Saints of Augustine (6 page)

He jumped at another wave that brought him halfway back to shore. Then another that moved him so close, his toes dragged the sandy bottom.

Kate was propped up on one elbow, reading a large paperback. He pushed his wet hair out of his eyes and squinted at the cover.
The Story of Philosophy.

“That's the book we had in Mr. Metcalf's class,” he said.

“Yep.” She glanced up at him and smiled, then looked down at the page.

Charlie picked up his towel and dragged it over his head. “I used to call it
The Story of Nytol.
”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Why are you reading it again? Is it on the senior list?”

“No. I just like it. I'm rereading the part on Immanuel Kant. Did you know when he was seventy and really sick, he wrote an essay called ‘On the Power of the Mind to Master the Feeling of Illness by Force of Resolution'?”

Charlie couldn't follow the title. In fact, two seconds after she said it, it seemed to evaporate from his mind. “Huh,” he said, drying his legs.

“Kant was an interesting guy. He liked to breathe only through his nose when he took walks. He thought he could experience nature and not get a cold, that way.”

“You can only get colds through your mouth?”

“That's what he thought.”

“Well, what if he already
had
a cold?” Charlie asked. “His nose would be clogged up. How would he breathe?”

Kate clucked her tongue. “It's philosophy, not
biology. It's like an idea injected into the world of facts, instead of the world of facts shaping ideas.”

“Sounds like he had
issues
.” Charlie dropped down onto the blanket next to her. He stretched out on his back and cupped his hands behind his head. “I was thinking about my mom, out there. She went out on my raft with me one time, and this wave just totally knocked us over. My dad took some pretty funny pictures of it.”

“How's your dad doing, anyway?” Kate asked, closing her book.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean”—she seemed to search for the words—“in his grief. You know, grieving is a process. He must miss your mom an awful lot.”

“I miss her, too.”

“I know you do. I was just thinking about him as a widower. Losing a spouse is a whole different process from losing a parent.”

“You sound like a shrink already.”

“Therapist,” she corrected him. “I've just been reading some things. So how's he doing?”

“I don't know. We don't really talk about it.”

“You have to. It's just the two of you in the house. You lost the one person you both shared.”

“I don't know,” Charlie said again.

“Come on, you must talk about it
sometime
.”

“We don't.”

“Well, you should. It's part of the process—”

“We
don't
. Okay? We don't talk about anything, as far as my mom goes.”

“Don't get mad. I'm just asking as your friend.”

“I'm not mad,” Charlie said. But he was. To talk about it was to talk about how his dad was turning into a hermit, and how he drank every evening, and it was embarrassing to even
think
about that stuff around Kate, much less speak it out loud. If she thought he was a lamebrain who should wash cars for a living, what would she think if she knew his dad was going off the deep end? She'd reopened her book and was staring into it now. “Sorry,” he said. “It just…bums me out to think about that stuff.”

“It's okay,” she said without looking up. “When you want to talk about it, I'm all ears.”

“Spoken like a true shrink. I mean, therapist.”

They stayed out for another hour or so. When
they were back in the car, Charlie started to turn the ignition but stopped, let go of the key, and put his hand on the back of Kate's head. He stroked her hair and said, “You're really great, you know that?”

She pecked him on the lips. He leaned into her and kissed her back. Then kissed her again, opening his mouth over hers and sliding his hand against her hip.

After a few minutes, she said, “You know, I love your car. I really do. But sometimes I wish it was a little bigger.”

“We could get in the backseat.” He gestured toward the space that looked even smaller than where they were sitting now.

“It's broad daylight,” she said.

“We could go…someplace else.”

“Where, one of those seedy motels on A1A?”

Actually, he was thinking about asking her if she wanted to go to the Danforth house. There wasn't a stick of furniture in it, and the floors had gotten pretty dirty since Charlie had started smashing out the windows. She probably wouldn't want to go if she knew the condition the place was in. But they
definitely could have some fun there, even if they had to stand up the whole time.

Kate was giving him a funny look. “Hello,” she said, waving at him. “I was kidding. You look like you were watching a porno film in your head.”

“I was
not
.” He felt himself flush.

“It's okay,” she said, grinning, “as long as it starred us.”

He kissed her again. He wanted her to put her hand in his lap, like she had for that brief, amazing moment the last time they'd made out. Instead she squinted at the dashboard clock. “Oh my god, is it really five thirty?”

“No, that thing stopped working. There's a watch in the glove compartment.”

She opened the little door and pushed her fingers through the random junk he'd accumulated there.

“So maybe I
was
seeing a little film about us,” he said playfully, rubbing her arm.

“What's this?”

He looked down. She was holding a small wooden pipe.

He felt his stomach fold up. “What's what?”

“
This
.” She scowled. “It's a pipe.” She brought it to her nose and sniffed, then shuddered. “It
stinks
. You told me you weren't doing this junk anymore.”

“I'm not!” He tried to calm his voice.

“Then why do you even have this?”

“It's from back when I
was
doing it. I forgot it was even there.”

She glared at him.

“I swear!” There was at least a little truth in what he was saying: He couldn't remember the last time he'd used that particular pipe, and he really had forgotten it was in the glove compartment. He had a much better pipe and rolling papers in his bedroom at home.

Kate stared down at the stinking piece of wood. “I made it really clear when we first started going out. You can do whatever you want, dope yourself up, live in a cloud. Fine. But I'm not interested in dating someone who gets high. You can do this stuff, or you can date me. That's it.”

“Kate, I
know
that. Honestly, I'm not doing it anymore. That's like a—a relic from the past. Look, give it to me.” She didn't move. He took the pipe from
her hand and tossed it out the open window. It vanished into the palm scrub. “See? Gone.”

She didn't say anything.

“All right? Do you believe me?”

“All right,” she said finally.

“Thank you.” He leaned over and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. A long, awkward silence followed, while they both just sat there, staring forward at the beach. Charlie could hear his heart beating in his ears. “You want to go to a movie at the mall this weekend?”

“Sure,” she said, though her tone had flattened out some and she kept her gaze forward.

“Good,” Charlie said. “Just us. Whatever movie you want.”

He turned the key in the ignition.

 

That night, his father started crying at dinner. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and a moment later he was pinching his eyes with his fingers and it was over. Charlie sat across the kitchen table, and for some reason what he felt wasn't sadness, but fear. “Are you all right, Dad?”

“I'm
fine
.” He swallowed some wine and a bite of food and looked toward the television, which was on in the next room.

“Do you…do you want to talk about anything?”

“Me?” his father asked. “No. You mean, how was my day, that sort of thing?”

“Y-yeah,” Charlie said uneasily.

“My day was fine,” his father said in a flat voice.

“Did you get out of the house any?”

His father sniffed. He shot Charlie a look. “You like that question, don't you? You ask me that almost every night.”

“It's just a question.”

“Well, yes, I drove to the office. Did some things around here. The usual.”

The usual
, Charlie thought. That meant he hadn't done anything or gone anywhere.

After his father had drifted off to sleep on the couch, he went to his room, put on some music, and settled down next to his open window with his headphones on and the fan going. It wasn't so bad, what he was doing, was it? It wasn't like he
was cheating on Kate. Lots of guys he knew at school had girlfriends and tried to mess around with other girls. This was just getting high and lying about it.
Sue me
, he thought, lighting his pipe.

Mr. Webber started pointing
to his head long before he reached the Goody-Goody booth. Sam pretended not to see him. Standing behind the counter, he kept his eyes down on the round waffle iron and the spatula in his hand.

“Sam, how many times do I have to tell you?
Hat
.”

“Huh? Oh, hi, Mr. Webber. I was just making some waffle cones. I want to be ready for the Saturday-night rush. Did I show you my trick with the miniature marshmallows to solve the leak problem?”

“Where is your
hat
?”

“It's around here somewhere. I'll find it.”

“That was an awful visual I just got, Sam. I'm crossing the food court and I see eight different eateries, and eight identical mannequins behind the counters. If I were a potential customer, I could just as easily have gone over to the Cinnabon. Or the Dairy Queen. The eye should stop at Goody-Goody. That hat's an attention magnet.”

It certainly is,
Sam thought. Mr. Webber was a widower and a retiree from the phone company, where he'd worked as a supervisor for forty years, and once he'd retired, he hadn't known what to do with himself. So he'd bought a frozen-yogurt franchise and supervised that. He was a stickler for rules, and he was always popping up out of nowhere. He'd worked out a whole Goody-Goody philosophy, even though there was only him and a staff of four. “Draw 'em in hungry, send 'em out happy” was one of his mottos. “A little extra topping equals a little extra business” was another. For Sam, his five days a week were pretty much a cakewalk, because there were so many eateries in the food court that he never had more
than a couple customers at once. He didn't like the cleanup or the yogurt-machine maintenance, but other than that it was easy money—and a good excuse to get out of the house and away from Teddy for long stretches of time.

But the hat. What a nightmare. It was a blue baseball cap with the top of a brown waffle cone sticking out high on one side, and the bottom, pointy end sticking out low on the other, so it looked like the cone had come down out of the sky and pierced Sam's skull at a diagonal. The cone was topped with a round, white polyester blob that was supposed to be frozen yogurt and a cherry that dangled like a tassel. And, of course, the words
GOODY-GOODY
were stitched across the front. Franchise stuff Mr. Webber had been delighted to receive in the mail a few weeks ago, along with a new list of suggested company rules, one of which stated that if you were behind the counter, you wore the hat. It would have been better, Sam thought, if the cone had been turned upside down, like a dunce cap.

He held out as long as he could, but Mr. Webber wasn't going anywhere until he put that hat on his
head, so eventually he dug it out from under the counter and put it on.

“That's better,” Mr. Webber said. “Now what's this about a miniature marshmallow?”

“You put a miniature marshmallow in the bottom of the waffle cone while it's still hot,” Sam said in a flat voice, his enthusiasm gone now that he was under the weight of the hat. “It seals off the bottom so it won't drip.”

“That's great, Sam. You're using your head. I like that. Now, I've got some shopping to do, but I'll be back shortly, and I don't want to see you looking like all these other mannequins, you understand?”

“Absolutely,” Sam said.

Mr. Webber turned to go, but then glanced back over Sam's shoulder. “Vanilla's low,” he said. Then he wandered off through the food court.

Stuck in the hat
, Sam thought wearily. From the walk-in cooler he got a bag of vanilla mix as large as a king-size pillow, then climbed onto a footstool, hefted the awkward blob up, and flipped it over, twisting its spout open. A wave of milky liquid glucked out in surges, and gradually the bag got lighter.

“Pretty impressive,” said a voice behind him, “for someone who has a cone jabbed through his head.”

He started and turned around. “Melissa, you scared the hell out of me. You know what would happen if I dropped this?”

“Extra cleanup tonight?” She pushed her straight jet-black hair back from her face.

“Let's just say you could make a disaster movie out of it.
The Goop.
How are you?”

“The usual.” Melissa shrugged. “You're still coming over Monday night, right? There're going to be six of us this time.”

“Yeah, I'll be there.”

“Without the hat, I hope.”

“
Please
. Webber's snooping around, keeping an eye on me. It was an okay job until this cone-head thing started.”

“How did I not think of that? You
are
a cone head!”

“All right. A little sympathy for your friend, okay?” Sam climbed down from the footstool. “Did you get your pictures of the Pistol Museum?”

“Two rolls.
And
they let me photograph the
inside of the old jail. I sweet-talked them. Didn't have to do that at the cemetery, though—those people don't care
what
you do.”

“Very funny.”

“I think I'll get something.” Melissa squinted through her glasses at the flavors listed on the chalk-board. “Chocolate: boring. Mango-papaya: ick. Blueberry…that's what I want. Swirled with vanilla. And throw a few of those nuclear sprinkles on it.”

“At your service.” Sam took a medium cup off the stack.

“A small!” Melissa said. “Please, I'm a whale.”

“You are
not
.” He glanced around quickly, checking for Mr. Webber. “I'll give you a medium but charge you for a small, how's that?”

“Thanks. But make it a
small
medium.”

Sam was handing her the yogurt when he spotted Charlie Perrin across the food court.

Charlie was with Kate Bryant. They were holding hands, walking slowly toward the Pizza Hut and the Daniel Dogs, as if undecided about which one to go to. The last time Sam had laid eyes on Charlie, he'd
been running past the park at the back of their neighborhood and had seen Charlie shooting baskets. Sam had spotted him first and immediately veered away before he was noticed.

Melissa followed his gaze to the spot that was holding him transfixed.

“That's Charlie Perrin, isn't it? And Kate what's her-name.”

“Bryant,” Sam heard himself say.

“Right. One of those girls who doesn't know I exist because I'm not a size four. I guess we should be social and say hi.” Melissa waved at them.

“No!” Sam hissed. At that moment, he saw Charlie glance over.

“Why?” Melissa asked, lowering her hand. “Because of the hat?”

Suddenly remembering the hat, Sam yanked it off his head and shoved it under the counter. “I just don't want—don't
need
to talk to him.”

“God, that's right. You two aren't friends anymore, are you? When am I going to get
that
story?”

“There isn't any story,” Sam said. He was still holding the cup of blueberry-vanilla swirl; he shoved
it toward her. Over her shoulder, he saw Charlie's whole body make a kind of jerk, as if he were about to wave back. But Charlie didn't wave; the move was aborted. He turned with Kate toward the Daniel Dogs, and they approached the counter.

“Wow,” Melissa said. “I think we were just dissed. We were, right?”

“How should I know?” Sam snapped. “They probably didn't see us.”

“Not that I care. She can stick her size four where the sun doesn't shine.” Melissa brought a spoonful of yogurt to her mouth.

Hell
, Sam thought,
I had to be wearing that stupid hat.
He rang up the sale, stabbing his fingers against the buttons of the cash register, and took Melissa's money. She was going on about something and he was only half listening.

“…
so
tired of these snotty cliques that act as if the rest of the world—the average, everyday world—just doesn't exist. You know what I mean? It makes me want to punch someone.”

Someone
cleared his throat and said, “Can I get a small cup of mango-papaya, please?”

Both Sam and Melissa looked over. A guy was leaning against the end of the counter. His hair, so blond it was nearly white, rose up in a cool, crazy sweep off his forehead. He was wearing jeans and a light-blue, long-sleeved T-shirt with the words
YOUR BLISS
across the chest. He smiled, and then exhaled part of a laugh and said, “Don't punch me. I'm not part of a snotty clique, I swear.”

Sam recognized him. “You go to Cernak, right?”

“Yeah. I just transferred there last semester.” He held his hand out to Melissa. “Justin McConnell.”

Nobody shook hands nowadays. At least, no one they knew. Melissa looked down suspiciously, as if she'd been offered a joy buzzer, then brought up her own hand. “Melissa Rudge.”

“The photographer,” Justin said. “I know your work from the
Fountain
.”

A goofy grin spread across Melissa's face. “Wow! I'm recognized!” She pumped his hand energetically.

“You're right about cliques, by the way. They're boring and exclusive,” Justin said.

Sam felt nervous, for some reason. His hands weren't near anything, but he was certain he was
about to knock something over. Justin extended his own hand across the counter, and repeated his name. “I'm Sam,” Sam said, shaking it. He looked at Justin's wrist. He wore a thin, dark rope bracelet.

“Sam Findley,” Melissa clarified. “He works on the
Fountain
, too.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember that really classy article you wrote about…who was it—Ms. Crockett?—retiring.”

“That's…me.” Sam wondered when Justin McConnell had entered the food court and if that moment was before or after Sam had removed the waffle-cone hat from his head.

“He's going to be editor-in-chief next year,” Melissa said.

Justin nodded, impressed. “Kudos.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “It's a very important position. I'm actually doing undercover work right now, a crackdown piece on the whole…frozen yogurt scandal.”
Shut up
, he told himself.
Close your mouth
.

But Justin laughed. “Good. I love scandal. I'll be part of it, with my small cup of mango-papaya.”

Sam felt himself grinning. He looked from Justin
to Melissa, who motioned with her head toward the yogurt machine behind him. “Oh!” he said more loudly than he'd intended. “Duh!” He fumbled for a cup. “So…you moved here from the Midwest, right?”

“Yeah. Is it obvious?”

“No, it's just what I'd heard from Teisha.”

“That would be Teisha Springer,” Justin said. “Next year's class president.”

“You seem to know everyone.”

“Hard not to know Teisha after that big-budget campaign she launched. I'm still seeing those neon-colored posters whenever I close my eyes. But I knew her before that. She was the student assigned to show me around when I first got to the school.”

“Didn't you move here from one of those square states?” Melissa asked.

“Sort of. Ohio. It's not square, but it might as well be.” Justin dug money out of his pocket as Sam slid the cup across the counter. “What shape do you call Florida?”

“Oh, square,” Melissa said, “definitely.”

Sam couldn't stop staring at him. Justin looked so
relaxed, so comfortable with himself. Sam never could have gotten his own limp hair to swoop up like that. And Justin's skin was completely clear, which made Sam remember the bump on his chin that he shouldn't have messed with earlier because it was probably even redder now. When he met Justin's eyes again, Justin was looking right at him.

“You have a wicked smile,” Justin said.

The compliment (was it a compliment?) caught Sam off guard. “Wicked as in Witch of the West?”

“No. Wicked as in angelic. Sort of like bad as in good.”

“Or hot as in cool,” Melissa added.

“Exactly,” Justin said. “In fact, you have Montgomery Clift's smile.”

“He does. You're right.”

Who was Montgomery Clift? Embarrassed, Sam glanced down and said, “What's your shirt mean?” He pointed to the words
YOUR BLISS
.

Justin did a one-eighty for them. The back of his shirt read
FOLLOW IT
.

“Very cool,” Melissa said, nodding.

“You think? The three guys I passed in the parking lot didn't seem to agree.”

“What did they say?”

“Well, two of them snickered and one of them called me a fag. I assumed it was the shirt.”

Melissa groaned. “People are such assholes.”

Justin shrugged. “I didn't care. I felt like saying, ‘How very astute,' but I didn't think they'd know what
astute
meant.”

He looked down at his yogurt and stirred it with his plastic spoon. Melissa glanced at Sam and mouthed the word
Wow
.

Sam felt his hands threaten to knock things over again. He folded his arms across his chest.

“So,” Melissa said, “you're an old-movie buff.”

“You could say that. How did you know?”

“Not many people go around mentioning Montgomery Clift.”

“They should,” Justin said. “
A Place in the Sun
is one of the greatest movies of all time.”

“I just watched
The 400 Blows
,” Sam blurted out, wanting to contribute something.

“Truffaut,” Justin said. “It's a masterpiece. Did you like it?”

“It was great.”

“I love that last, long shot where you think some
thing awful is about to happen, but nothing does. It's so powerful.”

“Hey,” Melissa said, “you should come over to my house Monday night. I've been having this disaster movie fest, and a group of us are going to watch
The Poseidon Adventure
.”