Pieces of You(38)
Poor Jackie. Chris and I have kept so many secrets from her and told her so many lies, we should both be hanged.
“You’re right. We’ll try to work it out. I promise.”
She smiles even though I can see it in her eyes that she knows I’m humoring her. “He should be out of the care unit in a couple of hours. I’m sure he’d love to see you when he wakes up.”
I bite my lip as I attempt to stop the tears from spilling over. Of all the lies I’ve told this year, I think I regret the ones I’ve told Jackie the most.
Chapter Seventeen
Adam
WHEN I ARRIVE AT THE guard station at Barking Sands Missile Range, Sam Crowe meets me at the entrance as an escort, since it’s my first time there. She signs a waiver assuming responsibility for me then I follow her truck down the narrow roads to the project trailer on the south side of the base. I pull into the dirt lot and pull my green sedan into an unmarked parking space next to Sam’s old Chevy pickup truck.
“I’ll call the rental company today to see if we can switch out your mom car for something a bit more rugged,” she says with a snort as we climb the steel steps up to the door of the project trailer.
The inside of the trailer is cool and quiet and filled with the rich aroma of fresh coffee and the sweet smell of fresh blueprints. Four desks line the opposite wall of the trailer. On my immediate left is a water cooler and a foldout table topped with a coffee machine and various creamers and coffee supplies. The fourth desk at the end of the trailer is occupied by Larry Cromwell, who is currently on the phone. He nods at me and I salute him even though my dad already told me Larry doesn’t like to be saluted. Larry doesn’t know that I know this about him so I’ll just wait for him to tell me himself.
“That desk on the other end is for Ollie,” Sam says, nodding toward the messier desk at the opposite end of the trailer from Larry. “He had a meeting with the surveyor this morning. He’ll be in soon. These two desks in the middle are for us.”
Great. I’ll be listening to that snort for eight hours a day for the next two months.
After I boot up my laptop, I open my email to find a message from Claire.
Claire: Good morning, babe. I’m on my way to bomb this test on binomial distributions, but I wanted to shoot you a message to tell you how much I miss you. Call me on your lunch break. I should be back in the dorm by then. Love you.
She doesn’t normally send me good morning emails, but then again she doesn’t normally wake up five hours before me on a Monday. I make it through a few more emails from the grading and rebar subcontractors before I get to the last email from my cousin Jamie.
Jamie: Just thought I’d give you a heads up that Lindsay and Nathan are going to be at that competition on Koki Beach. Also, I spoke to Pauline (not about what you told me) and they’re doing okay.
That’s it. Even though we had a nice heart-to-heart discussion about Myles, she’s still a little pissed that I didn’t tell her the specifics of his death. She thinks I should have trusted her not to tell anyone. She doesn’t understand that I still feel like I got away with manslaughter. There’s no way I would have stopped Jamie if she went to the cops because that’s pretty much all I’ve hoped for these past five years since Myles fell to his death. I wish someone stronger than I would confess on my behalf.
So Nathan and Lindsay are going to the competition and Pauline and the rest of Myles’ family are doing okay. I don’t believe that Pauline is okay, but I have no doubt that Nathan and Lindsay will be at the Koki competition. Lindsay and Nathan are the reason I moved to Wrightsville Beach. On one hand, catching Lindsay cheating on me with Nathan was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it led me to Claire. On the other hand, I really don’t want to see her fucking smirk or the scar on his face from the day I beat the shit out of him. Mostly, I don’t want to be reminded of how out of control I was back then.
After a few hours of phone calls spent trying to work out permits and temporary utilities, Larry invites me to lunch while Sam stays in the trailer to hold down the fort. We each take our own vehicles because Larry has a meeting on the other side of the base after lunch. I follow him to Wrangler’s Steakhouse on Kaumualii Highway just a few blocks away from my rental house. As soon as we’re seated at our table, it only takes one sentence uttered from beneath Larry’s craggily gray mustache to know that I’m going to regret this lunch.
“So how long have you been working for Daddy?”
The waitress arrives and takes our drink order, giving me a moment to think of an appropriate response to this inappropriate question. Larry orders an Arnold Palmer and I order a glass of water.