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: : : AFTER DINNER CLARK CALLS. Fletcher sticks the phone between his ear and shoulder so he can talk and do the dishes at the same time.
—So I heard you're going to be teaching at DuSable again this fall, she says.
—Yeah, Fletcher says.
—What do they have you teaching?
—They've got me doing two sections of Comp—same as normal.
—What's your theme?
—Oh, says Fletcher, scouring at a piece of scorched-on cheese, —I'm doing “American Dreams, American Nightmares” again.
—Now's an interesting time for that.
—True—plus I've done it so many times I could do it in my sleep.
—Uh huh.
—It's—I don't know, it's not a great theme, but it's, whatever, it's good for college freshmen. So many of them just accept all that home of the free, land of opportunity business so uncritically, most of them don't know half the shit that's gone on in this country.
—You using People's History?
—Some excerpts. I mean, the book's what? Seven hundred pages?
—You using anything else?
—Oh, let's see—some of the new Chomsky one, Hegemony or Survival; some slave narratives from that Library of America book; Wojnarowicz's Closer to the Knives—the normal array of depressing stuff.
—Your students are gonna hate you.
—Hey, Fletcher says, —I'm not getting paid to be their friend.
—So, says Clark, —if you don't mind my asking—what does this mean for your relationship with Cassandra? I mean—she's still planning to go to Lancaster to do the whole quilt thing, yeah?
—Yeah, Fletcher says. He lets his hands drop into the hot water. —Yeah, she is. As for what it means—
He isn't sure what it means. It's been hard for him, to know that he won't be going when Cassandra goes. He's been spending extra time at her apartment lately, ostensibly to entertain Leander while she packs her things into boxes, but really it's been because he wants to see her as often as possible. He's never had much faith in the idea of long-distance relationships and so he thinks of her move date—August 30—as the day on which she will essentially forget him, unless he can manage, between now and then, to be extra-good to her, to form some graft too strong to be torn by distance.
It's only seven hundred miles, he tells himself. You can drive it in a day.
At night he holds her tightly, presses his face against her neck and breathes in her smell, tries to memorize it. Remember this, he thinks. You have to remember this.
It feels less like she's moving seven hundred miles east and more like she's about to die.
He tried, earlier in the summer, to make inroads at that university out in Lancaster, but budget cuts mean that they won't be hiring any lecturers this semester—in point of fact they needed to let some go at the end of last semester. There's a community college, too, but the pay situation there is totally dire—it looks like they're only really interested in hiring people for whom teaching is a thing on the side, a second income.
Maybe it could work that way. From what he's been able to figure out online, the cost of living looks pretty low in Lancaster—maybe, he thinks sometimes, maybe Cassandra's museum salary could make up the bulk of their combined household income, and he could chip in with a few thousand bucks from the community college. He'd have time to work on his manuscript; he'd be able to be around to look after Leander after school so Cassandra wouldn't need to worry about daycare—it could work. They could survive.
But even as he was working out this plan in his head the summer was ending. And the next thing he knew he needed to give an answer about whether he'd accept DuSable's offer of two Comp courses for the fall. And he signed his name to the form. And so Cassandra is going and he is not. At least not yet.
—Don't lose me, he whispers to her sleeping head. —Please don't lose me.
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