The Bed Moved Read Online Free Page B

The cookies were in one of those white boxes that make baked goods seem promising.
    “Some may have broken,” I said. “They’ll still be good.”
    “I can’t wait,” he said. He really liked cookies. He had told me many times, but what else did I know about him? He cared about real estate. His mother was dead. So was my dad. Cookies and real estate. I did not care. This was my first boyfriend since the last one.
    Does it matter that we were in Boston? We had to stay at his dad’s house in Newton, since my unwanted boyfriend wouldn’t rent an apartment. He only wanted to own. I wanted to meet the dad, but we got in too late. We put the white box on the white countertop, an island bisecting the kitchen, just like in my mother’s house. His dad had the same cheeses in the refrigerator, the same jams. The house had the same quiet.
    “Welcome Lilah!”
    On a bright square of printer paper, the dad had left me a note, a note that maybe needed a comma.
    “I made a reservation for tomorrow,” said the son.
    “For all of us?” He’d mentioned father, sister, maybe grandpa.
    “No, just us.”
    I didn’t know his father, his sister, or his grandpa, but there had been a chance they’d be people I’d like to know. I wanted to watch him with people he didn’t find cute. Maybe I could blend into those people. Though maybe he found his sister cute—not unfeasible.
    “I’m going to have one.” He opened the white box, and held up the kind with a fruit center, the dark womb of cookie.
    “I wanted to meet your sister.”
    “You will.”
    I wouldn’t. After the birthday ended, I was getting on a bus going the other way. Still, I liked the idea of the sister. She was a singer, a guitar cradler. She wrote funny songs about tingly soap. She had a nickname. She was a lesbian. They made up songs together and missed their mom together and posed together on their dad’s refrigerator.
    My name was hard to nick. Lie, I guess. Or Ah. This is my girlfriend, Ah. She’s sighing with pleasure. She’s having an orgasm. That’s not a problem for Ah. That’s not our problem. Our problem is death. The night her father died, Ah tore the dad and husband cartoons off the refrigerator, because she didn’t want to make fun of a family member who was no longer in the family. She tore down the couples in bed, hating each other. They didn’t look like her parents anyway.
    “No, Bean, dinner’s going to be just the two of us,” he said on the landline with his sister, slinking cordless past his own fridge cartoons. He tiptoed to get something from the pantry, and I watched his pants, dark gray with a little stretch in them. He shook a box of cereal. I saw that he wasn’t a boy, my boyfriend, but a small, clean man. He had come straight from work. Work was law. Real estate was his area. He had a client dying of AIDS who was suing his sister over a house they’d both inherited. I liked him best when he talked about the case.
    —
    WE WOKE UP LATE on the birthday, Saturday. The father was already gone. We walked around a pond. He took me to the Newton library and read me a poem in one of those soundproof study rooms. I didn’t really hear the poem. When we left the library, I tried to call my friends who’d had a party the month before, the party where we’d met, but both of their voicemails picked up after no rings.
    “Hey,” I said, over dinner with just us, “when you turned twenty, did you care about real estate then?”
    We were high up on plump cushions, intimidated by our steaks.
    “I guess. Sure.” He started to cut a piece.
    “How about when you were sixteen?” I looked at my knife, fork, perfect on the white cloth. I didn’t want to bloody them. It occurred to me that he would pay for dinner and that the paying would matter after I broke up with him. I was taking pains to wait until the birthday was over, but unless I waited a week, it would still be his birthday. And he would have paid even if I had broken up over