She put her hand again on his bare wrist. The touch felt so powerfully delightful that he thought he could run up the steps of it right into her heart. But it was only a friendly touch, a pat. She smiled at him and her smile was congenial, nothing more. Way back in the woods a bird, some unidentifiable, ridiculous creature, let loose a single cry, round and sweet as a scuppernong grape. He jumped down to the sandy bar and stood there peering upstream under the bridge. Big clots of brush tucked under the eaves. He had a great desire to jump into a boat and float away down the stream, but the stream was too shallow, the dark water turned thin and copper colored as it washed the sand edge, and he had no boat. A turtle with a saucer-shaped black and yellow shell perched on a slanted log. It wobbled and fell into the water; he didn’t know they were so ungainly.
She walked away, but still he stood there. He picked up a piece of pine bark and sailed it at the water. It flipped and parried off, catching on the surface as he stood thinking. Everybody he met had a different dream. Every dream was strong and secret and clung-to and hoped for with all the dreamer’s might. One wanted a little patch of good soil, another folding money on the section, another a hazel-eyed baby with a burblous laugh, another rescue rolling in from a far country. Each thought he could find his soul’s satisfaction in a single scrap of creation. . and build his life on it. But the air or water or bit of ground that separated you from the dream. . how could you cross it?
He climbed the bank and walked back to the car where she sat waiting. He had hoped she would look up, look away from where she had stored herself these last moments, look at him with delight, but she only looked half pleased at seeing him, half annoyed at having to wait. He got in the car and leaned toward her to kiss her anyway, but halfway there he stopped and smiled at her. It was a forced smile that felt cracked and stiff on his face.
“You know,” he said, “I think you and I fit together better than any two. .” And then stopped. He slumped back into his seat as she started the car. She didn’t need a crank, the machine fired right up.
“I like you,” she said, understanding everything, he thought, seeing right into him, “but I am older than you. I feel kind of sisterly toward you.”
Oh no, he wanted to say and raised his hand as if to stop her: Don’t talk that way. “You and I would be perfect together,” he said.
“None are perfect,” she said, “and we both have other plans, other lives we want.”
He turned away, for the moment defeated. The car chugged, creaking and shaking up the bank and stopped; the bank was too steep. She gave him a scared look. He told her to drive it back down and turn around. After she did this he took the wheel and backed it up the slope, something he had seen a driver do before. Her face was flushed a hidden, rising red, strongest in the point of her cheeks, and a bead of sweat slid down under her ear. At the top, after he’d wheeled around and stopped, as he leaned back in the seat under big mossy oaks, a smoothness, a calm in his body, she darted in and kissed him on the cheek. They changed places and then sat a minute on the grassy shoulder. The dirt road was a soft orange dusty color. She looked as if she wanted to kiss him again but she only put the car in gear and they started out.
“That was too scary,” she said.
“Wadn’t much to it.”
“I’m so thankful you knew what to do.”
“Me too,” he said and smiled.
“You’re a curious boy.”
“Not in a bad way.”
“No, no, I don’t mean that. It’s just. . you’re out here in the world wandering around on your own.”
“I got the professor. I got a job.”
“I don’t mean to insult you.”
“It’s all right.”
They were silent. The pine woods streamed by. A distant hawk, drifting in its singleness, tipped and slid off to the west.
“Thank you for telling me everything you have,” she said. “I love listening to you.”
“You said you didn’t really want to become a doctor. What is it that you want to be?”
“I’d like to do something like you’re doing,” she said, reaching over and touching his hand. “I’d like to ride around showing people things.”
“Why don’t you come along with us?”
She smiled at him and then she tossed her head in an artificial way. “I probably will become a doctor if they’ll let me. A nurse if that’s all they’ll allow. And then I’ll travel around helping sick people.”
He could offer her a lot of things better than that, he thought.
“What people really want,” he said, “is to hook up with somebody they feel comfortable with and then get on with living.”
“I don’t really think much about that,” she said.
“But you don’t have to. We got it in our nature already. You don’t have to cozen it up.”
“But I have other things to do first.” She smiled again, fondly; distantly. “And so do you.”
“No,” he said emphatically, hurriedly. “The somebody you hook up with goes right along with all this other business we got to do. They’re a natural fit. One helps the other.”
