Be Mine by Laura Kasischke Page B

aerobic dance in bare feet on a burning floor.
    I was holding the steering wheel so tightly that I couldn't feel my fingers anymore, and then I was home, in my own driveway, and Jon came to the door and said, "Hey, I hear through the grapevine that we're going to be having venison for dinner tonight."
    ***
    I 'D FORGOTTEN to call him long enough that it had begun to seem pointless to call him. I'd see him soon enough when I got home, I thought, and show him the mangled bumper, tell him I was getting it fixed tomorrow, that Garrett had set it up.
    In the hallway after class, I'd run into Garrett and told him what had happened.
    "Wow, Mrs. Seymour. That could've been bad. You're really lucky. What happened to your car?"
    I told him about the bumper, and he looked concerned—an expert, calculating the trouble—and offered to take a look. So I got my coat and led him out to the car, which was, despite the snow falling steadily all day, still a gruesome sight. The blood on the windshield had gotten sticky, thickened, but it still looked like blood, and there were dark streaks of it down the white side of the car, down the hood.
    Garrett hadn't worn his coat, and as he knelt at my bumper in his thin shirt I remembered watching him in his Cub Scout uniform outside in the winter during a pack meeting, shivering but refusing to come in, to put on his jacket.
    Kneeling at my bumper, Garrett didn't shiver, although his shirt was rippled by the cold wind around his shoulders in a way that made
me
shiver.
    "This can be straightened without much trouble," Garrett said, looking up at me. "We need some tools. Do you have time to bring it over to the garage?" He nodded in the direction of the auto-mechanics building.
    "Not today," I said. "Tomorrow?"
    "Sure," Garrett said. "It's not going to hurt to drive it. But you'll want to get a car wash."
    We laughed together at that—the blood on the hood of my car, what would that look like to someone driving by me on the freeway?
    While we stood outside, snowflakes accumulated in Garrett's short, dark hair. I remembered snowflakes like that in Chad's hair, bending over him, brushing them off his head with my glove—the starry hundreds of them, scattered, and that first winter of his life, zipping him into his insulated snowsuit. All one piece. How blunt he was in my arms as I carried him from the car to the house, the house to the car. A bundle. A package. Looking at Garrett's hair foil of snow, I felt a stab of such deep longing for Chad—a physical ache—that I had to look away. Where was Chad now?
    Somewhere else.
    Somewhere no snow fell.
    Garrett went back to work on my bumper, and I watched him, and it felt to me, standing bereft and useless in the snow as he picked blond for out of my grille and tossed it to the curb, as if Chad had been erased from the earth. As if there was nothing left to him but the memories of him. Imagining him in Berkeley was no easier or less fanciful than imagining him in heaven. "Garrett," I finally said, snapping myself out of my imaginary grief. "You'll catch pneumonia. Let's go in, and I'll buy you a cup of cocoa."
    "I'm not cold," Garrett said. (They always said that, these boys.
I'm not cold, I'm not tired, my hands aren't dirty, I don't need a hat.)
"But, well, okay."
     
    The cafeteria seemed stiflingly hot when we came in from the cold and sat down at a table together. Garrett got a cup of coffee, not cocoa, and I got a bottle of water, because I was thirsty, sweating in my coat, even in my silk dress.
    We chatted about the cold, about classes, about deer and freeways and traffic. I felt lighter than I had for days, maybe even weeks. Such pleasant company. Such a polite, easy young man. We conversed effortlessly—not like mother and son, or student and teacher, but like friends. Old friends. He seemed genuinely relieved and astonished by my good luck, hitting a deer on the freeway and only having a bent bumper to show for it. He leaned back in his chair