preface part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8
In no time at all Joey had dropped me back off at my little beige house on the east side of Des Moines. He waited until he saw that I was inside, with the door shut and locked tightly behind me, before pulling out into the dark.
I climbed the steep steps to my room and went through all of my clothes three times trying to find the best outfit to wear to the first day of our summer class. We were planning to sit together so I had to look my best…
Monday morning. First day of summer school…with Joey. I was not looking forward to the class, but I was definitely ready to spend a whole bunch of time with him. I woke up so much earlier than necessary, took a very long shower and spent forever on my hair. I was just about done when my phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hey, did you put the Mt. Dew in the fridge?”
It was Joey; I smiled. “Of course I did. How many do you want me to bring?” I asked, juggling my mascara wand, concealer, and the phone.
“Start with four. If we need more we’ll go get some,” he said.
“Sounds good, I’ll see you in half an hour.” I grabbed my lunch from the fridge and shoved it in my blue messenger bag, swinging it over my shoulder, and grabbed my keys. I bounded out the door and down my creaky wooden steps, careful to double-check that I’d locked the front door and windows.
Ten minutes later I was halfway to school, speeding up Highway 69 and singing along with the radio at the top of my lungs. (I’m always singing along with something.) I dug in my messenger bag and verified that I’d brought my new Rubik’s cube along; today at lunch was to be my first lesson. My goal was to solve it once, just once, by myself. Joey could solve the thing in just over 30 seconds – I had no illusions of that, but I could definitely play “damsel in distress” and have him teach me to solve it, at the very least.
He was standing in the parking lot, waiting for me when I pulled up. I turned the radio down quickly, hoping that no one had heard the bass pumping out of my speakers, and jumped out of the car.
“Hi! Ready for this?” I asked, overly cheerfully. Idiot! I thought. Act normal!
“How much Mountain Dew did you bring?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
We walked into the classroom and picked out a table, third row back, next to the window.
“This is perfect,” I leaned over and whispered to Joey as the professor was beginning to hand out the syllabus. “I can watch the birds and squirrels this way.”
Joey winked at me and slid me a syllabus.
Four hours and two Mountain Dews later, we had an hour break for lunch. We stumbled out into the sunlight with our twenty or so other classmates and blinked against the brightness.
“I cannot do that for another four and a half days,” I moaned.
“It’s pretty rough,” Joey agreed. We found a good spot in the grass and pulled out our lunches. “Did you bring your cube?”
I held it up, showing him that I had indeed remembered.
“OK, your first lesson is getting all the white on one side,” Joey explained. He showed me several different ways to move the squares so they’d shuffle in a pattern. It was actually kind of interesting, not what I had been expecting. I’ve never been keen on math (ahem) and I had this sinking feeling that solving Rubik’s cubes had a lot of mathiness to it. (Joey had said the word “algorithm” a few too many times when trying to explain the ease of Rubik’s cube solving to me.)
Twenty minutes later, after I’d gotten all the white squares on one side of the cube, I had had enough. “I’m done for now,” I said.
“OK,” Joey said, putting his apple core into his lunch sack and squashing it against the grass. “Let’s walk over to the HandiMart, I bet we can make it before class starts.”
I glanced at my watch and noticed that we still had about half an hour until class resumed again. “Let’s do it,” I agreed.
The two of us walked along enjoying the spring breeze and talking about our upcoming summer. I planned to stay in Des Moines the whole time, house-sit and work for Dr. D. Joey, on the other hand, was headed to Minnesota in less than two weeks. He had an internship up there and would be gone for nearly the entire summer; two months.
Two long, long months where he’d have no access to the Internet or email, and a cell phone that was on “Roam” the moment he drove across the Iowa border (and for some reason the cell carrier was called US Cellular…but it seriously only works in Iowa).
This summer would either make it or break it for any potential relationship for the two of us, I could tell that already. About every other evening, after we’d finally hang up the phone from our hour (or two, or three) long conversations, I’d get cold feet.
You shouldn’t be doing this, I’d say to myself. You don’t know what you’re doing.
You’re a relationship train wreck; do you want to ruin another one?
He deserves better…not somebody else’s leftovers.
And do you really know him?
Are you sure?
And so on, and so on, and so on.
I was one confused chica. But there was just something about Joey, something I couldn’t shake off, so I hung in there. I didn’t want to let go of something that could be fantastic just because I got a case of cold feet. So every day I went to class and sat with Joey. We whispered, giggled, passed notes and acted like high schoolers when the professor wasn’t looking. We ate lunch together. We talked on the phone all evening. (It was a good thing I worked for a chiropractor because my neck was so out of alignment from making dinner or trying to fold my laundry with the phone pressed between my ear and shoulder.)
It rained all week. My lawn was getting entirely out of control; I hadn’t had time to mow it before our summer class began, and it was impossible to mow the lawn and talk on the phone. So Thursday afternoon, when the sun finally broke hesitantly through the clouds, I passed a note to Joey.
At break I’m leaving – I have to go mow my lawn before I have to haul in a baler to get the thing cut. It’s so out of control.
Joey wrote back, I’ll come help you, I can run your weed whacker, weren’t you having trouble with it?
I was having trouble with it, now that you mention it. I smiled secretly and prayed the rain wouldn’t start up again before break; the minutes dragged by like they used to when I was a kid waiting for my birthday.
Finally, we had our bags packed up and had escaped from the classroom. “Want me to follow you down?” Joey asked.
“Sure, that makes sense,” I said.
Twenty minutes later we were driving up Wright Street. I glanced at the shabby, broken down houses my neighbors lived in, thankful that my little house at least looked cute. (It was a fixer-upper that just happened to be in the wrong neighborhood. One afternoon there was a double stabbing a couple of blocks away.)
I lived in a house that was built in the turn of the century. It was two stories with a slanting porch painted gray and fantastic wood floors on the first level. The basement was one of those creepy old Iowa basements that is dark, damp and smells like spiders and mildew. (I only went down there to do laundry and during tornadoes; the place gave me the willies.) Upstairs was one larger bedroom, one small one and a slanted crawl space that could have been turned into a bedroom if need be. I generally stayed out of there too, it was dusty.
My favorite room was the kitchen. It was big, open and breezy, there were windows on two sides and it had a gas range. The family who owned the house was in the middle of remodeling it, but I loved to go home in the evenings and invent something fantastic for dinner; it was my first “my” kitchen.
On this particular evening, I was out of groceries but I had a box of Macaroni and Cheese leftover from the semester at college.
“Sorry, all I can feed you is Mac & Cheese,” I told Joey as he stomped up the porch and into my house.
“That’s ok, I love that stuff,” He said. “I’ll help you make it later.”
I ran upstairs and changed my clothes while Joey rummaged around in the garage to dig out the weed whacker, gas, and lawn mower. I grabbed the lawn mower and got started while he fiddled with the weed whacker; that thing was acting seriously problematic.
I was half done with the lawn by the time he got the thing to work. (My sibs and I are all remarkably fast at lawn mowing; when your yard is the size of the one we had to mow growing up you learn to mow extremely fast.) Forty five minutes from when we started, we had finished the job.
“I don’t know how I’m going to get this done when you’re in Minnesota,” I whined. “I can’t weed whack my way out of a box.”
“It’s not so bad once you get it started,” Joey reassured me.
“That’s just the thing, I can’t get it started.”
Joey gave me a ten minute crash course on starting a weed whacker before I figured it out. We put the mowing stuff away and went inside to start the macaroni.
“Here, I’ll do it,” Joey said.
I stepped back and watched the master work. He actually set a timer for eight minutes once the water began to boil (“that’s what it says to do on the box,” he said) and when it went off, he began throwing noodles at my fridge.
“Woah, woah. What are you even doing?!” I asked, springing forward to pick the two noodles up that had fallen to the floor.
“When the noodles are done they stick to the fridge,” Joey said.
I burst out laughing. “You seriously test them by throwing it at the fridge?”
“Yeah, what do you do?”
I spear one with a fork and eat it. But that’s a whole lot less funny than throwing them at the fridge.
Since the noodles hadn’t stuck to the fridge, he let the water boil a few more minutes before trying again. Sure enough, that noodle stuck to the fridge door like it was glued on.
“Very impressive,” I said, stifling another laugh.
His next move wasn’t quite so smooth. After draining the water he poured about half a cup of milk into the noodles before I squeaked “STOP!” (I’m a little bit of a micro-manager in the kitchen, can you tell?)
Joey realized what he did and I could see his mind trying to analyze how to get all the milk out of the pan; he had already added the cheese and butter.
“What in the world were you doing?” I teased him.
“I usually make two boxes at home, which is about two glugs of milk from the jug.” At least there was method to his madness. “I forgot we were only making one.” He stirred the pan and the milk/cheese/butter mixture sloshed around the noodles. Not a good sign.
It was the runniest, blandest Mac & Cheese I had ever eaten, but I had so much fun eating it that I barely noticed it had absolutely no flavor.
To be continued…
