Deanne squeezes his hand, and then he walks around and climbs up into the passenger seat of Coach Diggins’s car. Coach leans out the window a bit. “Straight home,” he says. Deanne doesn’t say anything, just storms over to her car.
Diggins pulls out onto the road, waits for Deanne to back out, and then follows her CRV toward Highland Road. He glances at Jessup. “Where do you live?”
Jessup tells him, and at the corner, when Deanne turns right, Diggins turns left. He looks over again at Jessup, sees him shivering.
“There’s a seat warmer,” he says. Pushes a button on the wood-trimmed dashboard. After a few seconds, Jessup can feel the heat radiating through the leather seat.
“Thank you.”
Neither one of them speaks for the first mile, Jessup not wanting to break the stillness, Diggins seeming to consider what he wants to say. The windshield wipers move of their own accord; some sort of automatic moisture detection that comes on fancy cars, Jessup realizes.
When Diggins does speak, it’s not what Jessup expects. “I’m not going to yell at you. Deanne is old enough to make her own decisions. I have to respect those decisions even if I don’t like what she is choosing to do. That being said, you understand, though, don’t you, that it’s different for a girl than it is for a guy? It means more for a girl. What you two were doing—and I don’t want to know the details, don’t really want to talk about it, I’ll leave that for between Deanne and her mom—it’s not something to be taken lightly.”
He doesn’t seem to want an answer, so Jessup stays quiet. He wonders what Diggins would say if Jessup told him that David John’s brother, Earl, likes to ask why it is that we acknowledge that men and women are different—men are stronger, women better as caregivers—but you can’t say whites and blacks are different. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that the different races might not be the same? He wonders what Diggins would say if Jessup told him that Wyatt calls Deanne an ebony, that Wyatt’s girlfriend thinks Jessup is debasing himself with a black girl.
Diggins adjusts the temperature a degree. The road hums under the tires, a wet passage, the distance between them and Jessup’s home splitting into infinity.
“Jessup, I want to believe you didn’t say anything to Kevin Corson.”
“I didn’t.” He blurts it out. Angry. Scared.
Diggins shakes his head. They pass under a streetlight. The LED lights have a blue tinge to them, and it makes Diggins’s skin seem to glow.
“That’s the thing, Jessup,” Diggins says, his voice slow, quiet, sad. “It doesn’t matter what really happened.”