Part Twenty Nine

They buy the diner. Susan puts together sketches and schemes and color swatches, just as she does each time they redo the Wine Dark Sea. And Sarah and Preacher are properly impressed and deferential and do exactly what she hoped they would do: proceed to tear it apart and present their own ideas. They want to avoid nostalgia industry. They want something timeless. They want something that evokes history but has a modern stamp.

Preacher programs the juke box. Bob Marley. The Clash. Robert Johnson. Bruce Springsteen. Marvin Gaye. A fistful of old Sun records. Sleepy LaBeef. Bo Diddley. Leadbelly. Woody AND Arlo Guthrie. Bob Dylan. The Boomtown Rats. The Motels. The Cars. Nirvana, of course. And Soundgarden. And the Flying Burrito Brothers. And Small Faces. Rolling Stones. Marshall Crenshaw. Eagles. Aerosmith, somewhat incongruously. The Pretty Things. The 13^th Floor Elevators.

There is a sandwich on the menu called the Haywood: two slices of rye bread, buttered and lightly salted, with thick slices of Edam cheese covered by a few apple slices, grilled on both sides.

The music is always loud there, the colors vibrant; the food is hot and greasy and filling.

The cheeseburger is called the Gus.

The margins are thin -- they keep menu prices deliberately low -- but the place is always packed, mostly with U-Dub students.

The houseboat is another world to them. They keep it quiet; Preacher may sometimes listen to music on the tiny stereo (bluegrass, when she’s not present; she can’t abide it), the volume turned down low. No TV. It is a little cramped, and quiet, and after a very short time he, too, cannot sleep if he cannot hear the lap of waves and the creak of old wood.

When they come home they peel off their clothes as soon as they are below. They want to leave the smell of smoke and french-fries behind. They go into the shower together and soap one another -- they have different soaps, each grabs the other's. The shower on a houseboat is not really large enough for the two of them, certainly not large enough to accommodate the two of them in any activity other than showering, but they steal a few kisses along the way. They emerge feeling as if they have put their work far away.

This ablution is important to them; they are born again each time, baptized from their public selves to their private selves, from employer-employee to lovers. She puts on whichever half of her pajamas is at hand; Preacher has boxers he might wear, or gray sweatpants that say Dulaney on them if it is colder. She brushes her hair and Preacher climbs into bed. They talk about things, not work-things, other-things; he might just tell her how beautiful she is, something she has not heard often in her life, or he might tell her about a place he lived; she might tell him about an old friend she'd not thought of in years, or a song she heard on the radio. This is a form of fore-foreplay for them, even more so than the shower. They don't analyze this.

He is the type who could, but she is not the type to whom he would, quote Rilke, “See how in their veins all becomes spirit;/into each other they mature and grow”; she is not the type who would even be comfortable knowing that her lover thought in that way. She clambers into the smallish bed with him and turns out the light and presses her face against his chest and breathes in; Ivory soap is part of the smell of him, and something faintly like cinnamon, and... aspen leaves? She cannot describe it, but she finds it heady. He strokes her hair; this is how it always begins, when he strokes her hair in that way. Every strand is familiar to him. She suffers a brief, sensation of being a violin, her pegs turned a hairsbreadth before the bow is drawn.

Her mouth strokes the soft skin of his belly; he draws his other hand across her skin, lightly, and she feels fine hairs rise on her forearms. And she straightens to bring her mouth closer to his. There is something about his kiss that pulls; she cannot describe it any other way, it pulls something from her, it draws her into him. He has said to her, in the past: you penetrate me, too. But she is not sure about this. This is why she always turns out the lights. When she can see his eyes she sometimes thinks she sees something... close down. Like closing the door to a furnace; the heat is still there, but the light goes out. But with the room dark out she does not notice this. She notices instead the script his fingers trace on her skin; she notices instead the warmth and fullness and closeness of him; by the time he is inside her the taste of his skin and the sound of his breath alone are almost more than she can bear. On this night he is slow and deliberate and his hand strokes her cheek and the curve of her jaw as he kisses her, and the first time she comes it is sharp and sudden, and the second time it is slow and shuddering, and finally she struggles to draw enough breath to give voice to the cascading chords her body sounds, taut then unbound in rolling succession like the slurred pop of the waves against the boat. When her arms begin to ache from squeezing him and the tiny implosions are too much to bear and his kisses have pulled her all the way into him he lets go, and she feels that release, too, and they have done it right because each has felt the other.

He's the sort who doesn't even mind sleeping in the wet spot.

In the morning they do it again, just because. When the sunlight fills the cabin, though, she opts for something that takes his eyes from her view; he calls it “Aibha,” but she doesn’t bother to learn the fancy names he has for these things. She just knows she likes it.

In case you’re wondering: he has told her he loves her. And she has returned the sentiment.

He still works the occasional shift at the Wine Dark Sea; he has refused title or promotion, although he is a de facto assistant manager of both facilities. He earns more in tips at the Sea, of course. Jimmy is teaching him more about cooking, about the difference between cooking in your kitchen and cooking in a restaurant. He picks up some basic technique, chopping, sautéing, that sort of competent sure-handedness in the kitchen that makes even an indifferent chef appear to know what he's doing.

The businesses thrive. They laugh at a man who comes to see them about franchising Gus’s; it won’t work as a franchise, they tell him. How do you franchise keeping the place loud when it should be loud, quiet when it should be quiet? How to describe the right volume for the music? How do you write a manual about the waitstaff bickering with the grill cook, loudly, in front of the guests? The food is “sophisticated diner” but served at truck-stop prices, so the joint only makes money if it stays packed. It stays packed in part because the kids know it’s one-of-a-kind, authentic, not just another TGIFridays. Because it is controlled chaos. Because the staff learns everyone’s names. Because they keep enough vegetarian stuff on the menu. Because they are open (after the first month) 24/7. You can go there late in the morning for beignets and coffee and get some reading done; you can go there late at night and yell to be heard.

You can’t franchise it. The Douglases won’t admit it, but they aren’t sure if it would be at all possible without Haywood; he remembers everyone’s name, the regulars ask for him, he brings them food they haven’t ordered and they eat it and pay for it because Preacher wouldn’t steer them wrong.

(Some of the girls and a few of the boys flirt with him; he flirts back; to her own surprise, Sarah finds this funny, not threatening.)

In March of 1991 Preacher and Sarah both take off at the same time and go visit one of her cousins in Redland. There’s a new baby in the house. Preacher makes all the appreciative noises. Plays with abandon with their three-year-old. Sarah is not surprised that he’s good with kids; she’s just a little surprised that she couldn’t recall him ever showing any interest in one at all before that time.

They don’t discuss it. But a few days later she comes home and he says to her: I need to talk to you about something important.

She is dripping from the shower. OK, she says. She thinks she knows where this is going.

I have been so happy, he says. Here. With you. I love you, and my work, and your folks, and even this rainy city.

I love you, too, she said, and you’ve made me happy, too.

There’s really nothing else I could want, he said, except…

She hopes it is a giant rock, the sort of thing that will put her cousin’s 1 karat, off-color thing to shame.

Except that there is more, there is more for both of us, and there’s no sense in putting that off another minute.

She wonders where he is hiding it. Will he get on one knee? She hoped not. That was so… clichéd.

So, he says, his face wet, I have to leave.

There is a long silence, in which she almost says “yes.”

What, she says. There is no question mark at the end.

I feel so… so bad, he says to her, looking her in the eye. That I am not able to be… that I can’t be your… I wish that our future was together, I wish that I could give you all the things that you should have, a family and a future and… and everything. But I can’t. This is not my future. It should be, I want it to be, but it’s not.

What? There is a question mark that time. A threatening one.

I wish I could explain it better, he said. I can’t. I wish you could talk me into staying. You can’t. I don’t want to have to go. But I do.

He stood.

I hate the fact that you’re going to hate me now. I hate the fact that I have wasted your time and… and… I hope that there is a time when you are finished hating me, a time when you are with someone else and happy and glad, in fact, that I left to open the way for all that. And after that happens, if you are finished hating me, I hope that you can remember some good things about this time.

She grabs his arm, she cries, she threatens, she curses. Desperate, she demands two weeks’ notice. He leaves with the same knapsack he had when he moved in – a couple shirts, jeans, toothbrush, alternative shoes.

Years later she is married with kids and happy. Gus’s faltered a bit but picked back up again. Preacher’s prediction seems to have come true – once she stopped hating him, she remembers those days fondly. Susan, however, won’t mention his name. Just glares when asked about him. Kevin… Kevin won’t admit it, but on some level he keeps thinking this was just a phase and Preacher will be back.

Sarah and her husband and child are ritual Worshippers. Kevin and Susan have read the book.