Page 8

In two minutes, she had the shop locked up, and in another five, they were through the line for granitas and soft serve, and then for a timeless interval after that they talked and walked in the sun along the river, bare arm to bare arm, not yet holding hands, but with the achy knowledge they could.

The soft inner parts of Meryl’s lips were bright pink from her dragon fruit granita, and the sunlight by the bench they’d found along the river trail turned her hair the color of a campfire.

“What?” Meryl smiled.

Tressa Fay shook her head. “Nothing. I’m glad you came into the salon.”

Meryl turned her body on the bench to face her. “Me, too.” She looked Tressa Fay over in a way that Tressa Fay could feel behind her knees. “Are you seeing anyone?”

“Whoa.” Smiling, she blew out a breath. Of course she knew she couldn’t flirt with someone like she’d flirted with Meryl this afternoon without some version of this conversation, but she’d always loved these very first questions and feelers and awkward I like you s. She shook her head.

“How is that?” Their knees touched. Tressa Fay was smoldering from the inside and might actually catch fire. It had been a while, yes. She had felt, lately, like she might be starting to be…ready. Almost ready. She hadn’t told anyone except Mary, but telling Mary was a decision in itself, since Mary was legendary for her matchmaking.

Meryl was Tressa Fay’s type, sure. But chemistry could make a tall, cool glass of water, or it could make everything explode.

She looked at Meryl, who was studying the river.

Tressa Fay would just ease into this water. That was all. Take it slow.

“Um. No one’s asked lately?” Tressa Fay said.

“I’m not, either. Seeing anyone.” Meryl gathered her hair in her hand to keep it from blowing in her face. She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve been doing the app thing.”

“Yeah. The app thing.” Tressa Fay laughed. “To find someone or to find some thing ?”

“Mostly the second one. I don’t have a lot of faith that I…have a lot of faith, I guess. At least, not when it’s important to have faith. Important to the other person.” She picked an invisible thread off her shorts. “I mean, I’m an engineer, right? The math, the statistics, aren’t in favor of the some one but are good at finding lots of some things .”

“That is a very practical perspective.”

“To be fair, I have no sense of what my criteria are for swiping right. None. None, none, none. I mean, I think I do? But I suspect that there is some kind of dopamine brain squirt that happens when you’re on the app, and then you’re just, like, backing yourself up to this person as if you came across them in the forest and they smelled fine.”

Tressa Fay squealed with laughter.

“I do look over my shoulder once I’ve backed up. I’m not a complete animal.”

“Oh my God,” Tressa Fay said. “You are a little scary. I like it. I suspect you’re doing better than I am on the apps because you are driving straight at the thing. I’ve tried them, but even when people are very straightforward in their profiles and when I’m texting them, I get confused when they’re right in front of me.”

“But this isn’t confusing you?” Meryl gestured between the two of them.

Tressa Fay smiled at the sky. It was bluer than blue. “Nope. I’ve already decided I’m not going to let you kiss me, if we’re calling this a first date. Although that’s frankly shocking to me, because it’s also eighty percent of what I’m thinking about.”

Slow ish .

Tressa Fay watched Meryl smile and settle back into the bench. Her T-shirt had ridden up and was exposing a soft, freckled strip of belly. Looking at it sluiced lazy desire through Tressa Fay’s body.

Slow er ?

“I should tell you that I very seriously couldn’t be in a worse position to start dating right now.” Meryl said this to the river.

“You mean dating me, for real, as in you call me or I call you, and we do something else together where I wear as few clothes as possible and rummage around in your nerdy mind for my pleasure? Because you said you were apping about.”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.”

Tressa Fay watched the water move. She liked this conversation, but there was something she didn’t understand in Meryl’s tone, something that flashed a warning in the cautious part of her brain. “Why?”

“There is a lot in my life, coming up in the future, that I haven’t figured out yet, and none of the people I love have been able to help me figure it out.”

“At work? With your family?”

“The entire cosmos?” Meryl sighed. “But also, to be honest, I’m only going to try very weakly to scare you off. In fact, this is my whole show. I just wanted to say it in case I fuck up a lot of little things. Or a big thing.”

Tressa Fay thought about that. “I haven’t seriously dated anyone since my ex, which ended two years ago. I’ve tried. I really have. And I’ve wanted to, even if my friends think I don’t want to. Except Mary. She knows everything. She runs all the non-hair parts of the salon, but she wasn’t there this afternoon, so you snuck through.”

“I’m glad.” Meryl turned to look at Tressa Fay again. “Mary’s a good friend, then?”

“Yes. She’s actually the only one of my closest friends who hasn’t known me since I was a baby. I think that’s why I confide in her the way I do. Linds and Guy are like family, and there’s that impulse to protect them. Even from myself.”

“I understand that.” Meryl took a long pull of her granita. “My best friend in town is James. He was actually my older sister’s best friend first. We don’t all hang out together the way you’d think. James tried, but he became my friend in the first place because I started dating him.”

“Ooh. Like an older sister’s best friend kind of trope.”

Meryl laughed. “Complete with the annoyance of the older sister. Which we didn’t need at the time.”

“I see. I mean, I’m an only child, but I’m a hairstylist, so I’ve heard some things about those dynamics.” Tressa Fay looked at Meryl’s pretty, freckled ribbon of belly. Her glowing hair. The wrinkle between her eyebrows. She liked this woman. She liked her a little bit too much. It was exciting in the exact way that she remembered her dad never wanting her to get excited—the kind of excitement that could tip over into anxiety or stomachache or tears.

She had never listened to her dad about tamping down that kind of excitement, though.

“My parents split up when my sister, Gayle, and I were really small,” Meryl said. “She remembers how it was when they were together, but I don’t. I’ve figured out that whatever that dynamic was, and me missing out on it, drove some kind of wedge between Gayle and me, even though, growing up, I adored her. Our mom was not okay. There was just enough basics, and just enough child support from my dad, to skate us over the surface and keep CPS out of it. I was the one who tried to make Mom happy, and Gayle was the one who fought with her. So of course I fought with Gayle.”

“Do you still?”

Meryl gathered her hair again and looked at the water. “I would say we have silent fights. I got hurt, really hurt, by my mom, eventually, once she had gotten tired of using me as a shield and a weapon. Long story short, Mom’s in Florida, and Gayle and I are on the same page about her and about how we grew up. But I started dating James when we’d only just started to do better. That didn’t help. Then James and I figured out we were better friends, and so I’d say we’ve all been trying. She loves me. She’s proud of me.” Meryl shook the icy pink slush in her cup, casting a nervous glance at Tressa Fay. “I am possibly oversharing.”

“Nah.” Tressa Fay watched two kids, one almost a teenager and one little, try to get a kite in the air, reminding her of the beautiful, unseasonable day going on around them. “I can return serve with my family history, or we can agree to enjoy the sun and the sugar only. Your call.”

Meryl laughed. “Tell me about yourself, Tressa Fay Robeson.”

Tressa Fay put her palm against the wood of the sun-warmed bench. “My mom died when I was little, just a baby preschooler. I only remember, really, what she felt like. Her neck was always warm and smelled good. I could always get her to pick me up. I have a memory of picnics at Bay Beach and napping on her lap, and I’m not sure it’s even real or if it’s just what my friend Linds’s mom told me. My dad’s churchy. We lived in Our Lady parish on the west side, so he got help with the heavy lifting, and he is extremely, extremely, re-spon-si-ble ”—Tressa Fay drew out the word—“so I lacked nothing, and there were lots of moms around, including Linds’s and Guy’s. But I wouldn’t say Dad and I are going to start a family band anytime soon. We have our routines. Very little changes to make it better, but also, that means nothing gets bad.”

“Yeah,” Meryl said. “That’s how I’d describe where Gayle and I are at right now.”

“Tell me, Meryl Whit.” Tressa Fay sipped from her granita cup. “About your job. The engineering. The mathing. If you use a protractor, show me a picture.”

Meryl tapped the sides of her glasses. “These have that blue light filter in them because, honestly, most of what I do is in front of a computer.”

“Don’t underplay. This is a date.” Tressa Fay waggled her eyebrows.

Meryl laughed. “It’s really not that exciting, unless you’re me. I like to take things that don’t make sense and find a way to get them to work. I like to make lists, and I like to worry over every possible way that something can fail. When it starts to rain, I’ll be awake in bed, listening to the rain hit the roof, thinking about how much water is going to come down and how fast, and how much it will test the city systems. I get to do a lot of this because the stormwater systems in Green Bay are old and failing, and we have two rivers and the entirety of Lake Michigan beating down our gates.”

Meryl’s voice got more serious and husky when she talked about her work. Tressa Fay couldn’t help imagining this might indicate how serious Meryl would be about everything she committed to. That Tressa Fay might someday hear Meryl talk about them in that voice.

“Hmm. My dad fishes, and I’ve been out with him plenty, until I was old enough to have my own thing on the weekends. I liked wandering around finding things in the mud and sand on the bank and looking at weeds and nests and litter, which would frustrate my dad because I scared the fish. That is the beginning and end of my knowledge of what you do all day long.”

“I love to go creeking,” Meryl said.

“Creeking?”

“What it sounds like. Wandering around in creeks, looking, finding things. Spring is such an interesting time for creeks and streams and brooks and rivers. They’re taking on more water, breaking up their banks. This time of year is when all the animals come, the frogs spawn, the plants emerge from their beds. It’s messy. Creeks are the kind of thing that’s more interesting when it’s messy.”

“What else is more interesting when it’s messy?” Tressa Fay put her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t actually mean that as an innuendo.”

Meryl laughed. “Problems. More interesting when they’re messy. And big.”

“Because then you get to stick your hands in up to the elbows and fix it, huh?”

“Yes. Though maybe that’s revealing more of my psyche than is strictly a good idea on a first date.”

Tressa Fay choked and then laughed so hard, she sounded like a kid. Meryl feigned innocence with her expression, but her eye crinkles gave her away. Whether or not Meryl herself was messy, she was a little dirty . “Better to know what I’m dealing with, I think. Didn’t you say you’re up against a cosmos-level mess in your own life right now?”

Meryl’s gaze followed the kite. It had found an updraft and was soaring high over the river. “I did, yes. For sure the biggest mess I’ve ever had to fix, and it might even be a problem I can’t solve. It should be taking up all of my mental resources. Every single one.”

“Why isn’t it?”

When Meryl smiled, it wasn’t a smile Tressa Fay had seen yet. It was big and secret and happy. “There’s also such good distractions in the middle of this mess.”

“Hey-oh.” Tressa Fay laughed. “But hear me out. I wonder if the distractions are the answer to your problem. Not to shamelessly bid for a second date or anything, but also, give me your number.”

Meryl grabbed Tressa Fay’s hand and pulled her up from the bench. “Let’s walk a little more, if you have the time.”

“I have the time. I have all the time.”

Tressa Fay didn’t let go of Meryl’s hand as they made their way along the river trail, bikes and skateboards and strollers moving past them as they ambled.

“So no end-of-the-trail kiss?” Meryl asked after a while, making Tressa Fay’s belly flutter.

“If I kiss you, then I won’t be able to feel everything I feel anticipating kissing you. I’m inclined to drag out every minute and hour. For example, I haven’t had the pleasure of trying to fall asleep while thinking about what it would be like to kiss you, and how could I possibly leave that on the table?”

“You couldn’t, obviously.”

“Never.” Tressa Fay smiled.

“Do you think that what we do now, every little thing, changes the future?”

When Meryl moved her fingers to lace them with Tressa Fay’s, she felt it in the pause between heartbeats—a fraction of a second when time stopped. She’d had almost the same thought, earlier, at the salon, thinking about changing Meryl by cutting her hair. “Is this the part where I pull back the curtain on this date to reveal that you’re really trying to recruit me into your MLM?”

Meryl laughed. “Didn’t you see those life-changing essential oils I left at your station for a tip?”

Tressa Fay slowed her walk and had a moment when the hot sun and the cool river breeze and the remarkable feeling of Meryl’s hand in hers felt like something that had always been happening. “Not too long ago,” she said, “my dad gave me a box with all of my mom’s clothes he never gave away. Those clothes made me…not remember, but know my mom in a way I never had before. Not even from pictures. This top I’m wearing—she crocheted it. I didn’t know she crocheted. She was my size. Her clothes fit me. I didn’t know the size and shape of her until I got those clothes, not really. Now I do. I know her favorite colors, and that she shoved change in her pockets, and how she tied and laced her boots because of the wear on the laces of her Doc Martens. I can see her. I can smell her Shalimar and Camels, imagine what it would be like to hug her, what bands she listened to.”

Tressa Fay glanced at Meryl. She was surprised by how receptive Meryl’s expression was. Almost…loving. It filled her chest up with a glowing, good feeling that made her shy enough that she had to look away.

“Getting that box of clothes changed so many things about how I felt about my mom, because they made her real, and I’m a different person since I’ve spent ungodly money to have those clothes cleaned and fixed so I can have them hanging up in my closet. I’ve made different decisions.”

Meryl squeezed her hand. “Like what?”

“Like to move on from my last relationship, for real, because my mom didn’t get to love my dad for as long as she would’ve wanted to. Also, to have a better relationship with my dad, because I’m sure that’s what she would’ve wanted, too. I mean, who was she dressing in all these hotness clothes for, right? I haven’t really figured out the dad thing yet, but I have hope.” Tressa Fay could hear the skepticism in her voice.

“Do you think that getting those clothes and wearing them and wanting to date again is why you’re on this walk with me?”

“ You ”—Tressa Fay stopped and pointed at her, laughing—“were the one who confessed to me that you walked in my salon this afternoon because you had a parasocial crush on me. So who’s changing the future here, really?”

For a teeny part of a second, a cloud skated across Meryl’s expression, and Tressa Fay wondered if she’d offended her or said the wrong thing.

But then Meryl smiled and pulled her down the path again.

“We both are,” she said. “We’re both changing everything.”