stuck to the ceiling where she'd tossed them to see if the
pasta was done.
When I was in elementary school, I'd come down with
food poisoning. To be fair, it wasn't my mom's fault. I'd
spent the day with my dad at his country-club pool, where
they fed me extravagantly on fries and hot dogs instead of
making me eat the peanut butter and jely sandwich my
mom had packed for me. I brought it home and ate the
sandwich later that night for dinner. An hour after that, the
sandwich later that night for dinner. An hour after that, the
world began to spin. An eternal half hour after that, I
started to puke.
I had a morbid fear of food gone bad after that. I wouldn't
eat anything I suspected, even vaguely, of having turned.
When I opened my mom's fridge and saw the containers
and jars, al potentialy swimming with bacteria, my
stomach clenched tight in protest.
'Let's go out to eat, okay?'
I didn't have to say it twice. My arms filed with squirming
little boy as Arty tried to squeeze the breath out of me and
mostly succeeded. I put the kibosh on McDonald's, but
conceded to Wendy's, where he thought he tricked me
into letting him get a Frosty, when realy I just wanted an
excuse to get one for myself.
Inside the restaurant, Arty launched himself across the
room. 'Leo!' Arty seemed incapable of using a voice at
anything less than a shout, but Leo didn't seem to care. He
patiently let Arty leap al over him, then looked at me over
the top of Arty's head.
'Hey, Paige.'
'Hey, Paige.'
I stuttered for a second. 'What…hey. What are you doing
here?'
He lifted his bag of food. 'Getting dinner.'
Arty had settled back down to the toy he'd found in his
kids' meal bag. Leo was hesitating, but I gestured at the
table, and he sat. 'It's good to see you, Leo.'
'You, too. What's been going on?'
Of al my mom's boyfriends over the years, Leo was the
one I liked the best. He'd never tried to be my dad, and he
hadn't forced friendship on me, either. Maybe it was
because I was already grown up and moved out of my
mom's house when they started dating.
I glanced at Arty, lost in his own world of ketchup-firing
French-fry cannons. 'I thought you and my mom were
going away together.'
Leo's eyes never left mine, though his mouth set into a hard
line centered in his bushy, biker beard. 'Obviously, we
didn't.'
'So where did she go?'
