“I just hope he comes home,” I said.
She shot me a funny look, and I realized I was setting my hopes weirdly low. So I added, “Yeah, but . . . of course. Uninjured would be great.”
For a good minute or more we lived out an awkward silence.
“Does he have anybody he can talk to?” I asked.
“Well. Me.”
“Yeah. Right. Of course. But I guess I meant . . .”
“Somebody who knows about war stuff.”
“Right.”
“He has a counselor at the VA. But it’s the government, so I don’t know how good the guy is.”
I thought about Zoe Dinsmore and what she’d said about government work. How it never works very well.
Then Libby spoke again, knocking me out of those thoughts. What she said knocked me out of everything, actually. My whole life up to that moment.
“How come you never ask me anywhere?”
Honestly. That’s what she said.
“Ask you anywhere?”
“Yeah.”
“Where, for example?”
“You know . . . out. For example.”
Then I felt like a complete idiot. Because Connor had been right all along. And I’d been too stupid to see it. Even a second before she said it, I hadn’t seen, though we’d been sitting together for several minutes and she hadn’t talked about my brother much. Not even when I brought up hers. My first thought was that I wanted to tell Connor about this. Tell him he’d been right. Because that’s always a good-feeling thing when somebody lets you know you were right. Then my second thought was that I shouldn’t tell Connor, because it was bad enough he was stuck in his house and feeling all desperate and angry and depressed. Hearing that I was not only out and about but making a date with a pretty girl would have to be something like rubbing salt in his wounds.
“Well . . . ,” I began. “I guess I just didn’t know you wanted me to.”
“I talk to you every chance I get.”
“I thought it was just because of my brother being drafted, like yours.”
“I didn’t know what else to talk to you about,” she said.
And with that we fell deeply into that humiliated silence. The one where you have no idea what else to talk about.
“I could ask you somewhere,” I said. Anything to break the stillness. “A movie, maybe.”
“That would be nice. Tonight?”
“I was thinking Saturday.”
I got my allowance on Fridays. But I didn’t want to say that, because it made me sound too young and too broke and too utterly ridiculous.
“Okay,” she said. “I accept.”
“What do you want to see?”
“I don’t care. You choose.”
“Okay,” I said. But it was not okay. It was a huge burden, and I felt in no way up to the task. What if I chose something she hated? “I’m going to finish my run now. But I’ll call you.”
“You better.”
I smiled without meaning to.
Then I got up and left the shop. Picked up a run before the door had even swung closed behind me. As I ran by the window she waved at me, and I waved back. I felt my face redden to a humiliating degree. Fortunately, that takes a minute to play out. And it only took a couple of seconds to run by the window. So I don’t think she saw.
So that’s how fast the world changes, I thought as I ran home. I’m minding my own business, thinking it’ll be a day just like any other. And then all of a sudden I realize I might be about to have a girlfriend for the first time ever.
And I hadn’t even seen it coming. But maybe you never do.
When the dogs met me outside the cabin the following morning, Mrs. Dinsmore was nowhere to be seen. I figured she was just inside. At first I didn’t think anything about it. I was all ready to go running without giving the lady another thought.
Then I started worrying, and I didn’t want that on my mind the whole run. It was hard enough trying not to think about Libby Weller. Add a worry onto that and I figured I’d probably crash into a tree or something.
I stepped up onto her porch and rapped on the door.
“Mrs. Dinsmore?” I called.
“I’m alive, Lucas,” she called back.
“That’s good to hear, ma’am.”
“It’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”
“Pretty much, ma’am. Yeah.”
“Then go run.”
I made eye contact with the dogs and launched myself from the porch, and then we were off.
We hadn’t gotten more than an eighth of a mile before it started to mist rain. That was unusual for June, to put it mildly. First I slowed, thinking we might have to go back. Then I thought, What the hell? It wasn’t cold—in fact, it was clammy and warm. So if I got wet . . . so what?
I ran faster, and the dogs kept pace with me, and then the rain came down harder. Bigger drops. It made all three of us blink and squint our eyes against it, but we didn’t stop.
We ran all the way to the cemetery. Because I’d been thinking about it. And I wanted to see it again. I wanted to stand in front of those two grave markers again, now that I knew who those two young people were, and how they intersected with my life. I wanted to see what I would feel.
The old yellow flowers had been taken away. They had not been left there to wither. In their place were two similar stalks, but blooming with purple flowers. They looked like they must have come from the same garden or shop as the last ones. Only the color had changed. They looked fresh.
I read the names of the children again, but I can’t really say what I felt. I didn’t know them, so I didn’t know what to feel. But I did feel bad for the people who had known them. It was just obvious that I hadn’t gotten to be one of them. Part of me regretted that. Painful as it must have been, I felt as though I’d missed something important.
Then we
