The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(59)

“No, Mickie. I don’t think anything. That’s my problem—I don’t think.”

She wiped her eyes, and I realized she was fighting back tears. “Because I don’t, okay? I know what people say about me, but I’m not like that. Look, sometimes I just like to feel like . . .” She turned her head, but I saw a tear escape, rolling down her cheek. “My house . . . it’s not great, Sam. My dad is working all the time, and he and my mother fight a lot when he’s home. I usually have to take Joanna away,” she said, meaning her little sister, who was eight years younger than Mickie. “And then I can’t get my homework done.” Her chest heaved. “I’m failing two classes. It’s a real mess.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t know. You live with Ward and June Cleaver, for Christ’s sake. Why do you think I’m always at your house? It’s nice being someplace where people aren’t yelling and screaming at each other all the time.”

“How long has it been like this?”

“Forever, but apparently not for much longer; they sat us down the other night. My dad is moving out. They’re getting a divorce.”

“I’m sorry.” I opened my arms, and Mickie stepped into them, sobbing. It was one of the few times I can recall Mickie crying.

“Hey,” I said. “We’re going to miss the previews.” I wrapped my arm around her shoulder as we walked back to the Falcon.

Mickie wiped her tears from her cheeks, and I opened the passenger door for her and closed it after she slid in, making my way around to the driver’s side.

“She likes you, Sam,” Mickie said when I climbed behind the wheel.

“You hardly talked to her.”

“I can tell,” she said. “Be careful.”

“About what?”

“Just be careful.”

In hindsight, I know that Mickie’s concern wasn’t that Donna liked me. She couldn’t say it then, but what she was contemplating was something I knew intuitively but refused to consider—why someone like Donna would like someone like me. I had never even been on a date, and now this eighteen-year-old was sticking her tongue down my throat. Odd as it sounds for a guy who should have been sensitive to such things, I was blinded by the raw hope that maybe, just maybe, Donna did like me, despite the color of my eyes. She had, after all, kissed me, hadn’t she? That had to have meant something, didn’t it? And why couldn’t she like me? I wasn’t bad to look at, putting aside the whole eye thing for the moment. I was smart, and I could be funny, at times.

But I was being naive. I didn’t know it then, but I soon would.

Mickie remained pressed against the passenger door. “Slide over, will you. It feels strange having you way over there.”

Mickie picked up the bag of candy and slid over, pressing up against me so hard the armrest on the door dug into my side. She did spend much of the movie nearly in my lap, but rather than being annoyed, I savored it. Mickie was like Ernie; she had always been there for me when I needed her, and it felt good to be there for her when she needed me. We were misfits, the three of us. I didn’t think of us that way back then, but looking back, I know now it was why we gravitated to one another.

After the movie I drove Mickie home, parking the Falcon beneath the outstretched limbs and full leaves of a gnarled hundred-year-old oak tree in her front yard. She didn’t immediately get out. She sat staring at the front door of her family’s two-story stucco home. “Are you going to be all right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll be home after I run deliveries if you want to talk.”

“I have a date,” she said.

“Call me later?”

She nodded. Then she did something she’d never done. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I love you, Hill.”

But, as always, Mickie was out the door and up her driveway before I had the chance to respond. I watched her until she disappeared into her home. “I love you, too,” I said.





16

Donna sounded as friendly as ever when I entered the store after dropping Mickie at home. “How was the movie?” she asked.

“Good,” I said, still preoccupied by Mickie’s deteriorating family situation.

“Was Mickie scared?”

“She’s tougher than she lets on.”

I dust mopped and stocked the shelves while my dad got the deliveries ready. I contemplated telling him what Mickie had told me about her parents getting a divorce, then thought it would break a confidence and decided not to. I wondered if that was what Mickie and my mother talked about in their hushed whispers when I wasn’t around. I felt sad for Mickie and for her sister, Joanna, who was still just a kid. Mickie’s brothers were older, and from what I could tell, didn’t have a lot on the ball. I was naive, I know. My parents weren’t perfect. They argued on occasion, and there were times I’d get home and the chill in the house would be palpable. My mother also thought my father was “a little too wed” to his Manhattan each night and said that it set a “bad example” for me, and I’d heard him tell her she was a bit too zealous when it came to religion. Still, I never even contemplated my parents divorcing, and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to enter our home and not have them both living there.