Friend of My Youth

food poisoning or the most incredible hangover of his life—something terrible, he told her on the phone that night—and she had to pretend it was somebody calling to sell them a sofa. She never forgot the wait, the draining of hope, the heat and the bugs—it was in July—and her body oozing sweat, here on the seat of the van, like some sickly admission of defeat.
    He is there, he’s there first; she can see one eye of the Mercury in the deep cedar shade. It’s like hitting water when you’re dead of heat and scratched and bitten all over from picking berries in the summer bush—the lapping sweetness of it, the cool kindness soaking up all your troubles in its sudden depths. She gets the van parked and fluffs out her hair and jumps out, tries the door to show it’s locked, else he’ll send her running back, just like Cornelius—are you sure you locked the van? She walks across the little sunny space, the leaf-scattered ground, seeing herself walk, in her tight white pants and turquoise top and low-slung white belt and high heels, her bag over her shoulder. A shapely woman, with fair, freckled skin and blue eyes rimmed with blue shadow and liner, screwed up appealingly against any light. Her reddish-blond hair—touched up yesterday—catching the sun like a crown of petals. She wears heels just for this walk, just for this moment of crossing the road with his eyes on her, the extra bit of pelvic movement and leg length they give her.
    Often, often, they’ve made love in his car, right here at their meeting place, though they always keep telling each other to wait. Stop; wait till we get to the trailer. “Wait” means the opposite of what it says, after a while. Once, they started as they drove. Brenda slipped off her pants and pulled up her loose summer skirt, not saying a word, looking straight ahead, and they ended up stopping beside the highway, taking a shockingrisk. Now when they pass this spot, she always says something like “Don’t go off the road here,” or “Somebody should put up a warning sign.”
    “Historical marker,” Neil says.
    They have a history of passion, the way families have a history, or people who have gone to school together. They don’t have much else. They’ve never eaten a meal with each other, or seen a movie. But they’ve come through some complicated adventures together, and dangers—not just of the stopping-on-the-highway kind. They’ve taken risks, surprising each other, always correctly. In dreams you can have the feeling that you’ve had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it’s really nothing that simple. You know that there’s a whole underground system that you call “dreams,” having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar—where you are now, where you’ve always been. That was the way it was with them and sex, going somewhere like that, and they understood the same things about it and trusted each other, so far.
    Another time on the highway, Brenda saw a white convertible approaching, an old white Mustang convertible with the top down—this was in the summer—and she slid to the floor.
    “Who’s in that car?” she said. “Look! Quick! Tell me.”
    “Girls,” Neil said. “Four or five girls. Out looking for guys.”
    “My daughter,” Brenda said, scrambling up again. “Good thing I wasn’t wearing my seat belt.”
    “You got a daughter old enough to drive? You got a daughter owns a convertible?”
    “Her friend owns it. Lorna doesn’t drive yet. But she could—she’s sixteen.”
    She felt there were things in the air then that he could have said, that she hoped he wouldn’t. The things men feel obliged to say about young girls.
    “You could have one that age yourself,” she said. “Maybe you do and don’t know it. Also, she lied to me. She said she was going to play tennis.”
    Again he didn’t say anything she hoped not to hear, any sly reminder about lies. A danger past.
    All he said was, “Easy. Take it easy. Nothing happened.”
    She had no way of knowing how much he understood of her feelings at that moment, or if he understood anything. They almost never mentioned that part of her life. They never mentioned Cornelius, though he was the one Neil talked to the first time he came to the Furniture Barn. He came to look for a bicycle—just