He knocked, and I called out that it was open, and he should come in.
He looked down at me, half sitting, half lying, on that couch, with my leg up, a saturated ball of cotton dripping peroxide down both sides of my knee and onto the towel. The sharp needles of pain punctuated the moment. I had no urge to defend myself. If he’d pulled out a knife, I might have let him stab me with it.
He didn’t. He didn’t yell, either. I remember half wishing he would.
“You went down and talked to Rachel?” It was only half a question.
For a minute, I said nothing.
Then I said, “Remember that first day I met you? I stomped over to your house and accused you of calling the police on us. You said when you do something, it’s because you think it’s the right thing to do. So, then, you wouldn’t lie later and say you didn’t. You’d say you did it, and why you did it. Yes, I went back to the old place and talked to Rachel. Because you made it clear you were never going to. And I wanted things to work out for you two.”
“Which they might not have. You could have messed things up big.”
“Apparently, I did,” I said. “But my thinking was that if I told her, then if she didn’t feel the same, she could just pretend I’d never said anything. And the two of you wouldn’t have to be awkward around each other. And your friendship could keep going. Yes, I know it was dicey. I knew that all along. But I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do, even though I totally get why you’re upset. I knew I was gambling our friendship.”
He stood staring down at me for another minute. I couldn’t look at his face for long. Because I didn’t recognize it. He still looked like Paul. But he wasn’t the Paul I knew. He wasn’t my friend. That Paul had gone away.
“How did you hurt yourself?” he asked.
“It’s not important. It’s stupid. I was trying to climb a tree. That property is gone. They sold it already. We lost that. Not that we ever really had it, but…”
“Look.” His voice was so flat, it was scary. And sickening. “I get that you did the wrong thing for the right reasons. But you broke a confidence. That was the most sensitive thing I ever shared with anyone, and you took it to the most sensitive person involved. I get that you didn’t do it as gossip or out of meanness, but it’s just not something I feel I can forgive.”
Those last words made a sort of thump in my gut. I thought I was all surrendered in there, and nothing could pull me down another rung. Because there were no more rungs.
Wrong.
When I looked up, he was over at the door, his hand on the knob. His head was tilted down. He looked shorter. Like what was happening made him small.
“So,” I said. “I guess we need to get out right now, then.”
He looked over at me. His eyes seemed confused and far away. Like he had to dust the inside of his head for cobwebs before he could answer.
“I told you when you moved in that if it didn’t work out, you could stay until you found a new place. So I’ll stand behind my word on that. But as far as us being friends… my friends are people I can trust.”
Not to be mean, but I wondered who that was. Other than Rachel.
As if he could read my mind, he said, “Not that I have a lot of friends. Now you know why. I won’t be friends with anyone I can’t trust, even if that means being friends with practically no one.”
It hit me how badly he must miss Rigby. Probably the only friend who ever completely made the cut.
“I hope this doesn’t make a problem between you and Rachel. Things were just looking like they were going to work out. Don’t let this ruin it. Okay? Please.”
He leveled me with a look exactly like the ones he used to shoot through Aunt Vi’s fence. “What you still don’t seem to understand is that things between me and Rachel are between me and Rachel.”
“Right. Got it. Sorry.”
Then he let himself out.
My mom got in a little after three. Opened the door with her key and then stood there looking down at me like I was only doing what I was doing—which was not much, by the way—to make her life more difficult.
“You didn’t tell me you’d hurt yourself that bad.”
“You were kind of off somewhere.”
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t know. You just seemed like your head was somewhere else.”
She put her hands on her hips the way she always did when it was time to defend herself. “If the message here is that I didn’t pay enough attention to you when you were hurt, you might want to look at the fact that I always ask if you’re okay, and you always say you’re fine. Like you want me to stay out of it.”
I thought about that for a minute and then said, “That’s true.”
It wasn’t what she expected. It stopped the conversation completely.
After an awkward moment, she said, “Well. Come on.”
“Come on what?”
“Sophie will be home any minute, and then we have to go back to the motel.”
“Maybe not. We’re sort of thrown out already. So maybe we can just stay here quietly. I don’t mean thrown out like we have to leave right now. But we’re not invited to keep living here. So maybe it doesn’t even matter.”
“What the hell happened, Angie?”
“It’s kind of a long story. And I’ve had an incredibly crappy day. Can I tell it to you some other time?”
Rachel called at nine-thirty that night.
My mom brought me the phone. Held her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “It’s for you. It’s the queen.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call her that. It really bugs me.”
She said nothing. Just handed me the phone.
“Rachel?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. Like it hurt. Like that one word could shatter everything. “I’m sorry if it’s late to call. I hope I’m not waking anyone up at your house.”
I looked down at Sophie, sleeping curled up on the rug.
“No one’s asleep except Sophie. And you didn’t wake her. Why didn’t you just come up?”
“I’m home. I’m not downstairs.”
“Oh, no.”
“It’s all right. Paul and I will work it out. At least, I think we will. I think we’ve known each other too long to let anything come between us. It’s you and Paul I’m worried about.”
I looked over at my mom, who was sitting at the kitchen table, her back artificially straight. Obviously listening. I had no way to get to any privacy. It wasn’t worth hobbling outside. I gave up and let her hear.
“There is no me and Paul. He doesn’t want to be friends anymore. And I guess that’s up to him.”
“Oh, dear. I was afraid of this. He may come around in time.”
“I don’t think so. He might be civil to me at some point. But I think our friend days are over.”
“I’ll keep talking to him about it. Maybe I can help.”
“That would be nice. But I’m not holding my breath or anything.”
“And if you had it to do over?”
“Excuse me?”
“Coming down to see me. And telling me. What if you had it to do over?”
“I’d do it again.”
“Even knowing it would cost you your living space and your friend.”
“I just feel like…” Then I stalled. I knew what I felt like. But not quite how to wrap words around it. I tried again. “I feel like a love like that… one that’s still the same after fifty years… I just don’t think it should go to waste.”
“I’m going to tell him you said that,” she said.
When I got off the phone, my mom was staring at me.
“I’ve got plenty of time for a long story,” she said.
I sighed. “I went back to Paul’s old house and told Rachel how he felt about her. Which he had no idea I was going to do. But now he knows I did, and he’s plenty pissed.”
A long silence. I looked up at her after a while.
“Oh,”
I said. “You look plenty pissed, too.”
I thought, Well, it’s official. Everybody hates me. Except Rachel.
“You did that… knowing if it didn’t work, it would make a God-awful mess, and if it did work, it would get us tossed out of here?”
I nodded.
“And you just told her you’d do the same thing again.”
“Way not to eavesdrop.”
“I don’t understand that, Angie. I swear, I just don’t understand you at all.”
“I know you don’t. Believe me. I know. But some of my favorite parts of me are the parts you don’t understand. I don’t mean to be hurtful. I’m not saying it in an angry way. I wish we fit together better, too. But I’m not going to change the best of me just because you don’t get it.”
I waited for an answer, but it never came.
After a while, I gave up and stopped waiting.
The following morning, I slipped a note under Paul’s back door. Despite the fact that there was walking and stair climbing involved. I just did it, anyway.
It said, “Will you please leave your newspapers on the back porch when you’re done reading them? Because I want to look at the want ads for rentals.”
He never answered the note. But after that, there was always a newspaper on the back porch by eight o’clock in the morning.
It was ten or eleven days later. I was sitting at the breakfast table with my mom. Sophie was flapping her hands in the air, but silently, ignoring her breakfast. I was reading the want ads, holding the paper with one hand, eating cereal with the other. It was only about seven-thirty. The paper had shown up on Paul’s back porch early.
“Any good rentals?” my mom asked.
She asked every morning, unless I read the paper after she was gone. I wondered why she didn’t just trust me to tell her if I found something. It was a form of nervous small talk that made me uncomfortable.
“Well, that depends,” I said. “In our price range?”
“What’s the point of hearing about it if it’s not?”
“Then, no. No good rentals.”
“You are reading ‘For Rent.’ Not ‘For Sale.’ Right?”
“I’m reading both.”
“You’re wasting your time, kiddo. We couldn’t even afford that rundown place, and we’ll never find anything that cheap again. Not around here. Face it. We’re going back to the city. That’s where you can live cheap, and that’s where Sophie will be if we want to go see her.”
Before she even finished her speech, my eyes locked on a listing.
“Here’s a place as cheap as that other one. Oh. Wait. It’s the same place.”
I read the whole listing, and it couldn’t possibly have been a coincidence. It was even the same real estate agent.
“Maybe it’s a mistake,” I said. “Maybe they ran the ad again by mistake.”
“Or maybe the sale fell through. But I’m not sure what difference it makes, kiddo, since we still have no credit. And now you don’t even have that professional loan expert in your back pocket anymore.”
“Oh. Right.” I ate three bites of cereal, chomping down too hard on my own molars. Then I said, “Come by the real estate office with me. We’ll leave a little early for your work. I’ll drive you.”
“Can you even walk on that ankle now?”
“Yeah. Pretty much. I can limp on it.”
“I doubt they’d be open that early.”
“Oh. Right. Lunch hour, then. I’ll come get you.”
“To what end, kiddo?”
“I just want to know what happened. Why it’s in the paper again. And I can’t go in by myself. I don’t think she’d take me very seriously if it was just me. I need a grownup.”
She sipped her coffee, and I could see wheels turning.
“Make a deal with you,” she said. “I’ll go into that real estate office with you today if you’ll set a deadline to give up on finding a place here and moving back to the city. Two weeks, say.”
I hated that a lot. Because it was a bad gamble. Just the type I knew I was supposed to avoid. I was taking something flimsy and betting everything on it.
“Fine,” I said. “Deal.”
It was a small office, all open space, with only four desks. Two of them had people behind them. A man I didn’t know. And the lady I did.
She looked up at us. Squinted. I wished she didn’t always look so put together. I wished she could have been someone less intimidating to my mom.
“I know you, don’t I?” she asked, looking at me.
“I was… we were interested in that property, that rundown house with the little orchard. I came in to see you with Paul Inverness. Remember?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, and she got to her feet. And shook hands with my mom. Not with me. I thought that was weird. “And this is your mother?”
“Right,” I said. “That property was back in the paper this morning.”
“Yes, the sale fell through.”
“Fell through? What happened?”
“I can’t give specifics about a prospective buyer’s situation.”
“Okay. Sure. I just… I mean, I don’t even know what that would mean. What does it mean when a person tries to buy a house and it falls through? What can fall through about it?”
“Oh. In general.” She sat back down again. Like she’d already decided this wasn’t worth much energy. “Occasionally a buyer will just change his or her mind, but usually it’s dollars-and-cents. Buyers may think they can come up with the down payment, or that their loan will be approved. But sometimes their thinking is too optimistic.”
I just stood there like a statue. Even though I knew I should talk. Because I’d just learned something that changed my worldview. That buyer I saw, who looked like he could write a check for the place. He wasn’t as different from us as I’d thought. Here I was, thinking everybody had it together, and everybody looked down on us. And a bunch of them were just wearing that on the outside. Just being too optimistic.
The real estate lady got tired of waiting.
“If you think your grandfather is still interested, have him come see me.”
“Right,” I said.
My mom and I walked out into the bright summer sun.
“Now what did that accomplish?” she asked me as we stood, blinking, on the sidewalk.
“No idea.” Which was true. Housing-wise, I had no idea. But I’d gotten something else. Something I’d never expected. “Did you hear what she said?”
“What about it?”
She signaled that we should walk and talk. We headed for the car. I was going slow on that ankle. I could barely keep up with her.
“That thing about how people are too optimistic.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Real estate people see that all the time. All kinds of people try to buy houses when they may not have enough money or credit.”
“I’m not quite sure where you’re heading with this.”
“You thought it was just us. Admit it. You thought every person who walks into a real estate office or a bank is a qualified buyer. You thought they’d treat us like the only case they ever saw of somebody who might not be able to pull it off.”
No answer.
We reached the car in silence, and she got in and opened the passenger door. I sat down and put on my seatbelt, wondering if I should press the issue further.
Just as she was pulling out of the space, she said, “I might’ve thought that. Yeah.” Then, a block later, “But I’m not really sure what it changes.”
I didn’t answer. Because I wasn’t sure, either. It changed something in me. But I wasn’t sure it changed anything in my real estate goals.
I more or less resigned myself to the fact that we were taking our newly found worldview and moving it back down out of the mountains.
I dropped her at work and drove back to the apartment. I limped upstairs, leaning heavily on the railing. Got the newspaper off the table. Found a marking pen and circled
the listing. Drew three big arrows pointing to it. Underneath that, I wrote IT’S BACK, in big block letters.
Then I limped downstairs and slowly made my way up to Paul’s back door. I left it on the porch, tucking one end under the door so it couldn’t blow away.
I looked out the window an hour later, and it was gone. He’d taken it inside.
I sat on the edge of the couch for most of the day, hoping. Until it was time to pick up my mom.
Then I sat on the edge of the couch all evening, trying to hope less obviously.
But I didn’t hear anything from Paul.
Two days after that, I was still more or less on the edge of the couch when I heard footsteps on the stairs. It was mid-afternoon, not quite time for my mom to be home. I ran—well, hobbled fast—over to the door so I could open it when he knocked.
But no knock ever happened.
Instead, I watched as a note appeared under the door. Sealed in a lavender-colored envelope. I grabbed it up and sat back down on the couch with it, my hands shaking. I slaughtered the envelope, getting it open.
It wasn’t from Paul. It was from Rachel.
Everything fell and sagged in me. I knew then that I might as well slump back on the couch and breathe. Because that sudden change of heart I’d been counting on in him wasn’t going to happen. I’d thought the fact that the house was back on the market might mean something to him. But as I sat there, Rachel’s note sagging onto my lap, still unread, I felt stupid for having thought so. I was the only one who cared about that ugly, rundown house. I had no idea why I’d ever expected anybody else to share my enthusiasm.
I lifted the note and read it.
It just said she was up visiting, and she wanted me to know. And that she’d try again to talk to him.
But I felt like I had a pretty good idea how that would turn out.
The following day, mid-morning, I walked into town.
It was a stupid thing to do, on a number of levels.
First, my ankle wasn’t really healed enough for that long a walk. My knee was partly scabbed over, partly still infected, and it hurt every time I bent it. And the whole point of the walk was what my mom called a fool’s errand.
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