Scott swirled his glass. She bet he was smirking.
“My mom needs an explanation. Every time she thinks she’s got something, I come down here. But she doesn’t get that not everyone can just drop everything and come. Charles always has something going on, but she doesn’t understand that he just has to work.”
Scott moved slightly, shifting his weight to his left side. She listened as he raised his glass to his lips, pulled the liquid to the back of his throat, and swallowed. “So Charles is working.”
She wanted to hit him. Why bother answering, if he already had it all figured out? “Of course,” she said stiffly.
But then her face started to tremble, first just a little, then a lot. But she wouldn’t let herself cry, not here. She swallowed. “Did you know I grew up not that far from you?”
“In Parkesburg?”
“Lionville.”
“Right.”
She’d never told him this before, so it was curious that he knew this about her. “When I was little, maybe in like third grade, there was a big announcement about the Kimberton Fair. Do you remember the Kimberton Fair?”
“I’ve heard of it. I’ve never been.”
“I got really excited about this fair. There was going to be an amusement park as part of it, and I thought, This is going to be great. An amusement park right down the street from my house! I’ll go every day. I’ll wake up and ride a roller coaster. There wouldn’t be any lines or crowds, it would just be me running free and alone through this enormous park with workers ready to attend to me.”
“I think every kid fantasized about that,” Scott answered.
Joanna uncrossed her legs and crossed them in the other direction. “So the fair shows up. I’m so excited I can’t sleep the night before opening day. And I get up really early, before the sun is even up, and I run down there. And there’s already a line of kids waiting. They’d gotten up earlier than I did. I had no idea how—I mean, I guess they just didn’t sleep at all. And so finally someone comes along and lets us all in. There were only five rides, not even a roller coaster. Just a merry-go-round, a Ferris wheel, swings, some lame-ass fun house, and a tilt-a-whirl.”
Her voice caught on whirl, but she swallowed fast, trying to pass it off as nothing. “I only went that one morning,” she said. “I spent the rest of the summer at the pool.”
Scott nodded. He bent his knee in and out, making his joint crack.
“I don’t know what made me tell you that story,” Joanna said. “It has nothing to do with anything.”
Scott took another sip of his drink. “Maybe it has to do with a lot of things.”
Joanna picked at a loose thread on the knee of her jeans. She should thank him for accompanying her here, and then go inside to her old bedroom and go to sleep. This could still be explained to Charles. She’d come to the house looking for Sylvie, maybe, but Scott had been there instead. She’d been distraught, and he’d offered to come. She just needed some company, someone to take the edge off her mother. It was hard, coming down here alone every time.
She was still unmarred, unharmed. She could still look Charles straight in the eye.
Scott’s eyes burned into her. Taking a deep breath, she raised her head and stared back. Electricity passed through them. She could almost see it, a blue snap through the air. He knew what she wanted. He had to. He knew what was going on inside her, but he was going to make her work for it. He was going to make her ask.
Hank and Carla’s parrot screeched. The same sob rose up inside her. She felt so terrible.
The moment broke, and Scott looked away. Joanna lowered her shoulders and looked down, too, disappointed that he hadn’t acted on the moment, then ashamed by her disappointment. She made a tight fist with her hand. “Charles told me about that time you hit him, you know.”
Scott stopped rocking. “Oh yeah?”
“Uh-huh. He said you did it for no reason.”
The ice rattled in his glass. “Is that what he said?”
“Yes.”
“Then he didn’t tell you everything.”
“What’s … everything?”
“There was a reason I did that.”
“And that would be … what?”
He stubbed out his cigarette.
“Come on.”
But he stood, not answering, and opened the screen door and walked inside the house. Joanna felt confused. Did that mean something more had happened than what Charles had told her? Or was that just what Scott wanted her to think?
Scott opened the freezer; cold, blue light shone against his face. She heard the crack of the ice cube tray, and the clank of the cubes hitting the glass. This was probably just a game for Scott. A mind-fuck.
She stood up, too, and made her way slowly down the hall to the first-floor bedroom that was always set up for her. She would sleep on her old childhood twin bed, its creaky mattress as stiff and loud as the paper liner on an examining table at a doctor’s office. Scott, of course, would sleep on the couch.