waiting when he arrived, hoping to avoid this.
Colleen Murphy stared at him, looking down on him slightly because she was up a step in the door frame. He moved his eyes away from hers and looked around at the old-growth trees on the property, the azaleas framing the stoop, and a large triple-trunk crepe myrtle with scarlet blossoms. A Sunfish sailboat, covered by a tarp, was set on a trailer beside the house.
“Nice yard,” said Chris lamely.
“Yes,” said Colleen Murphy.
“Does Mr. Murphy sail?”
“Occasionally.”
Thankfully, Katherine came down the center hall stairs. She wore a green-and-rust shift with green T-strap sandals, and she had one of those black band things in her strawberry blonde hair. She brushed past her mother and met Chris outside the door.
“See you, Mom,” said Katherine.
“Take care, Mrs. Murphy,” said Chris, saluting stupidly, immediately wishing he hadn’t. Katherine kissed him on the cheek and took his hand, and they walked across the yard to his van. Chris thinking, Her mom hates me.
Colleen Murphy watched as her daughter and Chris Flynn got into the van. At that moment, she had no animosity in her at all. She was thinking of a time when her boyfriend, Jimmy Murphy, had picked her up from her own parents’ house in Burke, Virginia, back in the midseventies. How they had laughed and held hands on the way to his car, a gold Ford Pinto station wagon with synthetic wood-paneled sides. How tall he was, how strong his hand felt in hers, how she couldn’t wait to have those hands on her breasts and ribcage.
She turned and went back inside her house. James Murphy would be in his office, working. They would have a quiet dinner with little conversation. She would turn in early, and he would come to bed after she had gone to sleep.
In the van, around the corner from her house, Katherine told Chris to pull over to the side of the road.
“Where?” said Chris.
“Here. That house has been unoccupied for the last six months.”
“So?”
“Just do it.”
“Okay.”
When he put it in park, she leaned across the carpet and padding and kissed him deeply.
“What’s that for?” said Chris.
“My apologies. For keeping you waiting.”
She rubbed the crotch of his jeans. He placed his hand on her muscled thighs, and she opened her legs as she unzipped him and pulled him free.
Chris laughed. “Right here?”
“There a problem?” she said, working him until he could take it no longer. He moved her hand away.
“ Damn, girl.”
“What?”
“I’m about to bust.”
“You afraid you’re gonna mess up the seats?”
“More like your hair.”
“Quit boasting.”
“I’m sayin, I’m a young man. I got velocity.”
“C’mon, let’s get in the back.”
“For real?”
She kissed him. “Come on, Chris.”
Afterward, they went to dinner at a pho house in Wheaton, because they liked the soup and it was cheap. The restaurant was in a commercial strip of Laundromats and Kosher and Chinese grocers. The diners sat communally at tables similar to those found in school cafeterias. Except for Chris and Katherine, all of the customers were Vietnamese. No one talked to them, or seemed to notice the sweat rings on Chris’s shirt or Katherine’s unkempt hair. At the end of the meal, Chris bought an inexpensive bottle of Chilean red at the deli next door, and they drove back to his place in Silver Spring.
They made love properly, but no less energetically, in his bed. Chris had lit votive candles around the room, with his small stereo set on WHUR, playing the old EWF tune “Can’t Hide Love.” The candles and the music were on the corny side, but Chris was a D.C. boy all the way, and Quiet Storm was in his blood. His parents had listened to Melvin Lindsay, the originator, spin Norman Connors and Major Harris when Thomas and Amanda Flynn were young and making love on hot summer nights just like this one.
Katherine, lying naked atop the sheets beside Chris, reached over and traced her finger down the vertical scar above his lip.
“Your dad finally talked to me today,” said Katherine. “Susie sort of made him. In her own sloppy way, she let him know that you and I were together.”
“Did he call you honey or sweetheart?”
“I think it was ‘darling.’ ”
“That’s my pops. He has trouble remembering names. Odd for a salesman, but there it is. He’ll remember yours now, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“My parents had a baby named Kate who died before I was born. Dad still talks about her. Like she’s going to come back and be everything that I’m not.”
“Your father cares about you, Chris.”
“Like you care for a lame dog. You know Champ is never gonna win a show or a race. But you look after him anyway, out of the kindness of your heart.”
“It’s not attractive when you feel sorry for yourself.”
“I’m not. I never do. I’m sayin, this is how I think it is from his eyes. I don’t have a problem with who I am. Far as I’m concerned, I’m doing fine. But my pops looks at me like I’m some kind of cripple. My past still eats at him, Katherine. There’s got to be a reason for the troubles I had, and he needs to know why. Look, my parents didn’t cause me to jump the tracks, and I never meant to hurt them. I was selfish and full of fire, and I wasn’t thinkin right. That’s the best way I know how to explain it. Truth is, my fuckups were mine and mine alone.”
“When I dropped out of college,” said Katherine, “I could hear my parents whispering, and then arguing, behind their bedroom door. It was all about the bad decisions they thought they had made along the way. How they should have moved out of PG County, or put me in a better high school, got me away from my friends and other bad influences. How they should have pushed me harder to get better grades. But I just plain didn’t like school, Chris. I didn’t like it when I was a little kid. Not everybody goes to college. Not everybody can get more education than their parents, or make more money than them, or live in a nicer house than the one they grew up in.”
“I hear you. But they want it for you anyway.”
“It’s natural for them to feel like that.”
“Way your mom looks at me, seems like she’s made her mind up that I’m not the right one for you.”
“My mom’ll come around,” said Katherine. She moved beside him and pressed her flat belly against him. “You know, if you weren’t an installer, if I hadn’t dropped out of school and taken that dumb job in the office…”
“We wouldn’t have met.”
“So everything’s been to the good, far as I’m concerned.”
They kissed.
“This is right,” said Chris, holding her close.
“You can feel it, can’t you. We’re supposed to be together, Chris.”
“Yes.”
He told her about the bag of money that Ben had found earlier in the day. He told her that he’d convinced Ben to put it back in the space under the floor.
“You made a good decision,” said Katherine. “I guess.”
Chris chuckled. “You’re not so sure, either.”
