What Happens Now (6 page)

I hadn’t told her about the parking lot and Camden’s friends, and how a bona fide conversation had happened. I liked having
the memory of it pressed against my palm, facedown, where it could only be felt and not examined to death.

“Sure,” I said.

Kendall smiled. I rarely said “Sure” to anything when it came to the newspaper masthead. Suddenly, my phone dinged with a text from my mother:

Coming to pick you up. Can you be at the loop in 5 min?

“My mom,” I said, worried.

“Everything okay?”

“I don’t know. She’s picking me up.”

“Call me later.” Kendall squeezed my shoulder before I rushed off to gather my stuff and head outside.

“What’s wrong?” I shouted when Mom drove up.

She had all the windows open, a news report blasting on the car radio. She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and frowned.

“Nothing’s wrong. I figured I’d drive you home so you had extra time to study.”

“God, Mom. I thought something had happened.” I went around to the passenger side and climbed in.

“What would have happened?” Mom asked after I slammed the door.

“You’re the nurse. Accidents? Fires? Death and dismemberment?”

“Is it that unusual for me to surprise you at school with a ride home?”

“Uh,
yeah
.”

Mom looked hurt. Oops, she must have wanted me to lie. “I’m trying to help, Ari. I know how important it is that you finish the year with a bang.” She clutched the steering wheel tighter and eyed some other students outside, like maybe if she threw one of them in the car for a ride home, she’d get the gratitude she was hoping for.

“It
is
important. Thank you.”

As we waited to make the right turn out of the school’s main driveway, I studied Mom’s face in profile. From this angle, you couldn’t really see the dark circles under her eyes. She looked more like the Mom I remembered from when I was little, sitting next to me in the evening light, watching TV.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I woke up early and have tonight off, so I figured I’d go do stuff.” She paused. “Sometimes I forget what it’s like to be out in daylight.”

“You should be gardening, or taking a walk.”

“Shush. Will you please let me do this?” Her voice caught a little at the end. “I feel like I’m never around for you.”

Then just talk to me
, I wanted to say.
Ask me how my day was. Ask me if I had any good moments and I would tell you that, yes, I did. And I might even share them with you.

But I knew this simple car ride was all she had to give right now.

At home, Mom shooed me straight to my room to study. She said she’d bring me a snack, get Danielle off the school bus.

So I let her do that. It was all I really had to give back.

I heard Dani’s musical voice fill the house when she came home, Mom whispering for her to be quiet and that she couldn’t go see me right away. Dani protesting, then some kind of food being unwrapped and the TV turning on, and Dani not protesting anymore. I put on music and reintroduced myself to my history notebook.

Sometime later, I heard Richard come home. Voices, footsteps down the stairs, up the stairs. Raised voices.

Then, crying.

I leapt up, opened the door, and poked my head out of my room. My mom was at the kitchen table with her laptop, her head in her hands. Richard stood above her, holding Dani in his arms, her limbs pretzeled around him.

“You couldn’t hear it? Come on, Kate. I caught at least three F-bombs between the front door and the den!”

“I got involved with something online!”

Dani saw me, then scrambled out of Richard’s arms and came down the hall. Neither Richard nor Mom seemed to notice. They continued bickering.

I motioned for Dani that it was okay to come into the safe harbor of my room. After she stepped inside, I closed the door and turned to her.

“What was that about?”

“Uh. Nothing.”

“
Dani.
”

“I may have started watching an inappropriate movie. I
didn’t mean to, I was trying to get to Nickelodeon. But I don’t know how to use the remote!”

“How inappropriate are we talking?”

“Boobs.”

“Fantastic.”

I put the pieces together. Richard was often mad at Mom for not spending time with Danielle. In most houses, it’s the mother accusing the father of that. We were Mirror Image Bizarro World Family.

And now here I was, curling up on the bed with Dani instead of reading about the War of 1812, folding her against my body so maybe she wouldn’t hear my mother’s words as they swirled down the hall.

“I just needed some downtime, Richard,” Mom was saying, her voice high and squeaky. “When do I get a break from taking care of people?”

You chose to be a nurse
, I thought.
You chose parenthood. How is “taking care of people” a surprise here?

Okay, so I knew it wasn’t that simple. She was tired. She was giving so much, she was losing track of herself. I understood all that; I understood more than I wanted to admit.

“They’ve been fighting a lot lately,” said Danielle. “One of them always goes to the store or takes a walk around the block. Why do they do that?”

“So that person can come back and everything can be okay.” I pressed my cheek into the back of her head. Her hair was so damn silky and she never even shampooed it.

“Was it like that with Mom and your dad?” she asked.

“I don’t really remember. I was only two.” I didn’t want to tell her that I imagined it had been like this. The muffled but angry voices down a hallway, and way too long between good memories. “But it must have been worse,” I said instead, “because eventually, my dad didn’t come back.”

I’d gotten none of the real story. Only gift cards on my birthday and Christmas from an address in Oregon that looked like a small rectangle of a house in online satellite photos. Not that I searched for it (that much).

“Do you think that’ll happen?” asked Dani. “Would Daddy leave and never come back?”

“Absolutely not,” I said, with conviction about the second part of her question. Richard would always come back, to her at least. And if he left, he wouldn’t go far. He wouldn’t go anywhere, except maybe a really sweet condo in one of those new developments with a pool and workout room. Dani would get passed back and forth like a hot potato, and she’d get used to it. Two birthdays, two Christmases. An extra bedroom to fill with new toys. There were worse things.

Like me, and how much I’d miss Richard.

And also my mom being the way she was in the years before she met him.

“It’s just a little fight and it isn’t your fault,” I said to Dani, turning her face so I could look her in the eye and she’d know I was telling the truth. “All parents have them. It’s going to be okay.”

Here’s what I discovered about talking to my sister: sometimes I said things because she needed to hear them, and sometimes I said things because
I
needed to hear them. It never mattered that I couldn’t tell the difference.

5

Finals were over
and school was done, and the days now stretched as tall as they could go.

So here was summer, all official. The white noise of cicadas and crickets, rising and falling against the hum of my bedroom fan. The two big trees outside my window sighing with the breeze. Somewhere on the other side of them was Camden Armstrong.

When I got to Millie’s for the first day of my new schedule—nine o’clock to two o’clock, five days a week—Richard looked up from the greeting card catalog he was flipping through, putting sticky notes on the ones he wanted to carry in the store. “Hey, ducky,” he said. “It won’t suck too bad, will it? Working
here? I remember what it felt like at your age, to be forced to do something.”

I adjusted the stool at the register to my height. “You understand why I wanted a different job, right? It had nothing to do with the store.”
Say it, Ari. He deserves it.
“Or you,” I added.

Richard’s face warmed, even though I hadn’t answered his question about the suckiness. “I do understand,” he said, “and I also understand that your mom’s in a weird place right now. She’s worked so hard to get where she is. I think she’s afraid it’s all going to fall apart any second.”

“We make sure it holds together,” I said.

“Just until the glue dries.”

“I always think of it as Velcro. When things do come undone, we can easily stick them back on.”

“See, Ari. If you didn’t work here, you wouldn’t be allowed to use craft metaphors so freely.” Richard scooped up the catalog along with some others and headed toward the back room. “I have some ordering to do,” he called over his shoulder. “Holler if you need me.”

It was a slow morning. Art students from a summer college program buying jumbo drawing pads. A mother and her son looking for a Batmobile model car kit, their joy at finding the last one as if we’d saved it especially for them. An elderly woman spending over twenty minutes trying to decide between two fancy journals—you know, the kind you can’t actually write in because they’re too beautiful—then eventually putting them both back on the shelf and walking out.

God, it was going to be a long summer. The next time the door chimed, I really had to force myself to look up and do the HiCanIHelpYou smile.

Camden’s friend Max was standing in the vestibule, unstrapping his bicycle helmet.

Something in my throat now. A sandpaper-wrapped grapefruit, perhaps, or aquarium rocks. Whatever it was, I had to swallow it down if I wanted to keep breathing.

This was what always happened the summer before, seeing Max or Eliza. I’d have some kind of physical event, because it meant Camden might be nearby. I grew to know the backs of their heads as well as I knew the back of Camden’s. It’s an unsettling side effect of being infatuated with someone. The infatuation bleeds into everyone surrounding the person, and the sphere of things that make you feel sick with longing grows dangerously wide.

Max saw me at the register and it took him a moment to figure out why I was familiar.

“Oh, hey!” he said. “The lake, right?”

“Yes.” My voice caught.

“Are you . . . Millie?”

“Oh. No. Millie’s dead. My stepdad bought the store from her daughter, so I guess he’s Millie now.” I sounded weird to myself. High-pitched.

“I was kidding.”

“I know,” I lied. “Can I help you find something?” That was better.

“I. Um. Am supposed to find yarn.”

Move, Ari. Act normal. Human, at the very least.

I stepped out from behind the counter and motioned for him to follow me down an aisle.

“We have some, but not very much.” I glanced at Max and he smiled at me, and I realized he was only a guy looking for yarn. And that was odd, yes, but not exactly intimidating. “There was a business feud for a while,” I added. “Between Millie and the lady who owns the knitting store down the street. They worked it out. We honor the treaty.”

Max looked at our selection of yarn, then shook his head. “I need a super-specific color. It needs to match this.” He held out a fabric swatch.

“Agnes at Knit Your Bit. She’s your woman.”

He shook his head again sadly. “I was hoping to avoid that. Let’s just say, Millie wasn’t the only one she had a feud with. We’re sort of banned from shopping there.”

I didn’t know who “we” referred to, but the more appropriate thing for me to ask was: “What do you need it for?”

“My girlfriend, Eliza . . . she’s making me a scarf.”

“In the summer?” Also,
Girlfriend
+
Eliza
. Processing that.

Max gave me a look, and although I didn’t know him, I could tell it was supposed to be a meaningful one. He held out the swatch again, so I looked at it again. Really looked at it.

Then I understood. There was a character on
Silver Arrow
named Bram, a tall alien with silver hair. And he always wore a scarf that was this color.

Eliza was making a Bram Scarf (on the fansite message boards, the real Arrowheads referred to it with one word, a Bramscarf).

Girlfriend + Eliza + Bramscarf
. Still more processing needed
.

“I can order the yarn for you,” I said. “But don’t tell anyone. You know, because of Agnes.”

“No problem there. Agnes scares the shit out of me,” said Max, who then leaned in closer because apparently this had become some shady deal. “How long would it take to come, if you ordered it?”

“Probably two days.”

Even though I could pick the color out of a lineup from thirty feet away, I snapped a picture of the fabric swatch and took down Max’s phone number.

“I’m really curious about why Agnes banned you from shopping at her store,” I said, feeling more confident now.

“That answer would also involve my girlfriend. She has, you know, artistic vision. It’s pretty strong. She wants what she wants and sometimes she gets a little crazy—I mean, intense about it. That’s why she sent me today. She didn’t want to piss anyone else off.” He looked at me and smiled. His two front teeth were crooked, parted like a tiny curtain. “If she’d known it was you working here, she would have come, I’m sure.”

“I’m here for all your
Silver Arrow
needs.”

Max laughed hard, as if I’d said more than I’d thought. “Will you be at the lake today?”

Max asking felt like Camden asking. That mammoth lump in my throat again.

“I might.” It came out as a croak. “Will you?”

“Yeah, maybe. See you then. Maybe.”

Then he was gone and the door chimed, and the
FIND VERA!
poster fluttered in the sudden gust like the wave I should have made but didn’t.

The town day camp was held at the rec center, whose cinder block walls and unfortunate orange-and-green interior design scheme had seen the birth of dozens of pot holders, God’s eyes, and sock monkeys for at least a decade, including several I’d made as a kid myself.

When I walked into the gym, I found Danielle’s group and spotted my sister standing off to the side, her counselor’s hand on her shoulder. Dani was crying. When she saw me, she ran up and wrapped her arms around my waist.