“That's Uncle Bob,” Spike whispered.
He was a pale, round-faced man with a dollop of chin, like a piece of dough stuck under his mouth. He jumped out of the truck and shook Spike's hand, then mine, and helped me into the cab.
“Heat's broken, so you two snuggle,” he said. Everybody's breath blew whitely toward the dashboard. Spike pulled me closer, and I leaned my head against his shoulder while he talked to his uncle.
“Your mother says you're thinking of dropping out of graduate school,” Uncle Bob said.
“I am,” said Spike.
“I'm supposed to talk some sense into you.”
“Okay,” said Spike. He leaned forward and looked at Uncle Bob, and both of them laughed.
Ten minutes later we pulled onto a dirt road and the headlights played uncertainly over rocks and trees and snow. The road turned out to be the driveway leading to a small wooden house. Smoke rose from the chimney and lights glowed in the windows.
“Is someone here?” Spike said.
“Miriam is.”
“Who's Miriam?”
“She's my lady friend. You get to bring a lady friend, I get to bring a lady friend.” He smiled at me and parked the car.
“I never thought of myself as a lady friend before,” I said.
“Well, you are now.” He patted my shoulder. “Congratulations.”
Spike took the bags and Uncle Bob went around to the passenger side of the truck, holding out his hand to help me climb out.
The house had been in their family for generations and was beautiful inside, small and old with hardwood floors and a stove with a pipe running up to the ceiling. I smelled garlic and tomatoes.
“This is nice,” I said to Spike. As we took off our coats, Miriam came out of the kitchen and introduced herself. She was wearing a black turtleneck and dark red lipstick and she looked about my age. Uncle Bob kissed her on the cheek, then disappeared to make drinks. I lit a cigarette and stood next to the stove; three hours of continuing cold had left an ache in my legs and arms. When Uncle Bob returned from the kitchen and handed me a glass of red wine, I took a big, grateful sip, and felt warmer and, right after that, sleepy.
“So,” said Uncle Bob. He rubbed his hands together and laughed. There was something impish about him, gleeful and young. It was hard for me to imagine him in his professional life, being competent and busy and medical. He was supposed to be an obstetrician.
We ate spaghetti and drank red wine.
“So how's Michael?” Spike said.
“Who the hell knows,” Uncle Bob answered glumly. He turned to me. “My son's a graduate student in East Asian languages. He's learning how to forget English. He only speaks Mandarin now.”
“I know,” I said. Michael had come to see Spike once. We took him to a Chinese restaurant, where he drank plum wine and refused to eat the food.
“I call him on the phone and he quacks like a duck,” Uncle Bob went on. “I'm supposed to learn goddamn Chinese to speak to my own son?” He kept looking at me. “I'm not an unreasonable man.”
Miriam leaned across the table and whispered loudly, “Michael has issues. Since his mother left.”
“He's sensitive,” Spike said.
“I'm sensitive, too,” said Uncle Bob. “I'm so sensitive I can hardly stand myself. As a matter of fact, everybody in this family is sensitive.”
“That's true,” Spike said.
Uncle Bob smiled broadly. “Take my wife,” he said, “please.” He laughed and I laughed, too, just to be polite. Miriam didn't. “She was so sensitive she had to move to California.” He spoke the word California in a mincing, high-pitched tone, and he put his hands up in the air, as if he were doing a little dance in celebration of the state. Miriam put her hand on his shoulder and he took it and touched it to his cheek, a sweet gesture, I thought. “Sunny California,” he said. “Going to California in my mind.”
“That's Carolina,” Spike said gently. Uncle Bob went into the kitchen and brought a large jug of wine to the table. Miriam— I assumed it was her — had made a little centerpiece of pine branches and there wasn't space for both, so Uncle Bob threw the centerpiece into the fireplace, where the needles melted and snapped, and set the jug down instead.
“Jesus Christ, Bob,” she said.
“Oh, lighten up,” he said. He poured us all more wine. “It's a wise man who buys in bulk,” he pronounced. “Ancient Chinese proverb.”
“Ancient Irish drinking,” said Miriam.
“Shut up, Miriam,” he said.
“So anyway, Miriam,” Spike said, dropping his cigarette ash into the remains of sauce on his plate, “how did you two meet?”
Miriam shrugged. “It's a small town. Everybody meets everybody else. And you? How did you and Lucy meet?”
Spike and I looked at each other. At the beginning our relationship had been a secret, and we had discovered that's how we like it, the world it made for the two of us. He had been my TA in “The Bible as Literature” the spring before. In class he said the Bible contained the greatest and most basic stories of our culture, then asked us to put our notes aside and retell stories from our reading to the class. Tell whatever you remember, he said. He walked around the room, pacing and talking, and I thought he was sweet and fierce and slightly terrifying, like a raccoon trapped in your basement. My friend Stephanie and I used to mock him outside of class. Spike? What the hell kind of name is Spike? We imagined some foolish woman having sex with him and moaning, Oh, Spike, give it to me, Spike. Then, all of a sudden, that woman was me.
“It's a small school,” I said to Miriam. “Everybody meets everybody else.”
Halfway through the semester I came upon Spike in the quad. It was early spring and the campus bloomed sedately with the first flowers. He sat under a tree with a bottle of wine in a paper bag, smoking a cigarette.
“Ruth, right?” he said when he saw me.
“Lucy,” I told him. “My name's Lucy.”
“I know.” I realized he was referring to the story I'd chosen to tell in class, Ruth and Naomi. Ruth said to Naomi, Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. I liked that story, the devotion in it, Ruth making that permanent promise.
“Are you allowed to do that — at school?” I said, looking down at the bottle.
“School,” Spike said. “Do you want a sip?”
“Okay,” I said. “But aren't you, you know, religious?”
Spike laughed. He passed the paper bag over to me, and I sat down next to him.
“It's just a divinity degree,” he said. “Not the seminary or anything.”
I took a swig from the bag and swished it around like mouthwash and winced. It was pretty bad wine. Spike laughed and told me I was funny. We spent all that summer together. Every night we sat on Spike's porch, drinking beer and talking in the dark. I never talked so much in my life: three o'clock in the morning, sometimes four o'clock. We'd fall asleep holding hands. More than once, after we had sex I cried, from the closeness of it.
“Must have been fate,” Uncle Bob said now, “because you are such a beautiful couple.” He refilled the wineglasses and toasted us silently.
“I don't believe in fate,” said Spike. “Or God. That's why I'm leaving school.”
“Shit, Spike,” said his uncle. “Nobody believes in God anymore. That doesn't mean it's not interesting.”
“Some people do,” said Miriam. Her red lipstick had worn off, except at the outlines of her mouth, and the real color of her lips was pale. “I do.”
“Sure,” Spike said, putting his elbows on the table in an irritated jerk. He ran his hands through his hair. “And fanatics and terrorists and people who wage wars.”
“That's not true,” Miriam said.