I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(57)

He left a few hours later. That night, Edith removed her clothes and surveyed her body in the mirror and felt, for all the world, as if she were staring at a stranger. For more than four months, she had made love to a man she did not love, and not loving him had been good. But it wasn’t good anymore. She wasn’t ashamed; she was just finished. The next time he came, without malice, she asked him to leave and to never come again, and without malice, he had gone.





Chapter Twenty

Clare




As soon as Dev got into my car, he said, “Breaks, contusions, abrasions, lacerations, ruptures!” not in the lions-and-tigers-and-bears manner you might expect with such a grim list but gleefully and accentuating each word with a karate chop to the dashboard.

Unaccountably, it was exactly the right thing to say.

I’d been nervous on the drive from Edith’s house to Dev’s mom’s house. Not sweaty-palms, heart-clanging nervous; no high school orchestra warmed up inside my brain as sometimes happened. But my thumbs fluttered; my legs vibrated; three separate times, I caught myself humming a song that had nothing to do with the one coming through my car’s speakers. After ten miles of this, I was faintly exasperated with myself. By thirty, I had become the most irritating person I had ever met. And by the time I hit fifty, I was threatening to pull over and dump myself out on the side of the highway.

“You’re just lucky you’re driving,” I said aloud, “or you’d be gone, baby, gone.”

While it was true that I had spent a little face-to-face time with Dev at my nonwedding, it had been very little time, and for most of it, we’d been with at least one other person, so our attention had been divided, although looking back, I understood that the other people had been a minor distraction compared to the elephant in the room, the elephant being, of course, the fact that I could not possibly, in this lifetime or in any other, marry Zach. So when you factor in the other people and the elephant, Dev and I had almost not been together in real life that weekend at all.

Since then we’d been together on the phone, yes. In texts, yes. We’d been comfortable and jokey and chatty and even, once in a while, serious, more and more so with each conversation or exchange, until, by the time I pulled up in his mom’s driveway, we were very nearly back to the business of being the Dev and Clare of old, minus being in love, of course. Which is exactly why I was nervous because, as everyone knows, nothing makes you feel stupider than being familiar and totally at ease with a person over the phone, only to be stilted and shy and awkward when the two of you are finally physically in the same room. Or car. Cars are so much worse.

But Dev’s litany of bodily injuries turned out to be—if you’ll excuse the lame joke—just what the doctor ordered. “Breaks, contusions, abrasions, lacerations, ruptures!” and—poof—the awkwardness vanished.

“Nice to see you, too,” I said, starting the car.

“Br rbs, clav. Cont, abr face,” said Dev, more or less, and then again, “br rbs, clav. Cont, abr face!”

“Wow. This is going to be a long drive,” I said.

He said it again, loudly.

“Increasing the volume never helps in these situations,” I pointed out.

He said it again.

“You know what would help? Vowels.”

He rapped on the side of my head with his knuckles, lightly but not that lightly. “Clare. Pay attention.”

As I rubbed my head, he began to say it again, very, very slowly, but before he finished, it hit me. “Oh!” I said. “Oh, oh, oh!”

“Finally. Geez.”

“The shadow ledger! The stuff after the town abbreviations! She’s listing their injuries!”

“Yup,” said Dev.

“That’s wonderful! I mean, it’s awful. But how did it take you so long to figure it out?”

“And by that you mean, Way to go, Dev!”

“You start medical school in two months, at a fancy-pants school, no less. Correct?”

“What’s your point? And I would not call it ‘fancy-pants.’”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not 1910 and I’m not ninety-seven years old. For starters.”

We went on like this for very close to all of the four-hour trip. Somewhere in there, I noticed that Dev’s hair had grown out since the nonwedding and that he was back to doing the thing where he’d rake it impatiently off his forehead with his fingers as if it had fallen there just to annoy him; and, after we’d stopped to switch places, that he still drove with just one hand on the wheel despite all those years of my admonishing him about safety, safety, safety; and, when dusk fell outside the car where we sat talking, that his eyes, when he glanced over at me, matched the sky exactly.



Even though it was just after ten o’clock at night when we got to my parents’ house, everyone was there. Besides my mom and Gordon, there were Dev’s paternal grandparents, Ingrid and Rudy Sandoval, and Dev’s maternal step-grandparents, Ellie and Dr. B. Brown. They all lived in the same neighborhood, the one I’d moved to with my mother when I was eleven, the one in which Teo and Cornelia and their brothers and sisters had grown up, and the one Dev had visited so often that it was his neighborhood as much as anyone’s.

The first time I talked to Hildy about these people, and their children and their children’s children, and their various relationships to one another, she had pretended—very convincingly—to tear her hair out by the roots and had then thundered, “Enough! From now on they are ‘Leftover Night.’”