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“Where did you go to medical school?” Jecca asked Tris.
“Uh oh,” he said. “It’s first-date time.”
“A little late for that,” Jecca answered. “By now I should be asking you about your past girlfriends.”
He groaned. “I’d rather anything than that, so school it is.”
When Nell stopped to take pictures, Tris and Jecca continued their conversation from the car and asked each other questions about their childhoods, travel, friends, and finally, even past boyfriends and girlfriends.
Tris insisted he was a virgin until he met Jecca.
She looked at him.
“That thing you did in the chair on the first night . . . That made me feel brand-new to the art of—”
Jecca cut him off with a look at Nell.
Tris chuckled. “What about your relatives? Cousins, aunts, uncles?”
“None,” Jecca said, and told him that her mother had been an only child and her father’s older brother had been killed in Vietnam.
“And all four of your grandparents have passed away?” Tris asked.
“Yes. I think that’s part of why the Sheila War hurts my dad so much. He only has Joey and me.”
“And his grandchildren.”
Jecca sighed. ?
??Sheila doesn’t let Dad see them very often. She wants them to be . . .” She glanc221hoods, traed at Tris. “Doctors or lawyers, not men who work in hardware stores.”
They were sitting on a big rock at the side of the trail and watching Nell run about a field as she tried to get a butterfly to stay still long enough to photograph it. “Your poor dad,” Tris said. “Everyone around him has left him. Parents, sibling, and now it seems he’s even lost his son.”
Jecca had to look away for a moment. “I’m all Dad has left,” she said. “I feel bad that he’s stuck in a family war, so I do all that I can to look after him. I call him, e-mail him, except that he hates computers. I gave him a phone that gets e-mails and I visit when I can, but it’s not enough though. None of it is enough.”
Tris stood up and held out his hand to help her up. “You sound like you do more than most adult children do. Why don’t you get him to come here for a visit?”
“My dad take a vacation?” Jecca said. “Never has; never will. He’s a man who can’t bear to be idle. He gets fidgety on Sundays when the store’s closed. One time Joey jammed a bit up inside a drill because Dad was making us crazy because he was bored. Dad lectured Joey, then settled down to repair the drill. Joey said I owed him twenty dollars for babysitting Dad.”
Tris laughed. “Your father sounds like a handful.”
“You have no idea,” Jecca said.
Nell came back to them, and they picked up their packs and started walking again. At last they went around a bend to see a truly beautiful place, with a deep stream running at the bottom of what was almost a mountain. Tall pine trees were at one edge, a field of wildflowers at the other end.
“We’re here,” Nell said and ran forward.
“Like it?” Tris asked.
“Very much,” Jecca said.
“Nell and I usually set up a day camp over there by those rocks. That okay with you?”
“Perfect. Why don’t you go fishing and let us girls make the camp?”
“I could help,” he said, but she could tell that he was dying to get to the water.
“You’d just be in the way.”
