18. Chapter Eighteen
Percy
Penelope tells me on a Tuesday, in the diner on Franklin, over eggs.
“I fly out on the ninth,” she says, shaking hot sauce onto her plate. “My mother’s found a way to make three months look like a punishment and an opportunity at the same time. Chicago for six weeks. Then, Portugal with my aunt. Then Chicago again. Then I’ll be back.”
“Okay,” I say.
“I’ll be back the last week of August.” She takes the toast off my plate. “You’ll be here?”
“Yeah.”
That’s the whole conversation. Nineteen seconds. She says it the way you’d tell somebody you were getting your car serviced, because that’s what it is — a friend telling a friend about her summer.
I eat my eggs while she talks about her aunt’s home in Lisbon and the way the light comes off the courtyard at four in the afternoon.
The last real day I get with her is the Saturday before she flies.
She texts at nine in the morning. The fire escape, so I walk over.
It’s the alley off Tenth, behind the old dry goods building, where an iron fire escape climbs four floors up the brick. She’s been telling me about it since March. It’s the first real warm day — seventy degrees, and the whole town smells like wet dirt and cut grass.
We climb it, which I don’t think is exactly legal. She goes first, and she’s quick about it. I come up behind her and try not to look like I’m behind her. The landing at the top is wide enough to sit on. She takes a seat, so I sit next to her.
“There,” she says, and points across the alley at the building opposite, which is a wall.
“That’s a wall.”
“That’s a ghost sign.” She’s already gone somewhere I can’t follow.
“Look at it. Under the paint. You can only read it in this light, when the sun comes across at this angle. RIDGEWAY MILLING CO. It’s been under there since the twenties.
Somebody painted over it twice, and it’s still coming through. ”
I look.
It takes me a while. And then I see the shape of letters under a hundred years of paint, ghosting up out of the brick where the sun hits it sideways.
“How’d you find it?”
“I look up.” She says it simply.
We stay for two hours.
She’s got a coffee. She tells me what the building was and what it is now, and how you can tell where a building’s been added onto by the color of the brick.
She takes her shoes off and puts her feet on the rail.
Somewhere below us, a truck backs up and beeps for a long time, and she waits it out with her eyes shut.
I look at the side of her face, and then I look at the wall.
She says, “You have to see it in October. The light’s better. It’s lower.”
October.
She says it like it’s a thing that will simply arrive on the calendar with her in it, and me in it, and this alley still standing here with the sun coming in at the right angle.
“Yeah,” I say.
I don’t ask her to text me. I don’t ask what she’s doing in Lisbon, or how long she’ll be there, or whether things are okay with her mom.
She flies out on Wednesday, and I’m not there because I’m at work.
And I don’t have a car. She never offered, and I’d never have said yes.
But she comes by the house Tuesday night to drop off a book she says I should read over the summer, and I walk her out to her car at the curb.
She’s parked under the streetlight in front of the Hawthorne House.
The porch light’s on behind me. It’s the eighth of May.
“It’s just summer,” she says. “You’ll be okay. You’re the only person I know who’d be totally fine.”
I nod.
“Percy.” She stands there with her keys, half turned. “Thank you. For this year.”
That thing I’m supposed to say doesn’t come up. I stand on the curb in front of my house with my hands at my sides and my throat closed around two words I cannot get out.
She waits and waits.
Then she smiles like it doesn’t matter.
“Okay,” she says.
She gets in. The engine turns over. She pulls away from the curb, and at the stop sign at the end of Hawthorne Street, her brake lights come on and hold, red, for four or five seconds. Then she lifts her hand out the window. And she turns the corner, and she’s gone.
I stand there a while after. The porch light’s on behind me and the street’s empty, and the whole thing goes on around me the way it did when Josh left. I’m on a curb again, watching somebody drive away, with a thank you still stuck in my chest where it’s been my entire life.
I go inside and close the door.
The summer is simple. I work. Marco puts me on the floor five and six days a week, doubles when somebody calls out, and I take every hour he has.
I learn the wine list well enough that the bartender starts letting me run bottles.
My feet stop hurting sometime in June, and I don’t know what day.
I walk to work at ten in the morning, and I walk home at midnight through the same one.
The house is dark and hot and empty, and I open the windows because there’s no air conditioning and lie on top of the covers listening to Hawthorne Street have a summer.
Nobody ever said anything about the lease. Benson texted in June to ask if I’d water Rowan’s plant, which is how I found out I’m staying. That’s how it happened. A text about a plant.
The money goes in the drawer. Eight hundred. Twelve. Two thousand and something by the end of July — more money than anyone in my family has ever had at one time — and I count it about once a week and put it back and don’t spend it on anything.
Penelope texts sometimes. It’s not often.
A photograph of a courtyard in Lisbon with the light coming in exactly the way she said it would.
A dumb question about hockey. Once, at three in the morning her time, a picture of a ceiling.
I always answer. I never text first. I read her book in nine days, and then I read it again, slower, and by August, I’ve read it four times. I don’t tell her that though.
In August, they put the ice back in, and I go down, stand at the boards, and look at it for a while.
Freshman year is over.
I’ve got a room in a house with my name on the mail.
A stick another man handed me. A chair at a table that nobody sits in but me, and a French novel that four hockey players have decided is the funniest thing that ever happened to them.
There’s a folded note in my drawer under a broken watch that I haven’t read yet.
And there’s a girl coming back the last week of August.
Everything the man in the truck told me was waiting for me is here. All of it. He said they’d pay me to stand right there, and they did. He said this thing could change my whole life. It did.
I lie awake in an empty house in the middle of a warm night in May, and again in June, and again in July.
Don’t get used to it.
It’s the last week of July, and I’ve already checked the calendar twice.