Walk Me Home (11 page)

“
The Mummy
?”

“Hey,” he said. “This is a classic.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Where’d you go?”

“I just wanted to take a walk.”

“No. Really. Where’d you go?”

“I walked, Teddy.”

She’d started to say, “I just walked.” But that wasn’t true. She did more than
just
walk. But she did walk. So she stuck with that.

“This have something to do with that boy?”

It relieved Carly to hear him guess wrong.

“I didn’t see him,” she said. Hoping he might think she’d tried.

“Better luck next time.”

They sat for a time. Watching the horrible film. How long a time, Carly wouldn’t have been able to say. Could have been five or ten minutes, or it could have been half an hour.

Then the front door opened, and Carly’s mom came through. Something came up and filled a big hole in Carly’s heart, from the inside. Maybe Carly really had made things better. Maybe it really was possible to advocate for what’s right. And get it.

The look on her mom’s face was hard to read.

She came and stood over them, hands on her hips.

“Don’t you three look comfy.”

“Because we are,” Teddy said. “I hope you’re hungry. I made your favorite dinner.”

Carly watched the look on her mom’s face change. Soften. And Carly didn’t think it was about spaghetti and meatballs with extra Parmesan, although that may have been a contributing factor. Carly realized then that her mom had been waiting to see whether Carly had ratted her out.

“You’re a sweetheart, Ted,” she said. “I’m starved.”

“Oh, good. I was worried maybe you ate at work.”

“Just nibbled on the French fries all night. But that didn’t get me much of anywhere. Carly. Wake up your sister, and you girls go upstairs to bed. If you’re not sleepy, you can tuck in and read. Me and my beau have some celebrating to do. Three’s a crowd.”

Teddy’s arm disappeared. So did Teddy.

Carly shook Jen awake, gently, and half held her on her feet all the way up the stairs.

Then she snuck back down and watched from the landing. Just for a minute. Watched through the open kitchen doorway as Teddy poured her mom a glass of red wine. Then he disappeared again. She heard that deep, throaty laugh that Teddy only used when her mom was around. Heard her mom say, “There’s no music, you big dope.” A minute later they waltzed past the doorway in each other’s arms, Teddy humming a tune.

Carly withdrew up the stairs. And slept. Well. For the first time in a long time.

TULARE

December 18

“Absolutely,” Carly’s mom said. “Absolutely you can.”

It didn’t feel right. It felt too easy.

They were sitting at the breakfast table. Just the two of them. Jen had ridden her bike to her friend Krista’s house, and Teddy wasn’t even up yet. Carly’s mom held on to her coffee cup as if it contained some life-saving serum for exactly what might be about to kill her. Her face looked ragged and tired without all that makeup.

“Seriously? You’re really going to let me go?”

“Oh yeah. Absolutely. Best idea I ever heard. You just keep an eye on the weather reports and give a yell when hell freezes over.”

Carly absorbed the news the way she might absorb a slap.

She stood and marched out of the room.

She could think of a dozen things to say, but she couldn’t untangle them, one from the other. Besides, it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good. Suggesting that her mom was being unfair would not bring about fairness. And it didn’t help to be angry. Because Carly’s
mom could out-angry Carly. She could out-angry anybody. She could bully Teddy, and Teddy was a big, strong grown man.

Carly made her way upstairs, into her room, and slammed the door behind her.

She picked up the phone, then realized that the phone book was downstairs. Rather than risk it, she called directory assistance.

“What city, please?” the operator asked.

“Tulare.”

“What listing?”

“Hannish. With two
n
’s. I think. I don’t know the first name.”

“I have a Dean Hannish Senior on West San Joaquin Avenue.”

“That’s it. Thanks.”

She wrote the number on the inside of her hand in red pen. Her heart thrummed lightly. The ink absorbing into her hand made it feel important, like tattooing a guy’s name on her skin. The redness of it made it feel forbidden. It was both of those things and so much more. She didn’t know what, specifically, the “more” was. But she was determined to find out.

She dialed the number, and Dean—her Dean, not Dean Senior—picked up on the second ring.

“’Bout time you called, you big asshat,” he said, in that place where “hello” would normally have fit.

“Um…”

“Oh. You’re not Jerry. Uh-oh. Sorry. Sorry. Especially if you’re calling for my mom. Extra sorry.”

“No, I’m calling for you.”

“Carly?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey. Carly. Hey. Glad you called. Wasn’t sure if you’d call.”

A long, awkward silence.

Then he said, “You coming to the cabin tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Carly said. “Absolutely I am.”

“Great. We’ll leave at eleven. Give or take. We’ll swing by and pick you up around eleven.”

“No!” she said, far too stridently. Nearly giving it all away. “No, that’s fine. I’ll come to your house. Your address is in the book, right?”

“You sure you don’t want to get picked up? Parents like that.”

“Positive.”

“Slight problem. You can’t come to the house. The only reason my dad’s letting us go alone is because he thinks it’s all guys. Tell you what. Pick you up in the parking lot behind the middle school.”

“OK.”

“See you tomorrow.”

Carly set the phone back into its cradle. Gently. The way she’d handle live ordnance.

It was pretty simple, really, in her head. One of two things would happen. Teddy would work with her, and for her, persuading her mom to change her mind. Or Carly would take off in the morning, leaving a note. Her mom wouldn’t find the note until after work, when Carly would be long gone.

The note could say something like:

After I get home you can punish me for the rest of the history of civilization. But right now, for once in my life, I’m going to be the one who gets chosen.

When Carly came downstairs around lunchtime, Teddy had three friends over. His usual guy friends. Ernie and Paul and Javier. They were playing poker in the kitchen.

Teddy had bowls of tortilla chips and salsa in the middle of the table. Amid the poker chips. Carly stuck her head into the kitchen just in time to watch Paul call a raise and toss a blue poker chip right into the salsa. It splashed. All four guys made audible noises of disgust. Ernie almost stuck his hand in the salsa to retrieve it, but
Teddy yanked the bowl out of the way before that disaster could happen.

As he was carrying it to the sink, he saw Carly over his shoulder.

“Hey, you,” he said.

He tossed Paul a dish towel, and Paul set about swiping at the stacks of poker chips to catch the salsa splashes.

Teddy took a fork out of the drawer and fished the poker chip out of the salsa. Rinsed both under the tap.

“At noon?” Carly asked.

“What better time to have chips and salsa than at noon?”

“I meant the poker. Isn’t poker sort of like drinking? Don’t normal people do it after five?”

Her eyes settled back to the table, where she noted that each of the four men had an open beer going.

“When you’re unemployed,” Teddy said, “every hour of the day is after five.”

All three of the guys nodded. Ernie and Javier clinked the mouths of their beer bottles together in a toast to the sentiment.

Teddy sat back down and rearranged the table so that the tortilla chips and salsa sat between Teddy and Paul. Where they would be safer.

Javier took a cigar out of his pocket and clamped it in his teeth.

Teddy set his cards facedown on the table.

“I will kill you with my bare hands,” he said, staring down Javier.

Javier was searching his pockets for a lighter and didn’t notice. Finally Paul jabbed him in the ribs.

“Oh. Who? Me?” Javier asked, meeting Teddy’s eyes.

“You’re the one with the cigar, so, yes. I will kill you with my bare hands if you light that thing in this house. And I won’t even have to face legal retribution because my lovely and delicate lady
friend will murder me in cold blood the second she walks through the door and smells what you’ve done.”

Carly leaned on the kitchen door frame and tried not to smile. It was fun to watch the men interacting. Especially with her mother playing an offscreen role as the attractive-yet-wicked witch.

“Teddy—” Javier began.

“Get thee to the back porch.”

“I don’t want to miss any rounds.”

“Great,” Teddy said. “Nice priorities. It’s not worth missing a round, but it’s worth signing my death warrant. I’ll be sure to come back and haunt you. Now put the stinky thing away.”

Javier sighed and slid the still-unlit cigar into his shirt pocket.

“Teddy,” Carly said. Suddenly. Surprising even herself.

“Yeah, hon?”

“I need to talk to you about something.”

“OK, but it’ll have to wait till after the game.”

“It’s important, though.”

“I got real money riding on this game, Carly. You know how little real money I’ve actually got?”

“I just…Did you talk to Mom about Dean?”

“I’m sorry, hon. Last night was not the right time.”

“So…you’ll talk to her today?”

“Um…Hmm…Things were better when I made that offer. I’m on thin ice with your mom right now.”

Carly just leaned a moment, marveling at how Teddy and her mom could be in trouble again so quickly. Last night they’d been sweethearts, just like the old days. Still, Carly couldn’t help but register that her mom’s swing back to Teddy was abrupt. Abrupt even for Carly’s mom, who only made sudden turns, with no notice or signaling. And if the number of towns and houses Carly had lived in over the past sixteen years was any indication, her mother didn’t stay in anything very long.

“You promised me, Teddy,” she said. Quietly. No overt emotion. But it was in there. Hiding.

“If I’m on her bad side, it could do you more harm than good, Carly. If she’s mad at me, and I say I think you should go, she’ll be a hundred times more sure you shouldn’t.”

That was true, and Carly knew it. Then again, “when hell freezes over” times a hundred might not be all that much worse than the original. Like multiplying zero by anything and still getting zero.

Carly peeled away from the doorway and sat on the big, over-stuffed chair by the front window. Looked out at the empty street. Every now and then a car drove by, one of them pumping out that gut-shaking bass from its sound system. Teddy had set up a fake snowman draped with Christmas lights on the lawn. It made her feel like a little kid to stare at it. To like it. To be comforted by it.

Maybe she was just a little kid. She wasn’t sure anymore.

She also wasn’t sure she was going.

Watching Teddy quake at the very idea of her mother’s wrath had shaken her. Wakened her senses. Was she really brave enough to do something her mother had expressly forbidden her to do?

She envisioned her mother marching over to Dean Senior’s house to find out where the cabin was located. Or calling the police and having them ask the questions. Dean would never speak to her again, never forgive her. None of them would. Word would travel. No one she went to school with would ever trust her for anything. Here Dean might have finally convinced his dad that they were mature enough to go up there alone. Carly could ruin everything.

She couldn’t go. There was no other answer. She just couldn’t go.

But she had told Dean she could.

Maybe she could feign illness.

It twisted into her stomach so tightly, so sickeningly, that it occurred to her that she might not have to fake it. Making a fool of herself in front of those three popular boys might be enough to make her sick for real.

Teddy came in about an hour later. Sat on the rug by her chair, arms wrapped around his knees. Looked out the window with her.

Carly listened and realized she couldn’t hear Teddy’s three friends in the kitchen anymore. Could they really have walked right through the living room and out the front door without her noticing? And why hadn’t she noticed when the voices, the slap of the cards, the clinking of the chips stopped? She tried to track where her head had been but came up empty. She literally didn’t know.

“Are the guys gone?” she asked, her voice sounding as though it had been in storage for days.

“Yup.”

“I didn’t hear them go.”

“They went out the kitchen door.”

“Oh. How’d you do?”

“Bad.”

“How much did you lose?”

“Let’s just say…everything I had to lose and then some.”

“Ow.”

“I’m on thin ice with your mom.”

“I know. You said that. Those were her words, weren’t they? She said that to you, right? Pointed her fingernail at your nose and said, ‘You’re on thin ice with me, Ted.’ Right?”

“Pretty much.”