silently to the truck. Inside the cab, he put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it.
“I am sorry. I mean it.”
“How did you learn how to do that?” She needed to talk about something besides his ghoulishness.
“CPR, you mean? My dad was a medic—”
“Really?”
“Yeah, in the army, served in Vietnam. He taught me the basics when I was like twelve. Practically the only good thing he ever did for me. When I was eighteen I got my EMT training. I was thinking about becoming a paramedic, too.”
The longest speech he’d given her in four dates. Maybe he was trying to forget his ghoulishness too. “What’s the difference?”
“As a tech you can’t do much more than CPR, oxygen mask. Paramedics can intubate, use needles.” He looked over at her, tried a smile. “Not that any of it would have done Gordon much good. He was dead before he hit the floor. I would have needed Jesus training, that’s like eight months plus a saint has to recommend you.”
She laughed a little, the tension easing out of her.
“Before the Internet stuff I worked overnights as a tech. I guess, I don’t want to make an excuse, but see enough ODs, car accidents, your skin gets thick.”
He turned the ignition, and they were quiet as he steered the pickup out of the parking lot.
* * *
“So was this the worst date ever?” he said a few minutes later. “Or the best?”
“I’m trying to figure that out too.” She’d married him and divorced him in barely two hours.
“I have to tell you one thing, though. You are a fantastic piano player.”
A flush reddened her cheeks. “Stop.”
“I’m serious. I mean, I don’t know much about it, but you are great.”
At 601 he signaled to turn left, back toward Charlottesville.
“Other way,” she said. “I want a beer somewhere I’m guaranteed not to see anyone from school.”
He swept the steering wheel right and the pickup rumbled north. She could already feel herself forgiving him, deciding that his fearless reaction when Gordon collapsed and his odd coldness afterward were inseparable.
The Virginia fields were dark, but she saw a big black horse silhouetted against the white light of an open barn door. She thought of the Steinway, how he’d found it and brought her to it.
* * *
They spent that night together, and the next, and the next.
Now they were curled up on her couch, and he was explaining the Internet.
“It’s the future. I’m telling you.”
“How is buying books on your computer changing anyone’s life?”
“Instant communication with anyone, anywhere? That doesn’t sound like a big deal?”
“You mean like a telephone?”
They were sitting on her couch, eating chocolate-chip pancakes and scrambled eggs with cheese. Saturday night. They’d said they were going to a movie. Then they’d started fooling around. Leaving the apartment had seemed like too much trouble. He’d said, Let me cook. Breakfast for dinner. His range was limited, but what he did make was perfect. He baked, too: blueberry muffins, warm and crumbly and tangy. He’d worked as a short-order cook for a few months up in Seattle, he said. Cooks never starve I can walk into a diner anywhere and get hired in ten minutes. Those places always need people.
He was so different from the men she met in school. They thought smart was all that mattered, didn’t care if they couldn’t change their oil. Even the ones who could, who knew how to use their hands—the Virginia bros who spent weekends hunting, the Connecticut boys who built their own bookcases—weren’t actually tough. They were hobbyists.
Not Brian. He was a survivor. He’d paid his bills a half dozen ways, from driving cabs to working as a landscaper—a fancy way to say mowing lawns, he’d said. Now he was a computer programmer who made “Web pages” for the Internet.
“Telephone?” he said now. “Tell me you’re joking. Pretty soon you’ll get music and movies and television this way. Right on your computer.”
“It takes two minutes to see the picture.”
“The connections aren’t fast enough yet. But they will be.”
“People aren’t going to watch television on their computers, Bri.”
“Why not?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“They just aren’t. Computers are for work.”
“You’ll see.”
If he’d been one of her classmates, this certainty would have infuriated her. But they weren’t talking about some case they’d both studied. She couldn’t pretend she knew anything about the Internet. He was looking at a future she had never even tried to imagine.
She already felt how well they meshed. Not that they agreed on everything. He didn’t