I could see why she’d been drawn to him. He was her type, physically. But there had to be something more to him—something I wasn’t seeing. If Ruby called a guy her boyfriend it meant she found him interesting enough to spend time with him beyond the stretch of one weekend. It meant Monday mornings, and underth.ings tangled together in the same washing machine, and spit exchanged on sidewalk corners where every single person in town could see. It meant the guy was worthy.
It was a rare occurrence, practically unseen in our town, like a comet, or that time Pete swore he saw a live lynx sprinting through the rec field and went around telling anyone who would listen, but we knew he’d only been drinking.
I was far away, across the dirt lot that I guess was Jonah’s back lawn, shrubs and a spindly tree between us, but when he turned to face the house it was impossible not to get a good view of his eyes with those safety goggles on. They magnified his eyeballs, making them seem far larger than real life. His irises were a watery blue that seemed all wrong, innocent in a way you knew he wasn’t. Alarming.
He caught me looking and stopped the saw. The sudden silence was enough to jolt me out from behind his house, losing my footing in the dirt of his lawn.
Slowly, he removed the goggles and let them hang around his neck.
“So it’s the famous Chloe,” he said. “The one who took my bed.”
I didn’t deny it, but I did come closer, close enough to see the bright red ovals suctioned around each of his pale eyes. I wondered how long they’d stay there, and if Ruby could kiss him when he was all deformed like that. She probably made him wait for his face to go back to normal before she’d get close.
He straightened his back, cracked it, then wiped sawdust on his pants. Two handprints, fingers splayed wide, were left on his skinny thighs.
“You look like her, you know,” he said. “Bet you hear that a lot.”
I shrugged. Before last night, I hadn’t heard it in awhile.
“So how do you like the house?” he said.
“It’s fine, I guess.”
“Just fine?” he said, seeming amused. “It’s not finished, but you could probably tell.” He thumped the block of wood he’d been sawing. “This’ll be a veranda. Ruby said she wanted a veranda, so I’m out here making her one. Really it’s a back porch. She wants it all the way out to the edge of the property, as far out as we’re allowed to build.”
“You always give her what she wants?” I teased, because of course he did. The guys she spent time with always did. What would be the point of them otherwise?
“Yep.”
“And this is what you do all day? Make stuff for my sister?”
“No.” He seemed offended. “I work. I have a job. This is my job.” He indicated the shed, scattered with half-assembled furniture and haphazard stacks of wood.
“You build tables,” I said, unimpressed.
“And dressers, armoires . . . other shit. I sell it. I work on the house on the side.”
I walked over and pulled open a random drawer in a random dresser. Inside I saw written in wobbly smoke-gray lines likely sketched with an eye pencil:
Ruby says hi.
I closed it before he could look in.
“Nice,” I said. “You’re not from here, are you?”
“I’ve been here a couple years . . .”
“So no, then.”
“No. I’m from—”
“It doesn’t really matter. How’d you meet my sister?”
“She pumped my gas at that convenience store in town. I was driving through, and my tank needed filling, and there she was. And, she’s, damn . . . she’s something else. I’m sure you hear that enough about your sister, so you don’t need me to say it. I’ve been places. I’ve been around. But I saw her at the pump, and . . .” He laughed, like this was funny. He laughed like she hadn’t reeled in a guy off the road before.
“And?”
“And I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She filled my tank, said she’d knock back the price because she liked me.”
I wrinkled my nose. “She does that to everyone, you know. It’s not special.”
He smiled, faintly, like he was remembering some other part of the story he wasn’t about to tell me, one that could prove she did like him.