I think they’re funny. I also love the fall. All month I’ve been using the shimmery copper pan in my eye shadow palette, trying to give my eyelids the same glow of sunset gently slanting over a pumpkin patch.
My bedroom floor is a mess of soft pullover sweaters that make me feel like a sea captain, knee-high boots, and infinity scarves. Every meal contains some hint of pumpkin spice. If I’m not ingesting pumpkin, I’m breathing it in like an addict, lining every available surface of my home with candles that smell like food. Apple pie, pumpkin pie, pumpkin spice, apple pumpkin.
My aesthetic is aggressively, unapologetically basic. Some of it stems from a lady at a MAC counter telling me I’m an autumn, because of my amber eyes and long, stick-straight hair the color of pecans, but I know in my leaf-ogling, beanie-loving, pumpkin-gorging soul that I’d be a basic bitch even if I had neutral undertones. It’s in my DNA.
And yet I don’t feel like passing out candy on Halloween. I haven’t even decorated, which used to be one of my favorite things to do at the start of a season. I might end up spending the evening alone in sweats, watching bad TV while Nicholas is off playing Gears of War at a friend’s house, or we might turn in before nine p.m. after passing out cheap, travel-size toothbrushes and floss to disappointed children.
“Maybe,” I say at last, because I no longer care what I do. I could be riding a roller coaster or writing a grocery list and my enthusiasm level would look the same. The thought depresses me, but what depresses me more is that I’m not going to do anything about it.
“I would if I lived on a busier street,” he replies. “I don’t get any trick-or-treaters out where I live.”
There’s no such thing as a busy street in Morris. We’re so small, you’d be hard pressed to find us on a city map of Wisconsin. We only have two stoplights.
Headlights roll by, tires spitting up waves of water like Moses parting the Red Sea. If I were driving I definitely would have pulled into a parking lot forever ago and waited this out. But Leon is completely at ease. I wonder if he retains this same pleasant expression when he chops people up into bits and slides their oozing remains down a cutting board into his trunk.
Not that Leon has ever given me any reason to be particularly wary of him. I should be making polite inquiries about where he lives or something like that, but I’ve got one eye on the emerald numbers of his digital clock and I’m wondering if Nicholas is home yet, because I’m hoping desperately that he isn’t. The Junk Yard opens at ten and closes at six every day except for Saturdays, when it’s open from eleven to seven.
Nicholas is a dentist at Rise and Smile Dentistry on the main road we’re on now, Langley, and he gets off at six. Usually I beat him home because he stops at his parents’ house to give his mother a coffee or to read over some confusing letter she got in the mail or whatever it is she’s squawking at him about on any given day. If she goes more than twenty-four hours without seeing him her operating system fails.
This morning I found one of my tires completely flat. Standing there staring at it, I was transported to a year ago when Nicholas remarked that he ought to teach me how to change a tire. Offended by his assumption that I didn’t already know how to change a tire, I set him straight and informed him that I’ve known for years how to do that. I’m a modern, responsible, self-sufficient woman. I don’t need a man to help me with vehicular maintenance.
The thing is, I do not actually know how to change a tire. The weather this morning was pleasant and I had no clue it was going to rain, so I decided to walk—which is what brings me to my current predicament in Leon’s car, because no way was I going to walk home. This sweater is cashmere.
My small lie about tires got a bit out of hand when Nicholas’s dad, who has deplorably antiquated beliefs, commented that women don’t know how to change their oil. In return I said, “Excuse you! I change my oil all the time.” I said it for feminism. No one can blame me.