Chapter Thirty-Five. Ingrid
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
INGRID
Can we get together tonight? I’ll bring wine.
I’m in the passenger seat of Dad’s car, phone in my lap, watching Anhalt roll past my window.
The skating rink where Izzy and I had our eleventh birthday party is now a laser tag place.
The car wash, where Kennedy Claire and I hosed down cars in bikinis to raise funds for Miss Lone Star is miraculously still there, though with a fresh coat of paint and a shiny new sign.
I feel Izzy’s breath on my neck, her voice in my ear: Do you see it, Iggy? Do you see?
Dad has the heat up too high, and he’s playing Jim Croce too loud.
“Time in a Bottle,” which I always thought was the saddest song ever written because he wrote it after finding out that he was going to be a father, wrote it about how happy he was, how he wished he could save up all his time and spend it with his son.
By the time the song hit number one in the charts, Croce had already died in a plane crash.
“Have you been able to talk to Joel?” Dad asks.
I reach over to turn the music down, to lower the heat. “Yeah,” I say. “Joel’s fine.”
Dad looks over at me for a second, then back to the road. He doesn’t say anything else.
My phone chimes with a response from Kennedy Claire:
I wish! Can’t tonight. Rain check?
I darken the screen.
Kennedy Claire and I have been friends for almost thirty years, not call-each-other-every-day friends, but “show up for the big things” friends.
I think of her doing my makeup for my wedding, her fingertip on my cheek.
I think of when I flew down when Sarah Lynn was born, how I held her when she was impossibly small, Kennedy Claire in the hospital bed, her face bare and her eyes tired, and how I thought she looked her most beautiful.
Dad pulls onto our street, where the trees are old, their branches twisted, intertwined with the ones beside them.
I think of the afternoon stretching into evening, Dad and I circling around each other in the house, making small talk, ignoring the photos of Izzy on the wall, ignoring the new medical supplies for Mom, and I feel like there is a vise around my chest, squeezing the air from my lungs.
My phone dings again. Another text, but this time it’s from a number I don’t know. I swipe it open.
Dinner tonight?
Followed by an address in Wimberley, a town about twenty minutes away.
And then: So we don’t run into anyone we know.
I stare at the message, my heart halfway to my throat. I’ve been half waiting for a follow-up to the invitation, wondering if whoever sent it will reach out again. Then a final text comes in.
This is Travis, by the way. With a wink.
Dad puts the car in park. “What do you think about Dad’s best mac and cheese?” he says.
“Don’t worry about dinner.” My hand is already on the handle. “I’m going out with Kennedy Claire tonight.”