We sat close enough that our legs were touching. It could have been anyone else and it all would have meant so little. We talked for an hour and for the first time in my life, it felt easy to be funny. I felt attractive and clever.
“People are going to start talking about us if we aren’t careful,” Adrian said at one point.
“They talk about everyone. It doesn’t matter,” I said back. Easy for me to say; I wasn’t married.
He got up to get another beer. “Can I get you one?” he asked. I nodded even though I didn’t like it. Anything to keep this going.
People had been leaving for the last half hour or so and the party was fizzling down.
“I better go,” Adrian said, looking at his watch.
“How are you getting home?” I asked him.
“You’re going to take me?” he asked.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, unable to hide my smile.
He and Belinda lived on the Near-East side, only a few blocks from my old Mifflin Street dump. I realized as we turned towards downtown that it would have been so much quicker to take him back to his car, which was still at Border’s. It’s what would have made sense. It was five minutes from Krystal’s, and now Belinda would have to take him to work in the morning.
“Do you want me to take you to your car, instead?” I asked.
“No, I wanted to spend some more time talking to you,” he said.
“Oh.” I smiled. “I guess you aren’t afraid to just say what’s on your mind.”
“I guess I’m not,” he said, laughing a little.
“Will your wife think it’s strange that you got a ride home instead of to your car?”
“I’ll tell her I drank too much to drive.”
“Good idea.”
When I was getting close, but we were still talking and laughing about one of our co-workers, I turned onto the wrong street and drove past the place where the house I had once lived in had stood. Now there were condos in its place.
> “I used to live there,” I said.
“Those are nice,” said Adrian.
“I mean, I lived there before the condos were there. It was a big, old house with mice.” We both laughed. Everything is funny when you’re falling in love.
“Turn here,” said Adrian. He pointed out a laundromat and said that he had once found a fifty-dollar bill in a washing machine there.
Then I took him down the street to where I had once found a five-dollar bill frozen into a snow bank.
“Five dollars? That’s kind of pathetic,” he said.
“But at least I’m telling the truth,” I said.
“You don’t believe I found fifty dollars?”
“Whatever you say…” We smiled at each other.
We drove around for two hours. Finally Adrian said he’d better get home.
I turned onto Livingston Street and found the house number. It was a tiny blue house with white shutters, cute as a button.
“Is this your house?” I asked, picturing his wife, unconscious and safe, resting inside with her cat-eye glasses folded on a table beside the bed.