Where We Belong (45 page)

“I have.”

“You said you could save a thousand a month.”

“Not that much.”

“But we’re saving fifteen hundred a month over where we were before.”

“Life intervenes, kiddo.”

It was not the first time she’d said that. I hadn’t liked it any of the other times, either.

“How much do we have?”

“A hair under twelve thousand.”

“Which is, like, half of what I thought. But at least it’s enough for a down payment on something. I think.”

“You’re forgetting two things, Angie. One of them is sitting right here at the table with you, eating link sausage. The other is that I have no credit. Which I’ve told you before. Every time you bring up buying instead of renting, I tell you that. And you always manage to conveniently forget.”

“I didn’t forget.”

“You have some magic trick in your pocket I know nothing about?”

“Maybe.”

“And that would be…?”

“That would be a friend who worked for forty-five years as a loan officer at a bank.”

She wrinkled her nose and forehead. Took a sip of coffee. Shook her head.

“I don’t think it’s a ‘who you know’ kind of proposition. More of a ‘how much you have.’”

“I just thought he could give us some advice on how to get a loan.”

“I’m sure he will. He’ll say, ‘Start with good credit.’”

I shook my head and said nothing. I had that “this is getting us nowhere” feeling again. It hit me that I got that feeling a lot around my mom. If it had been a day or two earlier, I might have jumped up and gone blasting away from the table in disgust. But that was getting old.

Besides. I was hungry.

Rachel showed up four days later. And only stayed two days.

On the day she left again, my mom had dropped me off at the apartment on her way to work. Partly because the Special Ed van still met Sophie there in the morning and dropped her off there in the afternoon. Partly because, if I hung out there during the day, I’d know when Rachel was gone, and whether we needed to camp another night. And it didn’t matter if
I
was there. They couldn’t hear me up there, and it didn’t change things for them at all.

It was Sophie. Sophie was the wild card.

I went upstairs and took a shower, and then poured myself some cereal. Before I even finished eating it, I heard Rachel’s car pull out of the garage. I looked out the window, hoping they were both going somewhere.

It was just Rachel.

I sat back down at the table and tried to think whether it would be okay to ask Paul how it went. I never managed to figure that out. My logic just kept going around in circles. It also occurred to me that maybe she was just running to the store or something and was coming back.

The phone rang. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I grabbed it up on the second ring.

It was Paul.

“You’re there,” he said. “Great.”

“You sound happy.”

“I am happy. Why wouldn’t I be happy?”

“I don’t know. It was such a short visit.”

“Good one, though. Come fishing with me.”

“Okay. Is there something to tell here? I mean, are you going to tell me what happened? I mean,
if
something happened. I’m not saying anything did. Just that… you sound really happy.”

“Meet me at the garage,” he said.

I did.

We packed up our gear and drove to one of those tiny, cold mountain lakes.

But while we were doing all that, he never told me what happened.

We were standing in a lake up to our waists—well, my waist—and had been for some time when he said, “I think I feel weird talking about it.”

“So you’re not going to tell me what happened?”

“I didn’t say that. Probably I am. I just feel weird about it.”

“So what do you want me to do while I’m waiting? Just fish and shut up? Or am I supposed to be trying to drag it out of you?”

“That’s a good question. I’m not sure.”

I was looking at his face when he said it, and I laughed out loud. Then he wanted to know why, and I didn’t know what to say. He didn’t exactly
ask
why. Not out loud. He just gave me a look that I could tell meant he wanted to know. I thought it was interesting that we could do things like that without talking.

Here’s the reason I laughed, if I could have put it into words at the time. Because when he was happy and excited, which he never had been before, that I knew of, he was sort of… adorable. But that’s not the kind of thing you say to a sixty-eight-year-old grown man, even if you can wrap words around it while it’s happening.

“We’ll play Twenty Questions,” I said. “Paul? Did something happen?”

“Yes. Not a huge something. Well. Yes. It was huge. But
you
might not think so.
Something
happened, but not
everything
. Does that make sense?”

“I’ve only asked one question so far.”

“She kissed me. I mean, we kissed. But
she
kissed
me
. I’m not saying I didn’t kiss her back. Of course I did. But she was the one who kissed me. That’s how it started.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“And then… why did she leave?”

“We both just sort of… we talked about it. We didn’t want to go rushing ahead. You know. Hurry things too much. We decided to go to our separate corners and see how we feel about what happened. I bet that sounds pathetic to you. Really old-fashioned. When you’re sixteen, that must seem pathetic.”

“As a sixteen-year-old who has, pathetically, not yet been kissed, I’d be a fine one to judge.”

He threw his left arm around my shoulders—he needed the right one for the fishing pole—and pulled me in close to him and gave me a big smack on the forehead. Hard enough to bend my head back.

I laughed out loud again.

“Thank you, but that still doesn’t count.”

“Of course it doesn’t. I didn’t mean for it to. If you think it’s pathetic to never have been kissed, imagine if your first kiss was from me. Now that’s pathetic.”

“I bet Rachel didn’t think it was pathetic.”

“That’s entirely different. Rachel is—”

Then he stopped talking to reel in a fish.

He pulled it up out of the water, and it twisted there on the end of the line, and he stood there in the lake and stared at it. Didn’t try to get it in the landing net. Just watched it hanging there, like he hadn’t expected any such thing to happen. That fish must have been hooked deep, because it couldn’t capitalize on the opening.

Finally I opened the creel basket and held it right under his fish, and he lowered it in and then took the hook out.

“It’s all about focus,” I said.

He cast back into the middle of the lake, and I put my rod between my knees, so I wouldn’t drop it. And then I threw my arms around him sideways and gave him an awkward sideways hug, pinning his arms to his sides, and sloshing the lake a bit higher onto us.

“What was that for?” he asked, quite a bit after the fact.

“It’s just nice to see you so happy.”

“Even though…?”

He never finished the question. But it didn’t matter, because I knew the finish of it, anyway.

“Yes. Even though, if it works out, we’ll be looking for a new place. It’s still nice to see you so happy.”

We fished in silence for a few minutes.

Then he said, “That’s unusual. Most people think of themselves first. That’s a pretty damn good friend.”

“Well, I’m glad you think so, because this pretty damn good friend is about to ask a pretty damn big favor. You know how I’m always looking at the real estate ads in your paper? Well, I found something I want to look at. I was hoping you’d take me out there to see it. I know I told you I wouldn’t need rides after I got my license. But I don’t want to ask my mom if I can borrow her car, because I don’t want her to know why yet, because she’ll try to talk me out of going. Because she’s totally down on the idea of buying something. She says we’d never make it work. That she doesn’t have the credit.”

“Does she have a down payment?”

“Is twelve thousand dollars a down payment?”

“It might be.”

“Good. I’ve asked her twice before to go look at places with me, and she won’t do it. I think it makes her feel degraded when they ask a bunch of money questions.”

“They don’t.”

“They don’t?”

“Not the seller. The bank you approach to handle the financing, now they’ll ask questions. And the answers had better be on paper. But the seller or the real estate agent just shows you the place.”

“Oh. Then I don’t know why she won’t go. I can’t really go by myself. Even if I could get the car. Because I don’t even think they’d show it to me. I mean, who shows real estate to a sixteen-year-old? But if we didn’t happen to mention that we’re not related…”

“That’s not such a huge favor.”

“It’s almost twenty miles outside of town.”

“I think I could manage that all the same. What do they want for it?”

“It’s cheap.”

“How cheap?”

“Cheap enough that I don’t want to tell you how cheap, because you’ll say there has to be a catch.”

“Well,” he said. “Only one way to find out. Let’s give the fish another half an hour, and then we’ll go see if there’s a catch.”

We were driving out this little winding highway. Farther and farther from town. Paul was all lost in his own head, and I was just looking at the scenery. Even though it was nothing but trees.

You could do worse than trees.

“Why did this happen?” he asked. Just out of nowhere like that.

“Why did what happen?”

“This thing with Rachel. Why did it not happen for fifty years and then happen?”

I swallowed hard and tried to get a bead on how he meant it. He seemed kind of intense, and I couldn’t figure out if he was just being philosophical, or if he really thought there was something there to investigate.

“Well, forty-eight of those years she was married.”

“Forty-seven.”

“I think the point is the same. Forty-seven years she was married, and the year before that, she was a college woman, and you were just a kid.”

“But why did it not happen in all this time since Dan died, and then suddenly happen? I still don’t quite know how it happened.”

I sat very still in the passenger seat for a minute and wondered how much I was willing to lie to cover my tracks. Not much, I think. I convinced myself that he was thinking out loud. Not really asking me, like I would know. But even if it was a rhetorical question, I still felt like dirt for holding something back from Paul. Then I realized I’d been holding something back from him for a long time. And feeling like dirt a lot. But it was a decision I made before I talked to Rachel. There was no going back now.

“Wouldn’t that come under the heading of looking a gift horse in the mouth?”

He peered through the windshield with that same furrow in his brow, that same faraway look in his eyes, for another half a minute or so. Then it broke like a fever and flew away.

“Yeah, I think you’re right about that. I hope we weren’t supposed to make an appointment. Did it say in the ad ‘By appointment only’? Or ‘Do not disturb occupant’? Or something along those lines?”

“I don’t know. I’ll look again.”