Mr. Garrett glances up from his post behind the register, reading glasses perched on nose, pile of papers in lap. “Well. Hullo, Samantha.”
I didn’t even change out of my uniform, which no one could call empowering and confidence-building. I feel completely embarrassed and remember the lock on the door and think: He knows, he knows, it shows, shows completely.
“He’s out back,” Mr. Garrett tells me mildly, “unpacking shipments.” Then he returns to the papers.
I feel compelled to explain myself. “I just thought I’d come by. Before babysitting. You, know, at your house. Just to say hi. So…I’m going to do that now. Jase’s in back, then? I’ll just say hi.”
I’m so suave.
I can hear the ripping sound of the box cutter before I even open the rear door to find Jase with a huge stack of cardboard boxes. His back’s to me and suddenly I’m as shy with him as I was with his father.
This is silly.
Brushing through my embarrassment, I walk up, put my hand on his shoulder.
He straightens up with a wide grin. “Am I glad to see you!”
“Oh, really?”
“Really. I thought you were Dad telling me I was messing up again. I’ve been a disaster all day. Kept knocking things over. Paint cans, our garden display. He finally sent me out here when I knocked over a ladder. I think I’m a little preoccupied.”
“Maybe you should have gotten more sleep,” I offer.
“No way,” he says. Then we just gaze at each other for a long moment.
For some reason, I expect him to look different, the way I expected I would myself in the mirror this morning…I thought I would come across richer, fuller, as happy outside as I was inside, but the only thing that showed was my lips puffy from kisses. Jase is the same as ever also.
“That was the best study session I ever had,” I tell him.
“Locked in my memory too,” he says, then glances away as though embarrassed, bending to tear open another box. “Even though thinking about it made me hit my thumb with a hammer putting up a wall display.”
“This thumb?” I reach for one of his callused hands, kiss the thumb.
“It was the left one.” Jase’s face creases into a smile as I pick up his other hand.
“I broke my collarbone once,” he tells me, indicating which side. I kiss that. “Also some ribs during a scrimmage freshman year.”
I do not pull his shirt up to where his finger points now. I am not that bold. But I do lean in to kiss him through the soft material of his shirt.
“Feeling better?”
His eyes twinkle. “In eighth grade, I got into a fight with this kid who was picking on Duff and he gave me a black eye.”
My mouth moves to his right eye, then the left. He cups the back of my neck in his warm hands, settling me into the V of his legs, whispering into my ear, “I think there was a split lip involved too.”
Then we are just kissing and everything else drops away. Mr. Garrett could come out at any moment, a truck full of supplies could drive right on up, a fleet of alien spaceships could darken the sky, I’m not sure I’d notice.
We stand there, leaning back against the door, until a large truck really does pull in and Jase has to unload more things. It’s only 11:30 and I’m not due at the Garretts’ till three, so I don’t want to leave, which means I busy myself doing unnecessary things like rearranging the order of the sample chips in the paint section, listening to the click-click-click of Mr. Garrett’s pen cap, and reliving everything in my happy heart.
Later, I struggle to concentrate and help Duff build a “humane zoo habitat for arctic animals out of recyclable materials” for his science camp exhibit. The task is complicated by the fact that George and Harry keep eating the sugar cubes we’re trying to use as building material. Also by the fact that Duff is unbelievably anal about what “recyclable” means.
“I’m not sure sugar counts as recyclable. And definitely not pipe cleaners!” he says, glaring at me as I slap white paint on egg cartons, transforming them into icebergs, which are going to float in our fake aluminum-foil arctic waters.
The kitchen door bursts open and Andy storms through, without explanation, in floods of tears, her wails echoing down the stairs.
“I can’t get these cubes to stay together. They keep melting when I put the glue on them,” Duff says crossly, swirling his paintbrush in the puddle of Elmer’s, which has just dissolved another sugar cube.
“Maybe if we put clear fingernail polish on them?” I suggest.
“That’ll melt too,” Duff says gloomily.
“We could just try,” I offer.