She smiles, a tentative curve of her lips. “I was wondering when you would bring that up.”
“I just … I’m sorry if that—embarrasses you, or anything,” I say. “I know I just left the next morning, and maybe today was a little awkward, but—”
“Ethan,” she says, and I shut my mouth. “It’s fine,” she says. “We’re adults. I’m a big girl. It was consensual, and fun. But I’m here for a job, and I don’t want to make things complicated for you or me.”
“Oh,” I say. Oddly, I’m both relieved and just a bit disappointed.
She tilts her head, as if considering me from a new angle. “If me working here is a problem, please, tell me now, and we can work it out.”
“No, it’s fine,” I say, shaking my head.
“Or I can go to Kennesaw State and their lovely adjunct position.” She makes a little pout at that.
Now I laugh. “No, seriously, it’s fine,” I say. “It wouldn’t be a problem at all.”
She smiles, clearly relieved, and holds her hand out again. I take it and she squeezes softly. “Thank you,” she says. “For everything today.”
“Good luck,” I tell her, and I watch her as she walks out the door. She turns to look back over her shoulder, tosses me one last smile, and she’s gone.
CHAPTER SIX
When I get home from work, Susannah greets me at the door wearing her Get Up the Yard T-shirt, artfully torn jeans, and black Doc Martens laced halfway up her calves. “We’re going out for drinks and food,” she announces. “Pick somewhere that has lots of both. My treat.”
I look over at Wilson, who is eyeing me from his bed and thumping his tail. I put my workbag down, walk over, and crouch down to scratch his belly. “What did you do to him?” I ask as Wilson half closes his eyes in doggy ecstasy. “He normally dances around when I come home.”
“Took him on a long walk around the neighborhood,” Susannah says. “Fed him lots of treats. He’s half comatose; he’ll be fine. I just took him out to pee. I’ve been stuck here all day. I even mopped your damn floors, which, by the way, were probably violating an EPA rule.”
“I thought the EPA was a bunch of hippies who believe in global warming.”
“Come on, Ethan,” she says, making a pouty face. “I’m hungry.”
Part of me wants to just have a beer and order a pizza and stare at the TV. I still need to process what happened today at work with Marisa Devereaux. But I’m sure as hell not going to talk about it with my sister. “You’re so pushy,” I tell her.
She grins, a dazzling show of teeth. “I’m assertive and cute.”
WE GO TO the Palms, a brewery three blocks up Roswell Road that serves good pub food along with craft beers. They have a pool table in the back, and after Susannah has had a beer, she heads to the pool table and hands me a cue from a rack on the wall. “Age before beauty,” she says.
We play a round and I win, sinking the eight ball into a far-corner pocket. “Lucky shot,” Susannah says, but she smiles as she says it.
“You’re in a good mood,” I say.
“Mercury’s out of retrograde,” she says, taking a sip of her beer. “Hey, I forgot to ask; how’s Frankie?”
I bend over my cue, chalking the tip and wishing I could avoid the question. “He’s good,” I say. I finish with the chalk and put it back on the edge of the table, and when I look up, Susannah is staring at me.
“You didn’t go see him,” she says.
I sigh. “No, I didn’t go see him.”
“So when’s the last time you did see him?” Her stare is getting sulfurous. “Last Thanksgiving? What about the year before that?”
I shake my head.
“You haven’t seen him since you and I went together? That’s over two years ago. What the hell, Ethan?”
I start putting balls into the triangle on the table. “I didn’t want to,” I say.
“Didn’t want to? He’s your friend.”
“I know that.”
“Did you feel guilty, or—”
“I didn’t want to go by myself,” I say.
She puts her hand on her hip, her other hand holding the cue with the butt end on the ground, like she’s planting a flag. “Don’t put that on me,” she says.
I roll the triangle of balls on the felt, hearing their muted clack, then lift the triangle off and hang it on its hook on the wall by the cue sticks. “You weren’t here,” I say. “It didn’t feel right to go alone.”
Susannah narrows her eyes in disappointment. “You think Frankie wasn’t alone?”
I lean my cue against the table. “I need to take a leak,” I say.
“Yeah, you do that,” Susannah mutters, grabbing the cue ball and lining up her shot.
AFTER OUR PARENTS died and Susannah and I moved in with Uncle Gavin and Fay, the world, to my disgust, kept turning. I still went to school. I tried to become invisible and inured to the profound hole in the center of my world. What I really wanted was the opposite, to have someone truly care for me, to let me cry and grieve and grope around in the dark to find hope again. But I was thirteen years old, and although I could understand Shakespeare and algebra and the history of ancient Rome, I had little or no clue about how to act like a human being. This was complicated by the fact that everyone at school treated me as if one wrong word would cause me to either dissolve or explode. So I withdrew into my hooded sweat shirt and walled out everyone. After a few weeks, everyone else in eighth grade quit acting like I was going to have a screaming meltdown in the middle of earth science and they all left me more or less alone.
And then, the summer before high school, I began working at Uncle Gavin’s
