“How long’s he been gone?” I asked after a time.
“Three days.”
He didn’t go on to say, “If you’d come by to see me, you’d’ve known that already.” Then again, he didn’t need to. It went without saying.
My mind was spinning around in circles, wondering what that meant. Wondering whether I should ask.
But Connor stopped my mind in its tracks.
“When were you planning on telling me?” he asked. His voice sounded stiff. Rehearsed, almost. And like we didn’t really know each other very well. Like the voice you use with a stranger you sit next to on a bus bench.
“Tell you what?”
“That you’re dating Libby Weller now.”
“Oh. That. It’s pretty new. How did you even know about it?”
“I watched the two of you walk by my house holding hands yesterday. You must know I have nothing better to do than sit up in my room and stare out the window.”
I was stunned. Not so much by the fact that he’d seen it. And said it. More by the fact that it had never crossed my mind. I’d been so busy holding Libby’s hand that it never occurred to me that the walk to the bus stop took us right by Connor’s house. How could I not have thought of that? How did a girl’s hand have that kind of power over me? When you stepped out of the thing and looked at it from a distance, it didn’t make much sense at all.
“It was our first date,” I said. “I was going to tell you.”
“Well, I figured. When I saw you were here just now, I waited. I waited for a few minutes. You know. For you to say something like, ‘Hey. Big news!’ I mean, it is big news. It’s sort of huge. And I’m your best friend.”
“You are,” I said. I couldn’t think what else to say.
“Did you figure I was so miserable and my life was such a mess that it would break me into a million pieces to hear that something good happened to you for a change?”
Now, I like to tell the truth. More and more as I’ve gotten older. But I was pretty attached to the truth even back then, if only because it stressed me out to have to juggle chunks of fiction and keep track of what I’d said. So much easier to stick with the facts. But this was one of those situations where the truth simply would not do. Because the truth was, yeah, that’s exactly what I’d figured. And that would’ve been a pretty cruel thing to go and say.
“No,” I said. “It’s not that at all. I just . . . I just wanted to wait and see if we even liked each other. If there was even going to be a second date. I think I just didn’t want to tell anybody I was getting my hopes all up. Because then if it came to nothing, I’d have to tell them. And they’d see how disappointed I was. And then they’d be all disappointed for me. And that’s worse than anything.”
I paused, in case he had thoughts he wanted to voice. While I waited, it bothered me just a little that it was so easy for me to make up such an intricate lie. But then I thought back over what I’d just said, and there might have been a grain of truth to it.
He wasn’t saying anything. So I added, “You know what I mean about that, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”
He didn’t sound all that sure.
We sat in silence for a weird length of time. Quite a few minutes. I was getting tired of baking in the sun. I wanted to go home and take a shower. Make plans for a romantic picnic.
I looked over at Connor, and saw that his chest was broken out in beads of sweat.
“Don’t stay out too long,” I said. “You’ll burn to a crisp.”
“Oh,” he said. A little surprised, as if I’d wakened him. “You going?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“Okay.”
“But I’ll come by again. Sooner. I mean, I won’t let so much time go by this time. That’s what I mean.”
“Okay.”
I pulled to my feet. Stared down at him for a minute. His eyes were squeezed closed.
“Think your dad’s coming back?”
I hated to ask. The last thing I wanted to do was upset him. But how weird would it be to act like it wasn’t a big deal, or like I didn’t even care?
“No idea,” he said. “And don’t say ask my mom, because she has no idea either.”
“Oh. Sorry. I hope he does. I mean, I hope he does if you hope he does. Do you hope he does?”
I was making a mess of things and I knew it.
“Yeah. I hope he does. I don’t know what my mom’s going to do without him. She’s pretty broken up about it.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Not your fault.”
“Still sorry.”
Then I didn’t know what else to say. So I just said goodbye and jogged home, thinking. Well, actually, I was trying not to think. But that didn’t go my way at all.
My mom was in the kitchen when I got home. And I wanted her not to be. I wanted to look around and see what we had in the way of picnic ingredients. But you don’t just ask your own mother to leave her own kitchen.
She was leaning her back against the fridge, reading some kind of women’s magazine. Holding it with one hand, its pages folded back. In her other hand was a half-eaten apple that she seemed to be ignoring.
She looked up and blinked at me. As though she’d expected to look up and see some entirely different scene.
“Lucas,” she said.
I wondered where my father was. It was Saturday, and the house was quiet, so he must’ve been far, far away. Golfing, maybe. Or now, in retrospect, I think he might even have been having an affair. I was getting used to his
