Eben Crownford chose Pennsylvania for its hills and over-stocked yard sales, for its apple butter, its flood museums, and most of all for its generous title, the Keystone State. It was never unlike Eben to underestimate the importance of nicknames: when he was five, he assigned everyone in kindergarten a nickname based purely upon physiognomy. His best friend back then was Stilts, a girl with the longest legs. They hadn’t spoken since he’d kissed her badly outside of astronomy in the eleventh grade.
Eben made crayons from home-heated wax, shaped them with his fingers while the stuff was still pliable, always careful to seal them with an EC, right on the flattened ends. He’d lived his entire life in a small boating town in Massachusetts, until rent became too high and so Eben moved ten miles north of Easton, Pennsylvania, ten miles north of the national Crayola Factory. If Eben had wanted to start a simplistic, God-fearing religion, he would have brought all his cardboard, black-suit-filled boxes to Lancaster, and if he’d wanted to design neo-modern homes, with strange red square couches and little to no closet space, he would have settled himself in right down the road from Fallingwater. He’d never been good with getting geography right.
But somehow, he managed to earn enough to buy a good flat-screen television, and after only three months he’d taken to buying name-brand groceries again.
Mostly it was the band of doing-it-themselves hipsters from the local high school who kept him going. They came with their ancient orange cars and Jewish T-shirts, walking awkwardly because of vintage shoes a size too small. Rather than just ringing on his doorbell, they would tap at the glass panes with the tips of their sunglasses. It was quiet enough that he could only hear them if first he’d heard their cars, and then had come prematurely to answer the door, and stood right behind it. Once inside, they would talk ironically about the weather, while picking through batches of Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber, and Stolen Patch Green. They were always most interested in the earthy tones. At the very least, they would spent sixty dollars.
The March after the move, he met a young businesswoman named Kate, who enjoyed breaking bread rather than cutting it, and waiting ten minutes for soup to cool instead of going right in and burning her tongue. She was short and blonde, with freckles running down her arms like splatters of copper wax clinging to a kettle. After nine months of dating, she moved in.
Eben enjoyed Kate. He had a blast with her. That’s what he told his mother when she asked if he was considering—as she delicately put it—renting a tuxedo in the near future. “But I’m having a blast with her,” he’d replied. Because his mother was hard of hearing, she took this to mean “I’m going to mass with her.” Frequent and sedulous church attendance was something that had always pleased her, and both left the conversation feeling triumphant.
