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.
George, crunching, suggests we build the walls out of marshmallows instead. “I’m sort of sick of sugar cubes.”
Duff reacts with a rage out of all proportion. “George. I’m not building this as a snack for you. Marshmallows don’t look anything like glass bricks in a wall. I need to do well on this—if I do, I get a ribbon and next month’s camp costs half off.”
“Let’s ask Dad,” Harry suggests. “Maybe boat shellac? Or something?”
“My life is over,” Andy sobs from upstairs.
“I think I should go talk to her,” I tell the boys. “You call your father—or Jase.”
I head up the stairs toward the echoing wails, grabbing a box of Kleenex from the bathroom before I go into Andy and Alice’s room.
She’s lying facedown on her bed, in her soggy bathing suit, having cried so hard that there’s a big damp circle on her pillow. I sit down next to her, handing her a wad of Kleenex.
“It’s over. Everything’s over.”
“Kyle?” I ask, grimacing, because I know that’s what it has to be.
“He…he broke up with me!” Andy raises her head, her hazel eyes swimming with tears. “By…Post-it note. He stuck it on my lifejacket while I was practicing rigging the jib.”
“You’re kidding,” I say, which I know is the wrong thing to say, but honestly.
Andy reaches under the pillow and pulls out a neon orange square that reads: Andrea. It’s been fun, but now I want 2 go with Jade Whelan. See ya, Kyle.
“Suave.”
“I know!” Andy bursts into a fresh round of tears. “I’ve loved him for three years, ever since he taught me how to make a slip knot on the first day of sailing camp…and he can’t even say this to my face! ‘See ya’?! Jade Whelan? She used to take boys behind the piano in fourth-grade assembly and show them her bra! She didn’t even need one! I hate her. I hate him.”
“You should,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
I rub Andy’s back in little circles much the way I did Nan’s. “The first boy I kissed was this guy Taylor Oliveira. He told everyone at school I didn’t know what to do with my tongue.”
Andy gives a faint watery giggle. “Did you?”
“I had no clue. But neither did Taylor. He used his like a toothbrush. Yuck. Maybe because his dad was a dentist.”
Andy giggles again, then looks down and sees the Post-it note. The tears resume.
“He was my first kiss. I waited for somebody I really cared about…and now it turns out he was a jerk. Now I can’t take it back. I wasted my first kiss on a jerk!” She curls into a ball on the bed, sobbing even louder.
“Shut up, Andy, I can’t concentrate on my project!” Duff calls up the stairs.
“My world is coming to an end,” she retorts loudly, “so I don’t particularly care!”
At this point Patsy wanders in, having recently learned both to climb out of her crib and to remove her diaper, in whatever state it may be. In this case, fully loaded. She waves it triumphantly at me. “Poooooooooop.”
“Ugh,” Andy moans. “I’m gonna throw up.”
“I’ll get it.” I reflect on the fact that two months ago I had never come in contact with a diaper. Now I could practically teach a Learning Annex course on the many ways of dealing with any potential toileting disaster.
Patsy watches me with detached curiosity as I clean up her wall (ew), change her sheets (again, ew), plunk her into a short bath, and re-diaper and clothe her in something sanitary. “Where poop?” she asks mournfully, craning her neck to examine her bottom.
“Gee-ooorge!” a furious voice bellows from the kitchen. I go down to find that George has used the hammer from his Bob the Builder tool kit to smash the remaining sugar cubes while Duff was on the phone with his father. Now George, spindly legs flying, is running out the door, wearing nothing but Superman underpants, with Duff, angrily brandishing the phone as though it’s a weapon, careening after him.
I chase them up the driveway just as the Bug pulls in and Jase climbs out, all loose-limbed grace.
“Hey now.” He reaches out to me. We stand in the driveway with Jase kissing me as though the fact that Harry is making vomiting noises and Duff is about to kill George doesn’t matter at all. Then he loops his arm around my neck, turns to his brothers, and says, “Okay, what’s going on?”
In no time he has it all sorted out. Duff is painting Popsicle sticks white to replace the crumbling sugar walls. Andy’s eating a Milky Way and watching Ella Enchanted on the big bed in her parents’ room. Pizza Palace is on its way. Harry’s making a gigantic pillow house cage for Patsy and George, who’re pretending to be baby tigers.
“Now,” Jase observes, “before some or all of that falls apart again, come here.” He leans back against the counter, pulling me between his thighs and smoothing his hands up and down my back.
It’s all so good. My body is singing-happy, my days are full of good moments, my life feels more right than it ever has been before. And that can be, I learn, how it happens. You’re walking along on this path, dazzled by how perfect it is, how great you feel, and then just a few forks in the road and you are lost in a place so bad you never could have imagined it.
Chapter Thirty-six
When I clock out from the B&T the next day, I’m surprised to see the Jetta pulling into the parking lot, and Tim beckoning to me from inside. “I need you,” he calls, pulling up—illegally—in the fire zone.
“What for?” I ask, nonetheless climbing into the car, awkwardly pulling down my short skirt.
“I bagged out on your mom. Well, mostly on Clay. I called and quit. Now I need to get my shit from the office and I need a shield. A—how much do you weigh?—one-hundred-ten-pound shield.”
“One twelve,” I correct. “I don’t even think Clay’s there. He and my mom were doing some factory thing.”
Tim knocks a Marlboro out of the pack stored in the sun visor, sticking it into the corner of his mouth. “I know. I know his schedule.” He taps a finger against his temple. “Maybe I just need you along so I’ll actually do this and not turn chickenshit at the last minute. Maybe I need you to give me a shove in—and out—the door. You gonna help me out?”
I nod. “Sure. But if you’re looking for a shield, Jase is a lot bigger than I am.”