by Naomi Niles
“Will you cut it out?” I yelled as I ran to the door. “You’ll wake up Dad!”
But when I opened the door, I found her standing there holding a plate full of grapes, gluten-free waffles, and sliced avocados in her mittened hand. “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that,” I moaned. “Now I feel awful!”
Nic laughed as if to say it was what I deserved. “Come eat with me!” she said, and I followed her into the dining room.
She had set up a workspace at the dining-room table with her new MacBook. The table was an old oak Victorian refectory table that she had recently bought at a thrift store, polished, and repainted. Not for the first time, I marveled at the texture of the wood as I took my seat.
“So…” said Nic slowly as she sliced up a cantaloupe into beautiful, perfect pieces. “How did things go with the boy last night after I left?”
I shrugged. “Not much happened between us, if that’s what you mean. I started getting tired and went home basically right after you left.”
“Penny, Penny, Penny.” She shook her head and clucked her tongue. “I should have stayed around a bit longer so I could explain how into you that guy was.”
“I could have told you that on my own.” I reached for the mug of hot cocoa she made me. “Anyway, he just wasn’t the right guy for me. At first, I thought he might be. I liked the way he looked at me and the way he talked to me. But he was really intense about it, and he started getting more intense as the night went on. Like, I was the only person he talked to the entire night.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.” Nic handed me a cantaloupe slice. “I thought it was every woman’s dream to have a guy who’s slavishly devoted.”
“Maybe it’s your dream. You were the one leading your guy around on a leash.”
“It was a tie, okay!” Nic laughed. “He said he liked it when I stroked his tie, so I did.”
“What a weird thing to say to someone.”
She smirked and shook her head at me. “Honestly, Pen, sometimes I think you don’t understand what flirting is.”
“Sometimes I wish someone would explain it to me.” I took a sip of my cocoa, which was unusually bitter but warmed me up from the inside. I could feel the warmth spreading from my throat to the tips of my toes.
After breakfast, while Nic cleared the dishes, I went to check on Dad.
He had moved in with us a few months before after being diagnosed with testicular cancer. It wasn’t an arrangement that Nic had been entirely pleased with, but she knew better than to raise a fuss about it. My dad was dying. The doctors had given him, at best, a year to live. He had been undergoing treatments to lessen the pain and sickness, and lately a nurse had been coming over once a day at around noon to check on him. In the meantime, I had been running the shop without him.
When I came into his room that morning, I found him sitting upright with a couple pillows at his back. He was wearing a pair of gray flannel pajamas and idly leafing through an old copy of Reader’s Digest. The portable TV at the front of the room was turned to Matlock with the volume down low, but he didn’t seem to be paying it much attention.
His eyes lit up as I walked in. “Hey, sugar,” he said, setting the magazine down on his knees. “How’ve you been?”
I came over and gave him a hug. “Don’t you worry about me; you’re the one I worry about. How did you sleep last night?”
“I had a bowl of cabbage and cauliflower and went to bed at around ten. I didn’t wake up until about an hour ago. This treatment they’ve got me on has been a real improvement. At least—” He paused, as he always did when having to broach the subject neither of us wanted to discuss. “At least it won’t be painful.”
I stood there quietly for a minute stroking the back of his hand. How did you respond to a statement like that?
He turned and kissed my hand. “How’s work going?”
“It’s been okay. Everyone still asks about you, wants to know how you’re doing. I think we might have to fire Gary soon; he’s been stealing radiator parts and spark plugs. I think he might be trying to build his own car out of spare parts stolen from the shop.”
“If he manages to get it running, that would be very impressive,” Dad said. “Hell, I might even consider letting him have it.”
As we were heading out the door that morning, Nic asked me how he was doing.
“Still has his sense of humor,” I told her, trying to stay composed. It was never easy to see him like that, and I had needed a few minutes to myself before we left for work. “He seems about as cheerful as any man could be when facing the end of his life.”
“God, I don’t know how he does it,” said Nic with a shudder. “Knowing that by the end of the year you could just be—not of this earth. Wherever the dead go. That’s bad enough, but to know you’ll never get to see your daughter’s wedding, never watch your grandkids take their first steps—”
“That’s assuming I even have kids.”
“But even if you don’t, you’ll get married someday.” She paused at the edge of the stairs and shot me a look of suspicion. “You are planning on getting married, aren’t you?”
Nic had been horrified to learn recently that I had never slept with a boy and that my experience of dating had been limited to a clumsy make-out session at the back of the gym in tenth grade. Evander had asked me out at the beginning of the period and broken up with me by the end. In the ninety minutes between, there had been some awkward, sweaty kissing. Leaving the gym that day, I told myself, If this is what dating is like, I don’t really care for it.
“I could see myself getting married someday,” I said as we emerged onto a sunny street lined with cedars. “I guess I just haven’t found the right guy yet.”
“That’s because you’re still waiting for Mr. Perfect,” Nic moaned in a tone of frustration. “I’ve never met anyone who had such high standards for what they wanted in a relationship. That guy last night, Drew, he’d have been perfect for you. And he really liked you, and you weren’t willing to give him the time of day. How much better than Drew does a boy have to be before you’ll consider going out with him?”
“I guess we’ll just have to see,” I said quietly.
“Whereas me, I was totally fine going home with a guy I had just met. Sometimes I wish we could just switch places for a day, like a Freaky Friday thing, so you could know what it’s like just to want somebody in the moment and just go after it.”
“I’d have to want somebody first.”
“But haven’t you ever wanted to do physical things with a boy?” She froze and stared at me. “Oh my god, are you asexual? It’s totally cool if you are—it would be clarifying.”
“I’m definitely not asexual.” I could feel the heat coloring my cheeks, making my face flush. “There’ve been plenty of times I liked boys or had crushes on boys or wanted to do things with boys. I just never told them, I guess because I didn’t think it was worth bringing up. I always knew I would get over it before very long, and I did.”
Nic shook her head. “You are—and I say this out of love—by far the most confusing person I’ve ever met.”
I was still laughing as we got into her Subaru and drove to work.
Chapter Three
Darren
I woke up the next morning to a call from Carlotta. She’d been looking over our bank statements, and she wasn’t happy about it.
“Hey, you wanna explain something to me? So, I’m going through our accounts last night, and Darren, what the hell is this? You spent four hundred dollars on a new muffler at Car Quest!”
“Yeah, what about it?” I said groggily. I had woken up to find the phone in my hands and Carlotta bitching at me, and I still wasn’t entirely sure how either of those things had happened.
“Darren, you know how much we need that money. You have a car that works perfectly fine. It gets you to work, and it gets you to my house. What more do you need?”
“It wasn’t a muffler for that car,” I grumbled
.
“Are you freakin’ kidding me? Are you still shelling out money to fix up that old car? A, you don’t even need that car. B, it’s illegal, and you could go to prison, and C, you could get killed!”
I mumbled a few words under my breath that I was glad she couldn’t hear. “Carlotta, I’m not going to die,” I said aloud. “I’m a better driver than that.”
But Carlotta had worked herself up into such a fit that by now she was practically in tears. “You promised me you were only going to spend that money on us. It says here you’ve eaten out nine times in the last week. McDonald’s, Church’s, KFC… why are you spending all our money on junk? You know how tight our budget is right now.”
I was beginning to regret ever getting a joint bank account. Rubbing my temples in exasperation, I said, “Look, Carlotta, maybe we can talk about this later when I’ve woken up a bit.”
“No, you always say that, and then we never talk about it. If this is your way of getting out of having this discussion, then I’m not having it. I want to know why you keep going out to eat when I specifically ask you not to.”
“Carlotta, a man’s gotta eat. I don’t think you understand that. I get hungry during the day.”
“Then make your own freaking lunch! Hell, I’ll come over and make it for you. We could save—between fifty and sixty dollars a week! And the crap you’re putting into your body… Darren, you can do better than this. You can eat sandwiches, salads. Real food. You don’t have to live on Big Macs.”
“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were my health specialist,” I said acidly. “If we’re being honest, I think you’re just mad because I’m spending that money on me instead of you.”
“I mean, I thought we were supposed to be saving that money,” said Carlotta, making no effort to deny it. “What if we had a kid?”
I froze, and for a moment, a cold feeling of terror came over me. “Are we having a kid?” I asked in a faint voice.
“No, but that’s not the point. The point is that you’re spending money without asking me, and you’re spending it on shit that you don’t need. Our relationship isn’t going to last if you keep making purchases behind my back. If I don’t feel like I can trust you, then one day I’m just gonna leave and take this body elsewhere.”
“Yeah, whatever.” I hung up the phone and threw it down on the bed, rubbing my sore eyes miserably. As great as she was in bed, sometimes I didn’t think it was worth this.
Perhaps it was a feeling of spite that drove me to visit Car Quest right after breakfast. Carlotta could yell at me later all she wanted, but I needed to make this purchase, or I’d be out of the race on Saturday.
I spent a couple minutes searching for it at the back of the store and was beginning to feel pretty frustrated that I couldn’t find it. It didn’t help that Dickie kept texting me to ask if I was on my way to work. After the fourth text, I turned my phone off and went up to the front counter.
There was a girl behind the counter trying to snap a picture of a moth that had landed on the rim of the donations jar. She kept trying to get it from different angles and at one point even leaned in for a selfie. It took her a minute to realize she had a customer: when she saw me watching her with a smirk on my face, she straightened up and said in a very serious voice, “How can I help you, good sir?”
“Are you Pete’s daughter? He’s mentioned you, but he never told me you were so interested in moths.”
“It’s a good moth,” she said with a shrug. “I like how its wings are fuzzy and how it didn’t fly away. Some moths get scared or annoyed when you try to take selfies with them, and those aren’t my favorite. I had a turtle once that ran away whenever I tried to take pictures with it.”
“It couldn’t have gone very fast.”
“You’d be surprised. It’s hard to outrun a turtle who doesn’t want his picture taken.”
It was an odd conversation to be having, and I began to wonder if she was alright in the head. She had this weirdly childish way about her and didn’t look much older than nineteen, though I remembered Pete saying she was in her mid-twenties. She had a button nose spotted with freckles, long, wavy blonde hair, and huge, bluish-green eyes that seemed just slightly too big for her face. And she was tiny—couldn’t have been any taller than five feet when she stood to her full height. She had a slender body with wide hips that gave her body a pear shape.
“Anyway, how’s your dad doing?” I asked. “I ain’t seen him around much lately.”
“He’s been alright.” Her eyes shifted evasively, and I got a funny feeling she was holding something back. “Last week we went out and played badminton. Do you want me to tell you a secret?”
“Sure.”
She whispered, “I let him win. Promise you won’t tell?”
“By the time I see him again, I’ll have forgotten you even told me.”
“Thank you,” she said in a tone of relief. “Did you need anything or did you just come up here to chat?”
I had gotten so absorbed in our conversation that I had briefly forgotten all about the spark plug. “Yeah, I was looking for a certain part back there, but I couldn’t find it.” I told her the make and model of my car, and she did a search on her janky old computer. “I thought maybe I was just overlooking it—this place seems to have every car part under the sun.”
“Yeah, no, it doesn’t look like we have it,” she said with a frown. “But I can order it for you. Would you like that? It’ll take about a week to get here, maybe even a bit longer.”
She must have sensed my irritation, because she quickly added, “Or, you know what I could do? I could rush order it for you at no extra charge?”
“Would you mind? I need the part by Friday.”
“Ooo!” Her mouth formed an O. “Planning on racing a turtle?”
It was such an odd question that I couldn’t help laughing. “Some other cars, actually. But those other guys are so slow, a turtle could probably outrun ‘em.”
“You never know,” she said in a very matter-of-fact voice, her eyes still fixed on the screen in front of her. “Those turtles can be really fast.”
I gave her my name and number and left the store with a feeling of relief, like a weight had been lifted off of me. Back at the car shop, I found Dickie standing behind the counter chewing on a beef stick and drinking a Diet Coke. The odor of gasoline and lighter fluid was pungent.
“How’d it go?” he asked when I came in. “You stopped answering my texts.”
“I stopped reading your texts,” I replied as I slung my leather satchel down across the counter. “We ordered the part, though. It only took forever because me and the girl at the register got to talking.”
“Which one, Nicole? That girl will fuck anything that moves.”
“Good to know. No, the other girl—Pete’s girl.” It occurred to me only now that I hadn’t asked her name. “She was weird as shit but hella cute.”
“Oh, Penny,” Dickie said with a knowing look. “Yeah, someone like her doesn’t really belong in this town. She ought to be up in Austin feeding pigeons or running a kids’ daycare. Matter of fact, I think she went to school in Boston for a while, but she dropped out and moved home because the pressures of college life got to be too much for her.”
“What’s her deal, man? Why’s she so weird?”
Dickie laughed. “What’d she do? Was she coloring in a coloring book?”
“No, she kept trying to take selfies with a moth, and we had a long conversation about turtles.”
“It could have been worse.” Dickie drained the last of his Coke and threw it in the bin behind him. He was grinning like I hadn’t seen him grin in a while. “One time when I went in there, she had the radio on and was doing aerobics in shorts and a sports bra. Another time she would only speak to me in a very fake Italian accident. ‘I’m-a very sorry! We still have not-ta gotten the part you ordered!’ She did that for twenty minutes.”
“Is she okay?” I asked, bewildered. “I just don�
�t get it.”
“Yeah, she’s fine,” said Dickie with a laugh. “She just has a very quirky sense of humor and likes to have fun. She’s definitely the weird one in her family, but if you think about it, you can sort of see how Pete would have a daughter like that. He’s always been a goofball at heart.”
“I guess, man.” I shook my head with a dazed feeling. “Like you said, she’s cute, and that could probably make up for a lot. But man, I think I would have a hard time explaining her to my parents. I’d be afraid to bring her home because God only knows what she might do—pull a live frog out of her pocket or start throwing turnips at people like a goddamned Mario game.”
“She’s unique; I’ll grant you that. It’s tempting to ask her out, but I would never do it. She’s too much of a goody-goody.”
“How do you mean?”
Dickie shrugged. “I would just be very surprised if she had ever slept with a guy. She mostly keeps to herself and doesn’t go out to parties—so basically the opposite of her best friend. If I just wanted a quick lay, I could hit up Nikki, but she’s not worth it. Penny is more interesting to me because she would be harder to get.”
“You seem to have thought a lot about this.”
“Well, I’ve known their family for a long time. And Penny is so different, she sort of stands out from everyone around her even when she doesn’t mean to. She’s eccentric, but not in a way where she’s obviously trying to get attention. She just does her own thing. She likes doing her own thing, and I respect that about her, even if it means we’ll probably never sleep together.”
“It’s too bad, really,” I said with a smirk. “She’s crazy enough that I bet she would be dynamite in bed.”
“Yeah, assuming she had any idea what she was doing. I doubt she’s even seen a guy naked.”
“Honestly, we’re not much to look at,” I replied.
“Speak for yourself!” Dickie laughed.
But at that moment, the door of the shop swung open, and Carlotta came walking in. She was wearing a brown crop top, high-waisted denim shorts, and a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses that covered half her face. She had the look of a Hollywood actress being harassed by the paparazzi.