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“You still there?” he said.

“Oh—sorry. I was just, uh, nothing.” Under the circumstances, “nothing” seemed a better explanation than “questioning the viability of our relationship.”

From the corner of my eye, I could see Scruffy still looking in my direction, which didn’t help matters one bit. I started blushing, a condition I was powerless to reverse once the process had begun. Long before I could establish beyond a reasonable doubt that I was speaking with my age-appropriate significant other, I heard the rumble of an engine.

“Looks like my bus is getting ready to board,” I told Hank. “See you Saturday night?”

“Can’t wait. You know, I miss you already, Dana.”

“Me, too.” It was true. I did miss Hank Wheeler, regardless of his linguistic shortcomings. Why, just last Sunday I’d sat on the rickety staircase of the brownstone, marveling at the painstaking way he stripped paint—not to mention the exhilarating way his biceps tensed and the endearing way his dark hair flopped into his eyes—and thought how appropriately timed Thanksgiving was this year.

You need to grow up,
I told myself.
Step One: no more flirting with youthful strangers. Step Two… ibid.

Soon the driver poked his head around the door, which was temporarily blocked while the gargantuan man staggered to his feet, and surveyed the snaking line.

“I can only take fifty-two of you on this run. But don’t worry, folks—we got another coach right behind this one.”

I quickly began counting from my position toward the back of the line. Scruffy was number fifty-three: first in line for the second bus. He’d been trying to count, too, but now that the passengers were milling around in preparation to board, it was unlikely he’d come up with an accurate total. He raised his eyebrows, gave me a hopeful look, and shrugged.

I shrugged back, torn between relief and dismay, with dismay coming out on top.
You are a horrendous excuse for a girlfriend,
I told myself, all the while wondering whether Scruffy’s eyes were more gray than green or the other way around.

As I reached for the bagel bag, Growling Man’s cell phone rang. Unfortunately for him, it was still in Hissing Woman’s coat pocket.

“You
shit
!” She brandished the glowing screen at him. “I
knew
it! How many times has she called? Wait—don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.” She ripped her bus ticket into sixteenths, threw the pieces in Growling Man’s face, and stalked off.

I scrupulously avoided looking to my right. Instead, I stared straight ahead, all the while wondering two things: what the Bieber bus line’s policy was with regard to saving seats, and what the hell was wrong with me.

I finally inched my way through the door and up the stairs to the bus, where I was once again confronted with the sight of the gargantuan man. He was sitting in the front row, across from the driver.

The entire front row. He was occupying both seats.

I let out a sigh of what I told myself was relief and made my way down the aisle.

The last thing I saw before the bus pulled out was Scruffy’s face through the grimy windowpane. He was waving goodbye.

CHAPTER EIGHT
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

M
y heart sank when the bus disgorged its passengers and I spotted Cal’s pickup idling across the street. Elinor Ann must be busy at home with giblets or yams. I had nothing against her husband—he hit fungoes for the boys and stretched chicken wire over the herb garden and dutifully draped his wet towels on hooks—but trying to conduct a conversation with him was excruciating. Even if I were to enter the truck and say, “What a bus ride! Just after we crossed the bridge into Pennsylvania, it exploded and collapsed into the Delaware river!” Cal would probably respond, “That so?” Or maybe, “ ’Magine that.” Or, if he was feeling particularly loquacious, “Don’t that beat all.”

Of course, I was partially responsible for the abyss between us, if only by virtue of being city folk—childless city folk, with a peculiar career trajectory and too many pairs of jeans, if that didn’t beat all.

Which would be off-putting enough for most any Lebanon County farm boy, but the situation was compounded tenfold by Cal’s being a living example of what can happen when rumspringa doesn’t turn out the way it’s supposed to.

“He’s
Amish
?!!!” I’d said when Elinor Ann called after their first date, which had taken place so long ago that we were conversing on phones attached by wires to baseboard jacks.

“He
was
Amish. He grew up Amish. But he hasn’t been Amish for the past seven years. I just told you, we met on a building site. His company’s tiling and grouting bathrooms, and we got the contract for the grab bars in the tubs.”

“He’s
Amish
?!!!” I repeated.

“I know. Do you think it’s too weird? Back in high school, rumspringa kids used to show up at Saturday night keggers once in a while, but after a year or so they were expected to go back home. They all did.”

That was what I’d always heard: Burn up thy youthful abandon; then throw down thy six-pack, sell thy Stingray, and return to the fold. “Here’s what worries me,” I said. “I think only the most extreme partyer—or motor head—would enjoy it enough to give up his family.”

“I’d be worried, too, if it were cars or parties he couldn’t live without. But it’s music. Cal says he left because he can’t imagine a future without Cheap Trick. Or Tom Petty. Or Pink Floyd. Especially Pink Floyd.”

“He gave up life as he knew it… to join the Kiss Army?”

“It doesn’t sound quite like that when he explains it.”

I could tell from her tone that she’d already made up her mind, that she was going to live out her days listening to
Dark Side of the Moon
with Calvin Burkholder.

He saw me coming from across the street and gave a half wave. I tossed my bag into the back of the pickup and braced myself for fifteen minutes of stilted silence, broken only by my wooden attempts at jocularity, which would be met with terse grunts.

“Hey, Cal—happy Thanksgiving!”

He immediately burst into tears—deep, hacking sobs that had me looking back to the era of terse grunting with wistful fondness. I fumbled
for a tissue, but the best I could come up with was a bagel wrapper, which he accepted with gratitude. No two people have ever been more mortified.

“I’m sorry,” he managed to say before burying his face in his hands.

“It’s okay. Take your time.”
But if you wouldn’t mind, please try to wrap it up before the tension sets me off on a laughing jag,
I silently implored him.

I knew from past experience that holidays were tough on Cal, so I could only assume he was grieving the loss of his birth family, who’d been forced to shun him once he’d struck out on his own. Usually he coped with his feelings by going down to the basement and playing Creedence Clearwater Revival records, the songs seeping out from the heating ducts long into the night.

I sat there, missing Creedence Clearwater Revival with every fiber of my being, until he managed a few deep breaths and blotted his nose with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. Cal was a big man, at least six-four, with fair hair and skin that was currently fuchsia with embarrassment. A trio of preteen girls crossed in front of the truck and stopped in their tracks at the sight of him. One of them screamed; then they ran across the street, shrieking and giggling.

“Guess they never seen a lobster drive a truck before,” he said, finally managing a wan smile.

“Cal—what is it?”
Get through this,
I commanded myself.
This is your chance to finally bond with your best friend’s husband. If you succeed, you will never feel uncomfortable or ill at ease in his presence—or his house—ever again.

Unless this has something to do with Elinor Ann, in which case you will never feel comfortable or at ease anywhere, ever again.

“It’s Elinor Ann.”

The fluids in my body stopped circulating.

“I mean—it’s not like she’s dying or nothing,” he continued, thank
god
, “but she’s got that—you know—that whatsis—”

That cancer? That brain tumor? Speak, you bastard!

“That algoraphobia. You know—where you don’t want to leave the house to go nowhere.”

“Ohhh—agoraphobia.”

“Yeah—that’s it. It’s just”—he reached into the Ess-a-Bagel bag for another wrapper and dabbed at his eyes—“I don’t know what to do for her. I don’t know how to help her.” The expression on his face was one of pure love. Under normal circumstances, I might have felt a tremor of jealousy, but now all I could think about was the word “algoraphobia,” and whether it would be manifested by a fear of algorithms, or of the former vice president. Meanwhile, what made Cal think Elinor Ann had agoraphobia?

“She sounded just fine last week,” I said. “In fact, she was in the car, driving home from the plant after work.”

“That’s not the problem—I looked it up on the Internet. She can get back and forth to her normal places. But they say over time, the circles get smaller.” He sighed. “That’s sure what’s happening. She’s down to the house, the plant, and the grocery store. That ain’t even a circle—it’s a triangle.”

How had I not been aware of this? I thought, trying to analyze the past few months’ worth of conversations. Elinor Ann was usually at home. Or at work. But she’d always been usually at home or at work, so why did I feel so guilty all of a sudden?

“And computers sure ain’t helping,” he went on. “UPS comes just about every week. If Land’s End don’t sell it, she ain’t wearing it. She hasn’t been to the mall in I don’t know how long.”

“So… what can I do to help?”

He shrugged and shifted into gear. “I dunno—get her to go somewhere? A square’d be better than a triangle.”

She didn’t look any different when I walked into the kitchen, which smelled the opposite of mine—all yeasty and cinnamony. Elinor Ann
was tall and skinny like me, with a mouth too large for her face—but in a good way, a way that transformed her when she smiled. She wore her dark, straight hair in a cut common to suburban mothers: shorter in the back than the front, giving the impression that the wearer had been caught in a sudden back draft.

“What took you so long?” She beamed and we hugged, and for that moment I felt everything would be fine; tomorrow we’d jump in the car and go off antiquing to Macungie or Moselem Springs, singing along with the oldies station at the top of our lungs.

“You painted the kitchen.”

“Cal painted the kitchen.” He was a weekend dynamo, invariably involved in a home-improvement project designed to keep the hundred-year-old farmhouse from succumbing to the harsh Pennsylvania winters. The walls of the room were now the color of butter, with cobalt blue trim on the baseboards and glass-paneled cabinets. Not for the first time, I envisioned myself in a similar setting just down Route 737, rustling up breakfast for several hunky farmhands while my photogenic herd of alpacas grazed contentedly on the back forty.

“Nice job,” I said. “Hey—you know what would look great in here? Curtains made out of vintage dish towels. Why don’t we take a drive over to Adamstown tomorrow and check out the antique malls?”

“Tomorrow? Oh, I don’t know about that.…”

We were interrupted when her sons thundered through the door in a blur of arms and legs and Phillies sweat gear.

“Hey, Aunt Dana.” I bumped fists with her elder son, Angus—named after Angus Young of AC/DC at his father’s urging—who had never been much of a hugger. Now, at sixteen, he would sooner swallow saltpeter than embrace his nominal aunt. Next I allowed myself to be crushed by eleven-year-old Eddie—named after Van Halen, but only because Elinor Ann had put her foot down and vetoed Jimi. (“No son of mine is going to bear the name of a dead junkie!”)

“Did you bring them, Aunt Dana?” Eddie said.

In response, I lifted the bag of bagels off a kitchen chair, but before I handed it over, inspiration struck.

“You know, we won’t be sitting down to dinner for at least a few more hours,” I said. “How about we all go for lunch at Willy Joe’s? The bagels will keep until tomorrow.”