by Lisa Duffy
“Sorry,” the boy mumbled, looking at his feet.
“Hey, ding-dong. Look her in the eye. Like you mean it.”
I saw the words in Kat’s handwriting. Ding-dong.
So this was Smelliot.
Damp strands of dark brown hair were plastered to his forehead, and a bead of sweat rolled down his round cheek. He looked about Kat’s age, but she was right about his size. He was big for his age, chubby, though, the baby fat on his still growing body more noticeable next to his father’s sculpted frame.
He’d dropped the basketball when his father whacked the back of his head, and now it rolled down the street, wobbling to a stop on the iron grate over the street sewer.
Mr. Finn had his son’s neck pinched between his thumb and his forefinger. Before I could tell him I didn’t want an apology, Smelliot said he was sorry again, this time looking straight at me, and Mr. Finn let go of his grip on him.
We both watched him walk away and disappear into the house marked 25.
When Mr. Finn looked back at me, he narrowed his eyes.
“You’re that girl from last night, the older one.” He crossed his arms, studied me. “You look like your mother,” he said, his eyes moving down the front of me.
I took a step back from him, and his eyebrows went up. His eyes were glossy, the alcohol on his breath turning my stomach.
“Did I scare you with my boy just then?” he asked, taking a step closer to me.
I froze, stopped breathing, a lump in my throat. I shook my head.
“I sure hope not. I was just teaching him his p’s and q’s. Nobody likes a boy to grow into a man with no manners. Know what I mean?”
He ducked his head so he was looking up at my face.
“I bet your Daddy taught you all about that, huh? Right from wrong.”
I heard the sneer in his voice. I met his eyes and promised myself I wouldn’t look away. I’d come for a bully. A harmless one, I thought. And instead, I got Mr. Finn.
His body was huge. Every part of him thick and solid and filling up space in front of me. But his eyes were empty. Gray and flat, colorless against the red of his face.
There wasn’t a part of me that wanted to be standing there, inches away from him. But I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what my father and Mr. Finn had been arguing about, but I knew the tone of my father’s voice well enough to know he’d been angry. And it was obvious that Mr. Finn was either drunk or a jerk. Maybe both.
Now all the emotion from this morning flooded my mind. The pain in my ankle was a white heat spreading up my leg. The word ding-dong swirled around in my head. Kat’s face flashing in front of me. My father’s scared eyes and crazy grin.
My head spun, a small hurricane building inside of me, and before I could stop it, words spilled out of my mouth.
“My father taught me a lot of things,” I blurted, standing on one foot as tall as I could. “One of them was not to hit people.”
Mr. Finn’s eyes lit up. Flashing from dull gray to slivers of ice.
“Well, see, you’re a girl, so I wouldn’t expect you to know the difference. But that was a tap. Not a hit. See, a tap says, ‘hey, listen up, kid,’ but a hit. A hit’s something different. A hit puts somebody on the ground.” He watched me, waiting for my response.
When he didn’t get one, he leaned closer. “Ask your father. Ask him if he thinks someone who gets hit by me would still be standing.”
I heard a rattling noise and turned to see a rusted silver pickup truck behind us on the street. We shuffled to the side so it could pass, and it parked directly across from us. The door opened, and a boy stepped out of the driver’s seat and glanced over at us. Mr. Finn tipped his chin up as a hello, but the boy didn’t return the greeting. Mr. Finn turned to me again, and I felt my body stiffen, but he stepped away, talking as he backed up.
“Tell your mother I said it was a great party. And don’t forget,” he warned, pointing his finger at me. He walked backward until he reached his truck. A loud rumble filled the air as he drove away, disappearing around the bend.
I leaned down, looking to see how bad my ankle was, when suddenly there was a shadow over me. Dark and large. I sucked in my breath and stood up quickly. The boy from the truck put up his hands and stepped back.
“Whoa. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. Here to help.”
“Did I ask for your help?” I snapped. “What is this? The sneak-up-on-people street?”
I turned away from him, hopping on one leg over to my bike.
“Wait a second,” I heard him say, and I looked over my shoulder at him.
“You’re bleeding,” he said. “Look.” He pointed to the line of blood running down my ankle, dripping over the side of my flip-flop.
I wanted to get on my bike and ride away as fast as I could, but the pain in my ankle was making me nauseous. I hopped over to the curb and sat down.
The boy walked over to his truck and leaned in through the open window. When he came back, he handed me an old beach towel.
“It’s clean,” he said, gesturing to my foot. “Use it.”
I reached out slowly and took it, mumbling a thank-you and pressing it to my ankle. After a minute, I lifted the towel and saw the cut was just a deep scrape, but the side of my foot was swollen.
“It looks like it’s sprained,” he said, and I glanced up, trying to get a look at him out of the corner of my eye.
He had a baseball hat pulled low on his forehead. He wore a baggy T-shirt with tan cargo shorts so worn that strings of fabric from the frayed edges dangled around his knees.
I reached down and pressed gently against the side of my foot, a bruise already spreading over the swollen area.
“Do you need a lift somewhere?” he asked. “You can’t ride that.” He pointed to the bike.
The only thing I wanted was to leave this street. I stood and put my weight on my good ankle.
“I don’t live far. I can hobble.”
“You don’t live far as in next door? Because that’s about how far you’ll get.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
He looked at my ankle and shrugged. “Okay. Hold on.”
He walked over to the bike and wheeled it over to me. I took a step, and a sharp pain shot up my leg. I winced, and he grabbed my elbow, taking the bike from me with his other hand. I had no choice but to lean my weight on his forearm for support.
He was only inches from my face now. The brim of the baseball hat had shielded his eyes until he looked at me. His face was sharp and angled, a shadow of brown stubble on his chin. He smelled like my skin after a day at the beach. But it was his eyes that made me suddenly aware of how close he was to me. They were green. The color of the inside of a kiwi, with specks of tan and black in the center.
Besides an awkward kiss with Robbie Messina in back of the gym at the eighth-grade dance and the two times I’d slow-danced with Josh Brown at the semiformal, this was the closest I’d been to a boy.
But even the word boy seemed wrong.
He wasn’t a man, but mannish—more mannish than Josh Brown would ever be.
“Hello?” he said, craning his neck at me.
He’d been talking to me, and I’d been thinking about how mannish he was. I dropped his arm and hopped back a step. He stood with his arm extended, as if he wanted me to know I could still grab hold if I needed to.
“Look. Are you sure you don’t want a ride? We can throw your bike in the back of the truck.”
I shook my head, hopped back to the curb, and sat down, thinking about what to do next.
“Okay. Well,” he said, taking his hat off and running his hand through his hair. It was brown, and curled up at the ends from where his hat had pressed down. “You can’t walk. You won’t let me drive you anywhere.” He paused. “I have a phone inside. You can call your mom . . . or dad . . .”
“No!” I said, remembering the lie I told about babysitting. “Nobody’s home. . . . My parents are out on our boat for the day.�
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“How about a friend, then? Look, I know I scared you earlier, and I’m a stranger, but I can’t just leave you here on the street . . . hurt and bleeding . . .”
“I didn’t say you scared me.” I blushed.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “I just meant I sort of snuck up on you over there. And you’re smart about the ride. I mean, I wouldn’t want my daughter getting in a car with someone she didn’t know.”
“You have a daughter?”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I thought you meant you had a daughter.”
He smirked, raised his eyebrows. “It was sort of hypothetical.”
I blushed again. I didn’t know if it was the pain in my ankle or his kiwi-colored eyes, but suddenly I was nervous, frazzled.
“Wait a second,” he said, a look crossing his face. “How old do you think I am?”
“I—I don’t know,” I stammered, not wanting to study his face with him staring at me the way that he was. “I’ve never seen you at school, and it’s a small town, so I just figured you were older.”
“How old?” he pressed.
“I don’t know.” Thinking, Does it matter?
He tilted his head to the side and waited. Apparently, it did.
I shrugged. “Nineteen. Twenty?”
His lips formed a smile. It was clear this was good news to him.
“Stay here,” he said then, and disappeared down the sidewalk.
I leaned back to see where he went, but his truck blocked my view.
I thought about getting up and making a run for it on my bike. The last thing I wanted was for Mr. Finn to come back. Not to mention how embarrassing this was.
Suddenly I felt almost hysterical, as if either tears or laughter might come pouring out of me. I put my head between my knees and told myself to breathe.
This was ridiculous. It had been a stupid idea to come here. Who did I think I was? Some sort of Wonder Girl riding my ten-speed across town to save the day? I wished I could call Carly or Betsy to come get me. But both of them were on vacation.
I talked to Carly last week, and she couldn’t stop talking about the bonfires at the beach every night, how much fun they were.
And Betsy had gone tubing with her older sister and a bunch of their friends. I’d listened to her talk for what seemed like forever about the bridge they’d jumped off and the boys she’d flirted with.
“What are you up to?” she’d asked, and I’d mumbled, “Not much,” and changed the subject.
What was there to say?
That the big event of my summer so far was sitting at the kids’ table with my sister at a dinner party at my house? That my mom had thrown my dad out of the house, his shoes as well, and now my little sister was convinced my parents were getting divorced, and the only thing I’d come up with was this brilliant idea of threatening some kid, and I hadn’t even managed to do that.
I felt silly sitting there. Like a small child instead of someone about to turn seventeen.
I pictured my father tugging my ponytail like I was a toddler last night when I asked him what happened with Finn, and telling me I was a kid when I asked about his fight with my mother. Refusing to allow me to date, even though all of my friends had been allowed to date since middle school.
My father and I had argued about it months ago, but he refused to budge, said that when I went to college, I could make my own decisions but as long as I was under his roof, it was his rules. I told him his rules were ridiculous. My mother had chimed in that she thought I was old enough, responsible. But he’d stormed out of the room, my mother frowning after him.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. A minute later I felt a cool pressure against my ankle and looked up to see the mannish boy crouched in front of me, pressing an ice pack against the swollen part of my foot. He was holding a rolled-up Ace bandage in his other hand.
“Okay if I wrap it?” he asked, and I nodded, the cold immediately dulling the pain.
He held the ice pack in place, winding the bandage around it and over my foot in loops, until my foot looked like it was covered in a tan cast.
I lifted my foot, turned it from side to side. “Not bad.”
“That’s what premed at Stanford gets you,” he said, blowing on his fingernails and polishing them on his shirt.
“Really?” I asked, impressed.
“No.” He shrugged. “I did a lot of skateboarding when I was younger. My mother was always wrapping one injury or another. I paid attention.”
“Is that offer for a ride still good?” I blurted before I lost my nerve. My father’s face flashed in my mind, and I pushed it away.
There was a fluttery sensation in my stomach, and my heart was knocking in my chest.
It wasn’t beach bonfires and tubing, but at least it was something.
He looked surprised, but he held his hand out and pulled me up when I took it. I hopped over to his truck, the door creaking when I pulled it open. I buckled my seat belt while he put my bike in the bed of his truck.
There was a tall metal pail on the floor at my feet, and when he opened his door to get in, he reached over and grabbed it quickly.
“Let’s give you some room for your foot,” he said, lifting it away from me and placing it on the seat between us.
Inside the pail was a coil of rope, the handle of a saw jutting out from the top, a pair of pliers tangled in the rope.
I swallowed, feeling my heart speed up.
The door shut, and he put the key in the ignition, the truck sputtering a few times before it started. He pulled away from the curb and did a U-turn.
“We won’t break down, I promise,” he said, looking over at me. “That’s all you need, I bet. To be stranded on the side of the road with some guy you don’t even know.”
I gave him a weak smile, eyeing the contents of the pail, thinking maybe this wasn’t the smartest idea. But it was too late now. We were turning off the street, onto the main road. He turned left, and I gulped, felt for the handle on the door.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
He looked over, startled.
“How do you know I don’t live that way?” I pointed in the other direction. I glanced at the sharp teeth of the saw, then back at him.
“Because unless you’re a mermaid, you live this way,” he replied. “That way ends at the ocean.”
“Oh, right,” I said, turning my head to look out my window so he wouldn’t see the red on my cheeks.
“By the way, what was that all about when I pulled up back there?” He gestured with his head in the direction of where we’d come from.
I didn’t know how to explain it to him, or even how to explain why I was there. I said the only thing that popped into my mind.
“It’s a long story. But that guy, the one you saw me talking to, is a total jerk.”
He looked over at me, his expression blank.
“I don’t even know your name,” he said.
“It’s Jess. Well, Jessica, but everyone calls me Jess.”
“I’m Alex,” he said. “Well, Alexander, but everyone calls me Alex.”
“Well, nice to meet you,” I said, smiling at him.
“Nice to meet you too, Jess,” he said, not smiling. “I’m the total jerk’s son.”
7
Hope
The weeks passed quickly. Jack and I moved around each other carefully. My mother was visiting again, and she was a buffer between us, another body filling the space.
Last night over dinner, she’d mentioned that she was going back to Florida soon. She wouldn’t be back for a while. Maybe not until after the New Year.
Jack had looked at me, raised his eyebrows.
Later, in the bedroom, he came in and stood in the doorway, a look on his face that I knew well. I felt my body tense.
“You heard your mother. She’s leaving,” he said.
I didn’t answer him. I knew what was coming next.
“She
’s been in your closet for a year,” he said quietly, looking over my shoulder into the darkness of the closet.
He was looking at Maddie’s ashes, nestled on the top shelf of my closet between my heaviest sweaters and covered with her worn baby blanket. I’d put them there to keep her safe and warm. I may have told Jack this at some point, but I’d never repeat it now.
Now the ashes were just another fight.
Jack wanted to spread them. I wasn’t ready.
He waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, just sat on the end of the bed looking at the floor, he cleared his throat.
“She’s been in there for over a year,” he said again, and this time I heard the blame in his voice. I felt a surge of anger roll through me. Before I could stop myself, I scowled at him.
“I know she’s in there, Jack. Do you think I just forgot?”
We’d argued, and gone to bed without speaking, and when my alarm went off, Jack’s side of the bed was cold and empty. He hadn’t said good-bye before he left for work.
Now, I was in my mother’s kitchen, having a cup of tea while Kat got ready for camp. The sugar wasn’t fully dissolved in my mug, and I was listening to my mother tell me how Roger had sent her the kindest letter, and she’d cried when she read it.
“You should go home to him,” I said. “He misses you.”
She spooned a dollop of honey out of the jar and held it out to me. I waved it away, and she put the spoon in her tea instead.
“He understands that I want to help up here. He’s no stranger to this kind of stuff, you know.” Roger was my mother’s boyfriend, a widower who’d lost his wife after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.
“When are we going to meet him?” I asked, blowing on my tea.
My father died of a heart attack in his sleep when I was sixteen. If my mother dated after my father died, I didn’t know it. When I went to Emerson College in Boston, she moved to Florida. She’d started dating Roger right before Maddie died, and now, a year later, we still hadn’t met him.
“Let’s not worry about that. I’m here to help you, and Jack, and the girls. To do what I can to make an unbearable time more bearable.” She patted my hand.