Miranda and Joe met at middle school in Perkins, Oklahoma. Joe was a lumpy kid, not fat so much as unevenly proportioned. If his father hadn't been Deputy Chief of Police, Joe likely would have been made to eat the gym-hall hand soap—the diet imposed on both wusses and fat pusses by the school bully. As for Miranda, the schoolyard name for her was Bookmark. That was because, to know what page you're meant to be reading in class, you only had to look at her.

 

Miranda's father was the town's head librarian, and she'd inherited his love of order and classification—plus his quietly judging eyes. She quietly judged that Joe was some kid among many such kids, and paid him no attention. Meanwhile, Joe's only thought about Miranda was that she had no feeling for color. Her outfits always looked as wrong as the green and red of a stoplight illuminated both at once, and Miranda was, by all signs, oblivious. 

 

One day, things changed. A substitute teacher straight out of grad school or rehab (same tremors) resorted to asking what they wanted to be when they grew up.

 

When Joe's turn arrived, he said, "Trucker."

 

The room fell quiet, and a few kids snickered. Stick-up-their-ass families like Joe's did not drive thousands of miles delivering diapers and pancake mix.

 

Miranda read Joe and saw this wasn't a joke. It was a stance of grim rebellion that she understood. Joe was not his family; his story would be his own.

 

When her turn came, Miranda said, "Trucker."

 

And Joe looked across at her.

 

They were best friends for the rest of junior high. They'd combine their bagged lunches to make hybrid sandwiches whose bread couldn't quite hold their wild new fillings. The excess would drip down and forever mark whatever was spread open between them. This might be a game of Risk; or the porn they would graffiti with quotes from the Declaration of Independence then slide back under Joe's brother's mattress; or the sketches Joe would make, redesigning the roads to speed up traffic.

 

"Being a dork," Joe laughed, "Is easier with you."

 

Miranda cast him her look of clinical disapproval. A person could only be a dork, she said, if they looked at themselves from the outside. Live like that, and you are never centered in your own life.

 

Joe nodded devotion, and wished that he understood.

 

Then, in high school, Joe took up football.

 

This was the first time Joe had ever been weird in a way Miranda didn't get. Sure, Joe was big of foot, hand, and neck. Overall, though, there was about as much athletic promise in him as there was in a coat hanger.

 

Miranda would sit on the bleachers, waiting for Joe to finish drills, and swipe impatiently through the homework she found increasingly low-bar—then Joe's homework, too. Whenever she looked up, Joe would be getting slammed five ways at once. So Miranda stopped looking up, and hoped that Joe would let this go, whatever it was, before his neck got broken.

 

After practice, Joe would be punch-drunk and gloating adrenaline. They'd go to the library, where Miranda's dad was struggling later and later into the night with shelving returns. Or they'd go to the diner where Miranda helped out a few nights a week for college money. Knowing his father's new girlfriend would be at home, oozing lines about "transformative love" with no bra on under her cashmere, Joe sat at the counter, drawing intricate diagrams of imagined car engines. Announcing that he had to stay in shape, he'd righteously order a frilly salad. Then he'd suck on Sweet'n Low packets when that wasn't enough. A babe parade from school would come and go for cherry soda, and if one of them turned toward Joe at all, it was only to grab an extra straw. But Joe watched them intensely, and Miranda, more discreetly, watched Joe the same way. Once, Joe had caught her looking, and they shared a strange smile, half-understood things in it.

 

Joe the jock. Of all the directions Miranda figured they each might go, that was not among them. 

 

In their senior year, Joe finally made the JV sheet. Cornerback. He ran messily and from his gut, like a fleeing animal. "Scamp," his teammates called him.

 

He had the letterman jacket. He had the girl: a redhead with an astronomical tattoo, which was about as deep as they needed to be for Joe anymore. And he still had Miranda. They'd drifted, their friendship looser and less urgent now. But they still caught up in the school hall, exchanging dull headlines from local newspapers, as was their lifelong thing.

 

"Council Vetoes Repainting Hydrant," Joe would still deadpan, and Miranda would still laugh. If, when he rejoined his teammates, they looked sideways at the barnyard vibe of Miranda's shoes or the ink smears on her shirt cuffs, Joe shrugged: she's like a sister to me. When they didn't get that, Joe would add: And her dad is sick.

 

Yes, Miranda's dad was sick. The muscle weakness complicating his work at the library had been identified as multiple sclerosis. The doctors had piled up numbers in their prognosis—two years, five, ten—and the future could take its pick. Miranda didn't want to leave for college, but her parents were adamant: Logan would live longer if he knew Miranda was out there, going at her own life with both hands.

 

The night before Miranda left for Yale, Joe stopped by. He was taking some time out to think about college, still hadn't found a design for the future that excited him.

 

All the dead lifts and the protein shakes... Joe's legs barely fit under the table. For a while there was small talk and thumbnailing faces into the dinner grapes. Then, in headline voice, Joe said, "Boy misses girl after she leaves this little town."

 

And they looked at each other. 

 

Their small talk had resumed, but for weeks afterward, that look kept arriving again in Joe. As he sat at stoplights, back seat full of muscled-up guys facing the same vista: graduation like the end of a pier. As his fingertip doodled on his girlfriend's hair after sex that felt like pushups. When his father padlocked the refrigerator, requesting fifty dollars a week for the key.

 

At the fraying end of summer, Joe knew what to do.

 

A full-time position was open at the town library. Duties were everything Joe had once done for free. Pay would cover an RV rental at the edge of town, plus Clif bars and toilet paper.

 

No, he couldn't live that way for long. But, until he'd figured out a future that fit, he'd put his time where it would mean something to Miranda.

 

Her dad still ran the library from his wheelchair.

 

He eyed Joe steadily over the application form and asked—no smile—why Joe was suited to this position.

 

"Because I love your daughter," Joe said in another world. "And precious to her is precious to me, too."

 

This world's Joe said, "I got pins," and made a Popeye shape.

 

"And Miranda has in no way put you up to this."

"She don't even know I'm here."

 

After a moment, Logan observed that, in shelving at least, Joe knew what he was doing. The job was his. 

 

Joe called Miranda to tell her the news. Party noise when she answered, but she went out onto the fire escape, left it all behind.

 

"You would not believe," she laughed, "the number of trees here."

Joe pictured that, then laughed, too. "How many d'you really need?"

"Oh, one. Absolutely! One good tree will do me."

"You'll tell me when you've found it, eh? Where it is, your good tree."

She fell quiet. Half voice now, "Don't be silly, Joe. I never found anything good without you. You'll be with me."

Joe said, "Miranda..."

 

He got to his feet to say it. There was something she should know.