Chapter Eleven
Eleven
TOLEDO, OH
The route led us to a sixty-foot bear. And by route, I meant Phoebe.
An unforgiving sun cast the world in the dense heat that made existing outside air-conditioning excruciating, yet the three of us stood in crunchy grass, sticky with sweat, squinting up at a wooden rendering of Yogi Bear.
I wasn’t sure why we were here. Yogi was before Phoebe’s time, and she’d never been one for cartoons.
Then again, it seemed like the kind of thing our dad would get a kick out of. Maybe that was reason enough.
“So,” I said. Phoebe’s expression was frozen somewhere between disappointment and irritation. “Is it everything you hoped it would be?”
“I don’t know what I was hoping for,” she replied. “But nope.”
“He’s pretty big,” I offered.
She made a face. “I mean. Sure.”
“He’s a world record holder. That’s cool.”
“I’m underwhelmed.”
Dex said, “It looks like he’s doing a Nazi salute.”
Phoebe laughed. I wheeled around, fixing him with a look. “He’s waving,” I said. He shrugged blithely, a bead of sweat working its way from his temple, arcing down his jawline.
“Right.” His dark eyes pierced me in place before shifting to my sister and quickly back again. I blinked away as he asked, “We done?”
Phoebe looked at Dex, her eyes going soft, lip beginning to jut. His expression remained impressively neutral.
“No,” he said.
“But this sucked!” she cried.
“You picked it.”
“I want to trade it in for something else.”
“We’re already here. You can’t trade it in.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“I won’t make you listen to any more of my playlists.” Phoebe threw on a dazzling smile, sweetening the deal. “We can ride the rest of the way in silence. Or you can listen to boring podcasts, if that’s what you’re into.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, anticipating the wrinkle in his brow. “I don’t listen to podcasts,” he said stiffly.
Phoebe brushed a sweaty piece of hair out of her face. “Audiobooks, then.”
He walked away. Phoebe deflated, eyes dimming, looking more like the kid I’d take out for ice cream after she scraped her knee than the surly teen who rolled her eyes when I said good morning. My palms itched with that familiar Phoebe-pleaser habit.
“Hey, go stand next to Yogi so I can take a picture.”
She sneered. “Why?”
“Because it’s fun.” She rolled her eyes. “And Dad would think it’s hilarious.”
“Dad thought Two and a Half Men was hilarious,” she muttered.
I waved this off. “Yeah, he had a terrible sense of humor. Just go. I’ll grab the camera.”
She let out a dramatic groan and stomped toward Yogi, grass audibly crunching. I smiled, despite the sweat dripping down my butt crack. Dex stood by the car tapping away on his phone with a grim expression behind his Ray-Bans, the back of his button-up soaked through.
“Ready?” he asked as I approached. I leaned a shoulder against the metal and nearly cried out; I peeled myself off, rubbing at the burn.
Dex’s attention remained on his phone.
“Hey,” I said. My reflection blinked back at me in his sunglasses; it looked like I’d just finished running a marathon. “Don’t you think—”
“No.”
“Come on, man, you know Yogi sucks.”
“I could’ve told you that an hour ago,” he said flatly. “Oh, wait. I did.”
This might’ve been true, but I had no recollection of it.
I’d spent a lot of time tuning him out considering he spoke exclusively in grunts and complaints.
And then he proved that to be patently untrue, and the tuning out turned into something more like oblivion, where rather than listening to a single word out of his mouth, I stared at the faint lines by his eyes, remembering what it was like to watch him earn them.
Something had shifted in that elevator. We’d laughed until we cried, missing our floor twice before finally stumbling to our room.
Dex’s face seemed frozen in that smile and I’d stared, drinking it in.
In the morning, I’d wondered if it was a dream, but as we checked out, Dex leaned against the pink desk and smiled right at me.
“That felt so fucking good,” he’d said softly, like a secret. It set my every vein aflame. And we got back on the road without a mention of the hesitation he broached last night.
So we were friends. Ish. In the friends realm, or somewhere in that vicinity.
Dex glanced down the road, the tendons in his neck pulling taut, shiny with sweat. I averted my gaze, focusing on Phoebe as she squatted down to inspect something in the grass.
I withdrew my phone from my shorts, his words lighting a fire in my gut. I squinted at the dark screen, attempting to tap it awake, but the glare from the sun made it impossible. “Come here,” I said, beckoning Dex. He looked at me, expression stony. “I need you. Your size, I mean. Height.”
Heat ripped up my neck, sizzling my cheeks.
The sun had gotten to me. Ignoring the embarrassing drivel, Dex stepped forward—he smelled fresh, as if damp from a shower instead of sweat.
His form blocked most of the gleam so I could at least punch in my code.
Still, I had to lean in close to make out anything clearly.
In the middle of mistyping “cool things near me” in the search box, Dex’s hand curled over the top of my phone to shield it further, his veins spiking like the inner workings of an umbrella.
I had to reread the typo-ridden search to remind myself what the hell I was doing.
I’d always been a sucker for hands.
“Hey!” Phoebe’s voice cut through the rustling leaves and chirping insects. Dex and I swiveled to find her standing near Yogi, hands up in a what-the-hell gesture. “Are you taking a picture or not?”
I reached through the open window to grab Dad’s camera from the back seat. “Compromise,” I said again, glancing at Dex. “Maybe nothing’s around here, but there must be something along the route. Take a wrong turn by the world’s largest spool of thread.”
“She’s not interested in Yogi but sure, a spool of thread.”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. I took it as a win.
The moment Dad’s camera spat out the Polaroid, Phoebe darted over, huffing and red-faced.
“Air-conditioning,” she gasped.
“What she said,” Dex agreed.
A few hours and a looped playlist later, we made it to the hotel in Toledo. Not a smidge of pink to be found.
Phoebe and I shared a suite with two queen beds and a view of the parking lot, while Dex had a room to himself on an entirely different floor, apparently having anticipated needing space when he made the reservation.
With glorious air-conditioning and a bed fluffy enough to keep memories of the floor at bay, I couldn’t complain. But Phoebe could.
“This is so boring,” she moaned. Her hair was damp from a dip in the pool downstairs; I’d let her go while I showered, suppressing a panic attack as I imagined her getting kidnapped at a Hilton. (Arden talked me down until Phoebe returned forty minutes later.)
“Watch TV,” I said from under the covers, fully tucked in at 8 P.M.
“There’s nothing to watch.”
“Order a movie.”
“They’ll charge Dex.”
“So?”
“There aren’t any movies I want to watch, anyway,” she mumbled.
I snuggled farther into the stiff pillow, inhaling the generic detergent; it wasn’t a thousand fluffy Sherpa blankets laid out by a moody companion, but it would suffice.
“Ugh. I should’ve stayed at the pool longer, but Dex said I shouldn’t leave you alone for that long. ”
My eyes snapped open. “Dex was at the pool?”
“Yeah.” She was lying in bed, legs crossed, inspecting her chipped nail polish. “I thought maybe he’d be up for a swim. He was.”
I sat up, blinking. “You invited him? And he went?”
She shot me an annoyed look. “Yeah? We’re friends.”
I tried to imagine my dad’s face if he knew Phoebe’s only friend was a thirty-one-year-old man we met through mail fraud. Something told me he wouldn’t find it as funny as everything else.
“I can’t imagine Dex swimming,” I said. Then another wave of shirtless Dex fantasies thundered through my brain—the lean muscles in his back, his olive skin, that little bit of hair I glimpsed when he unbuttoned his collar.
Cheeks warm, I mentally slapped myself for the bad thoughts in general, but especially with Phoebe ten feet away.
“Did he wear one of those nineteen-fifties bathing suits?”
“He told me he almost drowned in a pool when he was a kid. His brother saved his life.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes.” She shot me another look. “We’re friends.”
“Does Dex know you’re friends?” I asked, and she cracked a smile.
“He has a soft spot for me,” she said, stretching her legs to cross them at her ankles. “Just kids in general, probably. I mean, he works with kids for a living. Supposedly.”
I smiled. “Supposedly.”
“The more I get to know him, the easier it is to see.” Her voice grew a bit softer and her index finger dug at the nail polish of her thumbnail. “The guy who wrote the letter and broke so bad that he just, like, reprogrammed his entire world.”
Something in my chest twisted. “Yeah.”
“Do you think he still loves her? Catalina?”
Whatever twisted in my chest pulled taut. I rubbed at my solar plexus, blinking furiously. “Oh. Uh, I don’t know.”
“I mean, would he go through all this if he didn’t?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I wonder if she’s single. I wonder if she was as broken as he was.”
“It seemed like a pretty intense breakup, so,” I muttered. I felt her look over, but I rolled onto my back and stared hard at the ceiling.
“Have you thought about dating again?” she asked, startling a laugh out of me.
“What? No.” I twisted around, taking in the innocent curiosity in her expression. I didn’t trust it. “Why would you ask me that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been a while, is all.”
“You don’t know that. Arden tries to set me up all the time.”
“Tries.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, lying back and folding my arms over my chest. “I have other things to worry about. Dating isn’t a priority.”
“Right.” Bitterness dug into Phoebe’s tone. “Whatever.”
She grabbed the remote off the nightstand between our beds and turned on the TV, filling the room with the laughter of a studio audience.
I listened to her flip through the channels, biting back a complaint because that’s what she wanted.
I’d annoyed her. I didn’t even know how.
She opened up a crack and I said the wrong thing; it was so exhausting, the consistent failure.
I was almost tempted to try out Dex’s apathy since that seemed to work wonders on her.
Three things: A bed to sleep in, shirtless Dex fantasies.
The fantasies counted as two things because they were so fucking good.
Phoebe paused the channel surfing on Bill Murray’s voice. I recognized the movie in less than a heartbeat. I snapped upright, eyes filling.
“Caddyshack,” she murmured, lowering the remote to her lap. I swallowed hard, blinking to clear my blurry vision.
“God. He watched this, what? Twice a year?” I said.
“At least.”
“He wanted to name you Spackler.”
“I’ve never known a more annoying man.”
I laughed and swiped at my eyes quickly, hoping she wouldn’t notice. In my periphery, I noticed her do the same, and my heart squeezed tight. I asked, “Remember when he lost a bet and almost got Bill Murray’s face tattooed on his ass?”
“Yes.” She glanced at me, her smile lighting up the room. “I don’t think there was a bet. I think he just wanted that tattoo.”
“You might be onto something.”
Her smile faded and she turned her attention to the screen, teeth digging into her bottom lip. “Do you think…” She paused, curling her hands into tight fists. “Do you think he’d be mad at me?”
“What?” My ears buzzed, almost like she’d shouted the words through a megaphone. “Why would he be mad?”
“For everything I did,” she said softly. “Since he died.”
“No,” I said and got to my feet. “Out of everyone in the world, he would get it. He gets it. Phoebe, there’s nothing either of us could do that would change how he felt about us.
” I approached her bedside and brushed a piece of hair behind her ear.
My blood seemed to warm when she didn’t flinch away.
“And that goes for me, too. Hate to break it to you, but there’s nothing you can do that will make me love you less.
You break an asshole’s nose and I love you even harder. ”
She sniffled, keeping her eyes on the movie. “Whatever.”
To lighten the load, I pinched her cheek. “My Bumble Bee.”
“Stop.” She jerked away, a small smile piercing through the darkness. “You’re so annoying.”
“I am my father’s daughter.”
She shifted, drawing her legs underneath her. “He wouldn’t have let us do this, though,” she said. “This trip.”
“He would’ve realized the letter wasn’t for us and moved on with his day,” I replied. She nodded, accepting this, and then perked up as the scene on-screen changed.
“Oh, wait. This is the best part.”
She scooched over, silently inviting me to sit beside her. Maybe it was another step forward preceding a dozen steps back, or maybe it was simply my sister reaching out. Either way, I sat.