replacing fuse boxes, avoiding getting shocked in the standing water of flooded basements, Portland’s winter rains already in full effect.
Paul and Eva sat at the scratched orange Formica table in the kitchen, the bacon scent from breakfast lingering. They drank jelly glasses of his dead mother’s peach schnapps and went up to his bedroom, which he had cleaned in advance. He wasn’t always slow to catch on. On the plaid comforter set, last year’s Christmas present from his mother, they had tentative, awkward, desperate sex. Three times.
In the morning, Eva was backed up into him, her blond hair a stormy tangle in his face, her cheek pressed against his bicep, dampness everywhere they touched.
“Hey, sweetheart.” She flipped over, so their eyes were only millimeters apart, her giant breasts pressing into his chest.
Paul, afraid he had morning breath, only smiled as widely as he could.
“So,” she said as she got dressed, “I can’t believe it took you all damn semester.” She was wearing jeans and hiking boots, nothing on top, and he wanted to pull her back into bed, one more time, but they both had an eight o’clock exam.
“So why me?” He finally asked the question he had been thinking all night, all semester.
“It’s your last name,” she told him, finger-combing her ropy hair. “I saw you on the class list and thought, Eva Nova sounds good. You’d be amazed how many names don’t go with Eva.” She pronounced it in the Swedish way, AY-vah, just the slightest hint of an accent in her voice. Paul didn’t know whether to kiss her chunky brown hiking boots or run for the hills.
WHEN SHE FLEW BACK from Christmas break, neither Paul Sr. nor Ritchie said anything about the peach-cheeked girl who moved things, a dryer with a bullhornlike attachment for her tangly hair, a loud fan that they thought would drown out the squeaking bedsprings, up the staircase into Paul’s narrow bedroom.
“My roommate snores,” she told Paul as she pushed his clothes to one side in his closet. Occasionally she cooked for them, simple spaghetti with jarred meat sauce, but mostly she and Paul kept to themselves, learning the basics of higher education and honing the fine skill of the elusive simultaneous orgasm.
Three weeks later, in February, when the sun hadn’t shone in eleven days and there was the thinnest veil of slippery snow coating the streets of downtown, Ritchie died.
It turned out to be a malfunction of the company vehicle, a former bread delivery truck with “SuperNova Electric” stenciled on the side, a cranky diesel engine thumping away under the floorboards. Ritchie, who was on his way to a two-day gig in eastern Oregon, left before it was light, a gentle snow falling as he got farther from the coast, and pulled over at a rest stop for a nap off 84, near Bend. State troopers found him in the cab of the truck, early afternoon, the motor running, “probably to keep the cab warm,” they said, but something malfunctioned, and instead of warm air, the diesel engine pumped carbon monoxide fumes into the truck. Ritchie never woke up.
Three months later Paul Sr. died of lung cancer, morphined and unconscious until he let go, Paul and Eva holding his curled hands.
Paul was just twenty, Eva eighteen, when they worked together over Memorial Day weekend, packing first his mother’s, then his brother’s, and finally his father’s belongings into a U-Haul and driving them to a Salvation Army. They stopped at a Mattress Giant on the way home, and Eva bought a pillow-top king mattress set for a thousand dollars. Paul’s old bedroom became the office, Ritchie’s the rarely used guest room, and the new mattress set went on the floor under the windows in the master bedroom that looked out over the shady tomato garden in the backyard. His father’s small life insurance policy went into escrow for Paul’s tuition, because he didn’t want to have any debt. In between writing both of their papers and scheduling SuperNova clients, Eva cooked and cleaned when she could. After that, Paul noticed, the house was usually tidy but it never felt truly clean again, and while he was never hungry, rarely did he ever feel full either.
Eva had followed their plan, graduating with honors and running the office for SuperNova Electric without too many problems. It took Paul longer, six years, and only then did he ask her to marry him, though they had been living together in Sellwood since the first night he