Mrs. Fletcher(97)

Gareth poured shots and we all drank to Katie’s mom.

“It’s kind of amazing,” she said. “She hasn’t even been gone for a year, and here’s my dad getting married again.”

I asked if that bothered her, and she shook her head, no hesitation at all.

“I was worried about him over the winter. He was a real mess. But he’s been a lot better since he met your mom. I think he just needs a woman to take care of him. He doesn’t do that well on his own.”

That made sense to me. I remembered how George had just kinda showed up at our house in the spring and made himself a fixture. Right from the start, it seemed like he belonged there, like he filled an empty space in our lives. But I guess we’d done the same for him.

“You know what?” Gareth said, as if an idea had just occurred to him. “Fuck cancer.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Katie said, and we did.

Cancer was too depressing to think about, so I asked them how long they’d been together. They traded a quick look, like maybe this was a more complicated question than it appeared to be.

“We’re, uh . . . not really together together,” Gareth said.

“Yes we are.” Katie sounded a little annoyed. “We live together.”

“Yeah,” Gareth conceded. “But we don’t have sex.”

Katie nodded, maybe a little sadly.

“Gareth is an ace,” she told me.

“A what?”

“Asexual,” he explained. “I want to be with people. I just don’t want to do anything with them.” He made a face, like he was thinking about a food that grossed him out. “I never got what all the fuss was about.”

“That’s cool,” I said. “To each his own.”

We drank a shot to that, to people being whatever the fuck they wanted. I was feeling pretty loose by then, so I looked at Katie.

“So . . . are you like that, too? Asexual?”

“Only with Gareth,” she said. “If I’m attracted to a person, I tend to mold myself to whatever they are.”

They were sitting together on the couch, and she dropped her head affectionately on his shoulder. After a few seconds, he reached up with his hand and started rubbing her back in a circular motion, kind of like he was cleaning a window.

“We do a lot of cuddling,” Katie told me. “That’s the best part anyway.”

She was prettier than I’d expected—in the pictures I’d seen, she looked kinda plain—with her red hair and freckles, and kind of a soft, earth-mother body. Actually, she reminded me a lot of Amber, which was weird, because Amber had just sent me a long email a couple of days earlier, totally out of the blue. It was the first time I’d heard from her since I’d come home in the fall.

She said she’d just gotten back from Haiti, where she’d spent her summer volunteering in a women’s shelter in the capital city. It had been an amazing and humbling experience, trying to help women who were so much braver and more resilient than she could ever be. Women who had so little to begin with, and had to struggle just to survive—to feed their kids, to keep them healthy, and, maybe, if they were very lucky, to send them to school so they could learn to read and write and maybe someday have a shot at a better life. It was a transformative experience for her, an experience that made her realize how trivial her own life had been, especially her life at college.

She said she was dreading the thought of going back to BSU, getting sucked into that meaningless vortex again—the parties, the softball team, the social media, the dining halls, with all that food getting thrown away every day.

She said she’d been meaning to write to me for a few months, but kept putting it off, because part of her had wanted to apologize and part of her thought that other part was insane. She certainly didn’t want to apologize for anything she’d done—not for punching me, which I’d totally deserved, or kicking me out of her room, or ignoring the messages I’d sent her—but only for Cat’s painting, which didn’t accurately reflect her own feelings.

I’m not saying you weren’t a disappointment to me, Brendan. But so many guys have disappointed me, I don’t think it’s fair to single you out.

Also, if you were going to be up on that wall, I should have been up there with you. Because I’m the one who gave you the power to disappoint me. In that sense, I disappointed myself, which is just as bad, if not worse.

I’m not going to let that happen again.

I hope you had an okay summer,

Amber

I didn’t really know what to make of the email, though I guess it was somewhat comforting to know that she didn’t hate me as much as I’d thought she did. I was tempted to tell Katie the whole story, just to hear what she had to say. I had a feeling she was somebody you could turn to for advice in situations like that. But Gareth had started to give her a neck massage, and she was totally distracted by how good it felt, wincing and groaning like a porn star as he kneaded her traps.

“So Brendan,” he said, squinting at me while he worked his magic fingers. “Are you really gonna be a plumber?”

“I’m just an apprentice,” I told him. “It takes a long time to get your license.”

Katie opened her eyes. “My dad says you might take over the business someday.”