‘I wasn’t a kid,’ I told him. ‘I was sixteen.’
‘You’re always a kid around your parents,’ he replied. ‘Unless they’re acting like children. Then you don’t get the chance. You know what I’m saying?’
I realized, suddenly, that I did. Just about the same time that it hit me why my brother had stayed gone for so long, careful to keep an ocean and a telephone line between us and him. It was the reverse of most families: to be a kid, you had to leave home. It was returning that made you grow up, once and for all.
Just as I thought this, Adam and Wallace whizzed by on a pair of bikes, zigzagging through the pedestrians. Hollis said, ‘Speaking of which, it’s not too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘To learn to ride a bike.’ He nodded back at the shop. ‘I bet your friends could teach you.’
‘I can ride a bike,’ I said.
‘Yeah? When did you learn?’
I just looked at him. ‘When I was six,’ I said. ‘In the driveway.’
He thought for a moment. ‘You sure about that?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Because all I remember,’ he said, ‘is you getting a bike, falling off it right away, and then it sitting in the garage and slowly rusting until Dad gave it away.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is not what happened. I rode all over the driveway.’
‘Did you?’ He squinted, thinking hard. ‘Well, you’re probably right. God knows I’ve killed a few brain cells in the last few years.’
This was the truth: between the two of us, there was no question whose memory was more reliable. And wouldn’t I know my own history better than anyone else? Still, even as we ordered, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said. He was going on about Laura, and Europe, but I was only half listening as I thought back, back, to that day in the driveway. It was all so clear: climbing on, pushing down on the pedals, rolling forward, it had to be true. Didn’t it?
Chapter
TWELVE
‘So the word on the street,’ my mother said in her formal, cool way, ‘is that you’ve changed.’
I took my toothbrush out of my mouth, already wary. ‘Changed?’
These days, she always called around five, when I was waking up and she was ending her workday. I wanted to believe it was because she missed me, or had realized how important our connection really was to her. But I knew that really, she just needed someone to vent to about Hollis, who was back under her roof, still madly in love with Laura, and completely on her nerves.
‘For the better, if that’s what you’re asking,’ she said now, although her tone suggested she was not entirely convinced. ‘I believe the exact word your brother used was blossomed.’
I looked at myself in the mirror: my hair was uncombed, I had toothpaste on my lips and was still wearing the scoop-necked tee I’d had on last night at the bowling alley, which reeked of smoke. Not exactly flowery. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s nice, I guess.’
‘He was particularly impressed,’ she said, ‘with your newfound social life. Apparently you’ve got scads of friends and a serious boyfriend as well?’
The fact that this last part was phrased as a question pretty much said everything about how she felt about it personally. ‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ I told her.
‘Just a boy you spend your nights with.’ A statement, this time.
I looked at myself in the mirror again. ‘Yep,’ I told her. ‘That’s about right.’
Among all the other sudden changes in my brother, he was now an early riser – Hollis, who’d always slept past noon – as well as a jogger. He and Laura ran every day at sunrise, then came home to do yoga stretches and meditate. Although apparently, he wasn’t that immersed in his oms and namastes. When he heard me come in the morning after their arrival, he immediately came to investigate.
‘Auden Penelope West,’ he said, wagging a finger at me as I carefully shut the door behind me. ‘Look at you, doing the walk of shame!’
‘I’m not ashamed,’ I replied, although I did kind of wish he’d keep it down.
‘And who is this young man dropping you off?’ he asked, pulling aside a blind to peer out at Eli, who was backing his truck out of the driveway. ‘Shouldn’t he have to show himself, get my approval before taking you out courting?’
I just looked at him. From the living room, I could hear Laura chanting.
‘My little sister,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Staying out all night with a boy. Seems like just yesterday you were playing Barbies and skipping rope.’
‘Hollis, please,’ I said. ‘Mom considered Barbies weapons of chauvinism, and nobody’s skipped rope since 1950.’
‘I just can’t believe,’ he said, ignoring this, ‘you’re growing up so fast. Next you’ll be married and bouncing a baby on your knee.’