AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I’m standing next to Ruthie, watching as Izzy mows through the playground like she’s practicing for a tough mudder. Who knew being a kid required such work?
Then again, I was the kid who’d attack my mother’sVoguemagazines and then get yelled at for it. I never had much use for outdoor recreation, even when I had two working legs.
I watch Izzy pull off a flip worthy of an Olympic gymnast, then say, “He told me you thought he might…well, that he might be on the autism spectrum.”
I hadn’t planned on saying it. I haven’t been thinking about it all that much, beyond the research I’ve done about what I can do to make him more comfortable.
Ruthie gives me a sharp look. “He said that to you?” Before I can answer the obvious, she waves a hand. “Sorry, that was rhetorical. Obviously, he must have. I’m just shocked. He doesn’t usually talk about that. I don’t even know if he’s told all of his friends.”
“Why not?” I ask, caught off guard. “From what admittedly minimal research I’ve done, it sounds like there are a lot of adults who think they would have been diagnosed if doctors looked for the same things when we were kids that they look for now. Back then, they only looked for more extreme cases, right?”
She nods slowly. “He’s never gone through the diagnostic process. I don’t think he ever will. But it makes sense to me…him too.”
“He won’t do it because he figures it doesn’t matter?” I guess. “He is who he is?”
“Partly…” She pauses, watching Izzy, her bottom lip between her teeth. After a full thirty seconds, she says, “Our parents thought something was wrong with Danny. He wasn’t anything like they are—he didn’t like to play ball with the kids in the neighborhood. He wasn’t any good at sports, really, until he started biking. And when he was little the noise from the vacuum cleaner made him run into his room and rock. So did the parties they used to hold. Loud and late. Lots of alcohol and pot.” She glances at Izzy, decides she’s fine, and turns back to me. “Our mother used to call him a pussy. She’d say he wasn’t any kind of a man. Of course, my father was a guy who got drunk and liked to throw things—same as she did—so they’re not authorities on what makes a man. They’d tell him he was wrong in the head, and it wasn’t until he did IQ testing in school, at his teacher’s request, that they found out he had an IQ of 155.” Her face hardens. “Then they saw him as their gold mine. Their way out. And he let them take advantage of him because he wanted to take care ofme.”
I feel my heartbeat accelerating. It’s beating in my ears. I want to hug that boy. I want to smother him with love. I want to run to Danny and hold him and tell him the truth—that he’s the best man I’ve ever known, and I feel impossibly lucky to have him in my life.
I swallow against my dry throat. “I’m sorry, but your parents are assholes.”
“You’re telling me,” She says with a snort. “Our father ran off years ago, and I guess our mother’s found religion, but it doesn’t seem to have changed her. People don’t change at their core, if you ask me. If someone’s rotten, they’re rotten all the way through.”
I think about her dislike for Shane—does she see him as rotten all the way through? I don’t know him well, but he did go out of his way to help Danny and me. “Do they reach out to you?”
“She does, occasionally. Most of the time I don’t answer her calls. Sometimes I feel sorry for her, and I’ll talk for a little while, but I’ve never introduced Izzy to them. They weren’t the ones who were there for me when life was tough. Danny was always there.” Her mouth lifts again, though not enough to qualify as a smile. “Even when I didn’t want him to be.” I’m startled to realize there are tears in her eyes. Even more so because I can feel them in my eyes too.
“Fuck,” I say, then flinch and glance around. No one’s looking at me except for a squirrel. It definitely seems judgmental, but it’s probably just pissed off because it lost its nuts. “Sorry.” I take her hand and squeeze it. “When you offered to give me dirt on Danny, I’m sure this wasn’t what you meant.”
She laughs, then rubs at her eyes. She must be rocking some truly exceptional waterproof eyeliner because it doesn’t smudge one bit. I make a mental note to ask her about it later. “I’m glad he felt he could tell you that much. Sometimes he’s so closed up, like he’s some treasure chest at the bottom of the ocean—only he’s the one who put himself there.”
I nod slowly, because I know what she means, and I reflect that he told me that information about himself when I barely knew him. When we were shut up in the elevator together with only each other to guard against the darkness.
“I probably shouldn’t have said so much. Dammit. He wouldn’t like that I did. But I always say too much, and I can tell you care about him. I’m so happy. He deserves to have someone special in his life. He was with this awful woman Daphne a while back—”
I try not to lean forward and show my interest, but I’m like a drunk person trying to hide a good hand at poker, because she cuts herself off with a nod. “So, you know about Daphne.”
“A little. I wouldn’t mind knowing more. Particularly if she has some fatal flaw that can’t be discovered by a simple Google search.”
She laughs and grins, so thankfully I sounded less of a psychopath out loud than I did in my head.
Then her smile slips away. “She saw him the same way they did,” she tells me. “She saw someone who was smart enough to take her ideas and implement them.”
“He did her work for her?” I ask, happy to fuel my kneejerk dislike.
“She’d make it sound like she was asking him to do little favors, no more, no less, butyes. And when he didn’t fall into line, she found someone else who would.”
“You mean when he wouldn’t go to Europe with her?” He couldn’t, because of his agreement with Jarrod Travis, but I’m not supposed to know that. I don’t even know whether Daphne knew. Maybe she didn’t. Danny’s not a man who would burden other people with problems he sees as his own.
“I’m so grateful he said no. That woman had some weird kind of spell over him.”
Not what I wanted to hear, especially since I know he couldn’t have said yes. Based on how Ruthie phrased it, I’m guessing Danny didn’t share the details of his agreement with Jarrod with her.
“Huh. Well, he’s meeting with her this week about his game.”
She swears. “He didn’t tell me that.”
No, and I can’t imagine why not.
