really—and it pisses me off. I run my hand behind her neck and pull her face to my chest and gently kiss the top of her head. I return each and every stare with a look that implies, When I’m done here I’m going to go over and rip your throat out, until attention has been categorically diverted elsewhere.
After Melody has regained her composure and gets back on her feet, we exit the coffeehouse. I open the door of my car and she drops down into the seat, stares forward like she’s trying to decipher the words AIR BAG on my dashboard, her hands in her lap, lifeless.
I get in the driver’s side and watch her for a few seconds, then reach behind her seat and hand her the bag with the textbook. “For you,” I say.
She looks at me and passes a smile that appears forced. “You’re always bearing gifts.”
“Well, I had time to kill in Baltimore.” She opens the bag and pulls out Zwiebach’s monster, stares at it like a practical joke she doesn’t understand. I rub my forehead, feel like an idiot. “Not as useful as a sweater, I suppose.”
But when she turns to me, her eyes are wet. “Are you kidding?” She reaches over the gearshift and hugs me. I slide my arm around her back and slip my hand beneath her underarm, tighten it around her body. She lets go before I do. “You pick this out on your own?”
“Get real. I would have thought string theory had something to do with the clothing industry. I spoke with the dean of math… stuff, who told me what the class after differential equations would be. He reeled off a list of titles that gave me a headache. The only one that stuck was string theory, and a girl at the bookstore told me this was the best one for self-study.”
She shakes her head and looks at me like she’s trying to interpret a newly learned language. “I can’t believe you called a dean to research this—and that you remembered I was ready to move beyond differential equations. That’s so”—she struggles for the word, is reluctant to use it once found—“romantic.”
I swallow, hard. She stares at me, shows no sign or interest in stopping. I look up to the sky, darkening with clouds from the west. Eventually she looks up, too.
“Where’s that useless fed of yours?” I ask, half waiting to be pistol-whipped right here on Walnut. Who’s to say her tears and sadness aren’t those of guilt?
“Who knows, really. I ditched him a few miles back. Last night.”
I check all my mirrors. “He managed to lose you twice in two days. That’s gotta be a career killer.”
I casually watch Melody from the corner of my eyes. She already returned her interest to the textbook. She runs her fingers around the edge of it like she’s caressing a lover’s hand, smiles as though someone just whispered something sweet in her ear.
She notices me watching her; I cannot look away.
“You know,” she says, “your dad referred to you as Little Johnny.”
Her having actually conversed with my father appears like it might be true. I try again for closure: “How did you get his number?”
She closes her eyes and dips her head. “I’ll tell you later.” I don’t respond. She looks at me and adds, “I cheated and lied to get it. I deceived some people into getting what I wanted. It’s not something you would likely find endearing.”
I give her a blank stare. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten who I am.”
She puckers her lips and sort of narrows her eyes at me, rips off an undoubtedly abbreviated, stream-of-consciousness edition: “I called information in New York for Bovaro and they found a listing but it was unpublished to a post office box address so I called the post office in that borough and posed as your mother and insisted the information they had in their system was incorrect because our mail—your father’s mail—was delivered to a neighbor’s house and that the whole reason we rented a post office box in the first place was to avoid having mail go to a physical address and hey if it’s going to go to a physical address why didn’t it come to ours so I concluded that their information was out of date and demanded the guy read whatever information they currently had on file to see if it was correct and he gave me an address on Hicks Street along with the phone