“You were always looking up at clouds when we used to run,” Tiffany says, “so I thought you might like to be able to tell the difference between the shapes.”
With excitement, I rotate the cover upward so I can read the first heavily laminated page. After reading all about the four basic cloud shapes—stratus, nimbus, cumulus, and cirrus—after looking at all the beautiful pictures documenting the different variations of the four groups, somehow Tiffany and I end up lying on our backs in the middle of the exact soccer field I used to play on when I was a kid. We look up at the sky, and it’s a sheet of winter gray, but Tiffany says maybe if we wait long enough, a shape will break free, and we will be able to identify the single cloud using my new Skywatcher’s Cloud Chart. We lie there on the frozen ground for a very long time, waiting, but all we see up in the sky is the solid gray blanket, which my new cloud chart identifies as a nimbostratus—“a gray cloud mass from which widespread and continuous rain or snow falls.”
After a time, Tiffany’s head ends up on my chest, and my arm ends up around her shoulders so that I am pulling her body close to mine. We shiver together alone on the field for what seems like hours. When it begins to snow, the flakes fall huge and fast. Almost immediately the field turns white, and this is when Tiffany whispers the strangest thing. She says, “I need you, Pat Peoples; I need you so fucking bad,” and then she begins to cry hot tears onto my skin as she kisses my neck softly and sniffles.
It is a strange thing for her to say, so far removed from a regular woman’s “I love you,” and yet probably more true. It feels good to hold Tiffany close to me, and I remember what my mother said back when I tried to get rid of my friend by asking her to go to the diner with me. Mom said, “You need friends, Pat. Everybody does.”
I also remember that Tiffany lied to me for many weeks; I remember the awful story Ronnie told me about Tiffany’s dismissal from work and what she admitted to in her most recent letter; I remember just how bizarre my friendship with Tiffany has been—but then I remember that no one else but Tiffany could really even come close to understanding how I feel after losing Nikki forever. I remember that apart time is finally over, and while Nikki is gone for good, I still have a woman in my arms who has suffered greatly and desperately needs to believe once again that she is beautiful. In my arms is a woman who has given me a Skywatcher’s Cloud Chart, a woman who knows all my secrets, a woman who knows just how messed up my mind is, how many pills I’m on, and yet she allows me to hold her anyway. There’s something honest about all of this, and I cannot imagine any other woman lying in the middle of a frozen soccer field with me—in the middle of a snowstorm even—impossibly hoping to see a single cloud break free of a nimbostratus.
Nikki would not have done this for me, not even on her best day.
So I pull Tiffany a little closer, kiss the hard spot between her perfectly plucked eyebrows, and after a deep breath, I say, “I think I need you too.”
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the kin, friends, mentors, and professionals who helped me along the way and made this read possible: Sarah Crichton, Kathy Daneman, Cailey Hall, and everyone else at FSG; Doug Stewart, Seth Fishman, and everyone else at Sterling Lord Literistic; Al, Dad Dog, Mom, Meg, Micah, Kelly, Barb and Peague, Jim Smith, Bill and Mo Rhoda, “Peruvian Scott” Humfeld, “Canadian Scott” Caldwell, Tim and Beth Rayworth, Myfanwy Collins, Richard Panek, Rachel Pollack, Bess Reed Currence (B), Duffy, Flem, Scorso, Helena White, “The WMs”—Jean Wertz, Wally Wilhoit, Kalela Williams, Karen Terrey, Beth Bigler, and Tom Léger—Dave Tavani, Lori Litchman, Alan Barstow, Larz and Andrea, Corey and Jen, Ben and Jess, Uncle Dave, Aunt Carlotta, Uncle Pete, and my grandparents, Dink and H.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Quick has lived his whole life—born, raised, and educated—in and around the City of Brotherly Love, except when he did his M.F.A. in New England and separation anxiety produced this book. He is an avid Eagles fan and lives with his wife in South Jersey—a fifteen-minute drive from Lincoln Financial Field. Go Birds! This is his first novel.