Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
It was a terrible time to ask, but the question burst out of Lola like she was an impatient child, unable to wait any longer. As soon as she did ask, she shook her head apologetically and gestured around them at their surroundings. "I know. I know, this is hardly the place to talk about it for either of us, but…"
Something pained happened in Sam's blue eyes, and she regretted asking even more. "No," he said, clearly seeing that regret in her face. "No, I want to explain. I have to, obviously. Just—the very simplest way to explain it is…" He faltered again and ended up chuckling, a faint sound. "There is no simple way. The plane went down, you know that. No one else survived. I only did because…" He exhaled again, looking momentarily lost. "Because I was very lucky, but for a long time after that I couldn't rely on anything or anyone but myself. I was trying to get home again, but…"
His smile went soft and tired as he looked down at her. "It would have been so much easier with today's tech. Being able to just call you from a phone I had on me. But back then, and where we were… it was weeks before I got anywhere near a phone."
"And by then we'd held your funeral," Lola said softly. "And I left Virtue the next day. It was too late."
"I'm so sorry, Charlotte. Lola. I would have done anything to get back to you. I've never really stopped looking."
Lola put her hand over Sam's heart, feeling its gentle thump even through his winter coat. "I did a good job disappearing. I didn't want anyone to find me, Sam. It didn't occur to me there might be even the slightest hope you would come home to look. If I'd known…"
He gathered her into his arms, warm protection from the icy wind, with one hand nestled against her lumpy hat as he bent his head over hers. His scent was still familiar, even after all these years, and a knot of loneliness that she hadn't even known she carried unravelled with his hug. She was safe, safer than she had felt in a long, long time, and for all Lola cared, she could stay right there, arms wrapped around Sam Todd, for the rest of her life. "You couldn't possibly have known," he mumbled into her hat. "True love conquers all, but I was dead."
"That didn't stop Westley and Buttercup."
Sam released her, looked down into her eyes, and laughed. "Well, if either of us had had Miracle Max or Inigo and Fezzik to call on, things might have been different, but we had to make do without storybook heroes."
"And," Lola added, thinking of it for the first time herself, "Buttercup didn't go anywhere. Westley knew where to find her."
"You always were a bit more proactive than Buttercup," Sam said dryly, and Lola laughed.
"Well, yes. She was a bit of a drip, although she did all right for herself in the end. The problem is I don't really want to go back to Charlee's apartment to talk. I don't want to go somewhere public, but I also don't want to be in her space. Even though she says she's hardly there, really." Lola chewed the inside of her cheek indecisively.
"The world isn't going to come to an end if we don't get every answer to every question we've got in the next half hour," Sam said with obvious sympathy. "I'd offer to buy you coffee, but you just had some, and I don't know if it's the same for you these days, but?—"
"Coffee after four will keep me up all night," Lola agreed. "This getting old thing is not for sissies."
"Or caffeine addicts. But we can't keep standing around out here in the wind." Sam was smiling at her like he'd actually be perfectly happy to do that, and Lola understood it to the bottom of her soul. As long as they were together, the rest of the details didn't matter that much. "Why don't we at least go see if Charlee is home? If she is, you can introduce me. If she's not, at least we'll thaw."
"No pressure," Lola murmured, feeling like she was echoing something he'd said, though he hadn't spoken the words out loud. Sam nodded agreement, and Lola gazed up at him, lost in thought for a moment. Lost in memorizing him, in seeing the crags and wrinkles that hadn't been present before, although they fell into the lines that she remembered seeing when he smiled. "You really haven't changed."
"Excuse me." A child's polite voice interrupted whatever Sam had been about to say in response, and they both turned to see a boy of about six, bundled against the cold, standing on the other side of the street. "Are you practicing to be some of those statue people? Because if you are, you have to stop talking. I can see your breath on the air. Otherwise you were doing a pretty good job."
Lola cast Sam a startled glance and laughed as he met her eyes with as much surprise as she felt. "No," she said to the child. "We were just being lovey-dovey old people, gazing into each other's eyes."
"Oh. Well, I bet you could get jobs being statues if you wanted to. That would be cool." The boy turned a critical gaze to the town square as a whole, as if envisioning it filled with statue people. "Maybe we could have a contest!"
"A…statue people contest?" Lola asked cautiously. The kid nodded enthusiastically, and she couldn't help a grin. "Why don't you see if you can set that up?"
The boy's gaze snapped back to hers like he'd heard a challenge that he was fully capable of meeting. "Okay, but you have to come be statues if I do."
"I don't even live here," Lola said, amused.
"Then you'll have to come back, " the kid said, exasperated, and Lola laughed, looking up at Sam.
"Apparently this will not be my only visit to Virtue."
Sam grinned and said, "Tell you what," to the kid. "Maybe we can run daily statue contests so she'll have to stay."
The little boy's eyebrows lifted and he gave Sam an up-and-down sweeping examination, then turned an absolutely charming smile on Lola. " I would take you out for ice cream, not daily statue contests."
Sam clutched his chest and staggered back with a shout of laughter. "I've just been outplayed by a six year old."
"You really have," Lola said through laughter. "That's a very nice offer, young man, but I'm afraid I'm a little old for you. I may have to stick with the statue contests."
"I'm Noah," the boy offered, and, with great certainty, added, "No one is too old for ice cream."
"Well, that's true. Is there a good place for ice cream around here?" Sam asked. "I'm Sam. This is Lola."
"There's an ice cream parlor next to the movie theatre," Noah said with great authority. "A jerk works there."
Lola had forgotten how random conversations with small children could be. Fighting down another laugh and trying to smooth the sound of it out of her voice, she said, "That's unfortunate. Perhaps your mother should complain to the management? Is he only a jerk to you?"
"No, not that kind of jerk. A Coke jerk? He makes ice cream sodas, oh a soda jerk!" The kid simultaneously lit up at remembering the right word, and cringed at himself for having forgotten it in the first place. He looked, Lola thought, like Calvin from the old cartoon strips, defined by his emotive ability.
Aside from that, though, was the astonishing news that Virtue had an ice cream parlor bold enough to employ a soda jerk. "I'll be da—rned," she said, becoming mindful of the small child halfway through the word. Noah looked at her like he knew perfectly well she'd been going to say damned , but he didn't call her on it, and Lola went on with, "I think the last soda fountain in Virtue closed when I was about nine. That's wonderful. Next to the movie theatre, you said?"
"Yeah, but…" The little boy eyed her suspiciously. "I thought you said you didn't live here."
Sam coughed on a laugh, and Lola tried to remain solemn. "I don't, but I did grow up here."
"Oh! Did you know Old Miss Brannigan? She was my great-great-aunt. I live at her house now. They said she was really old before she died. Like you, I guess."
"Doris Brannigan was at least twenty years older than I am," Lola said dryly. "It's not polite to comment on peoples' ages, Noah."
He squinted. "People comment on my age all the time."
Lola, flummoxed, looked at Sam, who was doing a terrible job of not laughing at the forthright little boy. "The older you get, the less polite it becomes. But you might be right and people just shouldn't comment at all."
Noah sighed deeply. "There are a lot of rules about life, aren't there?"
"There are," Sam agreed solemnly. "But there are some good things, too. Like the fact that I'm going to take Lola here over for an ice cream soda now, and I'm going to tell the soda jerk there that I'm paying for one in advance for one Noah—Brannigan?—whenever he wants to come by and have it, as thanks for letting us know the parlor is there."
The little boy's eyes went round and he managed to squeak, "Thank you!" before rushing down the sidewalk and tearing up toward the massage therapy clinic, bellowing, "MOOOOOM! MOOOOMMMM!!!! Mr. Sam is gonna buy me a SODA!!!!" as he went.
Lola threw her head back and laughed, nearly losing her hat in the process. "I think you've got a friend for life, now. You were wonderful with him. Your foster kids were very lucky."
"What a character," Sam said through his own smiles. "He must keep his parents on their toes. Well, may I buy you an ice cream soda? If I remember our teen years, canoodling and whispering secrets over a diner meal was actually a pretty good way to talk."
"That sounds so much less intimidating than going back to Charlee's to Talk," Lola agreed, imbuing the word with a capital T. "Honestly, Sam, I just want to be near you. The rest…"
"Almost doesn't matter?" he asked softly as she tucked her arm back into his and they made their way around the square, following the wide sidewalk. "That's what I thought when I saw you. We can catch each other up, but…it doesn't feel urgent. Except one thing that I really do need to tell you, and can't in public."
"My curiosity is piqued." Sudden alarm shot through Lola. "Wait. Sam. You're not ill, are you? It's nothing bad?"
"No! No, I'm healthy as a horse, if horses lived to be my age. No, it's just…" He paused. "Weird."
Relief swept Lola as quickly as the alarm had risen. She tilted her head against Sam's shoulder a moment, smiling. "Weirder than that mole on your hip?"
Sam sniffed, trying to sound injured. "It's not that weird!"
"The mole, or what you have to share with me?"
"The mole!"
"So it is weirder than the mole on your hip. I just needed a baseline." Lola smiled up at him, and Sam chortled as they made their way to the ice cream parlor, which had a chrome-plated sign across the top that said Silver Dollar Ice Cream Parlor , complete with a three-scoop ice cream outlined in silver. "This is a terrible idea," she said as they went in. "It's cold out."
"But it's great! Wow, look at this place! There's a Silver Dollar Diner out on the other side of town, and they have a soda fountain, now that I think about it. It opened…a while ago." He made a sudden face. "I'm sorry. I just realized that at my age, 'a while ago' could mean thirty years and I'm not sure I'd think it was more than five or ten. This getting old thing really isn't for sissies. Anyway, they must be doing well enough to expand. I should keep up on what's going on in town better," Sam added, that last bit mostly to himself, as Lola, delighted, took in the parlor's decor.
It was unabashedly retro, 1950s style with chrome fittings, red plastic booths, and a checkerboard floor. Best of all there was a genuine soda fountain that clearly mixed not just the usual popular sodas, but could mix up a host of others, including ice cream sodas from the short but fascinating list of ice creams hand-written on a chalkboard. "I'm going to need a chocolate cherry bomb ice cream soda. Is the ice cream chocolate cherry, or is it chocolate with a cherry bomb soda, or…?"
She spoke to the young man behind the counter—presumably the, or at least a , soda jerk that Noah had mentioned—and the kid flashed a grin. "It can kinda be any combination of those, honestly. I got chocolate ice cream, cherry ice cream, chocolate cherry bomb ice cream?—"
"I don't know what that is, but I want it," Lola said as he went on.
"—cherry soda, chocolate soda, chocolate-cherry soda, whipped cream, cherries on top, the whole nine yards. I love working here," he added happily. "It's like getting to make delicious chemistry experiments."
"Please. Don't let me stop a master at work. One chocolate cherry bomb ice cream soda, made as you see fit."
The young man turned a hopeful look on Sam. "And you, sir?"
"I'll have a vanilla milkshake, please."
In a tone of crushing disappointment, the soda jerk said, "Not even a malt?"
Sam chuckled. "Not even a malt. Oh, but I do need to pay for something in advance. Do you know Noah Brannigan? About this high, six or so?—"
The kid laughed. "I think everybody in Virtue knows Noah. He and his mom moved here a couple years ago, into to the Old Brannigan Place, and he's been charming everybody he meets ever since."
"Well, he worked his charm on us," Lola told the kid, who really needed a name tag. Although when she was young, she'd have known his name anyway; Virtue really wasn't that big a town. "So Sam decided he'd comp him an ice cream of his choice the next time he came in."
"Oh, he'll love that. Sure, I can do that. I'll make a note and let the manager know. Take a seat," he said with a wave at the largely-empty parlor. "I'll bring your drinks over to you."
Sam slid his hand down to Lola's and, with a quick, enquiring eyebrow to make sure it was all right, led her to one of the two-person booths, where they settled in across from each other with effortless intimacy. "I have to keep reminding myself it's been a whole lifetime," Lola whispered. "Being with you feels so much the same. I didn't hate Virtue until after you died, and now I feel like I could belong here again. Are you magic, Sam? Is this magic?"
"A little bit," he murmured. "It's fate. After all this time, finding each other again? It has to be. Tell me? Tell me something about your life, Lola. About who you are, how you've been. You're right. In some days it hardly seems to matter. But in others…I have a lifetime to catch up on, so if you want to…tell me?"