Since She Went Away(11)
Jenna waited. The girl seemed on the brink of adding something else, but she stopped herself. Jenna decided not to prod. She’d already trodden uncomfortable ground. She didn’t need to pry into her parents’ marital troubles.
“I see,” Jenna said, trying to sound neutral.
“We’re going, Mom.” Jared reached out and gently guided Tabitha toward the door. “Tabitha’s late.”
The two of them walked side by side, but Tabitha turned back and looked at Jenna again. “I’m sorry about your friend,” she said, her voice still flat and cool. “It’s messed up when these things happen. When people just disappear.”
And then they were gone.
CHAPTER SIX
They walked side by side through the dark, close but not holding hands. Jared wanted to reach out, to fold Tabitha’s hand into his, but she walked with her head down, her eyes fixed on the ground as though she was afraid she might trip. And they never held hands in public. She didn’t want someone to see and tell her dad. So Jared didn’t push it.
And Tabitha did this at times, slipped away into someplace in her mind and acted as if the rest of the world, including him, didn’t exist. Jared wanted to chalk it up to the embarrassment of his mom walking in, and then her slip of the tongue about Tabitha’s mom, but he suspected something more. He’d seen her withdraw that way on an almost daily basis, and whenever he’d ask what was wrong, she’d simply say, “I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry about my mom,” he said. “She really is pretty mellow, but sometimes she says stuff. It’s kind of like if there’s an embarrassing situation, she feels the need to acknowledge it or talk about it more instead of just letting it go away.”
Tabitha kept walking, eyes down. In the street beside them, cars zipped by, the headlights catching their figures in the glow and making Jared squint. He couldn’t wait to get his license, to no longer have to be dependent on walking across town in the cold or rain. Or taking rides from his mom or his friends’ parents.
“She was probably a little shocked to see a girl in my room,” he said. “It’s never really happened. I mean, I’ve been with girls and stuff, just not in my room.”
Tabitha looked up, turning to face him. But she still didn’t say anything.
“Is that okay? Should I have not said that?”
“No, you’re lucky,” she said.
“Lucky?” He didn’t understand what she meant. Lucky? Because he hadn’t had a lot of girls in his room? “You mean because I have a mom looking out for me?” he asked.
She didn’t answer right away, but then she said, “Yes, that.”
“Will your dad be pissed that you’re late? I know you’re supposed to be home before it gets dark.”
Tabitha spoke but barely moved her lips. “I don’t know.”
The nature of their relationship—if he was even allowed to call it that—had always seemed strange to Jared. They spent a lot of time together but only in the most narrow, limited way. Tabitha’s father insisted she come home right after school every day, which meant they rushed out of the building carrying their books. Only a couple of times—including today—had Tabitha defied her father and done something else. Mostly the two of them ate lunch together and talked all through study hall in the cafeteria, to the point that Jared’s best friends—Mike and Syd—had taken to shaking their heads at him for being so quickly and completely in love.
Tabitha texted him from time to time outside of school, but she never called, and the messages stopped in the early evening, long before either one of them would have been going to bed.
They crossed Washington Street, lights glowing in all the houses. Through some of the windows, Jared saw families sitting down to dinner together or watching TV, like some kind of sickeningly perfect Norman Rockwell scene. He’d never had that in his life, at least not in the ten years since his dad left. But how many kids did? Half of his friends’ parents were divorced, and he’d been in enough homes and around enough families to see the strain and tensions that simmered in even the most normal places.
A few blocks later, the houses started to change. He and his mom lived in what she called a “working-class neighborhood,” which as far as he could tell meant they were surrounded by store clerks and mechanics and men and women who worked in factories. They all took good care of their yards and kept a careful eye on their kids. Occasionally somebody threw a party, and there’d be loud music and whooping and hollering and beer cans in the yard the next morning. But the beer cans always got picked up, usually by the homeowners themselves, tired and looking hungover, sweating out their booze as they tossed the empties into an orange recycling bin.
The few blocks around Washington Street were nicer. The homes were older and bigger, made out of brick with wide front porches and bay windows. Those houses had beautifully cared for yards as well, but the people who lived there didn’t do the work. They paid someone else to cut and trim and weed and plant. Jared knew a few kids from school who lived there, the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers and executives.
But across Washington, as they headed into Tabitha’s neighborhood, the houses looked different from the way they did anywhere else. They were small and dirty, the yards filled with toys and trash. The cars in the street were dented and damaged, leaking oil and hoisted on blocks. People sat on their porches a lot over there when the weather was nice, but Jared didn’t get the sense it was because they were looking out for anybody else. Those people gave off a boredom that bordered on desperation, a thick, palpable sense of being lost and adrift. He couldn’t imagine what else they did with their time, if anything.