by Naomi Niles
“Maybe.” I didn’t want to commit just yet, especially not now when I was weak with emotion and could easily be pushed into making a decision I might regret later. “I don’t like what it did to him, but I’m careful. I would never have wrecked the car like this.”
“There’s a reason they’re called accidents,” Penny said softly.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. Finally, she added, “I’m going to go back home and make some breakfast. Would you like me to bring you something? Just go ahead and say yes because I’m doing it anyway.”
“Please.” It felt wonderful to bathe in her kindness again. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday, and I don’t plan on eating out of the vending machine.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry,” she said. “I’ve always got you.” She turned to leave, but before she had taken more than a few steps, I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her close to me. Her fear and surprise subsided quickly when she saw the look in my eyes, all gratitude and hunger.
“It’s good to have you back, girl,” I said and kissed her warmly on the lips and face.
We pulled back for a moment, and I studied her face. Her eyes, already dilated in the half-light, widened with unspoken emotions. Her lip trembled, and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Then, before I really knew what was happening, she had pulled me tight into a hug and was sobbing into my chest.
“I know I sent you away yesterday,” she said, “and I’m so sorry. I’ll never, ever do that again.” She sniffed loudly, her small body shaking against mine. “You’ve no idea how much I missed you.”
“Don’t think anything of it,” I whispered, breathing in the scent of her, the scent of jasmine and lilacs. “Now we’ve had our first fight, and it wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“It was, it was awful,” moaned Penny.
“I didn’t like it, either. But we got through it, and today is going to be better than yesterday.”
“No day will ever be as bad as yesterday,” she said, and I realized she was shaking with laughter.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Penny
“So did you finally kiss and make up?” asked Nic as I stood in the kitchen making breakfast the next morning. “After the fight, I really thought this might be The End.”
“Not yet.” I turned over the pancakes with a spatula; once again, they were slightly burnt on the bottom, and they hadn’t formed the perfect circle I wanted. “I think he understands that I had just gone through a very painful experience and I wasn’t handling it well.”
Nic was sitting at the wooden table in the dining room in a t-shirt and blue velour track shorts, peeling an orange. She hadn’t offered to help with breakfast, but for once I didn’t mind; I was glad just to have her in the house. Without her, it would have been unbearably lonely.
“Ever since you and Darren started dating,” she said, “I’ve had a good feeling about you.”
I froze in the middle of reaching for the butter. “Oh yeah? Why?”
Nic shrugged. “Because you’re so loyal, and because once a person has earned your devotion, you never let go. Also—and I think this is a big part of it—you’re the sort of girl who was always holding out for the right person. Look at me, for example: I’ve dated three or four boys just in the past year. I once told Dickie I thought there was a very good chance you would marry the first boy you ever dated.”
“Oh, Dickie.” I dropped the butter into the skillet and stirred with a melancholy feeling. “He always wanted to be that boy, didn’t he?”
“He did.” She set the peel of her orange on the edge of a paper towel. “Once or twice, I tried to get him to go out with me, but it didn’t take long for me to realize he only had eyes for one woman.”
“Sometimes I think, maybe if he had been a bit less interested in me—” I shook my head. “But then I think, no. There’s no universe in which Dickie and I end up together.”
“It’s never a good idea to go out with someone who dotes on you that much,” said Nic.
“Except now I feel bad because he’s in a coma, and I sort of wish I had treated him better.”
“Don’t. You did the right thing by not getting his hopes up. You and Darren being together will be good for him in the end, I think, because he’ll realize he has to move on with his life.”
“I just hope he gets the chance. Today the doctors are taking him out of his coma. Darren is still over there keeping vigil. He asked me to bring him breakfast.”
Nic took a sip of her lingonberry juice. “He’s been there, what, three days now? I hope he hasn’t tried to kiss you.”
I turned my face away so she couldn’t see how hard I was blushing. “I didn’t mind too much,” I said quietly.
After our talk the morning before, I had returned in the afternoon with a homemade pizza—cheese and veggies unevenly distributed—and a couple board games. We spent most of the day there at Dickie’s bedside playing the Harry Potter version of Clue and talking about nothing in particular. He still maintained that Star Wars was better than Lord of the Rings, a statement that might have been a deal breaker a month ago, but now I didn’t mind so much.
“He’s not the sort of boy I ever imagined myself with,” I told Nic. “Growing up I always thought I was going to marry a pastor’s kid or a missionary. He would be clean-cut, neatly dressed, carrying a guitar in one hand and a Bible in the other. But life hasn’t worked out that way. There are days when I still wonder if that man is out there, somewhere.”
“Maybe,” Nic said with a shrug. “But I think maybe you’re not seeing the extent to which you and Darren are good for each other.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean you both share a certain sensitivity and love of imagination. Darren is one of the most sensitive men I’ve ever met, and you—well, you once cried because you read in a book that a baby had been abandoned by her parents.”
“It was a baby!” I exclaimed. “Good parents don’t abandon their own children.”
“See? And you’re both playful and love to pretend, and when you’re together, you tend to retreat into your own world that probably only makes sense to the two of you. Do you remember when you were in high school and you started your own lunch club?”
“Yeah, the Cook Lunch Clan. We would make our own lunches and share stories and poems we’d written.”
“I think you’ve always wanted to create this space where imagination could flourish without any restraints. And that’s what you have with Darren. I used to worry that anyone you dated would discourage your love of play and try to mold you into being a more conventional person, but he encourages you like no other.”
“It’s true,” I said shyly. “I could do a lot worse than marry Darren.”
“He couldn’t do any better than you,” said Nic. “So if you end up together, it will be—” she bit into the last of her orange “—ideal.”
I took the finished pancakes and set them down in the center of the table. They were lumpy and misshapen, but Nic didn’t seem to mind. I sat down across from her and reached for the syrup, thinking over what she had said about Darren.
“Sorry,” she said after a short pause. “Is it okay that we’re talking about this?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because I know your dad just died, and I feel bad talking about something so lighthearted.”
“It’s a relief, honestly.” I closed the lid on the syrup and handed it to her. “I’m just glad you’re not one of those people who feels we have to be talking about it all the time. ‘Are you okay?’ ‘You poor, poor thing!’ And they make such a fuss about it that you go away feeling worse than you did before.”
“Well, at least you won’t have to go to work today.” We had jointly decided to shut down the shop for one day in Dad’s honor. “And yesterday while you were with Darren, I made a large sign explaining that he had died and when the funeral will be held. I need to run by the store and set it up after breakfast.�
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“Mmmm, good idea. I have a framed picture of him in my room; you’re welcome to use it. Would you mind running past the hospital on your way over?”
“Of course not.”
I nodded solemnly. I didn’t feel remotely prepared for the funeral, despite the fact that I had spent much of the past year mentally preparing myself for his death. “I’ve never in my life lost someone this close to me,” I said.
“Well, you had better get used to it.” Nic reached for the pitcher and poured herself a second glass of lingonberry juice. “If you end up getting married, one of you will have to bury the other someday. And that’s in the best-case scenario.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Darren
When Penny came into the room that morning, I was still wearing the same clothes I had been wearing for the past couple days. Embarrassed, I instinctively drifted toward the back of the room. I didn’t want her getting close enough to be able to smell me.
“You alright?” she asked, sensing my unease. “I brought you some breakfast.” Reaching into her purse, she pulled out a Tupperware container with a red lid. “Pancakes, sausage, onions, and hash browns. At this point the pancakes are cold, but I didn’t think you would mind.”
“You’ve no idea.” I ran over and grabbed the container and took it back to my corner. “Last night I was so hungry I broke down and bought a bag of Bugles out of the vending machine.”
“You definitely look like you’ve fallen on hard times,” said Penny. My stomach twisted into a knot—did I really look that bad? “Are you sure you don’t want to come to the funeral?”
“Pen, you know I love you, but there’s no way I’m going to your dad’s funeral looking like this. I’d need to go home and get cleaned up first. And I want to be here when Dickie comes out of his coma.”
“Suit yourself,” said Penny, though I detected a hint of sadness in her voice. “Nic’s waiting for me downstairs, so I need to get going, but I hope this won’t be the last time I see you.”
I knew what she was getting at; I had a habit of disappearing for weeks at a time, as though waiting for her to come find me. “I promise you won’t have to wait a whole week before you hear from me again.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said with a sad smile. She turned and left.
I sat down in the chair beside Dickie’s bed and opened up the Tupperware container. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have found the sight of cold pancakes remotely appetizing, but I was famished. My stomach gave a loud rumble as I cut into the first pancake with a plastic fork, wishing I had some butter and syrup to put on them. Penny had never been the best of cooks, but she more than made up for it with her other fine qualities.
Our fight over the weekend had exposed to me just how easily I could lose the relationship. Ever since, I had been feeling oddly shy, not wanting to do anything that might put it at risk. I was still replaying our last conversation in my head when Dickie groaned and stirred and opened his eyes.
I sat up slowly in my seat, not wanting to startle him. “Dickie,” I whispered, “are you alright?”
Dickie moaned softly and turned to face me, his eyes blinking back tears. “Where am I? Was there an accident?”
“There was. You’re quite lucky to be alive, actually. The Mustang exploded just as they were pulling you out.”
“Damn.” He was quiet for a moment, apparently reflecting on this turn of events. “Well, sorry I wrecked your car.”
“Don’t even worry about it,” I said. “I’m just glad you’re alive. For a long time, nobody was sure whether you were ever going to come out of that coma.”
“Coma? How long have I been asleep?”
“Almost three days.”
Dickie blinked back surprise. “Is that how long it’s been since you’ve had a bath?”
“Hey now!” I said, laughing in spite of myself. “There’s no one else in the world who would’ve kept vigil by your bed for two nights in a row.”
“Maybe not, but you’re allowed to go home. Who brought you the pancakes?”
“Penny.”
“How is she?”
“Doing a lot better than she was a couple days ago. I think she’s been dreading his death for so long, it was almost a relief when it actually happened.” I decided not to tell him about the fight we had had, not yet. There would be plenty of time to talk about all of that later, once we were out of the hospital.
***
We talked for about half an hour before he threw me out of his room and told me to go home. I drove home, tore off my clothes, and climbed into the shower, letting the warm water pour over me. I had gotten too lost in my own head lately, worrying about Dickie and what Penny thought about me. It felt good to let go of all that. There in the shower, I didn’t have to please anyone. I just was.
I hadn’t gone grocery shopping in at least a week, but I found a supreme pizza hidden in the back of the freezer under a bag of assorted vegetables. I was just preheating the oven when my phone buzzed. It was Penny.
“Hey, how was the funeral?”
“It was…a funeral,” said Penny. It sounded like she had been crying. “Where are you?”
“I’m at home. I was just about to make dinner.”
There was a slight pause, and then Penny asked in a quiet voice, “Do you mind if I come over?”
“Of course not.”
“Thanks. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” She hung up.
I sat at the kitchen table waiting for the oven to finish warming up. It had been so long since Penny and I had been alone together, and my body missed her. I missed the weird, rambling stories that she seemed to tell me and only me, as if she didn’t feel at home around anyone else. I missed the slope of her shoulders and her chipmunk cheeks and the lilac scent of her hair. I missed hearing her talk about the characters in her book as if they were real people, her eyes wide with excitement.
She showed up at the door half an hour later. She was wearing a brown leather jacket, high-waisted jeans, and a low-necked blue and white shirt spotted with blue dots, and it was obvious that she had been crying up until about two minutes before.
“You mind if I come in?” she asked softly.
“If I did, I wouldn’t have invited you over.”
“I guess that’s true.” She followed me into the living room and set down her purse on the couch, kicking off her boots in the process. “Would you just hold me for a minute?”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“I just want to be held, is all.” I came over and put my arms around her. From a distance, she seemed mostly composed, but now I could feel her body shaking.
“You know what I love about you?” I asked after we’d been standing there for a moment in silence.
“Mmmm?” She shifted imperceptibly and nestled into me.
“How when you want to be loved, you don’t make any secret about it. You just come right out and tell me. I’ll never forget the night you sent me the first three chapters of your book. And after I had finished reading them, you called me and said, ‘Just tell me that you love it. I just want to hear you say that you love it.’ And finally, I said, ‘I love the story, and you,’ and you said, ‘See, that was perfect,’ and you fell asleep.”
“Well, I was really tired,” said Penny. “I probably didn’t even know what I was saying at that point.”
“I think you meant it, though.” I brushed my thumb against her cheek. “I’ve known so many girls who tried to be mysterious because they thought it made them more interesting. It’s such a relief not having to guess what you’re feeling.”
Penny stared up at me with her large eyes. “What am I feeling right now?”
“If I had to guess…” I studied her face for a moment. “I think you’re probably feeling pretty miserable and worn out. But you’re secretly really pleased to see me.”
“I guess it’s not really much of a secret, is it?” she said in a tone of disappointment, shivered, and pulled
me closer.
“Anything I can do for you?”
Penny shook her head.
“You sure? Do you want to go into our talk room?”
Our talk room wasn’t an actual room; it was a thing we had made up. Whenever one or both of us was feeling stressed, we would go into the “talk room” and talk it out. Over the last few weeks, we had spent an unusual amount of time imagining what this room looked like. There was a shabby couch toward the back of the room and a purple throw rug in the center. We even had a guard alligator named Lennie who stood watch over the front door and made sure no intruders got in.
Penny didn’t answer at first. Instead, she stood there looking hesitant.
“I’ll bring out the guitar if it helps,” I said. Sometimes I would play the guitar while she was talking.
“Would you tell me you love me?” Penny said at last, with an effort. “Just tell me you love me, even if you don’t mean it.”
“Why wouldn’t I mean it?” I asked, almost laughing. “Pen, why would I lie to you?”
“Just say it,” said Penny miserably. “You’re making me think you don’t want to say it. I just want to hear it with your lips.”
“Okay.” I bent low and kissed her once on the mouth. “That better?”
“I guess,” she said in a pouty voice, sticking her lip out in a manner that was almost unbearably cute. “Don’t tell your girlfriend you love her. Just kiss her and hope it’ll distract her. Maybe she won’t even notice.”
“Did you notice?”
“I totally noticed.”
“Well here, how about this?” I planted a single kiss in the center of her forehead. She shut her eyes tight, as though praying. “I love you.” Once on the nose, more quietly: “I love you.” Once more on the mouth, more quietly still, “I love you. Is that better?”