Mia rolls her eyes, a move I don’t see often. She starts to leave, but I stop her, asking, “Hey, do you have the key to the barn?”
I don’t miss the way her eyes widen, almost imperceptibly. “Yeah, why?”
“I was just going to have a look around in there and see if there was any material I could use.”
“Nah.” She waves a hand in the air, dismissing the idea. “There’s nothing for you there.”
“You sure? Because—”
“I’m sure,” she interrupts, averting her gaze from me to the porch. “What are you working on today?”
“Laying the deck.”
She doesn’t respond, at least not immediately. It’s as if she’s contemplating what to do, what to say. Finally, she turns to me, that one eye squinted again. “You want some help?”
I don’t bother hiding my surprise. “Really?”
Nodding, she says, “Holden has to help out his dad, so…”
“Oh, so I’m like a consolation prize. Got it.”
“No!” she rushes out, laughing in that way that weakens my knees. “That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s fine,” I assure. “I’ll take it. But you better get more appropriate shoes on.” I crack a smile. “You can keep the pajamas.”
Her cheeks flush, and her mouth opens, closes, opens again. “Deal.”
Laying the boards is easy and monotonous and would be so much quicker as a two-person job if I had one of us cutting and the other screwing them in place. Mia suggests we do it that way, but I’m not in love with the idea of her using a drop saw and power tools on her own. I don’t tell her this, obviously, and it’s not that she’s incapable of doing it—she is. It’s just that I like the proximity of our bodies when I’m watching over her the way I am. Mia’s a quick learner, a good listener, and within two hours, I’m almost positive that I could leave her on her own, and the job would get done. At some point, Mia brings out a set of Bluetooth speakers and plays music from her phone, the same songs we used to listen to up on that water tower. I highly doubt the songs playing bring back the same memories for her as they do me, considering this is the music she’s listened to her entire life. For a moment, I get lost in that thought, in the memories she might hold on to.
Mia
My grandpa once told me that memories change based on the last time you remembered them. You don’t recall the solid, fact-based events, and so memories of the same occurrences change over time. When “Midnight Train to Georgia” plays through the speakers, I remember being on that water tower with Leo the final summer I spent with him. I was watching him, his profile, but he was so caught up in the lyrics he had no idea I was looking. When the song ended, he turned to me and asked, “Do you think you’d leave everything behind for love?”
I was fourteen.
He was fifteen.
I’d never experienced love before, but the way he looked at me then… I questioned whether I was experiencing it now.
I didn’t get a chance to answer before he added, “The man in that song, he moved to LA thinking he was going to be a star or something, and when he realized that it wasn’t going to work out, he wanted to go back to his roots. Back home to Georgia. And the woman… she just followed because she didn’t want to be apart from him.” He paused, his mind working. “He was going to leave with or without her, and she—she chose for herself.”
I thought about it a moment. “I think it’s love,” I told him. “I mean, she loves him enough to follow him.”
He nodded at that and didn’t say more.
It was the day after he asked me to stay, to go to school with him. When it was happening, I remember thinking it was his way of telling me he really wanted me to stay. Now, when I look back, I realize it was something else entirely. He was going to be there regardless, and he was going to live his life, with or without me. It was my choice whether I followed him or not.
“You want to break for lunch?” Leo asks, pushing me back to the present.
I glance up at him and shake my head. “I’m good.”
“All right,” he says, taking a screw from between his lips. He lines it up with a