“Oh, no,” Clark said quickly, his ears turning red again. “I’m—that’s not what I meant. I was surprised, but . . . I mean, it’s nice to see you again. I didn’t think that I . . . um, would,” he finished, a little haltingly, his voice fading out again at the end of his sentence.
I nodded, starting to smile. He really was cute. And I liked that he seemed a little bit awkward, like he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands right now. I was so used to Topher’s slick confidence that I’d forgotten what this could look like. “Right,” I said, when I realized I’d been staring at him. I pulled myself together as I stood, looping the leash once around my wrist. “So. Okay. I’ll take him around the neighborhood. Usually, when it’s just one dog, these are about twenty minutes, unless you want something longer, or a hike.”
Clark shrugged a bit helplessly. “I mean . . . twenty minutes sounds good,” he said. “Whatever you think.”
“Well,” I said, gripping on tightly to the leash as Bertie started straining toward the door, whining, like he couldn’t understand why we weren’t outside yet. “I should get him out.”
“Right,” Clark said, nodding a few too many times. “And I should get back to work. Or . . . get back to trying to work.”
I looked at him and realized how nice it was that he was close to my height. I was always looking up at Topher, feeling like I was getting thrown slightly off-balance. “Yeah,” I said, smoothing my hair back from my face with one hand and giving him a half smile. I hadn’t used my flirting moves in a few weeks, but they were coming back to me as I looked up at him, then down again. I took a breath, secretly hoping that there weren’t any rules against dating people whose dogs you were walking. “So I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, raising an eyebrow at him. “And, you know, maybe—” My phone buzzed with a text, and then another one. “Sorry,” I said, taking it out of my pocket, figuring it was another endless text chain with my friends. But I looked at the screen quickly and saw that they were from my dad. I didn’t see what they were, just that he’d texted three times.
“Everything okay?” Clark asked.
“Fine,” I said, dropping my phone back in my pocket and giving him a quick smile. “Just . . . stuff.”
Bertie whimpered, louder this time, and lunged for the door again, causing me to run a few steps to get my footing back. I knew whatever moment we’d maybe been about to have—if there even had been one—was now over. “See you,” I said, trying for casual, only to have this undercut by stumbling two more steps after Bertie. I maneuvered us out the front door, hoping that maybe he was still watching us go.
Almost exactly twenty minutes later, I brought Bertie back inside. He hadn’t been bad to walk—he kept trying to pull when we first started, but I did what Maya had told me to do with dogs who were pullers and kept the leash reined in tightly. Once he seemed to see what the new protocol was, he was fine on the leash, albeit determined to sniff every tree we’d passed on our half-mile loop.
I stepped inside the house and unclipped Bertie’s leash. He ran toward the kitchen, and I followed, a few steps behind, watching as he made a beeline for his water dish—B.W. painted on the side—and started slurping loudly. I tucked my hair behind my ears and pressed my lips together, hard and quick, the way Palmer’s sister Ivy had taught us when we were in eighth grade. I looked around, but there was no sign of Clark. And I knew that logically there was no reason for him to still be there.
Even so, I took my time as I hung up Bertie’s leash and double-checked he wasn’t tracking dirt all over the house. When I started to feel creepy about being in someone’s house when my job there was done, I gave Bertie a quick pat on the head, then headed out the door, making sure to lock it behind me.
Once I was walking to my car, I pulled out my phone again and looked down at the texts.
ALEXANDER WALKER
Hi—I was thinking we could get dinner tonight.
The Little Pepper? 7 p.m.
The Little Pepper had been an Asian fusion restaurant the three of us had gone to together a lot when I was younger, but it’d been closed for years now, torn down after a fire. It didn’t surprise me my dad didn’t know it was gone—I was honestly shocked he remembered we’d ever gone there. My dad never talked about our past, except in the campaign stories I’d heard him tell over and over again, until they were just well-polished anecdotes and not memories.
I got into my car and cranked the AC, still looking down at my phone.
ME
Little Pepper’s closed.
I hesitated, then typed again.
ME
But we can go to the Crane if you want. It’s pretty good.
I put my phone down and prepared to back out of Clark’s driveway—I didn’t want him to think it was weird that I was just sitting there, hanging out after I’d walked his dog. But a second later, it buzzed, and I picked it up.
ALEXANDER WALKER
Sounds good. Meet there? Or meet at home?
I stared at the last word he’d typed. I knew what he meant, of course. He meant the house we were both currently living in. But whenever I saw or heard that word, I always thought of the farmhouse first. Our house in Stanwich Woods was never the place that came to mind.
ME
I’ll meet you there.
• • •
I’d gotten a text when I was merging onto the highway, and so it wasn’t until I pulled into the Crane’s parking lot that I was able to look at it.
ALEXANDER WALKER
Stuck in traffic by East View. There in 15.
I looked at the words on my screen for a moment, trying to get them to them make sense, before I realized that the text had been sent twenty minutes ago, which meant I was probably late.
I hurried into the restaurant, feeling like everything was suddenly backward. I had gotten used to my dad being perpetually ten—or more—minutes late, to the point where I rarely showed up for things with him on time. I’d start getting texts from Peter, or some random intern, usually a minute before my dad would be there, and then get up-to-the-second information about where he was and what he was doing, like he was a plane whose progress needed to be monitored. So it was beyond strange to walk in and see my dad sitting at a table, waiting.
“Hi,” I said, sliding down into the seat across from him. “Uh—sorry. I thought you’d be late.”
“It’s fine,” my dad said, giving me a quick smile. “No problem.”
I reached over and took a sip from my water glass, noticing how strange it was that my dad’s BlackBerry wasn’t on the table with us—that, frankly, my dad was here at all, not jumping up to take calls or sending e-mails while I texted with my friends or played games on my phone.
“Something to drink?” the waitress asked, and when I saw who it was, I sank a little lower in my seat, holding up my menu to block my face. My friends and I had almost been kicked out of here by this same waitress—Wanda—when she and Toby got into an argument about the complimentary mint bowl and how many was considered a reasonable number to take. It had been a few months, though, so hopefully I was in the clear.
“Iced tea,” my dad said, and I piped up, “Diet Coke.”
I waited until I was sure she’d left before lowering my menu again. “You okay?” my dad asked, looking at me with his eyebrows raised.
“Fine,” I said immediately. “Just fine.” I opened my menu, then set it aside immediately, since I always ordered the same thing here. My dad set his menu aside as well, and we looked at each other in silence. I suddenly wished I’d pretended I needed more time with it, just to have a prop in front of me. “So,” I said, after we’d gotten our drinks and given our orders and I wasn’t sure I could stand the silence any longer, “um, how was your day?”
“Fine,” my dad said automatically. It seemed like that was all there was going to be to it, but after a moment he went on. “Yesterday was the last day I could have any communication with the office. The investigation started today, so I’m of
ficially not working.”
“Oh,” I said, a little taken aback. I’d realized, in theory, that my dad would have to stop working when he took his leave of absence. But like all good theories, I’d never seen it put into practice. My dad worked all the time; it was just who he was. Even before he’d been a congressman, I used to hear stories about his public-defender days, sleeping on couches and eating vending-machine dinners, standing up for the people nobody else was going to defend. It looked like he was still working—he was wearing a suit and a collared shirt, but no tie, which was what he wore when he wanted to seem professional but not stuffy. “So,” I said, “um . . . what did you do?”
“I went to the library,” he said, “got some books I’d been wanting to read for, oh, the last decade or so. And then proceeded not to read any of them. Did you know that we have a channel that shows classic basketball games?”
I shook my head. “I did not.”
“Well . . . we do,” my dad said, giving me a slightly embarrassed smile. “I may have watched one from the eighties. One or four.”
I smiled at that. “Even though the outcome was decided years ago?”
“Ah,” my dad said as he unwrapped his chopsticks, separated them, and set them to the side of his silverware, “but there always seems like the possibility that something might change this time around.” Silence fell again, and I was about to take a breath and say something about the decor, or the size of the restaurant, when my dad asked, “So what about you?” He cleared his throat. “I mean . . . how was your day?”
“Oh,” I said, “well . . .” I knew I should probably tell him about my job; with Maya trusting me to work on my own, it seemed likely that I wasn’t going to get fired. But I didn’t want to see his expression when he heard what I was going to be spending the summer doing. I knew I’d have to tell him eventually, but not today, not when I’d just begun to feel like I was getting the hang of it. “It was fine,” I said, and without warning, my mind was suddenly back on the text he’d sent. “Um . . . you texted earlier that you were on East View?” My dad nodded. “Were you . . .” I took a breath and made myself ask it. “Were you at the old house?”
My dad looked up at me, his brow creasing. “The farmhouse?” he asked, like we had so many other old houses, he needed to clarify. I nodded, not even sure what I wanted his answer to be. There was a piece of me that wanted him to say that he’d been over there. That maybe he went all the time when he was back, and since I had never asked him, I never knew. It would be some kind of proof, at least, that he thought about my mother occasionally, that he remembered the life we’d all had there together.
My dad sat back in his chair, and it was like something crossed his face briefly before his normal expression returned again. “There was traffic on the Merritt, so I got off at the exit by East Loop and drove over here from there,” he said, then shook his head, like he was still trying to understand me. “Why would I go to the farmhouse?”
“I . . . just . . . ,” I said, reaching forward and taking my own paper-wrapped chopsticks, unwrapping them mostly to have something to do with my hands while I tried to sort out what I wanted to say. “I don’t know.” I took a breath and realized that even though I might not know exactly what I wanted to say, I was pretty sure I knew where it was coming from—it was like something had been churned up since the press conference. I wasn’t sure if it was seeing my mother’s painting, or reading what my dad had written, or even if it was just this, the reality of the two of us struggling to talk to each other when there were no distractions to hide behind.
I looked down at the table, wishing I’d never brought it up. Wishing I hadn’t asked. I should have known the answer would be something like trying to avoid the traffic.
When Wanda arrived bearing food, we busied ourselves with our meals until there was just the sound of silverware on plates, and it seemed to take up so much time and energy it was hard to imagine how we would have talked, anyway.
We ate in silence until Wanda came back to check on us and my dad told her that we’d love the check, please—we were ready to go, but that everything had been really wonderful, no complaints, just great.
Chapter SIX
“He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts!” the actors on the stage chanted in singsong unison. I was about to ask Palmer what the hell was going on, when the group continued. “He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts!”
“What. Is. Happening?” Toby said from her seat next to me, her eyes wide and fixed on the stage, where the cast had begun to jump around in circles, chanting, “Red leather yellow leather red leather yellow leather.”
“Vocal warm-ups,” Palmer said with a shrug. “You learn to tune it out after a while.”
I looked at the stage again. Everyone was now lying on their backs, rolling from side to side, and I could swear they were meowing. “Really?” I asked skeptically.
“You can tune anything out,” Bri said with authority from my other side. “I’ve now seen Space Cowboy fourteen times. I swear, I’m not even hearing the dialogue anymore. Yesterday, I watched it just for the cinematography choices.”
“What?” Toby gasped, leaning across me to whack Bri on the arm, but hitting me in the process. “You’ve seen it fourteen times and you haven’t snuck me in once?”
“You know I will, at some point. Just let me work there a little longer before I start breaking the one rule they gave me.”
“I thought the one rule was to always wash your hands before operating the popcorn maker,” Palmer said.
“Well, that, too,” Bri acknowledged.
We were all sitting in the back row of the Stanwich Community Theater, where Palmer’s stage manager table was set up. The three of us had the day off (more or less—Bri was working the evening movie shift and I had to walk Bertie at four), so we’d decided to hit the beach for the first time that summer. When we’d been figuring out our plans over group text, Palmer had been whining about the fact that she had to stage-manage and how she was stuck alone in a theater all day (with her boyfriend, which Toby had pointed out, but that Palmer hadn’t seemed to appreciate). So we’d decided to stop by with lunch from Stanwich Sandwich on the way to the beach. I had not realized that by agreeing to come over with food and hang out with Palmer, I would be watching tongue twisters performed onstage.
“What a to-do to die today at a minute or two to two,” the group onstage started chanting, while bending from side to side, apparently done with their meowing. “A thing distinctly hard to say but harder still to do.”
“So is this your job?” I asked, as the group continued with this one, saying something about a dragon and a drum. “You just have to sit here and watch this all day?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Toby said, leaning forward in her seat and squinting. “That one guy up there is cute. I’m pretty sure. Is he?”
“When are you going to get glasses?” Bri asked her for what was probably the millionth time.
“When they stop making me look like an owl,” Toby said, still squinting at the stage.
“You could always get contacts,” Bri said, leaning closer to Toby and putting her finger on her lens, wiggling it around on her eye, causing Toby to shriek and turn away.
“Stop it,” she said, though she was laughing. “You know I have a phobia of hands-near-eyes!”
“I wonder why,” I said, knowing it was almost entirely because Bri had been doing this to Toby ever since she got contacts in sixth grade.
“Which guy did you mean?” Palmer asked as Toby pointed.
“You think he’s cute?” Bri asked, shaking her head. Bri and Toby never liked the same guys, ever. Tom had a theory about why their taste never overlapped, but it involved Venn diagrams and math, and we hadn’t let him get very far with it before we made him stop talking.
“Oh, that’s Jared,” Palmer said. “He’s in college. And he has a girlfriend.”
; “Damn it,” Toby said, as she sat back again.
“It’s okay,” Bri said, patting her arm. “He isn’t that cute.”
“He is. I think.”
“I write down blocking, when it gets set,” Palmer said, leaning forward to answer my question. “But my real job comes when we go into tech and performance. Then I have to call all the light and sound cues.”
“Look at you,” Toby said proudly, nudging Palmer’s arm, “sounding like you know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay!” a bearded man who looked like he was in his forties stood up in the front row. “Good warm-up. We’re starting from the top of act two in fifteen.”
Palmer jumped up. “Fifteen minutes!” she yelled, as actors started to jump down from the stage and stream up the aisles. “Be back in fifteen, guys.”
“He just said that,” Toby said.
“I know. But for some reason, it’s my job to repeat times loudly.”
“Hey, guys.” I glanced over and saw Tom walking down the row to join us, looking slightly out of breath. “When did you all get here? Are you going to stay and watch the rehearsal?”
“No,” Bri, Toby, and I said in unison, and Tom took the water bottle Palmer handed him, looking hurt. It was nothing against Tom—but I really preferred to watch a play when it was rehearsed and costumed and lit and people weren’t wandering aimlessly around the stage clutching their scripts.
“But it’s really good,” Tom said enthusiastically, pulling his script out from his back pocket. I turned my head to read the title—Bug Juice. “It’s this total classic, been around forever. But the writers just won a Tony this year for their play about Tesla. . . .” We all looked at him blankly, including Palmer. “We went to see it together, P,” Tom said, sounding pained.