NINETEEN | IVY

“YOUR FATHER’S PLACE?” I suggested again. “A friend’s? Somebody from school?” Lucan had deflated since returning Nanook to her rightful owners, and I wanted to deliver my unusually subdued second cousin somewhere that I wouldn’t have to worry about him. I had my violence against women fashion-wear issue to tackle and layers of anti-Jeremy emotions to consciously avoid. There wasn’t much left of me to deal with anything else, particularly when Lucan was refusing to open up about what had happened at his mother’s condo.

“Maybe the café,” Lucan muttered. “I have a key.”

“You want to hang out at the café while it’s closed?” I knew he had friends other than Des, various places he could go. He definitely had more friends than me, who mainly just counted fellow believers as my closest acquaintances.

Lucan gazed out the window as he answered. “I can sleep there, make myself breakfast in the morning. Drop me off. It’ll be cool.”

I didn’t think I had any extra feelings to channel into guilt, but I was wrong. Lucan had been a good friend to me lately, a much better friend than Betina or Jeremy. As far as I knew, he’d never lied to me, and he’d taken on Nanook for no other reason than to help me out. So how was I repaying him? By being entirely selfish. Yes, I had my reasons, but that didn’t give me license to behave as though I was the only person in the world who had problems.

“Why don’t you stay at my house tonight?” I suggested.

Lucan’s head settled back against the seat. He glanced at me from the corner of his eyes. “There’s your parents. You’re forgetting about the whole bad blood thing.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not your mother.”

Lucan drummed his fingers on his knees. “It’s not worth aggravating your folks, Ivy. The last thing I need right now is more aggravation.”

“Right. Sleeping on a tile floor, between tables, is so much less aggravation.” I made a face to demonstrate how ridiculous he was being. “I honestly don’t think my parents will mind. It’s one night, and don’t forget, I’m working at Frasier-Hay this summer. If they don’t object to that …” He didn’t need to know about the family crests and battling kilted men. I was sure my mother’s anger was still pointed squarely at Jeremy. Timing was on Lucan’s side.

“All right then.” Lucan pulled at his right ear. “If you think it’s okay.”

I drove back to my house, where Mom was in the middle of putting away leftover roast potatoes, carrots, and pork chops in a dill pickle marinade that my Dad was manic about. Mom’s eyes hung on Lucan as we stepped into the kitchen. “Ivy, did you have dinner out?”

“I didn’t get around to that.” I pointed to Lucan with my thumb. “Do you remember Lucan Rossi?”

“Lucan.” Mom set her container of leftovers on the counter and approached with a warm smile. “You were at my mother’s seventy-fifth, weren’t you? We didn’t have much of a chance to talk.”

“Yeah.” He nodded, smiling back. It wasn’t his usual sodium pentothal grin, but Mom couldn’t know that. “I was outside mostly. I had kind of an allergy problem that day.”

“Mom, can I talk to you for a second?” I herded her swiftly out of the kitchen and towards the empty living room, where I vaguely explained Lucan’s family problems. There wasn’t much I could tell her, and I wouldn’t have shared more details anyway. I didn’t want to tread on Lucan’s personal boundaries; I just needed her to agree to his presence.

Mom brightened at the sound of Rossi discontent. “Well, of course he can stay here tonight,” she said, brushing a hand against her chin. “Do you think I should call his mother — just to let her know he’s all right? Surely she’d be worried if he didn’t come home all night, despite the tension there.”

I swiveled in the direction of the kitchen, wondering what Lucan would have to say about that, as Mom continued. “Tell him if he doesn’t feel up to speaking to Sheri just now I’ll call to let her know his whereabouts. I know we haven’t been in touch much recently, but I think it’s the right thing to do.” She patted my arm, lowering her voice. “I’ll go make up the lemon room for him. You can reheat dinner for the two of you if you’re hungry.” I had the feeling Lucan’s presence had just saved me from another solemn Jeremy discussion with my mother — yet another reason I owed him.

I returned to the kitchen and microwaved the leftovers. Lucan and I sat next to each other at the table while I racked my brains for something casual to say. None of our usual topics would work here, within potential eavesdropping distance of my parents.

“This pork is really good,” Lucan said. “What’s in it?”

I froze with my fork in the air. His allergy had completely slipped my overloaded mind. The dill marinade — what was it made of? Only pickles, salt, and pepper. I’d seen Mom make it often enough over the years. The rest of the meal was just carrots and potatoes. We were safe.

“Do you have your EpiPen with you?” I blurted.

“Why?” he asked suspiciously.

“There’s no peanuts in that. I just realized — I mean, we do have peanut butter around here, and I wouldn’t want anything to happen.”

Lucan sliced into his pork and loaded a chunk onto his fork along with a baby carrot. “I don’t have it on me,” he admitted. “I left in a hurry.” He watched me as he chewed, chased the food down with water, and added, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine. You’re not going to force-feed me peanut butter for breakfast, right?”

“Yeah, but aren’t you supposed to have it with you at all times?”

Lucan groaned lightly. “You sound like my parents.” His left hand disappeared into his pocket and then whipped out with a blister pack between his fingers. “Look, I have these, okay? I’m not entirely fragile, you know. I’ll be fine as long as no one decides to spike my drink.”

After dinner we loaded up the dishwasher and I led him to the guest bedroom. The person who’d spent the most time up there was my grandmother who’d passed away six months ago. Her favorite color was yellow, so when my parents had the room redone three years ago the walls, lampshades, and bedspread all took on a lemon hue. Mom even used to plug a citrus scent into the wall before Grandma’s arrival to round out the effect.

In the upstairs hall we ran into my father, who threw out his hand to give Lucan’s a vigorous shake. “Lucan, nice to see you again. How’s your brother, Michael, these days?”

“He’s good,” Lucan replied. “He’s over in Europe doing the touring thing.”

“Sounds like an excellent way to spend a summer,” Dad summed up with a tilt of his head. “Expensive. Anyway” — he blinked at the empty space behind us in the hallway — “you let us know if you need anything.”

Lucan bobbed his head, and my father continued along his route downstairs. I resisted the urge to say I told you they wouldn’t mind and opened the door to the lemon room. Mom had left Dad’s pair of green checked pajamas folded on the double bed for Lucan to sleep in, along with one of the yellow bath towels she’d routinely allotted to my grandmother. Being inside the guest room, surrounded by so much yellow, filled me with the kind of sadness that comes from knowing you’ll never see someone again.

The feeling took me by surprise, and I stalled just inside the doorway, Lucan ambling past me to sit on the bed. “Your parents are being really nice about this.” His gold lashes blinked up at me, and I thought about how even they could be classified as yellow; he matched the room.

“I don’t know how altruistic it is,” I said truthfully. “My mom offered to call your mother to let her know where you are. I think she may be … not happy but … I don’t know, forget I said anything.” I didn’t want to explain that Sheri’s current troubles were probably making my parents feel justified in their aversion. Possibly they were even silently congratulating themselves on their open-mindedness when it came to Lucan. “That whole situation with them and Sheri is so weird. You’d think they could’ve worked the money thing out somehow, with them being so close before.”

“I didn’t think it was mostly about money.” Lucan opened his mouth to say more, then allowed it to drop shut again without elaborating.

I sat down on the bed next to him. “You mean the boyfriend thing from when they were teenagers?” I thought I caught a whiff of citrus in the air and stood up to check behind the pine bedside table. Sure enough, Mom had plugged one of those scent units into the wall.

“It doesn’t matter,” Lucan said dismissively. “That’s ancient history, right?” The mattress creaked under his weight as he shifted on the bed.

“Are you holding out on me? What did you hear about the whole thing?”

He glanced at the ceiling, slowly exhaling. “I have a feeling I shouldn’t say. We’re talking about something that happened seven years ago. How could it even matter anymore?”

“If it can’t matter anymore then there should be no problem telling me.” I plopped down next to him and nudged his arm. The sadness passed as quickly as it had taken hold. Maybe I would never actually lay eyes on my grandmother again, but I thought I could feel her there in the room with me. Of course, there was a good possibility that I was just responding to the memory of the clean, fruity smell permeating the air.

“Don’t shoot the messenger, okay?” He leaned back on his hands and said, “My mother said she saw your dad with another woman at a hotel. I heard that’s why they stopped talking. My mom called yours to tell her, but she wouldn’t believe it — your dad said she was lying.”

A stunned hum of air escaped from my throat. “And what do you think? Do you think your mom was telling the truth?”

Lucan offered a level stare that spoke volumes. He did. He thought she was telling the truth. “I think we shouldn’t get wrapped up in our parents’ problems. I mean, you obviously heard something else about money, so who knows? I’m fed up with my parents’ shit at the moment, so as far as I’m concerned one explanation is as good as another.”

It occurred to me that I was becoming desensitized to his swearing, maybe desensitized to four-letter words in general. I could’ve cross-examined Lucan about the details, but I had a sneaking suspicion that Sheri’s version of the feud might not have been entirely wrong. I didn’t know my father well enough to attest to what he would or wouldn’t do. Maybe there’d been some other woman in the past, or maybe it had genuinely been some kind of misunderstanding. It was impossible for me to say.

“Are you okay?” Lucan asked, his eyes still on me.

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s … you know … it was a long time ago. They told me they lent your parents money that they never paid back. They never mentioned the rest of it.”

“It could be there’s something to do with money mixed up in there too,” he said helpfully. “I think somewhere along the line I might have heard there was money involved, but you know how it is, they don’t tend to give lots of details on these things.”

I nodded, and I wasn’t upset about the revelation (if that’s what it was) in the way that most people would’ve been. If it was true, as I was beginning to suspect, I was vaguely disappointed with my mother for either long since forgiving my father or living in denial. But like Lucan said, how could it matter much anymore? My own problems — and Lucan’s — were so much fresher. There’d been a moment back at his apartment where I was afraid that Julian would answer Lucan’s push with a smack, that Nanook and I would find ourselves protesting a full-fledged fist fight from the sidelines.

I wondered if Lucan was ready to talk about it yet, and I said, “I know. Listen, thanks again for helping me bring the dog back to Jeremy’s. You really didn’t have to do that.” He nodded briefly, like it was nothing. “You can tell me it’s none of my business if you want, but is there something going on with your dad, too? How come you didn’t want to go over to his place?”

Lucan explained about his dad dropping by the condo and exchanging unpleasant words with Sheri and her boyfriend. He said he hadn’t been there when his father showed because he’d gotten an emergency phone call from his friend’s ex. He kept looking at me and then looking away as he described the scene at her house.

“So Des is still denying it?” I said.

Lucan’s hands were motionless on the bedspread. His eyes had stopped blinking. “But he knows that I know.”

“That must be why he ran. He doesn’t want to admit it.”

Lucan’s jaw tightened. Then he jolted up, darting towards the bedside table. “Do you mind if I take this air freshener thing out?” he asked. “The smell’s driving me nuts.”

“Go ahead.”

He tugged it out of the wall and set it down on the bedside table, then changed his mind and transferred it to the otherwise empty bottom drawer of the matching pine dresser. “Sorry,” he told me. “It’s just a sickly smell. Like a cough drop or something. It made me feel like I should be blowing my nose.”

“It’s okay.” I told him about how I associated the smell with my grandmother, how she used to stay with us a lot before she passed away.

Lucan paled next to me. I wondered if he was the kind of person who was worried about lying in the same bed where my dead grandmother used to sleep, but then he cleared his throat and apologized for putting the plug-in away.

We talked about a lot of things. I told him Jeremy had called earlier, worried for his dog and admitting that his relationship with Betina was basically just about sex. Lucan said he could never get how something could only be about sex when you were seeing someone on a regular basis, but then again, he didn’t know much about it because he’d never had sex.

He didn’t seem self-conscious about admitting it. He didn’t even make a joke about it after the fact or try to explain it away, and I thought that made him more mature than he realized, but I didn’t point it out and risk inviting awkwardness in where he’d previously shown none.

We spoke in generalities rather than specifics, about how a lot of people wouldn’t admit they were virgins, still others wouldn’t admit they weren’t, and some people just wanted to brag while simultaneously pretending none of it was a big deal anyway. We didn’t linger on the subject for long. We moved on to the crappy way his dad had been speaking about his mom lately, how my father and I practically never had a meaningful conversation, and the disturbing social implications of the T-shirt I’d seen at the mall. The fringes of any given topic seemed to overlap, melting seamlessly into the next until I realized that my mouth was dry and it was nearly dark outside the window.

My mom ventured in and said that she’d called Lucan’s mother to let her know he was spending the night with us. Mom peered at him as she said, “She asked that you call her later.”

Lucan’s head dropped in a noncommittal way. He stroked the yellow bath towel next to him.

“I’m thirsty,” I told him. “Are you thirsty? I’m going down to get something to drink.” We hung out quietly in the kitchen for a while before relocating to the backyard, where mosquitoes attacked us like we were the last warm-blooded creatures left in the northern hemisphere. I dug out the repellent and rubbed it liberally onto my arms, neck, and face because God knows I didn’t intend to trade chlamydia for West Nile disease. Lucan complained about the smell as he stood next to me, staunchly refusing to smooth any on himself.

“You’re so cranky about smells today,” I teased. “It’s not even that bad.” I sniffed my arm to demonstrate. “Your deodorant probably smells stronger.”

The light was on in the yard, illuminating the flowers my parents had paid someone else to plant, and we both spotted a mosquito zipping towards him. I swatted at it in front of his chest. I swatted all around him, actually, sort of like airport security minus the handheld metal detector. Lucan laughed and wrestled the bottle out of my hand. “Okay, have it your way.”

He coated himself in repellent, pulled up a lawn chair, and set the bottle down in the grass. “Happy now?” he asked, the genuine version of his smile leaping to his lips.

“Ecstatic.”