Crossing the Bridge by Michael Baron Read Free Book Online Page A

pay me any attention.
    “You the son?” she said.
    “Yeah, hi. You’re . . .”
    “Tab.” She moved her head back and forth quickly as though she was shaking off excess water. “Tabitha. I hate that name, so I make it as short as I can. No one calls me Tabitha.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind.”
    “Yeah, thanks.” She looked back down at the magazine and turned a page. Clearly, this was all the information she thought it was important for us to exchange.
    “Where’s Tyler?” I asked.
    She kept her eyes on the magazine while she answered. “He doesn’t come in on Fridays. Some independent study thing or something.”
    “So he’s not going to be here at all today?”
    “Not unless he’s planning to surprise us.”
    She turned another page. I wondered if I should apologize for breaking her concentration. A customer walked up to the register and Tab moved over so I could ring him up. For the first time since I had been back in the store, I felt an urge to flash the authority
that was my birthright. I got over it and helped the customer. A few minutes later, I suggested to Tab that there might be shelves that needed restocking or merchandise that needed straightening and she laboriously closed the magazine and walked to the back of the store.
    The stock guy, Carl, was working again, but as was the case the day before, I saw him only on the occasions when he wandered up from the back room. With Tab tinkering at whatever she was tinkering at, I was alone behind the counter to register a few sales and answer a couple of customer questions. None of it was particularly taxing and, while I was slightly irritated at Tab’s laxity, it was hard to fault her. The closest thing to a challenge came just before lunchtime when the candy vendor showed up – the same man who had sold my father candy ten years earlier – to take an order for the next week. To keep myself entertained, I reviewed every item available on the vendor’s stock list and ordered a box of BlisterSnax.
    “You sure about this?” the salesman said. “Your dad doesn’t usually carry these.”
    “We’re gonna take a walk on the wild side.”
    That marketing experiment addressed, I navigated my way through what stood for a lunchtime rush and then settled into the long lull that typified the early afternoon. Without Tyler there to talk to, and with very few customers to deal with, I had no choice but to think about the way the night before had ended. I hadn’t been conscious of how much I wanted to kiss Iris again until I was actually kissing her. I was certainly aware of how much I enjoyed talking to her,
how beautiful she seemed to me, and how I felt – especially that second night – that I was beginning to get to know her in a new way. And of course, I was aware that I simply saw her differently than I saw most other women. But it wasn’t until she reached for me, until we were actually kissing, that I realized how much I wanted her physically. It was like exiting the highway expecting to eat at Denny’s and finding The French Laundry instead.
    And at the same time as I was buckling under the sensual weight of the kiss, I was sucker punched by the emotional impact. I hadn’t been smitten for a long time, but when Iris kissed me, there was so much possibility to the act that I allowed my mind to race. I began to calculate the distance from Springfield to Lenox, to think that New Mexico (one of the destinations I’d been considering) could wait for a while, all immediately in the seconds after our lips first touched. And when we continued to kiss, I swear I had actual visions of Iris and me walking together and holding hands. It wasn’t simply a kiss; it was a time altering act transporting my sensibility back to my junior year of college.
    And then she pulled away. And there was that shake of her head, that muttering about “gathering her wits,” that look in her eyes. It was a different look from the one Iris had given me when we kissed