and felt a shiver ripple down my neck. I’d come so close to losing him. “I can think of simpler ways of getting the message across.” My voice was hoarse and overfull.
“Yeah, but not as dramatic. This is the drama-queen side of me.” He managed a smile.
“Who knew?”
“She’s a late bloomer.” He coughed.
“Want something to drink?”
“Yeah.”
“You can be whatever you want, Trey—a bouncer, a ballerina, a candlestick maker . . . Just be alive, okay?”
I got him a glass of water and he fell half-asleep in the seconds it took me to return to his bedside.
“Guess the muddlehood got a little out of hand this time, huh?” he said in a weary voice.
“Yeah. And it’s probably going to take a while to unmuddle it too.”
“I’m going to go to cooking school,” he said, eyes closed.
“Right now?”
“Someday.”
I knew “someday” would come much later, only after he’d recovered from this day. “Yeah?” I said. “I’m going to become a football coach.”
Coach Taylor was on the move, striding up the steep, uneven path like there was a mountain of Twinkies waiting for us at the top. Shayla was hot on his heels, though she took three steps for each one of his, and they were miraculously managing to carry on a conversation as they climbed. I, on the other hand, was a fair distance behind, breathing like an asthmatic heifer in a marathon and squinting up into the distance with the hope that Sausenburg’s tower would suddenly materialize out of the forest.
I had three problems with the adventure at hand. One, it required physical effort. I was okay with physical effort if I could work at my own pace and self-medicate with my foods of choice along the way, but this was most definitely Scott’s pace we were keeping, and the food of choice he’d brought along was oranges. Oranges. ’Nuff said.
My second problem was the fact that it was cold—bitterly cold—and I didn’t like it much. It had taken me ten minutes to get Shayla decked out in so many layers that she now moved with all the grace and agility of the Michelin Man. This fact, however, wasn’t slowing her down, what with her growing infatuation with the guy in the lead, whose enthusiasm and energy made me feel like I was moving at the pace of, say, a tree stump. A tree stump with screaming calf muscles and something wet trickling down the middle of her back, but I didn’t think I had the fortitude to consider that just yet.
And my third problem was causing the kind of internal head-slapping that threatened to dismantle the precarious can-do attitude I’d brought along for the hike. The problem was that I had no one to blame for this excursion but myself. And maybe the Betty Crocker syndrome. Back in the good old days when my idea of cooking had been boiling up some water for Kraft macaroni and cheese, I hadn’t had any delusions of grandeur. I’d gone about my business in the kitchen in the five to seven minutes it took to cook the noodles; then I’d plopped down at the table and declared myself a genius. That simple. But now that I was possessed by Betty Crocker’s ghost, I’d been doing things that were as foreign to me as, say, bringing soup to ailing men, which had led to climbing up a mountain to a castle on a frigid day with a four-year-old and her way-too-fit partner in crime.
Scott had returned to school on the day after the soup incident and had tracked me down in my English classroom during lunch. He’d handed over my Tupperware and cocked his head to the side again, which had the unpleasant effect of making me wonder how weird I really was.
“Stop looking at me like that. It was only soup.”
“It was great soup. I think Shay’s carrots put it over the top.”
I’d been wondering since yesterday what had put me over the top. “She was adamant about bringing it to you,” I lied. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.” Score one for being a mom—you got to blame things on the kid.
He took a deep breath. “Okay, so I’m going to go out on a limb here and revisit the battlefield of skirmishes past,” he started.
I held up my hand. “You sure you want to go there? ’Cause I tend to pull out my zingers when things get weird, and I wouldn’t want you to get, you know, injured or anything.”