22. Jonny
Chapter twenty-two
Jonny
Iundo my seat belt when we pull into his space in the parking garage on Flint Street. “That was—intense. I can’t believe we spent four hours at a Waffle House.”
“My ribs literally hurt from laughing. You should write a memoir. Those stories were epic.”
“It was really fun to tell them,” I admit. “I hope I didn’t sound like that guy who comes back from living abroad and thinks he’s special.”
“But you are special,” Lance says, getting out of the car.
“Meh. I’m okay.”
“I mean it. You were independent and brave as hell.” He opens the door to the stairwell. “I’m in awe, honestly.”
“Maybe, but I didn’t go to battle for anybody. That’s brave. What I did was—”
“I’m going to stop you right there. Being in the Marines meant I let someone tell me what to do for eight years.
They said jump, I didn’t ask how high. I just did it.
You, on the other hand, decide you’re going to see a swami on top of a mountain and you literally do it. Boom. Done. That’s something.”
“Well, thank you.” I put my hands in my sweatpants pockets because I don’t know what to do with them.
“What are you thinking? You’ve got a funny look on your face.”
“I was thinking about first dates. I’ve had some really romantic ones, but this was the best first date ever. It had everything I didn’t know I wanted. Needed, even. Thank you, Lance.”
He smiles at me, so big and pure that it makes me feel giddy.
“Then you must allow me to walk you home,” he says as he opens the door onto Flint Street. “Like a gentleman.”
I look across the street at Aunt Shelley’s building, then back at Lance. “I don’t want to go home,” I say.
“Oh, thank God,” he says. “Because I wasn’t going to let you go anyway.”
“I’ll need a toothbrush,” I add. “And we’re not going to talk about how creepy that sounds, right?”
“No. We’re going to talk about toothbrushes. I have a spare.”
“Is it Kermit?”
“Get in the elevator.”
The doors close and Lance crouches in front of me. “Get on my back.”
“What? I’m way too heavy.”
“I used to run with fifty pounds of gear. I think I can give my boyfriend a piggyback ride.”
“If you put your back out, can I call you a dumbass?”
He waits. After a beat of hesitation, I lean forward awkwardly, and he steps in and takes my weight before I’ve committed to it, so that my only options are to cling to him or fall. I cling. He stands, locking my legs in place.
“It’s all about the weight distribution,” he tells me, and lurches just so I have to tighten my grip around his torso.
“You did that on purpose!”
“Yup.”
“Point proven. Set me down before you drop me on my ass.”
“Nope.” He locks his elbows around my legs.
The elevator stops on the fifth floor and the door opens. Lance’s neighbor, a young woman with flyaway hair, stops dead in the doorway.
“Hi. This is Jonny,” Lance says. “He sprained his ankle and needs some help getting home.”
She rolls her eyes, and I put my face into his shoulder so she can’t see me laughing. “Very bad ankle,” I manage as he bears me out of the elevator.
She makes a noise that says she isn’t buying it in the least and passes us in amused silence. Lance carries me all the way to his front door. “Could you get the door, please?”
I reach around and pull the key from his pocket, which takes longer than it should, and let us in. He carries me across the threshold to the bed and only unloads me when his calves touch the mattress. I’m still laughing when he turns and leans over to kiss me.
It’s simultaneously the most natural thing I’ve ever done and the most perfectly right. His mouth is warm and he tastes like maple syrup and coffee. I put my hand on the back of his neck and hold him there.
When we separate, he looks at me with an expression I’ve never seen on him before—something unguarded and almost disbelieving, like he can’t accept that this is real.
“Oh,” he says. “I have something for you.”
“I’ll bet,” I murmur.
“Aside from that.” He pulls me up from the bed and opens the closet. He looks at it hard. “Please don’t be mad. We only just found them and I was working up the courage to get them to you.”
He pushes the box out to me. Someone has written FROM THE TRUCK in Sharpie.
I crouch down and open it. The first thing I see is books.
My sketchbooks.
I sit down on the floor of his closet with the first one open on my knees and I don’t say anything for a while, because there is a version of my own handwriting in here that I haven’t seen since I was seventeen.
And then pictures. My grandmother asleep in the recliner with her mouth open.
Elliott from behind, at the window. Rochelle in profile in art class, badly, because I could never get her nose exactly right.
I had forgotten I could do this. Not the drawing. The looking.
“How do you have these?” I say. “I thought all of it burned.”
The third book is of nothing but him. Page after page after page of Lance Broussard, aged fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, from the side, from behind, asleep on a lunch table, laughing at something out of frame. I go through it slowly with my ears burning because he’s staring at me so intensely.
“I might have had a thing for you in high school.”
“Really?” His smile is infectious.
“Okay, I was really into you in high school.”
“147 sketches worth?”
He stops. “You counted them.”
“I said I was working up the courage.” He isn’t looking at me. “I didn’t say I managed it. I got about four pages in and then I sat on that closet floor for two hours.”
“Ouch. That sounds…accurate.” I’m pretty sure my face is on fire.
“Well, we’re even. I am into you now. And then.” He leans over and kisses me.
“How long have you had these?”
“They’ve been in the basement for ten years, and my dad just found them last Christmas. He gave them to me a week ago to give to your aunt. But I’m giving them to you. They were in a little box I put behind the driver’s seat and forgot about. I think they were last-minute grabs.”
I put my hand over his and we sit there on the closet floor like that for a minute.
Then I put the sketchbook down and reach back into the box, because there’s still a folded bag of papers at the bottom with my mother’s name on it, and I pull it out.
Lance crouches beside me.
It’s a bank statement from Fairhaven Community Bank, and my eye catches on the one number that doesn’t fit: a deposit for twenty thousand dollars from a company called Albatross Press.
Lance peers at it. “Albatross Press. Isn’t that the name Alice gave you?”
“That’s what Alice said. She asked if my mother ever mentioned a company called the Albatross Press. She said my father owned it.”
We stare at the number. Twenty thousand dollars from a publishing house owned by the man Alice thought was my father. It could be a book deal. It could be a coincidence. But the amount is wrong for a book deal from a small press, and my mother was not a writer.
Lance doesn’t say what we’re both thinking. He just puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes.
There’s an address book in the bag too. Spiral-bound, rubber band around it, so swollen with loose paper it won’t shut flat.
I take the band off and things come out of it into my lap.
A recipe for pound cake in handwriting I don’t recognize.
A funeral card for somebody called Wilbur.
Phone numbers for cousins in Roanoke I have never met and she never once mentioned.
And folded together in the back, two pieces of paper.
One is a photocopied class schedule from Fairhaven University almost thirty years ago. Somebody has gone over one line of it in ballpoint, hard enough to score through the paper.
The other is a newspaper clipping, brown at the folds. A young woman in a nurse’s uniform accepting a plaque, smiling straight into the camera. SUZANNAH CLEMMONS. I skim over the article. It’s about a young nursing student being given an award for excellence.
“That’s my neighbor,” I say. “That’s Suzannah. Why would my mother keep this?” He scans it.
Lance takes it and holds it under the closet light for a long moment, and hands it back without saying anything at all.
“I don’t know. I mean, her award was a scholarship.
I know this grant. The nursing department gives it out every year to their top students, though they gave out less money in those days.
Did your mother have some sort of beef with Suzannah? ”
“She had beef with everybody. I don’t think she liked Suzannah.
I think if she were here, she’d say something really bitchy like, she’s no better than she ought to be.
I don’t think she actually said that but it seems like the sort of thing she would say.
Just a kind of obliquely bitchy remark.” I sigh and put both pieces back where they were, because they are the only things in this box I don’t understand, and right now there’s a number on a bank statement that I understand even less.