Right Behind You

by Gail Giles

  “There’s a half bath, behind the kitchen,” Carrie said. “There’re three bedrooms and two full baths upstairs.” An open staircase with treads that seemed to float ran along a side wall. I trudged up the stairs and checked the bedrooms. I left the master with its adjoining bath for Carrie and Dad, skipped the smaller room next to theirs — they wouldn’t want to hear my music and I didn’t want to hear them.

  The only other bedroom faced the Gulf. I could watch and hear the waves fighting the coastline as I went to sleep and when I awakened. Maybe if the fight was out there . . . maybe I could hand it over.

  I swung my duffel onto the bed. Sailboat prints on the wall. Seashell collections on shelves. And a cloth doll. Red hair. Red-and-white-striped legs.

  “Pippi Longstocking,” Carrie said from behind me. “This was my room. I can’t believe Grant kept it like this.”

  “It looks more like a boy’s room, except for the doll.”

  “I wasn’t a girly kind of kid. Hated pink. Still do.” She took the doll from me. “But I loved her. She had attitude.”

  “You must have caught some of it,” I said.

  “Speaking of attitude,” Carrie said, “you called me a pimp. Couldn’t you have said matchmaker?” She gave my head a light thump. “What a mouth you’ve got on you.”

  “Carrie, lay off a little. I don’t want to be set up. Leave me alone for a while.”

  She headed back down the stairs. “I think we need a dog. Dogs don’t sass.”

  I followed. “Are you trading me for a dog or just adding one?”

  “Ummm, I’m considering the situation.”

  “To be fair, I don’t bark, I don’t have fleas, I shit in the toilet, and I don’t lick my own butt,” I said.

  Carrie put up her hand like a traffic cop. “Stop, you’ve convinced me to never, ever try to set you up with a girl again. It would be too cruel.”

  “I rest my case.”

  We hauled boxes and filled closets and bought flip-flops and filled out the forms for my homeschool courses. Dad got a job with a contractor that worked with one of the chemical companies in the area. The place in Indiana gave him a great recommendation because he left willingly and didn’t cause them grief.

  We got wired for the Internet and I hit the books again. The literature course was easy and fun, trig was impossible, economics was interesting. I had to take Texas history, which was really interesting. Geez, I learned that I now lived in a republic. I took psychology as my elective — why not? I needed a science credit, and I found Sailing: The Dynamics of Wind and Wave Motion. I signed up.

  And I learned something else. Dad took me to the lonely back roads of Surfside and taught me to drive. He said I was worse than Carrie. But he laughed when he said it. And I knew that this piece of geography had worked a little voodoo.

  Dad was happy. He complained that the houses here were too close together, but he moaned about that in Indiana, too. To Dad, if you could see another house with binoculars, it was too close. But that untamable Gulf, an expanse of nothingness out to the horizon, I think that appealed to Dad. He showed no interest in the boat, but he and Carrie walked the beach and he sat on the porch and watched the waves and the sunsets.

  One evening I sat with him.

  “You look better, Wade. Not so . . . I don’t know . . . blank,” Dad said.

  “It’s February and there’s no snow. What’s not to like?”

  Dad cradled the back of his head in his laced fingers.

  “I like the courses I’m taking. Well, not trig. But independent study — it’s good,” I said.

  “Making yourself a cocoon?”

  I didn’t answer. Dad’s tone implied cocooning wasn’t a good plan.

  “I realize you want to keep yourself and us safe, Wade, but be careful that your comfort zone doesn’t get too small.”

  I liked my zone small and I didn’t want visitors.

  The next day, I dug around in the shed and found a paint scraper and a ladder and got to work. I knew how this worked. If Dad started with a warning, Carrie followed with action. I had to head that off. I’d scrape paint during the day and study at night. How could Carrie and Dad insist I find a place in the bigger world if I was productive in my small one?

  I underestimated the force that was my stepmother.

  Carrie liked her bookstore job and predicted she would be managing the place within six months. It was a failing business in a great location, and she convinced the owner to shift things around, open a coffee corner, and put some tables outside on the sidewalk.

  “We’ve got new stock and I need a strong back to help me unload. Think you could stop scraping paint today?” Carrie asked over breakfast.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Wade, you have to leave this beach occasionally. You don’t have to talk to customers. Just manhandle some boxes.”

  I met her gaze across the table. I assessed her smile as a no-win situation for me.

  “Sure.”

  But Carrie was still pimping. The owner’s sixteen-year-old daughter was the barista after school and on weekends.

  “Oh, Jessica, meet my stepson, Wade. He’s going to help with those boxes that have to be taken to the second floor. She turned to me. “Wade, this is Jessica.”

  “Hey, Wade,” she said. “I’m learning to make all these coffees. In between boxes, do you think you can be my guinea pig?”

  I nodded at Jessica, who was pretty cute, then glared at Carrie. “Where are the boxes? And there was no mention of a second floor when I agreed to this.”

  Carrie led me to the back. “There was no mention of a girl either. Or you’d still be scraping paint.”

  I hefted a box and headed for the main room, then up the stairs.

  “I’ll have a mocha cappuccino ready when you come down,” Jessica said.

  “That’s great, Jessica,” Carrie said. “Wade loves chocolate.”

  I dropped the box next to the shelves Carrie pointed out.

  “This will take all day if I drink coffee after each box.”

  “I work until five and you don’t have a way home.”

  “Grand-theft auto.”

  “Drink mocha. Make nice.”

  For the first time since I moved to Texas, my head hurt.

  I clomped down the stairs and sat on the stool in front of the mug.

  “You don’t know anybody here, right?” Jessica said.

  She did the girl thing of looking up through her eyelashes. Her long eyelashes. That rimmed brown eyes that snapped with life. No disconnect here. This girl was plugged in.

  “No, no yet.”

  “And my mom says you’re not going to enroll at the high school. You’re going to do homeschooling? Is that right?”

  “Right again. You a spy or something?” I tried for a light tone, but I didn’t like all this background check.

  “So, you’re not going to meet anyone and you’ll turn into some kind of beach hermit without some help. Why don’t we go to a movie Saturday?”

  “Together?”

  “Oh, God, no,” she joked. “You go, I’ll go, you sit in the front, I’ll sit in the back, and in a few months we’ll compare notes.” Jessica put one hand on her hip. “Darlin’, this Indiana must really be socially deficient. You need serious remediation.”

  Carrie appeared over my shoulder. “He’s shy. And needs a little training. I thought about trading him for a dog. But we’re going to wait until he finishes painting the house.”

  I pushed my empty coffee cup forward. “This was good.”

  “Vanilla latte waiting for you after the next box.”

  Carrie practically snatched me off the stool.

  When we got to the storage room, Carrie asked. “What was going on there?”

  “Since I’m sure you set it up, I think you know. Jessica asked me out.”

  “And?” Carrie said.

  “She scared me worse than TwoFer did.”

  “Oh, yes, you’re going back to t
he shrink.” Carrie shook her head.

  I carried the box up the stairs, Carrie dogging my heels. Once upstairs, Carrie got in my face. “Wade, you are taking that girl to the movies. You will not be a hermit. You won’t lose all the progress you’ve made.”

  “Getting us run out of town was progress?”

  “You made friends. You trusted people. Making friends and learning to trust wasn’t the problem.”

  For the first time, I thought Carrie was being an idiot. “You’re wrong.”

  “I don’t care. Tell Jessica you’re taking her to the movies or . . .”

  I put my hands up. “All right. Just keep out of my face.”

  I hated the hurt that spread over Carrie’s face, but . . . I was so tired of trying. Did it matter whether I was a bad hamster or a good hamster? I was still running on a wheel to nowhere. Why did Carrie want me to invite someone onto the wheel with me?

  Sam came to dinner as promised. I couldn’t do much more than stare at her. By my freshman year I had got-ten some control over the one-eyed monster pitching a tent whenever he felt like camping, but Sam . . . I felt like I couldn’t talk and make the monster behave at the same time.

  She was like the Gulf. Fresh and filling up the room with the wind and the waves. Bold and full of fight if she needed it. But able to be calm and easy, lapping at the shore. Hell, maybe I was making this up. But I didn’t think so.

  I helped her set the table as she chatted with Carrie over her shoulder.

  “Yeah, I should be in high school. A senior. But I took some time out for a while and did some home-extension work and got ahead. I graduated in December, a semes-ter early, and started taking classes at the JC. The basics that transfer anywhere. But I’m leaning toward marine biology. The sea has me hooked. You can thank Grant for that.”

  Carrie put the casserole on the table. “You and Grant got close?”

  “He helped me a lot when I needed help.”

  Sam turned and pointed, seemingly eager to change the subject. “Did you see that lamp?”

  Carrie smiled. The base was made out of a glass ginger jar filled with seashells.

  “I made that for him. He had a ton of shells that he said you two had collected together. He didn’t have a good place for them and was afraid they would get broken. I bought that lamp and filled it with the best of the shells. It was one of his favorite things, because it reminded him of you.”

  Carrie had picked up the pasta bowl then set it back down. She leaned against the counter and put her hands to her face.

  “Carrie, I didn’t mean to make you feel sad.” Now Sam looked as pained as Carrie did.

  “I know. Why did I lose touch with Grant? Stop vis-iting?”

  Sam looked to me then back to Carrie. “Umm, Grant told me that when you tried to visit he made himself ‘unavailable.’ But not because he wanted to.”

  Dad got up from the couch and pulled Carrie’s hands from her face. He wrapped them around his waist.

  “I’ve just put myself in the middle of it, haven’t I?” Sam looked at Carrie. “When your mom was about to marry again she came down here. Grant and I were getting the boat ready for a sail. They went upstairs and talked.”

  Sam put her hands on her hips and paced in a tight circle. “Wow, I always thought you knew all this.” She stopped circling. “When she left, Grant told me that your mom said he couldn’t ever see or talk to you again. She thought he would make you sort of choose between your mom and her new husband and him.”

  Carrie stiffened her back and her jaw locked.

  “Guess I’m understanding why I’ve never met Mommy Dearest,” Dad muttered.

  Carrie clenched her fist. “Grant was the only person who gave me time and kindness, and my mother drove him away.” She didn’t look like the Carrie I knew. More like the Carrie that had to run up on the bumper of any car in her path.

  Then she kind of slumped. Rolled her neck. Then touched Sam’s cheek. “E-mail. That’s why it was always e-mail. He’d never break a promise, so he got around it.” She smiled, her eyes watery with tears. “Thank you, Sam. You don’t know what you’ve done for me. You’re a terrific person.”

  And suddenly, Sam looked like Carrie had slapped her. She jerked back, her eyes filled with tears, but they looked angry and hot.

  “I’m sorry about this, but I can’t stay for dinner. Really, I’m sorry.”

  Sam may as well have hit us with a stun gun. We watched her flee, and the door was closed behind her before our mouths were.

  Dad was the first to recover. “What the hell just happened?”

  Chapter 21

  HANGING BY MY CROTCH

  Jessica and I settled into our seats with a tub of popcorn and our “Cokes.”

  “Pop is a sound, it’s not a drink,” Jessica said. “You order Coke.”

  “What if you want Dr Pepper?”

  “The counter person will say ‘What kind?’ when you ask for Coke. Then you ask for DP or whatever.”

  I shook my head. “I thought Alaska was weird.”

  “It is. You’re a Texan now, bubba.”

  Jessica took a few kernels of popcorn and munched. Then she turned to me, a question on her face.

  “What?”

  “This is a chick flick. You’re either trying too hard or gay.”

  I pushed back against my seat. “I heard that Texans were plainspoken and direct, but this is incredible.” I put my Coke in the holder and handed the popcorn to Jessica. I was here under duress, and now she was pissing me off. Time to reassess and redirect, I thought, Doc Schofield’s words echoing back to me. Let the person know why she’s making you angry. Be angry with the situation, not the person.

  I tapped my index finger to my other fingers to count off.

  “One: I was brought up to be polite. That means to think of the other person first. I thought you would enjoy this movie.

  “Two: Most of the other movies are about killings, bombings, explosions, resulting fires, and have big body counts before the opening credits are shown. I don’t like those movies. If that makes me a girl, okay.

  “Three: I do like movies about sports. Of any kind. I think that makes me less of a girl. But none are playing tonight.

  “Four: The woman in this movie is hot. Let’s cross gay off your list.

  “Five: I gave up trying too hard awhile back. Didn’t work for me.”

  Jessica put her hand up and counted on her fingers. “Let’s see. Not gay, not a girl, and gave up trying too hard.” She grinned. “Open.” She pointed to my mouth. I opened. She tucked some popcorn in. “Now, let’s see if he likes popcorn.”

  She tipped her head to one side. “I was being a twit. Sorry. Too used to rednecks, I guess. Let’s have a good time. The guy in this movie is hot, too.”

  She passed me the popcorn tub. “He kinda looks like you.”

  So, fine, I didn’t have to be a complete hermit. She still wasn’t going to rent space on my wheel either.

  Sunday morning I awoke to find a wet suit hanging over my desk chair. I smelled the bacon and the coffee, so I hauled down the stairs.

  “What are you two doing? These puppies are ex-pensive.”

  Dad smiled. “I got a job right away. The house is free. Carrie says winter sailing is not to be missed.”

  Carrie nodded. “Take it as my thanks to Grant. I’m hoping someone else will love the Gulf like he did.”

  “Okay, you guys indulge me. But thanks, Grant.”

  “Sam is on her way over,” Carrie said.

  I paused. Sam. I could spend time with Jessica and never engage. Sam was different. She intrigued me.

  The girl clearly had problems of her own, I reminded myself. I didn’t need that. But the wet suit was bought. Maybe I could learn to sail in one lesson.

  Dad appeared in my room as I slid into the wet suit. “Have fun today.”

  “Sure.”

  “Wade, we want you to make friends and Sam seems like a great kid . . .” Dad was clearl
y uncomfortable. “But she’s right next door and you’ll be together a lot . . . and you might tend to . . . talk. Maybe you should . . . play it cool a little. You know what I mean?”

  “I’m ahead of you, Dad. Don’t worry. I won’t be telling any secrets. Especially since she seems like she’s got baggage of her own.”

  “Come on, landlubber, get your rear in gear. We’ve got a great onshore breeze.”

  I came out in my wet suit. “I look like a penguin.”

  “Nope, too tall. You look like a guy in a wet suit. All that height and the big shoulders are really going to do you some good when we ride the wire.”

  “Ride the wire?”

  “You’ll see. It’s the best part of Hobie Catting.”

  She was the Sam of “before the meltdown” as she opened the shed and directed me to help pull the trailer to the beach. No explanations, no comments. Which was more than fine with me.

  We “stepped” the mast, seafaring lingo for putting the mast up. When the boat was on the sand we got mainsail, boom, jib, and “lines” (not ropes, ropes are for cows, lines are for boats, keep it straight) in their proper places.

  Sam licked her finger and told me to do the same. She held her finger up to the air. “Feel the wind? Where’s it coming from?”

  “Toward us. From the Gulf, toward the beach.”

  “You get a star. That’s called an onshore breeze. We love an onshore breeze. It’s a beginner’s dream.”

  “I’m ready. Let’s go sailing.”

  “Not yet. Put on your gloves.”

  “C’mon, Sam. Those things are ridiculous.”

  “After handling those wet lines, your palms will look like hamburger. You don’t get on the boat without them. Put ’em on now.”

  “Glove Nazi,” I muttered. I put on the gloves with no fingertips. Sam whipped out a marker and grabbed my right hand and printed a big S on the back of the glove, then grabbed the left and printed a P.

  “Starboard is the wind coming from your right, and port is wind coming from your left. Bow is forward or front of the boat and stern is the back.”

  Before I could say anything, do anything, Sam handed me a life jacket.

  “Don’t need that. I swim like a seal.”

  “Not when the boom has smacked you unconscious.”