The Vow (14 page)

“I had fun last night,” he says.

I can see his breath, the sheerest glimmer of icy air escaping from between his lips. But I can’t look at his lips without remembering the moment they touched my neck. “Me too.”

“Good. I was thinking about it, and I hope you didn’t feel like I pushed you into showing me your mural. Hearing you talk about it just made me curious.”

Curious.
Was that supposed to mean the itch had been scratched? I’m suddenly freezing and boiling at the same time. I reposition my grip on the bucket. I would put it down, but it feels like protection now—cold and solid enough to shield a blow.

“But afterward,” he continues, “I realized maybe it was really personal.”

“Yeah.” He’s staring at me, and I’m not sure what we’re talking about anymore. The mural or the kissing. I’m about to make it easy for him by saying it was no big deal, but then I remember what he looked like as he stood in the center of my room, spinning a slow circle.

“Anyway, thanks,” he says. “And I’m sorry if you felt—”

“I wouldn’t have showed it to you if I didn’t want to.”

A year ago I couldn’t have said that. The Annie that Chris Dorsey knew certainly couldn’t have said that. Not honestly.

His face relaxes. He’d been talking with his hands, but he lets them drop to his sides. It looks like surrender.

“Good,” he says, and I can feel his eyes trying to read me. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re different.”

“Okay.” I try to smile. “How should I take it?”

“As a compliment.”

“I’ll take it as a compliment then. So, how long do you think we have until Flora—”

Right on cue, the door sweeps open, and Flora’s maroon curls pop into view. “Hate to break up the
whatever
, kids, but we’ve got customers out here.”

“Coming,” I say, but before I can leave, Reed takes a step forward and reaches across to take the bucket from me. Our faces come dangerously close over its rim. For a second we’re near enough that I feel a shade of the thrill from last night’s kiss.

He lifts the bucket, and my arms drop away. I try to straighten my fingers, but they feel permanently bent.

“You have plans for this Friday?” he asks, following me out the door.

“Just work.”

“I mean after. Can I make you dinner?”

I shrug, trying to offset the grin I can’t help. “Depends. What are you making?”

“Exactly what you want.”

“What if I don’t know what I want?”

“I told you last night, remember? That’s my specialty.”

Chapter 16

Mo

I
t’s his specialty?” I ask, staring at the hand-written name and number on the scrap of yellow paper. Sam M. Cane. 502-241-3350.

Dad shrugs, licks his finger and turns the page of his magazine.
The Economist
.

Brutal. I’d rather slam my fingers in the door repeatedly than be here right now with him. I should’ve been the one to tell him. I wanted to, but Mom insisted on doing it, so instead I got to lie on my bed and listen to the first Jerry Springer–style shouting match this house has ever hosted. And now he’s treating me like I’m a traitor. No, like a disobedient child, like I’m not even man enough to own up to my own actions.

He won’t look at me.

I take a bite of my doughnut and lean back against the counter so I don’t have to sit at the table with him. “And I’m supposed to just call him?”

“You aren’t supposed to do anything.” He’s still flipping pages.

“Then why did you give me his number?”

“Because you have immigration forms to file, and you should consult someone. But clearly you’re your own man now. Do whatever you want.”

I’m dying for an emotion from him. A smirk, a grunt, a cocked eyebrow—anything would make his words easier to swallow, but apparently I’m taking them plain. Dry, burnt toast plain.

“It’ll be expensive though, right?” I ask.

“No. He’s not an attorney.”

“Then why am I seeing him?”

“He’s a law student. A cousin or something of one of the engineers at ReichartTek.”

“I shouldn’t see an attorney?”

He finally looks at me. “Can you afford an attorney?”

Definitely not the answer I was looking for.

“I’ll be putting money in your account for living expenses,” he says. “Rent, utilities, food, clothes. If you think you need an expensive attorney to fill out a few simple forms that you could do yourself, go right ahead. Good luck coming up with the money.”

I fold the paper and put it into my pocket. I’m not sure why I didn’t think about money before Annie and I got married. Glaring oversight.

I stuff the last few bites of glazed doughnut in my mouth and toss my napkin in the trash. The plates, along with the utensils and miscellaneous kitchen crap, have already been packed up to be taken over to my new apartment at Wisper Pines. And everything worth shipping has been packaged and is awaiting pickup in the living room in a mountain of
FRAGILE
-tattooed crates. The house looks naked and gutted, like a fish with its insides scraped out.

“You leave on Friday, right?” I ask.

No answer. I assume this means I’m right.

“So will this guy be able to squeeze us in before then?”

“I don’t know.” He drains the last of the juice from his plastic cup and wipes the corners of his mouth.

“So I’m going by myself ?”

I regret saying it immediately, even before exasperation and disgust take over his face. “You’re about to be alone in this country. If you can’t manage going to see some law student for immigration advice by yourself, we have a pretty big problem.”

I stare into my own juice cup and feel myself shrink.

“Too much hand-holding,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. “You probably don’t even know how to write a check.”

“I can write a check.”

“Just be sure to pay the rent on time.”

“I’ll pay the rent on time.”

“And the electric bill. And water. You forget and they tack on late fees, and then they turn off your power completely. And if you’re late paying the rent, it’s only a six-month lease, so they can kick you out if they want to. Where’ll you go then?”

To Annie’s, obviously. But that hypothetical nightmare is not worth discussing since I’m not going to forget to pay rent at Wisper Pines. The apartments are upscale, furnished, and best of all, on the northern edge of Elizabethtown—so, not in Jordan. Their inability to spell whisper correctly seems like an unnecessary adulteration of a perfectly good word, but that’s my only real complaint. “I’m not going to screw this up.”

No response. Apparently he’s alternating between the silent treatment and
You can’t handle this
pep talks

“Annie won’t let me,” I add.

He sniffs, and something inside me twists. After everything she’s done for me, he still can’t stand the thought of her.

“Anything else I should know about the law student thing?” I ask.

“What are you asking?”

“Well, we aren’t going to tell him that it’s not real, right? He doesn’t actually need to know.”

He frowns. “Know what? There’s nothing to know. You married your friend, Mo. People do it all the time.”

“Right, but he doesn’t need to know that we aren’t, you know, like . . . having, you know . . .”

He turns the next page of his magazine even though he’s obviously not reading it. Now it’s open to a picture of a cartoon brain, a fork and a steak knife sawing into it like the brain is Sunday dinner.

“Don’t be crass,” he says. “It’s nobody’s business what happens within a marriage except the two participants. And in some cases, their parents.”

In some cases
, some
of their parents
. I picture Mr. Bernier’s shiny bald head and rippling biceps. That man would rip my limbs out one at a time and eat them if he found out Annie and I got married. For immigration status, for love, for duty, for a joke, for sex—it wouldn’t matter. I’d be a chew toy.

“You didn’t pay Annie to marry you,” Dad continues. “You didn’t meet her last week on Craigslist or through some seedy human trafficker. She’s your friend, correct? You married your friend.”

“Yeah.” My stomach hurts. Too much fast food, too many breakfasts of stale doughnuts and rubbery egg McWhatevers. I miss Mom’s cooking already, and the kitchen’s only been packed up for three days.

Three days.

Crap.
Crap, crap, crap. I don’t know how to cook. Why have I never learned how to cook?
Why hasn’t anyone bothered to teach me how to cook?
Stupid question. I know why. I never needed to know how to cook, never anticipated needing to know, and never had the slightest interest in learning. Sarina can make almost anything, which I’ve always used as evidence that it can’t be that hard.

But what if it is?

This tied-up rot in my gut from three days of straight junk—what if it’s permanent? I like Taco Bell as much as the next guy, but I’m not fooling myself. I’m pretty sure my body can’t handle three fast-food meals a day.

But Mom learned. After that first year of being here in the States without a cook, she forced herself, one burnt, tear-salted meal at a time. I close my eyes and think about her naan, its perfect chewiness, the smell of the dough as it fries and puffs up. Or her tagine, the earthy richness of the lamb stew I ate just the other night. I’m glad I hadn’t realized each meal was the last of its kind. For a while, anyway. It would have made it harder.

“Another doughnut?” Dad asks.

“No. Thank you.”

He’s still turning pages of
The Economist
, and I’m distracted by the blur of images, the armies of words that he’s not even trying to read. He subscribes, so it’s not like he saw this issue on the stand and had to have it, but he usually scours and absorbs every inch from cover to cover. But what he’s doing right now, turning every page without taking in any of it, is just another task to be checked off his list.

“We need to go over some things,” he says.

“What things?” I ask.

“Let’s start with school. I’ve filed the necessary emancipation forms and sent them to your principal and superintendent, giving you permission to act as your own guardian.”

“You don’t want to make Annie my legal guardian? Maybe I should have asked her to adopt me instead of marry me.”

He doesn’t even smirk. It’s like I’m not talking. “Moving on,” he says. “Basketball camp.”

A sudden lump in my throat can’t be swallowed. “What about it?”

“You’re not going.”

“What?”

“You’re getting a job.”

“But—”

“Save it. You decided you were an adult. You got married. Now you’re getting a job so you can contribute financially. Summer camp is for children.”

I stare at my hands and nod. Why can’t I argue? Is it because he’s right? Everything’s sinking, though. My stomach, my heart, my brain. I drag a chair out from the table and sit down.

“As for your banking . . .” He pauses to pull several thick folders from the portable file box at his feet and careens headfirst into a fiscal responsibility lecture, hitting all the essentials: checking, savings, debit, credit, interest, record keeping, various PINs, and on and on. He doesn’t just go through it once, though. Several times he cycles through the same material, and unless this is his first and only Alzheimer’s symptom, he thinks he’s doing this for my benefit. Not only does he believe he can purchase me some financial savvy by repeating himself again and again, apparently he’s reverted to twenty years ago, back to a time before all my banking could be taken care of by him via the internet, all the way from, say, the Middle East. “—and are you even listening?”

“Yes.”

He shakes his head, shoves the folders back into the file box, but one doesn’t want to fit.

“I’m listening. I am.”

He wrestles the one offending file into submission, snaps the lid shut.

“But I can call you, right?” I ask. “Or email you. I mean, if I forget my debit card PIN or my Blue Cross Blue Shield number, or if I have some kind of emergency. It’s not like I can’t ever talk to you again.”

The moment I’ve said it, I realize I should have just shut up and kept on nodding. His face is raw with unguarded disappointment, and I see what he’s really saying through this never-ending, outward-spiraling lecture after lecture. If I can’t handle this, I’ve failed him. No, I’m evidence of his own failure, which is worse. I’m supposed to be the finished product right now, what he’s worked my whole life for me to be, and we both know I’m not. Maybe won’t ever be.

“I’m listening,” I try again lamely.

He sighs, takes out the folder labeled
CAMRY
, and starts talking about insurance premiums and mileage till I schedule my next oil tune-up. But it’s clear. He doesn’t really believe I can handle this, and I have this sudden uncontrollable desire for the hot, chewy fried naan that my mother will never again make for me. And I’m not going to basketball camp. If he wasn’t staring right at me while he talked, I’d be tempted to slump to the kitchen floor, put my head in my hands, and cry.

* * *

F
riday comes.

And then Friday goes, sweeping my entire life along with it. My family. I didn’t realize, I mean I knew, I knew they were going and I was staying, but it isn’t until I wake up to
Friday
Friday that I feel it: this swelling of every second. And I know that every moment is going to feel more, hurt more. And they all do. Every second balloons to near bursting, until they aren’t units of time but tiny eternities.

The worst is saying good-bye to Sarina.

Dad doesn’t want me to take them to the airport at all, but then they run out of trunk space in the taxi and need to stuff the Camry with the last-minute carry-on purchases Mom and Sarina made. But it’s understood: I’m not to come in. Mom can’t take it. As it is she’s sobbing, has been since we pulled out of the driveway, and doesn’t stop the whole way to Louisville. Her dramatics are going to rob us all of our good-byes. I know it, but I can’t do anything except feel sick and wait for the bloated seconds to wash through me.

I’m almost right. The moment we pull the last of the bags from the trunk, Dad lets Mom cling to me, pouring years of tears into my shirt for a few panicky seconds, then ushers her inside. Away from me. Like I’m damaging her. He doesn’t have the time to do more than grip me and tell me to work hard, and then in a moment of unanticipated generosity he turns to Sarina and says, “We’ll wait for you inside. Take your time.”

She’s wearing her glasses.

“What’s with the four eyes?”

She pushes the saucer-sized frames up with the back of her hand. “Shut up. I’m going to be on planes for the next nineteen hours.”

But her eyes are bloodshot. And when she hugs me it isn’t with that same clinging desperation that Mom had, but something weaker. She isn’t trying to pull a part of me with her. She’s given up.

“It’s not fair,” she mumbles and pulls back. “It’s not fair that you get to stay.”

Finally. It’s what I wanted her to feel all along, except now it feels so much worse than her denial. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“Yeah, but so what?”

“So I wish you weren’t going back.”

“But not as badly as you want to stay.”

I don’t fight with her. She’s right. Not that it has anything to do with anything, but I do want to stay more than anything else in the world, even more than I want her to stay. Maybe that makes me the most selfish bastard in the entire world, but it’s not like I could change anything anyway.

“Take good care of Duchess,” she says.

“Maybe. I really hate that cat.”

“Mo.”

“Of course I’ll take care of her.”

I should say something inspiring, but I’m drawing a blank. Seems like I should be able to reproduce one of Coach’s game-day pep talks—one of the really transformative ones he saves for when we’re about to get our asses handed to us—but I’ve got nothing. “Uh, good luck.”

For a second, half of her mouth pulls up into a smile that looks nothing like an actual smile. “Good luck? That’s the best you can do? You suck.”

“I know.”

She rushes at me for one more hug. I don’t think about the fact that this is the end of an era, and I hug her back. At first I’m exactly how Dad would want me to be: unfazed, patient, dignified. But then she shudders and I feel those stupid Coke-bottle glasses pressing into my chest, and the truth of what’s happening to us is suddenly so absolute I want to shove her back into the car and speed off.

These are the seconds that feel like swollen bubbles, caught in my throat, choking me.

In the end, I’m not the dignified one. She steps back and hoists her backpack onto her shoulder, but I’m already back in the car before she can even get her other arm through the strap. I’m driving away before she can see that I’m crying too.