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“Why would anybody say that about you?”
A few seconds’ pause. “Actually, I take it back. It’s been awhile since anybody said that. I’m trying to be the responsible one these days.”
“Trying?”
Three or four mornings out of five, his blue truck was waiting in the parking lot when she drove up, and he kept her late after work. He seemed about as responsible as they came.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t come real natural. My brother, Patrick? He and I …” Tony paused, then exhaled explosively. “Let’s just say he did something he couldn’t undo, and I had a part in it. It changed the way I think about … pretty much everything. And then my dad died a few years ago, and my mom took over the company, but she doesn’t know jack shit about building things. I’ve been helping her keep it afloat.”
“You don’t sound like trouble at all.”
“I used to be.”
An uncomfortable pause. They’d strayed too far from where they started. In an attempt to steer them back, she said, “That’s a relief. If you were a saint, who would teach me how to misbehave?”
Silence.
She’d walked off a conversational cliff.
In the dark, silence had a completely different quality. She felt exposed, her heart beating over a loudspeaker, her words echoing in the space between them.
She smelled concrete and pool chlorine and damp. She shifted away from the hard plastic of the chair digging into her upper back, and she heard it all coming. Everything he was about to say.
“Amber, look.”
She crossed her arms.
“You’re a nice girl.”
That. Exactly that. Now he would tell her he hadn’t meant what he’d said earlier.
“I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression. The thing is …”
“I get it,” she said. Anything to stop him before he could tell her she was too nice for him, or too young, or too something else that she didn’t know the words for.
“I’m pushing thirty,” he said. “And you’re, what, twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
“Twenty-four.”
Metal scraped over concrete as he shifted in his chair. “You’re a pretty girl.”
He said it like an apology.
“Thank you.”
Silence again. Pitch-black silence, into which no machines rumbled and no lights intruded, no shapes emerged to make the darkness feel familiar. She could hear the rain, a faraway white noise that only seemed to deepen the quiet of the basement.
She could hear her watch, too, ticking off the seconds. She’d had no idea it was making so much noise down there on her wrist.
And beneath that, inaudible but present, she could hear the anger and frustration she’d been finding increasingly difficult to ignore over the past few years.
This was what came of trying so hard for so long to be good. Twenty-four years old, and her inexperience was written all over her face, so obvious that it meant a man like Tony didn’t even find her attractive.
When she was little, she’d believed that God was watching her, and she’d wanted to please Him, just as she’d wanted to please her mother. In those first years after they moved to Ohio from Michigan, away from her aunts and uncles and her grandparents, her mother had become so bitter and unhappy she was almost unrecognizable.
Amber did what she could to make it better. She played with her younger brother, Caleb, and helped take care of baby Katie. She never made a peep at school, helped clean the house, brought home exemplary report cards.
After a while, Mom got used to Camelot, Ohio, and Amber got used to being good. For years and years, she was as good as she could possibly be, thinking it was going to get her somewhere. Win her a blue ribbon, or true love, or fulfillment.
