Aura surrenders her ballot to the lockbox and steps down out of the polling station into the sparkle and fade of freshly fallen twilight. A row of streetlamps stutters to life, freckling the OSU Family Resource Center in weary spheres of light. Just a few faces remain queued at the doors, the last of the body politic waiting to get inside and get out the vote. She slow-walks the parking lot for her car, skirting the floodlit ground in a sidewinding path, making a game of it. A cold front has moved into town and the air is tanged with woodsmoke and ozone, leaf mulch and diesel. The deep-nasal burn of synthetic rubber and pigskin. It’s a smell outside of time, pensive and prescient in the same instant. The smell of basketball season, just around the corner.
She’s reaching for her keys when a voice calls “Aura!” and jumps her heart up thumping someplace behind her throat. Nate Franklin steps out of the night, looking good in faded jeans and a camelhair sport coat. A DayGlo orange sticker stuck to his lapel announces: I VOTED!
“You even dress down nice,” Aura says. She pops her jacket collar against the chill, pretending everything’s copacetic. “How about that turnout?”
“Looks like folks are voting early and often. You look hungry.”
“Sneak up on me like that again and I’ll show you what angry looks like.”
“I could eat a horse all by myself. Let me buy you dinner?”
“It’s the least you can do after giving me such a fright.”
“It’s a date, then.”
“Call it what you like, long as you’re picking up the check.”
They decide on a seafood place hard by the university, one of those gimmicky franchises where the chef fishes your dinner still wiggling out of a bubbling showroom aquarium, and as they consider the merits of the various lobsters waving from the display tank all she can think is: We who are about to die salute you. She lets the preacher in on the joke and they share a not-so-guilty laugh about it, deciding finally on the bug with the biggest claws of the bunch because, packing a pair of pincers like that, surely he’s done something to deserve it.
The booths are jam-packed with belt-buckled cowboy types and farmer-tanned college kids, many of them sporting the same over-bright sticker as Nate, who does his best with the topical small talk—who d’you like tonight and so on—as if either of them could vote for anybody but Keith, the Democrat, whom they both admit doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance against Istook.
After a second awkward pause, which extrudes a few too many beats into her comfort zone, Nate lowers that bottomless voice of his even further and asks, in a gleeful whisper, “Do you feel it?”
“What?”
“That spark.”
“I don’t believe in all that.”
“You don’t go in for love at first sight?”
“Only in fairy tales.”
Nate sizes her up a moment.
“Yep. You’re feeling it alright.”
“Is this why pastor Nate left his last church? Run out by the womenfolk who got tired of being pestered?”
“This has nothing to do with my being a preacher. Nothing to do with religion or faith or politics or any other abstract philosophy found on God’s green earth. Unless it’s chemistry. Because this right here is about a man and a woman fixin’ to fall in love.”
“You certainly cut straight to the chase, Nate.”
“On a date, see, a pastor’s always guessing how long he needs to fake interesting.”
“There’s a concept you don’t seem to be embracing. When you are paying for the meal . . .”
“Right.”
“. . . you don’t need to.”
“Got it.”
In the neighboring booth a mutton-chopped beanpole of a man and his grade school–age daughter face one another across their food. She is perched with perfect posture at the very edge of her bucket seat, baby blues combing the sundry surfaces of the dining area. The man does not wear a ring. He is hunched over his clasped hands with the fatalistic patience of the single parent, resigned to yet another evening utterly lacking in adult conversation.
“I-spy-with-my-little-eye something that begins . . . with . . .” the girl says.
Nate watches Aura watch their game, listening.
“P-T-O-T-N.”
The girl turns to her father and waits.
“That’s cheating,” he says.
“No!”
“Too many letters.”
“Daddy. Get real.”
“I cry uncle.”
“People. Talking. On. The. News.”
She performs a self-satisfied flourish, finger-pointing to the television cantilevered over the bar’s mirrored liquor display, where Wolf Blitzer and a crack team of CNN newscasters are offering close-captioned commentary on the election-night tidings.
Intrigued by the preacher’s nerve, Aura turns back to Nate.
“Why me?”
“Well, I tried hitting on your grandmother first,” he deadpans. “But Opal informed me she was too young to be dating a pastor.”
His smile is tremendous, contagious, delicious.
“I think you’re beautiful, Aura. Why not lay it right here on the table?”
“So this—spark—you’re feeling. Where have the symptoms been presenting?”
Nate laces his fingers above his heart in a hopeful and supplicant way.
“I know a decent cardiologist at the hospital,” she says. “I’ll introduce you.”
“You’re dismissing this as just another facet of handsome pastor Nate’s quirky personality.”
“The preacher has reverted to the third person again.”
“Don’t dismiss it.”
Though the pastor’s diagnosis is accurate, Aura still finds herself wanting to object.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“And I’m glad of it.”
“Let me try to understand this spark of yours. You think I’m pretty and . . .”
“You can say that again.”
“. . . that this equals some basis for a romantic relationship?”
“It’s more than physical.”
Aura laughs.
“You don’t even know me.”
“I most certainly do. You are a kind and caring and attractive woman who worked her way through college and then nursing school.” The preacher ticks off traits on his outstretched fingers as he talks. “You drive thirty minutes every Sunday to care for your elderly grandmother Opal. You help people cope with the worst injuries of their lives. You help people back into the world. You set a pick like nobody’s business.”
“You heard all of that at the potluck.”
“Right before Opal told me one day I’d make some lucky lady a good husband.”
Aura slumps her head in mock mortification, mumbles into the tablecloth, “Nobody knows anybody, Nate. Not really.”
She can tell from his voice that Nate’s grinning again. “You’re a healer, Aura. Don’t try and deny it.”
A waitress delivers their dinner of hard shell lobster and king crab splayed on a bed of rice pilaf and steamed Yukon potatoes. They crack into it one heat-blushed extremity after the other and before long their hands and faces are greased with a sheen of clarified butter. When Nate sucks the meat from a demolished crusher claw Aura says, “You’re not showing any mercy.”
“I maybe should have played the first date a little safer,” Nate confesses. “There’s really no way to eat crab claws and come off looking like a gentleman.”
“Don’t worry.” Aura licks her fingers clean. “You’re looking just fine from here.”
Aura’s having a good time and why shouldn’t she be? Nate is funny. Gainfully employed. And tall. She could probably get away with wearing heels. Plus that ass in blue jeans looks like it’s been chiseled from a block of granite. Aura imagines taking him home. The things she could do to pastor Nate Franklin. A single word and he’s hers. But it’s never so simple as all that, is it? Being a woman. In the awkward choreography of the first date—and they both understand this on some unspoken level—Aura’s dancing lead. That one little word might invite him into her bed, but it also initiates a whole sequence of stumbling evasions. All those morning-after missteps.
Her gut says take it slow.
When the hostess shows a lumbering threesome of midnight basketballers along the well-trafficked path to the bar Nate excuses himself to drop by and say hi.
The father in the opposite booth has signed the check. As he reclaims his credit card the man’s eyes wander up from the wreckage of dinner, surveying the room one last time.
“I-spy-with-my-little-eye,” he says to his daughter, “something that begins with . . . ess.”
“S?”
“Yes.”
The girl leans back into the booth’s button-tufted headboard, pale eyes tightened to slits. She cranes her neck up and around, searching. “Seiling.”
“That’s see, not ess,” the man says. He notices Aura watching and offers a complicit wink. “C-E-I-L-I-N-G,” he spells to the girl.
The girl looks to Aura. Back at her father. Over to a poster hanging on the wall.
“Seafish,” she spurts. The poster shows two fishermen netting a catch of salmon from a roiling sea.
“Close.”
“Sailor.”
“No.”
“Sailors.”
“Nice try.”
“Sailboat.”
“No.”
“Ship.”
“No.”
“Storm.”
“No.”
“What are those black fish called?”
“That’s not black.”
“Do I know what they’re called?”
“I don’t know,” he says with a slow smile. “Let’s find out.”
“That’s black.”
“It’s not,” he chuckles. “It’s some shade of gray. Or silver. But not black.”
The girl points at Aura and says, “What color is she?”
The smile fades. The man straightens in his seat, gives Aura an apologetic shrug of the shoulders, says, “She’s brown.”
“How come everyone says she’s black?”
The man reddens. “Let’s talk about this in the car.” He scoots from the booth and says, “Time to go.”
But Nate has just returned and for the briefest of blundering moments the three of them end up tip-toeing around one another in the too-cramped gangway between tables, left then right, back then forth, everyone trying not to intrude on someone else’s personal space, until Nate finally beats a retreat back to the bar and the family has enough room to pass.
Nate settles into his booth with a riled-up sigh.
“That guy was keyed up, now.”
“It was nothing, really.” Aura sneaks a peek over her shoulder. She and Nate watch the man stoop into a whispered caucus with his daughter.
“What’s going on there, do you think?”
Aura turns back to Nate.
“They’re teaching each other how to see.”