Chapter 8
My sister rolled her eyes and I wanted to shake her, because now I totally understood the reactions I’d received when I had done that same thing as a thirteen-year-old.
Back then, I had also worn T-shirts with the logos of various bands whose music I had never listened to.
I had thought they made me look provocative and interesting, but I’d had to mumble “I don’t know” when people had asked me which was my favorite song or album.
“You’re not answering my question,” Morgan told me. “Why are you always at Shane’s house?”
“I’m not.” I had visited him when he wasn’t traveling, but it wasn’t like I was shirking my other responsibilities—and I suddenly got furious when I realized that she was accusing me of not doing my part. “How dare you!”
“How dare I?” she echoed. “Are you going to slap me with a glove or something?” She actually rolled her eyes again! “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t need me around. Everything is fine at Walter’s,” I informed her.
It was as fine as a place running on a shoestring, in need of repairs, and with hardly any customers could be.
The Junior Woodsmen season had ended because spring was here, and now we had to face a few months of empty tables before the real Woodsmen summer practices would begin in the nearby facility.
The lack of diners was obviously bad for the bottom line, but it also meant that fewer people needed to be on-site and working.
Because of that, I had been spending my time at other places.
Admittedly, I hadn’t looked for another job or prepared for my exams as much as I should have.
I wasn’t doing the things that I knew I should have focused on…
Instead, I had been hanging out with Shane.
He had gotten some more furniture for his house and it was a very nice spot for me because I liked the company so much.
We cooked, watched movies, binged on shows, read, and talked.
I enjoyed all of it and my sister’s opinion meant literally nothing.
After all, one of us, only one, had clean sheets (that was me because I was being more careful about it).
The other one of us probably had dirty sheets and was also pretending to have a glamorous European boyfriend—maybe not “glamorous” because she reported that he spent most of his day just as she did, closed up in a room to play games.
At least she was still helping at the restaurant. At this point, in fact, she was there even more than I was. My exams were close upon me and then I’d graduate. Finally! Then the future loomed, uncertain and terrifying…
Anyway, I was going to graduate and I was busy, and that was why she had knocked on my door right now, in order to berate me about spending so much time at Shane’s house.
He was in…I checked. He was in Illinois again, south of Chicago in the middle part of the state, so I hadn’t headed over to visit him today.
Maybe it was strange, but it made me less anxious when I was there.
Ever since he had told me about losing his vision, I had been worried about him being by himself.
I was also worried about him traveling alone but I didn’t say any of that to him.
My whereabouts were none of Morgan’s—wait a minute! “How do you know that I’ve been at his house?” I demanded. “I don’t report on my movements to you. I could be anywhere.”
“No, because you only know one other person. None of us have any friends because we’re such sad outcasts,” she answered. “Also, I can see your location on my phone.”
I grabbed mine out of my pocket to turn off anything to do with my geographic position and then I put it in my desk drawer and locked that, so she wouldn’t be able to get at it for a while.
“I am not an outcast,” I told her, emphasizing the “I” so she knew that I was excluding myself from that group but that others (her) were firmly in it.
“And why do you care about my location?”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
Most definitely not. We were friends, only friends, which was perfectly clear in the way we treated each other. There was no touching of body parts, none at all. Once, he had mistakenly brushed my hand while we were cleaning up the dishes after dinner and he had immediately apologized.
I didn’t think he needed to. I was ok with that, and I would have been ok with more as well. Like, if he had wanted to hold hands? Fine by me. Rest his arm around my shoulders, lie with his head in my lap? I would have been ok with those things, too. But Shane clearly wasn’t, so I didn’t push.
I was consciously not-pushing. I was also consciously not asking questions about his vision, because he didn’t want to talk about that.
I had a lot more that I wanted to know, even after doing all the research that I could, but I also didn’t want to pester him and make him think about it.
But wasn’t he thinking about it all the time?
Every time he opened his eyes, he was reminded and it must have been scary.
If I was worried about the future, how must he have felt about it? He might have wanted to discuss that.
It wasn’t my role, though. We weren’t having late-night texting sessions to share secrets, like good friends, and we weren’t making out like we were dating. We had fun being together and that was it.
Morgan was still going on about relationships. “You don’t want to neglect other things because you’re so focused on Shane,” she informed me.
“I’m not going to discuss the restaurant with you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t mean Walter’s. I remember how you used to act about Max.”
“Our brother? What are you talking about?”
“You worshiped him and you stuck yourself to his side. Like a zebra mussel,” she stated.
“How dare you compare me to an invasive species?” I asked angrily. “You were always jealous because we got along so well.”
“Quatsch. You were annoying and clingy and he hated you,” she snapped right back. “You neglected everything else, like making friends, so you could follow him around and be his best little helper. Don’t do that again!”
The conversation ended because I escorted her into the hallway. Working out was something else that Shane and I did together, so I was strong enough to remove her as I explained (fairly calmly and nicely) that she and I were done talking.
That was why it was extremely annoying when, not too much later, she was in the hallway calling my name and pounding on my door.
“What now?” I demanded when I opened it.
“Do you ever look at your phone?”
No, because I had put it in my desk drawer. “Why?”
Our mom had been calling and texting both of us, repeatedly. I saw that when I retrieved my device and I also saw messages from Max asking what the hell was going on. I wasn’t totally sure, except my mom had made one thing clear in her messages.
“Dad’s gone?” I asked. “Where is he?”
The problem was that Morgan didn’t know and neither did I.
No one in our family knew. Had he had disappeared on purpose?
Had something terrible had happened, or was it something innocuous, like an appointment to get his teeth cleaned that he had forgotten to mention?
But the last idea was highly unlikely, first because he never went to the dentist, but more importantly because he was chained to the restaurant just like the rest of us.
He never did anything else and his days were always the same. We never got away.
Except for me, because I hadn’t been quite as chained lately.
I pushed aside the guilt that accompanied that thought.
“Let’s try to think of where he might have gone,” I told my sister.
“We’ll make a list and you can start calling people.
I’ll drive to the restaurant in case something happened along the way. ”
There weren’t many people that he might have contacted, but she started on that job and I got in the car to retrace his possible route.
It didn’t take much time because we lived so close to Walter’s, and I didn’t see him or any indication that something bad had happened, like an accident or a collision with an animal.
I was in touch with my siblings and my mom the whole way but our group chat filled up with more questions instead of answers.
Have you talked to this person? What about this other person?
The tires on his car are old, did they finally give up the ghost?
When was the last time he got the oil changed?
Is his wallet at the door? Privately, I texted Morgan to ask if she was secretly tracking him, too, but she wasn’t.
The thing was, we depended on him. He was the cook, and how were you going to have a restaurant without one of those?
We had all done parts of his job but none of us had done all of it, not all at once.
He hadn’t wanted us in his space, annoying him, and honestly, we hadn’t wanted to be around him for long stretches, either.
There were no answers and there was no Dad. For the first time that anyone could remember, my mom taped a note on the front door of Walter’s Café: CLOSED FOR LUNCH TODAY. SORRY.
“I’m thinking about the dinner service,” I told my sister when I got home and she looked equally worried.
We should have been. He didn’t show up for the rest of the day and by that point, my mom called the police.
The restaurant was also CLOSED FOR DINNER TODAY.
SORRY. But the authorities didn’t seem all too concerned, especially when my mom blabbed to them about how much debt we were in, including the fact that she didn’t think she could pay for the next food delivery, and that the restaurant’s roof had started to sag and she was also afraid of an inspection because we might get shut down.
The question on the minds of the officers was probably, “Why would this guy have stuck around?” There wasn’t a good answer, especially since he didn’t like any of us.