The Pick Up

by Allison Tempe

  “There was potential there, but they’re not calling back, and I can’t wait around for them to come through. I can’t make my dad support both of us; he already does too much for us.”

  “But—” Adam’s heart sank. He could see the exhaustion on Kyle’s face, and suddenly he understood the impossibility of the situation. There was no way for him to argue this without coming across like the asshole, so he tried another approach. “Maybe Rebecca could help. She’s got to know other people she could introduce you to? Or maybe the café’s hiring. They’re always busy! You could work there. It doesn’t have to be permanent, just until you find something else.” Adam couldn’t help the desperation from rising in his voice. He didn’t want to acknowledge what was happening. Kyle was leaving. He was leaving and it might not be this job, but it would be another, and probably soon. It was going to hurt when he went. Adam’s anger mixed with self-recrimination that he had let himself get involved so quickly.

  “Adam.” Kyle had stopped reaching for him, and instead wrapped his arms around himself, squashing the big white letters on his T-shirt. “Can we talk about this? Nothing’s decided. I want to see what the charity’s got in mind. It could be good for me, you know? I need to be working for Caroline’s sake, but this could be work I actually want to do. It’s my background. I used to be good at it.”

  There it was. Kyle was really leaving.

  “So you’re going to go?” Adam said.

  “So you’re not going to come?”

  Was Kyle still hoping Adam was buying the romantic getaway bit?

  “I can’t.”

  Kyle frowned, and there was a twist of his head that said he didn’t believe what he’d heard. “You can’t? You said you have no plans for the next two months.”

  “I won’t—” Adam meant to say he wouldn’t let Kyle soften the blow by dragging this out, but Kyle cut him off.

  “You can’t? Or you won’t?”

  Adam bit his lip and shook his head. He didn’t want Kyle to twist his words around on him like that. “Forget it.” He turned to go, before one of them said something they’d regret later.

  Kyle’s expression darkened, and he stepped into Adam’s space. “Don’t walk away. You know I have to do this. Caroline needs me; I can’t be some jobless bum sleeping in his dad’s guest room.”

  Fuck. Adam felt sick. He was the worst sort of selfish idiot for thinking he had a chance of being what Kyle needed. He’d been kidding himself since the moment Rebecca had talked him into giving Kyle a chance, and now Kyle was going to play the martyr and there was no way for Adam to stop him.

  “Look. I understand. You’ve got plans. Plans that don’t involve staying in Red Creek.”

  Plans Adam hadn’t let himself think about. He had hoped they could sort out the growing distance between them after school ended, but now it seemed it was already too late.

  “Well, it’s not for sure, but I’m not really in a position to pass anything up right now, am I? I never said I was staying in Red Creek, but, Adam—”

  “But I am staying. I have a life here. I thought you might . . .” He couldn’t let himself admit the last part, that he’d started to hope Kyle would be part of that life. Speaking the words would only make it all hurt worse than it already did. He hadn’t meant to say any of it, but his emotions were spilling out like a science-class volcano and he didn’t know how to stop.

  “What? You want me to live in my dad’s guest room forever?” Kyle’s question made everything inside Adam’s head buzz louder.

  “Of course not. But I figured if you moved, it would be a six-minute drive to your new place, not a six-hour one.”

  “It’s not that far,” Kyle said. “If we did move to Richmond, you might come visit. We could make it work.” There was a hopeful note in his voice, but the idea stung Adam like he’d been slapped.

  “Are you listening to what you’re saying? I’m not some weekend booty call. I’m not going to meet you at some highway service station with your dad so you can trade Caroline off for me like I’m part of a shared custody deal.”

  “That’s not fair.” Kyle’s eyes hardened. “I’m asking you to look at this from my perspective. What am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re the one who’s not being fair.” Adam’s voice rose. He didn’t care anymore if there was anyone left in the gym to hear him. He’d broken every rule that had protected him for the last two years by getting involved with Kyle, and this was what he got for it. “Where has this been the last few weeks? Why didn’t you tell me that leaving was an option? Why didn’t you let me help you find another way? I offered, but you’re so scared of realizing that this town is where you need to be that you’d pack up everything and move to a place where you have nothing and you’re completely alone.”

  “Adam, that’s not what I—”

  “I know what you meant. You never wanted to stay here, did you? I’m sorry we’re only a pit stop for you, but you should have thought about what your actions would mean to those of us who want to live here!”

  “I asked you to listen. Can you do that, please?” Kyle’s quiet plea only made Adam madder. Kyle should have said something weeks ago, but in any case Adam didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want to work it out. He was too hurt, and he wanted Kyle to respond at the same level.

  “Did you think about me at all? Or your dad?”

  “This has got nothing to do with my dad.”

  “Did you consider what this will mean for Caroline?”

  Color rose on Kyle’s cheeks as he squared his shoulders and set his jaw. There. Adam had done it. He could see it on Kyle’s face. He’d finally hit a nerve.

  “Everything I have done has been for her. Everything from the moment Olivia called to say she was pregnant has been for my daughter. You don’t get to ask me that. Fuck you, Adam.” His voice was lower and meaner than Adam had ever heard it before.

  “You already have,” he said. They stared at each other in the dim silence for a minute. Adam’s throat ached and his ears rang.

  “So that’s it, then?” Kyle said.

  Adam took in his brown eyes, the skinny jeans, the long fingers, and the lips that could be impossibly soft and maddeningly forceful. He was going to miss all of them.

  “I think it is.”

  “Dooon’t gooo! Nooo!”

  Kyle threw his suitcase into the back seat of the van. Inside the house, Caroline was still wailing. Not the top-of-her-lungs princess-singing type of wailing she often did. It was an end-of-the-world soul-wrenching wail that Kyle hadn’t heard her make in ages. An hour of cuddling and attempts at tickling and diverting with Amazonia singalong videos had not managed to calm her down. In the end, his dad had picked her up, holding her stiff body against his chest, and told Kyle to go. There had been an uneasiness to his expression as well, but before Kyle could ask about it, Caroline had started to thrash and her crying ratcheted up another couple decibels and Kyle had only been able to ignore the helplessness that rattled through him as he headed for the garage.

  It was later than he’d meant to leave. Caroline’s meltdown had been unexpected. He’d told her several times over the past week that he was going to go on a short trip. They’d checked the maps on his phone so she could see where Richmond was. She’d seemed fine with it.

  And then, that afternoon, as she’d drowned her grilled cheese sandwich in ketchup, he’d asked her what she was going to do with Grandpa while Kyle was away, and she’d stared up at him with eyes like saucers.

  “Where are you going?” she’d asked.

  “To Richmond, remember?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to see some people about getting a new job.”

  “You’re going to leave?” Caroline’s eyes had gotten impossibly wider, and Kyle could see now where he’d made the fatal error.

  “For a few days . . .”

  But that was as far as he got, because the waterworks had sprung a leak and Caroline had started crying
so loudly that Kyle’s dad, dead asleep upstairs after three overnight shifts in a row, had come running downstairs in his boxers and a stretched-out T-shirt. He’d looked terrified at the unholy sound coming from his granddaughter’s heaving chest.

  Kyle’s knuckles were white as he gripped the steering wheel and pulled onto the highway. Guilt gnawed at him, and he didn’t like it. It felt like everyone around him had decided to amp up the drama in his life to eleven. Caroline’s tear-stained face and the way she’d clung to him shook him. She was the most important person in his life; to be responsible for the level of distress she’d shown ate at him as he left Red Creek behind.

  Compared to the scene at home, the interior of the van was tomblike in its silence. The truth was the muffler was hanging on by a thread, and most of the insulation that kept out the road noise had given up the ghost years ago, not to mention there were places where rust was eating holes from the outside in. Its various roars and grinding sounds filled his head, softening the remembered edges of his daughter’s howling. If he got this job, he thought, or any job, he was going to put down the first and last month’s rent on a place for him and Caroline, and then he would ask Ben to find him the cheapest car available that didn’t sound like the inside of a lawn mower.

  A few hours into his drive, he stopped for gas. He added better gas mileage to his automotive wish list for Ben, although it would probably be impossible to find anything not built to haul livestock or large groups of schoolchildren that would get worse mileage than the van. He grabbed a coffee and a dubious-looking egg-salad sandwich from the gas station. He tried not to think that if everyone had gone with the plan he’d laid out, his dinner would have been much more appealing, somewhere romantic in Richmond with Adam.

  He hadn’t heard from Adam in over a week. It was unreasonable for him to be so put out when Kyle needed to do this. Finding a new job was not optional, and if the best available job was six hours away, well, that was outside Kyle’s control.

  That particular argument led Kyle in circles like it had all week. The morning after the graduation, he’d told himself that it had all been a misunderstanding. He’d called, but all his calls had gone to voice mail, and the longer the silence went on, Kyle realized that things with Adam had gone really wrong. Kyle wasn’t proud of some of what he’d said in his third and final voice mail. A week later, he still couldn’t see how he could have handled telling Adam about the call from Richmond any better.

  He checked his phone before heading off again. There was a message from his dad.

  Everything’s good. We watched cartoons, colored, and ate dinner.

  If you can, call Caroline before she goes to bed.

  He checked the time. It was nearly seven thirty; Caroline’s bedtime, unless she managed to negotiate extra time out of her grandfather. Kyle wouldn’t put it past his daughter, but he thought he’d give his dad a little credit and at least pretend like he should call sooner rather than later. He peeled the cellophane off the egg-salad sandwich while the phone rang. His dad picked up the call quickly and got Caroline on the line with minimal fuss.

  “Hey, Bean,” Kyle said.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said without much enthusiasm.

  “Are you having a good time with Grandpa?” There was a pause. Kyle imagined her shrugging. He tried again. “I hear you watched cartoons.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did Grandpa make you dinner?”

  “It was the lasagna that you told him to make. I said I wanted chicken fingers, but he said we had to have what you made. I didn’t like it. The cheese was chewy.”

  Man. His kid had sulking skills beyond her years. They were not entirely unlike her former first-grade teacher’s. Maybe they were on the curriculum.

  “Bean, are you mad at me?” he asked.

  “No.” There was a sigh that said otherwise. At least Caroline was talking to him. Silent treatment must be covered in second grade.

  “Are you mad that I didn’t take you with me on this trip?”

  “No.”

  “Are you mad because Grandpa didn’t make chicken fingers for dinner like you wanted?”

  “Daddy, when are you coming home?”

  “I’ll be back on Friday.” They’d been through this. It had been part of the explanation he’d given her along with the geography lesson about where he was going. “It’s only two sleeps. You’re going to go to bed soon, and then tomorrow you’re going to spend the day with Grandpa, and then you’re going to go to bed, and then when you wake up in the morning, I’ll be there.”

  “Can’t you come home now?” There was a wobble in her voice, and he really didn’t want her to start crying all over again, especially when his dad would be stuck cleaning up the mess.

  “No, Bean, I have to go see some people about a job, so I can’t come home tonight. But as soon as it’s done I’m going to drive back home as fast as I can.”

  “But what if the people want you to stay?”

  Her question struck him as weird. In all the talking and rehearsing they’d done, Caroline hadn’t expressed any interest in the reasons for his trip, only that he was going somewhere.

  “Like if they want to give me a job?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Bean, I’d still come back.”

  “To Grandpa’s?”

  “Of course.” Did she think he wouldn’t?

  “To stay forever?” Her voice ticked up hopefully.

  Kyle thought about sleeping down the hall from his dad forever.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “If we had to move to Richmond, we’d get our own place like we had in Seattle, remember?”

  “Can Grandpa come too?”

  “I think Grandpa would want to stay in Red Creek. But he could come visit lots.” He winced. Adam hadn’t thought much of that offered compromise. Kyle wasn’t sure if it would work for his father either.

  “Okay,” Caroline said.

  “So are we good, Bean?”

  “Grandpa wants to talk to you.” There was shuffling. Kyle heard his dad tell Caroline to go brush her teeth, followed by Caroline whining, and then, clearly, he said, “Hello?”

  “Hi,” Kyle said. “Everything okay now?”

  “I think so. I’ll let her negotiate up to three books, and we should be fine.”

  “Don’t let her pick the Amazonia Christmas one. It’s got more words per page than any kid’s book has a right to have.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” His dad chuckled.

  “Did she really think I wouldn’t come back?”

  His father let out a dad sigh. “I don’t know. Maybe. She knows this could mean a change, and there have been a lot of those lately.” His voice was pointed, and longer tendrils of guilt wrapped around Kyle’s stomach. His dad had been mostly silent on the topic of the trip to Richmond, which had been almost as bad as Adam going nuclear over it. Kyle was developing new capabilities in disappointing people, even while doing what was best.

  “I should go check on the teeth brushing,” his dad said. “Call us tomorrow before you drive home.”

  “You bet!” Kyle hung up, but stared at the phone for a second. He imagined his dad, herding Caroline to bed, negotiating pajamas, stories, and glasses of water. He scrolled through his call history. Several calls down from the one he’d just ended were five calls to Adam. They had all been unanswered. It hurt, how completely he’d been shut out, and he resented that Adam’s phone would have let him know how many times Kyle had called, a digital record of Kyle’s pointless efforts to defend himself.

  He sighed and finished his sandwich, said a silent prayer that it had been properly refrigerated throughout its life at the gas station, then put his key in the van’s ignition and turned.

  Nothing happened.

  Kyle’s heart dropped. He turned the key again. There was a grinding cough, and then nothing again. He stared at his hand below the steering wheel, watching the movement as he turned the key again, to make sure h
e was doing it right, turning the key far enough. He was.

  “Come on,” he said, over and over, whispering encouragement to the van. This was Adam’s fault too. If he had only listened, they would have come together, and in Adam’s car, and this wouldn’t be happening now.

  “Come on, you piece of junk!” Kyle yelled. There was another cough, a metallic shriek followed by an unpleasant grinding, and then the van hiccupped into tenuous life.

  “Oh, thank you.” Kyle heaved out a big breath. “I’m sorry. You’re not a piece of junk.” He patted the steering wheel. The van coughed out an ugly black cloud of smoke from its exhaust.

  “I know. We’ll get Ben to look at that when we get home.” He headed back out onto the highway.

  An hour from Richmond, Kyle resolved to enjoy himself. He was doing what he needed to do, like he’d been doing for months, and even for years. There was no sense dwelling on what couldn’t be fixed right now. If he was the only one who appreciated what his responsibilities meant, it was just as well he was on his own.

  The van’s radio decided to work, and he turned the volume all the way up. The speakers were tinny, but Kyle sang along at the top of his lungs to every song he knew. As he approached the city limits, he rolled his windows down. Night air blew across his face.

  When was the last time he’d been alone? Completely alone, with no child, no father, no clients in his ear? Months. Before Olivia had died, when there had still been someone to tag team parental duties with. People were so worried that he was alone now, but the truth was he hadn’t been alone since the police had come to his door. At the time, the idea of being by himself had been terrifying. Now, months later, in a different state on a different day, the idea that he was truly alone was exciting.

  The hotel was a roadside place with free breakfast in the morning, but as he let himself into his room, it felt like a castle. There were two double beds set close together, and Kyle felt unbridled glee that he got to pick which one he was going to sleep in. He intentionally took up space on the other bed too, spreading out the things in his small overnight bag, and then the papers and pictures he’d brought in his portfolio.