Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Did you forget your flowers?” I ask while creeping down the gravel road behind Ray’s BMW.
She raises her eyebrows. “My first ever bouquet. You think I’d forget them?”
“Nobody’s ever given you flowers?”
“No. I put them in Dad’s car.” She cocks her head. “Don’t tell me you’re some secret romantic and you buy roses for all of your, uh, dates?” She says dates with distaste.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
She rolls her eyes. “Why didn’t you bring someone tonight?”
At the intersection, Ray turns left, toward Finn River, while we head north into the tiny town of Wolf Creek. “Didn’t want to.” Not only would I have been too busy to entertain a date, I can’t imagine sharing tonight with anyone but Charlotte.
“So if Zach’s your guardian, does this make Sofie like your stepmom?” she asks as I pull into the Snow Bunny’s drive-through. Outside the windows, cricket song blends with the throaty purr from my engine .
“More like a big sister,” I reply. She’s certainly nosy like I imagine a big sister would be. I definitely have to keep my guard up.
A tinny voice from the speaker asks for our orders.
A few minutes later, I’m turning out of the drive-through, accelerating south through the darkness, a giant blackberry milkshake in my hand.
The cool evening breeze fills the cab and the radio buzzes with a slow country song.
Now that we’re leaving the lights of Wolf Creek behind, the night sky above us dazzles with bright stars.
“Mmm,” Charlotte says, her lips wrapped around her straw.
It’s a little tricky to shift, steer, and hold the milkshake while also keeping my eyes on the road and not on her face while she makes those noises.
“Good?” I ask.
“The best.”
“Here,” Charlotte says, reaching for my milkshake. One of the cupholders that came with the truck was cracked and I kept catching my gear on the other one, so I ripped them out. Now I’m sort of glad, because when I let her take my cup from me so I can shift, her fingertips brush over my knuckles.
“Theo tell you about the Snow Bunny?” she asks, handing my cup back now that I’m up to speed.
“Yeah. That first summer I moved here. We hit that swimming hole on the north end of the lake after practice one day, and he said I had to try one.”
She takes another sip, her freckled cheeks hollowing. I force my eyes to stay on the road. “There’s a secret blackberry patch near that swimming hole. Did he show you that?”
“Uh, no.” We were pretty busy trying to spray the girls sunning themselves on the nearby rock slab with our cannonballs.
“I haven’t been yet this summer. We should go. We could make our own blackberry milkshakes.”
A warm tingle spreads through my belly as I merge onto the freeway. At this time of night, traffic is nonexistent. “Sounds good. When? ”
“How about next Saturday?” she asks, glancing my way, a curious quirk to her brow, her lips wrapped lazily around her straw. I can just see the pink tip of her tongue.
“Sure.” Practice is in the mornings on Saturdays, and band finishes before we do. And it’s the last free weekend before school starts. Picking blackberries with Charlotte is the perfect way to end the summer. “So what’s with this driving test?”
She wrinkles her nose in an exaggerated cringe.
“Apparently I drove too slow, and then I was too far away from the curb in my parallel parking, and....” She huffs a giant sigh.
“I’ve re-read the manual ten times. I just…
get nervous. And Mr. Barnes didn’t tell me that I can’t ask him anything during the test, and I got confused about which way I was supposed to turn, and…
accidentally went left in front of someone. ”
How am I not supposed to tease her with intel like that? “I was going to ask if you wanted to drive us home, but I do want to live to see tomorrow.”
“Ugh!” Her expression turns murderous and she thwaps my bicep with the back of her fingers. “Don’t give me shit, okay? I get enough from Mo and Theo.”
Laughing, I take the turn to Finn River. Like she’s reading my mind, she holds my milkshake so I can downshift.
“Can I do anything to help?” I ask after turning left to cross over the freeway.
“I’ve got it,” she says with determination.
She hands my milkshake back as I descend the overpass and slow as we cruise past the 76 Station and the strip mall.
Charlotte utters a gasp when we near the liquor store.
I glance across the cab to try to see what she’s looking at. “What?”
She presses her body back against the seat, like to hide. “It’s my mom.”
Lit by the liquor store’s neon and the floodlight over the door, a woman stands in a flower-print blouse and tight jeans, her dark hair limp against her face.
I’ve seen Charlotte’s mom in only one picture.
It’s mixed in with the others on their mantle, taken years ago.
In it, their mom’s arms are spread across Theo and Charlotte’s shoulders and all of them are smiling for the camera.
The woman in the parking lot looks nothing like the one in that picture.
There are two men with her, both big dudes, with full beards. Two sleek, black motorcycles are parked in front of the store.
“You sure?” I ask Charlotte.
She gives a tight nod.
“Do you want me to stop?”
Her eyes find mine. Her jaw looks hard in the low light. “No.”
We continue past, and Charlotte leans toward me to peer out the back window, then sighs in relief.
“When was the last time you saw her?” I ask.
She fiddles with the lid of her milkshake. “Six months, maybe?”
I don’t have to ask what her mom’s doing outside of a liquor store at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night, dressed like she is, talking to two biker guys. “Theo told me she was getting help.”
“Looks like it didn’t last. Big surprise.”
I wedge my milkshake between my left hip and the armrest, then reach for Charlotte’s hand. “I’m sorry.”
She releases a soft sigh, shrinking into the seat. But she takes my hand.
“Thanks, William.”
Her skin is cool from holding the cold milkshake, so I fold my fingers over hers. She squeezes back.
“There!” Charlotte says, perking up as we near a turnoff labeled “Fourth of July Creek.”
I turn onto a double track with dry grass growing down the middle. With the windows down and the scent of dry gravel and pine weaving through my cab while we bump over potholes, this feels bigger than just an afternoon of picking blackberries with a friend.
All week, I’ve been counting down the hours until our not-date. Thankfully we had double practices plus Theo and I put in extra hours running plays or I’d have gone crazy.
“Oh, before I forget, I gotta be home by six,” she says.
“Hot date tonight?” I tease.
She scoffs. “Morgan will be getting back from the fair by then. She’s not supposed to be home alone.”
Theo took his girlfriend camping, and Ray is likely working.
A song I’ve heard from “The Greatest Showman,” Linnea’s latest obsession, comes on the radio.
“I love this song!” Charlotte says, and reaches for the knob. It’s the one about rewriting the stars. Linnea sings it in the shower sometimes just to annoy me.
I follow the double track along an open, dry field that could have been a baseball diamond at one time, to where it dead ends at a small parking area.
On the radio, Zendaya is just getting to the part in the song about the mountains being in their way when I turn off the engine.
Cricket song and the distant hush of the river fills the silence.
Charlotte seems unaffected by the turmoil that stupid song kicked to life inside me, and jumps down, still humming along.
That the small gravel parking area is empty makes me wonder if we’re too late for blackberries. Not that I care. I get to spend time with Charlotte.
Will the stars shift someday, altering the course of us? Do I just need to keep hoping for a solution?
At the back of my truck, we each grab a five-gallon bucket.
Charlotte whips her hair into a braid and sets off for the row of thick bushes lining the berm that separates us from the river, moving at her breakneck pace.
Today, she’s wearing dark purple shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt that shows off her tanned shoulders dotted with tiny freckles, and her black converse high-tops.
I adjust my Falcons ball cap and lock the truck doors, then hurry after her .
“Are we trespassing?” I ask.
“Don’t think so?” she replies, scrunching her nose. “I mean, I’ve been coming here since I can remember. Nobody’s ever shot at us.”
I tap the brim of her hat. “I can’t die today, blackbird. Not with our opening game against Timberline Friday.”
She gives me a snarky little snort. “Blackbird?”
I laugh. “Would you rather I call you by your last name, like I do Theo?”
She makes a face. “No thank you. Mr. Paris calls me that when he thinks I’m slacking off.” She hunches her shoulders and pokes out her bottom lip to impersonate our PE teacher. “Step it up, Hannah! The goal post’s this way, Hannah!”
I bite my lip to keep from laughing again, even though the idea of her flustered is fucking adorable. “It’s settled then.”
“Why blackbird?”
“You sing pretty like one. And it’s the first song you played for me.”
From the way she rolls her eyes with the hint of a smile, I think she likes her nickname. Or maybe it was the compliment tucked into it.
“Kind of sad though,” she says. “In that song, anyway.”
I’ve read the lyrics, but I didn’t reach the same conclusion. “I dunno. It’s hopeful, right?” If I could sing worth a damn, I’d hum the chorus. “The blackbird flies off, free.”
One of her eyebrows dips, like she’s thinking this over.