Kat dropped us off at home and then left with a jaunty wave before I realized I was still wearing Jace's jacket. That meant I was going to have to track him down tomorrow in order to give it back to him. At least he'd seemed relatively normal—surprisingly so in comparison to Kat.
I shook my head as I followed Ari into the house. I never would have guessed when I woke up that morning that I was going to end up getting a ride home in a sports car from a crazy person.
Dad had turned the thermostat down again which meant two things. First that the house was downright cold, and second that he'd had a bad day at work yesterday and had been more worried about his job than he usually was when he got home. The thermostat had become the perfect barometer of how Dad was doing professionally, and finding out that he'd lowered it again put a damper on my mood faster than anything else could have.
Ari hadn't put two and two together yet, but it was only a matter of time. For now she just complained as she went about cooking dinner for us. At least she'd realized that the thermostat was a big deal, even if she hadn't figured out why yet. She would spend the evening complaining, but that was all she would do.
It was cold enough that I didn't even think of taking off my jacket until we'd finished eating, and even then I probably wouldn't have realized I was still wearing it if I hadn't had to wash the dishes. I pulled it off and hung it over the back of my chair and immediately felt a sense of loss.
It was the smell that did it more than anything else. It smelled like leather, cologne, and sunshine, like someone had packaged all of the best things about boys and then slathered it over the jacket, working the scent deep into the leather.
It was the kind of jacket that you sometimes saw in old movies, a jacket that was made to withstand decades of use, a jacket you could wear on a motorcycle and know that it would protect you from the pavement if you dumped the bike over doing sixty-five. The black leather had been somehow doing more than just protecting me from the cold air inside our house. It had been cushioning me from all of the worries you expect a seventeen-year-old girl with no mother, no social life, and an overworked father to suffer from.
For a little while I'd been living wholly in the moment rather than worrying about what might be barreling towards us with all of the momentum of a freight train. It had been nice.
I finished the dishes in record time, hoping that I'd be able to recapture that feeling by putting Jace's jacket back on, but I had no such luck. The jacket still smelled like a little piece of heaven, and it felt almost like I had Jace's arms wrapped around me, but that wasn't enough to distract me from all of my worries.
Ari didn't comment about the jacket until later that night. I'd finished up the last of my homework and was slowly pulling it off so that I could change into my pajamas when she broke the easy silence between us.
"So Kat's brother must really be something…"
"What makes you say that, runt?"
She stuck her tongue out at me, but didn't let the much-hated nickname sidetrack her as she followed me into the bathroom.
"Oh nothing much, just the fact that you've worn his jacket all night, the fact that you're obviously wishing you could get away with wearing it to bed…"
"I am not!"
"Yes, you are, but there's no need to get so defensive. There isn't anything wrong with liking a boy."
"It's comments like those that prove it's a good thing I'm around to keep you from getting swept up in some torrid romance that leaves you in Las Vegas divorced before the one-week anniversary of your marriage, runt. I don't have the time and we don't have the money for me to start mooning after Jace or any other boy."
I squirted a little toothpaste onto my toothbrush and tossed the tube to Ari with more force than I usually used. She easily plucked it out of the air and rolled her eyes at me.
"Isn't that the point of having a boyfriend? Don't they pay for everything?"
"Maybe in the movies that's the way it works, but these days it's more like fifty-fifty."
"You don't know that."
She was right. It wasn't like I had any experience dating, and I didn't have any close friends—female or otherwise—to live vicariously through, but it sure seemed like the girls I watched from afar spent a lot of time and money chasing the objects of their affection.
For once being speechless turned out to work in my favor. Ari sighed. "You're right. Damn feminists. They should have stopped pushing so hard a couple of decades ago."
"What, you'd rather live back in the days when women couldn't vote?"
"Nope, after women got the vote, but before men stopped being chivalrous."
I finished washing my face and used a towel to pat my face dry. "I'm not sure there was ever any such time period."
"Sure there was. I have it on good authority that there was a block of three whole years where everything was perfect. Mom told me all about it—she called it the golden age."
There was one thing that was guaranteed to instantly shut down any conversation around our house. Mom. Dad and I had gotten really good at not mentioning her, but Ari still sometimes forgot the unspoken rule.
She realized what she'd said almost as soon as she'd said it, but by then it was too late. "I'm sorry, Selene. I wasn't thinking."
I shrugged. "It's okay. It's not like you don't miss her too."
Ari followed me to our cramped little bedroom and dropped down onto her bed. "Sometimes I wonder what things would have been like if she never had cancer. No medical debts, no second mortgage, Dad working more reasonable hours."
I tried to blink the impending tears away. It didn't seem to be working. I turned off the lights so she wouldn't be able to see me and made my cautious way over to my bed.
"We wouldn't still be living in Cold Springs. Without all of the debt Mom would have been able to convince Dad to go get a job somewhere else."
It was a seductive vision. A world where we weren't beyond broke, a world where Sandra was a non-issue in my life, a world where my mom was still around to have some of the awkward conversations that dads weren't very well-equipped to have with their daughters.
I felt the tears break free and trickle down onto my pillow. I would have been happy to just let the conversation die right there. I needed the barrier of silence to shelter me while I tried to put myself back together.
Ari, on the other hand, seemed to have an ongoing need to talk about what had happened, a need that neither Dad nor I had been willing—or able—to fulfill. Apparently she felt like the conversation so far meant that all of the usual rules were off.
"It's been almost five years. I still remember what she looks like because I sometimes sneak into Dad's bedroom and go through the picture albums hidden in the back of his closet. I don't remember what she sounded like though. Do you remember, Selene?"
There was a pleading note to Ari's voice that made me want to say yes, but I couldn't bring myself to lie to her. Not now, not after so many years of always trying to be honest with my little sister about what had happened to our mother and what it was going to mean for us.
My voice came out rough. "I'm sorry, I don't. I don't really even remember what she looked like anymore. All I remember is the way she made me feel. No matter where we went, as long as Mom was there, it always felt like we were home."