The closest thing I’d had to a date were the phone calls with Dylan. And those weren’t real. They weren’t anything.
This man and his offer of coffee might as well have been asking me out to see the dragons. Or raft the Nile. They were on the same spectrum of impossibility.
Why impossible? that voice in my head asked. This thing you’ve had with Dylan…that wasn’t impossible.
I could lie to this smiley, book-loving cop with the red shirt, the arms of which were pulled taut over pretty impressive muscles, just as easily as I could lie to Dylan. But I wasn’t even tempted. Not a little.
Dylan operated in a separate place, far removed from my reality.
Christ, I was just beginning to realize how fucked up I was.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”
“Sure,” he said, waving his hand, even taking the rejection with a smile. “No problem. Maybe another time.”
“Sure,” I lied, scared of giving him false hope, but finding it impossible to do anything else.
I headed home, thinking of Dylan. Trying to put what I’d learned about him on top of what I knew about him, and all the answers that I had to the questions in my head only gave me more questions.
How did he get into stock car racing?
How did he survive the fire?
What happened afterward?
Fire…I couldn’t even imagine.
And then I forced myself to try and stop imagining.
Because I could cyber-stalk him all I wanted to, but I would never—ever—get the answers I really wanted.
And asking the questions would only get me hurt.
—
At home I unloaded my groceries and on my second trip to my car for the box of wine, Joan was walking back from the laundry building with a basket in her hands.
“Only the good stuff?” she asked, eyeing my box of wine.
“Be nice and I’ll let you have some.”
She lifted her eyebrows in surprise, and truthfully, I was pretty surprised too.
“You want to bring it over to my porch?” she asked, shifting the laundry basket to her hip.
“You have any food?” I was starving, and olives for dinner was a stupid idea.
She smiled. “I can dig something up.”
And just like that I had a date with a stripper.
—
Before heading over to Joan’s, I walked past the rhododendron to Tiffany’s trailer. Outside at the picnic table all three kids were coloring. Markers and crayons were in a shoe box in the middle of the table.
“Hi, guys,” I said.
Briefly they all looked up, blond hair falling over blue eyes, and then the girls bent back to their work. But Danny kept looking at me. “Hey,” he said. The spokesman of the group.
“Your mom around?” I asked, stepping toward the trailer and the closed door.
“Dad’s here,” Danny said and I stopped. It was silent inside and there was no telling if it was a dangerous or a happy silence. It was just silence.
I spun around looking for the car, only to find it parked in a different spot on the other side of the trailer, like it was hiding. I just caught a glimpse of its bumper.
The car seemed ominous. Good lord. Paranoid, much?
“Are you…okay?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“We’re going to McDonald’s,” one of the girls said. Her paper was a vast rainbow, stretching from side to side. “Dad said.”
“That’s awesome.”
I backtracked slowly, but before I passed the rhododendron I stopped. I might be imagining some of the devils, but at least one of them was very real. “Danny?”
“Yeah?” He was working hard on a Spider-Man coloring book, the red wax of his crayon thick on the page. Shiny.
“Do you know which trailer is mine?”
He stopped coloring and looked up. “First one past the bush.”
“Right. If you need anything…anything at all. If you’re scared or something. Come knock on my door.”
He stared at me for a long time, those eyes of his so grown up, and then shrugged. “Sure.”
I walked back to my trailer and grabbed the box of wine, thinking about all those people who’d tried to help me that I’d shoved away with both hands. With all my strength I’d shoved them until they never came back again.