“Is that true?” I’m suspicious of Thomas’s grasp of commercial health and safety.
“Probably. It’s mostly metaphorical, but I suspect you missed that part. Here.” He holds out the green-paper-wrapped chocolate and I break off a chunk. “Okay, so that’s me—wannabe patissier and upside-down apple cake of my father’s eye. Which is another terrible metaphor for saying my dad’s not exactly thrilled by my career ambitions. Or, outside of home ec, my grades.”
“You’re failing?” I ask.
After confessing The Wurst, I feel full of questions. The Great Thomas Althorpe Quiz! We’ve got five years to fill, and I’ve been wordless for so long. Wanting to use my mouth, to ask-talk-laugh—it feels as good as a thunderstorm when it begins to break.
“I’m majoring in biscuits—hey, look at that, I said biscuits not cookies. Canada’s wearing off. My grades are okay, but cookies-not-college is failing, according to my dad.” He says it lightly, but there’s an edge. I can imagine Mr. Althorpe’s response to a harebrained bakery scheme.
“Is that why your parents split up?” I nibble on my chocolate.
“Bloody hell, G,” Thomas says, suddenly as full English as breakfast. “This is what I like about you—that Teutonic sensitivity. It’s a chicken/egg thing.” He stares at the mixing bowl unhappily, flicks a bag of flour with his finger. “They were fighting nonstop anyway; my one-man detention parade probably didn’t help. It was a conduit—do I mean catalyst? Anyway, Dad was fuming when Mom took a pro-bakery stance. I won her over with my chocolatines.”
“And she wanted you to live with her in Holksea? Your dad didn’t try to get you to stay in Toronto?”
“Living in Holksea…” he trails off.
Silence blooms, expanding to fill the room. My mouth has rocks in it again, and I shove the remaining chocolate in to take the taste away.
“Canada wasn’t awful,” he allows. “It wasn’t wonderful either. It was somewhere in between. The baby bear’s porridge. Just fine, you know? Mom was planning to move back to England, then I got the chance to come back minus all the awkward years. And I’ll admit: I was curious.”
“About?”
He holds his fist straight out at me, little finger aloft. Our childhood signal, promise, salute, whatever. I gulp my chocolate down, but don’t raise my own hand. I can’t. Not yet. Neither of us moves, then he says:
“You.”
This time, the stare-off goes on and on. I’m sure Thomas has a hundred reasons for coming back to Holksea. I’m only part of it. But it’s a confession, so I match it with one of my own, in the form of a question.
“Thomas. When you left … why did you never write? And please don’t turn it round to me, because I need to know. I mean … you disappeared.”
“I know you want one big, earth-shattering reason,” he says at last, flopping back in his chair, his hands in his lap. “The boring truth is, it’s lots of little ones. I didn’t know your email or your number—if I wanted to talk to you, I always crawled through the hedge. The next reason was I didn’t know where to get stamps. It took eight hours to get to New York, then we stayed in a hotel and my parents watched me like a hawk because of the blood pact. When we got to Toronto, my dad gave me a million chores around the new house, then I had to register at school, then Mom made me get a haircut, because what you need on your first day at a new school is to rock the medieval monk look.”
Thomas picks up steam, waving his hands in the air.
“My dad kept his study locked, and when we fiiinally got a kitchen drawer filled with paper clips and stamps and a rubber band ball and a pencil with a little troll on the end, I was all set to write, when you know what I noticed? It’d been over a month, and you hadn’t written to me.”
I can’t believe that’s all it was. All this time I thought he’d Not Written as a unilateral decision, some grand sense of betrayal. It never occurred to me it was Thomas being Thomas—twelve, disorganized, and stubborn. It was geography. How different would the past five years have been if I’d just written to him?
How different this year might have been.
“Even Stevens?” Thomas holds out his hand for me to shake.
“A détente,” I agree, and take his hand.
There’s a crackle of static, then Umlaut appears, suddenly curling round my ankle. I hadn’t even known he was in the kitchen. Thomas and I disengage as the kitten springs up into my lap.
I wait while Umlaut turns figures-of-eight on my legs, revving like an engine.
“I looked for your email…” I admit. “I couldn’t find it. Did you use the Book Barn address? Because it’s not there—maybe Papa deleted it.”
“No—I used yours.”