I TOOK MY SNEAKERS OFF at the door and laid my keys down in the little dish on the kitchen counter. The volume on the TV was turned up in the other room.
“Hey you,” Isobel said as I entered the living room.
“Hey.” I plopped down onto the sofa next to her. “I was trying to be quiet in case you were sleeping.”
Subtext: I wasn’t trying to sneak in. But she was already side-eyeing me.
I tried to focus on the commercial that was playing; some late-night fast-food chain that made my stomach growl. Isobel pointed the remote at the TV, and I watched the volume bar lower until it was almost down to zero.
“So, how was your evening?” she asked.
“Okay. How about you? Busy night at the hospital?”
“Usually the Fourth is a lot worse. Only about a half dozen idiots with some second- and third-degree burns this year. And a middle-aged man fell off his roof—broke a couple things. A guy with a bullet hole in his thigh . . . I’ll never understand why people think it’s a good idea to celebrate by shooting guns into the air. What goes up must come down. But all in all, not too bad.” She paused, watching me nod along. “So, your night was just okay, huh?”
This was a game we played. I’d pretend I didn’t want to tell her what was going on, and she’d pretend to drag it out of me, when really we both wanted the same thing.
“Yeah, it was okay,” I repeated. “Just hung out.”
Isobel clicked her tongue three times, and breathed in deeply. I finally met her eyes. She was all grins, and then she shook her head and said, “Uhn, uhn, uhn.” As she exhaled, she sighed through the word “Kid . . .”
“What?”
She said only one word: “Trouble.”
“Why?”
“Why?” she mimicked. “Trouble,” she repeated, more firmly, pointing her finger at me.
I shook my head and laughed, and so did she. Then I stood up and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Good night, Aunt Isobel.”
“Good night, Trouble.”
I’d started to walk away, when she called behind me, “Hey, Chris?” I turned to look at her again. “You know a little trouble is good for the soul, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, taking the first step up the stairs.
“Oh, sure,” she sang, and I heard the volume on the TV going back up. “Love you!”
“Love you,” I called back.
When I lay down in bed, it was almost as if I could still feel my body moving. A phantom car ride. The scent of firework gunpowder lingered in the air. I felt light-headed and dizzy and perfectly warm and perfectly cool. Part of me wanted to ignore the sparkly feeling lighting up my chest, because I damn well knew what those sparkly feelings were all about.
They were trouble.
They were terrifying. But they felt so good too.