He shakes his head. “Clement and I go to church, and then I have—there’s some family stuff.”
“Oh, right.” Stupid. He just gave up his Saturday night to be here, so why would he want to give up his Sunday too?
“I can meet you on Monday, though,” he says. “Regular time?”
I shrug, like I don’t care if he shows up or not.
But I am supposed to care. For Tess, at least. So I let myself say, “I know Tess wil like that,” before I start to walk away.
“Hey, can I—can I take you home?”
I freeze. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. No one has ever asked me that before. Jack would sometimes walk me back to the house after we talked, but he never asked, and we both knew he only did it for a chance to see Tess.
I take a deep breath.
“You want to talk about Tess some more or something?” I ask, mostly to remind myself why I’m here, why he’s here, but when he says, “Yeah, sure,” I feel the bits of me I broke with Jack, those stupid hopeful bits, bleed open.
I feel grubby in his car, my crappy clothes a reminder that I don’t belong here. Tess belonged—belongs—in this car. Not me.
“Tess belongs here,” I say, and Eli, pul ing out of the hospital lot, looks at me like he doesn’t understand.
“This is her kind of car,” I say. “I can see her in here, you know? She’d like it.”
“I don’t like it,” Eli says. “It’s like driving a bus. I used to … I used to have my own car. My parents told me I could get a car when I turned sixteen because that’s what everyone did, and they wanted—they wanted me to be like everyone else. I was going to get a, you know—”
“Super-fast sports car?” I say. “Let me guess, you wanted a red one too, right?”
“Silver,” he says with a quick grin at me. “But we got to the lot and there was this car over in the corner, some car an old lady owned and that her kids had gotten rid of when she died, and it looked so sad. Al alone out there, you know? And her kids hadn’t even bothered to clean out the glove box. When I looked in it, there was a shopping list. Eggs, bread, tea, al in this tiny, old-lady handwriting. And I kept thinking, What if that’s the last thing she ever wrote? What if she’d made the list and put it in the car so she’d remember it when she went out and she never got to go out and just
—I don’t know.”
I stare at him, entranced in spite of myself. “So you didn’t get a sports car?”
“Nope,” he says. “I got a baby blue sedan with low mileage. It had this huge, soft plastic thing on the gearshift, I guess because the old lady had bad hands or something. When I was upset, I’d pick at it. My parents—” He taps his fingers against the steering wheel. “My parents thought I was crazy.”
“So what happened to it?”
“My parents sold it,” he says. “Before I came here, they weren’t … they weren’t real happy with me.”
“No, I mean, what happened to the shopping list?”
“What?” he says.
“The shopping list. What happened to it?”
“I left it in the glove box,” he says. “I didn’t want to throw it away. It was her car first, you know? Plus—I don’t know. My parents have never done anything like make a shopping list.”
“They don’t like shopping?”
“They like shopping,” Eli says. “But not for food. They have people who do that. Pick out menus, buy the food, and make it. Al that stuff.”
“Real y?”
“Yeah. They don’t—they like the house to be run for them. Someone to cook, someone to clean, someone to take care of the laundry.”
“Right,” I say, like it’s no big deal, but inwardly I’m feeling even grubbier. Jack’s parents had money but not like this, not money to have someone do al the little things that make a house run for them. “You must miss having al of that.”
“No,” he says simply. “So, how come you don’t drive?”
I wonder what kind of trouble he got into with his parents. A guy who’d buy an old lady’s car because her relatives couldn’t be bothered to notice that she’d left behind a shopping list didn’t real y seem like the kind of guy who’d be shipped off to live here.
But then, once upon a time Tess and Claire were such good friends that Tess had talked about the two of them as if they were practical y one person, and then she cut Claire out of her heart like she was a stone that needed to be cast aside.
“I don’t have a car,” I say. “I did, but it was Tess’s—she bought it to drive back and forth to school with money she earned working at Organic Gourmet. She gave it to me after her first semester was over, when she decided she didn’t need to come home so much, and if she did, she and Beth could—”
“Beth. Is that the—?”
“Yeah,” I say. “The girl from before. Anyway, she and Beth came here back then, and Tess left her car. She said I could drive it if I wanted. When I first got my license, every time I went somewhere people would come up to the car and say, ‘Tess?’ and then look disappointed and try to cover it up when they saw it was only me.”
