Ruby didn’t go to her job often, and she rarely worked through the hours of a full shift, but she never seemed to consider quitting. She’d made it clear to me that a girl should always have a job, gainfully employed boyfriend or no. A girl needs her own money, just like she needs her own car. But I was sixteen this summer and still didn’t have my learner’s permit or my first job. The difference was, I had Ruby. That’s what she told me. When she was growing up, she had no big sister. Imagine that.
Downstairs, I could see the full reach of the porch. It ran to the bank of the hill, and if there wasn’t a fence and city property in the way, I was sure it would have bunched up into an arching bridge over Route 28, then climbed down, step by step, to the water’s edge. Now, it stopped where it stopped. It made it so you could walk from the house to the hill without touching your feet to earth.
“He’s been good,” she said, eyes out the window. “They’ve all been so good.” She meant the other guys out there helping under the falling sun, as Jonah wasn’t the only one. Other guys from town had been coming over, some who were former exes and some who’d maybe become future exes. A couple of guys were way too young to become her exes; they were boys my age, boys I used to know from school. One of these boys was Owen, but she made no comment about that. It’s not like she would have noticed any one boy among all the others.
“There’s a pitcher of iced tea in the fridge if you want to bring it out to them,” she said. “I made it from a can.”
I watched her long white car chug out of the driveway, muffler groaning unchecked because she seemed to like the noise it made, and then she was out of sight.
I went out with the pitcher and some glasses just as Jonah decided they were done for the day. No one felt compelled to keep working, now that Ruby had left.
Or maybe it was that she’d taken her influence with her off the property and down the road—as if the radius of her charms had gotten smaller and more concentrated, and she had to give up the guys at the house so she could shine a spotlight on Cumby’s, casting her spell over coworkers and regulars and innocent tourists.
I’d assumed the house had cleared when I almost walked into him on the landing. “I thought there was another bathroom up here,” Owen said, “but all this junk’s in the way.”
“That’s, you know”—thinking madly of how to explain the gate without making my sister sound cruel—“we haven’t gotten around to moving that stuff yet. Just step over it. The bathroom’s right there.”
He stepped over the gate and leaned against the wall, in the shadows, so I couldn’t decipher what he was thinking from his face. And maybe it was better that way. Ruby told me it didn’t matter what a boy was thinking about you, so long as you had a good hold on what you were thinking about him. But for some reason I couldn’t figure out, he was still here in the house, though his ride must have gone away because there was just one vehicle left in the driveway and it was Jonah’s pickup truck.
Owen took a step toward the bathroom and then stopped. Backed up, came close. “Hey, Chloe? Could I ask you something?”
Then I knew. Or thought I knew. I’d gotten caught up in my sister’s fog, but all the while Owen had been piecing it together. He’d noticed something off about his friend London, too.
“Yeah, sure,” I told him, waiting for it. Maybe all it took was one other person to say it aloud for everything to shatter. The walls would come down first; they were flimsy enough. The ceiling would collapse in and crumble. In the sky the sounds of balloons popping, then a rainbow of brightly colored carcasses and limp red ribbons as they fell.
But all Owen said was: “You mind if I take a shower here?”
I had no ready response for that.
“We were working out there for hours,” Owen was saying, “and it’s so hot. . . . You don’t mind, do you?”
I shook my head. “Use the blue towel,” I said. “It’s clean.”
I went to my room and closed the door—or, really, moved the door to the closed position and let it lean.