“You won’t have any problems dealing with drunk frat boys, that’s for sure,” Jerry mused. “Not that we really get a lot of them. Tell you what, you bring me a résumé, and I’ll get you started on a couple shifts this week.”
Done with pool, we decide we’re ready to eat, and we sit in a booth and order burgers and another round of beers. After the waitress takes our order, I say to Susannah, “Why didn’t you want me to mention Uncle Gavin?”
She takes a long pull at her beer. “I don’t need his help,” she says. “Got this on my own. Two days here and already got a job offer. Did you see the look on that preppy boy’s face?”
“I tend to remember when people look at my sister like they want to murder her.”
“He was being a dick. Nice work with the pool cue, by the way. Thought you were gonna spear that poor guy in the neck.”
I frown. She had her back to me when I was holding the Jack Daniels kid at bay. “How did you—” I stop and look over at the bar and its mirrored back wall. “You saw my reflection.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Susannah says, raising her glass as if toasting me. “See, this is fun.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
February is usually a lousy time of year in school—it’s cold, it rains a lot, and seniors especially are getting antsy. Spring break can’t come soon enough. This year, I’m too busy to pay attention. Susannah showing up on my doorstep radically recalibrated things. She’s still crashing on my couch, although now she’s waiting tables at the Palms and is looking at apartments. She’s also started going back to group therapy, and she hasn’t brought up Frankie again either. All in all, it’s good, or as good as it gets with Susannah.
Teaching with Marisa has been surprisingly nice. She gets the kids, and while there’s been a little resistance, simply because they like Betsy Bales so much, they’re warming up to her. She’s focused and funny, a good combination with teenagers. And she is very careful to walk that line between taking over the class and letting me be in charge of everything. Not bad for only two weeks on the job. Coleman was ecstatic, of course. We were all relieved—no one wanted to hire a babysitter while we looked through whatever résumés we had left on file, scraping deeper and deeper at the bottom of a pretty crummy barrel.
Marisa hasn’t mentioned our night together again, and neither have I. Which is good. Except I admit to being distracted sometimes by her hair, or her throaty laugh, or how she walks. It’s not professional of me, but it bothers me for another reason.
I got this teaching job on my own. Yes, it helped that my mother was a teacher and that my boss used to work with her. But my uncle had zero to do with it. I’ve walled off that part of my life and built this new life, carefully, brick by brick. It’s mine, and I know every layer and crevice of it.
I’ve built different walls, too, thicker ones, around myself. I’m no wilting flower, and I’m not an insensitive jackass, either. But like I said before, I’ve found it easier to casually hook up with women than to create and maintain a relationship. I’ve told myself it’s because I’m young, that I don’t want to be tied down, that I enjoy being a bachelor. Deep at night, on the edge of sleep, I can admit to myself that it’s because I don’t want to get hurt, that I’m afraid of how I would react if I lost someone else I cared about. Breaking up with a girlfriend is not the same thing as losing one’s parents to sudden violence. But I dated two women semiseriously, one in college and one after, and when each relationship ended I felt gutted, hollowed out, my first instinct to lash out and make my ex feel the same way. I did that in college when my first girlfriend, Caroline, dumped me for another boy, and I said horrible, spiteful things that made her burst into tears before I marched self-righteously out of her dorm room, slamming the door behind me. When I broke up with my second girlfriend, Dani, it was more of a mutual thing—we liked each other, but neither of us was interested in getting married. There had been no other guy, and Dani had been nice. But despite that, I had the same mean desire to make her feel awful for bringing up a fact that had been true for some time: that we had been drifting away from each other. In that instance, to whatever little credit I deserve, I held my tongue, although I wasn’t as warm and understanding as I could have been.
So whenever Marisa smiles at me and my heart seems to turn over in a way that is not unpleasant, I examine the state of the walls I’ve raised around me, looking for cracks or gaps, and I shore up my defenses as best I can, as if I’m a stone fortress and not a human being.
THE SAME DAY we get word that Betsy Bales has had her baby—a little girl named Allison, seven pounds and healthy—Marisa is in my office after school to go over a reading assignment for our students, Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” She borrows a pen from me to take notes while I give her some background—how Coleridge took laudanum and fell asleep reading about Kubla Khan and had a strange, vivid dream about the Mongol ruler and Xanadu. When he woke up, he had two or three hundred lines of verse in his head and started to write them down. But then someone interrupted Coleridge and he stepped away from his desk
