The Lucky Ones(56)

“I’ll help. What exactly am I doing?”

“I need the contact information for Oliver Collins from Oregon, about age twenty-six.”

“And why am I hunting this boy down for you?”

“We think he might know something about my fall or whatever it was. We want to ask him a few questions.”

There was a pause before McQueen answered and Allison hoped the man hadn’t passed out on her.

“You really are planning on staying there with them, aren’t you?” he asked.

“For now,” she said. “But even so, I need to know what happened.”

“I’d want to know, too. I hope you have the family I could never give you someday,” McQueen said.

Allison swallowed a lump in her throat.

“I should hate you,” she said. “I really should. Why can’t I?”

“You know what they say...ours is not to wonder why. Ours is but to drink bourbon and rye.”

“They don’t say that. You say that, McQueen.”

“Is that so? Then I am a very wise man.”

She whispered a good-night and hung up before McQueen could say something else to make her remember why she didn’t hate him. She texted him Oliver’s name, his age and what little else she remembered about him—blond, blue eyes, from Portland. McQueen sent back a thumbs-up emoji. Message received.

She left her phone in her room and found Roland in the kitchen putting together what seemed to be a cocktail of pills into a tiny shot glass.

“Bourbon is better,” she said.

“These are all Dad’s,” Roland said. “We’ve got Benadryl for the itching. A diuretic to help with swelling. A few others I forgot what they do but they’re very important, I was told. They’ll add literally hours to his life.”

She sat down across from him at the table.

“Sorry McQueen gave you the third degree. You handled it really well.”

“I expected him to be, I don’t know, more of an asshole,” Roland said.

“He can afford to be nice. You were nice, too. Nicer than I would have been.”

“I hate to say it, but I like him.”

“He’s a charmer.”

“Seriously,” Roland said. “I’m straight and even I was thinking, Yeah, I’d sleep with this guy.”

Allison laughed. “Now that is quite a mental picture.”

“You still have feelings for him?” Roland asked. His tone was neutral but she could see a flash of nervousness in his eyes.

“I had feelings for us,” she said. “I liked us. I was used to us. He ended it and it felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. Turns out there’s pretty nice flooring underneath.”

She saw Roland trying not to smile. He didn’t try very hard.

“I’ll always care about him,” she said, “but I’m not pining for him.”

“That’s good.”

“Very good. I pined after you for years,” she said.

“You did?” he asked.

“I was still a virgin at nineteen,” she reminded him. “I think a big reason for that is a little part of me compared every boy to you. And they all paled in comparison.”

“I’m not that wonderful,” he said. “Really. I’m not.”

“You were to me,” she said. She watched for a moment as he added pills to the shot glass. “Deacon told me earlier today about Rachel. He asked me not to bring her up but I don’t want it to be like that with us. You don’t have to talk about her with me. I want you to know I know so there’s no secrets with us.”

Roland had looked up sharply at her when she said Rachel’s name but he didn’t seem to be angry.

“It must’ve been really painful to lose her in that accident. We don’t need to talk about it. All I’ll say about it is I’m very, very sorry,” she said.

“You lost your mom. Everyone in this house lost somebody,” he said.

“Everybody in this house found somebody, too,” she said.

Roland smiled and said no more about it.

“I’ll take those up to Dad if you want,” she said.

“You won’t talk about Oliver to him?” Roland asked.

“No.”

“Good,” he said. She kissed his cheek and started from the kitchen.

“It was my fault,” Roland said softly, but Allison heard and turned around.

“What was?”

“Rachel dying.”

“I had a cold. When my mother died, I mean. I had a horrible cough and I couldn’t sleep, so Mom went out to the drugstore at midnight. She’d been drinking—not much, just enough to be tipsy and tired. But she lost control of her car. Knowing the area, she probably swerved to avoid a dog or a tumbleweed she thought was a dog. Was her death my fault?”

“Of course not.”

“See?” she said, and kissed his forehead.

Roland took her hand and kissed it. She sensed he had more to say but all he said was, “Tell Dad I’ll be up later.”

“Of course.”

She left him in the kitchen and went up to the third floor, where she found Dr. Capello shuffling around his bedroom in his green-and-blue tartan plaid bathrobe and matching blue slippers. Something about the sound of the slippers on the floor and the loose way the robe hung on his shoulders made him look even older than his years.