Never Coming Back(18)

I looked up from The Depths and there was Asa, working his turn at the concession stand the way the varsity did for the JV and vice versa. That was how we did it at Sterns High. Maybe every school did it that way. Maybe it was a nationwide ritual, the way making out in basement party rooms was a nationwide ritual, a ritual that had somehow passed me by. Asa was standing by the hot dog grill, half smiling, watching me.

“You lose something?” he said. I remembered his voice as quiet, but it couldn’t have been. There was a distance between the concession stand and The Depths. I pointed to my ear. I was close to tears. That earring was the one physical remnant of my time with the old man, and I had to find it.

“I’ll help you,” he said, and then he was next to me, crouched down and looking. He was smart in the way he searched, tracing a path with his eyes and then retracing. He inched forward foot by foot, going over every bit of ugly under-bleacher wasteland.

“There you go,” he said, and he plucked it up from under a foam cup that had once held coffee.

He dropped the earring into the palm of my hand. But then he did something else, which was take my fingers in his and fold them up around the tiny hammer. Unexpected. In that second, before I looked up at him, I knew that my life had just changed. A window had blown open on the island and fresh air was breezing in. A boy had touched me, was still touching me. I kept looking at his hand wrapped around mine, the tiny silver earring held tight in the darkness between all our fingers.

“You going to look up at some point, do you think?” he said, and there was laughter and something else—tenderness—in his voice. Why? He didn’t even know me, did he?

“Look up,” he said. “I dare you.”

Up I looked. He was much taller than I was. Jeans and T-shirt and boots, like every boy I knew and like no boy I knew. “You’re Clara Winter,” he said, and I nodded like a toddler. Like a girl who had never kissed a boy, never gone down in the basement, let alone The Depths. Which was where we were. And which was where he kissed me, then and there.

I had not known you could meet a boy and everything could just fall into place. That I wouldn’t have to think or worry or plan. Nothing about it would be easy, was what I used to think, but everything about Asa Chamberlain and me was just that. Easy. Until it wasn’t.





* * *





“What went wrong between you and your mother?” Sunshine said. “Brown and I always thought she was cool.”

“The coolest,” Brown agreed. “She wasn’t like any of the other parents, back in school.”

From the first time they met her, that first year in college, Sunshine and Brown had loved my mother. We were from different worlds, Sunshine and Brown and I, and their fascination with my mother’s physical toughness, her fearlessness in the face of winter and chainsaws and axes and life as a solo mother with no one to take care of either her or her daughter, had always struck me as suspect.

“She wasn’t like your parents,” I said. “I’ll give you that. But you and I come from different worlds.”

We were sitting at their table. This conversation about my mother was one we’d had many times over many years, and this was where it always ended: them pushing, me resisting, end of subject. It was late and dinner was long over and it was time to go home. Back to the cabin. Back to Dog in his urn and Jack on the shelf and the unreadable look on my mother’s face in the photo next to it. Back to my bed of books. I still had a Words by Winter assignment due the next day, a man who wanted a birthday note in haikus to his daughter on her eighteenth birthday, one haiku for each year of her life. Haikus were not as easy as you might think. 5 syllables + 7 syllables + 5 syllables x 18 = 306 syllables exactly. Eighteen haikus were going to take me a long time, and I was tired.

But Sunshine didn’t let it drop.

“Remember the first time we met her, that first Parents’ Weekend?” she said. “She came bearing fudge, fudge for me and for Brown because you must have told her we were your friends.”

“Peanut butter fudge, as I recall,” Brown said. “From Hogback Mountain, in a little white box with a little white plastic knife inside the box.”

“And remember that summer in Old Forge after sophomore year, when you were working at Keyes and Brown and I were working at the water park? She took the day off work and took us all hiking up Bald Mountain.”

“She scampered right up that bare rock part at the top,” Brown said. “Put the rest of us to shame, as I recall.”

That was the second time he’d said as I recall in three sentences. It was driving me nuts.

“Also, and you might not know this,” Sunshine said now, “but she used to call us when she was worried about you.”

What?

“She did not.”

“She did. Sometimes.”

“So our impression of her is different from yours,” Brown said, and the delicate way he said it made me think that he and Sunshine had talked together earlier, had decided to press the issue of my mother. “Yes, she’s tough. But she’s also not.”

I shook my head. My mother had called them? About me? Look at the two of them, sitting across the table, remembering the fudge and the hike and the phone calls. A revised version of my mother was filling my head now, new information squeezing its way into the image I had of her.