he said. God, he was like a golden retriever. All bright eyes and wagging tail. “You have something good?”
“Pardon?”
“Books.” He pointed at the stack of books cradled against my chest. “I come in every week. I’m like a library frequent flyer.” He flipped his books around to show me. The one on top was the next one in the series of the thriller I’d just bought on sale.
“Hey, look at that,” he said, noticing the same thing. Really, he was very…smiley. “It’s really good. You’re gonna love it.”
“Thanks. I read one of his earlier ones a long time ago.”
“Which one?”
“The one with the aliens and the hotel.”
“Oh, God, I loved that one. With the kid…”
“And the drawings. Yeah.” The smile came before I could stop it and he grabbed hold of it with both hands.
“You know, if you’re not busy, it’s my day off and I can drop these off and we could go get lunch.”
“It’s ten a.m.”
“Breakfast, then. Coffee?”
A date. He was asking me out on a date.
I’d never been on a date.
Not in high school. Not when Hoyt was…God, I have no idea what you’d call those six months before he proposed, but you couldn’t call it courting. Softening me up, maybe, for the horrors to come?
The closest thing I’d had to a date were the phone calls with Dylan. And those weren’t real. They weren’t anything.
This man and his offer of coffee might as well have been asking me out to see the dragons. Or raft the Nile. They were on the same spectrum of impossibility.
Why impossible? that voice in my head asked. This thing you’ve had with Dylan…that wasn’t impossible.
I could lie to this smiley, book-loving cop with the red shirt, the arms of which were pulled taut over pretty impressive muscles, just as easily as I could lie to Dylan. But I wasn’t even tempted. Not a little.
Dylan operated in a separate place, far removed from my reality.
Christ, I was just beginning to realize how fucked up I was.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”
“Sure,” he said, waving his hand, even taking the rejection with a smile. “No problem. Maybe another time.”
“Sure,” I lied, scared of giving him false hope, but finding it impossible to do anything else.
I headed home, thinking of Dylan. Trying to put what I’d learned about him on top of what I knew about him, and all the answers that I had to the questions in my head only gave me more questions.
How did he get into stock car racing?
How did he survive the fire?
What happened afterward?
Fire…I couldn’t even imagine.
And then I forced myself to try and stop imagining.
Because I could cyber-stalk him all I wanted to, but I would never—ever—get the answers I really wanted.
And asking the questions would only get me hurt.
—
At home I unloaded my groceries and on my second trip to my car for the box of wine, Joan was walking back from the laundry building with a basket in her hands.
“Only the good stuff?” she asked, eyeing my box of wine.
“Be nice and I’ll let you have some.”
She lifted her eyebrows in surprise, and truthfully, I was pretty surprised too.
“You want to bring it over to my porch?” she asked, shifting the laundry basket to her hip.
“You have any food?” I was starving, and olives for dinner was a stupid idea.
She smiled. “I can dig something up.”
And just like that I had a date with a stripper.
—
Before heading over to Joan’s, I walked past the rhododendron to Tiffany’s trailer. Outside at the picnic table all three kids were coloring. Markers and crayons were in a shoe box in the middle of the table.
“Hi, guys,” I said.
Briefly they all looked up, blond hair falling over blue eyes, and then the girls bent back to their work. But Danny kept looking at me. “Hey,” he said. The spokesman of the group.
“Your mom around?” I asked, stepping toward the trailer and the closed door.
“Dad’s here,” Danny said and I stopped. It was silent inside and there was no telling if it was a dangerous or a happy silence. It was just silence.
I spun around looking for the car, only to find it parked in a different spot on the other side of the trailer, like it was hiding. I just caught a glimpse of its bumper.
The car seemed ominous. Good lord. Paranoid, much?
“Are you…okay?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“We’re going to McDonald’s,” one of the girls said. Her paper was a vast rainbow, stretching from side to side. “Dad said.”