Page 218 of Two Marlboros

“Inside would be perfect.”

He smiled back at me, opened the door fully and beckoned me inside. I didn’t let him tell me twice, grabbed the suitcasesand tried to get them inside without rubbing the wheels on the floor.

“Thank you very much.”

The door gave onto a narrow hallway that ran the length of the room, with a room that resembled a study to the left and a half-height wall to the right that gave onto the open living room. I left my suitcases beside the small wall and noticed that the knuckles of my hands were all red and felt tingly as the warmth of the house enveloped them, along with the face that was entering the thawing era. I took off my coat and Alan’s dad suggested I put it on the coat rack right next to the door, in front of the suitcases - I hadn’t really noticed it on the way in.

“If you feel up to it, you can wait over there with us.”

With a nod he pointed to the area of the house adjoining the living room, and the wrinkled smile I had put on up to that point disappeared in the blink of an eye.

About ten - no, about fifteen people were sitting at a long rectangular table discussing who knows what. A family lunch. In fact, a Christmas Eve lunch. What better occasion than Christmas to bring together all the family members possible and imaginable? And what better day for me to barge into Alan’s house? Ah, karma definitely had not yet finished playing all its cards. I wondered what else I should expect. The ten plagues of Egypt maybe?

Alan’s dad continued toward the table and motioned me to follow him, and with each step I took I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into that coffin I had so longed for all the way in the cab. I should have known it was an omen, a warning about the nefarious events that were just waiting to happen. First the grandmother forgetting her pills, then fifteen pairs of eyes on me - I had made a good start. And I had also succeeded in shushing the entire table.

He cleared his throat to draw the attention of the guests. A brunette girl, sitting at the head of the table with her back to me, leaned back in her chair and looked down at me. She was about my age, maybe a year or two younger.

“And you would be...?” she asked.

I was interjected for a moment by the insolent tone of that question - okay, maybe she was a little girl really, but there was a right way to approach people. Scottfield senior was about to open his mouth, but I realized that I had not even introduced myself before. He turned to me looking for an answer, and I tried not to get testy.

“Nathan. A friend of Alan’s.”

As I said my name, Alan’s dad got serious, and the same expression showed in a couple of people at the table, and I had a feeling that one of them was his mom. Great.

“You mean Nathan-who-went-to-California?” he asked.

My brain began to transmit the sound of a shovel being shoved into the ground to remove soil. I even had a nickname, and it wasn’t even cute. Better and better. I tried to keep myself neutral, but it began to dawn on me that Alan had told something about what had happened between us, in less than flattering terms.

“In person.”

I sketched a smile to dampen the tension, but I also thought that nickname didn’t exactly bode well. Maybe Alan had described me as the evil monster who had abandoned him and broken his heart to ride the California steers - I couldn’t know. But if that was British humor, it wasn’t much of a laugh.

Alan’s parents looked at each other for a moment, an instant when it seemed to me that they were deciding my fate, but he turned back to me and smiled. He looked sincere, not looking like he wanted to burn at the stake the evilAmerican boywho had broken his child’s heart.

“Come on, I’ll get you a chair,” he said, and after taking it he placed it next to the dark-haired girl who had spoken earlier. I sat down as he returned to his seat, and I felt all eyes on me, along with a growing desire to escape from there never to return. Well, come to think of it, that wasn’t an entirely unlikely scenario: there was still a chance that Alan would send me away.

As soon as I was near the chair, I could see that the girl was examining me, and without even bothering to be inconspicuous. On another occasion I would have said that was the look of someone hitting on me, but it was quite unlikely. She had industrial quantities of black eye shadow that made her green eyes stand out, along with a dark lipstick that also matched her clothes, which were also black. She scrutinized me from head to toe, then returned to staring at me with those doe eyes. But if she thought she was intimidating me, she was sorely mistaken: when I wanted to, I knew I was much more fawn-like than she was. Boy, was she sassy, though!

“Is there a problem?” I asked her with feigned naiveté.

“Virginia!” shouted someone from the other end of the table. “He’s been here not even for a minute! Stop bothering him!”

“I didn’t do anything!” she retorted.

She huffed and rolled her eyes as I crossed my arms, stunned by the theatrics. So, she turned back to me.

“Did I do something to you?” she asked.

“No,” I started to answer, but Virginia was quicker.

“See, I didn’t do anything!”

“...except for an X-ray,” I whispered.

I bit my tongue the next moment. Not a fly flew from the table, a sign that perhaps I had not spoken as softly as I thought. Virginia opened her mouth wide because perhaps she had not expected me to respond to her in that way, and immediately the idea crossed my mind that perhaps I had taken too much of a confidence. The others stared at me puzzled and cast glancesat each other. I meanwhile heard again the sound of the spade working. Inside the earth, shoveling the earth, inside the earth, shoveling the earth...

The room filled with laughter. It was a guy who was about thirty-five years old, sitting across from me and next to a redhead full of freckles. It only took a moment for the others to follow suit and start laughing along with him. I meanwhile paused the shovel. For that time, I had gotten away with it.

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