him. It then seemed a matter of great urgency to check his e-mail and see if any of his friends had written in the last three hours. Connie sat with the cats on the sofa and waited patiently while his computer powered up.
“By the way,” she said, “your mom says to say hi.”
“What?”
“Your mom says hi. She was out chipping ice when I was leaving. She saw me with my bag and asked where I was going.”
“And you told her?”
Connie’s surprise was innocent. “Was I not supposed to? She told me to have a good time and to say hi to you.”
“Sarcastically?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was, come to think of it. I was just happy she spoke to me at all. I know she hates me. But then I thought maybe she’s finally starting to get used to me.”
“I doubt it.”
“I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. You know I’d never say the wrong thing if I knew it was wrong. You know that, don’t you?”
Joey stood up from his computer, trying not to be angry. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s not your fault. Or only a little bit your fault.”
“Baby, are you ashamed of me?”
“No.”
“Are you ashamed of the stuff we said on the phone? Is that what this is?”
“No.”
“I actually am, a little bit. Some of it was pretty sick. I’m not sure I need to do that anymore.”
“You were the one who started it!”
“I know. I know, I know. But you can’t blame me for everything. You can only blame me for half of it.”
As if to acknowledge the truth of this, he ran to where she was sitting on the sofa and knelt down at her feet, bowing his head and resting his hands on her legs. Up close to her jeans like this, her best tight jeans, he thought of the long hours she’d sat on a Greyhound bus while he was watching second-rate college bowl games and talking on the phone with friends. He was in trouble, he was falling into some unanticipated fissure in the ordinary world, and he couldn’t bear to look up at her face. She rested her hands on his head and offered no resistance when, by and by, he pushed forward and pressed his face into her denim-sheathed zipper. “It’s OK,” she knew to say, stroking his hair. “It’s going to be OK, baby. Everything’s going to be OK.”
In his gratitude, he peeled down her jeans and rested his closed eyes against her underpants, and then these, too, he pulled down so he could press his shaved lip and chin into her scratchy hair, which he noticed that she’d trimmed for him. He could feel one of the cats clambering onto his feet, seeking attention. Pussy, pussy.
“I just want to stay here for about three hours,” he said, breathing her smell.
“You can stay there all night,” she said. “I have no plans.”
But then his telephone rang in his pants pocket. Taking it out to shut it off, he saw his old St. Paul number and felt like smashing the phone in his anger at his mother. He spread Connie’s legs and attacked her with his tongue, delving and delving, trying to fill himself with her.
The third and most alarming of her disclosures came during a postcoital interlude at some later evening hour. Hitherto absent neighbors were tromping on the floor above the bed; the cats were yowling bitterly outside the door. Connie was telling him about the SAT, which he’d forgotten she was even going to take, and about her surprise at how much easier the real questions had been than the practice questions in her study books. She was feeling emboldened to apply to schools within a few hours of Charlottesville, including Morton College, which wanted midwestern students for geographical diversity and which she now thought she could get into.
This seemed all wrong to Joey. “I thought you were going to go to the U.,” he said.
“I still might,” she said. “But then I started thinking how much nicer it would be to be closer to you, so we could see each other on weekends. I mean, assuming everything goes well and we still want to. Don’t you think that would be nice?”
Joey untangled his legs from hers, trying to get some clarity. “Definitely maybe,” he said. “But, you know, private schools are incredibly expensive.”
This was true, Connie said. But Morton offered financial aid, and she’d spoken to Carol about her educational trust fund, and Carol