Page 3 of The River Is Waiting

Emily and I met the year before my desperate cross-country drive to save our relationship. We’d both gotten summer jobs at Olde Mistick Village, a self-consciously quaint New England Colonial-era tourist trap with a town green, a duck pond, and small shops selling the kind of high-end stuff and souvenirs that nobody really needs. I was on the two-man landscaping crew and Emily was working the front counter at a bakery where they sold these oversized molasses cookies I liked, Joe Froggers, cellophane-wrapped in a basket on the counter. That was what I bought the first time I went in there: a coffee and a Joe Frogger. “Nope,” she said, looking at the cookie I’d selected. She put it back in the basket and replaced it with another. “This one’s bigger. Hey, do you think there’s a Mrs. Coffee?”

“Uh… what?” She was wicked cute but a little weird.

She tapped her painted fingernail against the carafe she was holding, the place where it said Mr. Coffee. “I mean, you hear a lot about Mrs. Santa Claus and Mrs. Doubtfire but never anything about Mrs. Coffee. Do you think he has a wife?” I shrugged. Gave her a half-smile. “By the way, I’m Emily.”

“Hey,” I said, catching up. “I’m Corby. I think Mr. Coffee’s a bachelor but he’s got a thing for Mrs. Butterworth.”

“That slut?” she said. “I hope he’s using protection because she’s also got something going on with Mr. Peanut. Three seventy-five.” I handedher a five and told her to keep the change. “You know who you kind of look like? Except he’s not a redhead? Heath Ledger.”

“Wasn’t he Billy Bob’s son in that prison film? Shoots himself in the head after his father humiliates him? What was the name of that movie?”

She shrugs. Says she’s thinking about10 Things I Hate About YouHeath Ledger. “You’re not as hot though, so don’t get a swelled head about it.”

“Okay,” I promised. For the rest of my shift that day, I thought about her as I picked up litter with my trash stabber and hosed off the walkways around the duck pond. Stupid birds. Why couldn’t they just shit in the water? I figured she probably had a boyfriend.

Every lunchtime after that, I bought another Joe Frogger, but mostly I went into the bakery to flirt with Emily. She had dark wavy hair, big brown eyes, olive complexion. She had a cute little heart-shaped butt below the bow tied at the back of her apron, too. And a low, sexy voice you wouldn’t expect to come out of someone not much over five feet tall. If there was a line at the register, I’d look at her and calculate which pigments I’d use to capture her skin tone: bronze, beige, maybe some flecks of Mediterranean green and Tuscany yellow. Not that it was likely she’d ever pose for me. How could I ask her to do that without sounding pervy?

“You eat many more of those, you’re going to turn amphibian,” she warned me one time about my cookie consumption. “As a matter of fact, you’re looking a little green around the gills.” She had a great deadpan delivery.

“Actually, we only have gills when we’re tadpoles,” I said. “As adults, we breathe through our skin.” It was some random fact I remembered my father telling me out by the stream across from our house after I’d just caught a frog.

Another time at the bakery, I was standing in line behind a woman and her little kid. “You see that guy in back of you?” Emily asked the kid. “He’s part human and part frog.” The kid swiveled around and faced me with a skeptical smile. When I nodded and gave him a couple of ribbit-ribbits, the smile dropped off his face.

I think that was the day I finally got the balls to ask her out. Half the summer was over by then and she hadn’t once mentioned a boyfriend. “You get off work at six, right? I was wondering if you wanted to grab something to eat this Friday and maybe go down to the Andrea? There’s an R.E.M. cover band playing there this weekend. I saw them in Providence last semester. They’re pretty decent.” I could feel my face getting hot while she kept me waiting.

“Sorry. I’ve got plans,” she finally said.

“Oh, okay. No worries.”

“Yeah, on Fridays my mother and I get into our pj’s early and play Scrabble.”

Scrabble with Mom? Seriously? If she wasn’t interested, she could at least have left me with a little bit of dignity. “Sure. No problem,” I said. “Well, back to work.” I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

“Hey, Red?” she called. “You planning to pay for that cookie?”

I looked down and, sure enough, I was holding a Joe Frogger. “Oh. Sorry,” I said. Flustered, I pulled a five out of my wallet and handed it to her.

“You know I’m kidding, right? I’d be eternally grateful if you rescued me from another Friday night of board games and jammies. And did you say food? Do you know what I’ve been dying for all summer?” I shrugged. “Fried clams.”

“I was thinking pizza, but yeah, that’s cool. Strips or whole bellies?”

“Whole bellies,” she said. “Eating clam strips is like stopping at kissing.”

Whoa, I was taken aback by her cheeky remark and she noticed. Laughed and told me I looked shocked. “Shocked?” I said. “Who’s shocked?”

I spent that afternoon weeding and deadheading the flower beds, thinking about what kind of signal Emily might have been sending me with that crack about kissing. I was doing math in my head, too. A couple of whole-belly clam dinners were going to cost three times as much as a pizza, I figured. But whatever.

For a lot of guys my age, sex was all about hookups, the more thebetter. Not me. The summer I met Emily, I’d had sex with a grand total of three women.

On that first date, we ate in the car at the clam shack she suggested. I didn’t dare tell her, but I preferred strips to whole bellies. “Are you done?” she asked. I told her yeah, I just wasn’t that hungry for some reason. Those bellies in my mouth felt too squishy. She ate the rest of mine and all of hers. Dipped her fries in tartar sauce rather than ketchup and polished them off, too.

On our way to the dance club, we talked about school. I told her I’d just finished my junior year at RISD with so-so grades except for Advanced Studio and Topics in Architectural Drawing. She said she was going into her senior year at UCLA, majoring in Educational Studies, and that she’d wanted to be a teacher since she was a kid. “Except for a brief time when I was eight and thought I’d like to be a nun.” She’d gone to grammar school in Connecticut and high school in Southern California, where her parents had relocated to save their marriage. When it failed nevertheless, her mother returned to her family in Stonington, Connecticut. Emily had stayed in Cali with her dad so she could access the free tuition offered to state residents. She missed her mother, though, and was glad she got to stay with her during the summer.

“You closer to her than to your father?”

“Now I am, I guess. When I was growing up, I was a daddy’s girl. Mom is Type A all the way and my dad’s more laid-back. I was living at his place and commuting. But now his girlfriend Ana and her daughter have moved in with us. Ana’s nice enough—it’s not like we don’t get along. But she and my dad kind of assumed I was their live-in nanny, so when I get back I’m sharing an apartment with some other UCLA students. How about you? Which parent are you closer to?”

“No contest,” I said. “My dad’s a dick.” I didn’t want to go into the particulars with her, so I changed the subject. At the bakery the week before, she’d mentioned that she was taking a night course at the UConn extension campus, so I asked her about that. “World Religions, right?”

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