You Are Here(10)

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“I might,” he said. “I know how to jump-start them.”

Emma rolled her eyes, but Peter thought he could detect the faintest trace of interest even so. “Maybe another time,” she said absently, already striding out ahead of him, her shadow long across the grass, leaving him there to watch her go.

The next morning, though he suspected she was already gone, he found himself standing in front of her house, wondering if it was okay to bother her parents so early on a Saturday. Much to his relief, the barbershop where he occupied himself five to six mornings a week for minimum wage was closed for the holiday weekend. It was a job he found nearly unbearable, pushing the broom in figure eights around the old-fashioned chairs, holding his breath against the fruity smell of the shampoo, and worst of all, disposing of the hair clippings, the flakes of dandruff still clinging to them determinedly.

Other summers, his jobs had been somewhat better. In fact, in his sixteen years in this town, Peter figured he’d done odd bits of work for at least three-quarters of the shops, everything from bussing tables and washing dishes to serving slices of pizza and bagging groceries. He’d once even worked as a janitorial assistant up at the college, which was just another reason he felt he could never go to school there: How could you attend classes at a place where you’d picked sludgy cigarette butts out of the fake plants in nearly every building on campus?

The lights appeared to be on in the Healys’ kitchen, and so after a moment, he found himself following the flower-lined path up to their blue front door.

“This is a nice surprise,” Professor Healy said, and his wife appeared in the doorway beside him, the two of them both dressed in khaki pants and navy sweaters, unwittingly matching in the way of long-married couples. “We’re just about to have breakfast. You brave enough to try Katherine’s eggs?”

Peter grinned. “That would be great.”

He followed them into the dining room, and took a seat at the large oak table, which was seemingly engaged in a mighty struggle to stay upright beneath so many piles of papers and books. The surface was littered with reading glasses and pens, random pieces of day-old fruit and two mugs of coffee that had left permanent ring stains in the dark wood. He spotted a ruler and a calculator, sheaves of typed pages and others decorated liberally with red pen, and not for the first time, Peter wished that he lived in a place like this, a dust-filled room that smelled of books.

Mrs. Healy poured him a cup of tea, and Peter added some milk, watching the white liquid cloud his mug. Part of what he loved about coming here was this: the way they treated him like a colleague, a grown-up, a fellow intel lectual. There were never any silly questions about school unless he brought up a certain paper he’d written or a subject he happened to be enjoying. He liked how they never assumed he was there to see Emma either; in their minds, it was just as likely he’d arrived for a discussion of the peculiar rituals of ancient Mayan funerals or the newest collection of poetry by Seamus Heaney.

There was something about them, too—an undercurrent of sadness, distant and lingering—that Peter found oddly comforting. He’d never had the chance to know his mother, and this absence often made him feel painfully alone. But every now and then—when Mr. Healy was scanning a bookshelf or Mrs. Healy’s eyes drifted to the sun-bleached windowsill—he could very nearly see it etched in their faces, a mystery that seemed both sad and sweet at the same time, like sleeping with a blanket even after you’d long outgrown it.

Now Mr. Healy passed Peter a section of the newspaper, and the two of them sat reading about the affairs of the world, weather that threatened to tip the globe off its delicate axis and wars that could shake the planet to dust.

“Well, it’s nice to have someone around to appreciate my cooking,” Mrs. Healy called out from the kitchen. “Since my own kids always seem so eager to escape.”

Peter glanced at the doorway, where he could see her poking at the eggs on the stove. He was surprised by how easily she joked about this kind of thing, when just yesterday his own dad had accused him of more or less the same thing—trying to escape—only he’d done it with a look so dark and injured you would have thought Peter had suggested making a permanent move to New Guinea.

“I don’t know about kids these days, Pete,” Mr. Healy joked from behind his newspaper, his gray eyebrows bobbing up and down. “I mean, what kind of sixteen-year-old wants to spend a weekend in New York City? Must be terribly boring.”

Peter looked up from his tea. “She’s just gone for the weekend?”

He noticed the Healys exchange a brief glance, and once again, Peter felt his face flush, worried they might find another meaning in his question. This was not a subject Peter took lightly. He’d had time to give it plenty of thought over the years, and the conclusion he’d come to—one that he was determined not to think of as wishful thinking—was that he didn’t like Emma. At least not in that way.

She was pretty, of course, with those unsettling gray eyes and that way she had of smiling with only one side of her mouth, and there was something careless about her that made the other guys at school glance at her sideways in the halls. But although Peter couldn’t help being drawn to her, he chalked it up to more of a quiet affinity than a lovesick hopefulness. They were both loners in their own way—for Peter, out of necessity; for Emma, more of a choice—but he was fairly certain the bond they shared didn’t amount to anything more than that.