“Rick?” I pictured him from all those packs of glossy three-by-fives, always grinning into the camera, a stranger from Pennsylvania.
“Yes,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “I have to sit down.” She plopped herself on the curb and pulled her knees to her chest, burying her face in her hands.
“Casey.” I reached to put my arm around her, unsure of how to act or what to say. This was the first time it had happened to us. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’d been calling so much, but he was never home, right? And I was leaving all these messages....” She stopped and wiped her eyes. “And his mother kept saying he was out, or busy, and finally he called me back today and said she made him call me. Haven, he’d been telling her all along to say he wasn’t home. He just didn’t want to talk to me.”
“He’s a jerk,” I said defensively, hearing that judging tone in my own voice, the one I recognized from Lydia Catrell talking to my mother all those mornings.
“He was hoping I’d just lose interest.... He didn’t even have the guts to call me and tell me he had a new girlfriend. He had his mom lying to me, Haven.” She made little hiccuping noises, bumpy sobs. I kept patting her shoulder, trying to help. “God, I was so stupid. I was going to go up there.”
“He’s an asshole.” I could see Rick, someone I didn’t know, lurking at the end of a telephone line, mouthing the words I’m not here. I hated Rick, now.
“It’s so awful,” she said, resting her head against my shoulder and sobbing full strength, while I cupped my arm around her head and held her close. “It hurts.”
I’d never been in love, never felt that surge of feeling or that fall from its graces. I’d only watched as others weathered it; my mother in her garden, Sumner on the front lawn all those years ago, Ashley sobbing from the other side of a wall. I sat curbside with my best friend, Casey Melvin, and held her, trying to shoulder some of the hurt. There’s only so much you can do, in these situations. We sat there together in our neighborhood and Casey cried, a short distance down from halfway.
Chapter Eleven
We were down to three days and counting. Things around the house were getting crazy, with the phone ringing off the hook and travel arrangements for the incoming relatives and Ashley having a breakdown every five seconds, it seemed. My mother and Lydia had set up head-quarters at the kitchen table, with all the lists and plans and last-minute invitations covering the space entirely. I had to sit on the counter, with the displaced toaster oven, just to get my Pop-Tart in the morning.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world went on, although it was hard to imagine how. Casey was still suffering, having locked herself in her room and refused to eat for three days, until her mother took her shopping, got her hair permed, and signed them up for another tap-dancing class. Life would go on for Casey, with Rick retreating to just pictures in a photo album.
My father and Lorna had returned from a News Channel 5 promotional trip to the Bahamas, where they’d accompanied a group of viewers who’d won a contest involving sports and weather trivia. My father came back with even more hair, a sunburn, and a set of shell windchimes for me, which I hung outside my bedroom window, where it clanged all night until Ashley claimed it was ruining her sleep and demanded I take it down. I did, but I resented it. I resented everyone lately.