The Hole In His Jeans

I wrote this for my sister and her boyfriend. This is a true story, dear reader, except for the needlessly poetic descriptions of the night stand–you’ll get it when you get it. For some reason I write a lot about night stands. Odd. Anyway. Here.

I love you. Jean holes and all.

 

The Hole In his Jeans

For Mac and Molli

 

Mac wanted two things; to work with his hands, and to be somewhere with music. It was a short list that could put him almost anywhere. There was a girl too, but he could handle that. She was moving to New York, and he knew he couldn’t follow her.

He was renting a house three miles from the lake-where the city was busiest. He had liked how it sounded immediately–how the city felt out the window. Mac had never owned a car, but he brought his bike. Three miles felt like the right amount to him; a good, solid number.

He got a job over the phone a week before; he was going to put up tents. The woman who hired him said the company did mostly concerts and festivals, so he was happy enough. The only problem seemed to be that he would only get paid as long as the company was hired; he wouldn’t know how much he’d have at the end of each month. Rent was $750.

He moved his boxes from the truck to the downstairs hallway, and from the hallway to the smaller of two bedrooms. The house was old. He leaned against the wall, took a curtain rod from an open box, and placed it on its side next to him. It rolled from the wall to the center of the room, and cradled by the sloping floor, rocked. He felt numb. The house was old, but it was only three miles from the lake. He didn’t want to sleep until the boxes were empty.

He wanted to call her.

He met the girl at school. She was studying math, and had a kind of easy way of talking about it that he had liked immediately. He had met her parents, and she had met Will. She liked Will, and so he knew she’d visit him in the city.

He couldn’t feel anything about it yet–New York. He was almost convinced she wouldn’t go, and completely convinced that if she did, she wouldn’t much like it there. People there wouldn’t be able to hear her.

“How’s the house?” She was asking him.

“It’s alright. It smells like hell but the windows all open and the stove works.”

“Did you eat?”

“Yeah.”

“Peanut butter dinner?”

He smiled, “And breakfast.”

He couldn’t picture her there, in an office on some floor of an anonymous building. People didn’t talk like her, not in New York, not anywhere. She liked to talk with her hands; to make big gestures. Even now, he was sure she was holding the phone with her shoulder.

Sometimes, she would lick her index finger, and draw circles on the edge of his nightstand. She would watch them dry, and in the time that took, she would say at least one thing he’d never heard before.

One night she had rolled over, eyes heavy with sleep, drew a circle, and whispered to him, “Do you know how I knew I loved you?”

“How?”

“You had a hole in the side of your jeans from carrying your skateboard around.”

“That’s why you like me? My jean hole.”

“Mhm.” The girl had smiled and closed her eyes. “That and because you’re spectacular.”

The girl sounded wide awake on the phone now, full of the energy that made her speak in good, long sentences. She told him about being home, and that her house felt like it was full of static. He understood.

She had to go, and so they said goodbye. She told him she missed him.

He slept then, a good sleep–without dreams–without the fuss of falling asleep.