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“Please, let’s get somewhere else.” Allie wiped her face clean with her palm. “Let’s talk about it. It feels better to talk. We’re getting somewhere.”
May stared out the window. Allie stared at May, willing her to say something, until she began to feel light-headed and not quite in her body.
She wasn’t the one who told her body to stand up. It just did. It walked to the door, stared at the doorknob, turned it and drifted her down the hall, into the bathroom, where she peed and splashed water on her face.
When she came out, Ben was in the hall.
“No,” he said.
“She won’t.”
“Then you didn’t do it right. Turn around, march back in there, an
d get it done.”
Her back hit the wall, sinking down as the strength went out of her legs. She closed her eyes and thought of Winston’s comfy bed, and his body, and the way he looked at her. She wanted to be back there. She didn’t want to cry anymore.
Ben sighed like she was the least competent of his line cooks. Barely tolerable.
The floor squeaked as his weight shifted.
She peeked. He was sitting right across from her, staring. “You need juice or something?”
“No.”
“You eat anything today?”
“No.”
Then he got up, and she heard him banging around in the kitchen. He came back and set a plate on the floor next to her. Green apple slices spread with peanut butter and drizzled with honey. “Eat it.”
She picked up a slice of apple, mostly to keep him from hating her more than he already did. She didn’t want to put it in her mouth.
“You’re eating that,” he said. “If I have to cut it into tiny pieces and feed them to you like an infant.”
“I don’t know what May sees in you.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not the first person to say that.”
He had a crevice the depth of a canyon between his eyebrows. Allie looked at that crevice as she ate the apple, wondering how many years you had to spend frowning in order to lose that much face real estate to your own craggy meanness.
The apple was delicious. She took another slice.
Some of the tension went out of Ben’s shoulders. He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a delivery coming. I have to be at work in thirty minutes at the absolute latest. So that’s what you’re working with.”
Allie bit into a third slice of apple. She thought maybe he’d put cashew butter on it, or possibly pistachio butter, if that was even a thing.
She wondered if the other half apple was in the kitchen. New York apples were apparently a whole different thing from Wisconsin apples, which didn’t make sense considering Wisconsin was the land of the honeycrisp.
“Listen, what do you want?” Ben asked. “I mean, what do you really want?”
More apple.
To run away.
My sister back.
“A bunch of my Fredericks aunts and uncles hate each other. They hold two different family reunions every year, and you have to pick which one you’re going to attend because if you go to both, everybody hates you. It’s awful.” Tears were dripping onto her shirt, which was stupid. Crying was stupid.
