For Keeps (15 page)

Liv pats my knee. “There,” she says. “I’ve said my piece.”

“You have to stop watching Dr. Steve,” I tell her.

“Pops finally got TiVo. I can watch every episode now.”

“God help us.”

“We should blow off practice more often. I think we’ve made some real progress here.”

I snort. Then it hits me. “What do you think Coach is going to do to us?”

Liv shrugs, turning the key in the ignition. “Just a warning. I mean, it’s not like we
do
this sort of thing. This was our first offense. . . .” She pulls off the grass and onto the road, formulating her counterargument as she drives—everything she’s planning to tell Coach tomorrow, to justify our actions. This is classic Liv. I don’t mind listening to her; anything is better than rehashing what happened with my mother and Paul and Matt and everything.

“Great,” I mutter ten minutes later as Liv pulls into my driveway.

“What?”

“That,” I say, pointing to the car that’s parked in my mom’s spot. The rusty beige Subaru with the I BRAKE FOR MOZART bumper sticker.

“Sweet ride,” Liv says.

I grunt.

There’s no mistaking who’s on my front porch right now, sitting on the top step. Sandy hair, suede jacket. Funky green sneakers poking out of khaki legs. The only question is, where’s his little blonde sidekick?

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Liv says, whipping out an imaginary microphone. “The man, the myth, the musical legend . . .
DJ . . . Jazzy
. . .
Jonathaaaan!”

“Hilarious,” I say.

“Why is he on your porch?”

I shrug.

“Where’s Kate?”

“Gee, I don’t know . . . an abortion clinic? A
liars’ convention
?”

Liv shoots me a look.

“What?”

Jonathan must have spotted me because now he’s standing, looking over at the driveway.

“Well,” Liv says, glancing at her watch, “I’d love to join your little duet, but . . .”

“Liv. You are
not
leaving me alone with him.”

“I have to get the car back. . . .”

“Liv.”

“I promised Dodd! It’s my first day out, and if I ever want to drive again I have to—”

“Fine,” I mutter, reaching for the door handle.

“Call me later,” Liv says, leaning over to kiss my shoulder. “I want to hear
everything
.”

And then she deserts me.

Crap
, I am thinking as I walk across the lawn toward the porch.

Crappity crap
.

Big, steaming pile of crap on a stick.

The closer I get to Jonathan, the worse he looks. Slumped shoulders. Bags under the eyes. He’s like a puppy that’s been kicked, and, truth be told, I feel a twinge of sympathy. If I’d been the one to run into the ex of the person I was dating— and that ex’s entire family—I might look the same way. I might go slamming out of houses and peeling out of drive-ways in the middle of the night too.

“Hey,” I say, as nicely as I can.

“Hey,” he says. Then, “I’m looking for your mom.”

“She works on Mondays.”

He shakes his head. “That’s the first place I checked. She called in sick, they said. Early this morning.”

“Yeah . . . she’s not sick. She . . . we . . . went back to the hospital. You know, to check on Mr. Tucci.”

“Oh,” Jonathan says. “Uh-huh.”

The expression on his face is so miserable I have to ask, “Are you OK?”

“I just . . . need to talk to her.”

“Did you try her cell?”

“About a hundred times. She isn’t picking up. Do you know where else she could be?”

I shake my head. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”

Well, this isn’t exactly true. I
might
know where she is, if I bothered to check my voice mail. Ever since I booked it out of the parking lot this morning she’s been calling and leaving messages. I’ve just chosen to ignore them.

Jonathan looks at his watch. “I’ve been waiting here for two hours. . . . I canceled my afternoon lessons. . . . I don’t know why. Well, I
do
know why. I . . . I’m crazy about your mom, Josie, and . . . I don’t want to lose her.”

“Oh,” I say. “Uh-huh.”

I am cringing so hard right now.

“This happened to me once already, in college. . . .” Jonathan shifts his eyes to the yard, staring out at nothing. “Amy Hahn. We went out for two years and then, out of nowhere, her ex-boyfriend shows up for homecoming and . . . never mind.” He laughs, a short bark. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this. . . .”

I can’t believe it either. I would like nothing more than to jackhammer a hole in the porch and dive through it.

I have no idea where my mother is right now, but I’ll tell you one thing: I cannot stay here, having this torturous conversation—

“Will you come with me? To look for her?”

“No,” I say. The last person I want to see right now is my mother.

Jonathan looks like I just punched him in the stomach.

“But I
will
take you to do something else. . . . If you let me drive.”

“What?”

I shrug. “It’s a fair trade. You give me your car keys. I take you somewhere fun, to get your mind off my mom.”

I can’t believe I’m suggesting this. I must be completely mental. But . . . I feel for the guy. And also, there’s no way I’m staying on this porch.

“OK,” Jonathan says. Incredibly. He reaches into the pocket of his suede jacket, pulls out his keys, and hands them to me.

Twenty minutes later, we are in the back room of the Pizza Palace, playing video games. In middle school, Liv and I used to come here all the time. Whenever one of us had a crappy day, the other one would say,
You need the Palace.
I reached Level 5 on Super Mario Bros. the day I farted doing a hand-stand in gym. Liv can attest to this; she still has the chart she made of all our humiliating moments in seventh and eighth grade and which video games we played to make ourselves feel better.

Jonathan is great at video games, as most guys are. He throttles me at Pac-Man and Donkey Kong
.
So I move us on to Virtual Boogie
,
because—despite my questionable talent on an actual dance floor—I am a virtual boogie
machine
.

I have already racked up 200,000 boogie points when Jonathan takes over the mat. And he is hilarious. If I were in seventh grade and I were watching him across the arcade, I would think,
What a dork
. In fact, a cluster of girls over by Skee Ball
is
watching; they’re wearing their super-low jeans and drinking their supersized sodas and laughing hysterically. Because Jonathan is dorking out, big-time. His feet are moving at warp speed, his arms are flying every which way, and his mouth is forming this crazy “O” shape the whole time.

I don’t know why this makes me like him more, but it does. I am thinking,
How many grown men would do this, voluntarily, without alcohol?

Now Jonathan has hopped off the mat and is shaking his head around like a big, wet dog, sending sweat beads flying everywhere. It’s completely disgusting.

“You,” I say, “need to hydrate.”

After a visit to 7-Eleven, we are back in the car. I let Jonathan drive, so I can focus on the task at hand. “I can’t believe you’ve never had a Slurpee before,” I say, sucking hard on my straw so that red slush shoots up into my mouth, exploding against the back of my throat, coating it in ice.
Ahhh.

“Deprived child,” Jonathan says. “My parents were health nuts. No sugar. . . . No artificial colors. . . .”

“You think Blue Woo-Hoo! Vanilla isn’t found in nature?” I ask. “Come on. . . .”

He turns to me, smiling a little. His lips are turquoise. “See?” I say. “Slurpees are good for what ails you.”

“Well ... .”

“You’re loving it. Admit it.”

“OK,” he says, sticking the straw back in his mouth. “I admit it. . . . Now I want to introduce
you
to something. . . .”

“What?”

“Not
what
.
Who
.” Jonathan reaches out, presses a bunch of buttons on the stereo. Then he pauses, one finger hovering in the air. “Josie?”

“Yeah?”

“Prepare to have your mind blown.”

“Oh, God,” I say.

“Better than God,” he says. “Better than
Slurpees
.” He presses Play. “John Coltrane.”

When we get back to the house, my mother is still not there. Before Jonathan can lose his John Coltrane high, I reassure him.

“Listen,” I say, as we’re walking across the lawn toward the porch. “About my mom . . . I don’t think you have to worry.”

Of course, these words are based on nothing. Because what do I know? I know squat. I am only saying what I would want to hear right now, if I were him.

“Really?” he says. I can see the mixture of hope and doubt in the crinkles of his forehead.

“Really,” I say.

Because clearly I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. Clearly I can’t see my mom’s car pulling into the driveway behind Jonathan’s Subaru, or the red SUV pulling in behind her. I can’t see who’s getting out. I can’t see the two of them opening their separate doors and closing them. I can’t see this: My mother and Paul Tucci, strolling across the lawn toward us. Side by side.

I only turn around when I see the look on Jonathan’s face. Like a kid who’s just dropped his ice-cream cone.

“Josie,” my mom says. Her arms are outstretched. When she gets to the top step she hugs me: a long-lost-daughter hug.

“What’s up?” I am trying to sound cool while the voice inside my head is screaming, WHAT THE %&*#?!

Paul Tucci is on our porch
.

Paul Tucci is wearing jeans with a rip in the knee, and hiking boots, and he is on our porch.

Maybe this isn’t really happening. Maybe it’s a dream—a hallucination brought on by the physical trauma of one hundred squat thrusts. Maybe if I close my eyes and open them, he will disappear. . . .

Close. . . . Open
. . . .

Nope.

“Josie,” my mother says again. She’s stopped hugging me and has pulled away just enough to stare into my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

She’s sorry
.

“For what?” I mumble.

The sky is getting dark, but the porch lights have kicked on, so everyone is illuminated. Paul Tucci has great skin—olive-toned, the kind that tans perfectly in summer. My mom is pale and burns. I am somewhere in the middle.

In my peripheral vision I can see Paul and Jonathan size each other up. This is what guys do. I remember seeing it on the playground in fourth grade. A new kid, Ryan Lounsberry, had come into our class and during recess all the dodgeball boys lined up along the bushes, checking him out. Ryan was short, unlike the coolest boy in our class, Willy Meyer, but there was a beefy cockiness about Ryan, and it took all of five minutes before the two of them were rolling around in the dirt, pummeling the crap out of each other.

Not that this would happen here. Jonathan isn’t exactly the boxing type. He’s skinny, for one thing. And anyway, all you have to do is look at his car. In addition to braking for Mozart, his message to the world is, NO NUKES! NO WARS!

You could imagine Paul Tucci throwing a punch, though. He’s got that square-jaw thing working for him, and muscles you can see through his shirt. It’s almost November, but he doesn’t bother wearing a coat. His
job
is scaling walls and zip-lining through the North Carolina jungle with juvenile delinquents. He could take Jonathan down in one swing. . . .

But no.

Peaceful and civilized, Paul Tucci is holding out a hand for Jonathan to shake.

Which Jonathan accepts—briefly—before announcing, “I need to talk to Kate.” He turns to my mother. “I need to talk to you.”

My mom hesitates, and for a second I think she’s going to say no. But then she nods. “Let’s go inside.” She fumbles around in her bag for her keys, then clicks the door open. “We’ll be inside,” she says to me, like I didn’t hear her the first time.

As she and Jonathan enter the house, I notice his hand fly out to perch in the curve of her back. She’s wearing her best jeans, low-riders, that hug her butt just right. Paul Tucci’s eyes zoom in, like magnets to metal, and I think,
You’re damn right she looks good.
Then,
Stop looking at her, asshole. You have no right to look at her.

This spark of anger makes my mouth pop open. “Why are you here?”

“It’s pretty funny,” Paul Tucci says. “Actually. . . . I ran into your mom at the Mobile station. . . . I told her I wanted to talk to you, and she said I could follow her to your house, so . . .”

“Why?”

“I never knew where you lived.”

“No, why did you want to talk to me?”

“Oh . . .” He hesitates, clears his throat. He gestures to the pair of wicker chairs beside the porch swing. “OK if we sit?”

I shrug. “Whatever.”

Sitting in one chair while Paul Tucci sits in the other, it hits me that this is really happening.

My father is here, on my front porch.

This could be the biggest moment of my life.