“But before that,” Ellis said, “we’ll be eating our way to Texas. Hey, speaking of that, our travel fund just topped a thousand bucks, thanks to Dave’s FrayBake bonus.”
“You got a bonus?” Riley asked him.
“Employee of the month three months running,” he replied, all proud. “That’s a hundred extra dollars to you and me.”
“You guys have a fund?” I asked.
“We’ve been saving since last summer,” Riley explained. “You know, putting in what we can from our jobs and birthdays and Christmas and stuff for gas and hotels and—”
“Food,” Ellis added. “I’m working on plotting a map just of diners from here to Austin. I want eggs Benedict in every state.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said to him.
“You guys need to stop talking about it,” Heather said as she reached up, putting some glasses on a shelf. “At least while I’m here.”
“You might still be able to come,” Riley said to her.
“Unlikely. Unless I make employee of the month for the next, oh, twelve months or so.”
“First,” Ellis said, “you’d have to get a job.”
Heather just looked at him. “I have applications out in several places, I’ll have you know.”
“FrayBake is always hiring,” Dave said cheerfully.
“That place gives me the creeps,” Heather replied. “It’s so fake.”
“The money they pay is real, though.”
Heather sighed, shutting the cabinet. “I’ll pay my dad back. Just probably not in time for the trip.”
“It’s okay,” Riley said, reaching to squeeze her shoulder as she passed by. “We’ll take some trips this summer. The beach and stuff.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Yesssssss! That’s how you do a layup, son!” Mr. Benson yelled. Deb, for her part, clapped politely, her eyes on the screen, while Riley’s mom, who’d settled into a rocking chair by the fire, just shook her head.
“Hurry up and rinse that,” Dave said to Ellis, nodding at the pitcher in his hand. “We’re missing everything.”
“You two are just useless. Get out of here,” Riley told him. With no protest, they scrambled out of the room. She sighed. “I swear. It’s like dealing with children.”
“Oh, yeah!” Mr. Benson hollered as if to confirm this. “Suck on that, Loeb!”
“Woo-hoo,” Deb added with a bit of a golf clap, as Dave and Ellis plopped down beside her.
“Daddy.” Riley winced, covering her eyes with one hand, then said to me, “Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you about the whole crazy thing.”
“They’re not crazy,” I told her. She dropped her hand, surprised. “They’re great. Seriously. You’re really lucky.”
“Yeah?” She smiled, then looked back over at her dad, who was pumping his fist in the air.
“Yeah. Thanks for the invite.”
“No problem. Thanks for the help.” She reached into the water, drawing out a soapy bowl, then handed it to me to rinse. As I did, I looked at the window in front of me, where I could see the TV reflected, motion and light as the game moved past on it, the announcer calling every play. It made me think of my mother, suddenly, and I wished in that moment she could see me here, in a real home, with a family, just like she wanted. Maybe it wasn’t ours. But it was still good.
Twelve
“Okay,” Opal said. “Be totally honest. Angel Baby or Calm Waters? ”
“What happened to just blue?” Jason asked.
She looked down at the two color swatches she was holding. “I don’t know. It’s too boring, I guess. And they’re both blue.”
“I like this one,” Tracey said, flicking her finger at the lighter color on the right. “It looks like the ocean.”
“So does the other one,” Jason pointed out. “I honestly can’t tell the difference.”
“The other one has higher hues, more white in it. This one”—Tracey picked up the swatch on the left, flipping it over—“Angel Baby, has darker notes going to lighter, but it’s more of a mix.”
Opal and Jason just looked at her as she turned the swatch back over, sliding it back in place. “What?” she said. “I’m into art, okay?”
“Clearly,” Jason said. “That was impressive.”
“So we’ve got one vote for Angel Baby, and one no opinion. Maybe I should go back to the yellows.” Opal sighed, picking up a stack of swatches and flipping through them, then looked up and saw me. “Hey! Mclean! Come tell me what you think.”
I walked over to the bar, dropping my backpack onto a chair. “About what?”
“Colors for the new-and-improved upstairs alfresco dining area,” she said.
“You’re going to reopen the second floor?” I asked.
“Well, not right now. I mean, there’s the model, and we still have to get the restaurant on a better footing.” She laid out the two swatches. “But now that Chuckles has spared us, he might be open to some ideas for expanding and improvement. He’s supposed to come in tonight, passing through town, so I’d thought I’d just plant the idea in his head.”
“I do not like the idea of having to go up and down stairs to my tables,” Tracey said.
“And there’s the question of keeping food warm during the trip,” Jason added.
“Where is your sense of adventure? Of change? This could be really, really good for the restaurant. A return to its past glory days!” Opal said. They just looked at her, and She laghed, flipping her hand, then turned her attention to me. “Okay. Mclean. Pick one.”
I looked down at the colors. Two blues, different and yet so similar. I couldn’t see notes of white, or various shading, and didn’t know the language Tracey used to describe the most subtle of nuances. These days, though, I was sure of one thing: I knew what I liked.
“This one,” I said, putting my finger on the one on the right. “It’s perfect.”
It was now March, and my dad and I had been in Lakeview for almost two months. Anywhere else, those eight weeks would have followed a routine pattern. Get moved in, get settled, pick a name and a girl. Unpack our few, necessary things, arranging them in the same way as the last place, and the next place. Start school while my dad got a line on whether his restaurant had slimy lettuce or great guacamole, and plan my own moves in terms of joining clubs and making friends accordingly. Then, all that was left was following the signs so I’d know when to pull back, cut for good, and get ready to run.
Here, though, it was different. We’d come in the same way, but since then everything had changed, from me using my real name to my dad starting to date even with no next move in sight. Add in the fact that I was actually on decent terms with my mom, and this was officially an entirely new ball game.
Since I’d agreed to go to Colby for spring break, as well as committed to four other weekends between April and June, my mom and I had reached tentative peace. She’d called her lawyer and withdrawn her custody-review request, and I’d explained the plan to my dad, who was relieved, to say the least. Now, I had the third week in March circled on my calendar in Angel Baby or Calm Waters or just blue, and we had something to talk about that was not a loaded subject. Which was kind of nice, actually.
“Now, the ocean’s going to be freezing, obviously,” she’d said to me the night before, when she called after dinner. “But I’m hopeful that the hot tub will be working and the pool heat up and running, although it might not happen. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Your house has a hot tub and pool?” I’d asked her.
“Well, yes,” she said, sounding kind of embarrassed. “You know Peter. He doesn’t do anything halfway. But his place was a great deal, apparently, a foreclosure or something. Anyway, I can’t wait for you to see it. I spent hours agonizing over the redecorating. Picking colors was a nightmare.”
“Yeah, I bet,” I said. “I have a friend who’s doing that right now. She wanted me to help her, but all the blues looked the same.”
“They
do!” she said. “But at the same time, they don’t. You have to look at them in the daylight, and afternoon light, and bright light. . . . Oh, it’s nuts. But I’m really happy with how it turned out. I think.”
It had been weird, I had to admit, to be having such a, well, pleasant conversation with my mom. Like once again, the beach had somehow become a safe place for us to be together, separate from the conflict of her house or this one. So we continued to talk and e-mail about plans for what to do on rainy days, what I wanted to have for breakfast, if I wanted an ocean or sound view. It was easier, so much easier, than what I was used to. Maybe even okay.
Meanwhile, as I was making up with my mom, my dad was busy doing something with Lindsay Baker. As far as I could tell, they’d been on several late lunches—with her giving him the tour of other local eateries—and a couple of dinners when he could get away from Luna Blu, which was rare. Normally, I could tell when my dad was laying groundwork for another escape by how committed he let himself get, as backward as that sounds. Phone calls and lunch dates meant I should proceed as I had been, that nothing was happening. But once I started finding hair elastics that weren’t mine in the bathroom, or someone else’s yogurt or Diet Coke in the fridge, it was time to stop buying staples like sugar and butter and use up what we had instead. So far, none of these things had materialized, at least that I knew of. I was kind of distracted myself, though, to be honest.
It had happened on the night we’d gone to Riley’s, after the game, when Ellis was driving us all back home. Deb had hopped into the front seat, armed with a plate of leftovers packed up by Mrs. Benson for her mom, who Deb had said was working through dinner for overtime, which left me and Dave alone in the back. As Ellis pulled out onto the dirt road, we were all quiet, worn out by all the food and talking, not to mention a great game the U had won with a jump shot in the final seconds. When he put on his blinker at the main road, the ticktock was all you could hear.
There’s something nice about the silence of a car ride in the dark, going home. It reminded me, actually, of those trips back from North Reddemane with my mom, sunburned, with sand in my shoes, my clothes damp from pulling them on over my suit, as I wanted to swim until the very last moment. When we were tired of the radio and conversation, it was okay to just be alone with our thoughts and the road ahead. If you’re that comfortable with someone, you don’t have to talk.
As we headed toward town, I leaned back, pulling one leg up underneath me. Beside me, Dave was looking out the window, and for a moment I studied his face, brightened now and then by the lights of oncoming cars. I thought of all the times we’d been together, how I kept coming closer, then retreating, while he stayed right where he was. A constant in a world where few, if any, really existed. And so as he sat there beside me, I moved a little closer, resting my head on his shoulder. He didn’t turn away from the window. He just lifted his hand, smoothing it over my hair, and held it there.
It was just a tiny moment. Not a kiss, not even real contact. But for all the things it wasn’t, it meant so much. I’d been running for years: there was nothing scarier, to me, than to just be still with someone. And yet, there on that dark road, going home, I was.
Eventually, after dropping Deb at her car, Ellis pulled up in front of my mailbox. “Last stop,” he said as I yawned and Dave rubbed his eyes. “Sorry to break up the moment.”
I flushed, pushing myself out onto the curb, and Dave followed. “Thanks for driving,” he said. “Next time, it’s all me.”
“That car is a safety hazard,” Ellis told him. “We’re better off in the Love Van.”
“Yeah, but it needs to hold up for the road trip,” Dave replied. “Gotta take care of her, right?”
Ellis looked at me, then nodded and hit a button. The back door slid closed, like the curtain at the end of a show. “That’s right. Later!”
Dave and I waved, and then Ellis was driving away, bumping over the speed humps. As we started walking, he reached down, sliding fingers around mine. As he did, I had a flash of that night he’d pulled me into the storm cellar, when he’d taken my hand to lead me up to the world again. It felt like second nature then, too.
We weren’t talking, the neighborhood making all its regular noises—bass thumping, car horns, someone’s TV—around us. The party house had clearly watched the game as well. I could see people milling around inside, and the recycling bin on the porch was overflowing with crumpled beer cans. Then there was my dark house, and finally Dave’s, which was lit up bright, his mom visible at the kitchen table, reading something, a pen in one hand.
“See you tomorrow? ” Dave asked when we reached our two back doors, facing each other.
“See you tomorrow,” I repeated. Then I squeezed his hand.
The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad’s iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home.
I left Opal reconsidering her yellows, then headed upstairs to the attic room, where I found Deb and Dave already hard at work. This time, though, they weren’t alone. On the other side of the room, sitting in a row of chairs by the boxes of model parts, were Ellis, Riley, and Heather, each of them engrossed in reading a stapled packet of papers.
“What’s going on over there? ” I asked Dave, as Deb bustled by, a clipboard in her hands.
“Deb has shocked them into silence,” he told me. “Which is really hard to do. Believe me.”
“How’d she do it?”
“Her POW packet.”
I waited. By this point, it was understood that if you said one of Deb’s acronyms, you usually had to then explain it.
“Project Overview and Welcome,” Dave said, popping a roof onto a house. “Required reading before you can even think about attempting a sector.”
“It’s not that strict!” Deb protested. I raised an eyebrow at her, doubting this. “It isn’t. It’s just . . . you can’t come into an existing, working system and not educate yourself on its processes. That would be stupid.”
“Of course it would,” Dave said. “God, Mclean.”
I poked him again, and this time, he grabbed my finger, wrapping his own around it and holding it for a second. I smiled, then said, “So, Deb. How’d you manage to double our workforce since yesterday? I didn’t hear you doing the hard sell last night.”
“I didn’t have to sell anything,” she replied, checking something off the top sheet on her clipboard. “The model spoke for itself. As soon as they saw it, they wanted in.”
“Wow,” I said.
She puttered off, clicking her pen top. Beside me, very quietly, Dave said, “Also I might have told them that the sooner this thing is done, the sooner I can up my hours at FrayBake for the road-trip fund. This way they can pitch in during spring break next week, and we can really knock some stuff out.”
“You guys aren’t doing anything for spring break?”
He shook his head. “Nah. We thought about it, but figured we’d just save the money for the real trip later. What, are you taking off or something?”
“With my mom,” I said. “The beach.”
“Lucky you.”
“Not really,” I said as I walked over to my current sector, reacquainting myself with it. “I’d rather be here.”
“You know,” Heather called out to him from across the room, “when you talked me into this, you didn’t say anything about it being like school.”
“It’s not like school!” Deb replied from the other end of the model, where she was checking off things on another one of her lists. “Why would you say that?”
“Because you’re making us study?” Ellis asked. br />
“If you guys just plunged in, it would totally throw off the SORTA,” Deb told him. “I’m having to completely rejigger the STOW as it is!”
“What?” Heather asked. “Are you even speaking English?”
“She’s speaking Deb,” I said. “You’ll be fluent in no time.”
“I’m done,” Riley said, getting to her feet, her packet in hand. “All fourteen bullet points and the acronym overview.”
“Good,” Heather said, getting up as well. “Then you can explain them to me.”
“This is just like school!” Ellis said. Heather elbowed him, hard. “Hey, don’t get mad at me. You’re the one who can’t even make it through the POW packet.”
“You can take it home tonight, and really go over it then,” Deb assured Heather.
“Oh, okay,” Heather replied. “Because that’s not like school at all.”
“Great!” Deb clapped her hands, picking up her clipboard. “If you’ll all just follow me over to our top sector here, I’ll start your guided tour.”
Ellis got up, then followed Riley and Heather, who was dragging her feet, as they fell in behind Deb. “Are there going to be snacks?” he asked. “I do my best work with snacks.”
Dave snorted. Deb, though, either ignored this or didn’t hear it. “Now, once you’re confident you understand the system, you’ll be assigned a sector. Until then, though, you’ll share one. This one is relatively simple, perfect for beginners. . . .”
As she kept talking, I looked up at Dave, working away across from me, his hair falling into his eyes as he attached a roof to the building in his hands. “Hey,” I said, and he glanced up. “You know that building, behind our houses? The abandoned one?”
“Yeah. What about?”
“It’s on here, but not identified. I realized the other day.” I pulled the building out of the pile I’d assembled beside me, showing it to him. “So I went to the library, to see if I could figure out what it was.”
“Did you?”
I nodded, realizing, as I did so, how much I wanted to tell him. I wasn’t sure why this had been so important to me, only that it seemed fated somehow, that just as things began to feel real and settled, I’d moved onto the part of the map that represented my own neighborhood. There was my house, and Dave’s. The party house, Luna Blu, the street where I caught the bus. And in the middle, this blank building, its anonymity made even more noticeable as it was surrounded by things that were clear and recognizable. I wanted to give it a face, a name. Something more than two faded letters on a rooftop, and a million guesses about what it used to be.