“Mmm,” Jase says, opening the refrigerator and staring into it in that guy way. Like all the answers to any question I’d ask him are in the crisper or pasted onto the label of the orange juice.
“J., talk,” I say, looking down at the ledger I’m balancing, my phone set to calculator, the red pen I’m using much more often than the black one. “You and Sam on the outs?”
“Mmm. What? No. Far from it, I think. Did you see Tim today?”
“God. Boys. Why do you have to be so inscrutable all the time? What do you mean ‘I think’? Aren’t you in this relationship? Wouldn’t you actually know what’s going on?”
Jase finally shuts the refrigerator door with a thunk, frowns at it, opens it again, reshuts it. “I think the seal is going here. But I can probably fix it.”
“Forget the fridge. Did you and Samantha fight or something?”
He pulls out the orange juice, sloshes some into a cup. “No. It’s just . . .”
“Does Tim have something to do with it?”
“What? No. Why?” Jase takes a long swallow of orange juice, his mouth twisting as though it’s gone bad.
“You just asked about him,” I prompt.
“Did I?” He’s pulled his cell phone out of his pocket now and is studying it.
I angle my hip on the counter, reach over and give his chest a little shove. “You’re being spacey and weird. Tim was—off—tonight. What gives?”
“Nothing,” my brother says absently. He’s dropped his phone now and is staring at the figures on the ledger. He swears under his breath. “Mom and Dad know?”
I swallow. “I’ve been doing the books. Said I’d do it for a little while. They know that, but not how bad it is. It keeps getting funkier and—I—but—Dad gets headaches every time he tries to look at numbers.”
“Since when?”
“Since the accident. Apparently. He’s got double vision. Periodically.”
“The hell? No one told me that.”
“No one told me either. I read it on his chart this afternoon. Mom knows. They didn’t want to worry us.”
Jase curses again, a long, creative string. He never swears, and some of these I’ve barely ever heard, which makes it extra jarring. God, everything is off today.
“Temporary, right?” he asks.
“They hope. It’s from the head injury. Some weakness in an eye muscle. Probably temporary. There might need to be surgery, though. They just called in a specialist this week.”
He turns his back, walks over to the sink, braces his hands on either side, stares out the window into the dark. Then he’s kicking at the baseboard below the sink, swearing again. “How’s Dad going to get back to the store if he can’t see straight? Drive? How’s he even going to get through rehab?”
“He can do physical therapy without having to see perfectly. As for the store—looking at the numbers? That may not be a concern anyway.”
Jase curses again, polishes off the orange juice, drops the plastic carton to the ground and steps on it harder than necessary. “We can’t just let it die, Alice. What then? Goddammit.”
I swallow. I know what I have to say, to do. The math all those columns add up to. “I have to leave school. It’s the only way. Until Dad’s better. Mom can’t do it. Which was a huge battle to convince her of in the first place. She has to be the one handling all the hands-on stuff with him.”
He argues, of course. “I’ll do it.”
“And lose your scholarship shot? You’ve never been in better shape in your life. You can’t.”
“Joel—” he starts, talking over me. Then we both fall silent. Not Joel. He’s given his summers and plenty of nights and weekends to Garrett’s Hardware. He’s finally finding his feet in the police academy. We can’t let—we can’t allow—Grace Reed to plow us all down. And I’m the expendable one here. It’s not like I’m at some turning point. I’ve already delayed my transfer. What’s a little more time?
“It’s got to be me, J.”
“I won’t let you do it. Why should it be you? Because you’re the girl? That’s just stupid,” he says. “There’s got to be someone else who can pinch-hit. Someone it won’t derail.”
The door kicks open and Tim’s standing there, river breeze ruffling his hair. “Came for my car keys.”
“Get them tomorrow,” Jase says, a slice of a hard edge in his voice.
“You said not even if you begged,” I remind him.
“My apartment keys are on the chain too. I locked up—wasn’t thinking. You want me on my knees, Alice?”
“Jesus, shut up, Tim.” My brother’s voice turns steely. Tim takes a step back.
“You’re pissed at me now? How did our relationship status change in five minutes when I wasn’t even here to eff it up?”
“Hon!” says a cheerful voice behind me. Tim glances over at the doorway to the living room. His eyes widen.
“A me! Hon!” Patsy is at her most imperious, her baby voice nearly a growl, stomping into the room, all proud for being the Houdini of crib breaks.
She wavers her way across the kitchen, surer of her purpose than her feet, arms raised to Tim. “Upsi. Now.”
Not only has the baby escaped her crib, she’s also peeled off her clothes, and her diaper. She must have gone looking for me in my room, opened my closet to find the overflowing wicker basket I keep there. Stark naked, except for one of my black thongs dangling from her neck, a flowered push-up bra draped across her pale little chest like a Miss America sash, and a bright red lacy garter belt perched in her fluffy hair like a tiara, hanging across one big brown eye.
Both Jase and Tim are openly laughing, like a relief valve has opened.
Tim scoops her up. “You, Patricia Garrett, are my kind of girl.”
TIM
“I’ll let Tim back in. You deal with Pats,” Alice says.
Jase hesitates.
“You’re better at getting her down, J.,” Alice adds. “She gets all ornery with me.”
Still the hesitation. Then, after one swift look at me, Jase hooks his hand around Patsy’s waist, lifts her out of my arms, and sets her on his hip. She smooshes his cheeks between her hands, rubs her nose against his.
Alice gives me a tight smile, opens the screen door, strides out in front of me.
She always does that, walks ahead, like she expects people to fall in line after her like ducklings or something. She’s wearing these yoga pants with a bleach stain on the back of the knee, another near the waistband. Probably supposed to be some comfortable, I don’t give a damn outfit. But I spend the whole too-short walk up the steps trying to locate the thong lines under them.
Shoves the key in the lock, bumps open the door with her hip. Then she looks at me and everything goes quiet except for a car swishing by.
Crazy long eyelashes on this girl. Sparkling eye stuff on her lids, partially worn off—a little glint of it near the corner of her eye. Silver hoop earrings with these little bells hanging from them, which explains the faint jingling I hear when she tosses her hair back to look me in the eye. Then the clink of keys as her fingers tighten on them.
“You gonna hand those over or do I really have to beg?” I ask.
She doesn’t say anything. Reaches out and takes my hand, flips it palm up. “I can rely on you with these, right?”
Her dark green-brown eyes probe mine, like they could zero in and lock on to any lie I’d tell.
“I’m reliable.”
Even after the keys, warm from her hand, drop into my palm, she keeps looking. If there’s still darkness closing in on me, like earlier, she’s sure to spot it.
“Scout’s honor,” I say, finally.
“That won’t work,” Alice says. “My father was your Cub master. I know all about your scouting career.”
“What, you picked that as a bedtime story, Alice?”
“We have a picture. You’re in the back row. You’re holding the tie of the guy standing next to you and flicking a lighter underneath it
. You were, what, nine? Ten? Worth a thousand words.”
No defense there.
The breeze blows in through the maple trees, one hard gust up from the river, smelling like mud and sea grass. Alice’s hair blows across her face, her mouth.
“That’s your real hair color, huh?” Without the distraction of the extra chunks of different colors in her hair, she looks younger, eyes duskier, lips redder.
“Yes, dark brown. More like Joel than Jase and Andy. My dark secret.”
“One of many, I’m sure.” But not as dark as mine.
Alice shrugs, looking down at her bare feet. When she glances up, she’s smiling unexpectedly. That crooked smile of hers. “No secrets about my lingerie anymore, though.”
“And that was the best one.” For a second, “back to normal” hovers between us . . . whatever our normal was.
But she’s still watching me, seeing me a bit too well, even in the dark. “I want to believe you, Tim. That you’re trustworthy right now. But you have to admit, this hasn’t been your most reliable day.”
Nope.
“Do you want to keep the keys, Alice?” I ask, and I can hear the completely illegitimate anger in my voice.
“Not exactly the point, Tim. Is there anything you want to tell me?”
Delay the inevitable, a tried and true habit that I thought I’d left in the rearview mirror.
Pull out my old smart-ass smile. “Only that you’re more than welcome to store your lingerie collection here at my apartment. How extensive is it, anyway?”
Her lips flatten out and she shrugs, already turning away. “Guess you’ll never know.”
I watch her dark figure, only bright with the bleach stains, disappear into the night.
Chapter Nineteen
TIM
When Hester walks into the restaurant the next day and sees me, she does that thing where about six different emotions cross her face. Pissed, sad, relieved that I actually showed, hormonal, who the hell knows. I hop up to pull out her chair. I might have done a hump and dump, but what a gentleman, yeah?
“Wait a minute,” she says. “I left something in the car. I wanted to make sure you were here first.”
“Something” turns out to be the sleeping baby, huddled in his car seat—so frickin’ puny—wearing this frilly bonnet-type thing.
“Hester—you gotta stop ditching the kid in the car,” I say, watching her rest the car seat precariously on one of the chairs. It tips to one side. “Wouldn’t he be better off on the floor?”
Listen to me, acting like I know anything at all.
Probably thinking the same thing, Hester says, “He’s fine. This way we can keep an eye on him.”
Like she was doing when she left him in the backseat? Jesus.
I pull out her chair again, and she settles in, spreading her napkin in her lap. “Have you looked at the menu?”
I bite my lip so I won’t snarl, This is not a freakin’ date. Instead: “I need to understand more about how”—Calvin’s eyelashes flutter and I lower my voice—“uh, how all this happened.”
She nods, looking worried now. What’d she think we were going to talk about? The specials on the menu?
The waiter interrupts to plunk down bread, pour water, light the candle, and hover around until Hester sends him trotting off to get her a ginger ale.
“I just need . . .” What I need more than anything at the moment is something to do with my hands, so I pick up one of the books of matches with the restaurant logo from the little crystal bowl on the table, start methodically tearing them out one by one. “I need to know how we hooked up.” Why too, but asking that? Dickish.
Hester blinks at me. “You honestly don’t remember making love?”
“Nope.” Wow, way to be an asshole. Apparently it’s like riding a bicycle.
Her eyes well with tears. Jesus, no.
“Sorry, I . . . just don’t get why you’d have anything to do with my drunken ass.”
The waiter, who returned with the ginger ale just in time to hear “drunken ass” backs away, the glass still poised.
Her hand shoots out, rests on mine for an instant as I continue to mutilate the matchbook. Any time she touches me, or I touch her, it feels off, so . . . wrong. She’s freaking pure-looking. A horrible thought occurs to me. “That wasn’t, uh, it wasn’t your, um, you’d had, um—”
Hester somehow makes sense of this.
“No. Oh no.” She pats my hand reassuringly. “I’d had this boyfriend, Alex. Alex Robinson. Remember him?”
Total void there too.
“Head of the school newspaper? Tall? Student council? Class secretary?
I fumble through my unreliable memory bank. Alex Robinson . . . Dark-haired officious-type dude? Yeah . . . On my tennis team, major tool. Senior when I was a sophomore. And Hester was a junior.
“Riiiight,” I say.
“The night before the party, Alex . . .” Hester pauses, clears her throat. Not that it makes any difference. She has one of those throaty, raspy voices that should be sexy. “He’s doing a post-grad year at Choate. He called up and said we should admit the long-distance thing was hopeless.” The waiter’s crept back, sets down the ginger ale, then flees as though it might detonate. “I mean—come on!—it’s still in the same state! Not even an hour away! We’d been going out since freshman spring! He was my first—” She stops dead. “Anyway. That’s why I went to that party. I didn’t want to think or remember; I wanted to have fun.”
Having torn all the matches out of two different packs, I go to work on the bread basket, ripping off pieces, tearing them into smaller pieces, shoveling them in my mouth. Calvin—I freaking hate that name—stirs a little, frowns, but dozes on.
“Anyway . . . you were there and . . . kind of sad too.”
I plunge another chunk of bread into the butter, ignoring the butter knife, take a bite, and then pause. “Please tell me this wasn’t a mercy f— I mean, that you didn’t have sex with me out of some kind of pity, Hester. Tell me you didn’t screw up your life—and mine—and frickin’ create his—because you felt sorry for me.”
She twists at this little ring on her pinkie. “No. It wasn’t like that. We talked. A lot. We went to Ward’s room and we talked for, like, hours. You were charming and goofy and, yes, sad, but that’s not why I . . . why we . . .”
Again with the waiter, who recites a long list of incomprehensible appetizers. Hester orders and I mutter, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
“I didn’t really notice how much you’d had to drink. You acted . . . great. I was upset. I wanted to be—not me. I just . . . kissed you. It went from there. It was stupid. I was stupid.”
This little tear slides out of her eye, snakes down the side of her nose. She swats at it, hard enough to make a little slap sound. I wince.
“But, I mean, Hester. Didn’t I even use anything? I can’t believe I was that out of it.” However badly I’ve generally messed up, this is a new low. I thought I’d stuck to being Thoughtless Bastard, rather than Complete Sack of Shit. I mean—I have a sister, after all.
“Oh, you did. You were very insistent on it. Made sure I got your . . . your wallet and all that,” she assures me, turning red. “It’s just that, afterward, you sort of, well, fell asleep without—” She makes this indecipherable waving gesture with her hand.
I decipher it well enough, though. I passed out without . . . removing, disposing of the condom. Which obviously leaked. Or broke. I’m a prince.
“I’m a catastrophe, Hester,” I point out glumly. “You’re too smart for that.”
“Guess not, right?” She takes a gulp of soda like she’s slinging back a shot of tequila. Now the glitter in her eyes comes off more like anger than tears. “I wasn’t smart and you weren’t sober. We made love . . .” She trails off as I cringe.
We made Calvin, not love.
“Then you got kicked out.” She spreads her hands helplessly. “And here we all are.”
“Not qu
ite. Why the hell didn’t you . . . find me, or contact me before things—when you first figured out what was doing. Or why didn’t you ever once—once, Hester—think, maybe you should tell the father? Like, right away?” The waiter, who is approaching with more Perrier, once again scuttles off to a less emotionally volatile table.
“I didn’t know how to get in touch with you.”
“You found me now. You could have found me then. Instead you just went on ahead and had this baby on your own. Decided to keep him long enough to show him to me so now I’m guilty for the rest of my life.” The words are spewing out. “You didn’t give me any choices here.” I almost can’t see Hester; it’s like the whole world is red and swirling, tight and hot as the feeling in my gut.
“Well, I didn’t have a whole lot myself, Tim.” She’s definitely angry now. “You were a mess, like you said. Was I supposed to hunt you down and say, hey, mind putting down that liter of rum and the joint so we can have a rational discussion about our baby?”
I try to imagine what I would have done if she had. Got no clue. The Tim Mason I was back then is like some loser roommate I had years ago. Except that that guy came over last night and nearly moved back in. The waiter plops down our appetizers, flees without a backward glance.
“Besides,” Hester adds. “I . . .” She circles her index finger around the rim of her water glass. “I—”
I look down at the appetizers. Uh . . . what are they? Never mind.
“What?” I ask, poking with my fork.
“It’s kind of personal.”
I just stare at her. Though I barely know her, we are way past personal.
“I know. Silly, at this point. I have these irregular periods, and I didn’t have any, well, morning sickness, so it took me a long time to figure out.”
“How long?” She can’t have been one of those chicks you hear about who thinks she’s maybe gotten kinda chubby and then gets a stomachache and pops out a baby.
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