Chapter fifty-three

Against my better judgment, I drive us to Sanford & Son. We get there just before daybreak. I can hear Hatch and Mack both snoring in their rooms.

I grab us two Natty Lights. Beth bends down and peers into the illuminated fifty-gallon aquarium on the back wall. Her calves are muscular, tight.

“His name’s Bobo. Mack has had him since the beginning of college.”

“He’s huge.” Beth taps on the glass. “What kind of fish is he?”

I hand Beth her beer. “A snakehead, I think.”

“Natural Light, huh?” Beth raises her blue and white aluminum can for a toast. “Cheers.”

“Six bucks a case at Costco,” I say, raising my can in response. “Spare no expense.”

“That was a great show,” Beth says.

“It was?”

Beth smiles at my sarcasm, her cheeks a little flush. We had kissed for the rest of the concert. The fact people mocked us made no difference whatsoever. The fact Peter Wolf closed with “Centerfold” made no difference whatsoever.

Who am I kidding? We stopped kissing for that song!

After the show, we walked, aimless and smitten, down the streets of Broad Ripple. By the time we found our way to the car, everything had closed, even the late-night burrito shack that never dims its lights until at least four in the morning.

On every date I’ve ever been on, there’s an endpoint, a precise moment at which I say, “I’m done with this girl,” or, “I’m doing this girl.” This date doesn’t have that moment. It comes as a comfort to me.

“What are you thinking about, Hank?”

“Nothing,” I say, when of course what I mean to say is “everything.”

“You’re lying.” Beth takes a drink of beer. She wipes her lips, pointing to my mouth with her free hand. “You stick your tongue out and bite down on it whenever you’re thinking about something. You do it when you’re dancing, too.”

“I do?” I pull my tongue back in my mouth. I remember Dad. I grin, shaking my head.

“I say something funny?”

“Sorry, I just had a flashback of my father marching around the house to Chuck Mangione.”

Beth doesn’t respond, allowing the moment to carry its own weight. She grabs my hand. It’s getting to the point where I’m almost too caught up in the date. I’ve barreled past smitten to just full-on wanting this girl more than anything else in my life.

I look around the room. “You know, Beth, my friends think I’m crazy for going out with you.”

At best, it’s a last-ditch, halfhearted, but all-the-way lame attempt at reestablishing control. We take our beers and our flirting out onto the front porch.

“Your friends think you’re crazy.” Beth kisses me. “Or just Hatch?”

I close the front door behind us and lean in and kiss her back. “He bet me his truck we wouldn’t last the rest of the summer.”

“Like I told you, that dude has just got to let it go.” Beth kisses me again. “But if it makes you feel any better, my friends say you’re a bastard.”

“I am a bastard.”

“You are?”

“Okay, maybe in the literal sense I’m only half-bastard.”

“How so?”

“Fatherless but not quite rudderless.”

“That’s not what I’d call a bastard, Hank.”

“It’s not? If being a bastard means being a product of my pain as much as my joy, my vices as much as my virtues, a raised up, broken down, and raised up again mishmash of sin and sincerity, how can I not be a bastard? And not just a bastard, a lucky bastard.”

“Lucky?” Beth’s eyes perk up.

“The luckiest,” I say.

“How do you figure?”

“Look at me, Beth. I’m sitting on a porch, on the eve of morning, when the world isn’t yet full of itself, and after all my fuck-ups, I’m still getting to taste the lips of the hottest girl in school.”

Beth grabs my face with her hands and kisses me hard. Her tongue lingers inside my mouth awhile, licking my lips on the way out. “Anybody ever tell you that you have the softest and cushiest lips?”

I lie of course. “No, never.”

She sees right through me. “How many?”

“Counting you, four.”

Beth smiles and grabs my lips in her fingers, squeezing. “You are the most adorable thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, but you know this date has to end at some point.”

“What time is it?”

“Your clock inside said almost six a.m. Let’s go get some breakfast. I bet if we jump in the car right now, we can find an even better view of the sunrise.”

“I don’t need a better view. I’m waiting right here.”

“Waiting?”

“Yeah, waiting.”

“For what?”

“For nothing, for everything. I’m just tired of chasing the dawn. My postcard is right here, and the only thing that can lessen the beauty of this sunrise is you not being in it. Wait with me, Beth.”

She stands, fronting a vintage Coppolla pink-gray dawn that consumes the whole scene. I can’t stop staring at her calves. She reaches down to take my hand. “Eyes up here, pervert.”

I rise up, easing into her kiss. Her arms are around my neck, her lips pressed against my own. She pretends to rub her lipstick off my lips but leaves it there. She likes to mark her territory.

“I’m a sure thing,” Beth says. “You know that, right?”

I smile. “Now I do.”

She smiles back. “So what are you waiting for, really?”

“I told you what I’m waiting for…” I glance out over the pre-dawn horizon. I think about Dad, about Uncle Mitch, about Jack. I think about Mohammad El-Bakkar. I speak with a voice not quite my own but close enough to fool Beth, if not myself. “I’m waiting for the sun…to come to me.”

“Then I’ll wait, too, Hank.”

Her response comes as reflex. For as long as I’ve known Beth she’s exhibited an unconditional loyalty to me I’ve never earned and would never deserve. But hell, life has kicked me in the nutsack enough times that I’m taking this gift and running with it.

“Hey, Beth.”

“Yeah?”

“You ever think about taking up belly dancing?”