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Warren is there, waiting in his car a block away from Billups Hardware. His arm shoots out of the window as I come close, his fingers reaching for me, and I let our fingers meet. That amazing electric jolt rockets through me, and I lean down, my arms folding on the rolled-down window, his hand sliding along my biceps to my shoulder. I feel like water, liquid and weak. The slightest pressure on my shoulder draws me close and his kiss is warm and soft. He smells like mint and shampoo and soap. The hint of smoke that usually hangs on him has been washed away.
When we part, he motions for me to come around and get into the car. I do, scooting in front of the hood as the engine roars to life. I open the door and slide into the slick leather seat, smiling and excited. “Where are we going?” I ask, and he smiles a sly, sideways smile and takes off into the road without even looking for traffic. Riding in his car feels dangerous, uncontrolled, free. He isn’t reckless so much, other than not looking when we pulled out; it’s more that the car seems to float and slide along the pavement. That’s it, I realize—it feels like we are hovering, and that feels dangerous, like we are not properly connected to the Earth and may fly off, without warning, into the stratosphere.
“How have you been?” he asks, his voice low, casual.
“Really great.” I then realize that he was thinking about my mother being dead. We haven’t talked about that and “really great” was a totally shit thing to say. “Well, you know . . .” I add, blushing, turning to look out the window. It’s a strange sensation when I realize that entire minutes and hours pass and she doesn’t even cross my mind. There is something very wrong about my emotions, something off in the way I connect to other people.
“What have the police said?” He doesn’t sound like he even noticed my very uncool response.
“Suicide.” That is what they said in the papers and on the news. I know they are not certain it was suicide, but their investigation is very quiet as it continues, snooping around the edges of what my mother’s life was. There were suspicious circumstances that day in the apartment. I want to tell him what they’ve said. I want to tell him about being questioned by Detective Adam’s Apple, and all the things he asked, but I bite my tongue. Remembering that he is Cal’s brother and Cal is their number one suspect, if he ever comes back. “Have you heard anything from Cal?” I ask and wonder if he can read the direction of my thoughts.
“No. I’m sure he’s fine though, wherever he is. Bastard.” He says the last word without animosity, without any heat—like saying “man” or “brother,” just a title. He swallows hard, and I see the muscles of his jaw twitch. They have a difficult relationship. He doesn’t like his brother; I know this from things he has said. I know he holds scars front his brother’s fists, but blood is thick, and anything I say to him may make its way back to Cal, either directly or through the grapevine. The line of his jaw pulses as he sets his teeth then releases them, glancing at me with that so-sexy half smile back in place. We drive out of Charleston on 16 and head toward Mattoon. We wheel past the entrance to the interstate and turn down a frontage road and end up in the parking lot of Luke’s Steakhouse.
“Oh?” I say, looking at him. Our last date, our only date, consisted of me watching his band, Elliot’s Child, in a dive of a bar called Blind Billy’s. I had expected this would be along the same lines.
“You like food, right?” he asks, mocking.
I match his tone. “I do like food.”
He slips out of the car and is around to my side before I even get my door open. He swings it with a flourish and offers me his hand. His exaggerations take the worry away, and I laugh, letting him take my hand and lead me through the parking lot to Luke’s. My eating-out experiences are very few and very far between, and I try not to look like a country cousin when we go inside, but the dead buffalo and long-horned cow heads mounted on the walls make my jaws drop, creeping me out, and my appetite takes a dive. The hostess leads us to a booth in the back, and I am grateful that no great moose, goat, or cow is looking directly down on me.
“You ever been here?” he asks, looking calm and confident.
I shake my head.
“You’re in for a treat.”
I take up the menu and start reading through it. What is an Exploded Onion? Spinach and Artichoke Dip sounds completely disgusting, and I flatten the wrinkles in my nose when I realize he is watching me. I smile at him, adjusting in my seat and going back to the menu. After several minutes spent reviewing the options, daunted by the prices, not knowing the difference between a ribeye and a sirloin, I close the menu and set it aside. I am too self-conscious to admit that I don’t know anything, so when the waitress comes, I just second his order.
Warren looks like he is going to laugh but just reaches out and takes my hand. “You’re something else, Alison.” His hand on mine calms me, and I let the tension flood from my shoulders and down my arms, releasing through the tips of my fingers. His thumb rubs the knuckles on my hand, and when he turns my hand over, his thumb rises over the tendons of my wrists. I am watching his face, and when a small crease lines the space between his brows, I suddenly snap to, glancing down at my naked arms and the scars that mar the flesh.
I jerk my hands back, but he holds tight to one, and I start to feel the panic rising. I haven’t cut in weeks, months, I haven’t even felt the need to cut since Mom died. When he looks up and catches my eyes, his eyes are dark and mournful. “Don’t ever do that again,” he says, low, quiet, a request, a command.
I swallow hard, and he lets me draw my hand away. “I won’t,” I say, and I almost believe it. “It was just a really bad year.”
“Yep. It was. I know. But temporary.” He reaches out, taking my hand back, running his thumb over the scars. “Permanent.”
I want to explain that I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I wasn’t, except maybe the one time. It just made all the noise in my head go quiet, made all the yuck fade away and let me rest from it for a little while. I don’t know if he would understand, but I don’t want to talk about it here, with all the ears and eyes looking down from the walls and listening from the other booths. I roll my hand in his and squeeze, stopping his thumb.
“How’s the band?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Great.” He smiles. “Really great actually. We’re getting ready to go to St. Louis to record a demo. All new stuff.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re heading to the big time, baby.” He smiles, broad, proud of what he and the guys in the band are on the verge of accomplishing.
“Wow. That’s exciting.” I try to put a sandbag in the sinking pit of my stomach—“big time” is far away from here, far away from me.
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Elliot’s already there. His wife’s family lives in Litchfield, and they been bugging them to come that way, so he’s got the ‘in’ on a studio.”
“Wow,” I say again, trying to think of something else to say, but the food comes and he releases my hand as the plates descend, and I’m relieved to have something else to focus on other than his imminent departure from my life. I feel the doors shutting inside me, preparing to be left behind again, intent upon not caring when he goes. He’s just a guy, and this is just dinner, and he isn’t even really that great of a guy. He smokes and drinks and is entirely too old for me. I mean what kind of grown man really wants to date somebody like me?
We eat steaks and baked potatoes, and after I give up on finishing my own meat, he whisks it off my plate and devours it. We’ve talked through dinner, mostly about the band and a little about Leslie and her family. He laughs when I tell him about my rose-exploded room. It’s all easy, because my doors are all closed. When the check comes, I am nowhere near ready to go home, and neither is he. We pass right through Charleston and head left on 18th Street out toward the lake. The music is ringing in the car, and I roll my window down so the wind can blow through. I am young and alive and nothing can stop the world rolling around me.
When he opens his trunk, I laugh, remembering how I thought he probably lived in his car when I met him at Christmas. The trunk was bursting at the seams with stuff that night. Black bags filled with clothes and everything except a sink. It was in that trunk that he’d found that strand of Christmas lights that we threw over the tree behind the trailer. Today the trunk is less full, the black bags full of clothes are gone, but it’s still got a fair share of stuff.
He has brought me to the spillway, and we are alone in the deepening dusk of night. He spreads the blanket out on the grass, in a space open to the night sky and in full view of the car where he parked it on the farthest edge of the lot. Anybody driving into the lot would not see the car until they came a full two-thirds into the lot. We are alone. We are alone, and we lay under the stars.
Hours tick by. We talk, we kiss, we touch. Those doors of mine stay firmly closed, but a window is opened and some of him sneaks through the pane. Sometime after the moon has crested, we sleep. We sleep twisted and twined, his legs and mine tangled. My cheek is resting on his shoulder, my breath brushing along his neck. When I wake it is to a buzzing in my ear. I swat and shift, and he groans with my waking. It is still night, still dark, but the world has shifted toward morning, and I nudge him to wake. “I have to get back to Leslie’s,” I say. She’s an early riser, and I don’t want her to wake up and find me missing. It feels strange to think that somebody will worry about me. She may be angry if I’m not there, upset like the night I walked away from graduation.
He sits up, shaking his head, his hair spiking like a porcupine. I laugh, and he draws me to him for a kiss. “We have to go,” I say between the touches of his lips, and I push back, away, standing and grabbing the edge of the blanket to force him to get up. He does, but with grudging resistance. Finally I have him on his feet, and we make our way to the car. He digs for his keys, and soon we are floating out of the parking lot and heading back toward Charleston. My blood is singing, singing through my veins. How could I have thought I was in love with Dylan? He suddenly seems so pale and plain in my memory. Warren takes up all of the empty space inside of me, and the feeling of his lips on mine still has my mouth slightly numb.