John stepped out into the cold evening and sat down on the apartment building steps. The chilly concrete seemed to cut right through his thin khakis, but he only felt the sting from a distance. He lifted his glass to eye level and admired the whiskey’s amber glow against the overcast sky. A mass of clouds had rolled in that afternoon, a dense yellowish-grey curtain that promised snow overnight. He shivered a little and set his drink down on the steps, but the glass hit the concrete harder than he meant it to, with a loud clink. His left hand curled tighter around his cell phone, waiting.
Rachel would call soon, he just never knew exactly when. It was 6 p.m. for him in Salt Lake City, which meant 5 p.m. for her in Seattle, and around now she would be packing up at the library, sliding a thick stack of books and papers into her bag and rising slowly to her feet. The timing of their daily phone call had evolved to fit her schedule, and now they talked each night as she walked home, exhausted. In the summer John had gotten into the habit of fixing a drink after work and sitting down outside on the steps to wait for her call. Then, Salt Lake had still been new and unexplored. Taking in a summer evening felt like luxury and a chance to get out of his one bedroom apartment. Now the cold was growing uncomfortable but he found the habit surprisingly hard to break.
From the steps he surveyed the suburban panorama that had become so familiar over the past few months. The street was wide and flat, trimmed on both sides by a neat sidewalk that seemed brand new. There was none of the density he associated with a city, and all the open space unnerved him. Even the old trees that should have lent some charm looked small, and spaced too far apart.
John decided he would make a rule. I will not take another sip until the phone rings, he thought. That way it wasn’t up to him. They seemed important, these rules, because they kept things under control. He would have to try to remember this one.
He and Rachel had met a year ago, during their senior year at Seattle University. He and his friends were at a karaoke bar just off campus, on Capitol Hill. They got enough beer in him that he agreed to do God Bless the U.S.A., on the condition that if he made it through without cracking a smile he’d drink for free the rest of the night. Rachel and her friends were at a table near the front, and they started heckling about halfway through, just as he was really trying to deliver a line about the “hills of Tennessee, and the plains of Texas” with the appropriate feeling. Afterward he came over and sat down at their table in mock indignation, and introduced himself to all of them — but mostly to Rachel. An hour later he’d convinced her to turn over her phone number.
When he arrived to pick her up on their first date, she also met his car. The Ugly Mobile a.k.a. The Yellow Beast, or just Ugly for short. It was a 1989 Mitsubishi Montero, the Japanese answer to the Jeep. It featured two doors, flaking yellow paint, and a couple disturbing looking rust spots on the hood. A previous owner had added some oversized off-road tires, and now it steered like a bus. The suspension was shot, and the creaky springs were loud enough to turn heads. So many fuses had blown out that none of the dash lights worked. The speedometer was invisible after dark. He’d told her: you don’t understand, it’s perfect. If I get pulled over at night and the cop says Son, do you have any idea how fast you were going, I can say No sir, I really don’t.
“If you’re speeding in this thing you’re insane,” she said. “You should be committed, not ticketed.” She’d refused to drive it at first, but seemed to like riding around town. Ugly didn’t have a backseat, just two metal rails where the backseat used to be attached, though by the end of senior year she was the only person he wanted to drive around, anyway.
Now it was parked outside the apartment complex in Salt Lake, sticking out worse than ever, an eyesore in the neighborhood collection of maroon family sedans and silver SUVs. John knew it was heading toward the end of its life, but he felt fiercely protective of this last relic from his past. The rest of his possessions had changed subtly since he’d moved, and the bits and pieces of his old room didn’t look the same when he unpacked and set them up again. His parents house was only a few miles away from campus, and there was a reassuring solidity to the way his room had remained in suspended animation those four years. Each holiday break and each summer back home he’d found it the same, if dustier. But something about breaking the pattern of the old arrangement had altered his plastic clock radio, the rug, his old dresser, the lamp by his bed. Instead of cozy they looked cramped, and a little cheap.
His phone lit up in his hand, vibrated, and then started to ring loudly.
“You there?” she said, her voice lost in a burst of city sidewalk noises.
“Rachel, can you hear me?”
The phone beeped twice, and informed him: Call Dropped.
He picked up his drink and swished it around slowly, watching it coat the sides of the chilly glass. When he took a sip it was cold, sliding down his throat.
*****
By the end of senior year they’d became more attached than they’d realized, so when the time came to split up they started talking about long distance instead. With some help from his dad, John found a starting position with a commercial real estate brokerage in Salt Lake. Rachel was staying on at the Seattle University law school with the full approval of her parents. She’d started out as a simple English major, but slowly buckled under the weight of weekly phone calls from home, until she went pre-law.
The day after he got the job he started packing. It seemed like every time he looked over another drawer was emptied, or the contents of a shelf disappeared into a cardboard box. All day he heard the strangled sound of clear packing tape peeling off the roll. The morning after all the pictures and posters had come down, he opened his eyes and forgot where he was, didn’t recognize the blank surfaces. Then he rolled up the carpet, and the wood floors and bare walls suddenly echoed like a hallway.
The furniture was shipped to Utah, and he loaded up the remaining bits and pieces in the back of Ugly. Google Maps said 13 hours, but he figured at Ugly’s pace—at or below the speed limit—it’d be more like 15. The plan was to make the trip in one day, and Rachel had agreed to be his co-pilot. The next morning she showed up at 5:30 a.m. with two cups of coffee, softly knocking on the front door in the dark. His family assembled downstairs, and he hugged each one as Rachel waited by the door. They said goodbye, and for some reason found themselves whispering in the early morning quiet.
After he climbed in and shut the car door, he suddenly wondered if the starter would actually kick over, as though it were impossible that they were really about to move. But Ugly came to life, and the dim headlights blinked once and then flicked on. They squeaked slowly down the driveway and turned the corner, and Rachel was already slumped back in her seat, dark hair spilling over her face. He could just make out the silhouettes of his family waving from the porch, their blurry shapes receding in the grayish light.
They reached the downtown onramp for I-90 and rumbled slowly up to speed, the car swaying gently side to side. “Keep it below 65,” his dad had said. “And keep the rubber side down. This thing would crumple up like a Sprite can if you flipped it over,” he said, rapping his knuckle suspiciously on the thin metal doors. This last comment had drawn a pained how could you say that look from his mom.
In the seat next to him Rachel perked up slightly at the noise and rolled her head over to look at him. He hoisted his Styrofoam coffee cup as a toast, raised it as if to say cheers, and she formed a sleepy half-smile. This had always been his favorite expression. She looked relaxed, like she trusted him completely, and there wasn’t a doubt or a worry in her mind.
I should have known, he thought. I liked her best when she was still half-conscious.
*****
His phone lit up again, and he tried to flip it open before the shrill ringer went off, but his fingers were stiff from drink, and the cold. She was already talking, the tinny sound of her voice getting louder as he raised the phone to his head, and pressed the hard plastic receiver against his ear.
“…you believe people actually hide books in the library?” she was saying. “These competitive little assholes. They can’t sneak them out past the scanners at the door, so they just do some creative re-shelving and voila. Only they know where it is.”
“Well, everyone says the first year is the toughest.”
“I just can’t believe people. I have to go on a fucking easter egg hunt just to study.”
He was still getting used to this new tone, the bursts of outrage and anger. He’d never met her competitive edge, and he felt tired hearing about the grades, the demands, the late nights absorbing information from thick books with an intensity that he knew he couldn’t match.
“I don’t think the school cares,” she said. “I get it. They’re trying to weed out the weak.”
“I know you can make it,” he said. Am I slurring? “You just gotta push through this rough patch.”
A rough patch. That was comforting. And he was fair, perfectly willing to make excuses for both of them. She was under a lot of pressure, and this made her stressed and brittle. He’d barely gotten to know anyone at the office, and as the new guy he inherited the most paper-pushing grunt work. His boss had just smiled at him the other day, after dropping another stack of mortgage applications on his desk. “Shit rolls downhill, buddy,” was his boss’s explanation, with an inscrutable look somewhere between good-natured humor and scorn. He had to unwind somehow.
The Rachel he knew was still there, and he was certain she’d be back. The Rachel that he could always count on to suggest pancakes on the weekends even if it was already noon and they should really have been thinking about dinner. The one who laughed at his jokes when they were both buzzed on weeknights, when he’d clown around the kitchen pretending to cook, calling out for ingredients. He remembered the night he picked up the ketchup and proclaimed it pasta sauce, chased her around threatening to squirt it onto the spaghetti she was trying to eat. It was funny, until he swung his arm around and knocked their wine glasses together so hard they burst in mid-air, and the glass shards landed at their feet and scattered on the floor, dripping and purple. She’d screamed a little, from the shock, and he froze, thinking he’d gone too far. But she was already laughing, looking at the stain tie-dyed all over his shirt, raising one arm to her mouth to keep from snorting out loud as tears streamed down her face. “The ‘70s called…” she managed to say somehow, “and they want their shirt back, man.” He’d smiled too, in relief. But his eyes were still fixed on the jagged remains of her wine glass. She was waving it around carelessly, without realizing it’d suddenly become a weapon.
He shifted his weight on the steps and took another sip of his drink.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“You know, the same. Not a lot to tell, really.” This was true, but he knew it wasn’t what she was asking. “You and I both shuffle a lot of papers, I guess.”
“Did you talk to your boss at all? About getting more involved?”
The new Rachel wanted him to step up, be proactive, show some initiative, request meetings, take work home. Her excess drive had begun to spill over into his life, and it filled him with the desire to flee. You know, he didn’t say, there’s a reason that I didn’t sign up for more school.
*****
As the sun was coming up they’d merged seamlessly into the flow of commuters heading east towards Bellevue. Soon they were surrounded by sleek luxury cars, the early birds headed into tech firms and software companies. They whooshed past in the left lane like bullet trains while Ugly motored along. Rachel was still passed out in the passenger seat, curled up with her back to him.
After they passed through the city the traffic suddenly thinned out, and instead the other side of the highway was choked with commuters. Faces flashed by like snapshots: talking on the phone, slurping coffee, applying makeup. Finally the skyline sank into the horizon behind them as the highway started to curve up and climb out of Puget Sound, winding gently through the Cascades, around the shoulders of Mount Rainier.
They stopped for a cheap lunch just across the Oregon border, and switched drivers. “Talk to me,” she said afterwards, “I’m full and it’s making me sleepy. It’s too warm in here.”
He reached his arm across the seat, tucked his hand under the nape of her neck and gave her shoulders a gentle squeeze.
“How often will we call each other?” she asked.
“As much as we have to.”
“But we won’t be able to do this on the phone, you know. Just sit next to each other. If we don’t talk there’s nothing going on.”
“You always say we need to communicate better, so I guess we will.” She kept looking at the road, like she was still waiting for him to finish his sentence, or waiting for what she needed to hear. “Tell you what,” he said, “Just promise not to ever write me some letter that starts with Dear John…” He thought it was good, but she didn’t even smile.
*****
John shifted the phone around to give his right ear a rest. He heard a door click shut somewhere on her end. She let out a deep sigh, and it came through his end as a static, whistling sound. The line got quieter, and when she spoke again her tone was softer and he could tell she was back home.
“Really, I don’t care if you talk to your boss one way or another, or quit and walk out the door. But you don’t sound happy. You don’t actually sound like you.”
“There’s just not much going on here,” he said. He suddenly felt bored by himself. He shifted backwards and looked up at the clouds churning away in the sky.
“The long distance thing only works if you tell me what’s going on,” she said.
He took another sip of his drink and set it down on the step, but the glass hit the concrete harder than he meant it to.
“I can hear it, you know,” she said. “I’ve been hearing it for months now. Your glass.”
He froze.
“It took me a while, but I worked it out.” She was picking up speed. “College is over. You drink during the week? At home?”
“Well… excuse me,” he said. I sound like a child. He started to get angry. “I didn’t realize we’d crossed some invisible line, where everything would change and we’d both turn into different people.” His voice was getting louder, and he wondered if the neighbors could hear. Why was this place so quiet?
“We’re not going to talk if you’re just going to be sloppy and mean.”
“You don’t always get to decide. When we talk, or when we don’t, or what we’re going to do.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, “I do. We both do.” And then she hung up.
He heard the click but in his state it didn’t fully register. He was still waiting for her to finish her sentence, so he could say the next angry thing he’d been thinking of while she talked, trying to organize his blurry thoughts.
The snow had finally started while they argued, tiny pinpoints that barely existed. He wasn’t sure if his mind was working right, just then, but he didn’t understand how they could fall through the air so slowly. A few of them landed in his glass and dissolved instantly, without a trace.
*****
They’d finally rolled into Salt Lake just before midnight, stumbled in the door and fallen asleep together on his new wall-to-wall carpeted floor. But the next afternoon, she had a flight back home.
He couldn’t remember that drive to the airport, just the moment when they walked into the terminal together. It was nearly empty, and in a few minutes she had her boarding pass. There wasn’t even a security line.
“Well there’s no hurry, I guess,” he said.
Then she leaned toward him, pulled him in so he could feel her breathing. And this was the feeling that he tried to remember when he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to press that plastic phone against his head for one second longer: her real lips, moving next to his ear.
“We can do it,” she said.
“The long distance thing only works if you tell me what’s going on,” she said.
He took another sip of his drink and set it down on the step, but the glass hit the concrete harder than he meant it to.
“I can hear it, you know,” she said. “I’ve been hearing it for months now. Your glass.”
He froze.
“It took me awhile, but I worked it out.” She was picking up speed. “College is over. You drink during the week? At home?”
“Well… excuse me,” he said. I sound like a child. He started to get angry. “I didn’t realize we’d crossed some invisible line, where everything would change and we’d both turn into different people.” His voice was getting louder, and he wondered if the neighbors could hear. Why was this place so quiet?
“We’re not going to talk if you’re just going to be sloppy and mean.”
“You don’t always get to decide. When we talk, or when we don’t, or what we’re going to do.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, “I do. We both do.” And then she hung up.
He heard the click but in his state it didn’t fully register. He was still waiting for her to finish her sentence, so he could say the next angry thing he’d been thinking of while she talked, trying to organize his blurry thoughts.
The snow had finally started while they argued, tiny pinpoints that barely existed. He wasn’t sure if his mind was working right, just then, but he didn’t understand how they could fall through the air so slowly. A few of them landed in his glass and dissolved instantly, without a trace.
***
They’d finally rolled into Salt Lake just before midnight, stumbled in the door and fallen asleep together on his new wall-to-wall carpeted floor. But the next afternoon, she had a flight back home.
He couldn’t remember that drive to the airport, just the moment when they walked into the terminal together. It was nearly empty, and in a few minutes she had her boarding pass. There wasn’t even a security line.
“Well there’s no hurry, I guess,” he said.
Then she leaned toward him, pulled him in so he could feel her breathing. And this was the feeling that he tried to remember when he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to press that plastic phone against his head for one second longer: her real lips, moving next to his ear.
“We can do it,” she said.
