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“Why?”
I wait.
He sighs. “Orange and white,” he says.
“You positive?”
“Yes, burnt orange and white. Uniforms, mascot. Goalposts. The end zone. The entire stadium. It’s midnight. It’s after midnight. I’m sleeping. Why are you asking?”
I can’t seem to tell him the truth, which sounds crazy. The U.S. marshal who showed up at our house is based out of there. Bailey remembers being there. Maybe. And Owen got weird about the idea of us going there, two different times. Two different times I can now recall.
I don’t want to tell him that Austin is all I have.
I think of my grandfather. If he were alive, and sitting here with me, I could tell him. He wouldn’t think I was crazy. He’d just sit there and help me go through it all until I figured out what I needed to do. That’s why he was good at his job—at helping me understand what my job was. The first lesson he ever taught me was that it wasn’t just about shaping a block of wood into what you wanted it to be. That it was also a peeling back, to seeing what was inside the wood, what the wood had been before. It was the first step to creating something beautiful. The first step to making something out of nothing.
If Owen were here, he would understand that too. I could tell him too. He would look at me and shrug. What do you have to lose? He would look at me, and see it—what I’d already decided.
Protect her.
“Jake? I’ll call you back,” I say.
“Tomorrow!” he says. “Call me back tomorrow.”
I hang up, and I go back outside. I find Bailey where I left her, staring out at the bay, sipping on my glass of wine, like it belongs to her.
“What are you doing?” I say.
The glass is almost empty. It was full when I left it. Now it is almost empty. The wine covers her lips, the corners of her mouth stained red.
“Can you not?” she says. “I just had a little.”
“I don’t care about the wine.”
“So then why are you looking at me like that?” she says.
“You should go and pack a bag,” I say.
“Why?” she says.
“I was thinking about what you said, about the wedding. About Austin. And I think we should go,” I say.
“To Austin?”
I nod.
She looks at me, confused. “That’s crazy. How is going to Austin going to help anything?” she says.
I want to give her an honest answer. If I try to quote my grandfather and tell her this could be the peeling back, will she be able to hear that? I doubt it. And if I tell her what I’ve put together so far—a wobbly formulation at best—she will rebel and refuse to go.
So I tell her something that she can hear, something that is also the truth. Something that sounds like what her father would say.
“It’s better than sitting here,” I say.
“What about school?” she says. “I’m just going to miss school?”
“You said you weren’t going tomorrow anyway,” I say. “Didn’t you just finish saying that?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess.”
