Page 16 of A Night to Remember

He’s taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves now, and I can’t help but notice his strong forearms. He looks more than capable of swinging an ax. I force my attention back to the matter at hand.

“I think it’s here,” I say, picking up a more recent mailing from the bank.

“Yes. Excellent.” His tone is all business. He keeps his eyes on the papers in front of him, clearly avoiding touching or looking at me more than necessary.

He reaches into his leather satchel and pulls out a laptop. He starts a new document and records the outstanding loan balance, almost $30,000. The sum seems completely insurmountable. He also records the loan origination date. Then he sorts through the rest of the papers slowly, reading the first page of each letter carefully.

I’m not sure what to do with myself while he works. I want to help him but don’t know how. I shuffle around behind him, looking over his shoulder from time to time while I pretend to tidy things up, even though I did a pretty good job of that before he came over.

“Johnson,” he says, quietly but firmly. “Sit down. You’re making me nervous.” He pulls out the chair next to him, glancing at me briefly without making eye contact.

Where did this authoritative voice come from? Why do I respond to it like he’s an English sea captain rescuing me from dastardly pirates? As I ease into the chair, I have a sudden flashback to the Gabe I remember from high school. We were studying together for a calculus test after school one day, sitting at one of the tables in the lunchroom. He reached for an eraser and knocked his bottle of Coke all over my notes and lap, responding with a surprisingly high-pitched yelp. I laughed so hard that I spilled my Diet Sprite all overhisnotes.

“Johnson!” he’d squeaked. “You got my natural log all sticky!”

“Your calculus jokes are getting kind of derivative,” I quipped, frantically trying to sop up soda with blank pieces of notebook paper. “Don’t boys keep a box of tissues handy for this kind of thing?”

A lunch lady tossed us a handful of napkins with a glare. Gabe lowered his voice as he brushed off his pants. “Girls know about the tissues?”

“We know about the socks, too,” I whispered back. Gabe blushed and ran a wet hand through his hair, making it stick up adorably. I worried that I’d embarrassed him, but then he looked back up at me with his infectious best-friend grin.

“Let me buy you another one,” he said, gesturing towards my Sprite.

“I’ll buy it myself,” I replied.

“Johnson. I insist. I spilled first.”

“It’s fine.” He let it go until we got to the vending machine, where he playfully snatched the dollar out of my hand, easily keeping it out of my reach. We tussled briefly, laughing and bickering, until he pinned me to the wall. Our laughter slowlyfaded as we stared into each other’s eyes, our faces inches apart. We were both breathing hard, my breasts rising and falling to brush against his heaving rib cage.This is it,this is it, I thought frantically, my heart hammering so fast that I wondered if he could feel it through his skin. He tightened his grip on my wrists slightly and began to move his hips towards mine. My own hips tilted up instinctively to meet him. He was the cutest boy I’d ever seen, and deliciously funny and smart. I wanted more than anything for him to kiss me, but was terrified of giving myself to someone as completely as I wanted to give myself to him. In a high school cafeteria, no less.

“Let me go,” I whispered. I was still half-smiling, but he understood my tone and released me immediately.

“Sorry,” he said seriously. “I didn’t mean?—”

“It’s okay,” I said, smiling more broadly now. “It’s just that I’m not quite ready to multiply.”

“Sure, I get it,” he replied with a grin. “You should do that on your own timetable.”

I’d laughed at that, pleased to feel the tension ease somewhat, though I would torture myself later thinking about what might have happened if I’d been brave enough to let it.

“Can I buy you a drink first?” he asked, handing me back my dollar.

“Sure,” I’d consented. We were goofing around again, but I knew that helping me meant something to him, and thought, in that moment, that I could let him dothat, at least.

I risk a glance at present-day Gabe. Does he ever joke like that now? I remember what he said about not being a lawyer and the rumors I’d heard about a bad break-up. I squeeze my hands between my knees to resist giving in to another urge to reach out and touch him.

He’s typing on his laptop now, querying a legal database. I watch as he inputs search strings that include a kind ofshorthand involving $s and &s that I don’t fully understand. I can tell that he’s looking up case law related to mortgages, though.

Now he seems to have found what he’s been looking for. He turns to me, his eyes alive with enthusiasm. My heart gives a tentative little leap.

“Have you gotten anything else from the bank about the mortgage? It might have come as a certified letter.”

I think for a minute.

“Besides the Notice of Default? No, I don’t think so.”

“That’s what I thought,” he says. “The bank should have sent your mother something called a ‘preforeclosure breach letter’ before the NoD. They probably would have sent it by certified mail. The fact that they didn’t means that someone at the bank messed up.”

“But what does that mean?”

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