When Ghosts Come Home(63)

She smiled and shook her head, Danny’s face blurring as she did. “No,” she said, “Colleen Banks will not throw up in this car or any other vehicle this evening.”

Danny slowed and clicked on his blinker, the ticking sound filling the night like a clock that had suddenly been wound, the orange glow of its signal tossing light ahead and behind the Camaro in a way that illuminated the night with an unimpeded glow. Danny had turned off his headlights, just as he had done when dropping Colleen off late at night—both of them similarly wasted—when they were in high school and, later, when she was home from college.

As they slowed, darkness enveloped the car, folding over them as a solid thing. Danny’s car crept into her parents’ driveway, the soft light from the half-moon floating down in a way that seemed less like light and more like something physical that drifted on the air. Colleen could make out the dark lean of her parents’ house, the soft edges of her mother’s car parked in the driveway, her father’s cruiser parked by the road, the clean slashes of trees.

Danny put the car into park and took his foot off the brake. “How long are you staying?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. She let her head sag against the seat. “I haven’t thought much about it. My mom needs my help, and my dad’s got the election coming up, so—”

“Bullshit,” Danny said.

Colleen lifted her head and looked over at Danny. She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. “It’s not bullshit,” she finally said.

“It’s bullshit if you think your mom needs your help,” he said. “Your mom needs your help as much as your dad does, and I don’t think your dad has ever needed anybody’s help.”

“He’s probably going to lose this election, Danny.”

“And you hanging campaign posters with your mom is going to change that? Please.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything,” he said. “But they don’t need your help, Colleen. And you don’t need their help either.”

“I didn’t say I needed their help.”

He put his hand over hers. It felt warm and familiar. Colleen looked down at their hands. She turned hers over, palm up, and their fingers interlocked. “Look, honey,” he said, “I’m about the worst and last person to be giving advice on relationships, but I think the only person who can help you and the only person who needs your help is back in Texas.”

She let go of his hand and brought hers back into her lap. Out of nervous habit, she reached for her wedding ring to spin it on her finger, and again she remembered that she wasn’t wearing it. She looked out at her parents’ house. “Remember when we were in high school,” she said, “and you’d drop me off late and wait for me to get to the front door, and then you’d lay on the horn?”

Danny laughed. “I do,” he said. “I do remember that.”

“Please don’t do that tonight,” Colleen said.

Danny put both palms on the center of the steering wheel as if preparing to honk the horn. He smiled.

“You bastard,” Colleen whispered, trying not to smile herself. “Don’t you dare.”

“You’d better get back to Texas before my hands get heavy.”

She gave him a playful slap. “I needed this tonight,” she said.

“I know,” Danny said. “Me too.”

“I should’ve married you,” she whispered. She smiled.

“Oh, honey,” he said. He cocked his head and looked at her with mock sympathy. “There would’ve been a lot less screwing and a lot more drinking.”

“There hasn’t been that much screwing,” she said, “but there’s been plenty of drinking.”

“Go home,” he said. “To Texas.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and then she opened the door and climbed out. She leaned in the open door and put her fingers to her lips. “Keep your damn hands off that horn,” she said, and then she shut the door and walked up the short driveway toward the front porch, her Keds crunching over the gravel and oyster shells that covered the walk.

She’d made it to the porch steps when she heard Danny drop the car into reverse and roll backward down the short incline of her parents’ driveway. She stepped into the soft curve of yellow light where it cast a halo on the porch, and she felt as if someone’s eyes were on her. She looked up at the second story, expecting to see her mother peeking through the aluminum blinds in the office’s window. No one was there.

By the time she bent to retrieve the front door key from beneath her mother’s planter—the one in the shape of a toad with red geraniums growing from its open back—the motor of Danny’s Camaro was already too far down Yacht Drive to be heard. Colleen found the key and, as quietly as she could, lowered the corner of the planter back to the porch.

When she stood, she caught the scent of cigarette smoke, so overpowering that she could not believe that the near-empty bar in which they’d spent the evening had left such a strong smell clinging to her clothes and hair. It overwhelmed the damp odor of moss, the soggy wood on the porch, and the humid pungency of the dripping oak trees.

She inserted the key into the lock, and that was when she heard a man’s voice lift from the dark at the far end of the porch. “Don’t let me scare you,” the voice said.