was when it was just us together, him and me. ‘Don’t use that word in this house.’
Oh, she is scornful; she hasn’t seen him yet. ‘Or a fucking Barbie doll.’
Sweet man, he intervenes. ‘Hey Steff, I brought your backpack.’
‘You!’ She’s embarrassed – or something. ‘You told my mom?’
‘I would never do that.’
‘Told me what?’ I’m too distracted to follow up because I hear Davis rattling around in the breezeway, just back from wherever he went to sulk, the rat. I’m hurting so bad that I want him to come in on the two of us sitting close on the sofa, me and my new man. Then he’ll know who’s sexy, eat your heart out, you son of a bitch.
Steffy scoops up her backpack, glaring. ‘You didn’t say any . . .’
Something passes between her and this Dan Carteret but there are so many particles piled up in the room by now that I can’t read what he’s telling her when he says, ‘Nope.’
It’s the proximity – his young, lean body sitting this close to mine, and everything – the way my body feels this minute, how hard it was with Davis and how long it’s been – all piles up in me and meanwhile my girl Steffy stands there posing in the archway with her head lifted and wet lips like a model for something you want but are afraid to buy and then, damn, she gives me The Look! I saw it coming the day she was born, I just didn’t know it would be so soon: Now I’m the fairest in the land, and I have to be hard as nails.
‘Go upstairs and don’t come back until you find the right shoes.’ Meanwhile Davis slams the door and goes roaring off in that rattletrap without saying yes, aye or no, so much for that. He hates all these parties, he always has; God knows if he’ll even bother to come, and I’m damn well not going alone.
So I block what I’m thinking: Lucy’s son, and I say, all casual, ‘Want to come to this party with us?’
‘I’m sorry I . . .’
‘Come on, Steff and I would be thrilled.’ Then, my God, I take his hands. Did Davis see us together after all, and that’s why he burned rubber getting away? ‘Tout Fort Jude will be there, so no matter what you’re looking for, somebody at the party’s bound to know.’
‘I couldn’t.’ He shrugs, stirring up the gators on his tacky tourist shirt. ‘Not like this.’
‘Oh, no problem, Davis has plenty of jackets. You’ll need one from before he porked up.’ I sit there, willing him. ‘Hot hors d’oeuvres and an open bar.’
‘I’m sorry, I . . .’
‘And dinner.’ I was thinking, He doesn’t look like Lucy at all.
Then he got up. ‘I can’t. There’s this thing I have to do.’
15
Bobby
Bobby didn’t expect to be here, at the door to the Bellinger family fishing shack. Chape’s grandfather built it in the boondocks before he or Chape were imagined, when land was cheap. It sits alone on an inlet, so far out that whatever they did there, stayed there. No outsiders saw and nobody heard. Bobby would just as soon forget some of the stuff that went down when Chape brought him and his posse out here in high school, but here he is.
As instructed, he’s dressed for one more endless evening at the club. Chape phoned an hour ago. ‘We have a problem.’
‘Damn straight.’ Lucy’s son in a holding pattern, circling Fort Jude like an unanswered prayer.
‘Can you come?’
‘When?’
‘Usual place. Six.’ For a second there, Chape dropped his take-charge manner. ‘I need you, dude.’
Like it or not, Bobby is walking into his past.
He’s here because Chape was his best friend in high school and together they ruled. The guys he cared most about in high school will be inside. Well, all but Darcy, who wiped out at the end of junior year. Their names are carved in the unpainted door, along with the name of the one guy he ran with but never liked. If there is a call to accounting in life, this is the group he has to report to: living yardsticks, measuring him off. At another level, although he knew then that he was nothing like these men, Bobby Chaplin is thinking, These are my people, and this is my place.
In spite of everything, it still makes him grin.
They used to hide out in Chape’s shack on the inlet; all through high school they got