Teasingly, I shielded my eyes. “I’m home. I’m home.”
Dad kissed Mom on the tip of her nose. I should have been fifty shades of grossed out by my parents, but they’d always been this way. It was sweet when you considered that many of my classmates’ parents stayed married because they had children and expensive mortgages. My mom and dad liked each other. From what I could tell, happiness was getting stuck with someone and never feeling stuck.
Are you okay? Mom asked with her eyes.
Better, I said, also without words. I was pretty decent at nonverbals tonight.
“I’m going down to the dock,” I announced.
“No run?” Mom asked.
“Not tonight,” I answered. No run. No list. No Latin phrases. No worries about Big. I’d had enough of those today.
Mom licked some frosting off a spreader, acted casual, too casual, and said, “Max still with you?”
“Yeah.”
My parents wanted to ask: Do you swear you’re okay? Should we call Dr. Glasson? You know you can talk to us if you need to? They didn’t ask or say any of those things; instead, they psychoanalyzed me from three feet away. Their eyes were piercing.
So I smiled at them.
And it worked.
The atmosphere lightened considerably. Mom offered me icing off a fingertip—buttercream heaven—and trusted my silence. No more Oh, honeys tonight.
After a full sixty seconds with my toothbrush, I darted toward the back door. Dad called at me, “Family movie sometime soon.”
“Sure,” I agreed as always.
“Tell Max to join us.”
I smiled again. “I will.”
“Honey . . .”
“I know, Mom. Love you too.”
“Stay out late,” Dad suggested.
The Social Experiments were finally working to my advantage.
Back on the deck, I apologized to Max for taking so long inside. “I interrupted my parents having sex.”
“Seriously?”
“No, but they were up to something.”
“My parents were like that too,” he said.
“Were?” I asked, thinking they’d moved around the world to fix crap like that.
“Sometimes they’re fine. Sometimes they’re not.”
I couldn’t imagine the McCalls in separate houses or lives, but I still asked, “You’re not worried about them, are you?”
“No. I think they grieve differently. Dad needs to move. Mom needs to sit and cry.”
“What do you need?” I asked.
“To be able to remember him.”
“Me too. Sometimes I still talk to him,” I said, thinking if anyone understood, it would be Max.
“I do that.” Max hooked an arm around me. “Did I ever tell you that he used to wake me up in the middle of the night?”
“No.”
But he’d done that to me, too. Peck. Peck. Peck. On my window. Sadie May . . .
“We’d walk to Waffle House. He’d eat pancakes and play the jukebox. That’s how we learned all those old songs.”
“He never told me that.”
“It was our thing.”
“We always biked to the jetty on my birthday,” I told him.
“Yeah, I know.”
“You can remember him anytime you want with me,” I offered.
He kissed my forehead and thanked me.
Down at the dock, we hung our feet over the bay and listened to the inky water lap against the posts beneath us. There was salt in the wind and moonlight on the water. Usually, when I breathed in this view, I was not small. I was part of something that covered two-thirds of the world.
Not tonight. I was a dust mote on a universe-size stage.
I realized, sitting there next to Max, that I didn’t want to shrink the world so it would fit me better; I wanted to expand. That really, that’s what Fletcher and I had been working on all year. Even though I was so damn slow about it.
“Star Time?” Max asked.
“Please,” I answered.