it’s only funny if you’re not a bug. Call it weird, but I can’t help putting myself in bug shoes. Hey, that was my uncle Joe’s ass. That’s my friend Hector on that windshield. And it’s not so damn funny.
    ‘It’s like this,’ I said. ‘I just have this … aversion … to her. Since … you know. After what happened. It feels like one of those places you go to stop smoking, and every time you reach for a cigarette, they zap you with electricity. No. That’s not a good analogy. Because that’s a lot of little things. This is one big thing. It feels like when you eat a whole bunch of a certain kind of food and then get sick. And maybe the food didn’t even make you sick. Maybe you ate three plates of fettuccini Alfredo, and then got the stomach flu. And all night you’re up, throwing up fettuccini Alfredo. You’ll never eat it again. Guaranteed. It’s knee-jerk. So don’t give me more credit than I deserve.’
    We stared out the windshield a while longer. It was light now. It was officially morning.
    My driver was chewing up one end of his toothpick. I wasn’t sure how he could even see the road through all those bug splats.
    As if reading my mind, he said, ‘I’ll have to stop at the next filling station. Clean the windshield proper. Won’t help to put on the washers. That only makes it worse. Smears it. Damned inconvenient.’
    ‘Not as