For You(38)

“Feb.”

I waited but he said no more. “What?” I prompted, eventually losing patience.

“Nothin’. Later.”

“Later,” I replied then flipped my phone shut.

It was nine o’clock and the morning had started bad. This was mainly due to the fact that I was still in a shitty mood after seeing Colt give Amy Harris one of his killer grins. And also because I was in a shitty mood because I reacted to it the way I did, giving too much away.

Then the morning got worse when Dad told me I was moving in with Colt. He told me this using the voice he used when he’d tell me things like I had to clean my room, or I had to get my shit together and stop flunking chemistry, or when I had to go over to Old Lady Baumgartner’s house and vacuum and dust and clean out her cat’s litter box because she was so old she couldn’t do it anymore.

Of course being the age I was now I figured I could ignore this voice.

Then Dad told me about the killer’s profile. Then he and Mom gave me looks that showed precisely how worried they were.

Then I gave into moving into Colt’s.

I didn’t like it, but I gave into it. And even though I didn’t like it, hearing the profile, there was no denying Colt’s place, with him on his couch, his gun close and him knowing how to use it, was the safest place for me.

I used Dad’s morning constitutional time to get my head together.

So shy, sweet, pretty Amy Harris, who was no less pretty after two decades, comes into J&J’s for the first time in her life, doesn’t order a drink (by the way), has a gab with Colt which makes him smile at her and then scurries off.

So what?

It was a long time ago. A long, long time ago.

I needed to get over it.

Exhibit A was the fact that I’d lost half of my life to this shit. Drifting from town to town to try to escape it but in the end, never letting it go and landing right back where I started. There were some good times in that drifting and there were some bad but there weren’t many great times. None, in fact, that I could remember. And if I wasn’t careful, the next half of my life wouldn’t be much better.

Exhibit B was some guy was running over dogs and hacking up people because he was hanging onto some wacko delusion that he was connected to and doing this stuff for me. He probably had a crush or something which he never let go and now, decades later, it came to this, dead people and dogs in two states.

Therefore, evidence was pointing to the fact that I needed to get over it.

It was a long time ago, people had moved on but I was stuck in the past.

I needed to pull myself into the present, get passed this latest nightmare and get a life.

So that’s what I was going to do.

* * * * *

Dad rolled up to Colt’s house and I examined it out my window as he executed the four attempts he needed before he successfully backed the RV into Colt’s side drive.

He did this into a drive that at the back end had a one car garage with a long, sturdy, sided overhang under which was a speedboat under a tarp.

I knew Colt had a speedboat, Morrie and the kids talked about it, I’d just never seen it. Sometimes Colt took Morrie and the kids (and, used to be, Dee) to the lake in the summers. Both kids loved when their Uncle Colt would take them to the lake, they never shut up about it when they got back. They both knew how to water ski and they told me Colt went fast.

Colt, Morrie and I used to go with Mom and Dad to the lake. Dad didn’t have a boat but he’d rent one. I’d never got up on skis even though I tried. Colt used to tease that I was lazy but really I preferred tubing. You were totally out of control when you were tubing. You just held on as hard as you could for as long as you could and enjoyed the thrill. I also liked just sitting in the boat and letting the wind whip my hair around my face and beat at my skin. No better feeling in the world than having the landscape slide by while the wind was in your hair, whether you were in a speedboat or on the back of a bike.

I looked away from the back of the RV and out the side window to Colt’s house.

Colt had a crackerbox house in a crackerbox neighborhood that was so much better than Morrie’s neighborhood it wasn’t funny.

It wasn’t because the houses were large and grand and beautiful. They weren’t. They were small and one-storied but they’d been built in a time when houses needed to be put up cheap and space was all important so the houses were small but the yards were huge.

The neighborhood was better than Morrie’s because these houses had been there awhile. There were no rules that said what color you could paint your house or where you could park your car or what you could put in your yard. People had built screened-in porches on the front and decks on the back. They’d built extensions. They’d put in flowerboxes on the front windows. They had playsets and round, above-ground pools in their backyards. They had custom-made wood plaques with flowers painted on them on the front of their houses that proudly announced the Jones’s lived there (or whoever).