Cementville by Paulette Livers Page A

skinny too. And his fingernails. Lined with black grime. Must be a mechanic of some sort. She can only hope he won’t try to strike up a conversation.
    As a proscription against such a notion she cranes her head to the window, propping it against the cold glass, and closes her eyes. The man rifles through a filthy backpack and produces—judging from the soft crinkling paper sounds, for her eyes are shut tight—a homemade sandwich that must be wrapped in wax paper. Her nostrils flare a bit as they take in the smell of peanut butter and banana.
    She feels a tentative tap on the sleeve of her jacket and opens one eye. But she must be mistaken, because no, apparently he did not tap at all. The man is not offering her half his peanut butter and banana sandwich. Staring straight ahead, he chews politely with his lips closed, no smacking, which she’d almost expected. MaLou watches him lift the sandwich to his mouth, a gesture she would not have thought could contain diffidence, and imagines touching the rough knuckles, brushing a finger over the pale fluff of hair curling over the back of his hand. She tries to drift off.
    â€œI have an extra apple.”
    She jumps at the sound, fakes a startle, pretending to have been asleep. She inhales audibly and sits erect as if shaking off an unpleasant dream, her eyelids flickering in an exaggerated manner.
    â€œSorry. I thought you were awake.” The stranger leans deferentially in his seat away from her as if trying to respect MaLou’s personal space.
    â€œOh, no problem,” she says. “I need to wake up anyway. I don’t want to miss my stop. Do you know where we are?”
    â€œWe not five miles back passed Walton.”
    At least four hours to go.
    He reaches a hand over her side of the armrest and she flinches. But when she looks down, a small green apple settles in her lap, the kind she and Donnie collected as kids. They had ranged far and wide over the countryside, exploring abandoned farmhouses where daffodils or peonies bloomed faithfully in the spring as if they expected their people to come back. Sometimes she and her cousin came upon whole orchards, deserted and spooky, laden with fruit. MaLou picks up the apple in her lap. Black wormholes speckle its surface. Shepictures the young man next to her gathering apples on the side of the road this morning in the gray dawn. But it is May, apple season months away.
    â€œThanks,” she says, biting in with relish, surprised at the disappearance of proper reserve. She is hungry. She is on a Greyhound bus at five thirty in the morning. Who is she kidding about reserve? Peanut butter and banana would have gone good with this. “Where’d you get these?”
    â€œMy landlady. She calls them October apples. Stores them in her cellar, each wrapped in its own little paper collar.”
    â€œI didn’t know you could make them last so long.”
    â€œOh, she’s a wizard all right.” They sit in silence for a while. “Where you headed?” he says.
    â€œFuneral.”
    â€œAren’t we all.” He finishes off a second apple and wraps both cores in the wax paper from his sandwich. “Say, you’re not on your way to Cementville, are you?”
    â€œCousin,” she says, nodding, too surprised to lie, and what good would it do anyway?—they will be getting off the bus at the same place. Her heart might as well be lodged in her ears, as loud as it’s banging there inside her. A desolation she doesn’t want to feel and an odd attraction to this raggedy traveler skirmish for her attention.
    He holds out the open lunch sack and she drops her apple core in.
    â€œBrother,” he says.
    MaLou isn’t ready for this conversation. For all her familiarity with catastrophe—indeed, she has lately become concerned at the way she nearly craves the tragedies of strangers—she does not hanker to hear another story of family loss in this