I blinked. “Don’t do that,” I said. “It’s really not necessary.”
“I just meant … I’m just …” He stopped talking, thankfully, as his face flushed pink, then a deeper red. “Sorry. It was just an expression.”
“I know,” I said. He was still pink. “I’m just joking around.”
“Oh.” He cleared his throat, then gave me a smile. “Anyway, it’s just been sort of a hard trip so far. This will help. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I started the engine and we pulled away from Gert’s, back onto the highway towards Colby. I’d driven a couple of blocks before I said, “So which bracelets did you pick?”
“Bracelets?” A beat. “Oh, right! Yeah, the bracelets. These two.” He held up one with green beads, another with white. “I wasn’t going to buy any. But they looked sort of sad, set up like they were there.”
I kept my eyes on the road ahead, which was dark, no coming traffic. “His daughter makes them. Rachel. She went to school with my sister Amber until she had this accident the summer before eleventh grade.”
“Accident,” he repeated.
I nodded.
“What happened?”
I tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “She was riding her bike home from her boyfriend’s one night and got hit by a drunk driver.”
Theo looked back down at his bracelets. “God. That’s awful.”
“It was. The guy that hit her just left her in the road, like an animal.” I cleared my throat. “Went back to his hotel, parked his bashed-up car, then passed out in his room. Didn’t even remember getting behind the wheel when the cops finally tracked him down.”
“He was a tourist?”
I nodded. “She recovered in some ways, but her head injury was pretty severe. She started making the bracelets when she was in rehab. There’s something in the patterns, the braiding, the colors … it helps her. Or so her mom says.”
We were coming up to the outer edge of Colby now, where neighborhoods began and lights gradually became more and more visible. I tried to think of all the times I’d driven down this road, coming back home from one place or another. It seemed it was always this time of night, the air sweet and warm whistling through my half-open window, but I knew that wasn’t true. There were winters and falls and springs, too. I just never remembered them.
I was so lost, thinking this, that when I heard a horn give out a long beeeeeep as it passed us, I jumped. Glancing in my rearview, I saw Luke’s truck. I slowed down.
“Everything okay?” Theo asked me.
“Yeah, it’s fine,” I said, glancing back again. Luke had turned around, was behind now, catching up fast. He flicked his headlights, brights on and off, and I put on my signal, turning into the empty lot of Coastal Federal Bank. A beat after I parked, he pulled up beside us.
“What’s with the beeping?” I said to him, rolling down my window.
“What’s with not answering my text?” he replied, equally annoyed. He leaned forward, looking at Theo and his milk crate. “I thought we were doing dinner.”
“I told you I had to work late.”
“When?”
“When I texted you back?” He shook his head. I sighed, then pulled out my phone to show him proof. There, on the screen, was my response to his message. Unsent.
“Whoops,” I said, holding it up. “It didn’t go through.”
“You don’t say,” he replied. I made a face, which he gave right back to me. “So you were working. Doing what? Delivering milk?”
I just looked at him. “Luke.”
“Actually,” Theo said—as I watched a wave of irritation move across Luke’s face at the sound of his voice—“Emaline was showing me some local places. For our documentary? She took me to this store, where I found this, which references directly some of Clyde’s work. It’s pretty amazing, actually.”
Luke just stared at him for a second, then turned his attention back to me. “I’m going home. Call me later?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
With that, he shifted into reverse and backed away from us. I watched him pull back out onto the road, tires squealing slightly. Then he punched it and was gone.
Theo and I sat there, right beneath the Coastal Federal sign, as it informed us that it was 9:07 and 81 degrees. Then twice. Three times. Finally he said, “Well, that was a bit awkward.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, although in truth, it was unlike Luke to be visibly annoyed, ever, about anything.
“I’m sorry if hanging out tonight caused a problem for you,” Theo said.
“It didn’t,” I said.
“He didn’t seem very happy.”
“He’ll be fine.”
I backed up, then turned onto the main road. Now that we were close to town, there were more cars, there was more life, people coming home from dinner or going out to the clubs. As we pulled up to a stoplight, Theo said, “You guys been together a long time.”
It wasn’t a question. But I answered it like it was, saying, “Since ninth grade.”
“Wow.” He sat back, exhaling. “I can’t even imagine still being with any of the girls I liked back in ninth grade.”
“No?”
He winced. “Ugh. No. But then again, I was into the skinny, mean types. Who’ve probably just gotten skinnier and meaner.”
“Or fatter and nicer.”
“Maybe.” He looked down at the bracelets resting over the edge of the milk crate. “Don’t have an interest in finding out, though. I’d be happy if I never had to see anyone from high school again.”
“Really,” I said. “Aren’t you only, like, a couple of years out, though?”
“Doesn’t matter. Even in ten years, I still won’t want to see any of those people.”
The light changed and we moved forward.
“Sounds like it was pretty bad.”
“There just wasn’t much for me there,” he said. “It was jock-centric, seriously elitist. As a computer geek into the history of cinema and my trombone, I functioned mostly as a school-wide joke or a punching bag. Usually both.”
I glanced over at him. “Trombone? Really?”
“It’s an incredibly underappreciated member of the brass family.”
I didn’t even know what to say to that.
“I know.” He sighed. “I had no idea how to be cool. It was like I wanted to be beat up.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to. I heard it plenty, usually just before someone slammed my face into a locker.” His phone buzzed and he pulled it out, glancing at the screen. “College, though, is awesome. Plenty of geeks. No lockers. Much better.”
“Good to hear,” I replied. “I leave at the end of August.”
“You’ll love it,” he told me. “A whole new world. I promise.”
I nodded, slowing for a light as he typed a response to whatever text he’d gotten. I knew I should have told him that, really, the next four years wouldn’t exactly be that kind of sea change for me. Not at East U, anyway. But it was one thing for me to share my past in Colby with Theo; the future, as always, was different. I thought of the guys at the fish house, Rachel Gertmann at her table. It seemed like things either stayed just the same or changed irrevocably. And like most times I found myself with hard choices, I just wished there was something clear and easy, right in between.
8
“WHERE’S LUKE?”
This, apparently, was the million-dollar question, although I hadn’t expected Benji to ask it. At least, not the very first second he saw me. I hadn’t even gotten all the way up Miss Ruth’s walk yet.
“He got called into work,” I said. “Pool cleaning emergency.”
Benji gave me a doubtful look. I knew this was a bad lie, but I didn’t know where Luke was, as he was not returning my phone calls or texts. Mr. Easygoing apparently was not so much right now, at least when it came to bumping into me and Theo.
“If you ask me, he??
?s just being a big baby,” Morris had said earlier, when I’d told him and Daisy about what happened. We were on a bench outside Wave Nails, where Daisy was about to start her gyno shift.
“I didn’t ask you,” I told him.
“I think,” Daisy said, speaking around the bobby pin in her mouth as she twisted her hair up in a knot, “that Luke did overreact, a bit. But look at it from his side. You ignored his text to go out with another guy. He was upset.”
“Like a big ol’ baby,” Morris added.
I ignored this, turning back to Daisy. “I told him it was a mistake, that I thought the text went through. I didn’t even want to take Theo out in the first place. I got totally pushed into it.”
“I know that.” She removed the bobby pin, reaching up to slide it into the knot. “But Luke didn’t until after he saw you. So he’d already had a chance to take things his way.”
I rolled my eyes. Behind us, a moped whined past. Morris watched it, then said, “You know, they’re really not that annoying.”
“Yes, they are,” Daisy and I said in unison.
“If he insists on ignoring me, though,” I went on, “I can’t apologize. So what do I do?”
“Just give him some space and time to cool off,” Daisy told me. “You know he will. It’s Luke.”
She was right, of course. It was just a misunderstanding, exacerbated by both of us being tired at the end of a long workday. No big deal. And yet, I still felt uneasy as I walked up the steps to Miss Ruth’s wide front porch, where Benji was waiting for me in the porch swing. He, too, looked down in the dumps. Apparently, all the men in my life had PMS.
“Where’s your dad?” I asked him.
Benji tilted his head towards the front door, which was slightly ajar, the screen closed over it. “On the phone with Mom.”
“How’s she doing?”
He shrugged, kicking at the floor with his sneakers. The swing creaked as he pushed himself back a bit. “They always end up on the phone forever.”
“Oh.” I looked at the door again. “Maybe I’ll just stick my head in, tell him we’re going out for a bit?”
This got his attention. “Really? We can go ahead and go?”
“Can’t hurt to ask. Wait here.” I went over to the door, eased the screen open, and stepped inside. The house was dimly lit, but looked pretty much the same as I remembered it: dark hardwood floors, gauzy window treatments, furniture that looked heavy. Remembering my previous conversation with my father, I checked the doorknob. It was fine.
“—just don’t see the point, is what I’m saying,” I heard him say suddenly, from the other end of the hallway. I stopped, not wanting to eavesdrop even as I realized I already was. “It’s a long trip to make for just a couple of days, and I thought we agreed … well, that was my understanding. It’s not working. You coming down here, no matter the pretense, won’t change that.”
Yikes, I thought, looking back out at Benji. My father was quiet for a moment, but I could hear him in the kitchen, pacing as he talked.
“Yes, I know. I don’t want to do that either. But do you really think we can be here, together, and have him not be aware of what’s happening? That was the whole idea behind this trip, to work out the details while …” He paused. “Well, I did. I assumed we were on the same page.”
I knew I should just turn around and go back outside, wait until he was done. But I couldn’t stand knowing Benji might be able to hear any of this. “Hello?” I called out, louder than necessary. A beat later, he appeared in the open kitchen doorway, the phone to his ear. “Oh, sorry,” I whispered, like I hadn’t realized. “I was just …”
“Hold on, Leah.” He covered the phone with his hand. “Emaline. I didn’t know you were here.”
“I’m just going to take Benji to minigolf, if that’s okay,” I said, still keeping my voice low. “I’ll bring him back in an hour or two?”
He looked at me for a moment, then at the slightly open door behind me. “Yes, of course,” he said. And then, “Thanks.”
I slipped back outside, then smiled at Benji. “We’re in business. Let’s go.”
“Awesome!” he said, hopping off the swing. He darted ahead of me, down the stairs and onto the walk. Watching him, I felt a pang of sadness, thinking of everything he didn’t know yet. The least I could do was spring for eighteen holes.
At SafariLand, he picked out a blue putter, while I, out of habit, grabbed a yellow one. As a kid, I was always yellow, Amber red, Margo blue. It’s funny the things you remember. We headed out to the first hole, the easiest, a straight shot right into the cup.
“All right,” I said, waving my club. “You’re up.”
Benji put down his ball, then readied his stance, wiggling his hips a little bit. I tried not to smile. Which quickly morphed into trying not to gasp as he swung the putter backwards, up, up, up over his head, before hitting the ball with full force. Crack! It went flying, soaring through the air to land in the bushes by the eighth hole.
“Whoa,” I managed, as the people currently on that hole looked at us, alarmed. I smiled, waving to acknowledge that, yes, we were responsible for the projectile. “Easy now.”
“Sorry,” he said.
I jogged over to retrieve the ball, jumping a small river on the way. I felt around in the bushes for a minute, trying not to think about all the other trash that was probably down there, before finding it. SafariLand was older than I was, and not exactly known for its cleanliness standards.
Benji looked cowed as I returned. “I didn’t mean to …” he began, then stopped, kicking at the grass. “That’s just how they do it on TV.”
“I know. But a hit like that is more for long drives at the Masters,” I told him, putting the ball back down on black starting mat. “Putt-putt requires a more gentle touch. Right?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done it before.”
I tried not to look surprised. “No?”
He shook his head. “It’s not something we …” He paused, then set up again, giving the ball a cautious tap. It rolled forward, perfectly centered, right into the cup. “No.”
I had a flash of him at the table with Leah a couple of years earlier, wanting crayons but being told to do word puzzles instead. “Right. Well, there’s a first time for everything. And there will be some holes later when you need to give it a good whack.”
“Yeah?” he said.
I nodded, then put down my ball to take my shot. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how many times I’d played this very same course: as a kid, then a middle schooler, all the way up to when I, too, had gotten overenthusiastic and hit Luke in the forehead. My dad had always been all about family activities and certain nights at SafariLand kids golfed free. It didn’t matter (to him, anyway) that my sisters and I were quickly bored with the course and bickering, dragging our clubs along behind us or swinging them at each other. If it was a collective outing, you went, like it or not. Yet now, as Benji and I moved to the next hole, I realized the memories I had weren’t bad. Not at all.
At the windmill, for sentimentality’s sake, I called Luke. No answer. So I shot a picture of Benji putting towards it. Wish you were here, I typed beneath it. This time, I made sure the text went through.
Because Benji was a novice, I stopped keeping score about hole seven and just let him go at it, rules forgotten. By the time he knocked his ball into the clown’s nose on the eighteenth hole (after ten or so tries, from multiple angles) he was miles away from the surly kid in the porch swing earlier.
“Wanna play again?” he asked me, once the siren and circus music of the game finale died down.
“Nah,” I said. “Let’s go to the arcade or something.”
“Arcade?” His face lit up. “Awesome!”
I opened up my wallet, digging around to see if I had any SafariLand cards. When I was a kid, they’d issued the old-fashioned paper tickets when you scored points, which you could then exchange for your pick among the toys and prizes kept in a d
usty case by the snack bar. Sometime during the last few years, though, they’d switched over to a debit card system for both playing the games and keeping track of credits. I always had at least one floating around the bottom of my purse, usually coated in lint and half-melted sticks of gum.
“Aha!” I said, extracting a card featuring a smiling lion. I unwrapped a hair elastic that was tangled around it, wiped it on my shorts, then slid it through the slot of the skeeball machine beside me to check the balance. “Seven seventy-nine,” I told Benji, as the number popped up on the display. I handed it to him. “Should keep you busy for a while.”
“I can spend all of it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Word of advice, though: Don’t bother with the toy grabber thing. It’s totally rigged. I’ve never seen anyone win anything there. Not even Luke, and he aced all these games, like, years ago.”
Benji looked at the machine, which was full of stuffed animals that looked deceptively easy to snag with the metal pinchers that hung above them. “Right. I like the video ones better anyway.”
“Perfect. I’m just going to grab a drink, okay? I’ll come find you.”
He nodded, then was off, moving down the rows of loud, blinking machines, the card in his hand. I walked over to the snack bar, checking my phone on the way. No reply from Luke, at least not yet.
I went to the snack bar and got a drink, then tried Luke once more, hanging up when it again went to voice mail. What was it about suspecting someone was deliberately not answering that made you that much more desperate to reach them? I told myself to calm down and put my phone away.
After a brief search, I spotted Benji at one of the driving games, wrenching the wheel back and forth as the screen flickered in front of him. I was almost to him when my phone buzzed in my pocket. Finally, I thought, grabbing it and hitting the Talk button.
“Hey,” I said, cupping my hand over my other ear to drown out the array of noises around me. “You missed it. Benji’s got a lethal swing. Must run in the family.”
There was a pause. Then, “Emaline?”