“Shoot,” I muttered. “Coming!” I yelled toward the house.
“Let’s go.” Jacob smiled, enjoying the cloak-and-dagger. He snapped the light off, and for a moment I was blind. Jacob grabbed my hand and towed me out of the garage and through the trees, his feet finding the familiar path easily. His hand was rough, and very warm.
Despite the path, we were both tripping over our feet in the darkness. So we were also both laughing when the house came into view. The laughter did not go deep; it was light and superficial, but still nice. I was sure he wouldn’t notice the faint hint of hysteria. I wasn’t used to laughing, and it felt right and also very wrong at the same time.
Charlie was standing under the little back porch, and Billy was sitting in the doorway behind them.
“Hey, Dad,” we both said at the same time, and that started us laughing again.
Charlie stared at me with wide eyes that flashed down to note Jacob’s hand around mine.
“Billy invited us for dinner,” Charlie said to us in an absentminded tone.
“My super secret recipe for spaghetti. Handed down for generations,” Billy said gravely.
Jacob snorted. “I don’t think Ragu’s actually been around that long.”
The house was crowded. Harry Clearwater was there, too, with his family—his wife, Sue, whom I knew vaguely from my childhood summers in Forks, and his two children. Leah was a senior like me, but a year older. She was beautiful in an exotic way—perfect copper skin, glistening black hair, eyelashes like feather dusters—and preoccupied. She was on Billy’s phone when we got in, and she never let it go. Seth was fourteen; he hung on Jacob’s every word with idolizing eyes.
There were too many of us for the kitchen table, so Charlie and Harry brought chairs out to the yard, and we ate spaghetti off plates on our laps in the dim light from Billy’s open door. The men talked about the game, and Harry and Charlie made fishing plans. Sue teased her husband about his cholesterol and tried, unsuccessfully, to shame him into eating something green and leafy. Jacob talked mostly to me and Seth, who interrupted eagerly whenever Jacob seemed in danger of forgetting him. Charlie watched me, trying to be inconspicuous about it, with pleased but cautious eyes.
It was loud and sometimes confusing as everyone talked over everyone else, and the laughter from one joke interrupted the telling of another. I didn’t have to speak often, but I smiled a lot, and only because I felt like it.
I didn’t want to leave.
This was Washington, though, and the inevitable rain eventually broke up the party; Billy’s living room was much too small to provide an option for continuing the get-together. Harry had driven Charlie down, so we rode together in my truck on the way back home. He asked about my day, and I told mostly the truth—that I’d gone with Jacob to look at parts and then watched him work in his garage.
“You think you’ll visit again anytime soon?” he wondered, trying to be casual about it.
“Tomorrow after school,” I admitted. “I’ll take homework, don’t worry.”
“You be sure to do that,” he ordered, trying to disguise his satisfaction.
I was nervous when we got to the house. I didn’t want to go upstairs. The warmth of Jacob’s presence was fading and, in its absence, the anxiety grew stronger. I was sure I wouldn’t get away with two peaceful nights of sleep in a row.
To put bedtime off, I checked my e-mail; there was a new message from Renée.
She wrote about her day, a new book club that filled the time slot of the meditation classes she’d just quit, her week subbing in the second grade, missing her kindergarteners. She wrote that Phil was enjoying his new coaching job, and that they were planning a second honeymoon trip to Disney World.
And I noticed that the whole thing read like a journal entry, rather than a letter to someone else. Remorse flooded through me, leaving an uncomfortable sting behind. Some daughter I was.
I wrote back to her quickly, commenting on each part of her letter, volunteering information of my own— describing the spaghetti party at Billy’s and how I felt watching Jacob build useful things out of small pieces of metal—awed and slightly envious. I made no reference to the change this letter would be from the ones she’d received in the last several months. I could barely remember what I’d written to her even as recently as last week, but I was sure it wasn’t very responsive. The more I thought about it, the guiltier I felt; I really must have worried her.
I stayed up extra late after that, finishing more homework than strictly necessary. But neither sleep deprivation nor the time spent with Jacob—being almost happy in a shallow kind of way—could keep the dream away for two nights in a row.