Chapter 2: Sound
Except for the swish of the wheels and the rush of other cars Angela spends the rest of the ride to Three Rivers encased in silence. Her ipod was stolen on the subway last week and she barely owns any cds. She doesn't want to listen to the radio.
It's completely irrational, but the thought of hearing the rest of Jordan's interview feels like an invasion of privacy. Everything Jordan said was for the whole nation to hear, but she is the high school ex-girlfriend who apparently set him on his path to literacy, and he didn't know that she would be listening.
***
A barrage of noise greets Angela as she opens the door to her childhood home. The cuisinart in the kitchen and Lillian, her four-month-old niece, are competing with each other for dominance. It's three years since Danielle got married and six since she started dating her future husband but even with Lillian's screaming red face as proof Angela still has trouble rapping her mind around the fact that Brian Krakow is her brother-in-law.
Angela has vague memories of Danielle's puppy-like childhood crush on Brian but she'd just assumed that eventually her sister grew out of it. That was Danielle for you, though, patience and determination and cunning all wrapped up in a frighteningly unobtrusive package, a girl that could like a boy when she was ten and come back from her freshman year of college determined to catch him.
Brian had drifted around for a few years after he graduated from university, not really settled on anything, and then, with rent money more dear than he'd been expecting, moved back home to live with his parents until he knew what the next step was. Well, he didn't know it then but the next step was living right across the street.
Danielle must have spent every minute of those first weeks of summer "sunbathing" on the lawn, displaying her long brown legs to the world and just waiting for Brian to pass so she could embroil him in conversation. Soon she was inviting him in for a glass of her dad's lemonade (it's so hot and thirsty today), borrowing books from him as fast as he could reference them (and she didn't just return them, she discussed them and discussed them and laid her hand on his arm every chance she got), bringing him up to her bedroom to listen to the weird arty cds her friends at school had burned for her (and she sat right next to him on the bed while the music played, her thigh pressed against his, the smell of her vanilla lipgloss coating his suddenly dry throat). A month into the summer they were going to movies and bookstores and coffee shops together and three weeks before she went back to school Danielle had her ultimate success when, awkwardly saying goodbye at her door after a poetry slam, he leaned across and kissed her.
The rest, as they say, is history. He'd followed her to her college that spring for graduate school, they'd moved in together, she'd applied for her Masters at the same university he'd chosen for his PhD, they'd gotten married and a baby made three.
***
Danielle somehow hears the door closing behind Angela over the din, and she looks up with a grin before tucking her screaming baby up under her shirt. After that Patty and Graham come out to greet her, their voices loud in the sudden silence. There's a bowl of soup, and a taste of Graham's newest cranberry sauce recipe (it needs a tad more horseradish, in Angela's opinion), acres and acres of celery to chop and lots of slightly awkward conversation (none of the Chases are quite adjusted to Brian Krakow being part of the family, and her parents don't really understand the choices Angela's made in the eight years since all her plans were thrown out the window). Then Angela has brushed her teeth, sharing the sink with her sister, and changed into the ragged old t-shirt she brought from home ("It's Noah's" Angela bites out in response to her mother's offer to get her a "nice new nightgown, dear," and her parents exchange a sad, worried look while the conversation breathes its last gap on the floor) and she's lying between the cold sheets of her childhood bed, almost thirty and wondering what happened to her life.
Thank you so much to my reviewers! It was really amazing to get this outpouring of support, please keep it up. To those that commented, I did want to try something a little different from the norm, with Angela not pining after Jordan. She's actually had a pretty full life without him, but as you can probably tell things have started to stagnate for her... which is why he's going to make an in person appearance in the next chapter.
The cranberry sauce Graham is making belongs to Susan Stamberg's mother-in-law, my mom heard it on NPR, where Susan has been reading it every year since 1971, and it's absolutely delicious. You should look it up.
