Maybe the Moon

She grabbed the wheel and made a quick recovery. “Sorry.”
    “What do you mean, if they knew who I was?”
    “If they knew they were saying those ugly things to Mr. Woods.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake!” I hooted at her. “You think they’d give a rat’s ass?”
    “I do…yes…I do.”
    “You are such a schmaltzbag.”
    “I bet they went to that movie, and I bet they cried.”
    “And then they went out and joined the ACLU.”
    Renee frowned at me in confusion.
    “Just a group,” I said.
    Now she looked more wounded than ever. “You’re making fun, and I’m serious.”
    “No, I’m not.” Sometimes she makes me feel like I’ve just knocked a kid’s ice cream cone into the dirt.
    “I believe in Mr. Woods,” she said.
    “I know, honey,” I found a Kleenex in the glove compartment and handed it to her. “Blow your nose.”

    We sat on our private hillock and watched the glowing grid of the Valley. The air was cooler but still very pleasant. A helicopter dipped and swayed on the slope below us, slashing the underbrush with garish white light. The night was so still and diamond clear that I could hear a dog barking all the way down in Sherman Oaks.
    “I saw Ham today,” Renee said.
    “Oh, yeah?” I tried to sound as nonchalant as she had.
    “He was at that baked potato place. At the mall.”
    “What did he have to say?”
    “I didn’t talk to him,” she said. “I just saw him.”
    “Oh.”
    “That was the first time I’ve seen him in almost two years.”
    “Three,” I said.
    “He looked good.”
    Good God, I thought, the creep dumped her. What was there to get misty-eyed about?
    She turned and looked at me. “Do you think I should call him?”
    “No, I do not.”
    “He looks different, Cady. Sadder. Maybe he misses me. How would I know if…”
    “Sweetie, he threw your stuff in the yard and changed the locks.”
    Playing the old tape again, Renee nodded morosely.
    “I think that was a clue,” I added.
    “Yeah.”
    “Besides, you haven’t missed him for years. You’ve told me so a million times.”
    Another nod.
    “What’s this about, anyway?”
    She sighed and gazed balefully into the distance. The helicopter was rising now, heading away, growing tinier by the second. I thought she might cry again, but she didn’t. She just pursed her lips and frowned a little. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Maybe he was right.”
    “About what?”
    “Maybe he was the only guy who’d ever want me.”
    “Oh, honey.”
    “Ya know?”
    “No, I don’t know. Look, Renee. Just because some men can’t sustain a relationship long enough to…well, that doesn’t mean…” I didn’t finish, since I couldn’t really say for certain where the fault lay. The truth is, I almost never see Renee around her boyfriends; when she’s got something going, she tends to hang out at the guy’s place. It’s possible, given her insecurity, that she turns all clingy and desperate on the third date, scaring off even the nice ones.
    Looking for another way out, I reached over and tucked my hand into hers—my “baby starfish,” as Renee calls it, into her huge catcher’s mitt—and told her it was time to lighten up. Hand holding almost always works on her, but I save it as a last resort to keep from wearing out the effect. Also, there’s an unsettling sort of come-to-Mama thing that happens when the great and the small converge sentimentally. I’ve never been completely comfortable with it.
    Renee smiled wanly. “But what else could explain it?”
    “Explain what?”
    She shrugged her big fuzzy blue shoulders. “Why they don’t stick around.”
    “Because they’re buttheads.”
    She uttered an impatient sigh. “How can they all be buttheads?”
    “I don’t know. It’s one of the great wonders of the modern world. An all-butthead extravaganza.” Removing my hand from hers, I wrote across the sky with my forefinger. “ The Night of a Thousand Buttheads .”
    She giggled. Finally.
    “And it could be me, you know.” I threw this in breezily, as if it had just crossed my mind. Cooped up in that damned house so much, with too much time to stew in my juices, I’ve started to fret about all sorts of things.
    “What do you mean?”
    I shrugged. “Maybe it’s me who’s scaring them away.”
    “Cady…” Oh, how wounded she looked. “I brag about you all the time.”
    “Well, that’s what I mean. Not everybody’s like you, honey. Maybe you shouldn’t always mention