Saturday Afternoon

By the middle of her sophomore year, Laura and Scott had developed a habit of finding one another without ever discussing whether that was what they were doing. Sometimes they walked together after class, even when the most direct route to their separate destinations would have taken them in different directions. They met in the student union between lectures or arrived outside the business building at nearly the same time. Once or twice Laura had caught herself looking toward the door when he was late, and she had been mildly annoyed with herself for doing it.

Neither of them had suggested they were dating. There had been no first date, no conversation in which one of them asked the other what any of this meant. There had simply been another walk, another cup of coffee, another conversation that lasted longer than necessary. Laura liked that there was nothing to explain, although lately she had become more aware that she noticed Scott differently from the way she noticed her other friends. She knew the sound of his laugh before she turned to see him. She knew when he was about to make a joke because of the slight change in his expression, and she had begun to recognize which shirts he wore more often than others, information she could not imagine having deliberately acquired.

One Saturday morning in October, he knocked on the lobby door of her residence hall. Laura was already downstairs, wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a light sweater. She had spent slightly more time deciding what to wear than the clothes themselves would have suggested, then had been irritated by the possibility that this might mean something.

Scott grinned when he saw her.

“So,” he said.

“So?”

“I thought maybe we'd go exploring.”

“Where?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

Laura laughed. “That sounds like a terrible plan.”

“It probably is.”

She looked at him for a moment. There were sensible questions she could have asked—where they were going, how long they would be gone, whether she should bring anything—but the absence of a plan was unexpectedly appealing.

“Let's do it.”

Scott's pickup was old enough that Laura suspected it had accumulated stories neither of them would ever know. The passenger door had to be closed twice before it latched, something Scott neglected to mention until she closed it the first time and he reached across her.

“Again,” he said.

“What?”

“The door.”

She pulled it shut harder.

“There you go.”

“You could have warned me.”

“I wanted to see how you'd handle adversity.”

She gave him a look. “I grew up with horses.”

“Right. I forgot.”

“No, you didn't.”

He smiled and started the truck.

The heater worked intermittently, and the radio seemed unable to remain committed to a station for more than a few miles. There were scratches across the dashboard and something metallic rattled whenever they hit a rough patch of road. Laura loved the truck almost immediately, partly because Scott seemed entirely unconcerned by any of its shortcomings. When the radio dissolved into static, he adjusted the dial until he found another station. When the heater stopped blowing warm air, he slapped the dashboard once and said, “Give it a minute.”

“Is that how you fix things?”

“Usually.”

“My father would be horrified.”

“Your father doesn't have to know.”

They left campus without deciding where they were going. The neighborhoods thinned and eventually gave way to open farmland, where fields stretched toward low hills and old barns stood at distances from the road that suggested the road had come later. Laura rolled her window down for a while despite the cool air. It felt good to be moving somewhere without needing to arrive.

They stopped whenever something interested them. At a roadside orchard, an older man selling apples insisted that they couldn't possibly know which variety they wanted without tasting three of them. Scott accepted this as an obvious truth and began sampling with enough seriousness that Laura accused him of taking advantage of the man's generosity.

“I'm gathering information.”

“You've eaten half an apple.”

“Research takes sacrifice.”

They left with a paper sack they hadn't intended to buy.

By early afternoon they found a narrow road leading toward a small river and pulled off where the grass opened beside the water. They carried the apples down to the bank and sat several feet apart at first, close enough to talk without raising their voices. The river was quiet there, moving past low grass and trees beginning to show their autumn color. Nothing about the place demanded attention, which may have been why neither of them felt any need to leave.

Without classes or campus around them, the conversation changed. Scott talked about his family and the expectation that people should know where they were going. Careers were discussed at the dinner table as practical matters, and uncertainty was generally regarded as a temporary condition that ought to be corrected.

“So what's the plan for you?” Laura asked.

“That's the problem.”

“You don't have one?”

“Oh, I have several. Other people have been very generous about giving them to me.”

She laughed, but there was something beneath the joke that made her wait rather than answer immediately. Scott told her a little more, and Laura found herself listening not just to what he said but to the way he said it. He was usually easygoing, quick with an observation or a joke. Sitting beside the river, he seemed less interested in being amusing.

When he asked about her family, she told him about the ranch and the horses, about mornings that began before sunrise because animals had no interest in whether a person wanted another hour of sleep. She told him about riding and competitions, about the piano and the strange fact that something she had sometimes resisted as a girl had followed her willingly to college. She described her father, the engineer, as a man who seemed capable of building almost anything he could imagine.

Scott asked questions, but he didn't interrupt her answers. Laura noticed that because many people did. They waited for a pause and then used it to return the conversation to themselves. Scott seemed genuinely curious about the details, including details she hadn't expected him to care about.

“What kind of things did your father build?”

Laura thought about it. “Whatever needed building.”

“That sounds useful.”

“It was. Unless you wanted to buy something.”

Scott laughed. “He'd make it instead?”

“He'd look at the price and say, ‘I could build that.’”

“Could he?”

“That was the annoying part.”

Scott smiled, and Laura realized she had been watching his face while she talked. She looked toward the river, suddenly interested in the water.

The afternoon passed without either of them consulting a watch. They ate most of the apples and talked about families, high school, people they had known growing up, and things they had imagined college would be like before they arrived. Occasionally the conversation stopped altogether. The silences weren't uncomfortable, although Laura was increasingly aware of Scott sitting beside her during them.

As the sun dropped lower, the October air cooled. Laura pulled her sweater tighter around herself without thinking about it. Scott noticed.

He took off his jacket and held it toward her.

“You'll get cold.”

“I'll survive.”

“You don't know that.”

“I feel pretty confident.”

She hesitated before taking it, not because she was especially worried about his temperature but because accepting his jacket felt unexpectedly intimate. It was an absurd thought. People loaned other people jackets all the time.

She put it on anyway.

The sleeves were too long, and she folded the cuffs back. The jacket still held some of his warmth and smelled faintly of cedar and engine oil. Laura noticed both things immediately and wished she hadn't, because noticing them seemed to confirm something she had been successfully avoiding naming.

“You always this stubborn?” she asked.

“I've been told.”

She smiled and looked back toward the river.

By the time they returned to the truck, the light had begun to flatten across the fields. Scott turned the heater on, and after several minutes it surprised both of them by working. The drive back to campus was quieter than the drive out, but Laura didn't feel any obligation to fill the silence. Scott drove with one hand resting loosely on the steering wheel. Once, when he looked toward her, she was already looking at him and turned toward the window a little too quickly.

She smiled at herself.

There was no longer much point pretending she wasn't attracted to him.

Knowing it did not require her to do anything about it. That was the pleasant part. They could continue driving toward campus in his unreliable truck, and whatever was happening between them could remain unfinished for a while longer.

When Scott pulled up outside her residence hall, Laura unfastened her seat belt but didn't reach immediately for the troublesome door. Scott left the engine running. For a few seconds neither spoke, and the silence felt different from the ones beside the river. Laura was conscious of the small space between them, of the jacket she was still wearing, and of the fact that she did not particularly want the afternoon to end.

“I had a really good time today,” Scott said.

“So did I.”

“We should probably do it again.”

Laura looked at him. He seemed less certain than he had when announcing their terrible plan that morning, and she liked seeing that uncertainty in him.

“I was hoping you'd say that.”

She started to open the door and then remembered the jacket.

“Oh.”

She slipped it off and handed it to him. For just a moment their hands met as he took it. There was nothing remarkable about the contact, but Laura was aware of it after it was over.

The passenger door failed to latch on her first attempt.

Scott leaned across the seat. “Adversity.”

Laura opened it and slammed it again.

“Good night, Scott.”

He was laughing as she walked toward the dormitory.

At the top of the steps she turned. The pickup was still there, Scott waiting behind the wheel until she went inside. She lifted a hand, and he answered with one of his own before pulling away.

Later, when Laura was getting ready for bed, she found herself thinking about the afternoon again. Not in any orderly way. She remembered the orchard owner insisting on three apples, Scott's hand slapping the dashboard, the river moving past them while they talked. She remembered the way he had listened when she spoke about her father and the moment she had looked up to discover him already watching her.

And she remembered his jacket.

That irritated her slightly.

Of all the things they had talked about that afternoon, of all the things worth remembering, her mind kept returning to an old jacket that smelled of cedar and engine oil and had sleeves too long for her arms.

Laura climbed into bed and turned out the light.

She was still smiling.