Sarah watched as Nick gathered his ladder and tools and walked towards the ugly house. The muscles under his T-shirt worked across his back as he moved, his legs all strength and sinew. He was so fully male, yet so boyishly unsure, which made him more beautiful to her.
It frightened her how much she had needed to hear his voice. She seldom cried and never like that, never with a witness, all her sobbing over the phone.
No, that wasn’t true. There was that once, when she was just a young girl, barely old enough to do fractions, her mess of hair pulled back with barrettes. Mrs. Dobkins had called her to the front, her turn to display her art project, a golden fish with sparkly fins. It had taken her hours to glue on the sequins. One of the boys hissed, Carrot head, as she made her way up the aisle, then another, Pumpkin patch, and then all the boys chanted names. She had become used to the taunts, but she was so proud of her fish, so unwilling to let that moment be stolen. Mrs. Dobkins missed it (how did she always miss it?), and by the time she’d turned from the chalkboard, Sarah was lunging towards the first boy, pummelling him with her fists, pummelling the others that jumped in until they were a wild ball of arms and legs, sequins raining down like confetti. Most of the boys cried. She did not. She waited until after the witless Mrs. Dobkins had deposited her in the principal’s office, waited until after the nurse had bandaged her forehead, waited until after she was set in the big chair to watch out the window as her classmates poured onto the playground for recess. It was not until her mother rushed into the school, all fire and fury, and scooped her up in her arms. That’s when her tears started. They didn’t stop until she was tucked under her covers with a hot water bottle and a cold compress and a promise of a million shining sequins to start a new fish.
Her mother was her safe space. Her kind, fearless mother who smelled like their garden, her touch as soft as the peony petals that floated to the ground after a rainstorm.
If her mother were alive, she and Carter would skip to her house for Saturday sleepovers and Sunday dinners, their plates smothered in gravy and grandma love. Sarah would have called her every time she got sick, every time Carter got sick, her soothing voice on the line telling them to rest, to make chicken noodle soup. She would have called her mother this morning, her life thundering towards catastrophe. Instead, she dialled Nick. She barely knew this man, and she could hardly trust her instincts since they had steered her so wrong in the past. Yet his voice was what she needed. His voice. His arms wrapped around her.
He had disappeared into the tilting house. She rolled down the truck window to let in some air. A squirrel noisily argued with an indifferent black cat sauntering down the sidewalk. Two doors down, an old woman with a hairnet and sturdy, white-laced shoes hung laundry on a line that stretched over a thick bed of dandelions. Every time the woman pulled a wrinkled clump from her basket, she shook the fabric angrily until it stretched into the shape of a slip or a blouse.
Sarah pushed her head back and closed her swollen eyes. She hadn’t slept last night, moving from her bed to the couch, scrolling through channels and magazines and seeing nothing at all. For a half second, she thought of begging for her job back, but she would never pull it off. Her mouth would twist in rage every time Dorothy’s shadow crossed her path. She could not stay in Rigsbee. Not without a job. Not with rumours sucked in with the breeze through every window in town.
She didn’t want the plan to form, pulling her away from the safety of the truck and Nick’s woody lingering smell. She would move back to the city, start over. Get on with a senior’s centre or a nursing home attached to a hospital, maybe even a union job that had benefits. With a little luck, she could find Carter a good school. He’d continue to sprout, learn to escape with a book. She could teach him to skate, and take him to those city places with indoor slides and climbing walls. They still had each other. It was what they were used to anyway, just the two of them, and she could not fail at this one thing.
Sarah heard a door bang and saw Nick extending his ladder against the side of the house. A grubby man in an undershirt and suspenders followed him out and stood beside the ladder, puffing a cigar. Horse dung smoke wafted through her open window. She and the man watched Nick climb, then shimmy along the slant of the rooftop. He seemed surer of himself up near the sky than down on the ground, and she held her breath, willing him not to fall.
By the time Nick got back to the truck, Sarah was asleep, mouth slightly open, head tilting awkwardly. He didn’t want to wake her, but the dickwad whose inspection he’d just failed was pacing like a mangy lion, and he needed to get them out of there.
She woke when he opened his door, blinking and confused.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
She smiled sleepily, yawning while she fastened her seatbelt. “That’s okay. Coffee break’s over.”
“You’re done knitting your sweater?” He started up the engine.
“I knit an entire wardrobe. How about you? Find any holes in the roof?”
“Holes and more holes.”
She waved at dickwad, who thrust out his middle finger as they pulled away. “He looks happy,” she said.
“I aim to please.” Nick turned the truck around at the end of the street, and as they drove by stupid again, still standing in front of his tilting eyesore, Nick honked the horn and gave a thumbs-up.
Sarah laughed. “Are all your customers this pleasant?”
“Only in Winsdale. But now you’ve seen it. You can’t say I never take you anywhere.”
“I’ll cherish the memory.”
She joked, but he really would cherish this memory, Winsdale forever attached to the smell of her hair.
They shared his bologna sandwiches and took turns sipping the lukewarm coffee from the lid of his thermos. He stayed under the speed limit, wanting to stretch the minutes with her. They travelled in a straight line into a patchwork of green and gold, black and white cows and spotted ponies dotting the fields like plastic animals in a farmyard set. Noisy green-winged teals gathered in the pothole sloughs along the sides of the road, diving for food, popping back up like corks.
He’d often driven this stretch without seeing the view, but today, the world seemed new, full of colour and promise.
Sarah slapped her visor down to shield her eyes from the now blaring sun. Nick pulled sunglasses from the glove box and handed them to her. They were too big and kept sliding down the bridge of her nose. He wondered if she still felt shaky and needed to go over it again. The accusation, the fallout, all of it wrong.
Sarah lifted her glasses onto her head and stared at him with bright eyes. “I don’t really know anything about you.”
Nick laughed. “Um, yeah, you do. Sorry, but this is pretty much it.”
“No, I don’t really. I want to know more.”
“I’m not an axe murderer.”
“And?”
“And?”
“Tell me more.”
“And I’m a fun-loving single who enjoys travel, long walks, and hanging out with my friends. Redheads preferred.”
“Well done. All the clichés.”
“Okay, your turn then.”
“My mom died when I was fifteen. She divorced my dad when I was five. He’s got a whole other family down in California. Didn’t even bother to show up for Mom’s funeral. Carter’s dad is out of the picture too.”
“A lot of absent fathers in this story,” he said, lumping himself in the bunch.
“Back to the topic at hand. I was asking about you. Tell me about your family.”
“Not much to it. Mom, Dad, no siblings.”
“I’m not a census taker. What are they like, your parents?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “Good people.”
“I knew they would be. Have they met Billy yet?”
“Yep.” He felt uncomfortably warm. “My mom texts Billy a lot. They’ve got a dog. A yappy little thing that likes to do tricks. Billy must have fifty videos of him already.”
“I’m glad. Billy needs his grandparents. Sounds like you’re close. I love to see that.”
“We used to own a campground. The beach. Fresh air. Hard work. Happy campers coming and going.”
“It sounds like a fairy tale.”
“Yeah. It was.”
“And now? Where are your parents now? What are they like now?”
He didn’t want her to know the ugly parts of him. He didn’t want to lie to her either, so he kept his mouth shut.
“Nick?”
He wished she would drop the subject. When he still didn’t answer, Sarah stared out the window, the silence festering. Clouds rolled in from the east, marring the perfect blue skyline. He needed to say something, bring her back to him. “What about your mom? What was she like?”
He put his hand on her knee, but she moved it away.
“Why don’t I start where we are,” she said. “Yesterday was my darkest day in a long, long time. In my lowest moment I called you. I’ve spilled my guts to you, literally. And when I ask about you, your family, you brush me off like a stranger, like I’m asking too much of you. Why is that, Nick?”
He was not used to such persistence. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” she said quietly.
The bitter irony was laughable. Despite being innocent, she’d been tried and convicted, and here he was as guilty as hell yet assumed blameless. He could hardly share how pathetic his crimes, how pathetic the life he’d made.
He slowed the truck, his looming inspection just over the next hill, mere minutes away. He could not leave them like this, leave her in the truck alone.
He eased into a farmer’s pullout and cut the engine. “You want to know.” He kept his hands gripped on the wheel and his eyes focused on the rolling clouds. “I had an idyllic childhood. We weren’t rich. I had to make choices. New skates or new jacket, save my allowance for a bike or blow it on Cokes and fries. My parents . . . my parents raised me to believe that I could be whatever I set my mind to. You dream it, you can live it, my dad used to say.”
Sarah unbuckled her seatbelt and turned to face him.
He sucked air between his teeth to give him courage. “My mom, she liked to seize the moment, break the rules. She’d serve pancakes for supper, make jack-o’-lanterns with pineapples, decorate the outhouses at Christmas. She wore a bathing suit from June to September. Had no problem hauling me out of bed in the middle of the night to watch lightning flash across the sky. Listen to the music, she’d say. God’s concert. Every time I hear thunder, I still hear her words.”
“God’s concert,” Sarah repeated, her voice soft and low.
“She would drop whatever she was doing if you brought out the cards. She had the best poker face and always kept score. Competitive too. Merciless. I must have been thirteen before I beat her in Wizard for the first time.”
Sarah laughed softly. He was afraid if he turned to her, he would lose his nerve, so he kept his eyes ahead.
“My dad. My dad seldom lost his cool. He instinctively knew the right thing to do. When Dewy Turner came out of the water sputtering and drained of colour—the kid was terrified, nine or ten years old, almost drowned, his waterskiing tow rope tangled in his feet and dragging him under—Dad dropped his tools and took Dewy and his pale-faced dad up to the house and sat them down at the kitchen table in front of a couple pints of ice cream. I don’t know what he said. The next thing, they’re back in the boat again, Dad with them this time, skiing tandem with Dewy. He spent the whole afternoon on the water with the kid, until Dewy was screaming like a howler monkey on skis, his heart right back where it started. Dad was always doing stuff like that. The regulars would take a bullet for him. Every summer we had a few bad apples pitch a tent, too much beer in their bellies, itching to stir things up. My dad could break up a fight without raising his voice.”
He tried not to sound bitter. “That campground meant everything to them—to us. It brought together all I’d been taught to hold sacred. The earth. The water. The campers. The greater good.”
Sarah reached over and peeled his knuckles off the steering wheel. “What happened?” she asked, holding his sweaty palm between hers.
Nick stared at their tangled hands and let the warmth of her fingers seep into his skin. “I torched it.”
She squeezed his hand tighter and waited.
“I was careless. And drunk. Started a fire in Campers Hall. It was the hub for campers—my dad and grandfather built it—the place seeped to the rafters in Ackerman history. The hall and everything in it went up in flames. All the photos, my grandpa’s vintage radio with the broken dial, the weathered sign with all our silly campground rules. No synchronized swimming in the puddles. Even the stupid marshmallow mascot costume. Incinerated.”
She looked shattered. “I’m so, so sorry, Nick.”
He shrugged. “One thing led to another. My parents had to give up the campground and move on.”
“I can’t imagine how that must have felt. Was anyone hurt?”
“Not by the flames. No one had to get carted off in an ambulance. But there was plenty of hurt to go round.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“That’s a hard thing for a kid. A seventeen-year-old boy can barely get his shirt on right side out.”
“I was supposed to go to university in the fall, but I somehow got it in my head that I could want something different. Something bigger. I was up in the loft, drinking and dumbass dreaming about getting on a plane and seeing the world. At some point, I lit a few candles. Didn’t have the wits to extinguish them.”
“But you didn’t light the fire on purpose. You didn’t splash gasoline on the floor and watch it burn.”
He shook his head.
She took his face between her hands and forced him to look at her. Her eyes were wide and clear, no jolt of disgust lingering under her lashes. “You didn’t mean to start a fire,” she said, emphasizing each word. “It was an accident. You can be forgiven an accident.”
He took her hands away and held them against his shirt. “It’s not that I started a fire. It’s that I didn’t own up to it. Still haven’t. My parents think it was the campground kids partying in the hall, smoking God knows what, letting things get out of control. I never told them otherwise.”
He could feel her hand under his turning over, her palm against his. “I haven’t admitted it to anyone.”
She pulled him towards her. “Until now. Now your secret’s out, and the world hasn’t exploded. Look at me. I’m not running screaming down the highway. You’re not an axe murderer. You made a mistake. You were a kid. We’re allowed to make mistakes.”
He needed to make her understand. “You know what it’s like? It’s like tossing a burning cigarette out a truck window and a spark catches hold. You think that you should stop the truck, stomp it out, but you rationalize to yourself that it’s just a tiny ember, a small white lie that will die out on its own. But the ember jumps to another patch of ground, and another, and another, until you look back in your rear-view mirror and the whole fucking world is on fire. I’ve been living a lie since I was seventeen years old. My parents don’t . . .” he couldn’t finish.
She put her mouth to his ear, “It’s not too late,” she whispered. “You can turn the truck around. Go back. Douse those flames.”
“I’ve never really left that place. Never got on a plane.”
“It’s not too late,” she repeated.
He felt quieter inside, that relentless hum that lived under his skin turned down. She smiled, cheeks flushed.
“Today was supposed to be about you,” he said sheepishly. “Now I’ve gone and made it about me.”
She laughed. “Thank God. Here I thought my life sucked. You’ve cheered me up considerably.”
She buckled her seatbelt. “Don’t you have another inspection to go to?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ve got three more today.”
“Well, enough dillydallying.”
“Nobody says dillydally.”
“They certainly do. It’s big points in Scrabble.”
He laughed as he pulled the truck back onto the road. “You know the crazy thing. That’s where we made Billy. We met at the campground that last summer. I hardly knew the girl. A spur of the moment, one-time thing that ended up changing me, changing it all.”
She whistled through her teeth.
“Wild, right?” he said.
She looked out the window. “Since we’re sharing secrets. I want to tell you something too.”
He held her hand, knowing enough to keep quiet.
“Carter’s father. He was my English professor. In my first and only semester in college. How’s that for a classic cliché. The guy was married with kids. Twins, no less. Curls and toothless grins inside the picture frame. I could see their little faces while I lay sprawled on his desk with my legs in the air. I was twenty-three and knew it was wrong, but I was impossibly lonely, and no man had ever paid attention to me like that before. I thought what we had was special.”
Nick didn’t know what to say. Her damn professor. He was the culpable one.
“When I told him that I was pregnant, he begged me to get rid of the problem, so I quit school, my part-time job—him. Left the city and started over.”
Nick pictured Sarah driving into the sunset, Carter inside her, Carter now a beautiful boy who made the world brighter. “I’m glad you made that decision,” he said. “About Carter.”
She rolled down her window and let the breeze blow on her face. “Me too. My mistake turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. Your campground gave you Billy. There’s grace in this world, don’t you think?”
He looked at the honeycomb sky and saw only light, the world suddenly a place where forgiveness was possible.