Summer of Good-Bye

I decided that I must have been daydreaming, the connection to Kyle set off by a similar laugh and the old woman’s bag of lemons. I say I decided that, but that was only intellectually. Emotionally, I was sure that Kyle had come back to me—that our parting had been too abrupt for him just as it had been for me. Our bond had been too strong to be cut in an instant like that.

The next time Joseph came to my house, he opened the refrigerator door, only to have three cantaloupes fall out onto the floor.

“What’s this?” he asked. “Are you cornering the melon market?” The three melons that had fallen out of the refrigerator were just a few of what had been stuffed in there. I’d gone back to the market every day that week, retracing my steps precisely, doing exactly what I’d done the day Kyle had come to me—squeezing and buying cantaloupes. But he hadn’t appeared to me again.

“Hit a cart when I backed the car out into the alley the other day,” I told Joseph, intoning the excuse lamely enough that even he, who could be obtuse with the best of them, gave me a skeptical look. “I felt so sorry for the old woman pushing the cart of melons that I bought all that fell on the ground.”

Joseph didn’t pursue that, specifically, but he used it as an opportunity to return to an argument of the past few weeks that I was moping around too much and needed to become more active socially.

“When I’m off the crutches,” I said.