25. Anthony
twenty-five
anthony
Leave it to Mother Nature to homebound the two people who just can’t seem to get out of each other’s way.
A nasty thunderstorm rolled in this fine Saturday morning and hasn’t let up since. It’s only supposed to get worse as the day wears on, so I’m glad I got to the gym early. There will be no working on the house, no letting out the bees through manual labor, and no escaping Penelope’s presence today.
She hasn’t left the house either.
For the most part, she has been holed up in her writing cave, and I’ve been pacing the place trying to decide what I can do with my hands, since they can’t seem to do anything but damage between the two of us. We’ve been taking one step forward and ten steps back. At this rate, we’ll never be on the same page. Hell, we might not make it to the same chapter until we’re ninety.
I’ve already deep cleaned everything I can think of, but in my hyper-fixated state, that means the entire house was cleaned damn near spotless in about an hour and a half. Since I woke up at dawn due to the rain pounding on my windows, it’s still before lunch. As I’m scrolling my phone—standing up in the middle of the kitchen instead of sitting on the couch so that I don’t fall into a YouTube doom-scroll—an email from Nate catches my eye. He sent out a staff-wide email, surveying interest for the new behavior committee. All of a sudden, my day has purpose.
I set up camp at the kitchen table with my laptop, tablet, and Apple Pen, and get to work fortifying the behavior plan I made during my Master’s program. Fitting it to River Valley/Meadow Ridge’s specifications is one of those tedious jobs that won’t take much brain power, but will take a lot of time. It’s exactly what I need to get my mind off of Penelope.
I must be so in the zone that only a power outage can snap me from my project hole, because that’s exactly what has me finally lifting my stiff neck from my hunch over the table hours later.
“Pen?” I yell out, my head snapping up when the world around me seems to shut off. In the glow of my computer light, I spot her over the half-wall between the dining area and the kitchen. Her eyes are wide, but she blinks in her surroundings a few times and nods.
“I’m good,” she says softly, raising her hand in a wave. “Do you know if this place has a generator?”
“I still have cell service. I’ll give Mom a call real quick.”
As I dial up my mom on the other side of town, I register all I hadn’t while finalizing my project. Rain is coming down in sheets. Hail the size of golf balls pummels against the windows. I guess we really were in for one hell of a storm.
Hanging up with my mom, I flip on my phone’s flashlight and find Penelope has moved to the living room and is popping large square batteries into giant flashlights, illuminating the place like spotlights on a stage.
“Mom said there isn’t a generator, but—damn, boss, are you prepared for zombies or something?”
“Or something,” she says, looking satisfied with her spread, which includes four industrial-sized flashlights, four emergency candles with a hundred hours of power each, bottles of water, and a portable charging station. “Where do you want to set up camp?”
We hunker down in the living room, each bringing the comforters from our beds. Thankfully, we have a gas fireplace. I tend to it, and once the blaze brings warmth into the room, Penelope returns with two dinner plates.
“How’d you manage dino nuggets in the middle of this?” I chuckle.
“I was actually plating dinner when the power went out. No ketchup for your T-rexes tonight, though. I don’t want to chance opening the fridge if it’s going to be awhile.”
I marvel at what she has on the coffee table. In my project stupor—in the way that we’ve been needling at each other this week—she still thought to make me dinner. I swallow that down like a bowling ball.
“If it’s going to be awhile, we aren’t staying here. My parents have power. Sounds like it’s just this side of town, and Dad said they’re already working on it. If it isn’t up within the hour, we’ll head over there. My truck should be able to handle the roads.”
Though it isn’t the dead of winter by any means, it’ll still get pretty cold in here overnight, and I don’t like the idea of sleeping with the fireplace on. She nods, then bites the head off of a T-rex.
“Why do you have all of this stuff?” I ask, popping the silence.
“I think the better question is, why don’t you?” she chuckles, lifting a brow.
“I’m sure I have a flashlight somewhere.”
I watch as she stares at the flicker of the fireplace, following the shadows dancing across the walls as she contemplates her words.
“Mom was late on a lot of bills. When we were little, she got away with calling them ‘candle parties.’ I think I was in fifth grade when I finally realized what a load of shit it was. I guess, if I look on the bright side, I know how to prepare for a disaster.”
She turns on a flashlight, perching it on the coffee table we’re currently using for dinner, and turns her hands into a complicated shape to make a shadow dinosaur on the wall.
“Damn,” I whisper. It takes the place of the bowling ball that just returned to my throat. I’m not sure what to say. My mom never told me her childhood best friend was that downtrodden. Then again, it was never my place to know. Still, to see how resilient Penelope has become in spite of what she went through makes my chest ache with pride. Instead of unloading all of the questions I want to ask, I settle on, “How’d you do that?”
She grins, then reaches for my hands, guiding them into the right position until there are two T-rexes dancing in the firelight on our living room wall. I won’t admit that the second she touched me, even through the brace on her left wrist, my skin ignited. The last time I had my hands on her, she’d been letting my name echo off the shower walls. She must feel the way my skin heats beneath her touch, because she pulls back sharply. I watch as her own shadow-dinosaur transforms into a bunny, then a bird, then a dog.
In the flicker of the fireplace and the glow of the flashlights, I can see the faint purple beneath her eyes. Bags she’s trying to hide. Weakness she’s trying to keep from everybody else.
I stand, and rifle through one of my doom-boxes in the hall closet, coming up with exactly what I was looking for.
“Wanna play?”
“Uno?” she guffaws, taking the box from me. “Doesn’t this game end marriages? Haven’t we done enough fighting?”
“We have,” I say with utter seriousness. I sit cross-legged on one side of the coffee table and deal us both in.
The game is convoluted from the beginning, with only two of us playing, an endless cycle of pick-fours and reverse-skipping each other. But somehow, with this silent, seemingly endless game between us, we find the space to talk.
“I need to be better,” I say softly.
“You just triple-stacked the Draw 4. Maybe start there?” she laughs, lifting a brow at me.
“I’m being serious. I feel like we keep getting closer to maybe almost fixing things, and then they come crashing down again.”
I shake my head, giving her what’s on my heart while I pick up cards until I have a blue that I can toss on top of the pile.
“You aren’t the only one that needs to be better.”
Flicking my eyes across the table, I see the candor in hers, ringed with a little remorse.
“I’ve been short with you. Snippy. You’re trying to be better, and then I put up the roadblocks. I’m sorry I’ve been that way, Ant.”
I swallow a block of cement, still not quite understanding what it means to me that she’s asking for forgiveness.
“I’m sorry too.”
We lay down cards in silence for a few turns when she swallows audibly, her cheeks pinking as she speaks again.
“And then, in the middle of it all, I had to go and confuse us even more when I asked you to… When we?—”
“I’m not sorry about that.”
Her eyes widen as she blinks up through my bluntness. It’s my turn to swallow.
“It’s going to be hard as hell to keep my hands off you from now on, P, but I’m not sorry about what happened last week, and I’m sure as hell not sorry about what happened on that beach.”
She nods slowly. I reflect on how the lift of her head with the firelight in the background makes her look like a phoenix rising from the ashes. She gets a saucy little glint in her eye and smirks. I know exactly what’s coming.
“You’re not sorry enough to show mercy though?” I tsk , shaking my head as she slaps down a Draw 4.
“Never in Uno, Anthony.”
Her smile lights up the room, and I wonder if we’ll be okay without electricity after all.