One Wednesday night in late July, Alex invited her to an out-of-the-way seafood place for dinner. “Just as friends,” he’d said when he dropped by her mom’s house earlier in the day. “I promise, there will be no hand-holding, canoodling, or other tomfoolery. Just fried shrimp and the best hush puppies in the South.”
“Who could turn that down?” she’d said.
By the time Rebecca had returned to her dad’s after a day of inspecting, moving, throwing away, and (once) running screaming from the house after discovering a family of mice had taken up residence in a closet, no shower had ever felt so good. She couldn’t remember being hungrier, either. She put her long brown hair in a wet braid rather than taking the time to blow it dry, and waited on the front steps so that Alex would not even need to come to the door.
“Maybe I should have made a reservation,” he said, when he saw her. He opened the car door for her, and waited for her to get situated before closing it and walking around to the driver’s side.
“Do you think it will be crowded?” she asked. Her stomach growled.
“Shouldn’t be too bad on a Wednesday. But I think there’s half a protein bar in the glove box if you’re starving.”
“That’s okay.” She wrinkled her nose.
“You sure? It’s only a few days old. I don’t want to get my arm chewed off if there’s a wait at Abelle’s.”
“I think you’re safe.”
“You think?” He raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll keep you posted.”
He grinned at her and turned onto the two-lane highway that ran in front of her father’s rental. “Lucky for me we’re already on the south side of town. That will save us a few minutes.”
“Where is this place, exactly?”
“It’s down 231 and a little ways east. About twenty-five minutes. Basically the middle of nowhere. I can’t believe you’ve never been there.”
“We didn’t usually drive far to dinner, I guess. Dad was kind of a creature of habit, by the time Mom stopped cooking.”
They were quiet for a minute.
“Want to ask me anything?” he said. “You’ve got three questions for tonight if you want them.”
“Okay.… Um, where do you live?” she asked. She was surprised she had never wondered until now.
“The old Pickney Place downtown,” he said.
Rebecca searched her memory for why this name sounded so familiar. “The haunted house? Seriously?”
He laughed. “Everyone says that. It’s not really haunted, though. I just use a projector and an old tape recorder to keep Scooby-Doo and his friends from discovering where I’ve hidden the money from the bank robbery.”
“I thought that place was ready to collapse.”
“It pretty much was,” he said. “I bought it four years ago at an auction on the courthouse steps. Old Ruth Pickney had been in a nursing home for years, and when she died, there was no one to leave it to. It was pretty run-down, but I’ve been fixing it up. Hoping to sell it, maybe buy another one and do the same thing.”
Rebecca remembered walking past the Pickney Place as a kid when she visited her dad at the post office. Even then, she’d thought the creepy old house was ready to fall down, and that had been more than twenty years ago. Ruth Pickney must have spent at least two decades in the nursing home, because the house had never been lived in that she remembered. There were whispers that it was haunted, of course, fueled by the fact that all the other Pickneys had died suddenly during a smallpox outbreak in the 1930s, leaving only little Ruth behind to be raised by an unscrupulous aunt and uncle, who squandered her family’s fortune and ran away to New York as soon as Ruth was sixteen.
“People say Ruth was an odd bird,” she said.
“I never knew her,” Alex said. “But she certainly could have sold the house years ago and been better off. Lucky for me she didn’t, though. It’s been kind of a labor of love to fix it up. I only use salvaged materials, pretty much.”
“Salvaged materials?”
“Yeah, you know. When they tear something down, I’ll go talk to the demolition crew and try to find things that can be used again. It’s recycling, basically. Green building. But in my case it’s mostly because I’m broke.”
She made a face. “Wouldn’t it be … I don’t know, safer or whatever, to use new materials? How do you know you’re not bringing in some kind of nasty bug or something?”
“What? Like termites? I check for those.”
“Yeah, or mold, or bacteria or whatever.”
He laughed. “Bacteria?”
Rebecca hated when people laughed at her, and Alex seemed to do it more than anyone, except maybe Jake. “Never mind,” she said, sulking.
“You still have two more questions.”
“I’ll use them later.”
“Can I use mine?”
“Sure.”
“Do you see yourself staying in Atlanta? I mean, long-term?”
Rebecca wished she had asked him more questions instead. She twisted her ring and looked out the window. “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t really thought much about the long term.”
Alex did not respond, but kept his eyes on the road. He put the car into fifth and they hummed along quietly for a while. Hungry and cranky as she was, Rebecca was grateful for the quiet.
She tried to ignore her hunger pangs as they drove down seemingly endless country roads, with their innumerable dirt road tributaries and bridges over dribbles of muddy creeks. She hoped she would not have to find her way back to Oreville from here—they were in the middle of nowhere, and they had crossed two county lines that she’d noticed.
Finally, just before the millionth four-way stop, Alex turned in to a short gravel driveway surrounded by a grassy field full of cars and trucks. There were more vehicles parked here than they had seen during the entire half-hour drive. The restaurant itself was little more than a clapboard shack with faded paint on the windows advertising seafood specials and blue plate dinners. There was a bug-light zapping mosquitoes and flickering ominously near the door. An old man sat on a rickety bench out front, staring at the road.
“Evening, Elmer,” Alex said as he opened the door.
The man grunted in response.
“Good chat,” Alex said.
Inside was the quintessential hole-in-the-wall country restaurant: Formica tables and old padded brown chairs—half of which were losing their stuffing—linoleum floors, flickering fluorescent lights, and—she couldn’t help but notice—a layer of dust thicker than a magazine on the air vents next to their table. In her other life in Atlanta, she would have taken one look at this place and walked right back out again. But she was thirty minutes from nowhere, and so hungry she could eat her own foot. And Rebecca had to admit that the hush puppies frying smelled amazing.
“Do you have a drink menu?” she asked the middle-aged waitress who came to take their orders.
“Coke, tea, water.”
“It’s a dry county,” Alex said. “No booze.”
“Oh,” Rebecca said, and the waitress rolled her eyes. “Unsweet tea, please.”
“We’re out of unsweet. Be about ten minutes.”
“Sweet is fine, thank you.” When the waitress shuffled away, Rebecca said. “Jeez, I forgot dry counties even existed.”
“You’re in a whole ’nother world now,” Alex said, amplifying his already-thick Southern accent. “But at least they have a seafood sampler.”
They were halfway through dinner, and Rebecca was greedily licking the grease from her fingers while debating a third cheddar biscuit from the basket between them, when the little teenybop song rang out from Alex’s pocket. “Excuse me,” he said. He got up from the table and took the call outside.
The waitress came back to the table with a pitcher of unsweetened tea to refill Rebecca’s mason jar glass and to take away the now-empty bread basket. “Everything good?”
“Oh my God,” Rebecca said to her. “This is amazing.”
“It’ll put meat on your bones,” the waitress said. “Not that Alex will mind. He’s a good man. Doesn’t focus on appearances like so many do.”
Before she could protest that she and Alex were only friends, the waitress was gone again. He knows everyone in a ten-county radius, she thought. If I broke his heart, I wouldn’t even be able to fly in and out of the state.
Alex returned a few minutes later and put his phone on the table, smiling.
“I’d love to meet her,” Rebecca said, surveying her corn on the cob for any remaining kernels. “You guys seem to have such a great relationship.”
“We do,” he said. “She’s a good kid. But you can’t meet her.”
Even though her suggestion had been offhand, Rebecca was taken aback by his refusal. “Why not?”
“Nothing personal, but I don’t bring women around my daughter.” He used the last of his biscuit to guide a bite of coleslaw onto his fork. “Her life has been chaotic enough without a parade of potential stepmothers in and out of it.”
“A parade?”
Alex grinned. “Well, not a parade, I guess. More like a small tea party, but still.”
“But we’re just friends,” she countered. “Don’t you think she would understand that?”
“Well, there’s a fine line between friends and ‘friends.’” He made air quotes with his fingers. “I think when teenage girls hear their dad introduce a beautiful woman as a ‘friend,’ they are going to jump to the same conclusion anybody else with a bit of sense would.”
Rebecca wanted to dispute this characterization of their relationship, but she thought about her own father. He had referred to Sonia as a “friend” for several months, too. And she hadn’t bought it either. “I guess you’re right.”
“Besides,” Alex said, wiping his hands on a napkin before dropping it on his plate in defeat, “I haven’t given up on the idea that you might promote me from friend to ‘friend’ yet. So I want to make sure the timing is right when you meet Honey.”
Rebecca wished she had not said anything about it. She became engrossed in straightening the red checkered tablecloth so that it lined up with the edge of the table. The waitress returned with the check. “Here you go, darlin’.”
Alex threw down two twenties and pushed back his chair. “Ready to go? I’m assuming you don’t want peanut butter pie. It’s supposed to be good but I’m always too damn full to try it.”
“No, I’m stuffed,” she said. He stood and she followed him toward the door. “You didn’t have to buy me dinner. Thank you.”
“As long as you know I’m expecting sex in return,” he said as he walked out into the night. He was kidding, she knew. It was the same to him as Scooby-Doo and the haunted house, and the ten thousand other jokes he had made since they met. But the smile felt brittle on her face, and her stomach churned.
They navigated the grassy, unlighted parking lot in silence. There were thousands of stars in the sky, more than she could ever remember seeing before. He followed her gaze upward as he unlocked the passenger’s door for her. “It’s the country. You can’t see them near the city because of all the light pollution.”
“Oh,” she muttered. She climbed into the car but kept her focus on the sky, even as they drove away.
A memory floated back to her. She was with her dad and Cory beside the creek one summer night, watching a meteor shower. She did not remember where her mother had been, why it had been just the three of them. But she and Cory had been squabbling for half the night—probably he was picking on her about her braces because he knew that drove her crazy. And she was calling him stupid because it was her only defense, his only perceived weakness. Their dad had put one arm roughly around each of them and said, “Hush, you two. Don’t you know the stars are magic? You can’t be angry when you look at them. Stars are for wishing, and you never know what might come true underneath them.”
They had quieted then. Not so much because of the magical stars, but because Richard was not one to tolerate disobedience, not back then. Rebecca had still been angry with Cory and made a hasty wish on the next meteor she saw flare across the sky. I wish he would just leave me alone. For years after Cory’s death, Rebecca had half-believed that it had been her wish that caused it.
“You okay?” Alex said. They had been driving for several minutes in silence.
“I’m fine.”
“You sound fine.”
“Sorry, I think I just ate too much.”
“Me too,” he said, patting his belly. “It’s worth it, though, don’t you think?”
“It was really good.”
“Hey, do you want a beer?” he asked. “I know a great spot.”
“I thought it was a dry county?”
“It is, but I happen to have a six-pack in the trunk. It’s cold, or at least it was two hours ago. There’s a beautiful view of the river down one of these back roads. And an angry old man who shoots trespassers on sight down another. I’m pretty sure I remember which is which.”
“That sounds great, Alex, but I think I just want to get home tonight. Can I take a rain check?”
“Oh. Okay, sure.”
“I’m sorry. I just realized how tired I am, and I really did eat too much.”
“Definitely. No problem.”
They went back to being quiet as he navigated down the darkened highways, and Rebecca watched the stars appear and disappear over the silhouettes of the trees. Alex began to whistle. At first it was sort of a tuneless whistling, and then she recognized “It Had to Be You,” among other things.