*
Josh was quiet on the ride to Bay’s home. The inside of his father’s Audi smelled like leather, corn syrup, and a fresh, cologne-y scent she’d first smelled when Josh leaned against her as she’d helped him walk to the student parking lot. It was on her clothes now, that Josh-scent, but it felt stolen, not meant to be there.
Being this close to him, in this confined area, made her chest feel quaky. The intimacy made her giddy, like when you’ve been awake too long or had too much caffeine. She found herself impressed by silly things. He drives so well! Look how easily he steers! He doesn’t even take his eyes off the road as he turns up the heater! It occurred to her then that he’d mistaken her nerves for cold chills.
She focused on his hands on the steering wheel, willing herself to be still. He had nice hands, sun-browned and thick. His forearms were ropey, muscles tight.
Hopkins Dairy was a little out of the way, but every kid in elementary school had gone there on a field trip, so everyone knew where it was. She didn’t have to tell Josh how to get there. The moment before she was about to tell him to turn right or turn left, he was already doing it.
It was over too soon, this bubble ride. As they neared the turn to the dairy, Bay cleared her throat and said, “You can stop at the entrance. I’ll walk down the driveway to the house.”
To which Josh said, taking the turn off the highway, “That’s okay.”
As he drove down the bumpy gravel driveway, Bay felt herself getting more uptight. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen the Hopkins farmhouse before. But it suddenly seemed unbearable to her, with as little as he proved he knew about her, for Josh to see the farmhouse and think it was really where she belonged.
When she and her mother had fled from Bay’s father in Seattle, they had stayed in the Waverley house with Claire, but they’d moved to the farmhouse next to Henry’s dairy when Sydney and Henry married. Bay liked the farmhouse. She knew the first time she saw it that it was where her mother belonged, even though her mother considered herself an urban soul and didn’t care for the quiet. It made her jumpy, like back in Seattle, waiting for someone’s temper to flare and something bad to happen. But Bay didn’t belong there. She belonged at the Waverley house.
She wasn’t embarrassed by the farmhouse. Not exactly. But she’d seen Josh’s house, and she hated that she felt even the slightest need to explain where she lived.
He pulled in front of the small, white, two-story house. The bare-bulb porch light was on. There was also a light on behind the living room curtain.
She didn’t get out immediately. She sat there and waited, thinking he was going to say something. This was what her parents did after going out. They came home, but then stayed in the car—engine off, windows down in the summer; engine on, heater running in the winter—and talked, something about being in a car at night provoking one last conversation, one last kiss, before getting out.
It was a date thing, she realized.
And this wasn’t a date.
Josh stared straight ahead.
Without another word, Bay got out and walked stiffly to the door, telling herself not to look back.
*
“I can’t believe I missed her going to her first dance,” Henry said hours earlier, after Sydney came home from dropping Bay and Phin off at the gymnasium. Sydney had tried to reach him on the phone to tell him, but he’d missed the call.
Sydney had just swept in with a gust of perfumed air, her cheeks alight with happiness at this unusual turn of social events in their daughter’s life. She’d bought Chinese on her way home, and she was now setting the takeout boxes on the kitchen table. Henry stood there, fresh from his shower, and rubbed a pink and white towel over his hair to dry it. Pink and white. Sydney said that she and Bay had slowly but surely girl-ified this place. But he didn’t mind.
A house isn’t a real house without a woman in it, his grandad used to say.
“I’ve been saving up all these things to say to Bay when she started dating,” he said from under the towel. “I even wrote a few down. Seriously, I think I have notes in my office.”
Sydney laughed, as if touched by this knowledge. “How about I send her to you first thing in the morning, and you can lecture her about how terrible boys are and how they only want one thing.”
Henry draped the towel around his neck and sat at the table as Sydney put down plates. She touched his face before she sat across from him.
The first time Henry met Sydney was on the monkey bars at school. Some people come into your life and change it forever. Sydney did that with Henry. He’d loved her from the moment he set eyes on her. He became her best friend in elementary school. But she began to drift away from him as they got older. Hunter John Matteson had fallen in love with her, too, and actually had the balls to tell her. Henry had lost her in increments in high school, then lost her for good when she went away when she was eighteen. He’d never expected to see her again. His grandfather had still been alive then, though the stroke had slowed him down. He’d taken to spending his days trying to fix Henry up, wanting to see him settled and married. But nothing ever took. When Sydney came back, it felt like Henry had been running in circles, setting trees on fire, until there was nothing left but a barren landscape. Then she’d appeared and he finally stopped running in circles and ran to her like she was a cool, soft field.
That’s what it feels like to finally find her, his grandad had said.
Henry didn’t believe his luck at first, when they’d started dating. To this day, he would still find himself stopping in the middle of yet another story about his granddad (he knew he talked too much about him), thinking, How could someone like her find this remotely interesting? He wanted to give her the world. But even that didn’t seem like enough. It paled in comparison to everything she’d given him, this life together, this family, these pink and white towels, this fifteen-year-old daughter who was now going to dances.
“How did this happen?” Henry asked, giving up trying to use chopsticks on his shrimp and snow peas. He picked up a fork. “How did she get to be fifteen? She’ll be leaving us before we know it.”
Sydney suddenly went still. Henry could feel by the change in the air what was about to happen, and he slowly set his fork down and waited for it. He could almost see new red streaks popping out in her hair. This had become a common occurrence lately. It was first frost anxiety. Henry and Tyler had compared notes long ago and realized it happened every year around this time, their wives always doing something crazy. This year, Sydney was all over him. Not that he minded. Anything to help. But he kept worrying over the whys of the thing. What was really going on in that mind of hers?
She dropped her fork and leaned across the table and kissed him.
She pulled him out of his seat, and they were all over each other, shirts off, pants unbuttoned. Then they were on the kitchen floor, where they squeaked against the floorboards and knocked against the cabinets. The world tilted and time flew. Before he knew it they were straightening their clothing and going back to eating, giving each other googly smiles over their Chinese takeout.
The pink and white towel, still damp from his shower, was forgotten on the floor.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Henry wondered if this kept happening because there was something she wanted that he wasn’t giving her, so she was forced now to take it.
He didn’t like the thought. He would give anything to her. Anything he had.
All she had to do was tell him.