Dad might not roll out the red carpet, but he would be civil. Boyce could be a jackass, but she’d probably love him anyway. And the pantry bed was no smaller than her dorm bed – one of my favourite places in the world to be.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Our foreheads pressed together, I watched the fingers of her free hand trace over the inked patterns on my arm. She angled her head and kissed me again, her tongue teasing my ring. She loved to play with it when we kissed, and had pouted when I told her I’d have to remove it once I began interviewing for jobs.
‘You’re welcome,’ she breathed against my lips.
Our eyes connected and my hand came up to sweep her face. I love you, I told her silently. I was ready to tell her, but wasn’t sure how. It wasn’t something I’d ever said to a girl. Wasn’t something I’d ever felt – not really. Not like this. It seemed silly now that I’d ever thought I might love Melody Dover. What I’d felt for her had been real – but it had been like standing on the first rung of a ladder compared with standing halfway to the top.
When I knocked, Dad came to the screen door with the closest thing to a smile on his face I’d seen in years. ‘Son,’ he said, taking one of the bags from my hand. ‘Come in.’
The windows were all open, and the whole place was suffused with the briny scent of the gulf that lay across the sand, outside the back door. Dad had put a fresh coat of ivory paint on the walls and woodwork, and pulled up the old carpets to reveal battered wood floors that somehow looked a hundred times better. One of Mom’s paintings was hanging over the sofa. I stood staring at it as he said, ‘You must be Jacqueline.’ She still held my hand.
‘Yes. It’s nice to meet you, Mr Maxfield.’
With effort, I turned away from the painting and watched as my father shook my girlfriend’s hand and almost-smiled, again. ‘Please, call me Ray. I’m happy you’ve come with Landon, uh – Lucas.’
That was new.
He picked up both bags and walked … to his room? Jacqueline followed, glancing at the scant but clean furnishings the same way she’d examined the town as we drove through – logging details and missing nothing. I turned the corner into Dad’s room, but it wasn’t Dad’s room any more. Grandpa’s bed sat against the far wall, flanked by his night table and a new lamp. His dresser sat opposite. There was new bedding on the bed, and the walls were the barest hint of blue. Another of Mom’s paintings hung over the bed, and a mirror suspended by a threaded length of rope hung over the dresser.
Dad set both bags on the floor by the bed. ‘I thought you two would need your own space … when you visit. I moved back to your Grandpa’s room a few weeks ago. I can get a look at the gulf first thing in the morning now, figure out how the sailing will be for the day.’
‘What a beautiful room,’ Jacqueline said, looking out the window at the squatty palm tree cluster next to the house. The beach was visible in the distance. ‘I love it. This is one of your wife’s paintings, isn’t it?’ She walked closer to examine it, and I continued to stare at my father.
‘Yes, it is,’ he answered. Turning back to me, he said, ‘After you went through some of her things over Christmas, I decided that she’d have been sad to think that her paintings were wrapped up in an attic instead of out where they could be seen.’ Dad’s lips compressed. ‘Well. I’ll let you two rest up from your drive. Got plans tonight, I assume?’
I shook my head. ‘Not tonight. We’re meeting up with Boyce tomorrow.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll see what I’ve got for dinner, if you want to eat here. Several pounds of redfish, caught yesterday. We could do something with that.’
‘Yeah. Sure. Sounds good.’
He nodded again and pulled the door mostly shut behind him.
I sat on the bed heavily. ‘Holy shit.’
‘We never talked about Mom – sentences that began with she would have been.’
Jacqueline lay on her stomach and I lay facing her, my finger drawing invisible patterns on to her back.
At dinner, the three of us had talked about my impending graduation, and the research project with Dr Aziz that had altered my entire way of thinking about what I’d learned in the past four years, sending it spinning in an unexpected direction.
Your mother would have been proud, he’d said, and Jacqueline grabbed my hand under the recently varnished table, because she knew the weight of those words.
Now we lay in bed, in the room my parents had shared whenever we visited this place during my first thirteen years. Dad was back in Grandpa’s room, which he’d painted a seafoam green. Another set of Mom’s paintings hung there.
The pantry was back to holding food, along with neat stacks of storage boxes housing old files. The holes in the wall had been painted over. The three-pronged lamp had been replaced with a normal ceiling fixture. I’d chuckled, standing in that snug alcove when Dad sent me to fetch a clove of garlic. I felt safe, standing there, and was struck by the realization that I’d always felt safe there. Somehow, that had been managed while everything else went to hell.
‘Thank you for bringing me here.’ Jacqueline turned to face me in the dark, her eyes reflecting the subtle moonlight from the window. The sound of the waves pulsing across the sand drifted through the window like a slow, gentle heartbeat.
‘Thank you for coming with me.’
She scooted closer. ‘You aren’t going to tell me where you’re applying for jobs, are you?’