Franklin unlocked the driver door and opened it, still flustered, and hit a button on his armrest that unlocked Kim’s door. Before he got in, he placed a hand on the roof of the Audi and poised himself to speak. “I fucking hate kids,” he said. “Let me be clear on that. They should be kept somewhere until they’re twelve. Like a bunker. Until they’re at least twelve.”
Franklin drove them to the entrance of the neighborhood, then turned in a direction opposite from the museum’s. Kim knew which way the city was, and this wasn’t it.
“So I decided we’re not going to do the extra credit.” Franklin was picking things out of the cup holders in the console — gum wrappers, paperclips, parking garage cards — and tossing them into the back of the car. “I hope you didn’t get your heart set on seeing paintings. My grade is beyond help. It would be a waste of time in that respect. And really, you’ve seen one museum, you’ve seen them all.”
There was a huge book on the floorboard by Kim’s feet. She picked it up with two hands and twisted around so she could set it on the back seat. “Okay,” she said. “So no museum.”
“We can find a better use for a nice day like this, so here’s what I’m thinking. We go to this farm I know where we can get fresh fruit, then we go to this… well, it’s like a sculpture garden, and then we’ll have a picnic where we can eat the fruit we got at the farm. It doesn’t sound like much of an itinerary, but believe me, it’ll be enough.”
Kim couldn’t help but laugh. Nothing was funny. She felt a little snuck up on. “I’m not the one with a GPA to think about,” she told Franklin.
“Don’t remind me. Do me a favor: I’m going to take a vacation from GPAs and permanent records today. Let’s not mention any of that.”
Kim ran her window down with the button, then changed her mind and rolled it back up. She had a feeling she should protest, that she shouldn’t allow herself to be swept along on this new course, but the feeling was too remote. She didn’t know what the grounds for the protest would be. She looked over at Franklin, and his face betrayed nothing at all, just concentration on the road, peaceful focus. There was something about him that seemed above dishonesty, like he wouldn’t bother with it.
“Hope you don’t mind if we abstain from the radio today,” he said. “I’m taking an indefinite break from music. I think I listened to too much of it in too compressed a time frame. I’m really sick of songs.”
They proceeded over a couple overpasses, then a low bridge that spanned a still river. They were taking a back way out of the suburbs. There were a bunch of quiet apartment complexes out here that were neither upscale nor crummy. A big hardware store that didn’t seem open for business yet. Franklin had a firm grip on the top of the steering wheel, his wiry forearm muscles tensed. He had wispy sideburns, the kind you’d trim with scissors rather than shave. His lips were bright red, his skin healthy-looking against his shirt. Kim suddenly thought about how she looked, what she was wearing. Her toenails were freshly painted and her navy blue shorts were probably a little shorter than they should’ve been for an outing with a teenage boy, especially when she was sitting down. She rested her hands on her thighs and tugged at the material. She’d packed these shorts, she remembered, thinking she and Rita might go down to the lake, to get some sun and catch up. Turned out they hadn’t gone anywhere alone, hadn’t done a bit of catching up.
They passed an ice cream stand with a lone customer standing in front of it, then a big empty lot with a hill of reddish lawn mulch at its center. There was a part of Kim that was happy in a simple way, at being away from Galesburg and now away from Rita and her friends, getting driven around on a warming aimless weekday. The houses around them were growing austere, the yards turning into fields. Franklin slowed the car in front of an out-of-place Tudor-style strip mall, but he didn’t pull into it. Just past the mall he made a left, and they rolled down a bumpy lane lined with homes of all styles and sizes. Some of the yards were overgrown and strewn with tools or toys, and some were neat as a pin. They passed under a series of huge shade trees, which gave Kim the feeling of driving through a tunnel, and when they came out into the sun again Franklin raised his hand and pointed excitedly.
“The red pickup means she’s home,” he said. “This is our day. Luck is playing nice with us.”
He pulled onto the pale dirt drive and put the car in park. The house had a shingled roof and beige siding. There was a chimney on one side that seemed too big. Franklin squirmed in his seat, getting at one of his pants pockets, and yanked out the money Rita had given him.
“You don’t mind if lunch is vegetarian, do you? I know some people like a more substantial midday meal.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” Kim said, sounding odd to herself. This wasn’t an expression she ever used.
“I have a picnic spot in mind, but maybe when we’re out there we’ll see something better. A covered bridge or some such, or a broken-down tractor. Something in that ballpark.” He unfolded the cash. “Thirty bucks. That ought to do it. Two people like us ought to be able to have a rewarding day for less than thirty dollars. There was a show on TV like that, where this lady tried to do a day in different cities for thirty dollars. I think it was thirty. She had to leave a crappy tip if she went to a restaurant.”
Kim thought she remembered the show Franklin was talking about. For years she’d been trying to get herself to watch more TV, but none of it seemed intended for her. She wasn’t a target audience, she supposed — there wasn’t a spinster-in-training-of-above-average-intelligence demographic. She hardly even watched movies anymore.
Franklin led her around the back of the house, past a latticework apparatus covered in ivy. In the yard they found an old woman sitting in a lawn chair. The woman set her book aside, but didn’t stand up. She told them everything was the same price and sold by the bin, and you could fill your bin as much as you could manage not to spill. The old woman wore her hair up in a soft bun, and her jewelry was all of a set, silver with large scarlet stones. Franklin went and grabbed a bin, and stepped over to a row of crates that contained different sorts of onions. He picked a few up and sniffed them with gusto.
Kim heard music from inside the old woman’s house — dreamy electric guitar, Hawaiian-sounding. She let Franklin wander off by himself to choose the fruit, and stood by the lawn chair as the woman began talking as though continuing a conversation that had been interrupted an hour before. She told Kim she was taking a class at the junior college about the Mayans and the Aztecs. She was able to attend the class for free because she was old. The teacher was a handsome Spanish guy with an accent, who often told hunting stories. The woman said the seasons had been perfect lately. Fall and winter and spring, all perfect. Right on time, like the movements of a symphony. Franklin was at the far end of the crates now, holding in one hand a vegetable Kim didn’t recognize. He was spindly, too tall, but she liked that there wasn’t a bit of put-on in his mannerisms, no practiced reluctance, no breeziness, no mope. Perhaps he’d given up on being something other than himself.
“Your boy there’s a spitting image of my first husband. When I first met him, I mean. In those days, you got married young. You didn’t wait until you had a million dollars and all your towels matched. And of course people dressed different. He was always wearing a pressed white shirt and a vest and good shoes.”
The old woman cautiously pulled a stick out of her bun and let the hair fall in sections down her back. She set the stick on the table beside her. It was a regular stick from outside; it looked like a twig from the oak tree that was shading this portion of the yard. Kim had no idea if the woman thought Franklin was her son or her brother or what.
“He died young, in his forties. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give for one more day with that man. I knew the first time he held my hand there’d never be anything else like him, and I was right.”
Franklin walked up close then, carrying the bin and eating a strawberry. He gave the woman a twenty and thanked her, and she tucked the money into the pages of her book.
As they were walking back around to the car, Kim noticed there were flowers in the bin. Daffodils, the same color as Franklin’s shirt. As soon as Franklin found a place for the bin in the back seat, he emerged and presented the bouquet to Kim. He wore a daffy, bright-eyed expression, bowing slightly. Kim looked at him and at the flowers, and took them.
“I thought you might like these because you’re a woman and women enjoy when men buy them flowers. That’s one of those things you can depend on. It’ll never change. It crosses cultures.”
The stems of the daffodils were warm in Kim’s hand, still alive and doing the work they’d been doing before they’d been cut. “What if the man’s mother bought the flowers? Does the woman still enjoy it then?”
Franklin wanted to grin. “I don’t think when a woman gets flowers, she’s supposed to worry about exactly who financed them. Seems like a vulgar thing to worry about. It’s just something simple that both parties can feel good about.”
Kim could remember when Franklin was a toddler, could recall Rita forcing him to be normal, forcing him to eat what the other kids ate and play with balls and stare at cartoons. She couldn’t believe that that little kid was the guy standing in front of her. She couldn’t believe that so much time had passed. He was taking her out for the day, buying her lunch, giving her flowers. His expression was open and artless, without agenda, and maybe that’s what was making Kim feel disarmed. Kim was the adult and should’ve been the one steering the direction of the day. She found herself thanking Franklin for the daffodils, putting her face near them to breathe them in. She found herself trying to remember the last time she’d received flowers. Valentine’s Day a couple years ago — the obligatory roses, probably from the supermarket, picked up at the last minute.