Laura
Part of me hoped, deep down, that Dave wouldn’t be there when I got back. It was how he was. He wanted to leave, and he’d spent every year since I’ve known him talking about how he wasn’t going to be in the same place for more than a couple of days if he could help it.
Definitely not a little place like this, though. Not some po-dunk nothing town in a place too cold to live. Well, it’s not cold right now. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t gone yet. Maybe that was why I found him sitting on the couch frowning. I moved past him and kept moving through the house.
“Hey,” I said softly as I made it into the rear bedroom. Dave’s mother sat in her bed, reading something on her phone. It was most of what she did, if I left her to her own devices. It was only when I made her leave the room that she did so, and then only with a great deal of trouble. “How’d you sleep?”
“He’s in the front room,” Mrs. Collins answered. I closed my eyes.
“I know. But I’m here for you, regardless of whether he’s here or not.”
“Are you sure?” She let out a long breath after she said it, like she was slowly letting all the air out of herself. “I’ll be alright by myself.”
“You’re barely alright with me around.”
“Whatever,” she said. It wasn’t an agreement, but it was what I was able to get right now, and it’s better than a flat-out refusal.
It wasn’t like I have some right to be here, after all. She’s just another neighborhood woman to me, really.
“You need to get up.”
“You should be with Charlie,” Mrs. Collins said.
“Charlie’s still at school.”
I watched her lips pinch together. “Shouldn’t you be at school, too?”
“I’m done for now.”
“Work?”
“Not until tonight.”
“You work yourself too hard. If you’re at school in the morning, and work at night, and you’re here in the middle of the day, when do you expect to sleep?”
“Don’t worry about me,” I say. It’s a duck, but it’ll have to work because there’s no answer I’m going to give that she’s going to be happy with, and there’s no way that I’m going to leave here in either case.
“I wish I didn’t have to,” she said. Then something surprising happened. She pushed her feet towards the edge of the bed and stood up.
“Wow, that’s good! You’re doing great!”
The withering expression that came from Mrs. Collins’s face was enough to kill some small shrubs all on its own. “Don’t patronize me, Laura.”
“I’m… you know what? You do you.”
I leaned back against the wall. “So what do you want for lunch?”
“I don’t eat lunch.”
“No,” I agreed. “You usually don’t. But today, you do, because tonight I’m going out on a date.”
Diana raised her eyebrows at me. “You’re kidding. A date?”
“A date.”
“Anything serious?”
“I’ve had more serious things before,” I said. Not really an answer.
“Having someone babysit Charlie?”
I made a face. I need to get one. At least, I should get one.
“I was thinking I’d bring him along, you know?”
“That serious?”
No, I think. No, I’m just going to scare him off. Like I’ve scared off all the others. “We’ll see how it goes.”
“I need to have the house to myself sometimes. You know?”
“I don’t know if I understand what you’re saying.”
“So if you needed a babysitter, then I could offer one.”
“I don’t know if…”
Mrs. Collins let out a sigh. “Please? You’d be doing me a favor. If you don’t want to ask him, then I can do it.”
“I still don’t really know if that’s such a good idea.”
“The boy should meet his father.”
That made me press my lips together. “I’m not telling him, if that’s what you’re asking me to do.”
Mrs. Collins shrugged and looked down at her phone, leaning back against the wall. She scrolled through Facebook posts that had a lot of words in them and mostly said nothing at all.
“I didn’t ask you to do anything. I asked you to let me have a night off. Take a night off yourself. We can kill two birds with one stone, at least. And it wouldn’t be right to never let the two of them meet.”
I let out a sigh. Morally, she’s right. It wouldn’t be right. Which is one of the biggest reasons that Dave coming back, after all this time, after never sending a single message back to any of us, after being incommunicado for almost a decade, is a problem.
Because before this, I didn’t have to tell him. I couldn’t tell him if I wanted to. And now, I’ve got to come up with a good reason that I can’t trust him. Or at the very least, a good excuse.
Sometimes, you have to make do.
“You think he’ll go for it?”
“I think if you asked him,” Mrs. Collins began. I cut her off.
“You’re vastly overestimating what he thinks about me.” I turned and leaned to look down the hall. It was empty as far as the far kitchen wall. He might have been able to hear us, but I had no reason to believe that he had.
“I think you’re vastly underestimating, Laura. But it’s not my choice, okay? Now, what are you planning on making me eat this time? Or will you just let me buy a damn pizza for once?”
I sigh. “I’m not going to let you eat a pizza because Don Jones doesn’t know how to work an oven. You want a pizza that bad, I’ll make you one tomorrow, alright?”
“Donny’s a nice enough man,” Mrs. Collins objected.
“Of course he is,” I say patiently, walking back to the kitchen. “But nice guys don’t necessarily know how to run a kitchen, and he’s not one of the exceptions to that rule.”
I peered into the other room, looking for some sign that Dave had heard us. He doesn’t give one. He’s leaned back and laid out on the couch. The hem of his tee shirt’s ridden up to show tight, lined muscle. Suddenly an emergency brake goes in my head.
Don’t think it, don’t say it, and don’t go down that road again. I made a mistake once. It’s not going to be a clean brake like it was last time if I take the plunge again. But God, looking at him, do I want to.