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“Now you don’t have to worry about it,” she said coolly.
“It’s my family. They’remyresponsibility.”
She straightened. “They’re my family too.”
She’d never even met most of them. And this arrangement was temporary. Why was she tangling it all up? Making it harder for me when she went back to London and left me behind?
I drummed the steering wheel with my free hand and couldn’t make myself let go with the one she held.
The streetlights illuminated our joined hands on her lap every so often. Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Wasn’t that how our relationship had been since she’d been back?
I drove aimlessly, though I hadn’t headed toward Manhattan. When we passed by Mike’s house, I realized maybe I hadn’t been wandering after all.
“Everything I have is yours,” I finally said. What was the point in hiding? Was I pretending not to feel for her sake or mine? I was failing miserably regardless of who I was doing it for.
“Except what I want,” she said under her breath.
“Everything.”
If she didn’t see that, I didn’t know what else to do. And what could she possibly want that she didn’t have? Especially from me.
“Can we go home now?”
“Let me drive by Bobby’s, then we’ll head back.”
She looked out the passenger side window. “Someday I want to apologize to all of them. For what my father has done.”
“You don’t owe them an apology.”
“I still want to.” She turned up the radio.
“Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues” came on. She’d added it to this tape after I’d told her it was one of Pop’s favorite songs. The music was painful and soothing at the same time. We’d listened to the song in his truck when I was a kid, and later when we’d ride to work together.
“Your ma can whistlelike this guy.” Pop pointed to my radio.
“She can?” In all the times we’d heard this song, I didn’t remember her ever whistling.
“Yeah. Did I ever tell you that’s how I fell in love with her?”
I shook my head and looked across the truck at him.
“We were in junior high. I can’t even remember who started the fight, but it turned into an all-out brawl.”
I tried to imagine Pop in a rumble. He didn’t back down from a fight, but I’d never seen him raise a fist.
“This ear-splitting whistle bounced off the gym walls. You know how it echoes in there.”
I nodded. I did. It was awful off the concrete block walls.
“There she was. Standing at the top of the bleachers. She had on a blue dress and Coke-bottle glasses.” He rubbed his jaw. “Donny landed a sucker punch to my face. Damn near broke my jaw. But I couldn’t see anything but her.”
“You knew her before that though, right?”
“Sort of. She was a couple of grades below me.” There was a wistful look on his face. “I took those bleacher steps two at a time and told her she was gonna marry me.”
He chuckled as if he were back in a memory a lifetime ago. “She pushed me and told me to get lost. I won her over with flowers and carrying her books around. Do you know how much shit a guy gets following a girl around like a puppy?”
Yeah. At one point, I’d dished it out to my buddies who’d gotten hearts in their eyes. And I’d definitely given a hard time to my brothers.
