Kitchen Heat

The linoleum was cold against my bare feet, and I remember thinking that if Susan's mother walked in right now, I'd have no good explanation for why my pants were around my ankles and the refrigerator door was open.

Susan had her hand pressed flat against the stainless steel, fingers splayed, and she was making that sound she made when she wanted me to go faster but wouldn't say it. The hum of the compressor rattled through the shelves. A jar of pickles sat inches from her face, and I kept looking at it, that green glass, the brine, the little floating seeds, because I didn't know where else to look. Her mother's kitchen. Her mother's pickles. The clock on the wall was shaped like a rooster and its tail ticked back and forth with each second.

"Henry," Susan said, not loud, but with a kind of urgency that made my name sound like a warning. "Henry, stop."

I stopped.

She pulled away from the fridge and turned to face me, and her cheeks were flushed the way they got after tennis, that bright pink that started at her collarbone and climbed. She was wearing a tank top and nothing else, and she crossed her arms over her chest like I hadn't just been inside her thirty seconds ago.

"We can't," she said. "Not here."

"You said your mom wouldn't be back till six."

"She won't." Susan bit her bottom lip. She did that when she was thinking, and she was always thinking. "But it's still her house. It's still her kitchen."

I pulled up my jeans. The button was cold against my stomach. Outside the window over the sink, a blue jay landed on the bird feeder and pecked at the seeds, scattering them onto the grass below. The feeder was shaped like a little house. Her mother had painted it herself, red roof, yellow walls, tiny windows.

"So what do you want to do?" I asked.

"I don't know." She reached for her shorts on the counter and stepped into them, one leg then the other, hopping a little on the tile. "I just. I keep thinking about what happens after."

"After what?"

"After this. After summer." She looked at me then, really looked, and her eyes were the color of the sky right before a storm, that gray that couldn't decide if it wanted to be blue. "You're going to leave. You got into Michigan."

"I haven't decided yet."

"You're going to leave," she said again, and this time it wasn't a question.

The rooster clock ticked. The blue jay flew off. I wanted to tell her that Michigan was just a place, that a degree was just a piece of paper, that I could stay, that I could get a job at her father's dealership and sell Buicks for the rest of my life. But none of that was true, and we both knew it.

"I don't want to fight," I said.

"We're not fighting." She walked past me to the sink and turned on the water, held her hands under it even though they weren't dirty. "We're just talking."

"Okay."

"I mean, what did you think was going to happen?" She turned the water off and dried her hands on a dish towel that had strawberries embroidered on it. "We've been doing this since April. It's July. You leave in six weeks."

"I know."

"So what are we doing?"

I didn't have an answer. I was eighteen years old and standing in a kitchen that smelled like lemons and dish soap and sex, and I didn't have a single thing to say that would make any of it better. The truth was I loved her. The truth was I'd loved her since tenth grade when she beat me in a debate about school uniforms and then bought me a Coke from the vending machine because she felt bad about it. The truth was I was scared.

"I don't know," I said. "I just want to be here. Right now. With you."

"That's not enough."

"Maybe it is."

She laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh. It was the kind of laugh that comes out when nothing is funny but you need to make a sound or you'll cry. "You sound like a country song."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"Of course you will." She walked over to me and put her hands on my chest, and her palms were still wet from the sink. "Henry."

"Yeah."

"Promise me something."

"Anything."

"Don't promise me anything." She said it fast, like she was afraid she'd change her mind. "Don't make promises you can't keep. That's all I want."

I put my hands on her waist. The cotton of her tank top was thin, and I could feel the heat coming off her skin. "Okay."

"Okay."

And then the front door opened.

We both heard it at the same time. The creak of the hinge, the jangle of keys, the sound of her mother's heels on the hardwood in the hall. Susan's eyes went wide, and she shoved me toward the back door with both hands.

"Go," she whispered. "Go, go, go."

I grabbed my shirt off the floor and went. The screen door banged behind me, and I was across the yard before I could think, my bare feet on the grass, my shirt trailing from my hand like a flag. I didn't stop until I was through the gap in the hedge and standing in my own backyard, breathing hard, listening to the sound of my own heart.

Through the kitchen window of her house, I could see Susan's mother setting grocery bags on the counter. She was wearing a green dress and her hair was up. She looked tired. She looked like she'd been running errands all day and just wanted to sit down.

Susan was standing by the sink, her back to the window, her shoulders very straight. She didn't turn around. She didn't look at me. She just stood there while her mother talked, and I stood in my backyard with my shirt in my hand and my feet wet from the grass, and I understood something I hadn't understood five minutes ago.

She was going to be fine. That was the thing. Susan was going to be fine without me. She'd go to whatever school she'd picked, and she'd find someone else, someone who didn't leave, someone whose whole life wasn't already packed into cardboard boxes in the garage. She'd be fine, and I'd be somewhere else, and that would be the end of it.

The blue jay came back. It landed on the fence between our yards and looked at me with its head cocked, like it knew something I didn't.

I went inside. The phone was ringing.