Chapter 2: Grin
Ten miles away from Amaya's garden, Eric Williams tried to smile at his sister.
"You can't leave," Tanya told him, slapping her hand on the table with more force than she'd probably intended.
Eric saw the people at the next table jump. The old man put his hand to his heart, and the waitress glared at Tanya and Eric over the top of her order pad.
"Dad's sick," Tanya said, and three other people turned in their direction at the sound of her declaration, "and Julien is graduating in six months. You can't miss that. And what about—"
"What about our third cousin's baby shower? What about your mother-in-law's great-uncle's baptism?" Eric said softly, hoping she would get the hint and lower her voice too.
Tanya's jaw went tight, and Eric knew, as he had known twenty-five years ago when he took her coloring book and saw that expression for the first time, that she was going to hurt him.
"I'm talking about your nephew and your father," she said.
"Dad's been sick for ten years," Eric said.
"So you just don't care anymore?"
"He told me to go. Mom did, too."
"Of course they did," she snapped. "They wouldn't want to hold you back from what you wanted to do with your life," she said, and Eric smiled at her, wondering if she would catch the irony.
"I am sorry to be missing Julien's graduation," Eric said. "But I promise that I will find the most awesome present in the world, and he won't care at all. He wants to travel doesn't he? He can come spend a few weeks with me this summer. I'll show him around Burundi."
Tanya's face went white. "You are not taking my son into a war zone. It's bad enough that you're abandoning the family and going off to get malaria and whatever else they've got in that country."
Eric pushed around the remnants of his club sandwich. He didn't want to tell Tanya that she was a self-centered bitch and that the reason she and her husband had been in therapy for ten years was that she had never figured out how to put another person above herself and that her preppy, two-faced son would be better off if his parents divorced and his father got custody. No, that wasn't true. He did want to tell her all that.
Eric took his wallet from his back pocket and laid a twenty on the table.
"What are you doing?" Tanya asked.
"I have to get back to work," he said, and she gave a sniff that meant, you're giving up a real job that pays you in real money for a childish adventure that pays you in soup. "Thanks for letting me take you out to lunch."
"We are not finished discussing this," she said.
"I'll send you a postcard from Bujumbura."
"Eric, don't you dare leave before we've had a chance to talk this out."
"I'm still looking for someone to keep Ed Hermann for me. Do you have any friends who like cats?"
Tanya stared. This stare meant, I can't believe you're refusing to fight with me in public, even though you have not raised your voice since junior high and your voice probably can't reach that volume anymore. He leaned down and gave her a one-arm hug.
Eric turned off his cell phone as he left the restaurant. Tanya was queen of serial screaming voicemails, and he didn't have the energy to deal with her today.
He crossed the street from The Sandwich Hole and walked the five blocks back to the university in the boiling sun, stopping at a convenience store to pick up a dozen strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups. By the time he unlocked his office and dropped into his desk chair, he wanted nothing more than a cool shower and three tall glasses of water. Instead, he had an afternoon of classes with beginning Italian and French students who had grown up watching The Matrix and imagining that somewhere, someone was downloading entire lexicons into the brains of his students, while Dr. Williams made them sit in a class and learn it all the hard way.
He unwrapped a Fruit Roll-Up and let out a deep, noisy sigh, and jumped when a voice said, "That was a happy sound."
Speaking of The Matrix.
Trinity McStay leaned against the doorframe, smiling as though seeing him was her only goal in life. She strutted in without waiting for an invitation and fell onto his couch.
Trinity was a student-turned-colleague who made the boys in her Intro to Linguistics classes break into a cold sweat every time she turned in their direction. Eric sympathized. He hadn't been sure that he would survive Advanced German with her sitting in the front row every day, eyes wide as he spouted Rilke. Then she'd graduated and gone to grad school on the east coast, and Eric felt like the universe finally decided to take it easy on him for once.
Six years later, she was back, her Ph.D work drawing to a close as she took on the classes that the tenured professors didn't want to touch.
Tenure, he thought with a sigh. Oh, well.
"My mother says that every time you sigh, an angel slits her wrists," Trinity said.
"That's disturbing," Eric said. He looked down at his Fruit Roll-Up, briefly imagined himself shoving it into his mouth, turning his cheeks and lips and fingers into a sticky red mess. He shoved them into his desk.
"You think so?" Trinity asked. She leaned her head back on the cushions so she was staring at the ceiling, her dark hair spilling over the edge in a shiny sheet of waves. "I always thought it was fascinating. As though we had power over the spiritual world instead of it having power over us. Aus unendlichen Sehnsüchten steigen / endliche Taten wie schwache Fontänen, / die sich zeitig und zitternd neigen. / Aber, die sich uns sonst verschweigen, / unsere fröhlichen kräfte… fröhlichen kräfte…."
"Zeigen sich in diesen tanzenden Tränen," he finished. Out of infinite longings…he couldn't see what that had to do with anything.
"Exactly. Burundi still on?"
"Yes," Eric said. Yes. He was going no matter what Tanya or Trinity or the dean or his nightmares told him. He'd wanted this since he was fifteen, and this was the time. He knew it. He was finished with school, single, debt-free, and ready to separate himself from the world of abstract academia.
Nathan smiled at him from his photo on Eric's desk, nodding his approval.
"When do you leave?" Trinity asked.
Eric glanced at the calendar, even though the dates were fixed in his head as permanently as his own birthday. "School ends in three weeks. I leave in four."
"We should have dinner," she said.
"What?"
"Dinner. You know. With food. Tomorrow night? Eight o'clock? I'm thinking, that new little Indian place on Beatrice Street. Have you been there?"
Eric hadn't been there. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been anywhere with a woman who wasn't his sister. God, four weeks to go and Trinity asks him out. Except, he told himself, this was only food. She'd said it herself. Not a date. Friday night, eight o'clock, Indian food, not a date.
"Sounds great," he said. ���I'll pick you up."
"You don't have a car."
"Then you can pick me up."
Trinity grinned that worlds-revolve-around-you grin and left his office.
Eric put his head on his cool desk and left it there so long that he had to run to class with his books pressed to his chest.
As he stood in front of his students and yammered about verbs, he tried to shove out images of that grin and replace them with his travel plans. Soon, so soon, he would start a new life.
It was only after one student in the front row finally caught his attention and asked him what he was talking about that he realized he was teaching French to his Italian class. They looked at him with concern, but he could only laugh.
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