Chapter 14
Caleb
I'd planned exactly one date in my life before this, and it nearly turned into the end of both of us in a casino steakhouse, so I'm coming at the second one with a lot more respect for the logistics.
The big one is finding a spot on God's green earth where the coach's daughter and the player on thin ice can sit next to each other without ending up a story with a bad ending.
That rules out anywhere with people in it. After the Wendy thing, I started counting, and it turns out that's everywhere.
So this time I went looking for nowhere, and I found it off Route 9."
“I don't like surprises,” she says, climbing into my truck and yanking the seatbelt across her like it owes her money. “Especially, after the last debacle.”
“I know, I was just about to tell you where we’re going.
” I pull out of the lot and check the mirror twice for cars that aren't there.
“We’re going to an old drive-in off Route 9.
It closed years back; the screen's still standing.
I borrowed a projector from a guy in my Greek Mythology class and taught myself to run it.
We're going to watch your show on a fifty-foot wall from the bed of my truck. Dinner's packed. There's a blanket because it gets cold. And there’s nobody for a mile in any direction. We’ll be home by eleven.”
She's quiet for a second.
“Jasmine?”
“You told me all of it,” she says. “On purpose. So there's nothing left to spring on me.”
“That, and I like watching you marvel at how fucking awesome I am.”
She looks out the window so I can't see her face. It’s fine. I know she’s grinning.
“How'd you even find a dead drive-in?” she says.
“New habit. I keep a running tab of places nobody goes, so I know where to go when I’m trying to take my girl on a date.”
“That's the most romantic sentence anyone's ever said to me, and it's about making sure there’s a lack of photo evidence.”
“Welcome to us, Dixon.”
The drive-in's better than I talked it up to be.
Big empty field, a screen gone gray with weather, and because there's no town close enough to drown it out, the whole sky's filled with stars.
She gets out of the truck slowly with her head tipped all the way back, and for once, she isn't running any scenarios I can see. She just looks up.
“Okay,” she says. “This is good.”
“That’s high praise from you.”
“You know, you don’t have to go through all this trouble, right? I’ve already given you the rose. You got the girl.”
“Everything about you is trouble, Dixon. That’s why I’m addicted to your ass.”
I back the truck up to the screen, drop the tailgate, throw down the blanket and the pillows I stole off my own bed, and get the projector humming off a battery pack.
Her show comes up huge and a little crooked, and she laughs, the real one, the whole laugh, not the clipped thing she sometimes gives.
“Brayden's pores are the size of my fist,” she says.
“Worth every dollar I didn't spend. Eat. Chicken's on the left, and yeah, I packed it so nothing's touching. Don't make a speech about it.”
She points at the screen. “She's keeping him. Watch. She fixes her hair right before she makes a bad call.”
“You shove your sleeves up before you make a good one.”
She looks down. Her sleeves are pushed past her elbows in a cold field, because she forgot to keep them down.
“Huh,” she says.
“Yeah. Huh.”
She pulls them back. A minute later, when she thinks I'm not looking, they're up again. I don't say a word about it. I just do one of her numbers, turn, and smile to myself.
She eats. She narrates. She calls an elimination ten minutes early and jabs a finger at the woman's hands like a detective at a chalkboard, and I lie back on a pillow that smells like my own sheets and watch her truly be herself. Someone she doesn’t get to be around most people, not even her own father.
And now I understand. This is why people write love songs and shit.
This is the thing I didn't know other people had the whole time.
“You watch this every week?” I say.
“Every week for four years.”
“Never with anybody?”
“Who would I watch it with?” She says it matter-of-factly. No pity. Just truth. And it sits there between us, bigger than she meant it to. “You're the first person I thought to ask.”
“And the last.”
She giggles. “I never pegged you for the jealous type.”
“Neither did I, but here we are.”
That's when headlights swing across the field.
She's flat against the truck bed before I've finished sitting up, the show still flickering giant over both of us like a spotlight we can't kill fast enough.
The car slows at the mouth of the lot. My whole body goes to the place it goes right before a fight, hands loose, breath gone shallow, and for about four seconds, I run the worst version of what could be happening.
It's Coach.
It's a cop.
It's a nosy puck bunny trying to blow up my spot.
It's the end of everything I've bled three years for.
The car swings around in the gravel and leaves. It was just some kid using the empty lot to flip a U-turn. Headlights gone. Field dark again.
Neither of us moves for a second.
“It was nothing,” I say.
“It's never going to be nothing, though.” She sits up. The laugh's gone out of her. It hurts me to see it gone. “That's the part I keep running. There's no night where one set of headlights doesn't scare the shit out of us or end us. We just got lucky tonight.”
I don't have a good response to that, so I don't give her one.
My phone goes off against the wheel well. It’s Christian. My little brother doesn't call to shoot the shit. I do that. When he calls, there’s a reason.
“I have to take this. It's my brother.” I climb out of the truck bed and walk a few feet into the dark, because some things don't need an audience.
“Hey. What happened?” I listen. The water heater's dead, Mom's gone wherever Mom goes, and Christian is standing in a cold house with a fourteen-year-old and a ten-year-old looking at him like he's supposed to know how the world works.
“How much? Okay, don't call some guy off Marketplace, you'll get robbed.
I'll send it right now. You call the store in the morning to buy a replacement.” A pause.
“You're doing fine, man. You're not supposed to know how to do any of this. Put Bean on so I can say goodnight.”
I talk to my ten-year-old sister Bean (real name Catherine) about her spelling test in the middle of a dead drive-in until she's bored with me, and then I hang up and stand in the dark a minute before I remember I’m on a date.
When I come back, Jasmine hasn't asked anything. She's just made room.
“Everybody okay?” she asks.
“Water heater died.” I use my phone to send Christian the money through the financial app he prefers.
“Three hundred bucks.” I sit back down heavier than I got up.
“That's the thing nobody gets about hockey.
It's not a dream to me. It's hot water, and a kid's braces, and Christian getting to be nineteen instead of somebody's father.”
“I know,” she says, and the thing is, maybe she doesn’t actually know, but she definitely understands.
“Carolina called,” I say. I was holding this for later. “The visit at the apartment went the way it was supposed to.”
She goes still. “And?”
“Development camp this summer. Contract on the table after graduation.
Two-way, entry level, but it's the league, it's the whole thing.” I make myself say the rest. “There's one string. I finish the season with nothing on my record. No incidents, not one. The scout said it twice, real friendly, the way you say a thing you mean. They want me, and I quote, locked in. No distractions.”
The words sit there.
“No distractions,” she says.
“His words. Not mine.”
“But you know who the distraction is in that sentence.” Flat. “It's the coach's daughter you can't be seen with, who works for the program that grades you.”
“Don't.”
“I'm not doing anything. I'm reading the sentence the way it's written.” She wraps her arms around her knees.
“Four seconds ago, a kid in a Civic could have almost ended your career.
No hot water heater. No braces. Everything gone to shit.
That's the new math. You don't even have to lose your temper on the ice anymore. You just have to be standing near me when the wrong person looks up.”
“So why do you look like somebody handed you good news?” I ask, confused.
“Because it is good news. It's everything you've worked for; it's for your brother, your sisters.
It's a warm house and peace of mind.” She turns and looks at me straight on, which she almost never does.
“I'm allowed to be happy for you and be the problem at the same time. I am fucking amazing like that.”
That pulls a laugh out, I didn't think I had left tonight.
“Here's what I'm not doing,” I tell her.
“I'm not going to sit here and watch you do the noble thing in your head where you figure out a way to back out of this. I can see you considering it. You want me to get on a plane to Carolina, and you go back to being nobody's anything…or worse with somebody else. That shit ain’t happening.”
“It would be the smart play.”
“It'd be the worst thing anybody ever did to me, and that’s saying something. One time, my best friend, when I was five, gave me ringworm.”
“Is ringworm contagious?”
“Of course it is.”
“Listen, we're not solving it tonight. How long do we actually have to figure this out?”
“Camp's in June. They want an answer by the end of the season.”
“So eight weeks.”
“Give or take.”
She nods, and I watch her set the eight-week timer in her head. It's going to keep her up at night…or at least it’s going to me up.
“So we've got eight weeks,” I say, “to quietly love on each other.”
“Is that what we’re doing? Loving on each other?”
“That’s what I’m doing,” I tell her.
“This is risky, Dixon.”
“It’s too late to assess risk. You belong to me now, and I won’t let you go.
We just can’t slip up, and shit will be fine.
” I lean back on the pillow and pull her down with me, slow, so she comes if she wants to and stays put if she doesn't. She wants to.
“Tonight, though, there's no scout, no Coach, no more kids in cars.
Tonight it's just us and a giant TV. We deserve it.”
She settles into my side, on purpose, which means more than it would out of anybody.
“One more night,” she says.
I shudder at her statement. One more night? I want all the fucking nights. But I know it’s complicated, so I leave it there for now.
“At least.”
Over us, the show keeps going, enormous and silent. There are two strangers on a fifty-foot screen getting a love story with hot tubs and roses, while I feel the next eight weeks start closing in, quiet, an inch at a time.