The Banks of Certain Rivers by Jon Harrison Read Free Book Online

unopened parcel leaning against the wall that makes me pause.
    “No,” I say. “You didn’t.” Printed on
the side of the long box are the words 42” LCD TV .
Lauren holds her napkin over her mouth with both hands and raises her
eyebrows.
    “I did!” she squeaks.
    “This is the refuge, though—”
    “It was on sale.”
    “—Our place for reading!”
    “I’m not getting cable,” she says. “It’s
only for movies!”
    “Are you going to take all the John Hughes movies from my house
if you have a TV now?”
    “Are you saying you watch them?”
    “I’m not.…” I can’t keep myself from
smiling at the question. “I don’t watch them. I’m
just saying maybe I like the reminder of you in my home.”
    “Chris doesn’t ask about them?”
    “We have a million movies anyway, so I don’t think he
even notices them there. He did watch some, I think. I’m pretty
sure he saw The Breakfast Club at the end of the summer.”
    “Did he like it?”
    “I think he liked it. I also think he felt it was a little
dated. It maybe hasn’t aged so well.”
    “Unlike other things around in the eighties.”
    I make a noise like “Psh!” and swat the top of the pizza
box down on Lauren’s hand as she’s trying to grab a
slice. “I wasn’t the only one here around in the
eighties,” I say.
    She flings the top back up and says “Psh!” in return.
“You’re the only one here who remembers them.”
    We work for the next hour, sneaking bites of food here and there,
finding pieces, aligning them, driving fasteners home. A dent is made
in the mayhem on the floor, and Lauren shuttles a stack of flattened,
empty boxes downstairs to her garage as I stand one of the shelves up
and slide it against the wall. It partially covers one of two
colorful, orange-ish, modern paintings she has up in her living room.
They were made by her ex-boyfriend, and I hate them.
    “You’ll need to move your artwork ,” I call
as Lauren climbs back upstairs, putting a little unfair emphasis on
the last word. I pull the painting in front of me from its hook and
angle it to examine the rough dabs of acrylic pigment.
    “We can move them right into your house,” she says. “I
don’t know why you have to be so nasty about them. I mean, I do
know, but still. I like them for what they are, not for the person
who painted them. And you know that he’s not so—”
    “We don’t really need to talk about the person who
painted them,” I say, and I hang the canvas back up where it
was.
    “You’re acting like one of your kids,” Lauren says.
    “Oh?”
    “For such a measured man, maybe this is the one place where
your job rubs off on you.”
    “Rubs off on me how?”
    “You’re being petty. Like a teenager. Jealous.”
    “So you have to be in your teens to be jealous, you’re
saying.”
    Lauren gathers a pile of books from the floor next to her futon, and
she gently elbows me aside to arrange them on the top tier of her new
bookshelf. “It’s a more raw emotion at that age,”
she says. “Everything is more raw then.”

    Lauren had grown up in
a suburb of Pittsburgh. A Midwestern kid, not unlike me. She had a
little brother, two years younger, and two working parents who loved
each other, except for the year when she had been a junior in high
school that they lived apart. When she talks about that, she laughs.
It’s not like they stopped loving each other, she says, but
maybe they needed a break from it. It was a raw time for her, too. It
was a raw time for all of them.
    That was her rebellious time, the year her parents split up. She
laughs about this. She laughs about all of her childhood, like it was
a ridiculous ordeal that could have been borne only through laughter.
Upon her parents’ separation she buzz-cut her long hair with
clippers in a friend’s garage. Short and spiky—she
giggles at the memory of it, giggles when she shows me a
photo—looking like an otter’s fur. Her mother gasped when
Lauren came home to show