Everything I Left Unsaid(60)

She smiled. “I can dig something up.”

And just like that I had a date with a stripper.

—

Before heading over to Joan’s, I walked past the rhododendron to Tiffany’s trailer. Outside at the picnic table all three kids were coloring. Markers and crayons were in a shoe box in the middle of the table.

“Hi, guys,” I said.

Briefly they all looked up, blond hair falling over blue eyes, and then the girls bent back to their work. But Danny kept looking at me. “Hey,” he said. The spokesman of the group.

“Your mom around?” I asked, stepping toward the trailer and the closed door.

“Dad’s here,” Danny said and I stopped. It was silent inside and there was no telling if it was a dangerous or a happy silence. It was just silence.

I spun around looking for the car, only to find it parked in a different spot on the other side of the trailer, like it was hiding. I just caught a glimpse of its bumper.

The car seemed ominous. Good lord. Paranoid, much?

“Are you…okay?” I asked.

“Fine.”

“We’re going to McDonald’s,” one of the girls said. Her paper was a vast rainbow, stretching from side to side. “Dad said.”

“That’s awesome.”

I backtracked slowly, but before I passed the rhododendron I stopped. I might be imagining some of the devils, but at least one of them was very real. “Danny?”

“Yeah?” He was working hard on a Spider-Man coloring book, the red wax of his crayon thick on the page. Shiny.

“Do you know which trailer is mine?”

He stopped coloring and looked up. “First one past the bush.”

“Right. If you need anything…anything at all. If you’re scared or something. Come knock on my door.”

He stared at me for a long time, those eyes of his so grown up, and then shrugged. “Sure.”

I walked back to my trailer and grabbed the box of wine, thinking about all those people who’d tried to help me that I’d shoved away with both hands. With all my strength I’d shoved them until they never came back again.





Joan had heated up frozen taquitos, which were among my top five favorite meals from a box. And she mixed sour cream and salsa together to dip them in—a brilliant combination I’d never once considered. And she had real wineglasses set up on her little table, the ashtray put away.

“Well,” I said, stepping up onto the wooden porch. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. It was Joan after all. I felt like I was trying to make friends with a shark. “Aren’t we fancy?”

“We are. Open up that box.”

Box wine has a spigot, which cut the fancy down considerably.

“So?” she asked, sitting back with a lukewarm glass of wine and a taquito. She was wearing thin yoga pants and a tank top, and even that somehow looked amazing on her. “This guy you’ve got…”

“I don’t have him anymore,” I said, dipping a taquito into the sauce. “It’s over.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It’s probably…all right.” Though it wasn’t. Though I missed the idea of calling him far too much for it to be normal. “We weren’t ever going to be a thing, you know. It wasn’t real.”

Joan snorted. “What’s real?” she asked. “I figure if you’re living it, it’s real enough.”

I shook my head, unwilling to talk about Dylan. Unsure of what even to say. That photo and the article were still swimming around my head. He’d been hurt. Badly. And he was more handsome than I could even believe.

“What about you?” I asked, wrenching the conversation into a new direction.

“Me and men?” she laughed.

“Yeah, the guy that I’ve seen coming out of your trailer—”

She shook her head. “He’s no one.”

“No one? Two times coming out of your trailer?”

“A guy I work with. That’s all. And—” She pointed her taquito at me. “I am not talking about him with you.”

“Okay, okay, I get it. Smiling shirtless guy coming out of your trailer is off limits.”

“Fine, you want to be nosey?” She sprawled back in her chair.

“No. I don’t.”

“Too late. What are you going to do now?”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “You got away from the guy who hurt you…what are you going to do next? I mean, you can’t kill yourself in that field forever.”

“I’m thinking of becoming a stripper.”

Joan laughed. “Honey, you need a few thousand dollars in plastic surgery on those boobs before you’ll make a living.”

I put a hand to my chest as if I were stung.

“Seriously.” Joan poured herself more wine and the sun sunk down below Ben’s garden. I stretched out my legs, which were knobby and scratched. Looking at them made me think of Dylan’s lips, for some reason. Like the worst part of my body was connected somehow to the most beautiful part of his. Opposites—that why I thought of his mouth. We were a combination of opposites, the far edges of the beauty spectrum. “What are you going to do?”