Getting out of Rockford

Emma Baker was five years older than me. She lived down the street, in a white stucco house owned by her mother. Mrs. Baker worked all the time, but I would see her some Saturday mornings in the front lawn, waiting for her boyfriend smoking a cigarette or reading a magazine. My mother must have felt for Emma because she was prone to bringing her up in a moment of spontaneity. “She’s such a nice girl,” she would mention wistfully. I suppose she’d always wanted a daughter.
It was no surprise then that even after the awkward play dates of our earlier years Emma was ever present in my life. Up until she turned twenty she would be in and out of my house about once a week, a dramatic decline from her daily presence when I was in middle school. Her presence was always simple, bordering on homely. She must have been well read or brainy, because from my understanding she associated little with her peers. After she finished high school, Emma worked at the Burger King. When my friends and I would stop through out on some mischief, she’d wave a small wave at me from the drive through. I didn’t sit with her and play Legos anymore, but some Sundays she would float into the kitchen with an air of purpose and, seeing me there, would stop and smile her wan freckled smile, “Hey Billy-bear.”
The summer after my first year of high school she left Rockford for good. She had finally put together money to start college at Illinois State. The day before she left, Emma told me that I had been like a brother to her, though my fifteen-year-old self felt emotionally unaccomplished. It was a brief farewell, but I remember it clearly, down to the way her straight blond hair hung past her shoulders, making her pretty on our summer lawn. My mother cried those tears of feminine obligation as she hugged Emma, “Be good honey, you’re such a smart girl.”
I only ever saw Emma one time after that, though my mother told me she wrote on and off. It was two days after my thirtieth birthday in a Starbucks on Clark Street (I had moved to Chicago after graduate school). Her familiar smell caught me off guard, and I saw her slip out the door into a grey winter afternoon. As she walked past the window I still saw that warm silence, reassuring like when we watched movies in our pajamas, twenty-five years ago.