This time, I order coffee willingly, but not from Simone, who intimidates me. I still add an extra dose of cream and sugar to the cup. “What’s up, Lake?” Duke looks up from a glowing tablet screen at a table.
I clutch the warm mug between my hands, the steam rising up to my nose. I glance around. “Mind if I take a seat while I wait for Ringo?” I ask, feeling a little bit proud of myself for being brave enough to ask so easily.
Duke has on a short-sleeved black-and-gray bowling shirt that might have been in style sometime last century. Emphasis on might. “Please, allow me.” For such a large boy, Duke’s surprisingly both graceful and agile as he jumps out of his seat and sweeps a chair back for me. Slightly self-conscious at the gesture, I take a seat beside him. “I’m watching Margaret’s computer and bag,” he explains. “While she runs an errand. If anything happens to her laptop she’ll gouge my eyeballs out with ice cream scoopers.” I laugh. “I’m not joking,” he says. His jowls are floppy and serious. “Nah, I’m joking.” His face volcano erupts into a brilliant grin. “But wait, am I?” Serious again. “No.” I cock my head, totally perplexed. No, he’s joking? Or no, he’s serious? But then he shudders as though he really is contemplating how it would feel to have his eyeballs served in a sugar cone before at last grinning wickedly at me again. I realize at once that I should probably immediately give up making any sense of Duke Ellington at all.
“Lake, may I be blunt?” he asks.
I set my mug down on the table, nearly choking on a hot sip of coffee. “Sure, yeah, please.”
“Good.” He trains his large brown eyes on me. “What are your intentions?”
“My what?”
“Your intentions. With Ringo.” He straightens the collar of his shirt, then rests his meaty elbows on the table.
My hand knocks my coffee cup and liquid sloshes into the table between us. “Oh! No!” Duke isn’t fazed. “Ringo and I are just friends.”
Duke rubs his lips with two fingers. “Relax!” He swishes his hand through the air. “Oh man, you should see the look on—did you think I was serious?” He leans forward and presses his hands to his knees.
“Yeah.” I wipe the back of my mouth. “Kind of.”
“Good, because I am.” I look at him sidelong, unable to tell whether Duke is messing with me again or if he even considers any of this messing around at all. “What I mean to say is: Are you going to hurt him?”
I take another sip of my coffee. “I told you. It’s not like that. We’re not romantically involved.”
Duke grins. “What does that have to do with anything?”
I frown. Does the loss of Penny hurt me any less than the loss of Will? Romantic love is just one kind of emotion on equal footing with others. I think about being hurt by my brother too. One kind of emotion and one kind of pain surrounded by a dozen variations. “Nothing, I guess,” I say, remembering what Kai said about Ringo being fragile.
Duke lays both of his hands out in front of me on the table. “So the way I see it is, if you have to choose between hurting Ringo on the one hand and not on the other, I would go ahead and choose not.”
I roll my eyes. “Obviously.” He shrugs in response.
“Maybe obvious and maybe not.”
“And what about if he hurts me?” I challenge.
He leans forward and cups his hand around his mouth as if he’s about to tell me a secret. “That’s when I borrow Margaret’s ice cream scooper.”
“Deal,” I say. And I like Duke because I don’t think he’s actually antagonizing. He cares about his friend, fiercely, and I can relate to that. Only Duke’s clearly not as insular about it as Penny, Will, and I were. He’s the big guy checking IDs at the door. And I think I care about Ringo too, so I don’t know, maybe my ID needs to be checked.
“Are my services no longer needed?” Ringo leans over my shoulder so close, I can breathe him in. I blush, but then he picks up my mug and slurps some of my coffee. He wrinkles his nose. “That concoction you have there is going to kill you. Like, it’s literally going to give you diabetes, Lake.”
I pull it back from him. “Hey, I’m just starting to like coffee. Back off.”
We leave Duke to guard Margaret’s belongings, and stake out one of the sofas with the overstuffed arms where I can cradle my mug against my chest and almost pretend I’m three or four years older than I actually am, a college girl with everything figured out. Ringo props his arm on the back of the couch and hikes his knee onto the cushion so that we’re facing each other dead on, inches apart.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” I admit suddenly. “I know there’s nothing that you or anyone else can do. I got the paperwork, though, and the walls, they started pressing in.” I wrap my arms around myself and squeeze. “I needed to pull the rip cord and get the hell out of my house, you know?”
“More than you can imagine,” he says.
“My birthday. It’s so soon.” I moan and drop my forehead into my open hands. “How am I ever going to choose? I can’t. I can’t possibly. It’s—it’s in less than two weeks.” Ringo shifts his weight and looks off to the side. “Did you know that? Two weeks!” Our knees are nearly touching, but he pulls his away from mine ever so slightly. I almost wouldn’t notice if he didn’t seem to be developing a twitch over the eye with the red patch over it, the one that made him Ringo and not just Christian. “The paperwork,” I continue. “It’s so clinical.”
“Yeah.” He scratches his nose. “I, uh, I remember.”
“Two forms of government-issued identification. Resurrection candidate drop-off. Hello, we know what they mean—dead body. Dead person. And—” I rest against the cushion, feeling lightheaded. I’m watching the puzzle pieces of his face. I still see the birthmark when I look at him—I can’t help that—but the more I’m with him, the more I see just Ringo. I do wind up focusing on the unmarred half, the full eyelashes that brush the smooth skin and frame his cool blue eyes, the dark eyebrows, interesting for how much bolder they are than the color of his hair. It’s strange that in some ways I’m pretty sure the scarred port-wine stain on his skin makes the right side of his face all the more striking and beautiful. But I’m waiting for him to jump in, the way he did at Penny’s shiva. It’s like I came for a fix of Ringo comfort, but he’s not dealing all of a sudden.
“What?” I ask. “Why are you looking at me like that? Why aren’t you saying anything?”
He sighs and runs his fingers through his hair. “I thought you came to talk.”
“Yeah, but not to a brick wall.”
“About that.” He rolls his neck. He looks physically uncomfortable and I wonder if we should change seating. “I’ve been thinking maybe I’m not the right person for this….” He must note my dropped-jaw expression, because he trails off. “Or something.”
“What are you talking about? Did I do something?” I pin my gaze to the cream swirls in my coffee.
“I, um,” he starts. “Shit, Lake, okay, I need to tell you something.”