that I’ve started having the dreams while I am awake. Conversations get interrupted because the river has rushed in and engulfed me. I swim as fast as I can (thinking inhale, try, breathe, drown), but the truck’s only an inch closer each time. I’ll snap from the waking dream, laughing it off if I’m talking to a customer or my family. If it’s Cal, it doesn’t matter because he already knows. He’s the one who pulls me away.
But I’m getting closer each time. I have to see my father’s face.
“I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” I mutter, sitting on the edge of the
bed. “As a matter of fact, this sounds like an awful idea.”
Cal is standing in front of the mirror, his face scrunched up as he stares at his reflection, trying like hell to tie his tie. For all that he can do, for all that he is, it’s the tiniest of things that trip him up the most. The most human of things. Like tying a tie that I’m still unclear about why he decided to wear. (Where it has come from inspires a whole other set of questions I don’t want to bother with; the slacks and dress shirt he wears are tailored perfectly, as if they’ve been made for him. Someone has obviously been sneaking around.)
I sigh and walk over to him, knock his hands away and untangle the knot he’s somehow gotten his finger stuck in. “We can just stay in,” I mutter.
“Your mother invited us,” he says, checking himself out in the mirror again.
“Vanity,” I scold him.
“It would be rude not to go. Do you like this tie?”
“It’s okay, I guess. I don’t know why you want to wear a tie.”
“Oh.”
“She also invited Abe.”
“Yes. Good. I like Abe.”
“And the Trio.”
“Nina. Ah, little one. She is so special.”
“And Mary and Christie,” I remind him. “Who don’t know you sprout wings like a butterfly.”
He stops looking at his reflection to scowl at me. “I’m not a butterfly. I am big. Impressive, even. Suzie Goodman told me I was the most impressive specimen of man she’d ever had the pleasure of seeing.”
I roll my eyes as I finish his tie. “And why were you talking to Suzie Goodman?” I ask, ignoring the flash of jealousy that I want no part of. I know as well as Cal does that he’d never do anything with her. He just likes to get a rise out of me. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest, though I do cinch his tie more tightly than I need to.
“I was reading on the computer that you have to keep your man interested, so it’s always good to make sure he knows others are.”
I frown at him. “Angels are not allowed to go on the Internet.”
He winces. “Probably a good idea. That place has so much porn.”
I don’t want to know. Okay, I do. “Let’s just get through this so we can come back to Little House.”
Cal kisses me gently before walking out of our room. “Sure thing,” he calls over his shoulder. “I did learn some things on the Internet that I want to try on you. It’s not all bad.”
I stare after him as his laughter floats back to me.
It’s a warm spring evening, the Jump Into Summer Festival now only a week away.
Mom has invited Cal and me up for dinner at Big House with the rest of the family. She and I have kept our distance from each other since that night in the cemetery weeks before. It wasn’t anything unusual for us, at least at first. Even though we live right next to each other, there’s been times since I moved into Little House that we have gone months without seeing each other. We leave notes here and there. Maybe a text message or two. A voice mail if it’s really important.
But now I have a life preserver of sorts, someone who is trying to keep me afloat. He has his hand curled in mine as we walk up the hill toward Big House, the sun already starting to set. A sweet breeze that smells like the trees washes over us, and for a moment, a brief second, I’m able to forget about everything that has happened, and everything that could still happen. For a moment, I’m walking up the driveway to Big House with my boyfriend to have dinner with people I care about. For a moment, I’m twenty-one years old and don’t