We’re in the SOUTH, she thought.
Her palm was freezing cold. Daniel was handing her a Red Bull.
“Morning, Fabes. Welcome to Music City.”
Nashville in August was blistering. William felt like a fried ant in a sadistic little kid’s driveway. He took the measure of the city in glorious air-conditioned segments from inside the eleven boutiques on Melissa’s list, and Cuthbert’s Barbecue, where they scarfed ribs for lunch.
Nashville was a city of leafy streets that felt almost suburban, but unlike true suburbia, there were sidewalks everywhere. Tall buildings clustered downtown, as if the business district had been yanked straight up from the mud of the riverbank. The rest of the city dribbled out in a pleasant sprawl.
Melissa seemed to float along like Princess Peach, carried by the buoyant powers of her magical skirt through Five Points and Green Hills. William trooped dutifully from store to store, intrigued by Melissa’s deep focus. “Shopping” was too pedestrian a term for what she was doing. Maybe it was the heat, but he found the anthropological care she lavished on weird scarves enthralling.
In the bathroom of a kitschy mom-and-pop frozen yogurt place, he took off his shirt and dabbed at his sweat with a paper towel. When he emerged, he found Christina sitting at a small round table, messing with its centerpiece, ignoring the dollop of vanilla yogurt she’d buried under an avalanche of gummy bears. He sat down, and she slid a Twizzler-Coke across the table.
“Prenibbled,” he said, taking a sip. “Thanks. Is it me or is Coke better in the South?”
“Welcome to our garden of ceramic delights.” Fake carnations sprang from a handmade teapot, providing shade for a group of figurines: pastel cobblers at their workbenches, and suspender-clad children tending some vaguely biblical flock.
“Ah, shit,” he said, realizing they were Hummels.
“Wait for it…” Her hand disappeared behind the teapot.
“Don’t do it, Hernandez.”
She grinned wickedly and made a figurine amble awkwardly toward him. It was a girl Hummel in a demure country dress carrying a pile of textbooks. Her hair sported a pale pink bow.
“Why hello, William my sweet,” Christina said in a high-pitched Southern drawl that sounded a bit like Miss Piggy. “Why haven’t you written? I wait by the mailbox every day, but your letter never comes.”
He took a bite out of his straw. “I’m ignoring this.”
“Don’t you recognize me from my pretty dress that Mama made special? It’s me, Bridget Mancini!” Christina made the figurine hop up and down. “I just love dancin’. Won’t you dance with me again, William?”
Last year he’d had sex with Bridget Mancini exactly twice in Dylan Seidelman’s parents’ bedroom during a party, in a mutual agreement to take each other’s virginity before her family moved to Fort Lauderdale. Dylan Seidelman’s mom collected Hummel figurines, and now whenever William tried to conjure up the illusory feel of Bridget Mancini’s skin, he was forced to think about cherubic shepherds herding ceramic sheep along the nightstand.
“I’m not going to have a conversation with that thing,”
he said.
Christina made the Hummel gyrate and gallop. “This is what you get for coming home wasted after that party and barging into the basement to tell me all about it.”
“Okay, how’s this for a deal. When you hook up with some dude in Buffalo for the first time, you call me at three in the morning and give me the rundown, and then we’re even.”
Crack. Christina’s thumb popped the Hummel’s head off. It clunked against the table, and William trapped it underneath his palm before it rolled onto the floor.
“Shit,” she whispered, hurriedly placing the headless figurine among its brethren gathered around the teapot. She looked over her shoulder. The lady behind the counter was ringing up a gaggle of kids in orange church group T-shirts. “Let’s hit it.”
“What am I supposed to do with Bridget’s head?”
Christina grabbed her cup of gummy bears and stood up. “Why don’t you mail it to her?”
He dropped the head into the teapot and followed her out.
“Her post’s blowing up!”
William held his phone so Christina could see the screen. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed (this hotel room had two queens instead of one king), frowning at her laptop.
“Natasha Lynn Chao reposted it and added some filters to the part where Melissa films herself in the mirror, trying on those leggings, to make a halo spin over her head and turn into a hula hoop.”
There was a long pause while Christina finished typing. Then she shut her laptop and looked at William, registering the fact that he was still holding his phone up for her to see.
She shrugged. “Girls be shoppin’.”
They had rejoined Melissa and Daniel across the street from the frozen yogurt place and followed them to Aketha, Cannery Row, and Natasha Lynn Chao. Melissa had draped eye-popping mountains of fabric over her arm before retreating to dressing rooms with Daniel in tow, winnowing down her selections so that she emerged from each store with one or two bags that they took turns feeding to Otto. When they got back to their hotel on Broadway, where honky-tonks oozed guitar-shaped marquees and giant decorative cowboy hats, taxicabs were just beginning to discharge tourists into the evening streets.
“Every time I look at you, you’re on the computer,” he said.
“Sorry, Dad.”
“Hey, this is a judgment-free zone. I was just making an observation.” He went to the minibar. “Whoa! They have Twizzlers. And Cokes.”
“You just had one. And those minibar snacks cost a million dollars.”
“Okay, Mom, don’t worry. It’s on Otto.” He ripped open the candy wrapper and popped the can’s top. Then he peeled off a Twizzler, nibbled both ends, and dropped his freshly made straw into the can.
“But yeah,” she said, “I’m stuck in the middle of this weird Warcraft campaign. I just had to check on it.”
“You’re a weird Warcraft campaign.”
He leaned against the desk and looked out the window.
