19. Beau #3
“Roommates,” she says. “I didn’t come home. They noticed.” A small dry twist. “I’m a grown woman who got a flurry of welfare checks for sleeping somewhere. It’s very dignified.”
“They care about you.”
“They do.” She says it like it’s complicated. Like being cared about is a thing she has to brace for, the way she braced for the thank-you at the party. I don’t push, because the not-pushing is the thing I’m good at, the thing that keeps the door open.
Theo’s already rinsing his plate. Cash is hunting for his other shoe. Practice in forty minutes and the morning’s tipping from soft into logistics the way mornings do.
“I’ll drive you home,” I tell her. “Before practice. It’s on the way, sort of, and you’re not walking across campus in my hoodie and last night’s boots in the cold.”
“I can walk.”
“I know you can. I’m offering anyway.” I hold her eyes. “Let me do the easy thing, Sloane. It’s just a ride.”
She looks at me a second — that calculation again, the one that runs every time someone offers her something with no invoice attached — and then she nods. “Okay. A ride.”
“A ride.”
“Don’t read into the ride.”
“I would never read into a ride.”
“You read into everything. You’ve been reading into a hoodie for ten minutes.”
“That’s different. The hoodie’s special.”
“HA,” Cash shouts, from somewhere near the door, with his shoe.
We leave him to it. I grab my keys off the hook and my bag from the bottom of the stairs and hold the front door for her, and the cold comes in hard off the porch, the real first-week-of-the-season cold, and she pulls the hoodie sleeves down over her hands and steps out into it in her bare legs and last night's boots like she's daring it to say something.
The truck's parked crooked in the drive where I left it last night, frost gone white across the windshield.
I get the doors unlocked and the engine turned over and the heat going before I let her in, because she's not sitting in a cold truck on my watch, and then I come around and she's already there, one hand on the door, looking up at the height of the step the way short people do at my truck.
“It's a climb,” I say.
“I'm aware it's a climb. I have eyes.”
“You want a—”
“If you offer me a boost I'm walking to campus.” But she takes the hand I hold out anyway, and uses it, and hauls herself up into the cab with her boots in her lap, and I shut the door on her and the cold both and jog around to my side.
I drive her home in the cold morning with the heat blasting and her in my hoodie with her boots in her lap, and it's quiet in the truck, but it's a good quiet, mostly — her watching the town go by, me watching the road and stealing looks at her watching the town go by.
Haven's grey and waking up, the maples bare now, frost on the windshields of the parked cars, the diner lights on and steam coming off something on the corner.
“Thanks,” she says, at a red light. “For the ride. And the hoodie. And—” she stops, and I let her not finish it, the way she lets me. “For not making it weird this morning.”
“It wasn’t weird.”
“It could have been. The guys could have made it weird.”
“The guys made it extremely weird. Cash cried about a hoodie.”
“You cried about the hoodie. I have it on good authority.” And there it is, the corner of her mouth, the real one, and for a second the quiet thing she’s been carrying all morning lifts and she’s just Sloane in my truck in my sweatshirt being funny, and I think, we’re okay, whatever I thought I saw upstairs, we’re okay.
I’m wrong. I find that out in about ninety seconds. But for now, at the red light, I believe it, and I reach over and take her hand and she lets me, and we drive the last few blocks toward Sailmaker Lane like two people who’ve got all the time in the world.
We turn onto her street.
And the first thing I see is the smoke.
It’s coming from the side of the Sailmaker — the kitchen end, grey and wrong against the morning, thick — and there are people on the lawn, and as I get closer I see it’s Margo and June, out front in pajamas and coats thrown over, Margo with her phone to her ear and her free hand in her hair, June barefoot on the frozen grass with her arms wrapped around herself, both of them staring at the house, and the sound that’s been building under the morning finally resolves into what it is, which is sirens, not here yet but coming, close.
Beside me Sloane goes rigid. The boots slide off her lap to the floor of the truck.
“That’s my house,” she says, and her voice has gone flat and precise and terrible, the voice I’ve never heard from her, the one all the way at the bottom. “Beau. That’s my house.”
I’m already pulling over. Already throwing it in park.
She’s got the door open before we’ve fully stopped, out into the cold in my hoodie and bare feet, and Margo turns and sees her and her face breaks, and June’s already running, and I sit frozen for one half-second in the driver’s seat of my truck watching the best morning of my life walk straight into the smoke—and then I’m out of the truck too, and running.