17
E
IGHT
O’
CLOCK IN THE
M
ORNING
I
t was hard to get the timing exactly right. If she left too soon, she ran the risk of being in the awkward position of walking in front of Crawford all the way to school, because there were only so many ways you could dawdle so that someone would catch up with you, and she’d tried most of them already. If she pretended her shoe had come untied one more time, Crawford would probably think she didn’t know how to dress herself.
On the other hand, if she left too late, he would have too big a head start and she’d be forced either to run and catch up—and she really wasn’t good at running without her breathing turning wheezy—or call out to him, which would seem really dorky.
So she waited at the doorway until she could just see a movement at his front door. Then she hurried out, managing to cross in front of the Carter house just as he’d reached the end of his walkway.
“Oh, hi,” he said, surprised.
“Hey,” she said.
The door to his house banged open again and a beautiful redheaded woman wearing a flight attendant uniform hurried out. She stopped at an unfamiliar economy car parked in the Carter driveway and glanced up at Crawford. “Would you like a ride, sweetie?”
Lily’s heart stopped. Not because the woman had called him sweetie—you could tell by the way streaks of red appeared in Crawford’s cheeks that he was embarrassed to have some woman calling him that. No, her heart stopped because she worried Crawford actually would take the ride, and where would that leave her? Hurrying to school all on her own.
To her relief, Crawford shook his head. “No, thanks. I don’t mind walking.”
The redhead flashed a big toothy smile at him. “Suit yourself, sweet stuff.”
Crawford hurried on. Lily had to do a little skip step to keep up with him.
“Who was she?”
“My dad’s girlfriend,” he grumbled. “One of them. I think that one was Bev.”
“Your dad has lots of girlfriends.”
“Tell me about it! According to my mom, he
always
did.”
Her parents had always been so boring. They never even fought. Oh sure, there were moments when she’d been able to tell that her mom was exasperated with her dad—because he was forgetful, or something like that—but she’d never had to worry that her family would break up because her dad was a philanderer. “I can’t imagine,” she said.
“You’re lucky!” As soon as he’d blurted out the words, Crawford faltered a step. “God—sorry.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t mean . . . well, you know. I know you’re not lucky. I should just shut up.”
The accident embarrassed people sometimes, like this. Nobody knew how to act around so much loss.
“No, I see what you mean,” she said. “I guess when it comes to families, there’s no perfect situation.”
He slanted a thoughtful look down at her, and she had to turn away. Crawford’s green eyes always caused her to feel feverish when he looked at her. She was just waiting for the moment when he would murmur to her in a low voice,
“You really are amazing, Lily West.”
For a moment, it looked as if that moment had come.
Then she heard shouting from behind them. “Hey! Heeeeeeey! Crawford, wait up!”
Dominic.
Lily rolled her eyes and just barely bit back a huff of exasperation. She couldn’t say anything about her pesky little brother because Crawford liked him, which might have been endearing if it weren’t getting in the way of moments with romantic potential. Although, honestly, she had to admit that there probably wasn’t much chance of a romantic moment out on the sidewalk on the way to school.
Dominic came galumphing after them, breathing heavily. When he caught up, he had sweat trickling down his temples, but that probably had more to do with the jacket he was wearing in the eighty-degree weather than with the half a block he’d just run.
“Why are you wearing your jacket in this heat?” she asked him.
He swiped the maroon sleeve of the jacket over his brow. “We get a demerit if we show up in chapel without a jacket. If I don’t wear it every morning I might forget.”
Lily bit her lip, determined not to tell him in front of Crawford how dumb that was. But she couldn’t help saying, “You could get to your school faster if you walked up Forty-fifth.”
Dominic shrugged. “I’d rather walk with you guys, even if it takes a little longer.”
“Aw, dude,” Crawford said, in a way that managed to be both sarcastic and nice. “I’m touched.”
Her brother laughed. “What were y’all talking about? It looked serious.”
“Nothing,” Crawford said casually.
Disappointment pierced Lily. It hadn’t felt like nothing to her.
Dominic chattered all the way to the intersection where he absolutely had to peel off in the direction of his own school. Then, as Lily and Crawford were about to cross the street, Crawford darted a glance over his shoulder.
“I think your sister’s behind us. Should we wait?”
Jordan was moseying along at a snail’s pace, glowering at the ground as she went.
“Wait for Miss Technicolor Dream Hair?” Lily asked. “No, thanks.”
He laughed. “Great name!”
Lily couldn’t actually take credit for the name—she’d overheard two mean girls calling her sister by that name in the girl’s rest room the week before—but she let him think it was a product of her own wit. “You know how you were saying I was lucky?” She jabbed her thumb over her shoulder. “Well
that’s
the reason you were wrong. I have to deal with the punk prima donna every day of my life. Believe me, it’s not easy.”
He looked behind them again. How could he help it? If the word
weirdo
had needed a mascot, Jordan could have been it.
“She’s never even said hello to me,” he said.
“Yeah, well, she wouldn’t, would she? She probably doesn’t consider you cool enough.” She looked over at him as they were crossing another street and saw that his brows were knit together.
“I guess she likes weird dudes,” he said.
“Omigod, you have no idea. Her last boyfriend was Alex Plummer, who looks like the undead, only with a Mohawk and lots of piercings. And whenever Jordan’s walking around the neighborhood, she always stops and talks to the strangest guys. I even saw her once on Guadalupe, sharing a Twix bar with a homeless guy who was missing half his nose.”
“That was sort of nice of her,” he said.
Lily frowned. Maybe it was, but he was missing her point. “The Twix part was, but sitting down and talking to him for forty-five minutes? That seemed excessive and weird.”
“Were you spying on her?” Crawford asked.
“No! Why would I do that?”
He shrugged.
“I can’t help it if my sister and I have to walk around the same neighborhood. Believe me, I try to avoid her whenever possible.”
He laughed. “One big happy family!”
“Yeah.”
Not so big as it used to be,
she couldn’t help thinking. And as the thought crossed her mind, she had to try extrahard not to toss another angry glance back at her sister.
18
S
ETTING THE
D
ATE
G
race put a deadline of mid-September as the time she was supposed to go home. But then her father fell sick—they worried it was pneumonia—and she stayed.
The first week of October, one of Lou’s teeth had an abscess, and Grace stayed with him for a week while that was taken care of.
Everyone had started to pester her about the amount of time she was spending in Texas. Ben, of course. And her mother had phoned her several times, worried that Grace was being sucked away from her real life.
“This is real life, too,” Grace reminded her.
“But you’ve never stayed so long before.”
“Dad’s never needed me before. And it’s not forever. Just a few more weeks.”
Even Steven expressed worry over her lingering in Austin.
“Why should
you
be dragging Dad to the dentist and things like that?” he asked her one afternoon as they sat in a coffee shop. They had just dropped Lou off next door to get a haircut, with instructions for him to join them when he was done.
As she looked across the table at Steven, it occurred to her that she had probably socialized with her brother more in the past months than she had in her whole life. When they were kids, the nearly ten-year gap in their ages had seemed an unbridgeable gulf. And after she’d finished school, Steven was always married to some disagreeable woman or another. But now, alone, sharing their troubles and their concerns about their dad, he seemed more human.
“For that matter, why should you be here at all?” he continued.
“Because he’s my dad.”
“He’s my dad too. Why should we both be here? Now that my personal life has exploded, I can move back into the house so you can go home.”
She shook her head. That would never work. “You’ve got office appointments or surgery every day. You’re busy, and unreachable most of the time. Emily practically demands a secret password before she’ll let me through to you.”
Emily, the office gatekeeper.
He smiled. “Emily’s deciding to come to the new office seems like the one thing that’s gone right in my life lately.”
God, how grim. Grace liked Emily, as much as anyone could like a woman who seemed to thrive on scheduling appointments and filing insurance claims. One time when Grace was visiting the office she had asked Emily if she was seeing anyone. Emily had smiled politely, if a little impatiently, and informed her that she was much too busy these days for socializing.
“What are you busy with?” Grace asked her.
Emily had frowned at her, as if it should be obvious. “With the new office! There’s tons to do!”
Grace could remember being that involved in Rigoletto’s at one time. But that was her own store. She had a sink-or-swim stake in its success.
After much prying—interrogation, really—she learned Emily had no family. None. She had spent her very young years in foster care and her teen years in a group home. “My job is my life,” she confessed to Grace, almost bragging.
But even with Emily the office assistant extraordinaire devoting herself 24/7 to overseeing his professional life, Steven still didn’t have enough time to take care of Lou.
“We could hire someone during the day,” he suggested when she pointed out this problem. “And then at night I’ll be there. It doesn’t matter to me where I live anyway. Denise . . .” He swallowed. “Well, we’ll have to sell our house at some point.”
Poor Steven. Denise had left him squished like romance road-kill, and he was still carrying a torch for her. Grace imagined her brother up in his old room, dejected and alone with his bug collection and his Top Gun poster.
He took a deep breath. “The point is, you’ve got your own life to take care of. You can’t martyr yourself to Dad’s illness.”
She resented that idea, for her dad’s sake. “I love being around Dad. We have fun. We’ve sort of fallen into a strange
Odd Couple
existence. Most of the time I forget he’s sick at all.”
Steven nodded. “Most of the time he seems so normal that I wonder if he hasn’t been misdiagnosed.”
Unfortunately, at this moment the barber from next door streaked back and forth down the sidewalk. Grace and Steven craned their heads toward the window and followed him in time to see their father, with his barbershop poncho billowing around him in the afternoon breeze, stepping out into the middle of Duval Road.
“What’s Ben like?”
It was that lull between the end of school and dinner, and Lily was sitting backward in a chair, elbows propped on the backrest, watching Grace make granola, which at the moment was just a sludge of oil and molasses at the bottom of a mixing bowl. Most of Grace’s mind was focused on how she was going to whisk that gluey syrup together with oil. She didn’t give Lily’s question much thought.
“I guess the first thing I’d say about him is that he’s funny.” She added, “In a cranky guy sort of way.”
“Funny’s good,” Lily said. “Although it seems to me that lots of guys think they’re funny when they’re not, and girls giggle and laugh at them anyway.”
“I’m not a big giggler,” Grace replied, frowning at the recipe, which said to add water. Water in granola? Who knew?
Lily persisted with her inquisition. “Is he cute?”
“He’s not the Old Spice guy, but I think he’s cute in a shaggy kind of way.”
Lily’s brows knit together. “So he’s cranky, arguably funny, and not all that good-looking.”
Grace laughed. “Well, love is blind, maybe.”
“Love!” Lily exclaimed. “You don’t seem like you’re in love to me.”
Grace wasn’t aware that the look of love really existed outside of Burt Bacharach songs. “Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, you’re here and he’s in Oregon. And you never talk about him.”
“Not everybody wears her heart on her sleeve. Ben and I call each other all the time.”
“Every day?” Lily asked.
“Well . . . twice a week. Usually.” She frowned. Come to think of it, it had been a week and a half now since they’d spoken.
“So you really do miss him, then,” Lily said, and Grace couldn’t help noticing that she sounded disappointed. “I thought maybe it was all off with you guys, and maybe you’d move here. It’s better with you here.”
“That’s sweet of you to say.”
“If you weren’t here, it would just be the professor and the guys, and I’d feel weird about coming over so often. But with you here, I feel better about just hanging out.”
Grace laughed. She’d never quite met anyone who could be so sly and guileless at the same time.
“But if you actually miss him . . .” Lily shrugged.
Grace started whisking, and then hopped back to evade the splatters she’d kicked up. “I do miss him. He seems so far away. They all do.”
“Who is all?”
“Ben . . . my friends . . . Heathcliff and Earnshaw.”
“You have friends named Heathcliff and Earnshaw?”
“Heathcliff is a big orange cat, fifteen years old, a furry lummox, and Earnshaw is a seventeen-year-old tabby female.”
“Wow,” Lily said. “That’s really weird.”
“What?”
“You just volunteered a lot more about your cats than you ever did about Ben.”
“Well . . .” Grace busied herself mixing oats into her mixing bowl. Now that she studied it more closely, the recipe called for a lot of oats. Almost the whole box. No wonder she’d had to make so much goop to coat them in.
“It’s also weird that you’d name a female Earnshaw,” Lily said. “We read that book last year in school, and the woman in the book was Cathy. Earnshaw was her last name.”
“I know, but I worried that if I called her Cathy it would sound like I’d named my cats after two defunct cartoons.”
“Did you actually like that book?” Lily asked. “When I read it, I thought Heathcliff was a lunatic.”
Grace stopped stirring for a moment. “Oh, no—he was just wounded, and hopelessly devoted to Cathy.”
Lily laughed. “
Hopelessly devoted
reminds me of that stupid song the girl in the movie
Grease
sings.”
“Olivia Newton-John?” It had been years since Grace had seen that movie, but she’d loved it when she was a teenager.
“But when you think about it,” Lily said, “they’re sort of similar.”
“Who?”
“Heathcliff and Olivia Newton-John. Heathcliff is hopelessly devoted to Cathy, who is faithless and flighty—even though I personally think she made the absolute right choice to go live in the nice house with the civilized people—and Sandy is hopelessly devoted to John Travolta, who is, you know, greasy. Yuck.”
“Heathcliff was always my idea of a romantic hero,” Grace said. Until now. “Now I’ll always think of him as a lunatic, or as Olivia Newton-John man.”
Lily stood and came closer to inspect Grace’s granola-making progress. “You can buy granola in the store, you know. They sell it in bulk at Central Market.”
“I can put my own stuff in it this way. Like pumpkin seeds. They’re good brain food.”
Lily angled a serious glance up at her. “It’s for Professor Oliver, isn’t it? There’s something wrong with him—it wasn’t just that he broke his leg, was it?”
“He’s . . .” Grace swallowed. The kids would find out soon enough. Really, she was surprised they hadn’t guessed before now. “He’s got Alzheimer’s.”
Lily frowned. “That’s really bad, isn’t it?”
Grace nodded. “But it’s gradual.” Although she couldn’t get her mind to erase the vision of her father walking across the road in that poncho. It was a miracle he didn’t get run over again.
Someone knocked at the front door. Dominic and Crawford were outside somewhere with Iago, so Lily twirled around. “I’ll get it!”
Grace followed her, and when she saw the strange man on the other side of the screen door, she was glad she did. The guy was about thirty-five years old, wearing a torn T-shirt and old jeans, and he apparently hadn’t shaved in days. He kept his gaze focused down on the welcome mat, not on their faces.
“Grace Oliver live here?” he asked.
Lily turned to Grace, her brows darting up like question marks.
“I’m Grace.”
The man finally looked at her. “I’m from Portland.”
Grace tilted her head. “Do I know you?”
“No, see, I answered a classified. Someone was looking for someone driving to Austin from Portland? Guy named Ben?”
Grace gasped. Ben was here? She scooted past Lily and shot out onto the porch, looking around.
“Ben asked me to bring you something,” the stranger explained.
He pointed down to two beige plastic cat carriers sitting in the front yard.
In shock, Grace launched herself off the porch and fell to her knees in front of the metal grill of the cages. “Oh my God—Heathcliff! Earnshaw!” She looked up at the man. “You drove them here?”
He nodded.
“But—”
“Your friend paid me two hundred dollars. It sounded like a lot of money four days ago, but now . . . I’m not so sure if I’m ever gonna get that smell out of the upholstery.”
Grace couldn’t work up too much sympathy for the man, although she was grateful he actually got them to Austin safe and sound. But her surprise and happiness at seeing Heathcliff and Earnshaw were quickly being displaced by a rising tide of anger. How could Ben have handed her cats over to a total stranger? From a classified ad! Anything could have happened to them!
“Well, I can’t say that guy Ben didn’t warn me. ’Course he didn’t warn me about the sound of one cat yowling for twelve hours straight, days on end, right in the back of your head as you’re trying to drive.”
“Thank you for bringing them to me safely.” The man seemed hesitant to leave, like those bellboys you see in movies lingering in the room hoping for a tip, but he finally took off when he saw her and Lily picking up the cat carriers and taking them into the house.
“This is so weird,” Lily said. “You were just telling me about them, and now here they are. It’s like it was fate.”
Fate, shmate. Grace’s blood pressure was soaring. The boys came in from the back, along with Iago, who started barking up a storm, which in turn caused Heathcliff to bristle, growl, and hiss. In the other cage, a series of esophageal gulps had commenced, the prelude to a hairball.
“I guess I’ll take Iago back out,” Dominic said, just as Lou, roused from his afternoon nap by the commotion, came down the stairs.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “What’s that smell?”
Grace clenched her hands in fists and ran upstairs, closed the door to her room, and got on the cell phone. She speed-dialed Ben, pacing as she waited for him to pick up. When he did, she lit into him. It was early afternoon in Portland and he was probably at Rigoletto’s, but she didn’t even care.