Chapter Thirty-Eight
Allie
The next morning as we were eating breakfast, Mr. Savery somewhat abruptly set down his knife and fork and folded his fingers under his chin, looking at me thoughtfully.
“I hope you haven’t made any plans for the rest of the day, Allie,” he said. “I’m going to shoot skeet today, and I’d love it if you’d join me.”
“Gosh, it’s been so long since I’ve played that game,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve played since college.”
Curtis spit out his drink, spraying it everywhere. Both he and his father stared at me, dumbfounded. “I didn’t know you’d ever been huntin’,” said Curtis. “If I’d known that, I might’ve gone out with you sooner.”
“Hunting?” I said, perplexed. I felt like I was losing the thread of the conversation. “You must be mistaken. I’ve never picked up a gun in my life.”
“How’d you manage to go skeet-shootin’ then?” asked Mr. Savery.
It was rapidly becoming clear that we weren’t talking about the same thing. “You know that game with the table and the pegs, where you hit things?”
“Foosball?” said Curtis.
I waved him away. “No, not foosball! I know what foosball is. You guys, I’ve played this game so many times. There’s a room with a big wooden table, and you have, like, a puck, and you have to hit it into these triangles…”
“You mean hockey?” said Curtis, looking gape-mouthed at his father. But it was Mrs. Savery who came to my rescue.
“Oh, you mean shuffleboard,” she said.
I threw up my hands in the air and pointed at her. “Yes! Thank you! Shuffleboard!”
Curtis shook his head. “That is not at all what skeet-shooting is.”
I sat back down and dabbed at my mouth delicately with a cloth napkin. “Oh, well then I’ve never done that.”
“You’ll love it,” said Mr. Savery with an excited gleam in his eyes. “I don’t care if you’ve never picked up a gun. I’ll show you how to do it. The weather’s fairly mild out, and there’ll be plenty of time for us to chat and hang out.”
He rose from the table and bounded down the hallway with a bounce in his step. I turned to Curtis and said in a quiet voice, “Aren’t you coming?”
Curtis shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “Ain’t been invited.”
“Huh.” Mr. Savery and I had never spent any time together one on one. I couldn’t help wondering what he wanted with me.
After breakfast, Curtis stuck around the house and helped his mother make a spiced apple cake. Instead of taking the horses, Mr. Savery led me a distance of about a thousand yards to a large clearing dotted with clumps of scrub. He had been right about the mildness of the weather; it was unseasonably chilly, more like autumn than late summer, and I began to wish I had brought a sweater.
Mr. Savery offered me his hunting jacket, which I accepted gratefully as he showed me the basics of raising and firing a gun.
“You probably won’t hit anything the first few times you come out here,” he said. “But at least you’ll get practice, and with that and enough time, you’ll get better at aiming, and eventually you’ll be the one bringing home supper.”
I tried to imagine what Curtis would say if he found out that the excellent meal his mother had just set before him had been shot and bagged by me. I felt a warm glow of pleasure at picturing the stunned look on his face.
But Mr. Savery was right about needing practice. I fired a few shots at the clay figures without hitting a single one.
He led us to another part of the clearing where grackles were gathered among the bare branches of a couple of dead cedars. Along the way, we got to talking. Every few paces or so, he would pause to take a shot, then resume the conversation.
“Reason I asked you out here,” he said, “is because I wanted to get to know you a little better. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Curtis thinks the world of you.”
“He does seem to enjoy me,” I said, not really knowing what else to say. “We have fun together.”
“He’s crazy about you,” said Mr. Savery, his gaze fixed on a lone bird perched on a branch about fifty yards distant. “I’d even venture to say he’s in love with you. I can tell by the way he looks at you. It’s the same way my wife looks at me when she thinks I’m not looking. Still completely smitten after all these years.”
I hadn’t put it in those terms yet, but now that I thought about it, I supposed he must be. The thought gave me a pleasant shiver. Despite all the obstacles that had conspired to separate us, we were in love now. I didn’t know what that meant for the future, but I felt sure it could only be good.
We left the clearing and returned home just as the sun was setting, bathing the surrounding fields in a dusky orange glow. As we entered the house through the back door, we found Curtis rinsing his hands at the kitchen sink. He gave me a hard stare as we came in, as if to say, “What was that all about?”
Mr. Savery, however, just nodded and went to put up our guns.
“You have no idea how confused I am by all of this,” Curtis said as we walked home that night beneath a saffron sky. “What did you and my dad even have to talk about? I can’t imagine any conversation lasting longer than a couple minutes.”
I began whistling, my hands in my back pockets. “Oh, we found things to talk about.”
Curtis rolled his eyes. “You’re never going to tell me, are you?”
I turned to face him, walking back over the tall grass. He looked so cute when he was flustered like this, and I couldn’t help grinning as I looked at him. “Maybe someday,” I said with a shrug.
“Allison Driscoll,” he said with a shake of his head as we entered the dark house. “Long as I live, I’m never going to understand you.”