“Don’t call my daughter anymore. She can’t help you. She doesn’t have a car.”
He was still trying to force the lock, hitting the door with his hand. I turned halfway around. Haylie remained perfectly still, facing out her side window.
“I’m keeping your phone,” he said. “I’m not giving it back.”
He sounded pathetic. He sounded like a little boy. Maybe he had the whole time, but I only heard it then. I turned around the rest of the way. “You’re going to steal my mother’s phone?”
“Just turn the fuck back around,” he said. “I don’t want to look at your face.” He winced as if truly pained. “I can’t stand to look at your face. I can’t stand people like you. Miss Goody Two Shoes, phony bitch. You go running to Mommy and Daddy anytime there’s a problem.” He pointed at himself. “I don’t know anything about that. I’ve been on my own since I was fifteen. Completely self-supporting.” He thumped his chest. “On my fucking own. Nobody helping me. Nobody.”
His hand trembled a little at his chest, and the conviction in his eyes seemed real; but there was something about the way he delivered the speech that seemed like he had delivered it, maybe verbatim, many, many times before. He was stuck in it. I saw it right away. You could get stuck in a speech like that.
My mother took Bowzer from me. I continued to look at Jimmy until he looked away.
“Let me out of this fucking car.” He pounded a fist on the window.
My mother clicked open the locks. The door slid open behind me. When Haylie started moving, too, both my mother and I turned around. I don’t know what else we thought she might do. She lived in the town house. All her stuff was inside. She didn’t look at either one of us before she followed Jimmy out into the rain.
“He still has your phone,” I said. I started to open my door, but my mother held my arm and pulled me back.
“Let him have it.” She looked over her shoulder before backing out of the driveway. “If it makes him feel better to have it, he can have it. I’ll need a new number anyway.”
“He could make calls on it,” I said. I was feeling grateful and also guilty. I wanted to go back and at least try for the phone. “You could get charged.”
“Yeah. I’m so worried about my credit.”
I smiled, and then I felt guilty about that. It really wasn’t that funny. But she seemed fine, not just about the phone, but about everything, as if she really believed what she’d told Jimmy: sometimes fair just wasn’t going to happen; after a while, you had to cut your losses and move on.
She drove with her shoulders back, her chin raised, Bowzer balanced, once again, on her left arm.
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”
“No problem.” She reached over to pat my leg, but she didn’t look away from the road.
My conversations that night, with Marley and with Tim, blur together in my memory. It is somewhat surprising, since visually, at least, they were very different experiences. When I spoke with Marley, she stood in her doorway, looking up at me with small, piercing eyes. Tim and I talked in his car, parked just outside the dorm; even sitting, I had to look up at him, the top of his head almost grazing the roof. And he was smiling, happy to see me, at first.
In both cases, my apologies were not accepted. In both cases, I tried to explain myself, and failed. But neither one yelled or got angry. They weren’t like Jimmy, bent on making me pay. They just wanted to retreat, to get and stay away from me. And really, that felt worse.
I had meant to talk to Tim in my room. But my mother was taking a nap, stretched out on the guest bed with Bowzer at her side, her hat rolled down over her eyes. “Just a catnap,” she’d mumbled, before drifting off, the window still gold with afternoon light. Two hours later, she was still asleep, and I went down to the lobby to wait for Tim.
I told him everything at once: what I’d done, how much I wished I hadn’t; how much I already missed him; and how I had just been scared about moving in. He didn’t say anything. He put his hands on the wheel, hugging it toward him a little. We peered at each