Meanwhile, as I was making up with my mom, my dad was busy doing something with Lindsay Baker. As far as I could tell, they’d been on several late lunches—with her giving him the tour of other local eateries—and a couple of dinners when he could get away from Luna Blu, which was rare. Normally, I could tell when my dad was laying groundwork for another escape by how committed he let himself get, as backward as that sounds. Phone calls and lunch dates meant I should proceed as I had been, that nothing was happening. But once I started finding hair elastics that weren’t mine in the bathroom, or someone else’s yogurt or Diet Coke in the fridge, it was time to stop buying staples like sugar and butter and use up what we had instead. So far, none of these things had materialized, at least that I knew of. I was kind of distracted myself, though, to be honest.
It had happened on the night we’d gone to Riley’s, after the game, when Ellis was driving us all back home. Deb had hopped into the front seat, armed with a plate of leftovers packed up by Mrs. Benson for her mom, who Deb had said was working through dinner for overtime, which left me and Dave alone in the back. As Ellis pulled out onto the dirt road, we were all quiet, worn out by all the food and talking, not to mention a great game the U had won with a jump shot in the final seconds. When he put on his blinker at the main road, the ticktock was all you could hear.
There’s something nice about the silence of a car ride in the dark, going home. It reminded me, actually, of those trips back from North Reddemane with my mom, sunburned, with sand in my shoes, my clothes damp from pulling them on over my suit, as I wanted to swim until the very last moment. When we were tired of the radio and conversation, it was okay to just be alone with our thoughts and the road ahead. If you’re that comfortable with someone, you don’t have to talk.
As we headed toward town, I leaned back, pulling one leg up underneath me. Beside me, Dave was looking out the window, and for a moment I studied his face, brightened now and then by the lights of oncoming cars. I thought of all the times we’d been together, how I kept coming closer, then retreating, while he stayed right where he was. A constant in a world where few, if any, really existed. And so as he sat there beside me, I moved a little closer, resting my head on his shoulder. He didn’t turn away from the window. He just lifted his hand, smoothing it over my hair, and held it there.
It was just a tiny moment. Not a kiss, not even real contact. But for all the things it wasn’t, it meant so much. I’d been running for years: there was nothing scarier, to me, than to just be still with someone. And yet, there on that dark road, going home, I was.
Eventually, after dropping Deb at her car, Ellis pulled up in front of my mailbox. “Last stop,” he said as I yawned and Dave rubbed his eyes. “Sorry to break up the moment.”
I flushed, pushing myself out onto the curb, and Dave followed. “Thanks for driving,” he said. “Next time, it’s all me.”
“That car is a safety hazard,” Ellis told him. “We’re better off in the Love Van.”
“Yeah, but it needs to hold up for the road trip,” Dave replied. “Gotta take care of her, right?”
Ellis looked at me, then nodded and hit a button. The back door slid closed, like the curtain at the end of a show. “That’s right. Later!”
Dave and I waved, and then Ellis was driving away, bumping over the speed humps. As we started walking, he reached down, sliding fingers around mine. As he did, I had a flash of that night he’d pulled me into the storm cellar, when he’d taken my hand to lead me up to the world again. It felt like second nature then, too.
We weren’t talking, the neighborhood making all its regular noises—bass thumping, car horns, someone’s TV—around us. The party house had clearly watched the game as well. I could see people milling around inside, and the recycling bin on the porch was overflowing with crumpled beer cans. Then there was my dark house, and finally Dave’s, which was lit up bright, his mom visible at the kitchen table, reading something, a pen in one hand.
“See you tomorrow? ” Dave asked when we reached our two back doors, facing each other.
“See you tomorrow,” I repeated. Then I squeezed his hand.
The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad’s iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home.
I left Opal reconsidering her yellows, then headed upstairs to the attic room, where I found Deb and Dave already hard at work. This time, though, they weren’t alone. On the other side of the room, sitting in a row of chairs by the boxes of model parts, were Ellis, Riley, and Heather, each of them engrossed in reading a stapled packet of papers.
“What’s going on over there? ” I asked Dave, as Deb bustled by, a clipboard in her hands.
“Deb has shocked them into silence,” he told me. “Which is really hard to do. Believe me.”
“How’d she do it?”
“Her POW packet.”
I waited. By this point, it was understood that if you said one of Deb’s acronyms, you usually had to then explain it.
“Project Overview and Welcome,” Dave said, popping a roof onto a house. “Required reading before you can even think about attempting a sector.”