“Then—what is it, a week later?—and I’m buying this land and moving my whole business out here and starting work on the house and that girl at the pumps, she’s my girl now. All because I stopped for gas.”
He probably thought that was romantic. “How old are you anyway?”
“Twenty-seven. That all right with you?”
“We’ll see. It might be too old.” I let out a sigh. “Truth is, Ruby barely told me anything about you,” I said—and I said it because I had a feeling he wouldn’t like that. He needed to know his place in her world, now that he was living in it. He needed to know what he was here for, and what to expect. “Ruby doesn’t talk about you at all.”
He looked down and wiped more sawdust on his pants. Then he looked up into my eyes.
“Do you make her breakfast in the morning?” I asked.
“Some mornings.”
“And iced coffee the way she likes it?”
“Yeah, sure. Sometimes.”
“Do you answer the phone when it rings so she doesn’t have to? Do you make her popcorn on Wednesdays? Do you do her laundry and hang out her dresses to dry?”
He stepped away from the buzz saw and a little closer to me. “Do you do this with all her boyfriends? Ask them questions until they crack?”
“You don’t look like you’ve cracked.”
He seemed to think I was only teasing.
“It doesn’t sound like you take good care of her,” I said. “You’re not doing any of the things you’re supposed to.”
“Listen, I’m in love with your sister. That’s what you want to hear, right?”
It wasn’t, actually. It was sad to hear. It’s not like I hadn’t heard it hundreds and hundreds of times before, enough times to blur in my mind so all their mouths mushed together and it sounded like they were talking at me with cheeks stuffed full of leaves and fish-tank pebbles and driveway mud.
When Ruby said the words back to one of them, then maybe I’d care.
He tried again. “That make you happy?” he said. “That I love her?”
“I’m happy for you,” I said politely.
I checked the windows of his house, hoping to spot her. Her bedroom faced the backyard. Maybe she was there at the glass, observing.
He saw me looking and said, “She still asleep? She sure was up late last night.”
“Yeah, I know,” I lied, because what I knew was that she’d gone to sleep with me, and there was no way he’d have a clue of how late that was or wasn’t. Then I thought of the streaks of dried mud on her legs and I gave myself away by going, “Hey, you didn’t see her out last night, did you?”
“You mean when she went for a walk?” He indicated where that walk had taken her.
He pointed into the distance and I noticed the bright green snake wrapped in fat coils around his arm. The tattoo was so faded, he must have gotten it before puberty or done it homemade, jailhouse-style, with ink from ballpoint pens mixed with spit.
Where he was pointing was out toward the edge of the hill, to the view Ruby had showed me the night before. Pete’s car was still there, but Jonah didn’t mean the car. Between the gap in the shrubs, a path ran down the hill to the road. And across the road, the reservoir waited.
“She went down there?” I asked.
“I think so. Any reason you weren’t with her?”
I shrugged. “Didn’t feel like it, I guess.”
When I turned back I found him staring at me, simply staring. I had on a tank top and a pair of boxers that had belonged to one or another of Ruby’s ex-boyfriends. She liked to confiscate them and use them in lieu of underwear after they were gone. We both did. We also occasionally made use of exes’ button-down shirts and Visa cards.
Or maybe these were his boxers. Maybe that’s why he was staring.
“I should go wake my sister,” I said. “And get dressed while I’m up there.”
“You should,” he said. He was in dangerous territory, looking at me like that.
I stalked off, but I didn’t get far before a horn was honking from the driveway. Pete leaped out of some random car, looking dazed, as if the Tums he’d swallowed the night before really had been laced with something exciting.