“I’m sor—”
“Theo knows not to expect you tomorrow. We’ll talk then.” He cuts me off and lets me go at the same time, and I kind of wish he hadn’t. “Right now I think you should go to your room and stay there.”
Disappointment shimmers off him like a hot road on a summer day and I feel like picking a fight with him so he’ll be angry instead of disappointed in me.
“It’s not a room,” I retort. “It’s a trailer in your backyard.”
But as I circle around the side of the house to the Airstream—that I really love, regardless of what I say—I don’t feel any better for having said it.
Chapter 13
My cell phone vibrates me awake five hours later, and I have to dig through the blankets to find it. The little screen says it’s Kat calling, and I don’t want to answer. I’d rather turtle my head under the covers and hide from reality a bit longer, but she will be relentless. “Hello?”
“Oh my God, Callie.” Her voice blasts through the receiver. “I have been going out of my mind. Where were you?”
I scrub the heel of my hand against my eye, dislodging the crust, as I think about what I’m going to say. I can’t tell her about Alex. Not only because I’m afraid of her reaction, but because we reached a different place last night. It’s new and it’s mine, and I’m not ready to share it with anyone. “I just wandered.”
“For that long?”
“I’ve been homeless almost my whole life, Kat. A few hours is not a long time.”
The line is quiet as she considers the reality of my past, and in the background I can hear her mom telling her she needs to get moving.
“You could have told me about Connor,” she says.
“I wanted to, but you were so excited about it,” I say. “And he’s nice, so I really wanted to like him, but I don’t. At least not in a way that counts.”
“Callie.” She sighs and I feel as if I’ve let her down in the same way I let Connor down. “You don’t have to date someone because I say so. You can tell me the truth, you know. That’s what friends do.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Listen,” she says. “My mom is nagging me to get in the shower, so we’ll talk more at work. Want me to pick you up?”
“I’m not going to the shop today.” Something crackles at my toes. I reach down and find the fortune cookie, shattered within the plastic. “Greg hasn’t yelled at me yet.”
Kat winces. “That could get ugly. He was crazy worried last night.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me know how it goes,” she says. “Love you.”
She disconnects before I can say good-bye. I tear open the cookie wrapper, fishing out the fortune. My lucky numbers are 6-13-25-32-48, and printed on the front it says: You have the power to write your own fortune.
Thanks for nothing, fortune cookie.
I fall backward on my bed, but I’m only there a couple of minutes before I hear Greg calling me through the screen and knocking on the door. “Good morning, Callie.” He doesn’t sound angry, and it’s disconcerting. “Time for breakfast.”
I grab a pair of shorts and my old Girl Scouts T-shirt and duck into the bathroom, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. When I come out, Greg is holding the candle with Mom’s cigarette butt. Shit. I forgot to throw it away.
“You smoke?” he asks.
“Um—no,” I stammer. “I mean, once in a great while when I’m stressed. Hardly ever. Almost never, really.”
“I don’t know if you’re telling me the truth or not,” he says, as I follow him out of the trailer and across the lawn. “But if you’re smoking, you need to stop. Not only because I don’t want it around the boys, but because it’s so bad for you.”
“Okay. I mean, I’m sorry.”
“So this is how our day is going to go,” he says. “First, breakfast with Phoebe and the boys, then you and I are going to run an errand, and after that, you’ll be doing some yard work for your grandma. Weeding, mulching, mowing—”
“Is slave labor part of my punishment?”
He laughs. “Slave labor is part of belonging to a family.”
Which leaves me wondering what, exactly, my punishment will be.
Phoebe is scrambling eggs as we come into the kitchen. Tucker and Joe are sitting on the floor, playing with a little farm set of wooden animals. When he sees me, Joe extends a sheep toward me. “Play, Peach.”
“There’s time,” Greg says, going to help Phoebe with breakfast.
I sit cross-legged on the floor, and Joe wriggles his way into my lap and tilts his head so he’s looking at me upside down. He smells like baby shampoo, and I get the urge to bury my nose in his hair and just inhale that innocence. “Sheep.”
“Baa,” I say.
He laughs, grabs a cow from the set, and resumes the upside-down position. “Cow,” he says, and I know what’s expected of me.
“Moo.”
We do this with each animal—duck, horse, pig, goat, chicken—until I have a lap filled with wooden livestock and Tucker whines that we’re not sharing. Joe gives me a sly smile, as if this was his plan all along, and I give him a secret squeeze of solidarity. Except when I look up, Greg is watching and smiling, so I guess it wasn’t so secret.
“You can play more after we eat,” Phoebe tells Tucker. “Breakfast is ready.”
Tucker scrambles to his feet and I slide Joe from my lap to stand. He raises his arms, his little fingers making grab hands at me. “Up.”
I deposit Joe in his high chair and sit beside him as Phoebe and Greg bring breakfast to the table. Breakfast is pleasant, but I’m on edge. The specter of last night hovers and my stomach twists itself into a knot that makes eating homemade scrambled eggs and bacon not nearly as satisfying as it should be, and I wonder if this isn’t punishment in itself.
After breakfast, Greg and I ride our bikes across Tarpon Bayou to a waterfront construction site on Chesapeake Drive. Sitting on the lot is a faded blue house on stilts with a set of wooden stairs leading up to the front porch. The windows and doors are missing and there is new plywood jutting out from open spaces in the roof where dormers used to be.
“What is this place?” I ask as I follow him up the stairs.
“This is one of my projects.” We walk through the space where the front door should be, into a scaffolding of studs and half-hung walls. “The outside has those great old Florida beach-house bones, but the inside was really cut up and impractical. It’s kind of hard to picture right now, but there will be two bedrooms right up here in front, and back there”—he points to a big space with huge window openings overlooking the bayou—“will be a combined living room, dining room, and kitchen. And beyond that, another porch.”
I don’t know anything about architecture, but the preexisting house is pretty big. Not mansion-size the way they are out at Pointe Alexis, but a lot bigger than Greg’s cramped cottage.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he says.
The stairs are built of plywood and there is no handrail yet. Our footsteps echo as we climb to the second floor.
“This is my favorite part because I love the original wood and the slanted ceiling,” Greg says. “We’re blowing out the front dormer window to create an office space, but this—” He leads me through the two-by-four framework of a new wall. “This will be your room.”
His words stop me in my tracks. “My room?”
He pulls a folded set of blueprints from his bag. “Phoebe and I bought this house two years ago, at the same time we bought the cottage, and I’ve spent the better part of last year altering the existing design to something a little more updated.”
I kneel down and unfold the drawing. Greg squats beside me.