None of us spoke. The refrigerator hummed. The sound of cicadas and crickets swelled through the screen door to the back deck. Dani worked a hangnail off her thumb, sucking the blood, her eyes traveling from me to Mom to Richard and back again in the same way they did when she was zoned out in front of a cartoon.
Finally Richard said, “We’ll need more time from Ari.”
Mom looked at me and nodded, genuinely pained. “Just temporarily, until school starts again. You can handle that, can’t you, Ari? You’re already doing such a great job.”
She was worried about me, I could tell, but maybe her own need was stronger than the worry.
“It’s okay,” I heard myself saying. Not sure what it was.
Richard sighed and put both hands firmly on the table. I thought maybe he was about to try to push the whole thing through the floor and into the basement. Then he took a deep breath and said in a resigned way, “All right, then. We’ll make this work.”
“Thank you, my love!” Mom said with a catch in her voice, then gestured to the whole table. “All my loves.” I wondered if that included the pizza.
Richard smiled weakly, then got up and went down the hall to the bedroom.
Mom watched him. “There’s more laundry . . . ,” she said, and went almost eagerly downstairs. I couldn’t blame her. Laundry didn’t judge.
Dani freed her hangnail at last, peeling with it a long strip of thumb skin that she flicked under her chair.
I sat still, and instead of dealing with the reality of what had happened, what would now continue to happen, I found myself suddenly consumed with a painfully vivid memory of the two seconds my lips spent on Camden’s. I wanted to be back there. I wanted the thunderstorm to have passed us by, the afternoon to have unspooled differently. I wanted, period.
10
The next afternoon, I was out grocery shopping with Dani when my cell phone rang, the words Camden Armstrong lighting up the screen. When I’d saved his number in my phone, I didn’t feel right only entering “Camden.” I couldn’t yet claim him that way.
“Hello?” I answered.
“It’s me,” he said. These words, in his voice. In the frozen foods aisle. Worlds colliding.
“It’s also me,” I said in a way that would never reveal the mostly sleepless night I’d spent thinking about him.
Dani tugged on the back of my T-shirt. “Who is that?”
“Shhh,” I said.
“Why shhh?” asked Camden.
“Not you. I was talking to my sister. You can talk all you want.”
His laugh was like bells ringing.
“You sound busy. I’ll talk quickly. James wanted me to ask you if you could bring your friend when you come over later. He’ll be here. He was too shy to ask himself.”
I smiled. “I’ll let her know that her presence has been requested.”
We said good-bye and hung up. Dani narrowed her eyes at me.
“Who was that?” she pressed.
“Just Kendall,” I lied, then looked up at the gleaming case of frozen dinners my mom always forbade us to buy. If it has an ingredient you can’t pronounce, don’t get it. To hell with that. I wasn’t going to have time to cook. “Pick out something for tonight,” I said, pointing to the packages designed with begging seven-year-olds in mind.
“Daddy likes chicken nuggets,” said Dani. “He brings them home from McDonald’s sometimes, when he knows Mommy’s not going to be there.”
“Chicken nuggets it is,” I said, opening the case. “Want the ones shaped like dinosaurs or the little smiley faces?”
That evening, I read a long chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Dani, then sang her a lullaby. Her glossy blond head in the crook of my arm, her fingernails digging into my side. I loved the pressure of her need and want, its lack of shame. She was mostly asleep when I kissed her good night and left the room. On my way out of the house, I rapped on the door of the bathroom, into which I’d recently seen Richard disappear with the new issue of National Geographic.
“You should check on her in a bit,” I said. “I’m taking off. Thanks for the car.”
“You’re going out with Kendall?”
“Yeah. To another friend’s house.”
He paused. “I’m supposed to ask you if there will be parents there, right?”
“Yes, you’re supposed to ask.”
There was another pause. Leave it at that, leave it at that.
“Have fun,” said Richard’s knowing voice through the door. “Back by eleven.”
“Of course. See you then.”
I was glad to be the one driving tonight. It was Kendall’s night off from Scoop-N-Putt and that felt like kismet, that we could go back to the Barn together under completely new circumstances. It didn’t seem possible that Camden’s party had been only four days ago.
“How many emails have you and James sent back and forth since Sunday?” I asked Kendall after I picked her up.
“Four. No, five. He signs off as ‘Jamie.’ Should I call him that now?”
“Yeah, I think you could live on the edge and start calling him Jamie.” Kendall punched me in the shoulder. “So, is this, like, a romantic thing? Or a friend thing?”
“I can’t tell,” said Kendall.