Chapter Twelve
The evening seemed to take forever to arrive.
I couldn’t ever remember being so impatient for a day to pass by; by the time he made it from his bike to my front door I was already there and waiting for him. I was just as pleased to see that he’d dressed up for the occasion, just as I had. I was wearing just about the only nice dress I owned – a cute little navy blue number I’d just about been able to afford, back in the days when the restaurant was still doing OK. I was surprised I still fit into it. It wasn’t that I’d put on weight – it was hard to, running around like a madwoman in the diner, no matter how greasy and carb-laden the food was – but it had been a long time since I’d last had an opportunity to dress up. It was a shame. I looked good, I had to admit. The only thing that remotely spoiled the whole look was the small blue band aid on my palm, but somehow I got the feeling he wouldn’t object to that too much. If my dress was doing its job properly – and a look in the mirror told me that it most definitely was – then he’d barely even notice.
But he almost managed to outdo me.
I could never have imagined Hale at sixteen looking quite so at ease in a button-down shirt and slacks – thinking back to it, it was hard to imagine him wearing anything dressier than that old, ratty leather jacket – but the figure outside my door looks like he’s just escaped from the pages of a luxury menswear catalogue.
‘Wow,’ he says when he sees me, which is always a good sign. ‘I mean, really, wow. Carrie, you look…’
I give him a twirl in the doorway and follow it up with a goofy smile. ‘It’s OK, you can say it,’ I say. ‘Magnificent? Ravishing?’
‘Beautiful. You look beautiful.’
And suddenly, just for a second, the smile on my face isn’t so goofy after all.
‘You’re not doing badly yourself, Mister. You even ditched the jacket.’
He grins. ‘Wanted to make a good impression. How do I look?’
‘Oh, it’s working. A solid B-plus.’
‘I’ll take it. Ready to go?’
‘You bet.’
There aren’t really a lot of options for fine dining in Eden – if anything, the Red Rose Diner is one of the classiest options – so I’m not surprised when Hale announces that we’ll be spending the evening at Isabella’s, the closest thing Eden has to a fancy restaurant. Isabella’s is a real local institution: run by an old Polish couple, it’s about as far from a genuine Italian as Dallas is from Rome, but its red-and-white chequered tablecloths and corny wine bottle candles have made it stand out on the corner of Cypress and Penbrook for almost forty years. Isabella’s has seen more celebrations and sadnesses than just about any building in town, with the possible exception of the church, but even that would probably be a close call. When my parents got engaged, it was over a plate of Wilma Zielinski’s fettucine.
The building is small, intimate. You couldn’t ask for a better place for a first date.
Don’t read too much into it, I tell myself. It’s just a thank you dinner, that’s all. Nothing more or less than that.
‘After you,’ Hale says as he pushes the door open for me. It’s a little kitsch, maybe an outdated moment of chivalry, but I don’t mind in the least. We order dinner – mushroom risotto for me, and (after he asks for my recommendation of what’s good) a plate of salmon linguine for him – and drinks to go along with it.
‘I’ve never seen this place from the inside,’ he says casually, almost breezily.
‘No?’
He shakes his head. ‘It was always a little bit out of our price range when I was a kid, you know?’
‘Must be a bit weird coming back,’ I say. ‘I mean, after being in the city for so long.’
‘Yeah,’ he replies. ‘You know what’s really weird? When Merry took me out for dinner the first time – after she heard me playing at some open mic night – we went to this super-fancy restaurant out on the Upper East Side, all on the label’s dime. The kind of place that’s designed to be super imposing, you know? And I realised, no one there was having a good time. I wasn’t having a good time, and I wasn’t even the one thinking about the bill. It was just table after table of people pretending to fit in. The next meeting we had, once she’d run the idea of me past her bosses, I insisted we met up at this little taco place out in Brooklyn. I used to bus tables there when I first arrived in town, I knew every crack on every table, knew just what was good and what would leave you hunched over the toilet the next morning. And I paid the bill that night. But anyway, that’s my point. All of the fancy restaurants in New York, none of them compare to… Carrie?’
‘Sorry.’ His voice cuts through my distraction, pulling me back.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asks.
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Carrie,’ he says. ‘Don’t lie to me. What’s wrong? Is it something I said?’
‘No. God, no. Not at all.’
‘Then what?’
I gesture over to a table on the other side of the restaurant, where a tall blond man sits across from an almost equally tall, almost equally blonde woman. I hadn’t noticed him before I sat down, but there’s no way to avoid him now. More to the point, there’s no way to pretend he won’t notice us at some point in the evening. The minute he takes his eyes off his date – who, based on the look of her, doesn’t seem like she’s going to be enthralling conversation – it’s all but inevitable.
‘Carrie?’
‘Hmm?’
‘What is it?’
He turns in his chair, following my gaze, and then immediately I can see his whole body stiffen as he realises just who he’s looking at.
Scanlon. Aaron Scanlon. Here, of all places. Tonight, of all times.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say to him. ‘You want to leave?’
He shrugs. ‘And go where? Besides, I’m not running away from the likes of him. I didn’t when I was sixteen, and I’m sure as hell not going to start now.’
‘Who said anything about running?’ I ask. ‘It would just be…’
‘A tactical retreat?’ he says, then shakes his head. ‘Nope. Screw him. I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.’ And then, he does something entirely unexpected, something that – to an outside observer – would seem perfectly normal: he reaches across the table, and takes my hand in his. ‘Relax, Carrie,’ he says, stroking his thumb along the inside of my palm. ‘He doesn’t matter. Not anymore.’
Who doesn’t matter? I think for a moment; with the touch of Hale’s skin against mine, everything in the world outside of our little table is forgotten.
~~~
I spend the evening wrapped up in Hale’s stories: stories of music, stories of the city, stories of the last ten years. He tells me about the dive bars he used to play at when he was first trying to get noticed, the strange roommates he crashed with when money was tight, the nights he spent trying to sneak into concerts he could never have afforded.
‘Oh, Carrie,’ he tells me. ‘I never had more than twenty bucks to my name until I was about twenty-three – but God, it was fun.’
‘Would you do it over?’ I ask. ‘If you could?’
He grins, and gives my hand another little squeeze. ‘Not if you paid me. Does that make me boring?’
‘I think it means you’re an adult.’
‘Hmm,’ he says. ‘An adult. Who would have thought?’
I would have – and yet it’s strange, in a way. I always thought Hale was so much more mature than me, when we were younger. He was the cool older kid in his leather jacket. He had an actual honest-to-God job, while I was just picking up odd shifts in the Diner. He seemed to have so much responsibility on his young shoulders, I was honestly surprised the weight of it didn’t crush him down. Then he went away, off to the big city, and it would have been so easy for him to become a man-child – playing his guitar, hooking up with girls, sleeping on couches for the rest of his life. Somehow, it seems he managed to find a balance: mature, but youthful. Responsible, but fascinating.
Listening to his stories, I’m reminded that it’s been a long, long time since I spoke to anyone who made it out of Eden for longer than five minutes, let alone out of the state. The way he talks about his life now is like something out of a fairytale to me: the lights brighter, the food richer, the sound more vivid. New York has changed him. It’s sanded off his rough edges, yes, but it’s given him a confidence he never had.
I wonder for a moment what would have happened if I’d gone with him, and then I smother that thought underneath a mental pillow just as quickly. Don’t think about that, I tell myself. Just enjoy this for what it is.
A date, apparently. A date with Hale Fischer.
And there’s only one thing spoiling it.
‘Carrie?’ he asks. ‘You still with me?’
‘Sorry,’ I say, pulling my attention back to the man sitting across from me. ‘It’s Aaron.’
‘What about him?’
‘He keeps looking at us. He hasn’t taken his eyes off us all night.’
I can see Hale tense up; just for a moment he’s gripping the knife in his hand like he’s liable to find himself in a street brawl. Even after a decade, there’s still that much of a visceral reaction in him. ‘Forget him,’ he says at last. ‘If he starts any trouble, I’ll deal with it. Until then, I’m here for you, and only you.’
I can’t stop myself from smiling at that.
‘So what does he do now?’ Hale asks. ‘Scanlon, I mean. Still coasting on his daddy, I guess?’
I grin. ‘He runs a used car dealership out in Hogarth and still brags to anyone who’ll listen about the fact that he was the captain of the football team in high school. You know. The things that really matter.’
‘Is that so?’ Hale can barely keep the smile off his face.
‘Yep. To hear it from him, you’d think he was the second coming of Steve Jobs. He’s got the impression that he’s real hot stuff in the business world, but… well, you know.’ I gesture around myself, as if the meaning is obvious. It’s easy to be a big fish in a pond as small as Eden, even if you’re a guppy like Scanlon.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.’