“Me, what?”
“What are your parents’ names? Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“Don’t you think you might have met my brothers and sisters if I had any?”
He raised his eyes from the notebook, a line frowned into the freckled spot between his eyes. “I never met my dad.”
“Well, that’s different.”
“How? It doesn’t seem different.”
“Well. It is. It just is. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. We can put down my parents’ names.”
He watched my hand move across the page. “Are they—are they dead?”
His solemn face creased with concern, but for just this minute he gave me no comfort. Here he was, the justification of all those hormones flooding, bodies grinding, DNA strands replicating. But just for this minute, when my hand had just filled in the name of my mother—and my father, too, despite everything—I felt only loss. Nothing would change it. Nothing would cure it. If the presence of Joshua next to me didn’t fix all that had gone wrong, then there was nothing that would. “They are.”
“When did they—”
“My mother died in an accident. A car accident.” The truth was inadequate.
“What about your dad?”
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. “He died,” I said. “Of old age.”
The end. The period at the end of a sentence and the conversation, and I knew we both felt it. Joshua took the notebook from my hands and studied our tree. It wasn’t a tree, really. A little bush, perhaps. A little patch of weeds, grown wild and stomped out.
And where the world might have once seemed vast, now it was tiny. It was really rather small.
Chapter Fourteen
On Saturday, I reported for Boosters duty at the school, dodging practicing kicks by a group of cheerleaders with skinny stilts for legs and smiles full of braces. The Boosters booth was a squat little green-painted cinder-block building next to the home team stands.
I arrived at the front, like a customer. Stephanie waved me around to the back and handed me a T-shirt. I’d worn a button-down green shirt, the only green item of clothing I had in support of the school colors. But she was right. Next to the rest of them, I looked like an accountant. I threw the T-shirt on over my other shirt.
Lines quickly formed on both ends of the service window. The Boosters’ play clock started early, ended late.
Stephanie put me in charge of popcorn. I got the hang of it well enough: fill the pan at the top of the machine with kernels and oil, push some buttons, flip a lever, watch and listen for the popcorn to pop itself down to a certain threshold of pop-to-silence, and then flip the lever back and dump the popcorn into the bin. I was given a saltshaker and some red-and-white striped cups to fill. Newbie job. Stay out of the way.
The pros grabbed at everything coming their way, yanking potato chip bags from where they hung by clothespins, filling soda cups, taking orders and yelling them back. Stephanie and Grace were adding up figures in their heads and giving change. One woman who had shown up in tight white jeans and high heels—“Kelly,” Stephanie had cried, “you made it!”—had promptly been put in command of the nacho cheese and chili dog sauce bins. “Are there . . . aprons?” Kelly asked, holding her charm bracelet back to stir the cheese sludge as it warmed.
The double lines ran all the way to the fences for the first forty-five minutes, petering out only when a shaky national anthem started up on the field.
I loaded the popcorn machine again: kernels, button for oil, lever, pop.
“—anyone with a baseball bat could have killed—”
I looked up, trying to pick up the rest of the sentence out of the noise of the popcorn. Volunteers were resetting their stations and cleaning up spills, rushing by, bumping into one another, squeezing through narrow passages. So much movement that at first I had trouble locating the conversation.
“—meth heads are strong,” Grace was saying to someone over the counter.
The woman on the other side sipped at a straw, nodding. She had a paper tray of nachos and a popcorn cup tucked to her chest with a pudgy arm. “She could have done it, that’s what I’m saying. Didn’t you think once that she was after Shane—”
Grace waved the idea away. “He’s just doing his job. They’re a mess or he wouldn’t have to be over there night and day. Hold on—hey, Tara!”
Deputy Lombardi, in uniform, walked up to the counter. “You guys seen Russ?”
“Anyone left at the station to keep the lights on?” the other woman said.
“I saw him earlier,” Grace said. “Shane’s off duty but here to watch Shay play. Keller might be in the stands. What’s up?”
“You didn’t hear it from me, but the Jordans just found a suitcase packed with panties and lingerie stuffed into the corner of their garage,” Tara said. “Looked like someone was ready for a romantic getaway.”
“Charity’s hope chest,” Grace said. “Now, where do you suppose she thought she was going? And with which fella?”
“Bo,” said the other woman. “I mean, all that time with his wife gone, what do you expect?”
Tara shot her a disgusted look, reaching for a handful of popcorn and then edging away. “Yeah, so if you see Russ . . .”
Grace and the other woman waited in silence until she was out of range, then made eyes at each other. “Russ?” Grace said. “Notice how she has to find him, tell him in person. Not like his radio’s broken. It’s ridiculous. She wouldn’t leave Shane alone all last year, and I’d just about had it, though Shane always tells me I have nothing to worry about. These skanky girls.”
“The sheriff’s single, though,” the woman said. “How in the world, I have no idea. You know I’d—”
“What’s burning?”
Stephanie was at my side, pushing me out of the way and reaching for the lever to dump the popcorn, but it was too late. Smoke billowed out from the pan, a tongue of flame licking its rim. The woman on nacho cheese screamed.
“Kelly, please,” Stephanie said, propping open the back door to let smoke out. Volunteers were shoving to get past her and outside. “Your shift is over, anyway. Can you all get out of the way so I can find the extinguisher?”
Suddenly Sheriff Keller stood in the open door. He tracked the smoke to its source, reached up to a shelf above the sink, and grabbed the extinguisher. In mere seconds, the fire was out.
Stephanie looked at me. “Grace, can you make a sign that says we’re out of popcorn?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, not looking in the sheriff’s direction. “Is there anything else I can—ruin for you?”
“Go stir the nacho cheese while Grace makes the sign,” she said.
“I’ll pay for the burned popcorn,” I said. “And the machine.”