“Getting up at five a.m. is extremely awful,” Weldon said. “Don’t expect me to be here every day.”
“Of course not,” said Mir, the thing in her chest fluttering happily at the thought of Weldon crawling out of bed far too early to meet her.
Weldon hesitated, then shyly reached out his hand. Mir slid her hand into his, and they walked toward the golf course. The glowing seam at the base of the horizon was cracking open, spilling colors across the sky. Mir tipped her head back and stared at a line of brilliant red arcing above her. She wanted to say something, to point out to Weldon the strangeness of this moment, the two of them walking hand in hand to her brand-new job. But she stayed quiet, enjoying the silence.
The golf course sprawled before them, awake and buzzing. Red-shirted employees flocked around the long metal shed, green turf carts barreling in and out, flatbeds piled with dirt and turf-care paraphernalia. Mir felt her stomach lurch, nervous at the thought of new co-workers, new skills to learn. But she also felt eager. This would be her job for the summer. She mentally calculated the number of work hours per day times her hourly rate of pay, then multiplied it again against the number of days left in the summer. She could already feel the money safe in her bank account, slowly growing, counted against the cost of university tuition. It would never be enough. But it was a start.
“Good luck,” said Weldon, turning toward her. Her hand was still wrapped in his. Mir tugged her hand free and walked down the golf course’s long driveway, throwing a wave back over her shoulder toward Weldon.
“I’ll see you this afternoon.”
* * *
After eight hours of raking bunker sand and filling divot holes, Mir said goodbye to her new co-workers and staggered toward home. She saw Weldon was waiting for her at the top of the golf course driveway. He grinned and fell into step beside her. Mir was relieved he didn’t try to hold her hand; she felt like she was caked head to toe with dirt.
“How did it go?”
“My legs hurt,” Mir said.
“Seriously? It can’t have been that bad.”
“It was fine,” said Mir, and it had been. Holly had intercepted Mir on her way to the turf shed, handing her a red T-shirt with the golf course’s logo embroidered on the chest. “So you look all official-like,” Holly had said, apparently unaffected by the early morning hour. After pulling the T-shirt over her head, Mir had been assigned to a group of other turf workers, and sent out to rake the sand bunkers. The turf workers started an hour before the golf course opened to players, so that hour was when they hurried to rake the starting holes. At 7:00 a.m. on the dot, golfers in peaked hats and ridiculous pants were already lined up, eager to tee off.
Mir had raked bunkers until her arms felt ready to fall off, then had been sent out onto the green to fill in divots, dropping clumps of seeded dirt into notches carved in the grass. By the time lunch rolled around, Mir’s stomach was growling fiercely.
But it had felt good. The other members of her crew seemed nice, mostly college students home for the summer or high school students looking to save money for university. There was one girl with brightly dyed red hair who worked at the golf course “so I can finally buy a motorcycle that isn’t a hand-me-down piece of crap from my cousin.” Mir had liked the girl, who had arms already tanned and toned from raking bunkers.
“Just fine?” Weldon said.
“Okay, better than fine,” Mir said, smiling down at her work boots. “Pretty okay, actually. Just wish it wasn’t so early.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Weldon said. “Maybe it’ll even turn you into a morning person.”
“That is extremely unlikely,” said Mir. “You underestimate my devotion to sleep.”
They stopped at the Starbucks on the way back to Mir’s house. Weldon got coffee, and insisted on buying Mir a tea.
“It’s going to be too hot for tea soon,” Mir said, carefully sipping a cup of orange pekoe. “Guess I’ll have to start buying the frozen coffee drinks, and die of sugar overdose.”
“Kendrick, you put four teaspoons of sugar in that tea,” said Weldon, pointing at her cup. “I think you’ve built up a resistance to large quantities of sugar intake.”
“There are advanced levels of sugar consumption that even I haven’t mastered,” Mir said.
They sat in silence for several minutes. Weldon turned his head to glance out the Starbucks window, and Mir took the opportunity to admire his profile. He caught her looking when he turned back toward her, and raised his eyebrows. Mir shook her head, smiling.
“Who do you look the most like, your mom or your dad?” Mir said.
“My dad.”
“I guess,” said Mir critically, peering at him. She had looked at photos of David Warrick online, but didn’t think the resemblance between him and Weldon was strong. There was a little of David Warrick in Weldon’s eyes and jawline, but they didn’t have the same nose.
“I really don’t look like my mom. She looks kinda like … like an elf queen from Lord of the Rings. I don’t look like that.” Weldon grinned and gestured at his face, his crooked nose, the acne scars on his jaw. “Clearly.”
“Like Galadriel?” Mir asked. “I saw those movies. They were good. Kinda long, though.”
“If you wanted to find the largest per capita population of elf queens, you’d find them in Los Angeles,” said Weldon, leaning back in his chair and lacing his hands behind his head. “So many Galadriels, just walking around like they’re nothing special. Put them anywhere else in the world and they’re goddesses. But in Hollywood, they’re just one of dozens.”
“That’s kinda sad,” Mir said. She felt a sudden surge of sympathy for Weldon and his strange, dysfunctional family. She reminded herself to google photos of his mother the next time she had access to a computer with good internet. Is that weird? Mir thought. Looking up photos of the parents of this guy I like?
“You remember a while back when I came by your old job, and we talked about comics?” Weldon said.
“Sure.”
“Remember how you described your mom’s painting? Like painting was a practical need, a necessity?”
“Yeah,” said Mir.
“My mom was like that about acting,” Weldon said. “She was never famous, not above-the-movie-title famous, but she worked regularly. And I think she really loved what she did. She was good at stepping into a different character’s skin and becoming that person. And, well…” Weldon stopped. He stared out the window, his face turned away from Mir.
“I think it really hurt when she stopped getting work,” Weldon said. “I mean, can you imagine your mom not painting?”
“No,” said Mir. She tried to picture Stella without her brushes, without smudges of paint on her cheeks and hands. She tried to imagine Stella closing the door to her studio forever. The thought horrified her.
“It’s hard for actors,” Weldon said. “They depend on other people for their craft. They need writers; they usually need other actors. Sometimes a stage or a camera and people to work that camera. And they need an audience. I think that’s the most important thing, an audience. Maybe that’s something you don’t need if you’re a painter.”
“Sometimes you do,” said Mir, thinking of her grandfather. Micah Kendrick had longed for people to read his comics. He had wanted it so badly he had signed away the rights to his creations.
“Of course,” said Weldon. Emotion lined the skin under his eyes.
“My mom was supposed to be Skylark in the TomorrowMen movie,” he continued. “My parents met at San Diego Comic-Con years ago, when it was just this weird little get-together in a hotel, not the massive thing it is now. My mom was dressed as Skylark, and my dad … I guess he thought that was a sign they should be together. He said she looked like she stepped out of the pages of the TomorrowMen comics.”
Mir held her breath, waiting. She had the feeling that Weldon had never spoken these words aloud before. It was like he was peeling back the shining outer layer of hi
mself, letting her see the vulnerabilities under that beautiful shell. It thrilled and frightened her a little.
“They wanted to make the TomorrowMen movie together. My dad would produce it, my mom would play Skylark. But the movie didn’t get made when it was originally supposed to, because of the legal case over the rights to the characters. And while the court stuff was happening, comic book movies became these massive, massively expensive things. The budget for the TomorrowMen movie went from forty million to two hundred million. And suddenly my mom was too old and not famous enough to play Skylark in a two-hundred-million-dollar movie.”
Weldon smiled distantly.
“My mom says money ruined comics. I don’t think so. I think it just ruined my dad and her.”
Weldon’s gaze flickered up to Mir, and he abruptly leaned back, pushing his hair from his forehead.
“Why am I rambling on about my family?” he said.
“I like hearing about them,” said Mir.
“Why?” Weldon laughed, embarrassed, eyes darting away from Mir.
“Because they’re a part of where you came from, and I want to know you better,” Mir said.
Weldon reached out and took Mir’s mug of tea from her hands. He placed the mug carefully on the table in front of him, and took one of Mir’s hands between his own. Mir’s chest fluttered happily at his touch.
“Right,” said Weldon. “Can you tell me something super personal now, so things are even?”
Mir thought, trying to temper the thrumming in her chest. It was distracting. What was even more distracting was Weldon’s thumb lightly skimming across her palm.
“When I was eight I got so mad at my dad about something, I can’t even remember what, I dunked his toothbrush in the toilet and then put it back in the toothbrush holder.”
“Nooooo,” Weldon said, his eyes wide.
“Yes,” said Mir. “He used that toothbrush for about a week, and then I felt so bad about it, I went and bought the exact same toothbrush with my allowance and replaced it. I’ve never told him what I did.”
Strangled laughter burst out of Weldon.
Mir watched him, glad for his amusement.
“Was that personal enough for you?”
“It was amazing,” sighed Weldon, still chuckling. “I can’t believe you did that. I mean, I’m an actual criminal and I’ve never done anything that bad.”
His fingers slid between hers, their hands intertwined and locked. Mir stared at their laced-together fingers, feeling strange and thrilled all at the same time.
“Stick around,” she said softly. “Maybe I’ll tell you more personal things.”
“I’d like that,” said Weldon, and smiled in a very real way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In the week that followed, Weldon thought about Miriam every moment he was awake. He thought about her in the spaces between his strides when he jogged. He thought about her while eating dinner with his aunt and uncle. He thought about her as he finished his last school essay and emailed it to his mysterious internet teacher. He woke up every morning at 5:00 a.m. and walked to meet her by the bridge. Her face was always closed and sleepy that early in the morning, and he loved the way it brightened when she saw him.
“Hi,” she would say.
“Hi,” he’d say back, and then he’d reach out his hand for hers.
They went out for coffee every afternoon after she got off work, sitting opposite each other in the tiny nook at the back of the Starbucks. Mir always had tea. The kinds of teas changed from day to day, but it was always tea.
When they sat down at their table in the corner, Mir would reach her open hand across the shellacked wood surface, toward Weldon. She wouldn’t quite look at him when she did it, but the corners of her mouth were always turned up a little bit, as though she was nervous and amused by her nervousness. Weldon would slide his hand into hers, confident that a superhero could burst through the Starbucks and he wouldn’t even notice.
“I think I’m getting used to getting up at five a.m.,” Mir said, staring down at her cup of honey blossom herbal tea. “I still want to die when I hear my alarm go off, but I think I want to die slightly less than I did last week.”
“I told you you’d become a morning person,” Weldon said, and Mir squeezed his hand, just a little.
Weldon longed to touch more than her hand, but he decided he would wait for her to touch him, as she’d done when she first reached across the table. That way I hopefully won’t screw it up, Weldon thought. But he wished he didn’t have to wait between now and whenever Mir chose to reach across the distance between them.
When Weldon went back to dinner at Mir’s house, he told his aunt that he was going for an evening run with the Running Realm group. The look Stella gave him that night made him suspect she knew he and her daughter had been holding hands in the Starbucks every afternoon that week. But she didn’t say anything, and the serving of vegetables she piled on his plate was as generous as ever.
After dinner, he and Mir sat on the floor of the living room and played a game of Monopoly with Nate and Henry.
“Why are all the player pieces colored rocks?” Weldon asked, staring at the pile of brightly painted stones Mir was sorting through.
“Because sometimes certain parents are too cheap to buy a new copy of Monopoly and their children have to play with a game with all the pieces missing that they bought at a yard sale like ten years ago,” Mir said, shooting a pointed look at Henry.
“Hey, we still have the hat,” Henry said, picking up the small pewter top hat. Nate snatched it out of his hand.
“I’m always the hat,” said Nate.
“I’m always the green rock,” said Mir.
“I’ll be the red rock, I guess,” said Weldon, but Henry’s hand snagged the rock first.
“I’m always the red rock,” said Henry. “You can be purple.”
By the end of the game, Henry and Nate were so wound up they were yelling at each other over the advantages of owning all four railroads or Boardwalk. Weldon won the game over Henry by a very narrow margin. When his defeat became inevitable, Henry reached solemnly across the board to shake Weldon’s hand.
When it was time for Weldon to leave, Mir walked with him out to the front porch. They stood in the near-darkness for a moment and pretended to be very interested in staring at the horizon. Because he was looking away from her, Weldon didn’t realize Mir was reaching for him until he felt her hand on his arm. Then she was next to him, very close. Weldon tried not to breathe. He felt the warmth of her cheek pressing against his chest as she slid her arms around him. She fit almost perfectly under his chin. If he leaned forward, he could rest his chin on the top of her head. Before he could move, she pulled away from him, muttered a flustered “Good night!” and tore back inside the house. Weldon was left standing alone on the porch in the darkness, feeling the imprint of her body seared against him.
When he got home, Weldon’s aunt was waiting for him.
“Where were you? You said you were going for a group run, but when I checked the Running Realm schedule, there wasn’t one this evening.”
“Having dinner at Miriam Kendrick’s house,” Weldon said. His aunt blinked, a hurt look crossing her face. Weldon stared her down, feeling stubbornly defiant. He couldn’t remember ever fighting with her, even when he was a kid. But right now felt like a good time to start.
“You lied about your whereabouts so you could sneak off to Stella Kendrick’s house?” his aunt said, sounding almost plaintive.
“I just wanted to see Mir,” he said. “You don’t like her family, and I thought you’d tell me I couldn’t see them.”
“I don’t dislike the Kendricks,” Weldon’s aunt said sharply. “I dislike what they did to us. I told you about all that legal nonsense Stella Kendrick’s father dragged us through, and you still think it’s okay seeing her daughter? I don’t understand.”
“They didn’t do anything to us,” Weldon said. “But I think we did pl
enty to them.” He felt angry, but it was a different kind of anger from the one that urged him to steal cars. This anger was hot in his chest, fueled by the feeling of Mir pressing up against him as they said goodbye on the sloping porch of her falling-down house. “Stella Kendrick would be standing on the red carpet at the TomorrowMen movie premiere if it wasn’t for us.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Weldon’s aunt. “There wouldn’t even be a movie if it wasn’t for the work your grandfather and father did. They built Warrick Studios.”
“You’re right,” said Weldon. “All Micah Kendrick did was draw the comics Warrick Studios was built on.”
Weldon’s aunt recoiled. She hesitated, then shook her head, as though to remind herself of something.
“Legally we did nothing wrong,” she said, but she sounded doubtful. “I know—I know the buyout given to Stella was generous. It was more than what she deserved.”
Weldon said nothing, staring at his aunt. She deserves so much more, he thought. He remembered Stella’s studio, filled with paintings of the TomorrowMen. He wondered if she painted them because she felt she had to, if it was like she was reclaiming her father’s characters for him.
“Do you know what people say about our family online?” Weldon’s aunt said. “They say we robbed a man of his legacy. They say we used the court system to steal ownership of those comic book characters. But we won the court case over those comics, so how can that be? How can people say that we exploited someone, if everything Warrick Studios did was legal? How is it fair that people get to say things like that?”
“Katherine,” said Weldon’s uncle. Alex Warrick’s frame nearly filled the kitchen entrance. He didn’t look angry, but his expression was darker than normal, as though a passing thought had troubled him. Weldon’s aunt turned toward him.
“You know what they’ll say about us when the movie comes out,” she said to her husband.
Alex Warrick sighed.
“Maybe Warrick Studios deserves some of those criticisms,” he said.
Comics Will Break Your Heart Page 19