Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Four
It’s sad to see the campsite packed and tidy.
“Let’s stay,” I say.
“Forever,” Jeffy says, and lays his head on Rica’s shoulder.
“Let’s go home and shower,” Rica asserts.
“I like Rica’s plan better. Shotgun!” Jericho races toward Jeffy’s car.
Rica takes a step toward Jeffy’s car too, and I’m involuntarily seized with the possible reality of being alone with Miles in his car, windows down and racing south.
“Hey.” Miles comes over. He’s screwing a baseball cap onto his head so I can barely see his eyes. “I’m…actually not going home tonight.”
“Oh. Really?” My windows-down fantasy dries up, leaving a thin cast of disappointment behind.
He adjusts his cap. “Yeah, so if you’re anxious to get back to the city you should ride with them. But…if you…Uh. I’m actually headed to my house up here. To check things out, turn off the water for the winter. If you…wanted to see it, we could stay the night there.”
“Oh!”
“It’s nothing fancy. But it’s nice and—”
“I’m in. Super curious to see your log cabin.”
He laughs. “It’s not a log cabin.”
“Nothing you can say will ever convince me it’s not. You obviously have a butter churn.”
“You’re probably going to be devastated when you see the vinyl siding, aren’t you?”
“You kids riding together?” Rica calls.
“Yeah,” Miles says. He doesn’t mention the pending overnight and neither do I. Jeffy and Jericho round the car and it’s hugs all around. And then they’re all piled into Jeffy’s Honda. Miles double-taps the hood like a dad.
“Dinner next week?” he asks through the open passenger window.
“Oh!” Jericho checks his calendar. “I’m free on Friday.”
“Me too!”
“Sure, I’ll be there.”
And then, magically, we have friends and plans with those friends. Miles and I watch as they drive away.
“So…” He clears his throat. “Let’s go.”
We drive for an hour in almost complete silence. I’m tired and contemplative and happy for the quiet. He, on the other hand, seems to be chewing the kind of thoughts that get stuck in your teeth. His brow is deeply furrowed and one of his thumbs drums on the steering wheel when we stop at stoplights.
“Rhonda’s.” I read aloud the name of a little roadside café and my sudden voice makes him jump. “Pull over, I wanna go in there. It looks so cute!”
He steps on the gas. “No way.”
“Why?”
“My former fourth-grade teacher runs the place,” he says. “She’ll wanna hear every single detail of my life. Actually she’ll wanna hear every single detail of your life, too. You really want to go through that?”
I crane backward to look at the café. “Are you kidding me? Of course I want to meet your fourth-grade teacher. I want to hear what you were like in fourth grade!”
“Bigger than all the other kids, shy, and bad at reading. There. You’re caught up.”
“Bad at reading? Really? But you’re always reading now.”
He shrugs. “I stuck with it. We’re here.”
Our car takes a right turn directly into a forest. If we weren’t driving down it, I never would have known there was a gravel road here. It’s overgrown, and leaves slide against the windows of the car.
“Is this your driveway?” I ask in awe. “It’s like that scene in Beauty and the Beast. ”
He frowns. “I gotta talk to Burt about trimming down these trees.”
I’m beyond charmed. I’ve never lived somewhere that even had grass to mow, let alone the necessity for Burt the tree trimmer.
We round a bend and there’s a little blue house. Big, boisterous bushes seem to throw their arms out to us under the front windows.
It’s obviously been a while since anyone was here, but it’s a handsome sort of disheveled.
“Well, this is it,” Miles says. “The only place I lived before Manhattan.”
“You went from here to the studio where I’m staying?”
“Yeah.”
“Culture shock.”
“Yeah.”
We grab our bags and Miles leads the way up the front walk, onto the porch and clickety clack, through the front door.
We push into the entryway. On the wood-paneled wall there’s a photo of young Miles getting tickled to pieces by a woman who must be his mother. They don’t look that much alike, but the love on her face…yeah, this kid is her whole world. As Miles walks past, long-worn habit has him absent-mindedly lifting his fingers to the frame to give it a quick tap-tap. Hi, Mom.
I stand there and watch him disappear into the house, looking back and forth between him and the photo. Does it get that natural for everyone? To be reminded of the hole torn through your heart and be able to just tap the picture frame on the way past?
I catch up to him in the living room. The house is dark but he does a big circuit, opening all the blinds. Dusty shafts of light illuminate the furniture. His apartment in Manhattan is minimal and stylish. This home is floral prints and plaids, a ginormous rug, and a wall of knickknacks. It’s a little dusty but otherwise well cared for. Friendly and dated, and I can picture giant, shy, fourth-grade Miles lying in front of that very fireplace practicing reading with all his heart.
I turn to him, hands clasped under my chin. “I love it so much here.”
He lets out a breath and adjusts his ball cap again. “Really?”
“What should we do tonight?” I ask, inspecting a bookshelf filled to the gills with paperback thrillers. “Let’s play cards and eat hot dogs again, that was fun last night.” I gasp at an exciting discovery. “You can show me all your yearbooks.”
He comes up behind me and firmly pushes the yearbooks back onto the shelf. When I turn to him, he looks distinctly uncomfortable. “About tonight…”
“Hm?”
“I…didn’t tell you all of it. About why I needed to come here.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah…actually, there’s this thing I need to go to tonight. And…if you want, you can totally just stay here. I can build a fire for you. You can relax. I won’t be too long, I don’t think…”
I blink.
He blinks.
“Or…” I prompt him.
“Or…” He takes a breath. “You could come with me.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You don’t even know what the event is!” He’s all relieved exasperation.
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s…it’s this wedding thing.”
I drop my chin and survey him over imaginary reading glasses. “Miles. Is it a wedding thing or a wedding?”
He clears his throat. “It’s a wedding.”
“Whose?”
“Cody Ketterman. An old friend. He’s, uh, Kira’s older brother. So, yeah. She and her family are gonna be there. Obviously.”
I gape at him. “Your ex-girlfriend’s brother is getting married, invited you, and you want to take…” I look down at myself. Mud-streaked, hanks of unwashed hair, overalls with a truly nonsensical number of shells in the pockets, dirt under my fingernails, a stretched-out NASA T-shirt. “ A swamp thing as your plus one?”
His eyes drop to my toes and back up to my hair. The corner of his mouth quirks up into a microscopic smile. “Yeah.”
“Am I even invited? You can’t just spring an extra guest on them last minute.”
“It’s really casual. More of a barbecue than anything. There weren’t even invitations. Cody just sent a mass text about it. We wouldn’t be crashing.” His hands have found their way into his pockets.
“Are you wearing that?” I point to his creased jeans and flannel shirt.
“No. I’ve got some clothes here.”
I uncross my arms. “Well, I would be wearing this. So.”
He laughs but then considers. “I think there’s still a box of my mom’s dresses in one of the closets. How about this. You shower and I’ll find the dresses. If you don’t find something you want to wear, you can skip the wedding. If you find something you want to wear…”
Now my hands are on my hips and I pin him with a stare. “If there’s nothing here for me to wear, we’ll hit up a secondhand store on the way. I’m sure I could find something. Which way to the shower? Trust me, this is gonna take a while. Do you have a hair dryer? What’s wrong with your face?”
He quickly wipes away the look he was giving me. Halfway stuck between nerves and gratitude, I think.
“Nothing. Over there. Second door. Grab a towel from the closet on your way in. There might be a hair dryer under the sink.”
I clap my hands and scrub them together. “How much time do we have?”
“Three hours?”
“All right,” I say, cracking my neck and rolling my shoulders. “Prepare yourself. Because you’re really about to see something special.”
—
The shower is everything I need it to be. Scouring and peaceful. The water’s starting to go cold by the time I get out.
I spend forty-five straight minutes blow-drying my mane, and by the time I’m done I can no longer feel my arms. Even washed and blow-dried, my raggedly long hair does not look good. I have just enough strength left to French braid two plaits in my hair, but it’s giving Heidi (and not Klum), so I open the door and shout out to Miles. “Little help!”
He emerges down the hall, snacking on pretzels, but pauses ten feet away when he gets his first glimpse of me. He turns halfway and faces the wall. “Um, now?” he calls.
I glance down at myself. I’ve got the towel firmly pinned over me but from his point of view, peeking out from the door, yeah, I probably looked naked. “Yeah. C’mere.”
He shuffles to the bathroom door, his eyes on the wall behind me. He’s embarrassed. Cute.
“I want to twist these braids up, but my arms are noodles. Will you do it for me?”
He clears his throat. “Yeah.”
Miles stands behind me and takes directions well. He only gouges my scalp with a bobby pin once. I cement my hands to the towel and the very second the final bobby pin is in place he jets out of the bathroom.
“I found the dresses,” he calls over his shoulder. “I’ll grab them.”
There’s an old tube of mascara and some eye shadow and lipstick in my bathroom bag, by some miracle, so I use muscle memory from my former life and apply it all. He comes back and hangs four dresses on the doorknob.
“I’m gonna shower and get dressed,” he says.
“I used all the hot water like a total asshole.”
Finally, his normal smile is back. “Well, I probably deserve it, considering I sprang this whole thing on you. If you hear someone screaming like a baby, that’ll just be me.”
He disappears back toward his end of the house. I survey the dresses.
Her taste was simple and sweet. I like all four dresses but nix two of them right away. One has shoulder pads and I just don’t have the swag for that. The other is jean, which seems rude to wear to a wedding, even if it’s casual. One is sky blue and lovely, but it drags on the floor when I try it on so I reluctantly put it back on the hanger. The last one is light pink and short and shapeless. I try it on and step out to the big mirror in the hallway. I almost make myself blush. In braids and pink I look so girly and fun!
I lean closer to the hallway mirror and give myself a thorough inspection. My face is rounder than it was last month. The blue smudges under my eyes are receding. I’ve got pink cheeks and lips.
I look lively.
Another word for lively: alive.
I take a step back and really survey myself: bare toes, everything scrubbed raw in the shower, pink dress, and hair in an actual style.
Alive.
I hear footsteps at the end of the hallway and turn toward Miles, about to throw my arms out and make some joke about Dr. Frankenstein’s success.
But then all the jokes take one look at Miles in a suit and promptly pass out.
Hello, shoulders.
They say a good suit does for a man what expensive lingerie does for a woman.
And I finally understand the sentiment because I can barely make eye contact with that tie he’s currently straightening while he walks. He glances up at me and—thank you very much—does a double take.
“Good?” I ask, saving him the trouble of coming up with something to say.
He arrives at my end of the hallway. “You look,” he tries anyway. “Yeah.”
“ Nice is the word you’re looking for,” I inform him. “You look…” I step back and survey him, hand on my chin.
He braces for impact.
“Like a businessman who spanks his secretary with the door unlocked,” I decide.
He lets out a chuff of incredulity. He steps forward and puts one finger lightly on the bottom of my chin, tipping my head up. “ Nice is the word you’re looking for.”
But he doesn’t look nice. He looks like the kind of man you cheat on your inattentive husband with.
He glances at my bare feet, my neckline, my lipstick. I reach up and properly straighten the tie he’s given up fiddling with. The moment grows thick and my fingers tingle with warm fabric. One of his hands moves infinitesimally and then settles back at his side.
There’s only one way out of this kind of tension.
“I think somebody needs to check to see if that belt buckle is real gold,” I tell him, tracing a finger over it and chomping my teeth meaningfully.
“Quit compulsively flirting,” he scowls and slaps my hand away. “I’m nervous enough already.”
“Compulsively flirting?” I’m the picture of outrage. “How dare you!”
He presses one finger into my forehead and moves me to the side so he can pass. “We should get going.”
“Miles.” I pinch the back of his suit coat and he stops immediately. “Are you sure it’s okay for me to wear this? It’s not…weird for you?”
He shakes his head. “I only chose the dresses that I couldn’t really remember. It’s fine. She didn’t dress up very often. Now, if you were in her bowling league jacket, that might be weird.”
I smile. “She sounds so awesome.”
He nods. “She was.” And then he frowns, his eyes on my short sleeves. “Won’t you be cold?”
“I’m more concerned about the lack of footwear.”
“I scrubbed down your boots while you were showering.”
“Oh. Thanks! You think combat boots will…work?”
He shrugs. “There’s extra coats in the closet at the end of the hall.” He motions with his head. “Grab one and meet me in the car.”
He leaves and I double back to the coat closet. But when I swing open the door, I come face to face with a dim bedroom. Golden afternoon light juts through the cracks in the shutters and my heart promptly stops beating. This is a teenager’s room. There’s a signed Buffalo Bills jersey framed on the wall and a twin bed under the window. A desk with calculus textbooks stacked on the corner and a pair of gigantic sneakers lined up underneath the chair.
I blink back the tears that sting my eyes and immediately feel like such a bad friend.
Miles never talks about Anders. His cousin who died in the same crash as his mother. His cousin who lived with them. The cousin whose room Miles has clearly not touched.
I think of his mother as the hole torn in Miles’s heart, but he pats her picture when he walks past and has moved and packed and downsized her things to just a box of dresses that he can tear open and lend out.
I quietly close the bedroom door and go to the opposite wall. It’s the coat closet I was supposed to find. I grope through it and pull out a jacket and go join my friend in thecar.